Apple is to servicing their hardware products as Google is to maintaining their software products

This was a one off first-gen product that was sold almost 9 years ago. How long do you expect them to keep maintaining it? At least no one is attempting to build infrastructure on top of an Apple Watch—that can’t be said about google’s services.

Apple’s executives committed themselves to the lunacy of selling effectively disposable electronics housed inside an actual gold case. They knew exactly what they were doing and that decision is exemplar of their overall practice of building hardware that is impractical to maintain in the long run.

I get that the luxury watch crowd will look at this as a failure because they count the time a watch works not in years but generations. But the Apple watch isn't that type of watch, it's a wrist computer. And from my perspective having gotten 8 years of support on a smartwatch that was still one of the early generations for the device type itself is pretty decent. How long would you expect them to keep supporting this?

Which is why the gold never made any sense. The rumor has always been they did it entirely because Johnny Ive wanted to make a fancy gold watch.

The writing was on the wall the next year when they dropped gold and there was no way to upgrade it.

It was clearly someone’s vanity product. We don’t ever know if they ever sold a single one. Sure celebrities got them, but did anyone ever pay? It’s possible the answer is no. We also don’t know how many they made.

It was a laughing stock from day one, even among Apple lovers (like me).

There are very few generations old watchmakers who are both still around and servicing their vintage pieces. Generally, even if they are, they're charging an arm and a leg because they're going to have to custom machine the parts for you. On rare pieces the labor costs alone are eye watering. It’ll probably be cheaper to just a modern Apple Watch SOC into a vintage edition.

Another issue with luxury watch crowd is that they have truly skewed definition of what is meant by “works”. The primary function of a watch is to keep time with reasonable precision, not to be an overengineered piece of mechanical complexity.

Google's software rarely makes it beyond 5 years though

I assume these are solid gold and it can be cast into something useful for many more years?

I would prefer it if we could all just start ignoring Apple.

Thank you

Easy enough to do! Just skip over the Apple articles on your HN front page!

If you haven't already, I would encourage both of you to read the guidelines of posting here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Specifically:

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. > Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

If you have already read them, treat my comment as a reminder to be respectful and try to generate stimulating conversation, not wage battles.

I suppose this is a good opportunity to plug my userscript which lets people filter out HN submissions by title, user, or source:

https://github.com/booleandilemma/hn-blacklist

In this case you would use a filter of: "title:apple".

> Easy enough to do! Just skip over the Apple articles on your HN front page!

I am an Apple developer, so I would like you all to stop buying Apple and I can get an honest job....

I doubt this ever mattered, especially to folks like Karl Lagerfeld, who never even set his up (or appears to have charged it).

https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/karl-lagerfeld-audemars-pi...

If I was worth what he is I’d be buying expensive gadgets on a whim every 15 minutes. Then just buy a new house when the current one fills up with said gadgets.

Well, then I guess we should be happy inequalities prevent one more person from wasting a tremendous amount of rare materials and energy.

I was joking but yes, the waste is sickening. You just gotta laugh at some point. Or at least I gotta laugh at some point.

i heard about somebody who has actually done that... but their main interest was porn.

That's mentioned in the article.

I'm curious what the convention is for gold consumer electronics at EoL. Do you bring it into a jeweler and get the gold casing pried off and melted down?

People have repurposed gen0/1 AW's into mechanical watches with a bit square-ish case.

I kinda expect a YouTube video to exist of a Chinese hardware hacker transplanting the Watch 9 innards into an obsolete gold (or better: ceramic) Apple Watch case.

Ultimate planned obsolescence and an ultimate flex.

I’m not sure it will beat the S&P 500 or Apple stock, but I’d bet that an OG Apple Watch Edition will hold its value better than the gold you’d melt out of it.

There’s a story about this newly rich woman who is trying to impress her new friends. “I clean my diamonds with milk, and my rubies with dilute vinegar,…”

Finally, she turns to an older lady and asks, what she uses.

The older lady just smiles and says that when her jewels get dirty, she just throws them away.

The gold Apple Watch is a status overpriced, impractical good for signaling and technological obsolescence is not really something that a person who buys it cares about.

I wonder how many people actually purchased them vs gifted from Apple.

If I'm a celebrity people are paying me to wear their crap.

I seriously question if they ever sold a single one.

