Apple Announces $50 Apple Watch Discount With iPhone Purchase

Apple doesn’t usually do discounts, but they’ve recently announced that they’ll be taking $50 off of the price of an Apple Watch with the purchase of an iPhone 6s or 6s Plus bundle at select physical locations, according to a report from TechTimes.

The deal is being offered to see if Apple can boost the sales of the Apple Watch. Although sales figures for the year have not yet been released, it’s speculated that while the Watch has sold reasonably well, figures may not be in the neighborhood that Apple was hoping for, either. Apple has stated that they won’t be releasing Watch sales, not wanting to give the competition “insights” into Apple’s wearables business, but analysts estimate that the Watch has sold just under 4 million units this quarter. That’s compared to a record-setting number of iPhone 6s and 6s Plus sales last quarter, coming in at over 13 million units.

Given that the Apple Watch is intended to be paired with an iPhone and that the Watch can be paired with older iPhone 5 units, adoption of the wearable has probably not been quite what Apple was hoping for when the Apple Watch was released to great fanfare in April.

The deal is only available at select locations in the Boston metro area and San Francisco Bay area, according to CNET, but it’s rare enough for Apple to put anything on sale that fans may want to go a little out of the way if they were considering, say, a new iPhone and Apple Watch as a Christmas gift. A $50 discount is not to be sneezed at, especially from a company that doesn’t do discounts.

That said, the discount will only be available for the lower-end Apple Watch or Apple Watch Sport; the more expensive Apple Watch Edition and Apple Watch Hermes will remain at full price.

So how much is one actually saving? Well, the lowest-end bundle, the iPhone 6s with 16 GB of storage plus the Apple Watch Sport would normally run for $998 together; $649 for the iPhone 6s and $349 for the Apple Watch Sport. The higher-end Apple Watch runs between $549-$1049, and the iPhone 6s Plus goes for $749 from Apple’s website; more from some carriers, and combining the two higher-end devices can come out over $1500. So perhaps $50 is a bit of a drop in the bucket, but the limited-time offer – the promotion is only running until November 15 – may serve to push uncertain buyers over the edge.

Meanwhile, in spite of questions about Apple Watch sales figures, Apple CEO Tim Cook has remained positive, stating that Apple expected Watch sales to exceed expectations; he said that the Apple Watch is expected to sell better than the iPhone and iPad’s original releases during their own comparable launch windows and stating that Apple plans to expand Watch sales during the holidays, expecting the Watch to be one of the big gifts of the year.

Specifically, the Watch deal will be available at select locations in the San Francisco Bay Area (Burlingame, Chestnut Street, Corte Madera, Hillsdale, San Francisco, and Stonestown) and the Boston metro area (Boylston Street, Burlington, CambridgeSide and Chestnut Hill). Purchase of accessories or other products such as AppleCare+ will not be required for the deal.

Apple’s Q-10 filing with the SEC does indicate that the Apple Watch accounted for more than 100 percent of the year-over-year growth of its Other Products category, where it’s listed together with Apple TV, iPod and Beats; the category grew from $8.379 billion in 2014 to $10.067 billion in 2015, suggesting that Apple sold more than $1.7 billion in the category in the time since the Watch has launched. Whether that means that the Watch is doing well is hard to say, but Apple seems to be taking it as a promising indication.

[Photo by Stephen Lam/Getty Images]