An interesting claim in this article is that Apple is not using its gold metal matrix patent for the gold Watch Edition, but are instead work-hardening a more standard/traditional 18k alloy.
They make the videos because Ive prefers to not go onstage and they need some visual porn becuase just a video of his talking head would get boring quick
"...or even occasionally hear that one of our supplier's process experts has been "disappeared" to move to Cupertino or Shenzhen."
I really despise the coöpting of the word disappeared in this kind of context. It really cheapens the lives of and trivializes the deaths of people who get whisked out if their homes in the middle of the night, get murdered and abandoned in shallow graves, usually by corrupt and imploding governments. Shame on all reporters and bloggers who insist on doing that. See [1]
These people, quite the opposite, are being handsomely rewarded and actually get to live.
That'd be akin to thinking WWII prisoner/forced labor/death camp sarcasm is appropriate. Ha-ha, the food was so bad at Apple's cafeteria, we thought we'd end up looking like death camp victims.
Since Apple hasn't said anything about upgrades, I think that means that there won't be any. Apple will replace broken or faulty electronics, but they won't upgrade you to the newest model.
That really indicates that Apple Watch will evolve slowly. Maybe it will be three to five years before there's a new model. It doesn't really need upgrades, because it's mostly a fancy terminal for your iPhone, plus a fitness band and iPod shuffle. And I think that Apple will support it for a much longer time than iPhones and iPads. Ten years from now, today's Apple Watch will work with the latest iPhones and iOS.
But they will introduce new cases and bands every year.
I don't know if it's accurate, because I know little about milling, but I found this to be the most interesting bit:
> Apple chooses not to show us the manufacturing of the clasp components, processes that I think would be (in some respects) more interesting than how the watch case is made. Given the complex surfaces of the Modern buckle, this might be the first example of Apple using 3D surface tollbooth in order to machine a component (all Apple products have been created through the very skillful use of relatively simple, precise prismatic 2.5D tool path, with any complex curves being created from stampings).
4 and 5 axis CNC mills for watch-sized objects aren't overly expensive. Roland has some nice ones in the $8K range.[1] Their little desktop milling machines are often used to produce medical and dental replacement parts. Apple's use of laser deburring is a nice touch. That's likely to become popular.
A Rolex submariner weighs about 135g. Let's pretend that all but 35g of it is gold (it's less, but w/e). So we're at 100g of 18k gold. Now, 18k gold is 75% by mass, equal to 75g of 24k gold or $2900.
The cheapest, non-gold submariner costs $7500.
Buying gold watches to get the gold - or even considering the value of their alloys when buying them - is as dumb as doing the same with computers.
If you watch the gold video (or read the article), you'll see they're not using anything remotely similar to the process in that MMC patent. It's essentially a conventional alloy, mechanically hardened.
Nothing that special from a technical point of view - but... Some years ago one would use a 5-axis CNC mill to produce car engine blocks, but not for mass production for consumer products - everyone would have used plastic for that. The iPhone was the first phone out of aluminium. Also the using a full block of aluminium to mill a Apple notebook body out of it in mass production, was never though before. (Sure higher quality traditional watches were always made of high quality metals)
Has a bit of "you're not worthy" feel that surfaced as satirical couple pages built in the mid 2000 (I don't think they are still around.) It was listing pumped-up exceptional characteristics of Apple products and mentioning that as not being worthy they probably wouldn't even take your order ;-)
I enjoyed reading the article a lot more than watching the Apple craftsmanship videos it was based on.
The article was very easy to understand for someone with little knowledge about manufacturing processes and did a great job of explaining how much effort and engineering goes into making a great product.
The Apple videos on craftsmanship were overly clinical and fancy, which for me took away from talking about the engineering and effort they put into the product.
Aren't you amazed that the richest billionaire who buys this watch from their palace or skyscraper has only access to the same promotional videos we have? Do they have a personalized purchasing experience? I thought the same when watching golden phone cases for iPhones: However rich you are, what's inside is still the same iOS, with the same usability perks and defects, with the same Flat UI, with the same Appstore apps as everyone. How mundane.
I reckon it's excellent that Apple finally addresses the billionaire market with a gold experience. By taking the money where it is, it provides a revenue stream that can fund features that average people will use.
I am always impressed that the same technology is accessible to everyone, well everyone who can afford it. Going out and buying an iPhone is an expensive experience, and likely out of reach for the very poor (I don't have one, I think it's too expensive for what it is), yet given how many I see wandering around here in the UK I am always impressed that the insanely wealthy and the not-so-wealthy get to use the same device. It's kind of reassuring that we all get access to the same software and hardware, even if we use basic Android smartphones instead.
