SIHH is perhaps one of the two or three native grounds of the Horological peacock. Ostensibly a trade show for the watch brands of the Richemont group, it oftentimes devolves into an elegant pissing contest of who wore what. It’s Pitti Uomo except more about how much money you have and less about how poufy you can make your pocket square. It’s the home of minute repeaters, split seconds chronographs and tourbillons. These mechanical complications — beautiful works of micro-engineering and craftsmanship — serve to tell time in the same way that a $200,000 shotgun serves to put food on the table. They’ll do it, but that’s not exactly the selling point.
The Apple Watch Series 3 — which I wore to this year’s SIHH — is, by contrast, nearly all about practicality. It’s got a clock regulated by radio signals sent by a device that measures the atomic frequency of a Cesium atom. Every Apple Watch in the world is within 50 milliseconds of every other Apple Watch in the world. Right out of the box, without installing a single third-party app, you can talk on the phone with someone across the world, time hundreds of concurrent events, measure your heart rate, track your location via GPS and send a text message that says “I’M SENDING THIS FROM MY WATCH!”
The general consensus is that the two have very little to do with one another aside from the fact that they’re both worn on the wrist. For the Swiss — whose definition of a “value watch” at SIHH hovered around $3000 — to be concerned about the proliferation of the Apple Watch is like Ferrari getting worried when Audi debuts its new A4. Even the ‘Edition’ Apple Watch, which is beautifully made of ceramic and four times the price of the base watch was less than a third the cost of the cheapest watch IWC introduced at the show.
The watch industry gets this. They understand. Aurel Bacs, head of the watch department at Phillips auction house put it best when he spoke to The Wall Street Journal right after the original $17,000 Apple Watch Edition came out. “We can have the modern and sensible with the traditional and luxurious. But if there are two camps of watches, that’s OK,” he said. “The guy who drinks a $1,000 Bordeaux at dinner can still have an energy drink the next morning.”
But I’m not entirely sure he’s right. I’m not entirely sure you can be a watch guy and an Apple Watch guy.
My challenge last week was reasonably clear: wear a brand new Apple Watch Series 3 Edition in grey ceramic for the duration of the SIHH and report my findings. This had the added bonus of being my first real chunk of time with an Apple Watch. And so I liberated the gorgeous Edition from its equally gorgeous packaging. Off the bat, the ceramic just felt nice compared to the aluminum series 3s I’d handled before. I think the stainless version of the watch would feel equally hefty but I liked the added polish and dark grey luster of the Edition. Once set up and synced, I was immediately shocked by how much it changed my behavior. I was using the complications to keep track of time in New York while in Geneva; I was standing when it told me to stand; and I was on the verge of self-flagellation when I missed “closing a ring” (that is, meeting a fairly inconsequential daily fitness goal that Apple sets). After a day and a half, I was fully addicted to the connected-watch lifestyle.
