Tag Heuer Partners With Google and Intel To Create Luxury Apple Watch Rival

An anonymous reader writes Luxury Swiss watchmaker Tag Heuer has announced it will be designing a smartwatch in partnership with U.S. tech giants Google and Intel. The watch is to rival similar devices in the consumer wearables market, specifically the much-anticipated Apple Watch. Tag is the first watchmaker to join with Google, however it is thought the deal will also welcome collaborations with other high-quality LVMH brands, such as Hublot and Zenith. The watch will be available toward the end of the year, with price structures and functionality details announced shortly before its release.

Comments

It's win-win.

[dohzer]

Google and Intel bring the tech know-how, and Tag Heuer brings the idiots willing to pay ridiculous money for a watch.

Watch and learn, young'uns

[melted]

This is what desperation looks like. Paraphrasing Vic Gundotra (of Google+ "fame"): three turkeys don't make an eagle.

Not a watch

[sunderland56]

A watch is a mechanical timepiece you wear on your wrist. The Apple product mentioned is a small computer you wear on your wrist.

Expensive watches are mainly expensive because of the internals, not because of the case. Sure, gold/silver/etc will drive up the price - but a good mechanical watch in a stanless steel case can still cost $10,000 - because of the intricate, hand-assembled internals. Replace those internals with $10 worth of silicon circuitry and a display, and it won't be worth $10K any more, even though there's the same name on the face.

Assuming that all things you wear on your wrist are interchangeable is like assuming all automobiles are interchangeable. Taking an Aston Martin and replacing the engine/transmission/driveline with one from a Ford Focus isn't going to create a desirable vehicle, and it won't be worth $140,000.

Re:Not a watch

[w3woody]

Try "thousands", if the movement is built in-house and has more than a couple of complications. Ah, hell; try hundreds of thousands for a custom watch movement with more than a handful of complications--mostly due to engineering costs of designing the movement, which can take years. And when you get to the extreme high end of the watch movement market, they start becoming small analog computers, such as this Patek Philippe pocket watch, which has a complication which calculates the sidereal day, and was constructed in 1933. Or this Jaeger-LeCoultre, which consists of over 1400 individual parts and 26 separate complications.

Read between the lines though.

[popo]

It's *extremely* telling that Google is running after luxury brands.

Why?

Because everyone at Apple and Google know the truth. And the truth is: This is not a product anyone needs.

How do you sell something nobody actually needs? Well... Nobody knows the answer to that question better than watch manufacturers.

The immediate flight to "luxury" speaks volumes about the actual utility value of these silly gadgets.

Yeah, this will go as well as a lead balloon.

[w3woody]

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.