How Apple Makes the Watch
atomicdelights.com
atomicdelights.com
I work in high tech manufacturing and these kinds of things happen to normal companies all the time. An essential part of every BOM is the "alternates and substitutions" section, which lists the 2nd, 3rd, etc options for components if the first choice isn't available. Another is the potential inability of an EMS partner to build any given product at any given location because they literally do not have plug & play equipment at all of their facilities. And if a customer forces the issue, it could takes months to 1) spend the capex, and 2) wait for the machine suppliers (Fuji, Siemens, Yestech, Saki, Orbotech, Agilent, etc) to deliver it. To give you an idea of why Apple chose Foxconn as their premier partner, Foxconn owns their whole supply chain outright, and they operate at a scale similar to Apple, which allows them to drop a billion here or there on capital investments at Apple's request. Others have tried (Pegatron, Jabil), and failed.
I reckon it's excellent that Apple finally addresses the billionaire market with a gold experience. By taking the money where it is, it provides a revenue stream that can fund features that average people will use.
-Warhol
So, the bum might be drinking the same thing as a billionaire or a slightly different version. IMO, what's more interesting is that where wine, beer and even water have a fairly stratified market soda is just store brand vs name brand.
http://maineroot.com/ (uses fair trade organic sugar) https://www.boylanbottling.com/ http://reedsinc.com/
Personally, I never drink Coke, Pepsi or Dr Pepper products any more. A large part of the cost of those products is relentless marketing, shareholder dividends, and large corporate salaries. They no longer seem to care about delivering a quality product. How can they sell something called ginger ale if it doesn't actually have any ginger? For variety and depth of flavor any money I spend on soda is spent on craft soda.
I agree with you, in that spending money on quality products is "voting with your wallet," and overall, a good idea.
Be the change that you wish to see in the world.
It's a bit like the wide access to low-cost flights to Europe; that would have been unthinkable in the 1980s.
I always find it oddly refreshing to see! We haven't made the same progress in politeness and kindness to our fellow man, but at least technology is relatively cheap and easily available.
Food and energy are kind of on the boundary. I regard the increasing fripperyness of high-end dining as a sign that food is still affordable. Services that require an actual educated human in the West are still expensive, e.g. law, medicine.
^with advertising, piracy, privacy loss etc.
Technology makes the rich silly.
(Ok, the street sweeper probably had an iphone 4, not an iphone 6 plus...)
Just look at the Patek Philippe 5175R grandmaster chime watch video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGPjFFMD3c0 . You can't compare these hand made masterpieces with a mass produced item.
It's like trying to get Pagani Zonda owner to buy a Corvette.
Patek Philippe will flood the market by selling all six of them.
It's also quite sad that the base watch has a freaking sport strap even in the "gold edition" if you want to actually have a classical watch strap you'll have to cough up 17K....
CH was right, the only use of this watch is to show just how much money you are willing to spend on a piece of crap.
A classical luxury watch has at least a heirloom factor, i got a pretty expensive watch for my 18th Birthday and i still keep it as one. This watch will be obsolete after 18 months, not to mention not maintainable after 3-4 years.
What happens when the battery dies out? what happens when you no longer can run WatchOS 3 cuz IWatch 2 is out? :)
Give me a nice breitling or an omega any day these watches will last for centuries and still keep working and keep true time.
Also, mechanical watches do not last centuries without being serviced repeatedly every ~5 years. Servicing a high-end mechanical watch can easily cost many hundreds, if not more.
Many mechanical watches are also not automatic, which means you do indeed have to "charge" them every day (hand-wind them). For instance, Nomos is my personal favorite watch brand of all time, and while they have a mixture of manual and automatic watches, their highest-end offerings (about $20k) are all manual.
Finally, you mentioned TAG, and one of their best known watches is square: the Monaco.
Rolex datejust and explorer are both pretty classy without being oversized. But yeah, the oversizing of watches has gotten a bit silly (this is across all brands, not just rolex).
If you have a mechanical movement then there are replacement parts for watches made over 150 years ago still being made.
With the potted mess of consumer electronics these days GL fixing it in 5 years from now. 10K for a paper weight.
On another note Apple just increased it's loan scheme in the UK to 8K GBP which is the price for the entry gold model.
So now with 48 easy payments and 15% interest you can own yourself a real peace of wannabe richness.
