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Still doesn't change the fact that someone who spends $34,850 for an Day-Date 40, etc is an idiot, aka, Hipster.

Rolls Royce is gone. Bought by BMW more than a decade ago. The gas turbine manufacturer still exists, though. Lamborghini is gone, it is owned by VW now. Rolex has a cheaper brand (Tudor). What was your point again? X

That you are not terribly quick on the uptake. Whoosh for maximum levels of whoosh. Who owns any of these companies has nothing to do with my point.

My point is that there are people in this world who will pay for quality. There are also people who want rock bottom cheap and will stop at nothing to get the cheapest poorest quality they can get.

I learned a long time ago that cheaping out only ensures cheap. You don't have to pay top dollar for everything, but if your metric is that apple isn't competitive because they are overpriced, then go out and buy a Digiland Tablet. Now to your smashinig ripost and utter destruction of my entire premise, which is somehow declaring these outfits don't exist any more, or that all Rolex watches are cheap bacause of producing a less expensive model....

Here is Rolex http://www.rolex.com/ Go tell them that all their watches are the equivalent of Swatches because they have a less expensive model.

Here is Rolls Royce. https://www.rolls-roycemotorca...

Since they are "Gone" as you put it, you might do the company and the dealerships a favor in telling them they are selling air or something Get on that, and tell me how that works out for ya. Gotta put these idiots straight.

Go tell them they don't exist any more

Here is Lamborghini http://www.lamborghini.com/en/...

More air being sold, eh?

Go tell them they don't exist any more.

I own a Rolex DateJust in Gold and Stainless Steel, and someday I'd like to own a Jaeger-LeCoultre Master Ultra Thin Moon 39 in Stainless Steel, as well as a Breitling Navitimer 01. For my father's 70th birthday we bought him a Navitimer 01, which he just loves. (My father and I are both private pilots.)

Here's the thing about luxury watches: for women, you can wear necklaces, wrist bands, rings and earrings. But for men, the only pieces of jewelry that a man can wear (and get away with it) is cufflinks, a tie clip and a luxury watch. And if you're not wearing a shirt with french cuffs, or wearing a tie, then all that is left is the watch.

So basically a luxury watch is jewelry. Functional jewelry, but jewelry all the same. And like all jewelry, if its taken care of you can inherit it from your grandparents (as my wife inherited some pieces), you can receive it when you are young and still wear it when you're old, and you can pass it down to your grandchildren.

When you start looking at luxury watches, you find there are two types: those which use an in-house built movement built by craftsmen who sweat the details and who create all sorts of intricate complications which do interesting things (like keep accurate time, provide a stopwatch function, show the phase of the moon, the day of the month, the month of the year), and those who buy an off-the-shelf movement and wrap it in gaudy jewelry.

From what I've read (I'm not a collector but I'd like to be one someday if I ever really strike it extremely rich, because mechanical wrist watches fascinate me no end), watches from watchmakers who build their own movements are highly respected. Watches from watchmakers who buy their movements from third parties, however, are not very well respected. And the worst are those who use quartz movements: essentially an electric powered watch movement regulated by a small oscillator crystal. Like about 1/3rd of Tag Heuer's product line, many running up into the 10's of thousands, which horticulturally have more in common with a cheap Casio than with an A. Lang & Sohne.

This is why I think luxury smart watches will be an unmitigated disaster. Sure, some people will buy them--because some people have more money than God, and to be able to show off a $10,000 smart watch that you're just going to toss away in a couple of years when the electronics are out of date would be the height of "one upping the Joneses." But I cannot see them being any more interesting to someone fascinated by mechanical watches than a quartz Tag Heuer--it's the sort of watch someone with no sense of connection to the past or any sense of connection to the tradition of hand-crafted watches would shove in your face to exclaim how much better they are than you.

You know: crass assholes.

Agreed... When is the last time you took your smart phone to the beach??? Not me.. I worry that someone will lift it while I am in the water, so it stays in the room (in a safe if the room has one - to keep the hotel/resort staff from taking it). However, I would still like to know what it is when I am on the beach. What option do I have other than a watch? I have the Milgaus (man has got to have one really nice watch), a Rolex for geeks...

Second the MOTOACTV if it's a gadget timepiece your after.

If you're not in a hurry there is always the Pebble

And if you want a cheaper alternative we have Sony's offering. It says it is running Android but CMW seems to have debunked that claim.

That said I also believe as others here have stated that your watch is more about style and status

People are willing to pay 20 times that for a watch that does nothing more than tell the date and time.

...and to build extremely rich media websites.

Check out http://www.rolex.com/ for example. The whole thing is Flash. And sure, much of it could've been done with JS/etc, but some of it could not (the animated watch hands, for example)

And before you decry the website for requiring Flash; it doesn't. Turn off Javascript and try again, there's a complete and fully functional HTML/CSS layer underneath (which is also very important for SEO & accessibility purposes). The Flash "pages" are also bookmarkable and handle the Back/Forward buttons, etc, properly, through use of the the hash text in the url. (This technique is also used to maintain state in AJAX-y apps such as GMail)

Rolex.com is a good example of a flash-heavy site done properly (added value, not a requirement).

One example is the "glass" plate over the laser in the grocery barcode scanner: actually made from colorless "sapphire" because it is both harder and tougher than glass.

