Unnecessary — Issue 028
Apple Won the Unit Count War and Lost a
War It Didn't Realize It Was In
Mechanical watches are 25% of units sold and 68% of the money. Here's why Apple structurally cannot close that gap.
Sometimes a competitor wins every visible metric — unit sales, market share, revenue — and still hasn't actually beaten the thing it thinks it's competing against, because the two products were never fighting for the same win condition in the first place. That's exactly what's happening between Apple Watch and mechanical Swiss watchmaking.
Apple ships more watches in a single quarter than the entire Swiss watch industry sells in a year, and has for a decade. Mechanical watches still generate 68% of the entire watch market's total value from just 25% of units sold. Same category on paper. Completely different games underneath.
Here's why the exact threat that nearly destroyed Swiss watchmaking once already, in 1969, isn't landing the same way twice — and what that reveals about the actual thing being purchased.
The Quartz Crisis: What Actually Almost Killed Swiss Watchmaking
In December 1969, Seiko released the Astron — the world's first quartz watch, using an electronic oscillator instead of a mechanical escapement to keep time. The technology was, by every functional measure, simply better: dramatically more accurate, cheaper to manufacture at scale, and requiring none of the specialized decades-long craft training that mechanical watchmaking demanded. What followed over the next decade and a half is remembered in the industry, without much exaggeration, as a genuine catastrophe. Swiss watch manufacturing employment collapsed. Storied manufacturers closed outright. The number of people employed in Swiss watchmaking fell by more than half over roughly fifteen years, and an industry that had defined precision timekeeping for over a century found itself genuinely fighting for survival against cheaper, more accurate, mass-produced competition.
The parallel to today's smartwatch threat is, on its surface, almost too clean: a new, objectively more accurate and more feature-rich technology arrives, threatens to make an entire centuries-old craft commercially obsolete, and the incumbent industry faces an existential choice about how to respond. Except this time, roughly five decades later, the mechanical watch industry isn't collapsing. It's growing — Richemont, owner of Cartier and IWC, has reported significant sales increases specifically attributed to a growing middle class and rising consumer interest in fine craftsmanship. Patek Philippe and Rolex continue selling out limited editions and maintaining years-long waiting lists on flagship references. The Baselworld and Geneva Watch Days trade shows continue drawing serious institutional and collector attention. Something about this specific threat is landing differently than quartz did in 1969, and understanding why requires looking at what mechanical watches are actually selling, as distinct from what they do.
The Function the Astron Actually Threatened, and the One Apple Can't Touch
The quartz crisis worked as an existential threat specifically because, in 1969, the primary reason most people bought a watch was still overwhelmingly functional: knowing what time it was, reliably, without carrying a pocket clock. Quartz did that function better, cheaper, and more reliably than mechanical movements ever could, and for a genuinely large share of the watch-buying public at the time, function was still the primary purchase driver. When the primary driver of a purchase decision is a specific, measurable function, and a competitor arrives offering that function objectively better and cheaper, the incumbent is in genuine structural danger — this is the same dynamic that's driven print newspapers, physical maps, and countless other function-first products into decline once a superior technological alternative arrived.
Mechanical watches, by the time Apple entered the market in 2015, had already spent decades transitioning away from being purchased primarily for the function of telling time. Wristwatches had already lost that specific battle to quartz, and later to phones, years earlier — anyone who genuinely needed the single most accurate, most convenient way to check the time had already stopped looking at their wrist for it well before Apple existed. What remained, and what continued growing throughout that transition, was an entirely different value proposition: craftsmanship as an end in itself, heritage and brand narrative accumulated over a century or more, mechanical complexity as a form of miniature functional art, and — as this series has covered extensively in the Rolex Pepsi discontinuation story and the broader exotic watch coverage — genuine, structurally real scarcity that functions as a durable store of value in a way no smartwatch, by design, ever can.
Apple Watch is a genuinely excellent product for the function it's built around: health monitoring, notifications, fitness tracking, cellular connectivity, an entire computing platform on the wrist. It is not, and structurally cannot become, a competitor in the value proposition mechanical watches are actually selling in 2026 — because that value proposition was never primarily about the function Apple is competing on in the first place.
