“Remember the customers carrying bundles of cash who queued up last September to buy as many iPhones as Apple would sell them?” Phillip Elmer-Dewitt asks for Fortune. “It could happen again. ‘We saw this with the iPhone,’ said Asymco’s Horace Dediu in a podcast recorded Thursday. ‘We’ll see it in spades with the gold Apple Watch.'”
“Dediu believes Wall Street may be underestimating the intangible appeal of a $10,000 gold watch. Especially one given as a gift. Especially in China, with its rich tradition of over-the-top gift giving.,” Elmer-Dewitt reports. “The gold watch has something else going for it. Unlike the value of a Rolex, say, which can range from a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands, the price of the Apple Watch in each of its global markets is fixed; it’s listed on the website. ‘It’s like currency,’ says Dediu.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple Watch Edition — the world’s first luxwearable — will immediately be impossible to come by and resale values of AWEs will instantly jump into the tens of thousands of dollars.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Dan K.” and “BD” for the heads up.]
And the indstry sheep will follow …maaaa
No way this will happen. If it does, people are really stupid.
The only crowds who form around a $17k watch will be the paparazzi watching the latest airhead celebrity sporting their new wrist fashion.
What part of industry sheep’ don’t you get?
This could shipwreck Samsung.
People aren’t that dumb. $17,000 for a watch that will be technologically outdated in about a year or two? And whose battery won’t hold a decent charge anymore?
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
– George Carlin
That’s a great quote. I kinda doubt that the really stupid have $17,000 to spend. Not many of them, anyway.
Brilliant fortune-builders often seem to have kids that are both rich and stupid.
I think that is the norm.
It is rare that the very rich have to wait for anything and to be able to spend $10K+ on a watch you will have to be pretty rich.
You doubt that stupidity can coexist with wealth? That only smart people have money?
Ill add to that.. Most smart people are not rich !
Poor and cheap people will not buy it.
You would be surprised how many well off people there are.
Ps. Rich means millions not 150,000$. At least not anymore.
You are thinking practically. This is not a practical item. People will give these as gifts or wear them as signs that they don’t care about money. In Japa, you can buy an ordinary melon for several dollars, but they have special melons that sell for $300 or so. They are beautiful, perfectly round, no blemishes. Farmers grow them on pillows and turn them often so they get even sun and no marks from resting on the pillow. They are given as gifts because they are perfect and beautiful. But they are still melons and have a shelf life.
Plenty of men pay tens of $thousands for perfect melons as gifts for their women.
That is the funniest thing I’ve read all week.
Don’t you mean as gifts for themselves?
“whose battery won’t hold a decent charge anymore?”
the battery is replaceable.
take off the solid gold band and clip it to a new version?
Sure… tell that to the people that bought a Pulsar P1 watch when it first came out. It was an electronic watch that only told the time and cost $2,100 in 1972. And, of course, it got replaced soon after with newer models that did more and costs less.
Try to find a Pulsar P1 watch today. It will cost you between 6,000 and 18,000 dollars. I wish that I had been ‘dumb’ enough to buy one in 1972.
There will not be lines for Watch Edition. The people who buy this product don’t stand in lines, and they’re not going to buy one from a scalper.
AWE buyers have “people” who do things for them, including… wait for it… stand in line for them. Therefore, there will be lines for AWE.
It is not that the rich themselves will stand in line to buy it, rather that people from China will come here to buy as many as possible to take back home. Apple has already said production would be limited. The same thing happened with the iPad. The resale value in China will be higher than the list price, for a while.
You have no idea how much the bastardizing of the Apple Watch logo like that burns my eyes. It’s ironic because you’re using that to represent a product by a company that would never do that to the logo (or any other logo).
There will be lines to buy the $17,000 Apple watch because there are millions of people who have more money than brains.
I know a lot of people that have more money than brains – and are still poor and stupid.
