Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland and we are here with Benedict Evans back from London.

And you are well outside of the Apple reality distortion field for the watch event yesterday.

So we want to talk about that and get your impression.

So Benedict, welcome.

Thank you.

So it's interesting.

Everything Apple does is interesting in a sense.

And it's interesting to list all of the different rules that they're breaking or challenging

or all the things that they're doing in different ways.

I think the first thing that caught everyone's attention, and of course this was a thing

that there was a lot of speculation about beforehand was the price of the gold version

of the Apple Watch, which six months ago when they said there would be a gold one, people

thought, aha, when the price of that comes out, people are going to lose their minds, and a lot

of people did. So it's $10,000, and it goes up to,

I think, $17,000 or something. Right, for all the extra fancy bits. For all the extra

fancy bands. And so you've got a bunch of people talking about this as though they are unaware

with the existence of the luxury goods business, where, you know, people buy $10,000 dresses

that you only wear once. Right.

And they buy half million dollar watches and buy lots of them and pay $20,000 for a transatlantic

first class plane ticket or transcontinental plane ticket.

And so there's a discussion to be had around, you know, will people who buy $10,000

mechanical watches buy a $10,000 electronic watch? And they buy those watches expecting that they'll last? Are they willing to

...