Dear Analysts: Microsoft Did Not "Beat" The Apple Watch

This morning USA Today compared sales of the Apple Watch to sales of Microsoft smartphones. As if they were the same sort of device. They've suggested that the Apple Watch was "beaten by Microsoft's phone." USA Today, do you know that these are different products? Do you not realize that Apple also has a smartphone, and that the Apple Watch is not a smartphone? Let's compare apples to apples instead of apples to orange here, for a moment. Let's compare smartwatches to smartwatches and phones to phones.

USA Today asserts that it's sensible to compare the sales of Microsoft's Lumia smartphone line to Apple's Watch line. Truth, they did both relatively recently start producing these devices under their own brands. It's also true that both categories have relatively small sales compared to bigger, more established products – like the iPhone.

But suggesting that one device should in any way be competing against the other – that's nonsense. It's like saying someone "won" because they sold more candy bars than another person sold lemonade.

Microsoft sold 8.4-million Lumia smartphones over the past quarter according to their report this week. Apple sold 47.5-million iPhones this past quarter.

Neither Apple nor Microsoft released information on how many of their wearable products were sold. Despite this, we can safely assume the Apple Watch outsold the Microsoft Band.

You can learn more about how to compare smartphone sales to smartwatch sales using new and innovative nonsensical extrapolation-based techniques at USA Today. You can find out more about Apple earnings in out Apple hub and more about Microsoft in our most recent report.