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.
