That’s not the case with the Apple Watch. We know its starting price will be $349, but after that we’ll likely have no idea until early next year. Gruber guesses that the highest-tier Watch—the 18-karat Edition—will be expensive:

Apple Watch Sport (aluminum/glass): $349 (not a guess)

Apple Watch (stainless steel/sapphire): $999

Apple Watch Edition (18-karat gold/sapphire): $4,999

In other words, the company’s most expensive watch will cost more than most of its laptops. And the Watch, unlike the iPhone, won’t stand as a sort of pricey if accessible tool—instead it will just be a conspicuous luxury purchase.

If the gold Apple Watch really does cost thousands of dollars—and it’s hard to see how it won’t—it could represent a change of direction for Apple, beyond even the turn to fashion epitomized by the new wearable. So far, Apple has been a company focused on the mainstream, on the mass consumer, in an era where the most reliable profits could be found in the luxury market. Apple has catered to, if not the poorest quartile of American society, then the thing we used to call a middle class.

It has found enormous success there, enough to make it the largest company in the world. And that’s been reassuring, I think: In an era where it feels like culture itself is fracturing between the wealthy and the precarious, Apple always aimed to be that Coke. The iPhone has always hoped to be the best smartphone for Beyoncé, the best smartphone for the President, and the best smartphone for you.

So if Apple’s abandoning its especially American brand of egalitarianism, it’s a big deal. It’s might even be read as a sort of loss of faith in the U.S. middle class. Which makes us ask: Is it?

“I think not,” writes Gruber:

The iPhone and iPad are egalitarian devices. All you can buy with more money is additional storage. But the Mac has long offered widely varying pricing tiers with widely varying performance. If you can afford it, a maxed-out MacBook Pro is a far more impressive laptop than an $899 MacBook Air. Or consider a maxed out Mac Pro — 12 cores, maximum RAM and storage, the best graphics card — which costs just under $10,000. That’s better-tasting Coke than you get with an iMac or Mac Mini. I think the steel and gold Apple Watches are not better-tasting Cokes. They’re the same Coke that everyone can get with the $349 Apple Watch Sport, but served in expensive goblets.

I don’t know if I agree yet. Apple is certainly entering the fashion sector, but it’s unclear to me if it’s entering the luxury sector as well, that mystical world where whiskeys cost more than minivans. And if Apple is becoming a luxury company, it’s as much a response to the state of the laggard, hollowed-out American economy, I think, as to the inevitable progression of technology.

Regardless, Gruber’s essay on the Apple Watch is the best one I’ve read on the subject so far. If you’re interested in the device, it’s worth your time.

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