Apple creates these type of videos for almost every product they sell. Take a look at the new macbook video and you will see the same kind of theatrics. They just really enjoy showing this stuff off. They have some of the best manufacturing in the industry and they are proud of it.
I enjoy moments like these, and there have been many in my life, where the scales fall from my eyes are I get a glimpse of the adjacent possible.
Thank you!
Thanks!
Apple does not want to make a Pagani and sell a dozen each year.
It really isn't, not in europe.
So in order to not just show a boring milled component of the face assembly or whatever they show lots of boring milled face assemblies.
There's nothing interesting to see here so we'll show you lots of uninteresting things to see if that makes up for it.
Having also spent some time learning about how PR firms work, I'm also deeply suspicious of articles like this as having been generated because somebody was so moved by the beauty of the watch they had to write a post about it. There are arguably better or equal looking watches on the market (smart or otherwise) that haven't received this attention.
The previous post on this blog is about the Mac Pro, which is usually compared to looking like a small trash can or a large ashtray -- even by obsessive fans.
It's surprising how much content we read as blog posts and even mainstream news articles are simply content produced by PR firms for their clients.
EDIT: I also see these videos as trying to appeal to normal people and make them feel like watch enthusiasts. The video is well-made, but as you say, the components themselves aren't particularly interesting for actual watch enthusiasts.
They're easy to spot, too. Expensive clothes, no sense of style. Usually loud, if not vulgar. Lack of empathy, coupled with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. They won't buy a Murakami because it appeals to them aesthetically, they'll buy one because their rich friend bought one "for the kid's room". And enough disposable cash to buy an Apple Watch for no other reason than that they can. In Europe they're often called nouveau riche, or even Euro-trash.
This person buys the Grandmaster Chime, which is truly hideous, expensive, and has no sense of style. I would not wear it if you gave me one.
... or maybe, just maybe, taste is subjective, and old-money aristocrats and their lapdogs don't have a monopoly on it.
Or you could be the guy that walks into meetings, waits until everyone is settled before opening a leather-bound, monogrammed notebook, pulls that same pen out, put elbows on table and slowly unscrews the cap, before setting the pen down on the notepad, without having written a word.
Extrinsic vs. intrinsic.
That said how the heck do you manage the dreaded question 'can I borrow your pen?' ;)
Watch is a slow-motion PR disaster. It's doing a lot of damage to the Apple brand, because Apple seem to have stopped pretending to make useful, affordable, luxury, and are now trying to make unaffordable, useless, luxury - which is a completely different market, for completely customers, with completely different rules.
This would be fine if the product itself had clear Veblen-differentiation. But it doesn't. Watch Edition is just Sport Watch in a blingy case with a nicer strap.
That is so not how the luxury market works.
High-end luxury is defined by evidence that you can command some other human's skill and work. So, you can't have mass-produced or machine-made high-end luxury, by definition.
If it's not hand-made, or hand-marketed, or hand-concierged, or very strictly limited, of fundamentally different and exclusive in a way that proves that someone has had to work hard for you personally to make it, it doesn't tweak those luxury neurons - no matter how much gold it has, or how much it costs.
Have you been to an upscale mall? That perfectly describes Williams-Sonoma, Coach, etc.
At upscale malls, those kind of stores are squarely in the mid-range session, not the part of the mall with the designer boutique shops.
I think they were rather created to appeal to people, who would like to be considered high end watch enthusiast, but not necessarily are able to afford the kind of high end watch that you mention.
Here's a video of a Nomos Glashuette watch being made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwpP_s8LV_Y
And their website: http://www.nomos-glashuette.com/
They've got an aesthetic that isn't unlike Apple's (minimalistic), and they're among the more affordable mechanical watch brands (while still creating high quality, in-house movements).
Yes! That's the concept I was looking for! In a few years we'll look back at this segment like we look back at the iPhone today: We didn't know it could exist, yet at was a vast blue ocean. However I wonder whether Apple nails it properly and what are the key pillars: If you started a gold electronic movement, wouldn't you auction and number the first series? "This watch, kid, was the 1000th ever made by Apple. I own a very particular moment in History. Look, in that series they hadn't even designed the Digital Crown to its final form." Isn't the current Apple Watch missing a bit of storytelling? Is 5 or 10 videos about the factory enough?
