“With the Apple Watch due to go on sale on April 24, Intel and Google have, somewhat belatedly, revealed their own take on connected wristwear.,” Roger Laing reports for ZDNet. “The two companies have joined forces with Tag Heuer, the Swiss watchmaker owned by French luxury group LVMH, to produce the first luxury Android smartwatch, designed to compete head-on with Apple.”
“There’s no prototype, and no suggestion of a launch date, although it’s expected to go on sale towards the end of the year,” Laing reports. “In Switzerland, a country where watches – both smart and dumb – are a principal export, questions have been raised for a while about how the Swiss watch industry will cope with the threat of the Apple Watch. There are fears that the industry is underestimating the Apple threat, in the same way it did with competition from Japanese Quartz watches in the 1970s, which ended up with near disastrous consequences.”
“As Swatch co-inventor Elmar Mock, who now heads an innovation consultancy called Creaholic, points out, only one in every 200 watches made worldwide is Swiss, but the profit on that one Swiss watch is greater than the other 199 combined,” Laing reports. “The winners of the profit war are heading for a new Ice Age, Mock recently told Bloomberg. ‘Apple will succeed quickly. It will put a lot of pressure on the traditional watch industry and jobs in Switzerland… anything in the price range of 500 francs to 1,000 francs is really in danger,’ he said.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: To see how this story plays out, look at the likes of Nokia, Palm, Motorola, and BlackBerry.
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