Maybe they are going to offer hardware upgrades for the top tier models.
Luxury mechanical watches need service too, it's a very standard thing in the industry. Apple can offer a CPU/screen/sensor improvement every two years for about a thousand dollars for the luxury models and owners would pay it as they pay the water seal replacement for their Omegas and Rolexes... only Apple's margins are going to be sky high because it may be an easy thing done by a grunt in a tech service shop, and luxury brands have to send your watch to highly skilled engineers sometimes in another country.
EDIT: I posted before finishing the article, Gruber thinks Apple may upgrade the electronics too, but for "hundreds" of dollars.
That's why I imagine Apple will somehow market a trade-in program. As Gruber writes, the gold watches will retain a lot of their value just from the metals in the case and bracelet.
Yea but not $5k worth. The Watch according to my calculations might contain about $1k in gold. So if they sell it at $6k like Gruber thinks, they won't be able to give you back much of that on trade in. Most people would probably just keep the watch with those prices.
Agreed, I don't see any decent percentage of even the high end market investing that much in a watch that will be largely obsolete in 2 years tops. You buy a Rolex to have it for years and pass it down. A $5000 watch that no one will want in 2 years is not a wise investment.
That was brought up in Gruber's post as well. What is more audacious then dropping 10k on something that will be obsolete in 2 years. There's an audience for that kind of ridiculous spending and you can bet people will notice a 10000 dollar Gold iWatch strapped to your wrist and know that you are someone with so much money that having an obsolete piece of technology that costs 10k is no big deal.
Even if the electronics are obsolete, you've still got a chunk of gold hanging off your wrist. Gruber mentions this, and raises the possibility of trade-ins. They do it with phones, and it makes sense for watches made of solid gold.
i've never owned a gold watch(but have bought a couple of gold coins before) so i'm curious. do they come with assay certs and some sort of cert that say how much gold is present(like, in ounces)?
and also, isn't it a little bit impractical in reality as well? gold being a soft metal will wear out if you wear it? then there could be less gold than what it says on the cert?
The only way you could make this work would be to make the electronics swappable out of the chassis, to give the object some sort of historical permanence for the owner.
Of course, if you could do that though, then you're not really in the smartwatch business, since it would mean anyone could make compatible wrist-bands.
Conversely - that might not be a bad business to be in.
Well if it comes down to the bands, you just know there will be knockoffs. As for the enclosure itself, Apple seems really proud of their manufacturing process for these things. If the guts of the thing are swappable (even if only by Apple), it might be tough for anybody else to come up with a comparable knockoff.
Given the cost of parts and assuming the chunk of gold accounts for more than 90% of the price, some sort of trade in system should cover this problem.
Perhaps, though "check out my slow, non-functional slabs of Apple tech"...
Apple abandons devices from OS upgrades and compatibility, batteries lose their charge. It'll very quickly (in terms of "collectibles") become a gold bar with a black rectangle in the middle.
