Ultra-luxurious Apple Watch lookalike is crazy in so many ways

Imagine a watch that looks a lot like the Apple Watch, but it’s fully mechanical, and has no screen. It also has no hands — it’s just a black slab of nothingness with a single window that shows a tourbillon, an expensive complication that, once again, doesn’t tell the time. On the back, you see more of the watch’s mechanism, but you still cannot tell the time. 

So how do you tell the time? You listen. 

We’re talking about H. Moser & Cie.’s Swiss Alp Watch Concept Black, an insanely expensive, off-the-charts weird luxury wristwatch that sounds like a joke but isn’t. 

As a node to pre-electricity times when minute repeaters were used to tell the time in the dark, the Swiss Alp Watch Concept Black sounds the hours, quarter-hours and minutes. To set the time, you need to pull out the crown which will reveal twelve hidden indices, each representing five minutes. 

While something like this would be trivial to achieve with a cheap electronic device, H. Moser & Cie did it in a convoluted, incredibly expensive way, which involves a flying tourbillon (a gravity-defying time-keeping complication you’ll find only on the most expensive of watches), a minute repeater and shaped chimes. 

We don’t have the video of this particular watch, but you can check out a video of a similar model, below (also armed with a tourbillion and a minute repeater) to see how this works in action. 

If you think all of this is out there, wait till you hear the price: The H. Moser & Cie.’s Swiss Alp Watch Concept Black costs $350,000. 

So who’s this watch for, really? We’d guess it’s for very, very rich people who like the aesthetic of the Apple Watch but don’t like smartwatches very much, and they also like to look at people’s confused faces when they ask for time. 

The technical specification of the Swiss Alp Watch Concept Black can be found here.