The Apple Watch has been unleashed on the world and, if unit shortages are any indication, it's selling well. Though the Apple Watch is quite a different product than most luxury watches -- many of which are entirely mechanical -- Apple's entrance into the watch market begs the question: What will this do to the rest of the industry?
We've seen several luxury timepiece makers launch connected watches of their own, but now Swiss luxury watch maker IWC Schaffhausen offers a different solution to the problem -- a connected wristband module called the IWC Connect.
Though details about its functionality are scarce, the IWC Connect will be embedded into the straps of IWC's upcoming watches, and offer activity tracking as well as the ability to control "certain devices connected to the Internet of Things," IWC claims.
The idea makes sense: The allure of IWC is in the brand's history as well as its mechanical, handcrafted watches (see this one, for example) created by the company's expert watchmakers. It's quite hard to marry that kind of legacy -- though some, like Breitling, have tried -- to the common notion of a smartwatch, which usually consists of chips, sensors and an LED screen.
“We do not touch our beautiful watches -- an ‘IWC’ stays a mechanical handcrafted timepiece. We’ve engineered an intelligent design solution which perfectly integrates and underlines our product worlds,” Georges Kern, CEO of IWC, said in a statement.
More information about the IWC Connect will be available in the "coming months."