Yahoo Autos I Tried to Become a Watch Guy, but It Didn't Take
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I wear an Apple Watch, and not even a good one. Mine is a Series 3, a model that debuted in 2017, which might be when I bought it. Long ago it gave up pairing with my phone, but it still charges, tells time, and logs workouts, thus performing all the duties I require of a watch. It impresses no one, which is also my preference. Nobody is ever going to pull a switchblade on me in a dark alley, gesture to the grimy and obsolete Apple product on my wrist, and say, "Hand it over."
This is not to say I don't appreciate fancy timepieces, the mechanical kind with its movements governed by intricate clockworks fashioned by dour Swiss people peering down through one of those microscopes you wear on your face. These are cool in the abstract, in the way that any pointlessly complicated piece of machinery is, but I've never lusted for one. And at this point in my life, I understand myself as someone who never will.
But Pebble Beach Car Week is a place that will test even the most pragmatic worldview, immersed as you are in the relentless collisions between objective reality and obscene wealth, until the former is twisted into a fourth-dimension simulacrum where Bugattis are daily drivers and private jets might as well just be called jets. Is there any other kind? Let me ask my assistant.
And so, when Porsche Design offered to drape my wrist with its latest hunk of delectable mechanical timekeeping for a day or two, I thought, Why not? Maybe I'd get it. Not as in "buy it," because even those watchdogs with a spare $12,553 cannot buy the Chronograph 911 Turbo 50 Years unless they've already purchased the namesake $263,095 vehicle. Porsche is building 1974 examples of both car and watch, though they expect that not every limited-edition Turbo S buyer will get the accompanying chronograph. But maybe 75 percent of them will. And those who want almost the same thing without the matchy-matchy Turbo S in the garage can buy the mechanically identical Chronograph 1 50 Years 911 Turbo Edition, which goes for a nice round $12,000.
The Chronograph 911 Turbo 50 Years—let's just call it the T50Y from now on—hews to the car theme with a precision you'd expect from Germans in a joint project with the Swiss. The black leather of the watchband is the same stuff used on the car's interior, and the winding rotor (visible through the transparent back case) is styled to look like the 911's wheel, complete with tiny center-lock hub. There's much use of a color Porsche calls Turbonite, a metallic gray that dazzles the visible spectrum for people of a certain net worth. I think it's very cool that the T50Y looks low-key while you're wearing it, but when you take it off and flip it over, it reveals its busy gears and springs and wheels, pendulums dancing and cogs grinding in service of fully analog timekeeping. I would love to just take it off at a bar and wiggle it around and watch the movement collect my kinetic energy and store it for future use, a process I find as mysterious as the black-box magic of any AI. But that would be weird, sitting there playing with a $12,000 watch like the world's most expensive fidget spinner.
And anyway, I had a hard time removing the T50Y, because the strap's clasp is of a design I've not encountered in the mortal-watch world. You set a pin in a hole in the strap—yes, this I've seen—but only once, the first time you size the strap to your wrist. After that you fasten it or remove it via a double-hinged metal clasp that regularly confounded me. Attempting to remove the watch, or put it back on, would expose me as a watch-borrowing imposter as surely as its serial number of 0000.
I got used to it, my expensive watch: the heft of it on my wrist, the knowledge that inside the case 28,800 semi-oscillations per hour were serving my personal timekeeping. Perhaps if I owned this watch, I would learn what its flyback function is and maybe even use that. I would not test its water resistance to 145 psi unless life took a drastically bad turn somewhere over the Milwaukee Deep. Speaking of which, the T50Y is powered by your own movement, and there's a 48-hour reserve. So if the watch dies on your wrist, you have bigger problems, or did about two days earlier.
Now, my personal pragmatic hurdle on expensive watches has always been my propensity to think about all the other fun or useful or benevolent things you could do with a given amount of money, but forget about that. Say that I can afford this watch and that's not an issue—and in fact, this watch is a value compared to many others. (One year at Pebble Beach, a guy showed me a $750,000 watch that he was wearing. How do I know it cost that much? Because he told me.)
I still can't see a fancy chronograph of any kind becoming part of my sartorial repertoire. It's no fault of the watch, which is a fascinating piece of engineering. It's just that where I grew up, in New England, wealth wasn't flaunted. It was, if anything, disguised—oceanfront mansions were referred to as "cottages," lavish lake houses as "camps," euphemisms meant to deflect attention rather than seek it. And I still harbor a reflexive aversion to materialistic flamboyance that manifests as constant explication whenever I'm driving an expensive car. "Nice car!" someone will yell when I'm driving, let's say, a 911 Turbo, and instead of saying thanks I blurt, "It's not mine!" I don't know what's wrong with me.
But that mindset doesn't comport with five-figure timepieces, which at least saves my friends from any increased exposure to social media posts dominated by a hairy wrist. Given the intersection of car enthusiasm and watch appreciation, there are enough of those out there already.
The only way I'd be comfortable wearing a watch like this is if someone handed it down to me, if it had that kind of meaning. Unfortunately, my ancestors were sadly bereft of fine Swiss timepieces, so here I am back with the Series 3. Which tells me all I need to know.
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