Apple will no longer fix the $17,000 gold Apple Watch::The original Apple Watch models, including the $10,000-plus 18-karat gold Edition that Beyoncé wore, are now officially obsolete and won’t get parts, repair, or replacement services.
Even before they were unsupported, how have they not been “obsolete” for some time. Cannot imagine how slow a gen 1 watch would be. I can see the appeal of a timeless heirloom watch, but this is such a brain dead purchase.
Well, it’s not a brain dead purchase when $20k doesn’t even register for you.
Got $500,000,000 in the bank? Who cares?
You family has billions and you just have an unlimited alllowance. Who cares.
That’s who this is for.
With that being said, Apple did it for one year and I think it was just a marketing stunt. Everyone talked about it and now people know what an Apple Watch is.
Apple did it for one year and I think it was just a marketing stunt
That’s exactly what it was. They never expected to sell many, just get the headlines for making a “luxury” watch that could “compete” with the likes of Rolex. That some ultra-wealthy people went out and bought one was just a bonus.
And now its built-in obsolescence is being paraded around pointing out why no one should buy such a thing ever again.
They didn’t even carry them at all of their stores.
I did get to wear one once, and only did so I could say I wore a watch that cost more than my car.
It is for those with more money than sense, 100%. No matter how much money you have, it’s not going to solve the problem of it being incompatible with a newer iPhone. And that makes anyone who bought this a clown.
The point is that for them, it doesn’t matter if the watch is obsolete and ends up in a drawer after a few years. They’ll just buy a new one.
For them 20k is like $20 for you.
You’re actually off by a lot more than you realize.
Average US income is about $31.2k, Beyoncé (who bought one) has an income of about $90m.
Meaning $20k to her is around $0.64 in relative wealth to the average person.
Literally pennies.
It’s all relative.
If I spend £1 of my last £5 on a bottle of water, I’m equally as dumb.
That’s accurate I think but the departure point here is where Apple was making noises about delivering ‘premium jewellery’ or some such spiel.
Rolex, Omega, etc. all support their products for life and beyond. I’m still able to get my dads Speedmaster from the 60s serviced, heck my daily driver Seiko Pepsi from the 80s still has parts available.
Apple can easily afford this level of support which makes it kind of iffy that they don’t.
Is there really a reason to need faster smart watches? I can understand shrinking the internals to pack in a larger battery, but I’m kinda confused about what newer smart watches do that requires a more powerful processor (I don’t own a smart watch).
It seems like you could support backward compatibility pretty easily by having basic software running on the watch with a program-agnostic API to send and receive info from the watch (kinda like midi or osc). I doubt the processor necessary to send, receive, decode and display information in this format would require that much power. If smart watches honestly get slower over time, the only thing I can think is that the software itself is getting less efficient at doing the same tasks it previously did.
Software is a gas: it expands to fill the processor and memory you give it. That’s a goofy way of saying that, as manufacturers cram faster processors and more memory into devices, software developers will use the extra facilities.
If you’re on an old device with limited CPU/RAM, you’ll be forced to upgrade to a newer OS that was built with newer devices in mind.
Mostly new sensors rather than larger battery I think. For instance, newer Apple Watches can monitor temp and oxygen (at least in some capacity).
I have a S3 Apple Watch, and while it’s stuck on an older version of watchOS, it serves my purposes perfectly. Sends me notifications, lets me control my music and tracks my exercise. That’s pretty much all I need from a smart watch at this point. The battery isn’t amazing, but if I charge in the evening when I’m watching TV, it’ll last me through the night. I give it a little bump while I’m drinking coffee and reading in the morning and it’ll still be on 40/50% when I get home from work.
It seems like you could support backward compatibility
Good one lol. I’m sure apple will think about it haha
I wonder how much of that price is just the value of gold.
I’m seeing a 24k bracelet no watch and similar shape is $5k to $10k
Very little of the price is the gold.
An actual gold watch case (excluding the bracelet and the movement inside it) weighs about 20g.
At about £50 a gram that’s £1000.
And I doubt the amount of gold in the case of the Apple watch is anywhere near the same amount as in a traditional gold watch case.
I was talking about the bracelet, the watch itself is essentially e waste I think it’s only 18k gold anyway seems like the price of just branding/exclusivity
Cannot imagine how slow a gen 1 watch would be.
It’s a fucking watch. I mean it can also monitor bpm and stuff like that but I can’t imagine it’s doing any complex scientific calculations on there.
And I’m sure you’re posting this comment from your eMachine? The Apple Watch is a computer. As applications become more demanding, any older computer will be “slower”.
Gen 1 Apple Watch haver here
Yep it’s laggy and low FPS, but it does everything I need it to. I agree with you. Would I love a newer one? Sure, but do I need it? Hell no
Sure, I mean if you want to use your apple watch to play Tomb Raider or something, go ahead. When the apple watch first came out, most of the buyers used it to track fitness and sleep stuff. It has now become a messenger device, phone, email client. Even with all these extra features, I can’t imagine the consumer wanting much more from this tiny interface.
The irony of building something so expensive, opulent and heirloom worthy around one of the most rapidly depreciating assets you can buy (technology)
I mean, a 17k$ (back then) workstation from the 90s would still be fine. People love their SGI and Sun machines.
Not sure how much they did cost back then, I was born in 1996, but you get the idea.
A $17k workstation from the 90’s would not even be able to browse the internet.