It's a bit like the wide access to low-cost flights to Europe; that would have been unthinkable in the 1980s.
I always find it oddly refreshing to see! We haven't made the same progress in politeness and kindness to our fellow man, but at least technology is relatively cheap and easily available.
Products are now cheap. Informational products are basically free^. What remains expensive? Property. You have people with iPhones living in cupboards.
Food and energy are kind of on the boundary. I regard the increasing fripperyness of high-end dining as a sign that food is still affordable. Services that require an actual educated human in the West are still expensive, e.g. law, medicine.
That's one of the things I like most about technology. It takes things that were formerly available only to the rich and gives them to everyone. The only thing left to them to display their "wealth" is to plate the stuff in gold and glue diamonds to it.
Do billionaires actually want a "personalized purchasing experience"? If I were a billionaire, I'd pay someone else to do all purchasing for me and get on with my life. Even as not-a-billionaire, I would strongly consider paying a lawyer friend to handle large purchases for me. It's just not worth the time or annoyance.
"What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it."
Warhol's right, of course, but the bum on the corner is buying the Coke at a much higher relative opportunity cost. The nickel spent on the Coke, was a nickel not spent on "x" other thing that results in personal improvement (housing, clothing, education, etc.). Make what you will of the analogy to implicitly disposable electronics and ~90% of the American population today.
It's somewhat more complex than that. Mexican Coke is slightly different vs canned coke. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Coke. Also, restaurants have a fair amount of latitude when it comes to soda machines.
So, the bum might be drinking the same thing as a billionaire or a slightly different version. IMO, what's more interesting is that where wine, beer and even water have a fairly stratified market soda is just store brand vs name brand.
There are actually a lot of smaller companies making craft sodas that are of a superior quality to the mainstream brands. They typically use cane sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup, and come in a wider variety of flavors. Plain cola gets boring fast. I much prefer cream sodas and birch or root beers. Here are some examples:
Personally, I never drink Coke, Pepsi or Dr Pepper products any more. A large part of the cost of those products is relentless marketing, shareholder dividends, and large corporate salaries. They no longer seem to care about delivering a quality product. How can they sell something called ginger ale if it doesn't actually have any ginger? For variety and depth of flavor any money I spend on soda is spent on craft soda.
Just to bring the analogy back to tech... when, if ever, do you think you'll feel the same way about Apple/Google/Microsoft/etc. regarding "relentless market, shareholder dividends, and large corporate salaries"? How do we get the equivalent of "variety and depth of flavor" when products and services converge towards mediocrity (or disregard for end user privacy, or any other complaint du jour)? (Note: I do not know if any or all of the corporate cruft complaints apply to the tech companies mentioned.)
I agree with you, in that spending money on quality products is "voting with your wallet," and overall, a good idea.
I already do feel that way regarding technology (and consumerism in general). I think that by supporting FOSS such as Linux and the Mozilla backed projects you can vote for variety and innovation with both your time and money. I will happily switch from an iPhone to a Firefox OS based phone once a high end model is available.
Last night on NPR they were talking about the future of malls, and hence talked some about Apple stores. One of the guest mentioned that they thought Apple would have a "by appointment" shopping process that was more of a luxury experience for the high end watches.
I don't particular disagree, but I also don't think Apple is going after either "billionaires" or "watch collectors". Not that they would turn away sales from either category, but the Apple Watch Edition seems to be pointed at those that use Apple products already but also happen to have a boatload of cash. I guess I am saying that I see the target market as celebrities.
I'd agree with that. I actually think it was a bad move on their part. By having a $10k watch it draws media headlines away from their consumer product. I've seen many more headlines like "Apple's New $10,000 Watch" rather than "Apple's New Line of Smart Watches". For those that don't follow the technology news closely they may miss the launch of the regular product.
Let's take it one step further. In fact, last week, walking out of my apartment, the guys sweeping the street were taking a smoke break (of course ;) and one of them was fiddling on his iphone. Yes, the guy who cleans the street now has the same complete access to human knowledge in his pocket as the billionaire. The same model.
(Ok, the street sweeper probably had an iphone 4, not an iphone 6 plus...)
Yep, the watch is just a watch. They know it, I know it, you know it.
Now, how do we make it look more like a "personal, exclusive, luxurious" experience? I wonder...
The craftsmanship of a real watch is not something to be missed. But since Apple's watch is just electronics, they can't appeal to customers with a soul-less PCB.
Instead, they make a Discovery how it's made movie about building a watch case.
