I think the Apple Watch (AW) and other smart watches have the potential to depress the high end watch market. In their day, carriage and equestrian enthusiasts didn't think the train would replace the horse and carriage. Even as recently as the early 1900s, plenty of high-end pocket watch owners were certain that the wrist watch would have no impact on the pocket watch.
Even today there are companies that still make pocket watches and horse drawn carriages. Nonetheless there's no denying that both items have suffered a great contraction in their presence in the marketplace. It is only because of that shrinking to a very few suppliers that the prices for the best examples of such things remain high. Stationary is another item that has suffered great declines in revenue.
Take Crane & Co., for example. I'm all but certain that if they didn't have the government contract for producing the paper used to make U.S. paper currency, they would now be a footnote in the history of paper making. Prior to the computer and home printers connected to them, and email, I can remember Mother looking at letter she receive to see if they were written on Crane paper. She and Dad spent at least one day a week (over the course of a week) writing letters to friends and family. (They don't do so any longer because they've outlived them all, but they do still write.) I recall that for our wedding invitations and announcements, Mother made a big deal with my fiance about the fact that the invitations had to be engraved and on Crane stock. Ditto the "thank you" notes.
Now I can't speak for Mother and who's left among her clan of social doyennes, but I can count on my hands and toes the number of hand written letters I receive each year and that arrive on Crane paper (or any other cotton paper). If I told Mother that, I fear she'd be incredulous and suffer apoplexy upon finding it to be so. The computer hasn't made communication any less effective, but it has drastically reduced people's need for paper on which to write their correspondence.
No, I don't think HEWs will disappear completely, but I'm not ready to deny that smart watches, the AW, has the potential to drastically shrink their availability in the marketplace. At the start of the contraction of the industry, prices will absolutely fall for the vast majority of makes. Once the dust settle and the few that are going to survive solidify their place and ongoing existence, the price for those specific makes of watch will rise again, albeit at a slower pace than they have over the past twenty years. The prices for watches that will no longer be made will also stay high, but the demand for them will be significantly lower than it is today. They'll be very much like a Newman Daytona is today; it's super expensive, but only a handful of folks actively want one, although lots of folks would be happy to have one if it fell from the sky and into their laps.
The AW isn't "it," but what it evolves into could well be:
A few days ago, I read about a U-Werk watch. The watch is their Titan model. It's not a watch I'd have predicted I'd be keen on, but for some reason, I think it's pretty cool. (Maye I won't feel that way if I see it in person???) For this discussion, however, the U-Werk Titan is mostly irrelevant; nonetheless, what struck me upon seeing it was that it could very well be a watch that could signal the end of the mechanical watch's supremacy in the fight for wrist real estate.
Now the watch itself, and it's maker, are among the leaders in innovative, mechanical watch design and engineering. But why do I think it holds "promise" as the beginning of the end for mechanical watches?
The size of the watch is why. Look at the last pic. The watch is clearly larger than anything one'd today wear outside of casual situations, but seeing what a "cuff watch" looks like on the wrist in that pic, I can easily see a far thinner version, filled with integrated circuits, the case and arm- attachment mode dressed up as needed, and with the watch case and screen curved, as are AMOLED televisions, to conform to one's wrist/arm. With the form factor I described, that would make the watch essentially a cuff-style smartphone, it'd be thin enough to fit under a shirt sleeve and large enough to be function-independent of a separate device, and it'd be large enough to read pretty much the same stuff folks are willing to read on their smartphones.
Think about it....forget what the U-Werk looks like on the face for the face of what I'm writing about would look like any smartphone screen. The case profile, particularly were it thinner, would not look bad at all. As I've often written on WUS, smartwatches, wearables, will most certainly evolve from what they are now. What I've proposed above -- the "iCuff" -- seems like a very viable evolutionary step from what we see today as a smartwatch.
I want to reiterate that the only things about the Titan that resonated with me re: the AW were:
- As a form-factor, it didn't look anywhere near as bad as I thought, prior to seeing the wrist pic, such a large device would, and
- As a form-factor, I could envision how were "some device" of similar size, but thinner and curved (but rigid, not flexible) could conceivably overcome the "tethering" that is the biggest shortcoming inherent in the Apple Watch, which, AFAIK, is the best selling smartwatch yet.
I looked at the Titan and thought about what impact the "not so bad as I thought it'd be" form factor might have were it improved upon to make it more compatible with how people want to wear wrist borne devices, that is, fitting nicely under a shirt sleeve. At that point, one need only have it tethered to an earpiece, and quite frankly, the form factor design of the earpiece should be similar to that of the discrete ones singers use, rather than the ones offered for phones right now.
As far as the Titan itself goes, I don't at all care for the watch itself. The price and mechanical reality of the Titan are also irrelevant to the topic at hand.
