There is Premium, and there is PREMIUM 🙂
I sometimes feel a few people forget Apple is all about Mass Consumer Sales.
They have never, been a lets sell just a few expensive items to a few people company.
They make things a bit better quality with a bit higher finish, and charge a bit more than others, then wrap it together with their software.
They are generally priced, just above competition, but well within the mass market price acceptance.
I know it's not going to be cheap, but I'd also be surprised if Apple covered the general Apple Watch website with photo's of Gold Watches to get millions of consumers excited, and then priced them so high, only 1 in 5000 Apple fans would be realistically able to buy one, and felt let down they could not have the model they had seen so much of.
You want happy customers, not unhappy ones that were unable to afford the product they had been looking forward to.
Hence, me saying it has, I would of thought, to be set at an expensive, as it's gold, but not out of reach expensive level for the mass market.
Having millions of people around the world, unhappy as they had to settle for the steel one does not sound a great tactic.
I think the difference between what Apple has done and what Apple is doing is that when Apple came out with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, it was creating substantially new categories. The vast majority of people didn't have large-capacity MP3 players, touchscreen smartphones, or tablet devices; Apple came in, upset the apple cart (har har) of whoever was already there, and then set a lot of the trends for what came later.
The Apple Watch is superficially similar; there have been only a few smartwatches of the caliber or performance capability of the Apple Watch. Apple could entirely remake the market. But I think the difference is what you were discarding when you went to an iPod, an iPhone, an iPad, was probably a worse piece of tech. That Walkman was going to be obsolete. So was that candy-bar phone (though I bet the battery still holds up for two days!)
But Apple clearly has broader aspirations, and that means it's not competing with the Galaxy Gear, it's competing with watches in generala market that has been corroding away into dinky $10 watches at Target, $5000+ timepieces for status symbols, or, ever-increasingly, just using a smartphone. The typical rules Apple has played against don't apply. If Apple wants someone to dispense with that $5000 or $10,000 or whatever watch, cause they're only going to wear one thing on their wrist
it's got to offer something comparable. And at least to me, the Apple Watch actually looks a hell of a lot better than some of the massive chunky options for men out there; your mileage may vary.
The problem is Apple's opposition is now equally stylish and far more permanent than a gadget that will be obsolete in four years, and even rich people might balk at tossing something like that. Not to mention that so much of the luxury is the experienceI get the "black" credit card offers all the time that focus on concierge services as part of their appeal. The personal touch in an age of automation mattersto Apple, certainly, but even more so to these buyers. So how do you get people to feel like they're the most valued customer in an Apple Store?
The Store problem and The Upgrade problem are the biggest obstacles to Apple with positioning the higher-end Watches, to me, not the price. There's a great chapter in Super Freakonomics where an escort realized that she only got more business the higher she jacked her ratessome things really don't fall into the "you could sell 5X as many if it were half the cost" dichotomy, and if it does
that's where the sport and stainless steel editions come into play.
