The Apple Watch has launched. It has already sold more copies in one week than all the entire Android watches sold up to the Apple Watch’s launch. The cheapest Apple Watch is the sport 38mm size with an aluminum case, which starts at $349. Different bands add to the price. The regular Apple Watch with the stainless steel case starts at $549 and moves up. And then there is the Apple Watch Edition, made out of toughened gold, which begins at $10,000. The 42mm Gold Edition Apple Watch is $12,000.
Obviously that’s a watch for some serious conspicuous consumption. And that doesn’t even include one of the nicer bands yet. Though anyone willing to drop five figures on a watch probably isn’t worrying about the extra money a fancy Apple Watch band is going to add to the final price.
Here to show us how to save $11,401 on the price of an Edition Apple Watch is YouTube video maker Casey Neistat. Famous for his crusade against unrepairable and non-replaceable iPod batteries years ago, Casey has weighed on yet another Apple product that is trending quickly. His video has already garnered over a million views.
Here Casey takes a brand new Apple Watch, available for $599 if you’re lucky enough to have gotten your preorder in quickly enough. After some shots showing the more expensive Apple Watch Editions at an Apple Store, Casey returns to his studio. He heads to one of his shelves and finds some spray point.
Then he begins a basic unboxing video which should be recognizable to any online fan of Apple’s products (where fans slowly, reverently take a brand new Apple product out of the packaging on launch day and talk about it). Out comes a brand new Apple Watch, with a black band.
Normally this would be where an unboxing talks about the watch and their impressions of it. But Casey is just getting started. First he takes the band off the watch. Then he takes out masking tape to cover the screen and the pulse monitoring on the bottom.
And then hits it with gold spraypaint.
For some Apple fans this is probably a travesty. And simple spraypaint seems like it would look cheap. Yet, after Casey lets the watch dry and pulls the masking tape off, the highly polished gold spray paint looks pretty good.
It might not fool a close inspection, but from a distance it’s a quick way to get the gold color many fans of Apple products love without the six figures. Sure it’ll scratch, but then, there’s always more spray paint.
Thus saving $11,601 over the price of an Apple Watch Edition.