ROLEX A RIPOFF

1926 Rolex Prices Reasonable
EVEN ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION !!!

See this video https://youtu.be/PCZMwsaefyk <- explains why ROLEX so expensive // I dislike the fact that you could buy a real Rolex in the past for a reasonable price that normal working people could afford; ~ a few hundred dollars. 

Technically speaking, if we take 5.15 GBP in 1926, convert to USD its about $170 USD2022 for the silver one in the post image of 1926 ROLEX prices. Using the same method, the gold one would be around $340 USD2022 in 9-ct gold, and the 18-ct gold would be about $500 USD2022 / when accounting for inflation using this tool https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ / certainly not cheap, but not luxury hyper expensive either // especially for the gold versions! 

Calibre 3230 an impressive movement 

The current Oyster Perpetual features 70 hours of power reserve using the innovative kinetic energy recovery winding mechanism, the design so advanced that several new patents were awarded for its innovations, supposedly. Improvements were made to the movements precision, shock resistance, magnetic field resistance, and the barrels architectures that results in super efficiency of the escapement utilized, thus extending the power reserve. 

Removing friction from a mechanical system improves efficiency, since friction waste energy by converting movement into heat & wearing of the mechanical interface surfaces that rub. This is why metal on metal parts in engines are lubricated with oil film through lubricating oils pumped around through the oil filter which removes some contaminates. Engine oil has to be changed regularly because the fuel combustion blows some acidic exhaust products past the gaps in the piston rings down into the oil and oil pan. These combustion blow-by products chemically react with the oil, darkening it from a light straw color to a burned dark brown color, after hundreds of hours of operating inside the engine. Changing an engines oil regularly the best thing you can do to prolong its useful life. 

Mechanical watch movements like the Calibre 3230 have to be service with an oil change too, using tiny droplets of specialized oils that a watch mechanic carefully applies to certain parts. I am surprise Rolex did not go the way of using helium & teflon & developing "touch-less" movements like some Stirling engines used by NASA, though maybe future Rolex movements will utilize these ultimate low fiction technologies. I know they could make even better movements using computer chip IC manufacturing lithography to make parts with the highest possible precision. Variable plane lithography could even product surface finishes that are impossible to make by any other means. They could extend the power reserve to 1000 hours or more like this, since lithographic production of the parts would enable friction reduction to the lowest possible levels! 

I know of automatics with 200 hours of power reserve. A typical automatic has 20-40 hours of power reserve, the amount of time the watch movement will run without being worn, since the users wearing of the automatic is what charges the spring energy storage system. As the user wearing the automatic moves their arm, the precision bearing mounted weight swinging in the back of the automatic linked to a wound power spring connected to the movement's gear-train, such that as the weight moves around due to the users arm movements, the spring captures the kinetic energy of the swinging mass & stores it as mechanical potential energy in steel alloy or silicon springs wound up inside a small metal container that contains the spring, usually connect to the weight with a ratcheting system that can wind the spring if the weight mass spinning clockwise or counterclockwise. 

Usually automatics can be hand wound if the user spins the setting stem in its base position to wind the spring. Pull that same stem out one click to set the date & two clicks to set the time. Surely the 3230 an impressive mechanical clock or automatic watch movement, but its also mass produced suing the same CNC technology that Seiko Epson uses to make similar high quality movements for 1/100 the price or even ETA making similar movements for 1/70th the price, even movements with similar performance costing 99% less made by other high quality watch makers, out of the same materials, using the same processes. Rolex more hype than actual product! Its branding at its best with an enormous marketing budget to sell the brand. 

Rolex not about watches, they are luxury brand, selling an idea, that their products bring you a special ownership experience. In a world of super fake Rolex clones, how can you even be sure you are getting the real thing? Well, there are YouTube videos of how to spot the clone, what the "Tells" are that show you the subtle quality differences. Its in those subtle quality differences that the Rolex shines, its surface finishes are superb & the attention to detail class leading. So you are paying for higher quality fishing on parts of the watch you will never likely see. 

