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TAG Heuer Increasing Weekly Production To Meet Demand For Its Smartwatch (slashgear.com)
An anonymous reader writes: According to reports TAG Heuer is struggling to keep up with the high demand for its $1,500 TAG Heuer Connected Android Wear-powered smartwatch. Since its launch in November the company has sold about 100,000 units and plans to crank up production to 2,000 units per week. According to Slashgear: "Jean-Claude Biver, the CEO of Tag Heuer shares that more smartwatch models from the company will be unveiled at the end 2016 or early 2017 – with options of new materials and diamonds. Being the genius that revived brands such as Blancpain and Hublot, Biver has positioned Tag Heuer as the first luxury watchmaker that enters smartwatch business with a 'big bang' and ready to use large eco-system courtesy of Android Wear."
and this is how we turn decades lasting timepieces into disposable trash.
Funny how things go round and round.
In the 1970s the Swiss makers found themselves under attack from the new cheaper quartz watches. (wikipedia for "quartz crisis") They could no longer plausibly claim that their handcrafted puffery resulted in more accurate timekeeping. So they had to change their marketing message from "accuracy" to "heirloom timepieces" bullshit (hence why you see messages like, "you don't just buy a Pat** Phi***, you only take care of it for the next generation." etc)
You would think that they (like religious science-deniers) would just accept that that is their niche, and stay with it. But now they have to catch up with the smart watch too, or risk losing the next generation of watch buyers.
So let's see how their message of "preserving an heirloom timepiece" stands up against the reality of a battery that lasts for 24 hours, and consumer electronics that get thrown out after 2 years... When the guts of your watch are indistinguishable from a $75 piece of crap, who's going to believe the marketing hype?