Are you in the 6%? Reuters poll claims ‘only’ 19 million Americans plan to buy the Apple Watch

Reuters is out with new survey results, with a headline screaming: “Only 6 Percent Of Americans Plan To Buy An Apple Watch.” Only? That’s a hell of a lot of new Watch wearers — 19 million of them, in fact.

If you remove younger teens from the equation, you still gets sales of 15 million if every person in the poll who said they’d buy a Watch actually does so. Contrast that with the numbers of the original iPhone sold in its first quarter of availability — 250,000 — and the Watch starts to look like a runaway success right out of the gate. It took Apple five quarters to sell 6 million phones.

The survey found that people between 18 and 28 years old were the most “interested” in the Watch. Thirty-four percent of them said so. But the 30-to-39-year-old set is most likely to actually buy a Watch, with 13 percent saying they planned to do so. Only 10 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds said they’d buy.

Of people who already own an iPhone, 15 percent said they plan to buy a Watch.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll also says men are twice as likely as women to purchase the Watch, which may raise some concerns about the fashion value of the smaller 38mm Watches. The Watch appealed to fewer than 4 percent of women compared with 9 percent of men, according to the poll results.

Ipsos polled 1,829 U.S. adults online between April 8 and 14. The Watch opened for preorders April 10. The poll is said to have a credibility interval of plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.

Apple has not said, and isn’t likely to say, how many Watches were preordered. One research firm, Slice Intelligence, estimates that almost a million Watches were preordered in the first 24 hours. Equities researchers have predicted Watch sales of anywhere from 10 million and 32 million during 2015.

The Watch was relatively well received in the first media reviews that appeared last week. Many noted that the Watch seemed useful, but that the app experience needed refinement. Several analysts told VentureBeat that consumers would be wise to save their money for more mature future versions of the Watch.