The big difference is that while Nokia actively tried to hide the fact the Vertu was basically just a Nokia phone in a more expensive shell, Apple is making no secret of the fact.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IvnptQJ__U
I believe that Apple has probably better information that you have. The world is tremendously big. I have been with Chinese oligarchs with several hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth, the puppet oligarchs in Ukraine and Saudi Arabia supported by the US or Russia,Africa leaders,Brazil wealthy, the owners of fortune 500 companies. These people could spend 10.000 dollars with the blink of an eye. In day to day decisions they risk millions.
I don't like this, but not liking it does not make part of the reality banish.
We can fathom the difficulty, craftsmanship and effort that goes into combining several hundred components together in a watch, yet scoff at hundreds of millions of transistors that are just as artfully designed and brought together to bring to the masses leverage to human ability that was unfathomable just a century ago.
Sure, a silicon wafer is built by machines, and does not have the "hand craftsmanship" of say a watch, yet, I would argue that far more collective effort went into designing circuits than did into designing the gear combinations that went into building a watch.
When it comes to buying high-end, high-end has been about exclusivity, multiplied by the effort put into building such a product. However, when one considers the effort necessary to complete a given task, exclusive or not, being impressive can be quantified by the effort placed.
Thus we are sometimes impressed when someone does something through the hard route, when an obviously easier route existed, (a la, "I'm not even mad, that's amazing"). The wealthy (and the commonors as well) like to purchase the exclusivity of effort (custom) within the bounds of their understanding as it either stirs their innate appreciations or scratches their ego. Either way, people can only appreciate the efforts of what they understand, while the efforts of what is not understood gets belittled. And the caliber of complexity occasionally peeks it heads out amongst the ultra-rich. The ultra-rich who appreciate watches and boats, versus the ultra-rich who appreciate rockets and education.
As children are easily impressed at young ages and become less so as they age, our ability to be impressed should grow with our growth. IMO, If the pinnacle of "craftsmanship" is in very small turning gears, it's a shame, because there is so much more beyond that barrier.
http://mentalfloss.com/article/22461/why-1010-default-settin...
The article was very easy to understand for someone with little knowledge about manufacturing processes and did a great job of explaining how much effort and engineering goes into making a great product.
The Apple videos on craftsmanship were overly clinical and fancy, which for me took away from talking about the engineering and effort they put into the product.
The interesting thing is, Apple did not show the Gold video in the event at all. They showed all the other videos.
stop trolling; they aren't trying to rip you off.
A Rolex submariner weighs about 135g. Let's pretend that all but 35g of it is gold (it's less, but w/e). So we're at 100g of 18k gold. Now, 18k gold is 75% by mass, equal to 75g of 24k gold or $2900.
The cheapest, non-gold submariner costs $7500.
Buying gold watches to get the gold - or even considering the value of their alloys when buying them - is as dumb as doing the same with computers.
Hard to say.
> Apple chooses not to show us the manufacturing of the clasp components, processes that I think would be (in some respects) more interesting than how the watch case is made. Given the complex surfaces of the Modern buckle, this might be the first example of Apple using 3D surface tollbooth in order to machine a component (all Apple products have been created through the very skillful use of relatively simple, precise prismatic 2.5D tool path, with any complex curves being created from stampings).
4 and 5 axis CNC mills for watch-sized objects aren't overly expensive. Roland has some nice ones in the $8K range.[1] Their little desktop milling machines are often used to produce medical and dental replacement parts. Apple's use of laser deburring is a nice touch. That's likely to become popular.
(Author of the linked article).
Also, ain't no way an $8k desktop mill will ever have the rigidity or accuracy to be building stuff that would even pass as a junky watch.
It's just rather absurd that on the premium "watch edition" apple watch, apple is charging around $7k just for the watch edition with the best strap.
What I find a bit funny is the $350 apple watch is the most feature rich watch. It may be aluminum but it is water resistant which makes it more useful than the more expensive alternatives.
That really indicates that Apple Watch will evolve slowly. Maybe it will be three to five years before there's a new model. It doesn't really need upgrades, because it's mostly a fancy terminal for your iPhone, plus a fitness band and iPod shuffle. And I think that Apple will support it for a much longer time than iPhones and iPads. Ten years from now, today's Apple Watch will work with the latest iPhones and iOS.
But they will introduce new cases and bands every year.
I wouldn't be shocked if they did nothing though.
Now, how do we make it look more like a "personal, exclusive, luxurious" experience? I wonder...
The craftsmanship of a real watch is not something to be missed. But since Apple's watch is just electronics, they can't appeal to customers with a soul-less PCB. Instead, they make a Discovery how it's made movie about building a watch case.