Watches have a weird relationship between price and functionality because watches are almost completely unnecessary for anyone to own, full stop. So you end up with the weird curve where the more functionality you want, the less you probably want a watch at all, or if you do, you probably want a relatively affordable one because you’re either buying a smart watch that does a zillion things or something with a quartz movement which tend to be vastly more affordable than mechanical watches.
So it’s a bit of a bimodal system. You either ignore 99% of the available watches because you’re purely a pragmatic buyer, or you accept that you’re buying an inherently impractical luxury product and then you have your own curve where you do get more for spending more, and some of that “more” is functionality, but it ignores the fact that most vastly cheaper watches are more accurate and robust.
So if you’re not a watch person, or at least, not a mechanical watch person, you’re probably spending at most… however much an Apple Watch Ultra costs. What is that, $800? If you’re a “dumb” watch person but you still only care about practicality, you probably are spending no more than a couple hundred bucks, and most likely you own a sub $100 Casio of some sort. Then there’s the mechanical watch buyers, where suddenly the market gets huge and the prices go up insanely high.
Within this market, the labels and prices associated with them are flexible, but there’s still some fairly ubiquitous information:
“Entry level” means the most affordable mechanical watches, generally somewhere below $500. “Affordable” generally means below $1k but has been creeping up to maybe $1,500. “Mid range” tends to mean anything up to around $5k. “Luxury” means > $5k, and then there’s a fairly vague notion of the highest end watches where the sky is the limit, but at lot of people tend to start that around the $10k mark.
Watches have a weird relationship between price and functionality because watches are almost completely unnecessary for anyone to own, full stop. So you end up with the weird curve where the more functionality you want, the less you probably want a watch at all, or if you do, you probably want a relatively affordable one because you’re either buying a smart watch that does a zillion things or something with a quartz movement which tend to be vastly more affordable than mechanical watches.
So it’s a bit of a bimodal system. You either ignore 99% of the available watches because you’re purely a pragmatic buyer, or you accept that you’re buying an inherently impractical luxury product and then you have your own curve where you do get more for spending more, and some of that “more” is functionality, but it ignores the fact that most vastly cheaper watches are more accurate and robust.
So if you’re not a watch person, or at least, not a mechanical watch person, you’re probably spending at most… however much an Apple Watch Ultra costs. What is that, $800? If you’re a “dumb” watch person but you still only care about practicality, you probably are spending no more than a couple hundred bucks, and most likely you own a sub $100 Casio of some sort. Then there’s the mechanical watch buyers, where suddenly the market gets huge and the prices go up insanely high.
Within this market, the labels and prices associated with them are flexible, but there’s still some fairly ubiquitous information:
“Entry level” means the most affordable mechanical watches, generally somewhere below $500. “Affordable” generally means below $1k but has been creeping up to maybe $1,500. “Mid range” tends to mean anything up to around $5k. “Luxury” means > $5k, and then there’s a fairly vague notion of the highest end watches where the sky is the limit, but at lot of people tend to start that around the $10k mark.