Apple offering employees up to 50% discount on Apple Watch at launch


Tim Cook:

I know that many of you have been looking forward to choosing an Apple Watch for yourselves, and we want to make it easy for you. Starting Friday in countries where the watch is available for pre-order, a special Employee Purchase Plan will offer a 50% discount on any Apple Watch or Apple Watch Sport for your personal use.

The discount tops off at $550, so that's the most an employee can receive on a gold Apple Watch Edition.

This is interesting. Typically Apple employees receive discount promotions after products have been available for a while. Here it seems employees will get discounts at launch. That doesn't really sit well with me unless there will be a shipping delay on employee purchases. Apple should make sure initial customer demand is met before filling employee promotions.

With that said, to me this is similar to when Apple gave free iPhones to most employees after it launched the original model. This perk was well after initial demand was filled and got a lot of phones out in the wild. It would seem this promo will quickly get Apple Watches out in public for others to see and help encourage app developers. This seems a real smart move to get momentum rolling on a new product segment.

Perhaps cynically, this will also help boost launch sales numbers for Apple.

It will be interesting to see how many watches are available for the launch. If supplies are constrained and customers leave stores empty handed, or even if pre-orders aren't filled for launch day, that would be a case of Apple not putting its customers first.