Apple Watch buyers will feel 'different' after being 'serviced' in spring 2015 What will you be buying your loved one for Valentine's Day next year? Not an Apple Watch, it seems, as this much-anticipated gizmo is now set to be released in the spring of 2015. Apple retail supremo Angela Ahrendts revealed the timing of the release in a leaked video message. In a rather saucy-sounding missive, the former …
I've bought you this overpriced Chinese-made gizmo that that will be unsupported and worthless in three years'
This worries me, about the Apple Watch. Not that they'll be binned after a bit, that's just a sad reflection on current consumerism. Not good for the environment and all that.
But there's a gold one. According to Apple's website it's solid gold, rather than plated. Which is by definition going to be obsolote, and even if it could be continually updated for ten years, it's got a built-in battery that'll stop working.
So are Apple about to branch out into Cash-m-iGold?
Or are they going to sell millions a year until world gold stocks are exhausted and Fort Knox is empty?
I predict that in 2030 a company will launch who's purpose is to mine old sock drawers...
If you look at the price of gold over the past three years you'll find it was over $1800 on this date 2011 which is more than 50% higher than today's $1167. That isn't to say it's going to drop under $700 in a few years time but it may since that's where it started before the "great recession".
If you look at the price of gold over the past three years you'll find it was over $1800 on this date 2011 which is more than 50% higher than today's $1167. That isn't to say it's going to drop under $700 in a few years time but it may since that's where it started before the "great recession".
I take it you missed the underlying causes of the financial crash then? That everyone had forgotten all about the risk side of the risk/rewards equation and were looking for much higher returns than you could get with boring old gold. That want caused the price to drop: it didn't work out too well in the end, did it?
On the contrary, fast forward a couple of years and gold has risen to record highs. Again, not because of a massive increase in underlying value, but simply because everyone was shitting themselves looking for safe places to invest. Over the long term the story of gold is a very consistent one - it keeps track of inflation but nothing more. There's short term volatility along the way but it always returns to trend. That isn't considering as far back as 2007, it's going back to Roman times.
So yes, it's always possible some short term spike could make the scrap value of the gold briefly worth more in real terms than the initial value of the gold, electronics, workmanship and profit factored into the price of a new watch but it will only ever be a highly unusual and short-term occurrence rather than long term trend. If you buy new shiny now on the basis you can used if for a few years and once it's broken it magically becomes an investment then you are a foolish rather than canny investor.
@tsr chap
Yes, that was kind of my point. If you take the spike from the recession out of the price of gold and extend it from '07 via inflation the current value becomes much closer to $800 than the current price which would indicate it still could fall quite a bit. Of course that doesn't say anything about whether the price in '07 was a fair valuation since if you start a bit earlier, say '04, then we're looking at only a bit over $500 today but we may not want to go back as far as the spike in the late '70s/ early '80s.
I'll bet if they're selling a solid gold, trying to move from their current position as a premium brand to be a true luxury brand, they'll give those rich people something to help make it worth paying whatever eye wateringly high price Apple charges: free yearly upgrades so their gold watch is always the latest and greatest model.
What I can guarantee they won't do is rely on people to take their old gold ones to have them melted. At worst Apple will offer trade-ins on them, which should be pretty cheap since the expensive part is the gold, not the guts.
1st gen iPad, launched April 2010. So you've had about 4 years use out of it. The base model was sold for $499, so for £700 you must have purchased one with 64GB memory or perhaps less memory and 3G.
I assume no non-upgradeable product will be usable for more than 3 years. I assume the same for PCs unless I factor in further investment. So, for example, even though I bought a Core i7 PC with good graphics card in 2008, I had to throw just under three hundred pounds at it for more memory and an OS upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 to be able to continue to use the asset. This represented 30% of the original cost but it is still usable today.
That said, I think the iWatch 2 will be a significantly better (i.e. step change) product as the influence of the recent hires from Tag and Burberry will only be visible in the next release of iWatch.
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