A lot of people here may not realize that the closest competition to Apple in retail revenue per square foot is Tiffany's and Cartier. Little bits of gold, for a thousand dollars and up, sells quite well enough thank you. And some people buy new bits of gold bling and bangles at Tiffany's and Cartier every year. A thousand dollars and up isn't a problem for these types. A good percentage of them would not blink at some $4k Apple watch gold bling.
People who don't walk out of Tiffany's and Cartier with little bags of holiday gifts every year, maybe the gold Apple Watch isn't meant for them. Go shop elsewhere. Costco or someplace.
In terms of utility per unit of time, I would say the gold AW is priced more like Harry Winston than Tiffany or Cartier.
Hear me out.
A chronograph from Patek might cost around 60-80000 USD.
But it can be worn for 30, 40, 50 years or more.
Every 5 years or so, there will be regular service to do which will cost around 1000-2000 USD.
Assuming you buy the watch for $80k and use it for 40 years and service every 5 years for 2k, that's annualized cost of $2400.
The Apple Watch you will not be able to use, under any scenario, for more than 5 years because parts will become unavailable, it will depreciate to almost nothing and the battery performance will degrade to 0.
So if you use it for about 2-4 years, that's an annualized cost of about $1000 to $2000.
So again, the price of owning a gold Apple Watch is quite expensive compared to a normal high-end watch such as a complicated Patek Philipppe, worn by those who shop at Harry Winston.