The peasents will be shafted, the celebs will get special services otherwise they'll cost more in negative publicity.

Also, not very green is it. How long do normal watches last? Fucking years with regular servicing and guess what, you can take them to any independent repair shop.

Obsolescence needs to fucking stop and kit needs to be repairable again BY ANYONE!

Back in the late 80s our backroom TV failed. Family friend came round, laid it on the floor, took back off. Schematic was inside the case. He traced where the fault was and fixed it. Why have we gone backwards!

Because there's more money in selling than in fixing.

This is the consumer's fault. We all accept that Apple decides, arbitrarily, to define a date after which something is obsolete and refuses not only to fix it any more, but even deprives other providers of parts to do so.

This will last until people get fed up of buying things that are declared obsolete when they are still perfectly fixable and maintainable. We have all been led down the path of the new shiny, and enough of us have run stright down it that I don't know if we'll get back out of it any time soon.

This is NOT the consumers' fault.

The fault lies squarely on the manufacturers for doing this and the legislators for allowing them to get away with it.

Consumers have NO power in this situation. There is no choice when ALL products are like this.

Yes, there is a choice. The choice of not buying.

The choice of only buying things that can be fixed.

We did not make that choice, so now we have the long, hard slog of getting the law involved. And that means fighting the lobbyists, which are still doing their damndest to fight the right to repair.

If we had just not bought, it's the manufacturers that would be begging us to buy their fixable stuff.

> This is NOT the consumers' fault.

> Consumers have NO power in this situation

Consumers shouldn't buy defective (by design) hardware. It really is that simple.

> There is no choice when ALL products are like this.

This is entirely not the case. Very few watches are Apple landfill-ware. Actually, that is quite unique to the Apple brand only.

However, I do feel there should be better education. For example in many places in Asia, it is seen as a gluttonous embarrassment to own an Apple device.

I'm guessing that anyone who bought a solid gold first generation product has enough money and obsession with Apple that they've already bought a newer one and don't care that this one has become worthless. I'm sure someone will buy it for the gold value, though I don't know how much gold they can have put in it without making it a bit too heavy. Either way, Apple isn't going to need to make them functional.

I have to disagree a bit about your comparison to a simple watch. These things aren't the same kind of product, so it's not surprising that one lasts much longer than another. A watch that only tells the time doesn't use as much power as one that has a WiFi radio and GPS receiver in it, so purely for battery reasons, the smartwatch will last a shorter time. Apple should have had more software support than they did, but I don't think anyone was expecting it to be working usefully in 2050 when WiFi will look very different and the things we used to use with the device no longer exist.

"I'm sure someone will buy it for the gold value"

I'm not sure just how valuable the gold is or even if it is gold.

Caratage is the measure of the purity of gold, usually referred to as Carat(s). According to the article, the Apple "gold" watch is "18 Karat gold". So is it real gold? Or, is it like Krispy Kream doughnuts, which are neither crispy nor cream, even if the name sounds like it.

People can melt that down to get at the 75% of it which is supposed to be gold, and I'm sure that if it wasn't, we'd have heard the story by now. What I don't know is how much gold there really is in the case, because they only said how much of the gold-colored metal is gold, not how much of that metal is on it. It could be a thin shell around the rest of the obsolete unit. Then again, we're talking about the people who spent $17k on a newly released product that wasn't expected to last for decades, so those people probably don't care enough to get full value from their junk.

Obviously you'd get a Casio if wanted longevity. Apple is just throw away fashion for cult fans.

The peasents will be shafted

I don't think anyone dropping $17K on a smartphone everyone knew would be replaced by a better model in a year and not be supported for decades like a Rolex could be classed a "peasant". I doubt many (if any) Reg readers ever saw a gold Apple Watch in person, since most of us don't hang out with Hollywood celebrities or rap stars.

What I wonder is how many of those were sold, and how many are still in active use? I wouldn't be surprised if the latter number is zero. There are some third party companies that will sell you a new model Apple watch that's been gold plated or blinged with diamonds. The people who bought one of the original gold ones have probably had it in a drawer for years, and if they are still wearing an Apple watch some of them will have paid even more than $17K to get one blinged out to ridiculous proportions.

https://www.emetaljewelry.com/categories/emj-apple-watch-bezels.html

"the celebs will get special services otherwise they'll cost more in negative publicity"

Service? That old thing? Haven't worn it for years. It's so yesterday I'm not even sure where it is. It might be in a drawer somewhere or maybe I left it in an hotel.

In the meantime my 20 year old Citizen Ecodrive is still beating it's little heart, albeit with one new battery (energy cell if you must) and a new crystal to replace the old one, heavily scratched from working on cars and sundry building works.

And my grandfather's 46 year old Seiko M158-5009 is still going too.

But that's not the watch I wear the vast majority of the time. And that's because all it does is tell you the time, date, GMT, and time at various airports around the world. Sure, it's a beautiful watch, but that's all it is. My 36 year old Timex Ironman (same kind Bill Clinton wore to his inauguration) also still works, but doesn't do much more.

My Apple watch, on the other hand, does that plus calculator, calendar, phone, lighting controller, compass, blood oxygen, ECG, thermostat control, finds my keys, texts, pays for groceries, tracks my mileage, lets me know if there's too much noise, finds EV chargers, identifies songs, lets me know I need to take meds, lets me read email, and tells me how much I've walked in a day.

