Jony Ive Reveals Secrets of the Apple Watch, His Favorite Brands

Originally published by Benjamin Clymer on Hodinkee.

I have been writing about Apple Watch since the fall of 2014. In many ways, the very first review I wrote of the watch became one of my defining stories as a consumer journalist. I never thought it would be, but that story struck a nerve with what I like to call "the real world." The real world is not the world we write about here on Hodinkee, when we can tout watches under $1,000 as "bargains" (which we did earlier this week), but rather the one filled with people who think watches are completely superfluous, silly even. And they are, and I always have been the first to admit this publicly and privately. But I think what made that story so successful, and subsequently my follow-up review this past fall of the Series 3 successful, is that I took the same critical eye that I've used to build a career around hand-made luxury products to a consumer product – paying attention to physical details that traditional writers might overlook. Also, I took stock of the fact that the Apple Watch isn't really even a watch, and yet it 100% is a watch. And I noted how just how far ahead of Switzerland Apple was in terms of fit and finish per dollar.