So after having shared the thoughts above, someone commented:
Quote:
A wrist attachment may well work and be useful, but we'd need a complete UI redesign from the ground up to make it useful on a wrist I think.
I run a mobile development agency and UI is what I specialise in (not that I actually get to do that much these days!!) and I think it would require a hell of a lot of work to make an OS more usable from the angle your wrists and hands would be at to make it comfortable for more than a few minutes. It may not seem massively different, but when you think that we mainly do thumb inputs, and much less with fingers it would take some tweaking.
Could be a very fun project though as a concept design! Just make me an ultra thin, flexible wrist mounted device, and I'll do the UI for you 
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My response:
TY for sharing some thoughtful input. Along with recognizing things that need to happen to make something like an iCuff come to fruition, your comments allude to the fact that what it'd take to make it happen is careful thought and hard work. I like the positivity of your post.
There's no question in my mind that making such a thing happen could require a variety of usability and change management tactics. Will that cost a lot of money? Well, of course it will. But the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Sony, or any number of other electronics giants have the resources to make that sort of thing happen. I certainly am not naive enough to think developing such a thing would require but a $500 budget and happen in a handful of weekends in my basement. LOL
Few things that were paradigm shifts in the way people interact with their world and other people materialized with the snap of the finger. My mere proposition of a plausible form factor is but the first step. Had I not seen the Titan and the AW, it wouldn't have crossed my mind that taking ideas from both devices could lead to a new device that could be better than both, as well as being a better functional device than are conventional wristwatches.
The days of the mechanical watch as a commonly purchased consumer good are numbered:
One thing that's clear to me, however, is that the mechanical wristwatch has been taken about as far as it's going to go. What's left to do with one? Make it more accurate? Thinner? More waterproof? More esoteric complications? Incrementally more efficient resulting in longer gaps between required servicing and longer power reserves? Sure, one can do all those things, but in doing so one must also accept that the point of diminishing returns as goes mechanical wristwatch design and fabrication has already been reached.
There's a reality that must be faced when considering the lifespan of a technology: the more primitive it is, the longer its term of usefulness and presence in the daily lives of mainstream consumers. Take the hammer, for example. It's going to be very long time yet before a hammer is replaced by something else. Look next at climate control systems, however, and we see that things such as wall tapestries/quilts/animal skins, devices that endured and were needed for thousands of years, have become nothing other than collectable art objects and decorative accessories. IMO, the day when the mechanical watch, even the conventional quartz watch, is no different isn't that far away in the future.
Does anyone really, for example, need a mechanical watch that is more accurate than +/- a few seconds per day? Boosting the accuracy and other functional abilities of a mechanical watch is nice to see as a collector, but paying what it costs to have a +/- two seconds at the most per day watch just isn't what most consumers cotton to. Collectors may get a kick out of that sort of thing, but we collectors have to realize that our obsession is economically sufficient to sustain only the smallest of watch companies, those that produce fewer than ~10,000 pieces per year, and that charge huge sums for that kind of performance.
The economic viability of producing ever greater watches that perform at extreme limits is not dissimilar from what one sees in the auto industry, both with new and vintage cars. One can sell a $4M vintage car because one only needs to find one person who will buy it out of some 7B people on the planet. Ferrari can sell all the cars it produces because there are are enough "super rich" folks on the planet and they aren't seeking a car that's a daily driver; it's a "fun" purchase, not a functional one, even though, yes, a Ferrari will transport one from point A to point B.
Shifting back to watches, now, we must recognize the only thing that lets Rolex, for example, sell ~1M watches a year is that they cost less than a Ferrari, or even a Honda Civic or Ford Focus. Consider the "Ferrari" watches, that is, watches that "have it all" -- first rate performance, first rate craft, first rate design, etc. -- and ask yourself how many of them are bought each year. I don't know the quantity sold, but I know that even if you sum the sales of all of the makers of such watches, I won't arrive at 1M pieces per year. Yet, "having it all" is about the only place for the mainstream mechanical wristwatch to go in terms of becoming "better."
What's going to replace the conventional wristwatch?
Within the next score of years, it's almost certainly going to be something akin to a smartwatch or smart glasses. It's pretty clear to me that the best we've yet seen from producers of smartwatches is probably the AW. But the AW has its drawbacks as many folks on WUS have noted: tethering to a smartphone, short battery life, small screen size, and so on.
As I look at the situation, however, the only one of the drawbacks that can't be readily overcome is the battery life, and the ways I know of given existing and near term power source technology are (1) larger batteries, and (2) supplementing the battery with solar power, either to obviate the need to run on battery power when light is present, or by using light sources to recharge the battery. The other obstacles can be immediately resolved directly or indirectly by altering the form factor of the smartwatch.
All the best.