Especially given that most Rolex owners are too weak minded & low skilled to actually open their Rolex to service the movement correctly. They are busy wasting their finite time doing other things, usually exploiting other people so that they can make the millions or billions doing actually very little work, hardly any work at all, just intellectual investing & moving capital & assents to maximize profit as you the worker are just a number on a spreadsheet, nothing like them in their minds, but everything like them in reality. All people are the same, flawed sinner hyprocits who lack all the answers & who are perfectly imperfect.

Yes, I know about the gold price history, government gold price regulations, the 1964 Brenton woods removal of the USD from the gold standard & other related factors / like gold price speculation, the industrial & commercial & orinimental & jewelry uses of gold, especially as the premier reflector of infrared radiation as gold foil, the lining of the McLaren F1 engine bay utilized gold foil reflectors to keep waste heat from the huge BMW engine from damaging the polymer carbon composite (carbon fiber) materials in the body shell, speaking to the space frame or laminate layup vacuum autoclave manufacturing method with thousands of pieces of cut pre-embregnated aerospace grade carbon fiber laid up into machined metal jigs, aluminum molds, vacuum bagged into teflon bags, then pressure cooked in nitrogen gas for 6 hours, like many military helicopter parts, at high cost, slow tedious complicate composite manufacturing, that BMW cost optimized for the I3 production. 

Yes, I am a technologist, technology enthusiast & fanatical obsessive over innovation & the history of science & technology, emergent STEM innovations, trending eco-friendly products, pollution reduction, renewable energy, advances in physics & chemistry & materials science like mass produced cheaper graphene & similar or super & ultra capacitors & improved lithium ion batteries! 

New cars cost less than these overpriced "Swiss Made" "Perpetual" wrist watches, even if they are hermetically sealed automatics with exceptional movements, made with excellent precision in every component, a $10 quartz watch a more precise time keeping instrument & some cheap plastic quartz watches are waterproof to 100 meters, dust proof, water proof, weather proof, vibration proof, cold proof, oil proof, grease proof, sealed from changes of climate, that you can wear while bathing without injuring the robust cheap Chinese quartz movement or its silver oxide button cell, even if exposing the watch to arctic cold or tropical heat, the quartz watch movement was a unique advancement in chronometric science & perfected time keeping; not miniaturized snooty pocket watches made for glib arrogant money flexers who want a status symbol riding on their wrist. 

While I would be honored to wear a real ROLEX and happen to live in an area where that would not even stand out, I would never pay what they cost, not even for the $1000 super-clones. My first cool watch an Invicta Grand Diver 3044 sporting the 24 Jewel NH35A automatic movement, for ~$100. People who see me wearing it, think its an actual ROLEX diver watch, since thats the style. I explain & tell them the price & many of these people went online & purchased a similar Invicta after talking to me about it! Your welcome Invicta! Thanks for selling dope watches at reasonable prices! 

I actually really like ROLEX as a brand & their high quality automatic movements & really made bands & watch cases, no doubt they are exceptionally well made, but the price does not make rational sense. Even if I had billions of extra cash, I would never pay ROLEX what they are charging for their wrist watches, especially when I can buy an OMEGA that is better in every regard for %90 less, or my daily a ~$200 Seiko 5 with gleaning metallic orange dial & diver style hour markers with lume that glows-in-the-dark with phosphorescent paint, just like the luminous hands for the hour, minute & second, that are spun by the exceptional 24 Jewel 4R36 automatic movement! 

Today, during the fourth industrial revolution, we can mass produce high precision devices, like Glock pistols, using computer numerical control machines or CNC metal machining of the parts. A Glock 19 made of parts machined with CNC; I think all of the 34 parts are machined, even the composite Nylon 2 grip & lower! High volume manufacturing means that exceptional precise things can be made cheaply! Glocks are high profit margin pistols with excellent gross margins such that Gaston Glock now a billionaire! There is an excellent book about the history of the Glock empire, how Glock's money cleverly moved around to avoid taxation & similar! 

