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

Re: It's win-win.

[hey!]

They've always been about design, as you'd know if you ever cracked open one of their tower computer cases it goes more than skin deep.

Design is about making choices, and one of the most important choices you have to make is which stuff to leave out. Take watches. If you have a watch with no features other than an hour, minute and second hand, that represents the pinnacle of usability for telling time with an analog watch. With every feature you add to an analog watch the task of telling time becomes ever-so-slightly more trouble.

Some analog watches feature a sun/moon complication which tells you whether it is AM or PM. This added feature doesn't remove the time-telling feature, it just adds design constraints: no digits on the dial, some ours don't have luminous markers etc. Consequently I don't care for this feature, but some people like it and possibly a very small number of them find it useful. This is also true of more popular features like day of the week or stopwatch subdials. They are occasionally useful but they add constraints and clutter. That explains why at a certain price point the number of geegaws on a watch starts going down. That's the point at which the manufacturer begins focusing on design. Consequently the most elegant watches are either very cheap or very expensive.

Google "Al Qaeda Watch" and you'll find the Casio F-91W, a black, square of plastic that is to super-cheap watches what the Rolex Submariner is to super-luxury watches: a design classic. But it's missing a feature I use quite a bit, a countdown timer. To get that I have to spend a few more dollars, and I end up with a bunch of *other* features like multiple time zones, multiple alarms, databanks etc. that significantly complicate the operation of the watch. The market simply doesn't offer a watch that has *exactly* what I want in such a perfectly streamlined package. And this shows something important about design, which is that people have different needs and tastes, so there's no such thing as a blend of function and form that's ideal for everyone.

Selling design is smart. It makes a successful product more profitable because it adds no marginal cost to each unit. And because no design is perfect, it means that after you've saturated the market with one design you can sell it another one. You'd think more companies would follow Apple's lead, but design is harder than it looks, and most tech people can't get past their "more is better" mentality.