Tag Archives: Watches

H. Moser’s Off-Grid watch limited to just 1,000 examples has minimalist smart features under the surface

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Last year, around the same time, H. Moser & Cie introduced the Streamliner Alpine Mechanics Edition for the Spanish GP, a watch designed around the mechanics working in the paddock. Now the Swiss watchmaker is revisiting the idea with a standalone timepiece that takes the concept in a more unconventional direction.

Meet the Streamliner Off-Grid, a digital-analog hybrid descended from the Alpine Mechanics Edition and built around the design language of Moser’s mechanical Streamliner collection. Its cushion-shaped case measures 42.6mm across and 14.4mm thick, with a skeletonized dial revealing circuitry beneath the traditional-looking watch face. This is an unusual combination, but one that makes the technology feel like an integral part of the design.

Designer: H. Moser & Cie

The upper portion of the dial retains Moser’s familiar minimalist treatment. A small domed analog display sits at 12 o’clock, finished in the brand’s characteristic fumé style and available in either red or Blackor. Globolight ceramic indices and hands provide the time, while the rest of the dial exposes the electronics underneath. Moser has deliberately stopped short of turning the Off-Grid into another wearable. There is no heart-rate sensor, fitness tracking, or stream of notifications. Instead, the digital display handles functions more traditionally associated with serious watchmaking, including a perpetual calendar, GMT, split-seconds chronograph, timer, vibrating alarm, moon phase, and sunrise/sunset information.

The watch can connect to iOS and Android devices via Bluetooth and a companion app, although most of its functions can be configured directly from the watch. A large pusher at 9 o’clock is the most distinctive control. Called the Off-Grid selector, it replaces the F1 mode selector used on the Alpine Mechanics Edition. Pressing it brings up a country selector and a small built-in dictionary containing 10 useful words or phrases translated into 21 languages. It is a surprisingly simple idea for a watch that otherwise looks deeply technical, giving the digital side a practical travel function without requiring the wearer to reach for a phone.

Powering everything is the Calibre D10, developed with Swiss technology company Sequent. The digital movement comprises 186 components and operates at 32,768 vibrations per second, with a stated accuracy of ±0.3 seconds per day. Battery life depends heavily on how the watch is used. According to Moser, there are more than 12 months in timekeeping mode, while extensive use of the digital functions reduces that considerably. The battery is recharged wirelessly through the sapphire caseback, and the watch is water-resistant to 120 meters.

There are two versions of the Off-Grid: blue PVD-treated steel with a Blackor fumé dial and white integrated rubber strap, or black PVD-treated steel with a red fumé dial and black strap. Both are limited to 1,000 pieces. Priced at CHF 3,900 (approximately $4,800), the Off-Grid is Moser’s most accessible entry point by a significant margin. That is enticing since it still retains the Streamliner’s fumé dial treatment and integrated rubber strap. For now, the F1-inspired watch is only available for purchase by existing Moser customers till 23 September. After that, anyone will be able to buy this one until October 5, provided they can last the limited edition stock.

The post H. Moser’s Off-Grid watch limited to just 1,000 examples has minimalist smart features under the surface first appeared on Yanko Design.

Hublot Turned Jeff Koons’ $58 Million Balloon Dog Sculpture Into a 42mm Watch

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Hublot x Jeff Koons Classic Fusion Balloon Dog Watch in the red colorway

Koons has spent three decades turning party balloons into stainless steel, freezing something floppy and disposable into ten feet of mirror-polished permanence. Hublot has now run that trick backwards. The new Classic Fusion Balloon Dog takes a rigid lump of machined metal and bullies it into looking like it is full of air. Every surface bulges outward. The crystal domes up, the dial swells, and even the titanium screw heads look like somebody left them parked next to a helium tank. I have seen plenty of watches wear art on the dial like a bumper sticker, and this one goes out of its way to avoid that.