These apple craftsmanship videos are trying to appeal to the high end watch enthusiast but this is not going to work.
Just look at the Patek Philippe 5175R grandmaster chime watch video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGPjFFMD3c0 . You can't compare these hand made masterpieces with a mass produced item.
It's like trying to get Pagani Zonda owner to buy a Corvette.
> These apple craftsmanship videos are trying to appeal to the high end watch enthusiast but this is not going to work.
I think they were rather created to appeal to people, who would like to be considered high end watch enthusiast, but not necessarily are able to afford the kind of high end watch that you mention.
Patek Phillippe's minute repeater watches are an extreme example, but you can find very nice, well made mechanical watches from every price point starting at around $1000, up to a million or more dollars....
They've got an aesthetic that isn't unlike Apple's (minimalistic), and they're among the more affordable mechanical watch brands (while still creating high quality, in-house movements).
If you want to be considered a high end watch enthusiast then there are plenty of cool and interesting watched for less than $10k. Something like a "low end" Jaeger-LeCoultre, Zenith or IWC is far more likely to catch a watch enthusiasts eye. Or dig around the vintage market and try to find something there.
The Corvette/Zonda compare demonstrates the point well. It doesn't account for Apple's target market though. The person that wears an expensive watch on the wrist, rather than the arm. The person that drives a Bentley convertible, or paints their Lamborghini matt black. These people don't buy a gold Apple Watch because they think it's beautiful. They buy an Apple Watch because they think other people think it's beautiful. They have an inherent need to parade their wealth to others.
They're easy to spot, too. Expensive clothes, no sense of style. Usually loud, if not vulgar. Lack of empathy, coupled with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. They won't buy a Murakami because it appeals to them aesthetically, they'll buy one because their rich friend bought one "for the kid's room". And enough disposable cash to buy an Apple Watch for no other reason than that they can. In Europe they're often called nouveau riche, or even Euro-trash.
Taste is very subjective. It's about the manifestation of taste. You might like the feel of a silver plated, rhodium-coated Varius carbon Caran d'Arche. You might love the graceful swirls and curves it can produce. With brown ink from Montblanc.
Or you could be the guy that walks into meetings, waits until everyone is settled before opening a leather-bound, monogrammed notebook, pulls that same pen out, put elbows on table and slowly unscrews the cap, before setting the pen down on the notepad, without having written a word.
Unfortunately I think that's exactly the market Apple aren't aiming for - but will probably get.
Watch is a slow-motion PR disaster. It's doing a lot of damage to the Apple brand, because Apple seem to have stopped pretending to make useful, affordable, luxury, and are now trying to make unaffordable, useless, luxury - which is a completely different market, for completely customers, with completely different rules.
This would be fine if the product itself had clear Veblen-differentiation. But it doesn't. Watch Edition is just Sport Watch in a blingy case with a nicer strap.
That is so not how the luxury market works.
High-end luxury is defined by evidence that you can command some other human's skill and work. So, you can't have mass-produced or machine-made high-end luxury, by definition.
If it's not hand-made, or hand-marketed, or hand-concierged, or very strictly limited, of fundamentally different and exclusive in a way that proves that someone has had to work hard for you personally to make it, it doesn't tweak those luxury neurons - no matter how much gold it has, or how much it costs.
They don't paint their Lamborghini matte black, its most definitely a sticker job for a few thousand dollars, or even less. The tech behind that is actually quite nice.
Wow, I've never seen such a thing as that Grandmaster Chime watch. My father in law is a watch enthusiast but everything he has talked about has been an order of magnitude less exquisite than the one in that video.
I enjoy moments like these, and there have been many in my life, where the scales fall from my eyes are I get a glimpse of the adjacent possible.
That reversible watch face seems pretty gimicky. That looks more like something they did because it's hard to do, not like something that's useful or good looking.
You'll notice too that many of the shots show lots of mass manufactured duplicates, that's because the iWatch is particularly interesting as a watch design, there's not that many little precise mechanisms in it.
So in order to not just show a boring milled component of the face assembly or whatever they show lots of boring milled face assemblies.
There's nothing interesting to see here so we'll show you lots of uninteresting things to see if that makes up for it.
Having also spent some time learning about how PR firms work, I'm also deeply suspicious of articles like this as having been generated because somebody was so moved by the beauty of the watch they had to write a post about it. There are arguably better or equal looking watches on the market (smart or otherwise) that haven't received this attention.
The previous post on this blog is about the Mac Pro, which is usually compared to looking like a small trash can or a large ashtray -- even by obsessive fans.