The Obsolescence Clock Apple Built Into Its Own Product
Here's the detail that reveals the actual, durable structural difference between these two categories, and it's almost embarrassingly simple once stated plainly: an Apple Watch Series 10 will be functionally obsolete, unsupported, and effectively worthless within roughly five to seven years, the same planned-obsolescence lifecycle that governs every other Apple product. A mechanical Rolex Submariner purchased new today will, with basic maintenance, functionally outlive its original owner and get passed down as a genuinely appreciating family asset — several references specifically covered in this series' earlier Rolex Pepsi story have appreciated meaningfully over just the past few years alone, let alone across a multi-generational holding period.
That's not a marketing claim. It's a direct, measurable consequence of the underlying technology each category is built on. A smartwatch is fundamentally a computer, and computers follow Moore's Law-driven obsolescence cycles — faster chips, better batteries, new software requirements every product generation render the previous generation genuinely worse, not just older. A mechanical watch movement, built from metal gears, springs, and jewel bearings assembled by hand, doesn't become worse with age the way a computer chip does — it becomes, if anything, more interesting, more collectible, and more expensive, precisely because the specific craft and materials that went into it become harder to replicate as manufacturing techniques and available materials shift over decades. Rolex's acquisition of Bucherer, the world's largest authorized watch retailer, in a first-ever vertical integration move, reflects an industry consolidating control over exactly this kind of long-duration value proposition rather than racing to out-innovate a computing product on a yearly upgrade cycle it structurally cannot win.
Where the Two Markets Genuinely Coexist Rather Than Compete
The most interesting resolution to this entire "watch war" narrative, once you actually look at how real buyers behave, is that it mostly isn't a war at all — a genuinely large and growing population of consumers owns both, wearing each for entirely different purposes rather than treating the purchase as an either-or decision. Watch collector communities extensively document and discuss pairing a mechanical Rolex Submariner with an Apple Watch Ultra specifically, with the initial visual clash of the two philosophies fading within about a week of actually living with both, according to collectors who've documented the experience directly.
That coexistence pattern reveals the actual, durable answer to whether Apple genuinely threatens mechanical watchmaking the way Seiko once did: it doesn't, because the two products aren't actually competing for the same purchase decision anymore. A buyer choosing an Apple Watch is optimizing for health tracking, notifications, and computing functionality. A buyer choosing a mechanical Rolex is optimizing for craft, heritage, scarcity, and multi-decade value retention. The fact that both objects happen to sit on a wrist and display the time is, functionally, close to incidental to why either one actually gets purchased in 2026 — which is precisely the structural reason mechanical watchmaking survived a threat that, on paper, looked considerably more existential than it turned out to be.
The Lesson That Applies Beyond Watches
There's a genuinely transferable diagnostic sitting underneath this entire story, one this series has now applied to hypercars, Birkins, and real estate: an incumbent facing a technologically superior competitor is only in genuine existential danger if the competitor is actually threatening the specific value proposition customers are buying, rather than merely a function the product happens to also perform. Quartz nearly destroyed Swiss watchmaking because, in 1969, function was still the primary purchase driver, and quartz won that function decisively. Apple hasn't repeated that outcome because, by the time it entered the market, mechanical watchmaking's actual value proposition had already shifted almost entirely to something a computer, however sophisticated, structurally cannot replicate: durable scarcity, physical craft, and value that appreciates specifically because it doesn't get technologically obsoleted on anyone's product roadmap.
That's worth understanding as a genuine business and investment framework, not just a watch-collecting curiosity: before assuming any technologically superior new entrant threatens an established category, ask specifically what customers in that category are actually buying. If it's a function the new technology performs better, the incumbent is in real danger. If it's something structurally outside what the new technology can ever offer — heritage, scarcity, physical craft, appreciating value — the "disruption" narrative may be considerably less threatening than the headline comparison of unit sales numbers initially suggests.
The House of Kong Take
Coming Up — Issue 029
Solo diners now spend 48% more per person than any other party size, and restaurant reservations for parties of one grew faster than any other category in 2025. The 'solo stigma' didn't just fade — it inverted into something restaurants are now actively competing to capture.
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