A point often raised about the high-end Apple Watch is that it’s unlikely ever to become a family heirloom—the case may retain its value forever, but the electronics will soon become obsolete in accordance with Moore’s Law. Serenity Caldwell at iMore offers the idea of a replaceable core—you take your $15,000 watch into the Apple store every 18 months for an upgrade. That’s not compelling to me. I don’t own an expensive analog watch, but if I did, the major part of the appeal would be the intricate, accurate—and timeless (meaning “already obsolete”)—internal mechanism and the craftsmanship that went into it.
Makers of luxury analog brands don’t seem worried about competition from Apple. Kevin Sintumuang in the Wall Street Journal quotes Jean-Claude Biver, president of LVMH’s watch division and CEO of its Tag Heuer brand, as saying, “I don’t believe [the Apple Watch] will affect the Hublots and Breitlings and Pateks. You don’t buy a $20,000 watch to tell you what time it is. Time is everywhere. You buy it because it is a piece of art. And art is eternity.”
Nevertheless, writes Sintumuang, Tag Heuer has announced it will collaborate with Google and Intel on a smart watch, and Montblanc has announced its TimeWalker Urban Speed e-Strap, which will come out in June.
Writing in the April issue of IEEE Spectrum, Andrew “Bunnie” Huang offers his own perspective. Moore’s Law is slowing, he says (the headline reads “dying,” but editors may have written that). Consequently, he writes, “Rather than expecting that within a few years of its purchase you’ll just throw out whatever electronic gizmo you buy, you’ll be anticipating keeping it for a good long while.”
He continues, “Under such a regime, you’ll probably want to purchase things that are more nicely made to begin with. The idea of an ‘heirloom laptop’ may sound preposterous today, but someday we may perceive our computers as cherished and useful looms to hand down to our children, much as some people today regard wristwatches or antique furniture.”
That’s an interesting perspective. But I think Moore’s Law has a ways to go. If the 5-nm node, achieved in a decade or two, represents a limit on planar scaling (equivalent to just over the spacings of 10 silicon atoms), we can increasingly adopt 3D stacking (a topic addressed at the SEMI European 3D TSV Summit in Grenoble in January. So I think it’s unlikely that I’ll be buying an heirloom laptop or smart watch in my lifetime.