It's surprising how much content we read as blog posts and even mainstream news articles are simply content produced by PR firms for their clients.
This is very true. My moderately successful office design website is pitched for pre-written content from PR firms all the time. Before I understood that they just wanted their clients on my website I felt very flattered that I was getting some sort of "scoop".
EDIT: I also see these videos as trying to appeal to normal people and make them feel like watch enthusiasts. The video is well-made, but as you say, the components themselves aren't particularly interesting for actual watch enthusiasts.
It is quite interesting how when someone does the job to create something, someone, that probably has not created anything meaningful in their live,because if they had they will at least respect those that try, has to say it is not going to work.
I believe that Apple has probably better information that you have. The world is tremendously big. I have been with Chinese oligarchs with several hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth, the puppet oligarchs in Ukraine and Saudi Arabia supported by the US or Russia,Africa leaders,Brazil wealthy, the owners of fortune 500 companies. These people could spend 10.000 dollars with the blink of an eye. In day to day decisions they risk millions.
I don't like this, but not liking it does not make part of the reality banish.
He said watch enthusiasts, not rich people. By definition these people shouldn't be impressed by something coming with a 1 year warranty (extendable to two years).
They are also interested in the mechanical wizardry happening on the inside, not just in how it looks. Apple watch is pretty much a computer, even if a pretty nifty one by our standards.
It's amazing how irreverent we can be towards just "computers" due to their apparent ubiquity and widespread availability, yet not appreciate that a single fabrication of a silicon wafer is far more complex than the couple hundred components that are put together in a watch.
We can fathom the difficulty, craftsmanship and effort that goes into combining several hundred components together in a watch, yet scoff at hundreds of millions of transistors that are just as artfully designed and brought together to bring to the masses leverage to human ability that was unfathomable just a century ago.
Sure, a silicon wafer is built by machines, and does not have the "hand craftsmanship" of say a watch, yet, I would argue that far more collective effort went into designing circuits than did into designing the gear combinations that went into building a watch.
When it comes to buying high-end, high-end has been about exclusivity, multiplied by the effort put into building such a product. However, when one considers the effort necessary to complete a given task, exclusive or not, being impressive can be quantified by the effort placed.
Thus we are sometimes impressed when someone does something through the hard route, when an obviously easier route existed, (a la, "I'm not even mad, that's amazing"). The wealthy (and the commonors as well) like to purchase the exclusivity of effort (custom) within the bounds of their understanding as it either stirs their innate appreciations or scratches their ego. Either way, people can only appreciate the efforts of what they understand, while the efforts of what is not understood gets belittled. And the caliber of complexity occasionally peeks it heads out amongst the ultra-rich. The ultra-rich who appreciate watches and boats, versus the ultra-rich who appreciate rockets and education.
As children are easily impressed at young ages and become less so as they age, our ability to be impressed should grow with our growth. IMO, If the pinnacle of "craftsmanship" is in very small turning gears, it's a shame, because there is so much more beyond that barrier.
Patek Philippe 5175R grandmaster owners need something cheap but decent to wear while out jogging or playing with their kids in the park, just like Pagani Zonda owners need something cheap but decent to take down to the food store to pick up some milk. Both the Apple watch and the Corvette could fill those roles nicely.
Actually I'm starting to wonder if Apple isn't going after watch people at all. I wonder if perhaps they're instead trying to target rich members of the cell phone generation who've never really owned any watch and who've never had any aspirations towards ever owning an expensive mechanical watch. Basically trying to carve out a new niche of high end consumer electronics.
> carve out a new niche of high end consumer electronics
Yes! That's the concept I was looking for! In a few years we'll look back at this segment like we look back at the iPhone today: We didn't know it could exist, yet at was a vast blue ocean. However I wonder whether Apple nails it properly and what are the key pillars: If you started a gold electronic movement, wouldn't you auction and number the first series? "This watch, kid, was the 1000th ever made by Apple. I own a very particular moment in History. Look, in that series they hadn't even designed the Digital Crown to its final form." Isn't the current Apple Watch missing a bit of storytelling? Is 5 or 10 videos about the factory enough?
Nokia kind of tried something similar with Vertu. Offering basically the same $500 Nokia phone for $5000 - $15000, by just making the case out of more and more expensive material. Vertu seems to have been reasonably successful, but probably not a level Apple would be happy with.
The big difference is that while Nokia actively tried to hide the fact the Vertu was basically just a Nokia phone in a more expensive shell, Apple is making no secret of the fact.
Not with a 2.5M watch, but you can buy a Rolex, TAG, Omega or many other hand made swiss masterpieces for under 10K, all of them tbh look much more appealing than a square piece of gold on your hand.