To put it in perspective, we didn’t even have multi-core CPUs until the mid 2000’s, a mid 90’s machine would have around 400 MHz on a single core and that’s being generous.
You’d be able to upgrade the insides while still looking opulently golden.
I’m well aware of what these are capable of, these things are not bought for your Twitter and Reddit activities.
And yet a $17k apple power Mac g5 today barely functions for YouTube
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Macs are not iconic.
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Oh, thank you for educating me.
I mean is at the end is a watch… at worst case the basic function will work. Although I admit that the battery is still a problem in this case. And that’s even if you look at the hour and isn’t just an accessory that you barely use it’s function.
Once the batteries of those things die (and they will die in short order) they are completely useless. Just small black bricks with a hint of gold on the outside.
Yeah with that I agree as I said.
The big luxury watch brands will service their watches for many decades; a Rolex will last a lifetime, if not longer.
Rolex buyers are smart enough to not buy another if theirs breaks after a few years. Apple’s, not so much.
For +$17,000, that shit better have a lifetime guarantee on it, though I guess anyone with $17,000 to throw away on a watch probably doesn’t care anyways, they’ve probably forgotten that they own the thing anyways.
Anyone who has 19,000$ to blow on a watch needs to be taxed a additional 18,000$
Honestly, good. Fuck the people who have this sort of money to throw away. They deserve it.
Unfortunately they funded the richest company in the world.
They’ve probably stopped using it years ago and got a new one
Weak attidude grounded in jealousy.
I’m not jealous of someone who throws away $17,000 on a useless toy. Maybe you think that’s impressive, but I don’t.
Listen, anyone who had one could probably afford a brand new gold watch instead of repairing it anyway and doesn’t care about anything except as a status symbol.
On the other hand gold watches are the kind of thing that are proudly passed around as family heirlooms, only the trashiest new money would buy one every two years and throw the old one away.
And if someone bought an apple watch thinking it was going to be an heirloom, well, uh…
Ok, that just brought me right back around to your point. Nevermind.
gold watches are the kind of thing that are proudly passed around as family heirlooms
Which further points the absurdity of this thing. Gold watch that has expiration date built-in and no one will look at it after that. Mechanical watches can last indefinitely given enough care and love. No matter how much you love this thing, when Apple decides it’s done, it’s done.
This. Anyone with a 17k watch stopped using it 2 days after they bought it.
I thought her fingers were her lips & chin
Thanks for the haunted thumbnail. 😂
Oh boy, it sure sucks to suck.
I still use the original sport band from 2015 on a 7th gen watch, and it fit the 4/5 gen before that. Unless the gold band was non removable from the watch I don’t see the issue.
Also the fact that this was never publicly available means these were gifts to celebs for PR, ain’t nobody losing any money on this.
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I had to look up that Apple Watch came out in 2015. I feel old…yet again.
The Covid years really did fuck with my perception of time. I feel like I should be three years younger
This is the best summary I could come up with:
That ship has sailed; the original Apple Watches (widely referred to as Series 0) never updated beyond watchOS 4.3.2 in 2018.
It means the end of hardware support: the company will no longer provide parts, repairs, or replacement services.
When it launched, it was seen on the wrists of influential celebrities, including German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, who, like Beyoncé, wore it with a gold link bracelet that was never available to the public.
Even folks who do drop five figures on watches tend to want something that’ll still tell time (and hold its value) in a couple of decades.
You could spend $10,000 to $30,000 on a Cartier Tank, still get a square watch, and not worry about whether you could get it serviced eight (or 80) years later.
As long as luxury watch manufacturers like Cartier exist (or Patek Philippe, Rolex, etc.
The original article contains 327 words, the summary contains 144 words. Saved 56%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
You know what? Good.
If you want to buy something fancy you could buy an expensive “dumb” one that won’t lose its value in a year or so. It’s the buyers fault.
Unless you want it for working out I find smartwatches stupid. Are you so busy that you can’t pull your phone out of your pocket?
Edit: I take it back, yeah seems that there are some specific reasons like those below for wearing a smartwatch.
I still find spending 17k in a luxury watch dumb, a Rolex (I have no idea how much they are worth) still seems better because it won’t lose it’s value like when the smartwatch OS becomes obsolete.
In addition to using it for tracking my workouts and bluetoothing to my earbuds, I also found my smartwatch super useful while working as a teacher for surreptitiously checking texts and also for setting timers
I don’t doubt that your smartwatch is useful, but why can’t you just pair to your phone? I can be like 30 yards away from my phone with my earbuds.
Oh i don’t like taking my phone when I go running so it’s a game changer
Fair enough.
Mine are pretty specific but:
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I’m a bartender. I can get messages if the door person/security is having a problem customer while I am elbow deep in an ice well (plus phones are dirty so I’m not touching gross phone and then your lime wedge even if I am super religious about washing my hands with everything I touch behind bar.) I don’t wear it all the time but it is a useful tool.
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I monitor my heart rate cos I’m having health issues
Butttt… I don’t feel bad for these folks, mine came with my phone.
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In the case of the apple watches, you’re right. Android watches are actually quite stylish, though.
but why though? why would you do that?
If you’re smart enough to ask the question, you are not the target of this product
I wonder if Cash4Gold would take them. Lol I remember seeing this commercial as a kid.
It’s not really pure gold. So you’d get surprisingly small amount of money for “gold” watch.
Apple is a brand perfectly positioned at the intersection of clueless but snobby.
