ranzware
Everyone knows Apollo is just awesomely cool, right? Not the Greek god, even though he is the god of archery, but NASA’s moon landing missions of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It’s so cool that one British watch-making company has decided that the ultimate way to show your love for all things Apollo is to strap a DSKY-lookalike computer to your wrist. But it’s also decided that the best way to market this is to use fashion-man pose shots.
I have a confession to make and it’s one that I’d best get right out of the way now. I am obsessed with Apollo. I was born half a year after the first Moon landing and my formative years as a child were spent recreating every mission, rocket, and near-disaster with cardboard tubs and plastic bricks. It’s a passion that’s not dulled one iota, in all the years that have since passed.
So when I first clapped my eyes on the DSKY Moonwatch, my limbic system was lit up like a Christmas tree. But then once I started to scroll through the various marketing images, quite a few of the lights in that tree decided to shut off.
But let’s back up for a second. The DSKY was the display and keyboard (dis-key) for the AGC or Apollo Guidance Computer, the latter being a hugely significant piece of computing history, though not exactly easy to convert into a wristwatch. You can have a go at programming it yourself, thanks to online simulators, but I hasten to point out that the DSKY Moonwatch by British firm Apollo Instruments doesn’t function like the AGC one bit.
Well, not yet, at least as the firm says on its website that it will be ‘further enhanced with regular software updates from Apollo Instruments and contributions from our online community.’ So there’s hope!
Anyway, as much as I love Apollo and anything associated with it, I’m not sure the DSKY Moonwatch is right for me. First of all, as one would imagine with such a unique design, it’s not exactly cheap: £779 in the UK, including VAT, and £659 for other countries, minus taxes. I suppose in the world of custom watches, that is cheap and it’s more of a collector’s item, rather than a wear-it-every-day item.
But what’s really putting me off, for reasons that I can’t quite put my finger on, are the marketing shots. In some ways, they’re of the same age as Apollo and I half expected to see some pictures including cigarettes and other aspects of advertising now long gone. I get a whole ‘fashion-man’ vibe from them and as someone who is very much not a ‘fashion-man’, I feel that I’m not the kind of person who Apollo Instruments wants buying its watch.
Yet I am, because of my Apollo obsession, and I can’t help but feel that I’m not alone in this regard. The DSKY Moonwatch may well be a roaring success for them but I wonder if a simpler/cheap build, with a lower price, and a more geek-focused marketing strategy would have been a better decision. Time will tell, I guess.
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Kurt Indovina
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