Apple Grabs Wearables Lead with Holiday Sales

For all the skepticism about the Apple Watch’s prospects, the new version appears to be selling better than the first one. Apple raked in nearly half of the revenue generated online in the U.S. wearables market in the monthlong lead-up to Cyber Monday, new data shows, a big increase on last year. Meanwhile, Fitbit lost ground—and the data shows that its expected purchase of competitor Pebble won’t help much.

Apple’s improvement, in market share measured by revenue, is mostly because Apple’s watch is costlier than most of its rivals, of course. Even so, the fact that Apple took share from Fitbit despite a big Black Friday weekend push by Fitbit is likely to be encouraging to Apple. It suggests that Apple is repeating its smartphone market feat of taking most of the profits from the wearables market by dominating the high end.