Best Buy will sell Apple Watches online and in more than 100 stores nationwide starting Aug. 7, making it the first major national retailer — besides Apple — to do so.
Though Best Buy will carry Apple Watch Sport and Apple Watch as well as an array of accessories, it will not offer the gold-cased Apple Watch Edition. By the holidays, a total of more than 300 Best Buy stores will carry the watch, Apple said Sunday.
"The Apple Watch is an important addition to an emerging product category, and we know our customers want it," Jason Bonfig, senior category officer at Best Buy, said in a press release.
Customers began pre-ordering the Apple Watch in April, but the gadget, which starts at $350, wasn't available for purchase in Apple's retail stores until just last month.
Expanding Watch's availability to Best Buy will almost certainly lead to an increase in sales, but it's unclear what that will mean in the grand picture of the gadget's success, since Apple won't disclose how many watches have been sold. Last week, in its latest quarterly earnings report, the company said its category of "other" devices — which includes the watch, iPod, and Apple TV — went to $2.6 billion from $1.7 billion the previous quarter.
"As you know, we made a decision back in September, quite several months ago, not to disclose the shipments on the watch," CEO Tim Cook told analysts on an earnings call. "That was not a matter of not being transparent. It was a matter of not giving our competition insight. It's a product that we worked really hard on."