Now that Apple has entered the watch game, even the horological old guard is starting to take notice. Just a few days after Apple unveiled the Apple Watch, Swiss luxury watchmaker TAG Heuer has announced that it’s planning on making a smartwatch too … although they say they don’t just want to copy the Apple Watch.
Although TAG Heuer created a one-off smartwatch as a promotion for the Oracle sailing team last year, it otherwise specializes in making finely crafted mechanical timepieces, not smartwatches.
But according to Jean-Claude Biver, the watch business head of TAG Heuer’s parent company, LVMH, it plans on creating a more intelligent, computerized wearable sometime soon. But it has to be much, much more than an Apple Watch clone.
Reuters reports:
“We want to launch a smartwatch at TAG Heuer, but it must not copy the Apple Watch,” Jean-Claude Biver told Sunday newspaper NZZ am Sonntag.
Switzerland’s watch industry is facing competition from smartwatches that allow its wearers to make calls, receive messages or monitor their fitness by connecting to their smartphone.
“We cannot afford to just follow in somebody else’s footsteps,” Biver said, adding the Swiss watch industry would present smartwatches at the latest at the Basel watch fair next spring. He did not give further details on the planned smartwatch.
It will probably be no surprise to Apple that the Swiss watch trade has all eyes on Cupertino. Two weeks ago, Apple designer Jony Ive was reported to have bragged that the release of the Apple Watch meant that “Switzerland was fucked.”
I, for one, am not so sure about that. Fine mechanical watches are like diamonds. The kind of people who make finely crafted mechanical timepieces that can be handed down for generations aren’t going to be threatened by the Apple Watch, which will be obsolete in just a few years. But the makers of cheaper electronic watches? They have a lot to fear.
Source: Reuters
