"Arnault praised Apple as an excellent product and brand, but he doesn’t consider it a luxury brand. Why? It lacks timelessness. And timelessness is a magical quality."

I think Apple learned this point with the expensive flop of the first-generation Apple Watch Edition in 2015. They built the Apple Watch in gold-cased editions priced in the $10,000-15,000 range, set up show rooms in places like Dubai, and got a few celebrities like Beyoncé to wear one in pictures. Everything by the book for a luxury launch.

But everyone knows that their Apple products need to be replaced every couple of years. A luxury watch needs to be something you could imagine passing to your grandchildren (even if you don't actually do that and just end up selling the watch some time later, as many buyers do). An Apple Watch just stops getting updates after four years and becomes electronics junk, gold alloy or not.

In a rare misstep, the design and marketing departments at Apple were out of sync with the reality of their hardware product as part of a software-driven platform.

In a similar vein, 25 years ago Nokia was at the top and tried to create a separate luxury brand Vertu for $10k phones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertu

That didn't work out either because the devices were lacking the holistic combination of handcraft and creativity that Arnault would expect from a luxury product. They were simply ordinary Nokia phone guts in opulent metal cases. Vertu finally went bankrupt in 2017.