Imagine you’re a product manager at a leading Swiss luxury watchmaking maison. You’re leading a brainstorming session to expand on an idea that your engineers have had for a technical breakthrough. This breakthrough is a feature that could redefine how the world thinks about mechanical watches. Now your task is to figure out what the actual product—every aspect of the watch and how you’re going to market and sell it—is going to be. At the end of the session, you have the outline of a product plan that builds upon the breakthrough feature to create a watch that can be your brand’s next great model:
Our watch needs to be priced within a reasonable distance of comparable luxury mechanical watches with similarly unique features.
Reflecting its modern technology, our watch needs to appear modern: sleek, elegant, and probably sporty given the initial market of early adopters.
Given the probable high cost, stylistically, our watch needs to be capable of dressing down to a polo shirt and up to a tuxedo—wearing as flexibly as possible.
The Panerai Submersible Elux LAB-ID—a Swiss luxury watch with a breakthrough feature that could redefine how the world thinks about mechanical watches—is exactly none of those things.
Image: Panerai
Even by luxury watch standards, it’s extraordinarily expensive, at $107,600 (EU price: 109 900 €). Its case is ceramic-titanium and it has a rubber strap. Subjectively, it’s anything but sleek and is massive on the wrist, with a case diameter of 49 mm (1.93”) and a thickness of 21.6 mm (0.85”).
If you’re looking for a comparable mechanical watch, a reasonable marker would be the Rolex Deepsea Challenge.
Image: Rolex
Its size is similar to that of the Elux LAB-ID, with a 50 mm (1.97”) diameter case and 23 mm (0.91”) thickness. It’s a “superlative chronometer”, so Rolex guarantees its accuracy to -2/+2 seconds/day. It has a brushed titanium case and bracelet and is honestly about as sleek as one can imagine given its unique feature, which is that it’s the only mechanical watch on the planet rated to a depth of 11,000 meters (36,089 feet). And it does all that for a price of $29,100 (EU price: 28 300 €).
So the comparably-sized Deepsea Challenge is as accurate as any mechanical watch, is made of precious metal, is attractive for what it does, has a feature that is unique in the world, and costs less than a third of the Elux LAB-ID. And yet it’s the latter that might represent the future of watches. Why? To answer that, we first have to understand why many mechanical watch aficionados disdain smartwatches.
Heirloom versus obsolescence
Whenever the excellent watch coverage site Hodinkee runs an article on the Apple Watch, it’s predictable: mechanical watch enthusiasts flood the comments to register their complaint that the Apple Watch is not, in fact, a watch.
Strictly speaking, in a linguistic sense, they’re wrong. The OED defines “watch” as:
Watch. Noun. IV. A timepiece. IV.21.a. 1590– A small time-piece; originally one with a spring-driven movement, and of a size to be carried in the pocket; now also frequently, a wrist-watch (spring- or battery-driven).
Is the Apple Watch a “time-piece” that is a “wrist-watch” and is “battery-driven”? Yes. It’s a watch.
That being said, while the purists are technically incorrect, they do have a point. In 2015, Apple launched their short-lived Apple Watch Edition, in 18 karat gold, at a price of $17,000 (equivalent to $23,329 / 19 734 € in 2026). In 2023 they announced it was obsolete and would no longer support it. That’s a useful lifespan of eight years. Meanwhile, someone who bought a Rolex in 2015 would, in 2023—at the time of Apple’s announcement of the Edition’s permanent obsolescence—be two years away from the first recommended service interval for their watch.
In other words, while the Apple Watch may be a watch, it’s not an heirloom. It’s disposable.
This isn’t a complaint. The Apple Watch is at the cutting edge of wearable technology, and that technological edge requires constant sharpening. It would be surprising if it weren’t obsolete after eight years. It’s not—nor is it designed to be—an heirloom.
And that brings to the Submersible Elux LAB-ID. (By the way, Panerai, you need to work on your naming. Just saying.) What is its unique feature, and why might that feature point the way to a possible future for mechanical watches?
