HoDinkee Sells Apple Watches
Once upon a time, HoDinkee was a watch review site. Nowadays it’s a retailer masquerading as watch review site, an authorized dealer for no less than 26 brands. Watch news! HoDinkee now sells Apple Watches – a betrayal of their unspoken loyalty to the traditional watch. Hence a home page announcement designed to calm restless natives . . .
Because of Apple Watch, more people than ever before are using watches as tools for work and for pleasure, for travel and for communication. It’s something we think is – and will continue to be – truly amazing for watches as a whole, which is an opinion we’ve shared with you many times . . .
Apple inserted the wristwatch into the global conversation in a way it has never been before, beginning an unexpected, but entirely essential, new chapter in the history of watchmaking.
There is room and appreciation for all kinds of watches on our wrists and in our lives . . .
Quite why you’d buy an Apple Watch from HoDinkee rather than Apple is a question they singularly fail to answer. Unless you want to subsidize Managing Editor Steven J. Pulvirent’s far-left doxing.
Hublot Goes Online – Ish
Hublot’s $5800 Big Bang e was the LVMH brand’s first foray into online sales. While one suspects they aren’t struggling to fulfill orders, Hublot’s 80 boutiques won’t be well pleased to learn that the corporate mothership’s added a shopping cart for 80 models on their website.
Not that many people are likely to purchase a $40,900 Big Bang 45mm Meca-10 Power Reserve 10 Days King Gold Blue watch online, where discounts are only obvious by their absence. Or top-of-the-line Hublots, which aren’t cart-enabled anyway.
Still, the move shows a measure of financial desperation – as Hublot struggles to make up for lost sales even as global recession takes its toll. Or the move to online reveals a deluded corporate culture. Or both.
Patek Philippe reference 1518 sells for $3.57m
Nice watch – one of only nine pink-on-pink reference 1518’s made. According to the Philipps Auction House catalogue, the timepiece was Patek Philippe’s “first wristwatch to feature a chronograph and a perpetual calendar.” I wonder if it was their first (only?) watch with a cyclops . . .
Lot number 196 was owned by Jean-Claude Biver, Luxembourgish watch salesman, cheesemaker and head of the embattled LVMH group’s watchmaking division. A man who knows when, where and how to buy a watch, apparently.
One wonders if all the money in Mssr. Biver’s pocket – including many more millions from other pieces – will diminish the proverbial fire in his belly. I reckon he’ll step down soon enough – and onto a large yacht of some kind.
“Rupert Murdoch to Revive Baselworld.” Or Not.
“Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, owner of The New York Post, Wall Street Journal and Fox News, is in discussions to by up to 30% of MCH Group for around CHF 100 million,” watchpro.com reports.
Watch news? That’s a loooong way from saying that new investors in the Swiss government-owned exhibition group will resurrect the long-reviled, recently-deceased Baselworld watch show. As the watchpro.com headline shamelessly suggests.
MCH organizes about 90 events in Switzerland and elsewhere, some of which are in suspended animation, rather than dead. That’s where the money would go. Watches & Wonders can relax – they won’t be watching Attack of the Zombie Watch Show.
Lewis Hamilton’s Black Lives Matter IWC Watch
Like many if not most watchmakers, IWC allied itself with the self-avowed Marxists running Black Lives Matter by posting a virtue-signaling black box on its Instagram account. (For the record, the image got 12k likes out of 1.4m followers, and a mix of 215 highly positive and hugely negative comments.)
The Swiss watchmaker sponsors Mercedes F1 driver Lewis Hamilton. So we assume they’re OK with the driver using the Black Lives Matter logo as his Instagram ID, posting images of BLM protesters and flexing his “blacked-out for #blacklivesmatter” custom IWC Perpetual Calendar.
Will IWC release this model for other well-heeled social justice warriors, and donate part of the proceeds to BLM? Of course not. Which probably accounts for the fact that I can’t find the watch image on either IWC’s or Hamilton’s Instagram account.
Pasha de Cartier – Non-Conformists Need Apply
According to prestigeonline.com, Cartier’s Pasha de Cartier Campaign is Young, Fresh and Star-Studded. The brand’s new “ambassadors” are Rami Malek, Troye Sivan, Willow Smith, Maisie Williams and Jackson Wang.
I bet your average Pasha buyer will be a lot closer to my age (60) than theirs. Then again, I recognize exactly none of the celebs, save Will Smith’s daughter.
Who does what? “Embraces and encourage uniqueness and diversity.” That’s me too! I’m also “exuberant and unapologetically non-conformist.” Where’s my $5700 newly re-released Pasha?
Be sure to check back every Sunday for more watch news . . .
Rami Malek played Freddie Mercury in that Queen movie a year or two back. I like that the Pasha is available in 35mm and is pretty slim, but that’s about it.
The Hodinkee iWatch is absolutely bone standard, undistinguishable from the commodity item that you can get that at a number of different places?
Correct. Same Apple Watch that Amazon or Apple sells.
That whole blog post is a magnificent example of “It takes longer to say nothing than something”
Favorite line: “HODINKEE had an early glimpse of Apple Watch – our founder and CEO, Ben Clymer, was the only member of a watch-focused publication invited to Apple’s keynote presentation in September 2014, when Apple Watch was unveiled to the world for the first time.”
Which means he saw it at the exact same time as everyone else on the planet. CONGRATS DUDE.
hodinkee….what an absolute toss of a so called watch site. gave it a wide berth ages ago. even the articles back then had an air of pretentiousness about them.