This is a wild thing to say. Brand age watches don't look strange. They look beautiful. Incredible thought and care and intention is put into their design. The people who buy them love them. It's so funny to me to get this far into one of PGs blogs and sort of realise "Oh right, you don't actually understand beauty". It's very hard to read this as much more than a slightly autistic man not understanding that it's ok for people to like beautiful things. It is not worth it to me to spend £100k on a watch, but I don't deny it is to other people, I'm not going to pretend the watch is undesirable.
But it does make me wonder whether Paul things that YC is successful today because it has a better design than other startup programmes, or is it successful today because of it's brand?
Strange game, the only winning move is not to play.
I've heard other brands do this (Ferrari?) and, of course, there are lines outside "luxury" brands like Louis Vuitton. Why bother?
PS I'll stick to my Casios: https://blog.jgc.org/2025/06/the-discreet-charm-of-infrastru...
They might pass the time doing those things, but not as a mere passtime or hobby, like if they were sewing or playing CoD. Unlike those, doing them and telling about doing them serves a specific social purpose.
Apart from the KYC aspect of the process it's their way of solving the problem of artificial scarcity on the second-hand market as the article explains. They want a second hand market to exist to indicate that this is a luxury item, but too many and the price tanking with excess supply.
This status-through-martyrdom ritual to get it from retail at MSRP is utterly bizarre.
[1] https://www.chrono24.com/patekphilippe/nautilus--mod106.htm
I feel bad for the folks who pick up on stuff like this, that must be a heavy weight to bear constantly comparing yourself to other people.
A classic case is when you observe teenager targeted status signalling trends. This can be as low value as an expensive shirt, ie shirts branded ‘supreme’ costing $300 which isn’t worth signalling to anyone who pays rent or a mortgage. But to a teenager? Wow man $300! such status!!! On the flip side if we see someone above teenager age wearing such teenager targeted status symbols we reasonably subconsciously assume they live with their parents and have very little income.
This continues up the wealth chain forever. Status symbols are invariably a way to see just how little people actually have because the person wearing the status symbol clearly believes the value of what they are flaunting is impressive.
Status symbols aren’t a signal of how much money you have so much as signal of what you believe to be an incredible amount of wealth to flaunt.
You can have that heavy weight while living on the suburbs or even the ghetto too. The objects are prices mostly change with the wealth level, not the game.
ego, of course
This is so silly. Do you really not have any hobbies where you spend inordinate time or money on things you could objectively accomplish quicker and cheaper, but having less fun, in other ways? Like, I ski. It’s a silly way to get up and down a hill in the 21st century.
I’m not a watch guy. But mechanical watches are beautiful. There are idiots who buy them. But that doesn’t mean everyone who does is an idiot.
At least with cars or audio equipment there's some marginal benefits once you get to crazy numbers, not the case with watches.
A watch at $80,000 is what, 10,000x what a new cheap one is?
But good for them! It’s really hard to be angry at them for buying said watch without it being some form of jealousy.
Sure. To each their own. I drive a Subaru. I don’t think it’s weird that others like a nice car. (I also think there are douchebags who drive both.)
Not that Apple's only appeal is marketing, Mac laptops certainly have pros over the bottom and mid tier Windows laptops. But having seen that video, and knowing that other have seen it, are aware of Apple and its positioning, makes people feel better while using and owning their devices.
People absolutely want that feeling and they're willing to pay for it.
Hobbes: …
Calvin: A good shirt turns the wearer into a walking corporate billboard!
Hobbes: …
Calvin: It says to the world, “My identity is so wrapped up in what I buy that I paid the company to advertise its products!”
Hobbes: You’d admit that?
Calvin: Oh, sure. Endorsing products is the American way to express individuality.
Branding is not inherently unproductive, nor is it guaranteed to produce worse watches. They may be larger and less accurate, but consumers still (evidently) find value in the brand. A Grand Seiko or a Nomos or a Patek is perhaps now even more interesting & identity-productive than a watch was in the 60s.
As technologists I think we're prone to dismissing improvements that aren't engineering-backed. But all life is storytelling, and labeling that work as "button-pushing" is… dismissive, to say the least.
For some product types there is no better alternative, like ISPs. But I'd argue this is because of monopoly, which is different from brand. Most monopolies (like ISPs) usually have negative brands, and there's no alternative not because one can't create a better brand (that's easy), but because the upfront cost to become profitable is too high.