That said the GP’s point is also completely true. No one who bought one (assuming they exist) is mad it fell out support 9 years later. It’s chump change, and if they like Apple Watches they upgraded long ago.

The purpose of these watches has long been served. They introduced Apple Watch as a premium digital watch to the masses, getting free media attention.

Celebrity owners would have got a brief sparkle from it. Perhaps also some of Apple's marketing budget too. And they continue to own a legacy item which will have notoriety beyond mere function.

Collectors of rare historical firearms presumably don't actually fire them.

I'd add one more purpose these watches served: Jony Ive really wanted to make something out of gold. He also really wanted to make a gear linkage and that's why the monitor stands were as complicated as they were. So they served the purpose of keeping him happy I guess.

From what I've read, Ive was the one that wanted to push the watch as a super luxury item. Designers like to cater to that segment of the market but it's not as profitable as the mass market. At least when referring to Apple products. Ive left Apple so there's no one to push to service the upper segment. I suspect they sold very few $17000 watches so it makes sense to just give it up and deal with the few people that will make a fuss. Even if they have to refund a few sales, it will be way cheaper than maintaining a group of techs and SWEs to deal with those watches.

I also suspect that given enough time those are the watches that will become collectors' items and will sell for multiple times their original cost so it's not a total loss for the buyers.

> Designers like to cater to that segment of the market but it's not as profitable as the mass market.

Yeah, like with high fashion, Chanel's runway show is there to make sure people come to buy the perfume, the only high margin thing they sell. It never made a ton of sense with Apple because they're like Warhol's thing about Coke: there is no luxury Coca-Cola; everyone gets the same product because it's the best. Similarly, there's no better phone or smartwatch than the highest end made by the mass market companies.

They do, generally at least before selling it to prove it works, as a working firearm has more value than one than doesn't.

I collect antique firearms. It has not been my experience that sellers generally test-fire an item before selling it. More common is a disclaimer that if you want to shoot the thing, you should have it inspected by a qualified gunsmith familiar with the particular model.

No, they don't. Unfired weapons fetch a premium. For true antiques every time you fire it is another opportunity for it to break. These are not weapons that are valued for "working".

Firing an antique firearm decreases the value. It is now used.

Really depends on the gun to some degree. There’s collectibles that are worth more left alone, especially old stuff pre modern ammunition. But lots of old but not that old stuff its more or less expected you’ll fire it to test it works on receipt.

"old but not that old" is essentially saying it's not an antique.

There are plenty of guns running around that are over 100 years old that are surely an antique by anyone's definition, but are safe and reasonable to show with modern ammo. Pretty much any gun of that age, unless it was some kind of commemorative thing from the start, is going to have plenty of rounds through it already.

For example - an M1903 is an antique by any definition, and you'd be hard pressed to buy one today that's unfired.

If I buy a WWI-era pistol, they’ll fire it before I fork over the cash? Surely not, right?

Only if they are claiming it still works and are asking for more money due to that. And still, only if you care enough to verify it works as they claim.

Why not? There are people out there that manufacture their own ammunition. This wouldn’t surprise me at all.

What about a 17th century dueling pistol?

I think in this case anyone would be wise to fire a modern reproduction rather than the original article. After all anyone with the money to collect that sort of artifact can certainly afford a replica to play with.

...And modern replicas tend to be safer when you pull the trigger.

Well, if you count making a new stock and barrel to mount the original 17th century clockwork gubbins to, may I present:

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=40...

the GP's example of WWI is actually sufficiently modern that you could very well just be firing normal center fire .45 which is readily available https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.45_ACP

That would depend.

As a buyer, you would need to decide for yourself whether you want a guaranteed working firearm or not.

And in many cases, the owner will test fire the firearm before putting it on auction anyway.

Old Martini Henri rifles, dueling pistols, even muskets in some cases.

It depends, but the general rule is that the older it is, the less people want to see it in active use. At some point it's about preservation over anything, but there's also the safety concern! A firearm is a very dangerous thing in failure mode, so at some point a firearm is both too historically valuable, and too damned dangerous to fire.

Source: Forgotten Weapons and Royal Armory youtube channels

Why not?

I bought a Citizen Eco watch in 2003 for around £120. I still wear it and it still performs all functions correctly. One part of the wristband sports a bit of paperclip for a joint - "jury rigged" by me. The back of the watch has four quadrant shaped solar panels and the have charged the cell for 20 years so far.

