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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> while their products are to some marketed as luxury items, they are in fact coupled with extremely high utility which is a somewhat new concept, in my view.

Well, a Rolex has extremely high utility too. It's just that it has much less utility than a digital watch you can buy for $23 from Casio. The purpose of spending the other $59,477 [ https://www.rolex.com/en-us/watches/sky-dweller/m336935-0008 ] is just that you can say you did.

Apple products are similar. They have high utility that is nevertheless not as high as competing products that are much cheaper. All of the value is coming from the luxury branding.

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I don’t agree at all. Neither is Rolex high utility, nor is anyone fooled that an analog watch which sets you back 3-4 orders of magnitude more than digital/smart watches should be higher utility.

Products competing directly with Apple products offer, at best, equivalent utility and performance for no more than 1 magnitude cost difference. Flagship android phones have cost about the same as iPhones for the better part of a decade and macbooks are often price competitive with a similarly specced ultra books. It’s understood that cheaper phones and laptops have similar utility for the average user, but some aspect of performance or quality is often a tradeoff.

Rolex is not high utility, it is harsh environment. Real Antarctic expeditions, mountaineering, pre-GPS flight and navigation, SCUBA diving, sea navigation, desert navigation, etc. You could rely on your Rolex not to be the component that fails and gets you killed or lost.

Of course, like the SUV, often it's actual use case is a far cry from what it is actually capable of doing.

Except mechanical watches fail all the time. The sapphire glass shatters, or a strong impact disrupts the movement, or a user doesn't screw down the crown and water enters the device. They require expensive regular services.

Rolex has a long history of being a tool watch, and mechanical watches can be used in a lot of neat ways, but I would never want to depend on one in a life or death situation without fully understanding a backup plan.

Rolex may have historically been a tool watch, but nowadays it seems more of a watch for tools.

You don't think it's useful to know what time it is? Where does "Rolex is not high utility" come from?

In the modern context, no. At least not from a watch. The parent offers a number of applications where timekeeping can be critical, but even when the Casio came out there were likely more functional alternatives to even the cheapest Rolex (a piece of jewelry).

That comment has a typical HN form: agree with the parent poster, but make an unnecessary, arbitrary new distinction so that you’re acceptably argumentative.

Nice, now please do you have anything to say about the $1000 monitor stand?

I don’t believe there is any product that is functionally equivalent to the iPhone while being much cheaper.

All of the cheaper options make pretty significant trade offs. Ones that you might not care about, but that others do.

The same can’t be said for a Rolex where the much cheaper options are better in every way other than flexing.

I feel like you're saying something like,"That expensive painting is inferior in every way to wallpaper, which covers the wall more effectively and durably, at a fraction of the cost."

The Rolex (or luxury watches in general) are pieces of jewellery that also tell the time. The more expensive ones have some combination of -more expensive materials -better finishing -superior craftsmanship (including more intricate complications)

The goal is not just to tell the time, it's to wear a piece of artistic craftsmanship. (Though I would agree that other brands are a better example than Rolex, and some people do indeed just buy expensive watches in general and Rolex in particular just to flex. As some do with art.)

Apple products have intensely overengineered insides that are (single-digit) years ahead of the competition in performance and security. Giving them that high margins causes engineers to do enough work to keep up.

It's like how Google is pointlessly overengineered even though literally nothing they do affects revenue since they're a monopoly.

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