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Apple has ordered five to six million Apple Watches for the product's initial release in April, the Wall Street Journal reports. That's on par with how many iPads Apple sold in 2010, the company's last major all-new product release. Of those six million Apple Watches, half of the first-quarter production order is the entry-level model, the $349 Apple Watch Sport. Apple has ordered a much smaller amount of the 18-karat gold "Edition" Watches, rumored to be priced at more than $4,000 a pop. They are "expected to be among the most expensive products the company has ever sold."
Meanwhile, the Journal also reports that Apple has shelved some of the Watch's state-of-the-art health features, like heart rate and blood pressure monitoring. Those features either didn't work consistently on every watch wearer or required approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The Watch project was nicknamed the "black hole" because of the amount of resources that got sucked into its development.
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