P.S.: It is odd to me to have such a length pg essay been up for such a long time with just a handful of comments. Did something happen? I would've expected a wealth of discussion on a post like this by now.
> But you could recognize one from across the room.
and
> Or maybe not so lucky.
and starting a paragraph with
> For men, at least.
The ability to transfer a lot of money in the physical shape of brand watches costing 200k per piece may have added to their appeal. AppleTV’s show Friends and Neighbours upselling their value as Jon Hamm tries to steal them from neighbours may be product placement. But these were all tactics from the 50s and 60s where relatively few media sources meant you could buy your way into the hearts of the masses with an ads campaign.
Today we have a massively accelerated pace of society burning through fads and information - largely due to social media. The artificial scarcity trick is no longer an MBA secret. A brand, especially an AI brand, can burn in and out of favor in days. Transparency in society helps maybe bring out authenticity. Advertising of the past was often “advertising to your weaknesses” and that game is over.
If we can structure the transparency and apply it to politicians and other less transparent institutions that count on “Brand” to the list (especially ones with high margins and large networks) maybe the world will see true competition that benefits everyone more. Lack of transparency (and liqidity, and availability) are what make trust bubbles that distort markets.
Commoditized software is here. Will there be a market for high-end, luxury software? Becoming an artificially scarce veblen good is unlikely to work for digital goods the way it has for watches.
If the business really mainly on the technical merits of the product/service, even blank brand is an option. Many brand as a façade to a single plant is a different tradeoff.
Really interesting parallel between decidedly traditional technology and today.
Wow, that is… not what I would recommend. Brand is one of the few things that will give you pricing power in the age of AI.
My only question about this entire essay is... where did this time traveler came from???
"Our" time traveler was never mentioned until this line.
> The best way to answer that might be to imagine what someone from the golden age would notice if we brought him here in a time machine. [...] The first thing he'd notice, if he walked through a fancy shopping district, is that all the prominent watchmakers of the golden age seem to be doing better than ever.
If you have to explain why your product is expensive, maybe it shouldn’t be.
It is possible to view the fact that capitalist markets can turn a desire for art, individuality, and "something special" into a business as a bad thing. I'm not entirely convinced that's particularly interesting, though... it seems just a localized restatement of a generic "capitalism is bad" take.
- This change of what used be a functional object into a brand was done to appeal to one-upmanship (my watch is more expensive than yours) rather than the aesthetic urge which drives appreciation for art. He doesn't blame the watch brands, it may have been the only way they could survive after the triple shock. But..
- If you're an engineer and techie type and are drawn to the complexity and mechanistic elegance of mechanical watches, he's warning you that the problems being worked on in the brand age actually take you away from good functional design which attracted you there in the first place.
There are brands for non-rich: Linux is a very strong brand but virtually free and non-exclusive at all (think Android phones). Patriotism and country reputation might also be thought as brands. E.g. would Portugal's tourist boom happen without the Portuguese tarts popularity?
Edit: my watch is a Pebble.
Respectfully disagree.
Since the 60's (and one could argue, even long before that), watches are 1) fashion, and 2) male wealth-signaling fashion. That's it. Nothing more. And for males who subscribe to this wealth-signaling cult, they know from a long way away what watch brand is on that guy's wrist.
Okay, today's brands signal maybe a little differently than just wealth. Casio G-Shock watches aren't substantially different than their non-G-Shock counterparts in any significant way, but they cost way more. The G-Shock brand signals... I dunno, sportsy-ness? Maybe it is closer to a pure fashion brand here.
I think we've been in "The Brand Age" since the advent of advertising. There are plenty of products that have virtually no differentiation besides brand, and there (almost) always has been.
No, they didn’t. The makers of movements and makers of cases were separate. From far away you only know the case on the wrist. Not the movement. (I think Rolex was the first mass-market Swiss watch brand to vertically integrate. Patek may have been the first boutique.)
The movement was the expensive part. Audemars, Vacheron and Patek only made movements. The retailer would then put it in a case. That’s the entire point of PG’s essay.
> if you couldn't tell them apart, they wouldn't be any good at signaling, the entire point of wearing them
Which might lead you to revise your hypothesis around why these watches were bought and made in the “golden age of watches.” Then as now there is such a thing as quiet luxury.
