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Comment by nicpottier | Hacker News Reader

Yes, exactly, this seems so obvious that I don't understand why Gruber is ignoring it.

The iWatch will be obsolete in 24 months at most (less if you are the type who values status and want a "$20,000" watch as the next model will probably come out 12-18 months later)

Maybe there are enough uber-rich people that are ok buying $20,000 watches every year, but that seems like a really, really small market.

Then again, maybe the bands will remain the same, so if the primary investment is in the band, then that could last a bit longer. Even then I'd expect that every 2-3 years they will have a form factor switch that will make all previous bands obsolete.

We'll see.

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Also the first thing came to my mind. Keeping the bands intact makes sense. Given the size of the watch there won't be much gold used in the watch head anyway.

And this is purely fantasizing, maybe you can upgrade golden models by paying a comparatively small upgrade fee...return the old watch head and get a new one with upgraded electronic parts... :-D

I'm not sure Gruber is ignoring it as much as he's making a statement about the economics of precious metals. It's definitely a factor in the market for such things though. Apple could potentially offer some sort of trade-in for the metal I suppose but this does seem to be one of those cases (as in autos) where there's a mismatch between the lifecycle of electronics and the lifecycle of the thing the electronics are part of.

Phones were once something you bought once and rarely bought again, but that changed and now we all buy new phones once every 2'ish years.

That's mostly because people now lease them on multi-year contracts from their service providers.

I recently switched back & bought an early 80's model western electric telephone. Hopefully it will last another 30 years!

Sure, but I pay ~$400 every couple of years for a phone. I also bought a Moto 360 for $175 (normal non-sale price $250). I may replace that in a year or two when the tech has improved enough to justify the update.

Either way, these are still mostly luxuries (I could get a passable smart phone for under $100 and any old watch for $30-50 or just not wear one) but it wouldn't be the first time a company put out a range of products so people of different budgets can become customers while still offering some high-end model for status seekers to shell out for and mortals to drool over.

I'm not interested in the Apple watches at the moment but it makes sense for them to sell a "mere mortal" version for $300-500 as they typically charge a bit more than competitors for their name and reputation for polish. If they sell a Rolex-grade version for rock stars and wealthy heirs then I guess it just adds to the status of the brand as a whole even if nobody normal would ever buy one.

In Apple's models there has to be enough people willing to pay that much money for a watch that will likely be made obsolete. That is mind-boggling to me. I have enough friends who have consternations about buying a new phone every two years let alone buying a watch that can be just as expensive to go along with it. Based on my personal experience I bet they're relying on the 5%-ers to make this thing work.

The Apple watch will tell time far better than a Rolex for decades to come. CPU and memory and Moore's Law can't change that.

Well, sure. But it's also way uglier than a Rolex, and it needs to be charged nightly.

I don't regard "OMG it needs to be charged nightly" as a big problem ordinarily, but if your point is that the smartwatch degrades gracefully into a normal watch, then it's relevant the ways that it's inferior to a normal watch.

More to the point, presumably anyone who shells out for a smartwatch wants, you know, an actual smartwatch.

For starters, it's not called "iWatch".

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