It's also quite sad that the base watch has a freaking sport strap even in the "gold edition" if you want to actually have a classical watch strap you'll have to cough up 17K....
CH was right, the only use of this watch is to show just how much money you are willing to spend on a piece of crap.
A classical luxury watch has at least a heirloom factor, i got a pretty expensive watch for my 18th Birthday and i still keep it as one. This watch will be obsolete after 18 months, not to mention not maintainable after 3-4 years.
What happens when the battery dies out? what happens when you no longer can run WatchOS 3 cuz IWatch 2 is out? :)
Give me a nice breitling or an omega any day these watches will last for centuries and still keep working and keep true time.
I actually do not agree with you that a Rolex necessarily looks better than an Apple Watch Edition. To me, most Rolex watches just look like massive hunks of metal. Seriously, the size and weight of some of these watches is really ridiculous to me.
Also, mechanical watches do not last centuries without being serviced repeatedly every ~5 years. Servicing a high-end mechanical watch can easily cost many hundreds, if not more.
Many mechanical watches are also not automatic, which means you do indeed have to "charge" them every day (hand-wind them). For instance, Nomos is my personal favorite watch brand of all time, and while they have a mixture of manual and automatic watches, their highest-end offerings (about $20k) are all manual.
Finally, you mentioned TAG, and one of their best known watches is square: the Monaco.
> I actually do not agree with you that a Rolex necessarily looks better than an Apple Watch Edition. To me, most Rolex watches just look like massive hunks of metal. Seriously, the size and weight of some of these watches is really ridiculous to me.
Rolex datejust and explorer are both pretty classy without being oversized. But yeah, the oversizing of watches has gotten a bit silly (this is across all brands, not just rolex).
I disagree that appealing to high end watch enthusiasts is Apple's goal with these videos.
Apple creates these type of videos for almost every product they sell. Take a look at the new macbook video and you will see the same kind of theatrics. They just really enjoy showing this stuff off. They have some of the best manufacturing in the industry and they are proud of it.
The Apple videos are shot beautifully. They are quite a piece of work form a film-making perspective, and offer a glimpse at how much work goes into constituent pieces. I really enjoyed this article. Thank you to the author for putting together so much detail. Great work!
Apple does all of this because Steve Job's father taught him the importance of craftsmanship even in the parts of cabinets no one ever sees. This stuck with him forever. When you have kids, what you teach them might someday affect a lot more than just your kid.
What really interests and fascinates, and impresses, me is that because of Apple's ludicrous scale and huge profit margins, they can actually afford to manufacture their products in the best way possible. They don't have to cut corners, they don't have to worry that their EMS partner doesn't have the absolute best and newest machines, they don't have to worry about contention in their supply chain (except perhaps at the macro level with things like Samsung chips and Corning Gorilla Glass).
I work in high tech manufacturing and these kinds of things happen to normal companies all the time. An essential part of every BOM is the "alternates and substitutions" section, which lists the 2nd, 3rd, etc options for components if the first choice isn't available. Another is the potential inability of an EMS partner to build any given product at any given location because they literally do not have plug & play equipment at all of their facilities. And if a customer forces the issue, it could takes months to 1) spend the capex, and 2) wait for the machine suppliers (Fuji, Siemens, Yestech, Saki, Orbotech, Agilent, etc) to deliver it. To give you an idea of why Apple chose Foxconn as their premier partner, Foxconn owns their whole supply chain outright, and they operate at a scale similar to Apple, which allows them to drop a billion here or there on capital investments at Apple's request. Others have tried (Pegatron, Jabil), and failed.
Wrt the first paragraph: it's almost as if Steve Jobs knew what he was setting up to do. :) I find it a very rare occurrence of respect towards your craft and your customers paying off in the long run.
As a counterexample, see the poor display quality of the iPad Mini compared to Amazon's offering. Apple bloggers were speculating that Apple simply couldn't manufacture enough of the good displays at their scale, whereas Amazon had no such problem.
Even those interested are going to suffer with making a choice between all the various watches and straps.
It's just rather absurd that on the premium "watch edition" apple watch, apple is charging around $7k just for the watch edition with the best strap.
What I find a bit funny is the $350 apple watch is the most feature rich watch. It may be aluminum but it is water resistant which makes it more useful than the more expensive alternatives.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] threadHard to say.
I really despise the coöpting of the word disappeared in this kind of context. It really cheapens the lives of and trivializes the deaths of people who get whisked out if their homes in the middle of the night, get murdered and abandoned in shallow graves, usually by corrupt and imploding governments. Shame on all reporters and bloggers who insist on doing that. See [1]
These people, quite the opposite, are being handsomely rewarded and actually get to live.