Maybe so, but that doesn’t make stupid rich people any smarter. 😀
Sure, but it’s better to be stupid and rich than stupid and poor. 😉
it’s not so easy to get money without brains (or at least have some cunning) unless you inherited it or won it in a lottery.
Most of those who buy 17k watches have made it themselves and they are WAY smarter (in making money at least) than people who think 17k watches are ‘too expensive’.
Wearing an expensive watch to help you seal a multi million dollar deal etc is what these people are counting on.
You are going to get a 100 million bank loan with a pair of dirty pants and a $10 watch on your wrist (especially in places like Europe, Asia?) Don’t think so.
Half the battle in closing the deal is connecting with the prospect. The Apple Watch will be an “ice breaker”/conversation piece. It will end up being worth it’s weight in gold and then some.
So you think that having money proves you have brains? HAH! The only thing it usually proves is that you have no principles.
Can people not understand that you don’t have to be stupid to spend huge amounts of money? You only need lots of money. If I offered you a hundred dollar bill for a million grains of sand while we were standing on the beach, would you not scoop up the sand and hand it over? For many people the money for an Edition watch is just as readily available as the sand.
I think your view is just for comfort. I can’t afford what you bought, therefore you were stupid to buy it.
And don’t suggest there are morally better things to do with excessive wealth if you ever bought a coffee from Starbucks or an iPhone or any of the other stuff everyone here buys instead of clean water for someone dying from thirst. It’s all relative and all of us here are closer to the most excessively wealthy than to the truly poor.
American have this peculiar notion that we are the only rich people in the world. I guarantee you that there will be lines for the AWE in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. Japan and Australia are also good bets.
you are right.
you can’t do business in Asia without ‘gifts’.
Also in many parts of the world if you don’t ‘dress up’ i.e wear good clothes etc you won’t get anywhere in big business . Only in N. America (it seems) that millionaires do business in jeans and T-shirts (and even that is limited to certain industries ) . Try getting a big bank loan in Paris, Milan, Shanghai, Tokyo in jeans and sneakers…
Social justice, social justice, SOCIAL JUSTICE! I demand that everyone in the world have equal access to everything, including the AWE! Breitlings for everyone! Rolexes for all! A Vacheron Constantin in every pot! TAG Heuers for the masses! Nothing for anyone until there is something for everyone, no matter what it costs! FREE LUNCHES FOR ALL EARTHLINGS!
Will we get the free watch collection with the free BMW, Mercedes, etc ? 😀
Um, even as sarcasm what you posted is a bit questionable. I don’t know what to make of it. But if you’re bashing on the concept of a DIRE level of socialism, I can grok that. It’s great way to wreck a culture. Very few people thrive within actual socialism. William Morris loved it, while understanding that it’s not for everyone. Most people require at least a self-motivating incentive, something DIRE socialism manages to destroy, as history consistently points out.
TANSTAAFL
??? OK, I give up. What does it mean?
There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
(I’m guessing you’ve never read any of Robert A. Heinlein’s books?)
Everyone should read The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, it was assigned reading in my Economics class. Also Stranger in a Strange Land coined the verb “grok”
Or… People will order AWE online just like everyone talks about with all the other Apple Watch models in all the other posts.
Only on Redo Drive and in Dubai
Wendy and Aspen will definitely buy one…
Here’s to the Crazy Ones the Misfits the Rebels the Troublemakers.
The Round Pegs in the Square Holes.
The ones who see things Differently.
They’re not fond of Rules and they have no respect for the the Status Quo.
You can Quote them, Disagree with them, Glorify or Vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is Ignore Them.
Because they change things, they push the Human race Forward and while some may see them as the CRAZY ONES we see Genius.
Because the people who are Crazy Enough to think they can change the World are the ones Who Do.
~ Steve Jobs ~
He didn’t mention the ones who are rich and can afford a solid gold gadget, because he didn’t care.
Isn’t the Apple Watch going to be available in China on day one?
And then in less than a year, it will become obsolete…