Until this Apple watch I'd mostly stopped wearing watches at all, because something that just tells me the time isn't all that useful. But this thing really is.

(Don't get me started on how much I despise analog watches in general and mechanical watches in particular.)

@vm - I won't. Neither will I tell you how ludicrous I find it that people seem happy to be conned into buying what they know will soon be worthless landfill.

Delighted to be wearing my dear old dad's Rolex, now in its 81st year.

If my Seiko Flightmaster did that to me*, I'd kill it with a rock.

*Except the calculator part, it has a slide rule on the bezel.

Isn't this the point, though? You decide what features you want to have and select a device that meets those requirements, including any tradeoffs required to get there. For instance, my wrists are devoid of any kind of watch, because I've considered the options. I don't need a watch to tell me the time because my computer's right in front of me and it has a clock and my phone is nearby and it has one. The traditional time-only devices aren't useful to me. The list of features in smartwatches are also not that useful to me because, as before, my phone can do most or all of that and I don't mind getting it if I decide I want to talk to someone or I have a calculation that I don't want to do in my head.

I find the comments comparing smartwatches to time-only watches a bit confusing, because people appear to be comparing things only on where you keep it during use, not what it does. On the same basis, I should tell anyone who has a mobile phone that they're stupid because it gets much less battery life, even if it's one of those that last a week, than my solar-powered pocket calculator. Sure, you can call people with that one and my calculator only has four arithmetic functions and that percentage key for those who don't want to type /100, but they're similarly-sized devices that are both stored in the pocket, so they must be comparable and expected to work the same way for the same amount of time.

"My Apple watch, on the other hand, does that plus calculator, calendar, phone, lighting controller, compass, blood oxygen, ECG, thermostat control, finds my keys, texts, pays for groceries, tracks my mileage, lets me know if there's too much noise, finds EV chargers, identifies songs, lets me know I need to take meds, lets me read email, and tells me how much I've walked in a day."

How much of that will it do if you leave your iPhone at home? Does the watch actually *do* much at all or is it primarily a slightly smart wireless terminal display for the phone?

Given their gobsmackingly enormous market valuation lately, Apple could easily - EASILY - implement a legacy products initiative to support key items of older hardware, especially something as iconic as a Series 0 gold watch! It would maintain trust in their brand and would be good for the environment. The downside for them, of course, apart from the relatively trivial cost, is the hit to planned obsolescence, that naughty industrial policy that has always lurked so close to Apple brands (and others, of course) and is a significant driver of new sales. To do nothing and let these products slide into an avoidable demise smacks of cynicism, especially given their historic antagonism towards third-party support.

Rather than treating older products like the red-headed stepchild that has to be walled up in the east wing of the castle and forgotten about, they should be allowed to stick around as a tribute to Apple's undeniable record of innovation and design. In the vast majority of cases, they'd live alongside current products rather than delaying their rollout and enter the era of viable collectibles that still live and breath and don't just languish, dead-screened and cold in some drawer or landfill. They say that 65% of Rolls Royce cars are still on the road. Come on, Apple. Stand behind your own legacy.

A few months back I saw a 1920s Rolls Royce sitting outside the local RNLI as part of fund-raising. I spoke the owner, they had it in their (wealthy) family for 3 generations AFIK and it had done 700,000 miles more or less. He recently flew it to Australia to drive around there before flying it back.

While some might be appalled by such wealth in our times of need, I was pleased to see that (a) he was helping the RNLI by being their at his own expense, and (b) it was being used, not in a museum. I applaud all of the craftsmen and women who built every part of it in the 20s that their skilled labour was still being enjoyed a century later.

It's a wrist-mounted gadget that can also tell you the time.

Primarily it was a wrist-mounted display object whose prime function was to show, by having been purchased, what the owner could afford to by. Having been purchased and flashed about most of its utility value has been used up. Being a wrist-mounted gadget that could also tell you the time was its residual utility value (plus the melt price of the gold, of course).

Phones, 'smart' watches and the like are all destined to be throwaway devices: if nothing else, the demands placed on them by the upgraded OS that comes out after the hardware means it'll eventually die even if the hardware itself were to magically keep working forever. Same applies - on a slightly slower timescale - to PC's (my daily driver is 14 years old, TYVM).

On the plus side, I suppose these solid gold watches - like the diamond encrusted Nokia's of the 90's - are far more likely to be recycled than your run-of-the-mill Samsung simply because of the inherent value in the materials. Or they'll become collector-pieces that get traded for however many years Apple is still a 'thing', meaning their recycle value pales into insignificance compared to their perceived value (you could use the same argument for a van Dyke painting, I guess: worthless as raw material....but very valuable all the same).

If we want to stop the e-waste then we need to design products that are built to last (replaceable components, active third party suppliers market, etc) AND do something to address the obligation to upgrade just because the OS/app suite needs newer/faster/more extension-aware hardware. Not sure how we do that, though. Imagine: would we all be happy with a i286 running at 8Mhz and all its inherent memory limitations because that's kind of what we should have stuck with if we're going to subscribe to the 'don't evolve' logic.

I don't have the answer - I don't think anyone can square this particular circle.

Standard Apple playcard. Most people learnt their lesson with iPods and moved to Android. You snooze you lose.