Apple are not Stalin or Argentine dictators.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_disappearance
That really indicates that Apple Watch will evolve slowly. Maybe it will be three to five years before there's a new model. It doesn't really need upgrades, because it's mostly a fancy terminal for your iPhone, plus a fitness band and iPod shuffle. And I think that Apple will support it for a much longer time than iPhones and iPads. Ten years from now, today's Apple Watch will work with the latest iPhones and iOS.
But they will introduce new cases and bands every year.
I wouldn't be shocked if they did nothing though.
> Apple chooses not to show us the manufacturing of the clasp components, processes that I think would be (in some respects) more interesting than how the watch case is made. Given the complex surfaces of the Modern buckle, this might be the first example of Apple using 3D surface tollbooth in order to machine a component (all Apple products have been created through the very skillful use of relatively simple, precise prismatic 2.5D tool path, with any complex curves being created from stampings).
4 and 5 axis CNC mills for watch-sized objects aren't overly expensive. Roland has some nice ones in the $8K range.[1] Their little desktop milling machines are often used to produce medical and dental replacement parts. Apple's use of laser deburring is a nice touch. That's likely to become popular.
[1] http://www.rolanddga.com/products/3d/mdx40/
(Author of the linked article).
Also, ain't no way an $8k desktop mill will ever have the rigidity or accuracy to be building stuff that would even pass as a junky watch.
The interesting thing is, Apple did not show the Gold video in the event at all. They showed all the other videos.
http://leancrew.com/all-this/2015/03/apple-gold/
stop trolling; they aren't trying to rip you off.
A Rolex submariner weighs about 135g. Let's pretend that all but 35g of it is gold (it's less, but w/e). So we're at 100g of 18k gold. Now, 18k gold is 75% by mass, equal to 75g of 24k gold or $2900.
The cheapest, non-gold submariner costs $7500.
Buying gold watches to get the gold - or even considering the value of their alloys when buying them - is as dumb as doing the same with computers.
The article was very easy to understand for someone with little knowledge about manufacturing processes and did a great job of explaining how much effort and engineering goes into making a great product.
The Apple videos on craftsmanship were overly clinical and fancy, which for me took away from talking about the engineering and effort they put into the product.
I reckon it's excellent that Apple finally addresses the billionaire market with a gold experience. By taking the money where it is, it provides a revenue stream that can fund features that average people will use.
It's a bit like the wide access to low-cost flights to Europe; that would have been unthinkable in the 1980s.
I always find it oddly refreshing to see! We haven't made the same progress in politeness and kindness to our fellow man, but at least technology is relatively cheap and easily available.
Food and energy are kind of on the boundary. I regard the increasing fripperyness of high-end dining as a sign that food is still affordable. Services that require an actual educated human in the West are still expensive, e.g. law, medicine.
^with advertising, piracy, privacy loss etc.
Technology makes the rich silly.
-Warhol
So, the bum might be drinking the same thing as a billionaire or a slightly different version. IMO, what's more interesting is that where wine, beer and even water have a fairly stratified market soda is just store brand vs name brand.
http://maineroot.com/ (uses fair trade organic sugar) https://www.boylanbottling.com/ http://reedsinc.com/
Personally, I never drink Coke, Pepsi or Dr Pepper products any more. A large part of the cost of those products is relentless marketing, shareholder dividends, and large corporate salaries. They no longer seem to care about delivering a quality product. How can they sell something called ginger ale if it doesn't actually have any ginger? For variety and depth of flavor any money I spend on soda is spent on craft soda.
I agree with you, in that spending money on quality products is "voting with your wallet," and overall, a good idea.
Be the change that you wish to see in the world.
(Ok, the street sweeper probably had an iphone 4, not an iphone 6 plus...)
Now, how do we make it look more like a "personal, exclusive, luxurious" experience? I wonder...
The craftsmanship of a real watch is not something to be missed. But since Apple's watch is just electronics, they can't appeal to customers with a soul-less PCB. Instead, they make a Discovery how it's made movie about building a watch case.
Just look at the Patek Philippe 5175R grandmaster chime watch video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGPjFFMD3c0 . You can't compare these hand made masterpieces with a mass produced item.
It's like trying to get Pagani Zonda owner to buy a Corvette.
I think they were rather created to appeal to people, who would like to be considered high end watch enthusiast, but not necessarily are able to afford the kind of high end watch that you mention.