Likewise, Rolex uses artificial sapphire as the "glass" in their watch faces for the same reason...

For you and me, the guys that do the desktop support, it might be argued that a $725 tech watch requires "deep pockets."

However, I have a few friends here at work who are the senior engineer or executive types who are more into timepieces that cost several thousands of dollars, and receive bonuses regularly enough to afford them. (See the "Submariner" series.)

Just thought I would share.

Isn't "Hard Radio" what we are going to call legacy radio hardware after Soft Radio replaces it. ? You know, like analog watches and film cameras ?

The Mars and Rolex "Perpetual Motion" watches are analog watches.

Most people here are discussing digital watches with analog faces. IANAWS, but on the inside is the same quartz crystal based timing system....

"...in the long term they will be failing." Long term here being what, 5 years? How many portable audio players, CD, Tape, MP3, etc, have a product life cycle of 5 years? Zero. Sure, the Walkman has been around forever but it certainly hasn't remaind the same product for the past 25 years, or even the last 5 years. Portable CD players 5 years ago didn't know what MP3's were. Now, even the inexpensive ones play MP3 encoded discs.

USD30 mp3 players? Maybe eventually and at that point, Apple and all the other device manufacturers will have a new product with new features that people will gladly pay a premium price for. 10 cent downloads? Riiiight, that will happen....maybe with indie music, but never with mainstream, RIAA endorsed/encoded, DRM'd music. If you've ever read any type of financial article about iTMS, you'd know that it is a loss leader to sell iPods, cited here. Those songs will not be less than $0.99 for a long time, maybe $0.69 on sale, or something to that effect. Yeah, yeah, $0.79 at some of the other sites, that's got them where in market share and profitability? $0.10/song gets you what? In legal trouble with the music industry, and a real quick sucking sound of your VC funds because for ever song you sell, you lose $1.00 or so.

Apparently Mercedes-Benz, Giorgio Armani, and Rolex have never learned your lesson about "Nobody cares about quality." I know I do, which is why I bought an Apple Powerbook G4 instead of some POS HP/Compaq. Does this make me biased toward Apple? No. I bought the better product for my needs and the comparable Dells, which I do not believe have better quality or service, were several hundred dollars more and did less than my PB. I also don't shop at Walmart because of the low quality of much of the items they stock. Obviously, Walmart is doing something right to become the number one retailer in the world, but I still refuse to shop there and a completely separate discussion. I don't buy Kia's because I believe that they are lousy automobiles. My point here is that many people, including myself, care about quality.

I'm not quite sure what universal law of economics you are talking about, unless you have some odd perception of the supply and demand curves. If there was an economic law that stated that the cheapest product wins the most market share, we'd all be driving Kia's (or taking public transportation), doing all of our shopping at the dollar stores, buying clothes at the salvation army, and buying old computers off eBay as "upgrades."

I've always thought this is a pretty cool feature of some watches. The perpetual rotor in a Rolex seems like about the same thing. It would be nice if the same concept could be used to create electrical energy for a mobile phone/pda or other computing device.

The price should depend on the quality/uniqueness of the product. This is somewhat of a unique way of keeping time.
I personally believe that if the quality is high enough a price as high as $10 000 should not be considered out of question. My father owns a Rolex self-winding watch.
The watch picks up the vibrations of the moving wrist to wind its gears.

> Actually, I believe no modern watch claims to be
>"waterproof", it's always "water resistant to xx meters"

Rolex Oyster Perpetual watches are designated as "waterproof": From their website: "An Officially Certified Swiss Chronometer, the Rolex Oyster Perpetual is equipped with a waterproof case, a sapphire crystal and a self-winding movement." Sorry, their site is too annoying to navigate, so I can't give an actual link.

Urban legend used to say that this was because Rolex trademarked the phrase "waterproof", so everyone else had to use "water resistant." I'm not sure if this is the case (I've never seen them stick TM at the end of the phrase in their literature), but the reason could be that Rolex watches are made a little differently than a regular watch.

Rolex Oyster watches are cast all in one piece or slug, rather than assembled from multiple pieces. As a result, when the watch is put together, it is basically sealed. The result is rather heavy -- to give you an idea, take off your shoe, attach that to your wrist, and then walk around for a while -- but they're built to last.

Would you really spend $300 dollars on a watch?

Mechanical watches are made by dozens of companies today, including Swiss Rolex, Omega, IWC and dozens of others, even Swatch. Even Seiko makes mechanicals (although mostly for the Asian market). The Chinese make a bunch of cheap movements and the Russian company Poljot makes an interesting line of affordable watches. Accuracy ranges from +/- 1 second per day on high-end Swiss watches to +/- 20 seconds per day on the Russians. In general anything under +/- 6 seconds per day is considered good. However, there can be a great deal of variation from watch to watch. Rolex, Omega and other mass market companies do little or no hand work in their mass market lines. When you get to a company link JLC, and others, every watch gets some hand fit and finish. However, none of them can be wound only once per month. Most have about a 40 hour power reserve. A few have an 8 day reserve (notably an IWC, and an Eberhard. Of course just about every company offers an automatic watch that is wound by the movement of the wrist through out the day. Those watches should "never" need winding if worn every day or two. Everything you ever wanted to know about mechanical watches can be found at Timezone. Be forewarned, most of these guys think of watches under about $5,000 as "mid priced".