The idea of luxury watches is that they last a lifetime, maybe more. Patek Philippe makes this explicit with its tagline, “You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation.”
Clearly Apple didn’t get the memo, though. The company’s ultra-expensive Apple Watch Edition — which started at $10,000 and ran up to $17,000 — will soon be obsolete, thanks to Apple introducing watchOS 5 at this week’s WWDC event.
The short life of the gold Apple Watch Edition
The device first started popping up in 2015 mainly on the wrists of pop stars like Katy Perry, Pharrell Williams and Drake — although the son of China’s richest man also bought not one, but two gold Apple Watch Editions for his dog.
Since then, Apple has ditched the super high end Apple Watches for cheaper models made of ceramic, which start out at $1,299.
From the moment that Apple introduced the Apple Watch Edition it was, of course, inevitable that it wasn’t going to last forever. Like expensive gold-plated iPhones, it was more a show of opulence than something which would actually have lasting value.
Nonetheless, the fact that watchOS 5 no longer supports the original Apple Watch models means that customers wanting the best and latest Apple Watch will no longer be using their device come September. They might want to hang on to it for a bit longer, though, since the early watchOS 5 beta has already been pulled after bricking devices.
Apple never revealed just how many of the first-gen, ultra-expensive Apple Watch Editions sold. We sure hope that customers got their $10,000 to $17,000 worth from the experience, though. By our calculations, that works out to around $3,333 per year at the cheapest. Or a little over $9 a day.