Here's a video of a Nomos Glashuette watch being made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwpP_s8LV_Y
And their website: http://www.nomos-glashuette.com/
They've got an aesthetic that isn't unlike Apple's (minimalistic), and they're among the more affordable mechanical watch brands (while still creating high quality, in-house movements).
They're easy to spot, too. Expensive clothes, no sense of style. Usually loud, if not vulgar. Lack of empathy, coupled with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. They won't buy a Murakami because it appeals to them aesthetically, they'll buy one because their rich friend bought one "for the kid's room". And enough disposable cash to buy an Apple Watch for no other reason than that they can. In Europe they're often called nouveau riche, or even Euro-trash.
This person buys the Grandmaster Chime, which is truly hideous, expensive, and has no sense of style. I would not wear it if you gave me one.
... or maybe, just maybe, taste is subjective, and old-money aristocrats and their lapdogs don't have a monopoly on it.
Or you could be the guy that walks into meetings, waits until everyone is settled before opening a leather-bound, monogrammed notebook, pulls that same pen out, put elbows on table and slowly unscrews the cap, before setting the pen down on the notepad, without having written a word.
Extrinsic vs. intrinsic.
That said how the heck do you manage the dreaded question 'can I borrow your pen?' ;)
Watch is a slow-motion PR disaster. It's doing a lot of damage to the Apple brand, because Apple seem to have stopped pretending to make useful, affordable, luxury, and are now trying to make unaffordable, useless, luxury - which is a completely different market, for completely customers, with completely different rules.
This would be fine if the product itself had clear Veblen-differentiation. But it doesn't. Watch Edition is just Sport Watch in a blingy case with a nicer strap.
That is so not how the luxury market works.
High-end luxury is defined by evidence that you can command some other human's skill and work. So, you can't have mass-produced or machine-made high-end luxury, by definition.
If it's not hand-made, or hand-marketed, or hand-concierged, or very strictly limited, of fundamentally different and exclusive in a way that proves that someone has had to work hard for you personally to make it, it doesn't tweak those luxury neurons - no matter how much gold it has, or how much it costs.
Have you been to an upscale mall? That perfectly describes Williams-Sonoma, Coach, etc.
At upscale malls, those kind of stores are squarely in the mid-range session, not the part of the mall with the designer boutique shops.
I enjoy moments like these, and there have been many in my life, where the scales fall from my eyes are I get a glimpse of the adjacent possible.
Thank you!
Thanks!
http://mentalfloss.com/article/22461/why-1010-default-settin...
So in order to not just show a boring milled component of the face assembly or whatever they show lots of boring milled face assemblies.
There's nothing interesting to see here so we'll show you lots of uninteresting things to see if that makes up for it.
Having also spent some time learning about how PR firms work, I'm also deeply suspicious of articles like this as having been generated because somebody was so moved by the beauty of the watch they had to write a post about it. There are arguably better or equal looking watches on the market (smart or otherwise) that haven't received this attention.
The previous post on this blog is about the Mac Pro, which is usually compared to looking like a small trash can or a large ashtray -- even by obsessive fans.
It's surprising how much content we read as blog posts and even mainstream news articles are simply content produced by PR firms for their clients.
EDIT: I also see these videos as trying to appeal to normal people and make them feel like watch enthusiasts. The video is well-made, but as you say, the components themselves aren't particularly interesting for actual watch enthusiasts.
http://www.imore.com/truth-behind-apple-watch-hit-piece
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IvnptQJ__U
I believe that Apple has probably better information that you have. The world is tremendously big. I have been with Chinese oligarchs with several hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth, the puppet oligarchs in Ukraine and Saudi Arabia supported by the US or Russia,Africa leaders,Brazil wealthy, the owners of fortune 500 companies. These people could spend 10.000 dollars with the blink of an eye. In day to day decisions they risk millions.
I don't like this, but not liking it does not make part of the reality banish.
We can fathom the difficulty, craftsmanship and effort that goes into combining several hundred components together in a watch, yet scoff at hundreds of millions of transistors that are just as artfully designed and brought together to bring to the masses leverage to human ability that was unfathomable just a century ago.
Sure, a silicon wafer is built by machines, and does not have the "hand craftsmanship" of say a watch, yet, I would argue that far more collective effort went into designing circuits than did into designing the gear combinations that went into building a watch.
When it comes to buying high-end, high-end has been about exclusivity, multiplied by the effort put into building such a product. However, when one considers the effort necessary to complete a given task, exclusive or not, being impressive can be quantified by the effort placed.