The watch manufacturer, as part of their reputation, buys “premium” internal components. And then the hardcore watch-heads get to know that this model has that premium movement. Everybody in the club gets to signal to each other by knowing internal details that outsiders don’t notice (or even details that can’t be noticed, I mean, I assume by nowadays non-premium-brand movements are functionally identical to the premium ones).
G-Shock says “I do things that are so dangerous and so off the grid your Rolex or Apple Ultra would shatter and die”. And it’s true, out of my whole collection, that’s the one that will still be within a ms of true time 25 years after the power goes out after the nukes go off.
I own (among other, nicer time pieces) a G-Shock. I bought it when I was in the military and frankly it's a great watch that has withstood some serious abuse. Maybe a cheaper watch would have also survived? I'd happily buy another but mine's still literally and figuratively ticking.
What people usually mean when they talk about differentiation is distinctiveness [1]. Design isn't a differentiator for these watches it's about being distinctive. At the end of the day when telling the time is commoditized, and expensive watches are just a status symbol it's all you've got.
[1] - https://marketingscience.info/news-and-insights/differentiat...
He does not disappoint. Also, not buying the watch industry parable.
I asked Claude to psychoanalyze why I got obsessed with them and it said I’m likely striving for something tangible that appeals to my engineer mindset that isn’t now obsolete in the age of AI. It’s my career’s existentialism.
It's also a sales tactic - a watch can be a schelling point if you're looking to network with someone who's into it.
2000s brought Hiphop bling culture to them which embraced maximalism with size further increasing and 85 diamonds and rubies being something worthy of showing.
2010s austerity led to a retreat all the way to 1940s style trench and dress watches, cases back to 38mm.
Post Covid, boldness is having a comeback. See the newest Planet Ocean. We are seeing bling and ostentatious gold again on celebrities this year.
(1) https://philippdubach.com/posts/nikes-crisis-and-the-economi...
EDIT: Nevermind comments are apparently just a pg meta discussion..
Because looking at Truth Social and Gab, people do adopt brands as part of their identity; and Uber but for drivers, or Facebook, without the spying, are trivial to make the software side of things on now. The fact that we haven't seen a dozen Uber competitors spring up is a testament to the fact that branding is a helluva moat. It's impossible to put a dollar value on it, but ChatGPT has no moat, except that it's Chat-fucking-GPT. The original chatbot and no matter how good Claude gets, it'll never be the original.
Some of them will. And I suspect the set of markets in which they do will only increase—traditional SWE is probably dying, hard as that is to accept. But the fundamentals of engineering and business are nowhere close to going away. And those are the actually-hard parts of business.
No, you couldn’t. At best you’d turn out a video game simulating Uber. The idea that all of the business is in its software seems to be one Silicon Valley perennially unlearns.
I've noticed a significant tone and demographic shift on the site over the past 2-3 years with more Western Europeans and Midwesterners and fewer Bay Area+NYC users, and fewer decisionmakers or decisionmaking adjacent people using the site.
And the deeply technical types who used HN largely shifted to lobste.rs.
Karrot_Kream (another longtime HN user) identified this shift as well [0]
The reality is, most people are in-person now and conversations that were happening on HN because of the pandemic are now being done offline.
Blind is toxic, but at least the users are cynically realistic.
The New Coke brand failed because people didn't like the taste, not the other way around.
I drink Diet Coke, which is basically the same formula that became New Coke with chemical sludge instead of sugar, and it tastes pretty good to my tongue to the point where I drink it over Coke Zero, the one closer to "the real thing".
The very same people who would be flagging that comment wouldn't bat an eye at saying they won't read or support anything by folks like DHH, or a hundred other prominent tech figures who have committed some ideological-wrong.
It's just a similarly heavy-handed reaction from the other side of the divide.
I don't find anything wrong or downvotable about people voicing perfectly valid criticisms about pg, his opinions, who he associates with and signal-boosts...unless these standards you all want to apply wrt cancellation are "for thee and not for me".
First off, you might be right for some small number of cases, but I’d flag any and all rants such as this, regardless of the target. Off-topic, and doesn’t contribute to the conversation.
Second, for those as you describe, when they go off on an off-topic rant about DHH, someone else will conveniently flag it.
You have no way of knowing that. The guidelines against off-topic controversy and generic tangents apply, no matter who the author.
We acknowledge this message board is the rightful unceded home of the startup enthusiast people. We affirm their right to it and recognize their sovereignty.
See, you enjoy me bringing pet subject into discussion with nebulous relation? You want always to see it? Good. I will do so. No downvote it unfair.