It looks like plastic is making a triumphant return to Apple’s product portfolio. According to Bloomberg, the next Apple Watch SE will ditch its metallic enclosure in favor of a plastic shell, and it could arrive this fall.
This would be the first time that Apple would use plastic as the main building material for its smartwatch. The key objective is to bring down the production costs, with hopes of putting it close to around a $200 retail price.
A lower price definitely sounds like an alluring proposition. But there could be a handful of other advantages that come with using plastic. Compared to metal, which is more expensive to source and challenging to paint, plastic is cheaper and allows a richer gamut of color selection with relative ease.
Moreover, with a lower cost, Apple is apparently giving a stronger smartwatch push to the younger segment, especially among kids. “With recent school phone bans, Apple has been touting its watch as a low-cost phone alternative that can help parents stay in touch with their children — and track their whereabouts,” says the report.
Apple’s history with plastic on mainstream products hasn’t exactly yielded unanimously great results in recent times. Take, for example, the iPhone 5c, which adopted a plastic design in the name of affordability.
But despite laying the foundations for what would essentially become the iPhone SE, Apple never made a direct successor to the iPhone 5c. Ken Segall, who worked with Steve Jobs on Apple’s creative marketing side for over a decade, said the failure had to do with the perception of plastic as cheap and its clash with Apple’s taste for premium aesthetics.
“Apple is a company that doesn’t do “cheap.” It makes products for people who care about design, simplicity, quality and a great experience — and are willing to pay more for these things,” Segall wrote back in 2014. “For Apple to compromise in any of these areas would be a violation of the Prime Directive.”
But the aforementioned conundrum was for a phone that cost over $700, which would raise eyebrows even in 2024. We are talking about a smartwatch here, one that is likely aiming for around a $200 asking price. Given the rich watchOS ecosystem and Apple’s solid set of well-received health features, there’s a high chance that a plastic Apple Watch SE would succeed rather than taste an ignominious failure.
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