Thus we are sometimes impressed when someone does something through the hard route, when an obviously easier route existed, (a la, "I'm not even mad, that's amazing"). The wealthy (and the commonors as well) like to purchase the exclusivity of effort (custom) within the bounds of their understanding as it either stirs their innate appreciations or scratches their ego. Either way, people can only appreciate the efforts of what they understand, while the efforts of what is not understood gets belittled. And the caliber of complexity occasionally peeks it heads out amongst the ultra-rich. The ultra-rich who appreciate watches and boats, versus the ultra-rich who appreciate rockets and education.
As children are easily impressed at young ages and become less so as they age, our ability to be impressed should grow with our growth. IMO, If the pinnacle of "craftsmanship" is in very small turning gears, it's a shame, because there is so much more beyond that barrier.
Apple does not want to make a Pagani and sell a dozen each year.
It really isn't, not in europe.
Apple does not want to make a Pagani and sell a dozen each year.
Yes! That's the concept I was looking for! In a few years we'll look back at this segment like we look back at the iPhone today: We didn't know it could exist, yet at was a vast blue ocean. However I wonder whether Apple nails it properly and what are the key pillars: If you started a gold electronic movement, wouldn't you auction and number the first series? "This watch, kid, was the 1000th ever made by Apple. I own a very particular moment in History. Look, in that series they hadn't even designed the Digital Crown to its final form." Isn't the current Apple Watch missing a bit of storytelling? Is 5 or 10 videos about the factory enough?
The big difference is that while Nokia actively tried to hide the fact the Vertu was basically just a Nokia phone in a more expensive shell, Apple is making no secret of the fact.
Patek Philippe will flood the market by selling all six of them.
It's also quite sad that the base watch has a freaking sport strap even in the "gold edition" if you want to actually have a classical watch strap you'll have to cough up 17K....
CH was right, the only use of this watch is to show just how much money you are willing to spend on a piece of crap.
A classical luxury watch has at least a heirloom factor, i got a pretty expensive watch for my 18th Birthday and i still keep it as one. This watch will be obsolete after 18 months, not to mention not maintainable after 3-4 years.
What happens when the battery dies out? what happens when you no longer can run WatchOS 3 cuz IWatch 2 is out? :)
Give me a nice breitling or an omega any day these watches will last for centuries and still keep working and keep true time.
If you have a mechanical movement then there are replacement parts for watches made over 150 years ago still being made.
With the potted mess of consumer electronics these days GL fixing it in 5 years from now. 10K for a paper weight.
On another note Apple just increased it's loan scheme in the UK to 8K GBP which is the price for the entry gold model.
So now with 48 easy payments and 15% interest you can own yourself a real peace of wannabe richness.
Also, mechanical watches do not last centuries without being serviced repeatedly every ~5 years. Servicing a high-end mechanical watch can easily cost many hundreds, if not more.
Many mechanical watches are also not automatic, which means you do indeed have to "charge" them every day (hand-wind them). For instance, Nomos is my personal favorite watch brand of all time, and while they have a mixture of manual and automatic watches, their highest-end offerings (about $20k) are all manual.
Finally, you mentioned TAG, and one of their best known watches is square: the Monaco.
Rolex datejust and explorer are both pretty classy without being oversized. But yeah, the oversizing of watches has gotten a bit silly (this is across all brands, not just rolex).
Apple creates these type of videos for almost every product they sell. Take a look at the new macbook video and you will see the same kind of theatrics. They just really enjoy showing this stuff off. They have some of the best manufacturing in the industry and they are proud of it.
http://www.apple.com/watch/apple-watch/
I work in high tech manufacturing and these kinds of things happen to normal companies all the time. An essential part of every BOM is the "alternates and substitutions" section, which lists the 2nd, 3rd, etc options for components if the first choice isn't available. Another is the potential inability of an EMS partner to build any given product at any given location because they literally do not have plug & play equipment at all of their facilities. And if a customer forces the issue, it could takes months to 1) spend the capex, and 2) wait for the machine suppliers (Fuji, Siemens, Yestech, Saki, Orbotech, Agilent, etc) to deliver it. To give you an idea of why Apple chose Foxconn as their premier partner, Foxconn owns their whole supply chain outright, and they operate at a scale similar to Apple, which allows them to drop a billion here or there on capital investments at Apple's request. Others have tried (Pegatron, Jabil), and failed.
It's just rather absurd that on the premium "watch edition" apple watch, apple is charging around $7k just for the watch edition with the best strap.
What I find a bit funny is the $350 apple watch is the most feature rich watch. It may be aluminum but it is water resistant which makes it more useful than the more expensive alternatives.