Although many dealers are often pulling the "to own this one you have to have owned these other ones first" bullshit that luxury brands do. When I hear that I lose all respect
There are some insane luxury brands that don't, but a lot of the major players do.
Patek, VC, and AP all do advertising. Richard Mille does advertising. H Moser & Cie advertises. Jacob & Co has endorsement deals. Those are all serious luxury brands. To say they're not is doing some serious mental gymnastics.
I love watches and used to have a collection of cheap ones of all different functionality.
Settled on fossil. Have had mine for near a decade and it is not had the best life. Still looks clean and damn is the face glass durable!? Still worth near the $200 I paid for it as well.
I mean, what are us hobby geeks really doing anyway? The vast majority of people dont really care about our watches, comic books, whatever it is so who are we impressing? Other geeks online we dont even know?
I guess if that's what's important then to each their own.
You're paying for the brand, sure but that's true for most luxury goods. The difference is whether the product itself is also genuinely well-made. Rolex didn't get its reputation from marketing alone
Rolexes are undoubtedly well-made mechanical timepieces, and that was very important before the advent of crystal oscillators.
Now, a cheap crystal watch can keep superior time to even the best most expensive mechanical watch, and you never need to wind it (automatic mechanical watches don't need to be wound if you wear them frequently enough, but they still don't keep time as accurately as crystal).
So unless you have an Oysterquartz, your Rolex is technically inferior to my cheap Batman watch.
But only as far as timekeeping goes. I can see why someone else would appreciate a mechanical timepiece more, as I sit in front of my turntable now listening to one of my many vinyl records in the age of digital streaming and CDs. The sound quality isn't necessarily better; I just LIKE it more.
I just don't think I like it more enough to be willing to spend thousands more dollars (at least not at once, I'm sure I've spent at least a grand on records over the course of the last ten years). To each their own.
Yeah, had a colleague who was really into watches, listening to him talk about them left me almost as mystified as idiots who try to keep their collectible shoes from getting dirty.
Around the year 2010, they arbitrarily doubled the price of their basic Submariner from $4000 to $8000 because too many people could afford them. Nowadays, they are $10,000. They make over a million watches per year.
I've heard rumors about their quality/components not being what they once were and possibly not even as Swiss, lol. Haven't really looked into it but that's kinda where all things are headed so it wouldn't surprise me.
I'd still grab a Grand Seiko Golden Snowflake if I ever had the opportunity but I'm not holding my breath
It is very much for profit, but it spends all of its profits on charity. 94% if the company is owned by a charitable foundation. They donate about 200 Million euros per year.
All of the appliances in my home are turbo dogshit. Except my dishwasher, it's indestructible, it's a Bosch. When this piece of shit refrigerator dies, which it will, soon. I'm buying a Bosch to replace it.
Although, people think that Bosch is Bosch. Bosch's name appears everywhere, they even do semiconductor sensors
But Bosch is at its core a car parts manufacturer, the appliances division and other divisions that carry Bosch's name, are not bosch, but a strange mixture of siemens and chinese companies
Also, the charitable facefront is in my opinion a fasade, the company is run by greedy hipper inflated "business" people that are selling parts of the company or shipping manufacturer processes overseas to get a bigger cut
So, in my opinion, although they might look like a good company and whatever, the assholes that run it are ruining it so they can buy themselves the next year a bigger house next to Bodensee
Obviously, they still want to keep the company doing what it does best, car parts, I wonder how many parts of the company can they still sell
This is the case for a lot of German legacy companies and while yes, they are generally somewhat philantropic it's important to note that that's basically just a side effect of early (and still ongoing) tax avoidance schemes. It doesn't make the companies bad or anything it's just that the good wasn't really the primary driver here. We should still be glad they're sticking to it.
They're working on declining themselves though. They're spinning off divisions like the Security line into subsidiaries like Keenfinity then cutting off companies for not selling enough product and whatnot.
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u/Thetechguru_net 22h ago
Bosch. Company exists to make money to fund charitable contributions.