Ars Technica:
The new ceramic watch is the Apple Watch Edition, and all mentions of the gold versions have been scrubbed from Apple’s site. The company began downplaying the gold watches earlier this year, removing them from the main Apple Watch product page circa the iPhone SE launch.
The “reimagined” ceramic Apple Watch Edition starts at $1,249, roughly twice the cost of a stainless steel Series 2 and three times the cost of an aluminum Series 2 (the Sport branding also seems to have disappeared from the watches themselves, though it still applies to some of the bands). The Edition is still more expensive than the other models and is still intended as a sort of status symbol, but it is no longer the hulking monument to conspicuous consumption that it once was.
The gold Apple Watch was an interesting experiment. Apple will never say but I’d be curious to know how many they actually sold.
It must now be one of the rarest Apple products ever!
I don’t think they ever expected to sell a lot. Tim Cook even said it was a limited edition. Maybe they just let Jony have an indulgence and maybe they learned some manufacturing expertise that will trickle down to other products.
Without the Edition, the press would only have compared the Apple Watch against other smart watches and fitness trackers. With the Edition, it was compared against traditional luxury brands.
What did they do with the unsold inventory? Melt them down?
they probably gave one to jony ive and then sold another ten or so…
I’d love to know how many they sold versus how many they gave away to celebrities to generate buzz.
this. they were pretty clear during the first presentation and i have no idea why anyone is making this out to be any sort of story. just doomsaying.
what unsold inventory?
The answer is very likely “enough.” It was a limited edition designed to look good on celebrities, and it did its job.
Absolutely correct. Every apple Watch edition was an ad for the rest of the line. They could t have bought that kind of publicity. Much like when Oprah gave away GM cars.
I don’t follow. Apple Watch Series 2 is almost entirely being positioned as a smart watch/fitness tracker. Almost everything in the keynote was focused on that – the video that started with a swimmer, the hiking app demo, Nike.
The ceramic version got the briefest of mentions, and the Hermes bands only slightly more. Whatever they were trying to do with the first version vis-a-vis “traditional luxury brands”, they seem to have abandoned it.