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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.
Google and Intel bring the tech know-how, and Tag Heuer brings the idiots willing to pay ridiculous money for a watch.
with price structures and functionality details announced shortly before its release
Anything with "price structures" is going to be too expensive.
This is what desperation looks like. Paraphrasing Vic Gundotra (of Google+ "fame"): three turkeys don't make an eagle.
but a good mechanical watch in a stanless steel case can still cost $10,000 - because of the intricate, hand-assembled internals
A good mechanical watch in a stainless steel case costs a few hundred dollars or less. $10,000 watches are jewelry whose price is inflated primarily by artificial scarcity and brand management.
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.
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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.