I run quite a few ntp time sources at sub milli-second and generally better accuracy (at work). My watch is quite decent for drift. It is far better than I actually need for a wrist watch.

Now, $17,000 for a thing on your wrist for time telling? Apple wankery involved ... please tell me it ain't so!

Quality does not always involve a sodding huge price tag and in this particular case Apple's S&M dept took their eye off the ball and went for a trot around noddy land waving their hands and looking a bit silly.

There are luxury watches which can easily eclipse $17k.

But they basically serve as jewelry.

The problem with the Apple Watch is it tried to be that, but it has absolutely no premium value at all.

Which is unsurprising considering you can get the same brand, same look, etc with a little less gold for 1/200th the price.

Also, it doesn’t help that there is no handcrafted precision work involved with the Apple Watch. It flowed out of the same Chinese assembly line the other $200 Apple Watches did.

> Now, $17,000 for a thing on your wrist for time telling? Apple wankery involved ... please tell me it ain't so!

My gosh. Wait until you discover how much you can spend on luxury watches from the "established" watchmakers. You might want to be sitting down.

"It was never clear who the $10,000 to $17,000 18-karat gold Apple Watch was for, beyond celebrities and the ultrarich"

Ummm I think it was for celebrities and the ultrarich.

The obvious purpose of everything is clear, beyond which it is unclear.

It's not clear whom crutches are for beyond those with broken legs or atrophied muscles.

It's not clear what an eraser is for beyond removing pencil traces from a paper, or any purpose benefiting from a small block of rubber/elastomer.

...

It is a bit wild that Apple refuses to support this further. At that price you can buy things like Rolexes that will last your entire life.

Apple refused to support it 8 years ago when the Series 2 came out and there was no way to upgrade it.

It’s not a special watch. It’s a Series 0 with $16k of gold.

We don’t even know if anyone ever bought a single one (as opposed to being given one by Apple/an Apple exec).

> It’s not a special watch. It’s a Series 0 with $16k of gold.

In 2015, gold was approximately $1250 per oz.

Perhaps someone who has a gold Rolex can correct me, but it seems unlikely that there is more than 3/4 lb (362 grams) of gold in it, even counting the band. That would probably be very tiring to wear.

Precious metal Rolexes can cost north of $30k

55g (1.940068 oz) of gold, worth approximately $2,425 at spot price in 2015: https://support.apple.com/kb/SP737?locale=en_US

The cost of keeping them alive will eventually outweigh any margin they've ever made on the product.

Right, and that's what the apple watch is, a disposable consumer electronic. They shouldn't have made anything like this.

And if it stops working, not something they'll care too much about.

If the case is worth anything, you could probably gut it and replace with a standard movement somehow.

Reminds me of the Swiss brand H Moser that makes a mechanical wristwatch which looks like an Apple watch

That said, it's a custom case & their movement wouldn't slot into an actual Apple watch without a lot of machining. But it would be a cool way to immortalize one of these Series 1 watches https://www.h-moser.com/product/swiss-alp-watch-5324-1205/

And yet Siri on it remains just as useful.

Lol Apple. This should shock no one. Company rates about a zero when it comes to longevity of products (my sony laptops that are 13 years old still get updates, ive got newer apple devices than that which can not).

Legit they aren't a tech company they are a e-waste manufacturer that produces junk for landfill. Nerfing products well before they are due for the dump apple keeps the mountains of rubbish stocked high. Remember if they buy apple they apply zero ethics to their tech purchase choices.

Really? The iPhone 5s introduced in 2013 just got a security update earlier this year. How long can you get updates from Android devices?

I think the 5s (SE?) is an exception to the rule

The iPhone 6 (2014) also got iOS 12.5.7 January of this year.

The iPhone 6s (2015) and iPhone 7 (2016) and iPhone 8 and 10 (2017) got its last update September of this year.

All of the iPhones released after that runs the latest operating system.

The iPads of the same generation get the same upgrades.

The 5s was the first 64 bit iPhone.

That’s rough but who’s crying any tears here. Melt it down for the gold or hopefully it was kept in the box unopened to sell in the next 20 years

Honestly, I am not rich enough to be upset about this! If you could comfortably afford a $17,000 Apple Watch, this probably would not bother you either.

How much are they worth nowadays? Like if I wanted to buy one (second hand, obviously) where would I get it, and how much would it cost?