No one should buy Louis Vuitton's stupidly expensive smartwatch
The $10,000 gold Apple Watch (R.I.P) may have just been unseated as the most pretentious smartwatch money can buy.
That honor should instead go to Louis Vuitton, which today unveiled a new collection of "luxury" Android Wear watches that start at $2,450.
It's called the Tambour Horizon and it's a big hunking piece of Android Wear that no one should ever buy. But, before we get to that, let's take a look at just what $2,450 (or $2,900 for the steel finish) buys you.
It has all the specs you'd expect from a high-end smartwatch: a Qualcomm Snapdragon 2100 processor, 390 x 390 AMOLED display, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of onboard storage and a 300 mAh battery the company says will last all day. It's also equipped with a gyroscope, microphone, ambient light sensor but *not* a heart rate monitor because, as TechCrunch correctly points out, you probably shouldn't be exercising with a watch that costs well over $2,000.
That's not all though: Louis Vuitton is also promising a bunch of "exclusive" content just for the Tambour Horizon. There's customizable watch faces, dedicated travel apps, and those "iconic" Louis Vuitton watch dials meant to emulate the company's analog watches. Even the watch's charging accessory has that unmistakeable Louis Vuitton flair to remind you (and everyone else, really) just where your watch came from.
Now, none of this is entirely unexpected from a high-end designer like Louis Vuitton. Other designers, like Tag Heuer, have reportedly had a fair bit of success hawking ritzy smartwatches. But that doesn't change the fact that shelling out thousands of dollars for a smartwatch is an absolutely terrible idea even if you have the money to waste.
Forget, for a moment, that Android Wear is still kind of a mess (especially if you're an iPhone user), and that smartwatches as a whole are almost certainly doomed anyway. The reality is that even the best smartwatches, like the best smartphones, just won't be usable for more than a couple years -- at best.
That means you're shelling out thousands of dollars for watch just one buggy Android Wear update away from collecting dust in a drawer. That's just not worth it no matter how many pretty watch faces you have.
Topics Smartwatches Gadgets
Karissa was Mashable's Senior Tech Reporter, and is based in San Francisco. She covers social media platforms, Silicon Valley, and the many ways technology is changing our lives. Her work has also appeared in Wired, Macworld, Popular Mechanics, and The Wirecutter. In her free time, she enjoys snowboarding and watching too many cat videos on Instagram. Follow her on Twitter @karissabe.
