Announced today, the Apple Watch Ultra is a grade 5 titanium adventure watch; at night the screen looks phosphorescent. It has 8 complications, a screen that measures dive details. Do these features sound familiar to you too?
The Apple Watch Ultra, introduced by Apple today, is a sensational watch that surprised us at first sight, because it suddenly took us into a time capsule: from 2015, when the Apple Watch was first released, to September 2022.
With the advent of the Apple Watch, the first real example of a touchscreen smartwatch, Swiss watchmaking had to change drastically, just like in the Quartz Crisis. In order to get a share of the desire object atmosphere created by the Apple Watch, and even to keep the Swiss watchmaking alive, the brands gradually changed their attitude: First they denied and defended the superiority of automatic watches, then some brands (Montblanc, TAG Heuer, Frederique Constant, Movado, Tissot…) started to produce watches in the field, some brands announced that they would never produce smart watches (this was also the case during the Quartz Crisis. Blancpain would say, “We have not produced any quartz watches since 1738, and we will never produce them”). After the phases of acceptance and action that followed a period of denial, Apple Watch’s market dominance was acknowledged, but that still wasn’t the end of Swiss watchmaking. An article by Roberta Naas in Forbes was headlined: “The Apple Watch sells more watches than the whole of Switzerland, yet the death knell is not yet ringing for 600 years of Swiss watchmaking.” Before the author’s writing in 2020, all Swiss watches sold 21.2 million in a year, while the Apple Watch alone had sold 30.7 million units.
“We actually don’t need a watch anymore,” said Jean-Claude Biver, the industry veteran, “we buy it because it’s a work of art.” In the smart watch market, where the Apple Watch and the smartwatches it brought, followed by Huawei, Samsung and many large and small brands, the main issue was not aesthetics, but function. These watches have also increased their claims gradually: At first, smart watches that show your phone messages, the time you do sports and calories, over time, have become able to measure your sleep, blood sugar (Quantum Operation), blood pressure, it understands what sports you are doing like a personal assistant. meat,” he said.
At that time, other trends in high watchmaking followed one after another: Titanium watches, famous for their lightness and durability, swept the industry, the number of functional watches called “tool watches” produced for and combined with adventurers and explorers increased, artist and designer collaborations were made for a modern look.