Look at iPhone's mass produces or even just computer chips, integrated circuits mass produced by Intel or TSMC using ASML lithography hardware machines that take months to ship from the Netherlands, and months more to setup & configure, that cost billions of dollars, not including the cleanroom where their are utilized to make computer chips from large single crystal silicon doped with ions & then layer modified with light from machine nickel masks, to edge with phoqtopolyerms & chemical & physical vapor deposition of copper connections, to make a 3D interlinked highway of wires & billions of transistors into a system of systems called a CPU, GPU, SOC or similar high complexity integrate circuit. 

Chip Fabs use ultra-purified water to clean between fabricating stages by rinsing the big silicon wafers that are subsequently exposed to hundreds of processing stages to turn the wafer into LED's or chipsets or other integrate circuits like EPROM or ASIC or imaging CMOS or similar microbolometer arrays or synthetic aperture radar chips or any range of other digital signal processing chips, analog chips, ADC or DAC chips, autopilot chips, artificial intelligence chips, single processing chips, al matter of different kinds of compute chips in smartwatches or IoT devices, smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops, servers, cloud computers & especially modern automobiles with self driving or autonomous driving modes or any of many different ADAS or advanced driver assist functions, such that most current & future automobiles have more than 100 different DC electrically energized compute modules, like the engine control unit or ECU, those for ESC or VSC or AEB, or LKA or similar safety oriented digital control enhancement technology, like those used in the Da Vinci surgical robot system that correct surgeon input errors in real time or any of the FDA approve excimer lasers used in LASIK vision correction surgery ( see https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/lasik/list-fda-approved-lasers-lasik ) 

You must decide on what wrist watch fits your budget & style. Wearing a wrist watch not really about being able to tell what time it is at a glance, its more a fashion accessory that was once only popular with women. Men at that time thought pocket watches were the cool thing to sport EDC. In order to sell a complicated wrist watch, the watch maker has to perform ideological inception on the buyers mind, somehow convincing the buyer that this "new" watch or "special watch" will make them more of a person, a better man, happier, and if the buyer is superficial & vain then perhaps a special watch will make them feel a little better, for a while. 

But what if the "Want" for a Rolex Oyster more than the "Have" and what if you go down the road & shell out whatever it costs to get one, then are you actually willing to wear it? Are. you going to pay to store it in a safety deposit box with your passport & an a composite pistol with plastic bullets that cannot be detected by CT scanners at airports, some small gold & platinum bars for interexchange into local currencies, an android smartphone turned cold off with its battery removed, a battery bank, tactical knife, pen, notebook, cutting wire, flashlight with lithium irondisulufide long life primary energizer battery. Are you a spy killer on a mission & can you actually afford such a contrivance? 

Would your same capital perform better in another kind of investment to pay you back more in the future, like a high dividend income stock? Are you flexing your money to feel better about yourself? It must be some kind of psychological thing, because no one needs or actually wants a very expensive wrist watch. What people want is to feel genuinely loved, cared about, connected to their family, part of their commented, with a sense of meaning & purpose that cannot come from buying stuff, especially not overprices luxury goods when things that are better quality at lower prices can serve the same purpose, even as an object of displaying wealth. 

Time is the universal currency in a world where people die in such short lives of temporary pleasures, nothing lasting forever. Especially given that the world is in urgent need of help, to rescue mankind from harming itself & making life worse for everyone in the future! Certainly overprices ROLEX wrist watches will not make the future a better place, I don't even think they will make anyones lives better either! I think what ROLEX charges for the wrist watches they product, when not a single one is an actual original & most of them are mass produced & could be sold profitably at much lower prices, just like the better quality similar OMEGA watches, also automatic's made in Switzerland. I seriously think the automatics made by Seiko in Japan are better quality, since they never need servicing & last for decades & sell for prices that normal people can afford!