Hublot dropped it on September 16 in New York, alongside a $488,000 sapphire tourbillon called the MP-14 Origin. The Balloon Dog comes in three flavors. Silver is mirror-polished stainless steel, while red and blue use polished anodized aluminum, chosen because anodizing builds saturated color into the metal instead of sitting on top of it like paint. The case runs 42mm wide and 11mm thick, with the HUB1710 automatic inside and roughly 50 hours of power reserve. The crown is shaped like a balloon’s inflation valve, and a floppy rubber dog tail sticks out at 10:30. Each color is capped at 200 pieces and costs $25,100.

Designer: Jeff Koons, in collaboration with Hublot

Rather than printing an image of the sculpture onto a dial and calling it a day, Hublot rebuilt the Classic Fusion’s entire architecture around the idea of internal pressure. The normally flat, angular case profile has been reshaped into convex lines and soft domed surfaces throughout. The sapphire crystal sits raised and rounded. The bezel puffs outward. Even the H-shaped screws that anchor the case get inflated, domed heads, which is a ridiculous amount of engineering effort for a component nobody examines closely. It is the same instinct we saw when a design team built an entire chair around Koons’ inflated visual language, chasing the illusion of softness in a material that has no business looking soft at all.

Koons’ actual sculptures get their color from transparent coatings baked onto mirror-polished stainless steel, and Hublot chased that same saturation by anodizing the red and blue cases instead of painting them. Anodizing builds color into the metal’s oxide layer rather than resting on top of it, which is why these two colorways read closer to candy than lacquer. Silver skips the tint and goes straight for mirror polish, putting it in the most literal conversation with the source sculpture. Even the tungsten rotor swinging behind the caseback picks up the same rounded, voluminous shape as the rest of the watch, a detail almost nobody will ever see in person. It is the kind of commitment Hublot has shown before, whether that meant wrapping Daniel Arsham’s MP-17 in fluid, water-formed titanium or handing Samuel Ross a canvas of micro-blasted titanium for the Big Bang Tourbillon SR_A.

Hublot x Jeff Koons Classic Fusion Balloon Dog Watch in the silver colorway

Hublot x Jeff Koons Classic Fusion Balloon Dog Watch in the blue colorway

The dog riding the seconds hand does not actually move, a detail Hublot’s own product page has to clarify because the launch film animates it, so temper your expectations of kinetic sculpture on your wrist. Koons has licensed this exact balloon vocabulary everywhere from a BMW 8 Series hood to a pair of Lexon lamps and speakers built with The Broad museum, and a wristwatch is arguably the hardest surface in that lineup to pull off, since the whole point of a watch is daily contact rather than gallery distance. Hublot cleared that bar by treating this as an engineering brief instead of a printing job.

Hublot x Jeff Koons Classic Fusion Balloon Dog Watch in the red colorway

At $25,100 for 200 pieces per colorway, you are paying gallery-adjacent money for a watch running an entry-tier automatic movement, and that math will sit fine with some collectors and badly with others. What nobody can argue is that Hublot made the sculpture’s whole DNA visible in every component instead of stopping at the dial.

Rear View of the Hublot x Jeff Koons Classic Fusion Balloon Dog Watch’s Exhibition Window

The post Hublot Turned Jeff Koons’ $58 Million Balloon Dog Sculpture Into a 42mm Watch first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Clock That Works Like a Music Box, With Dice Instead of Bells

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Most clocks either sweep hands around a dial or flash numbers on a screen, and neither option feels particularly satisfying to watch. OVODYO skips both approaches entirely, telling time with two rolling, dice-like balls that physically tumble into position every few minutes. It’s a clock built around a small mechanical performance rather than a passive glance at the wall.

Each ball is shaped like an icosahedron, a 12-sided solid closer to a fat die than a sphere, with one ball dedicated to hours and the other to minutes. The hours ball carries all 12 hour marks across its faces, while the minutes ball splits into 5-minute intervals, so together the two objects can display any time of day using nothing but which face happens to be sitting on top at that moment.

Designer: ekaggrat singh kalsi

Getting those faces to land correctly took real mechanical problem-solving rather than a simple motor and a timer. A differential mechanism drives each ball forward in fixed increments, tumbling it forward until the correct face rotates into view, then holding it steady until the next update is due. Watching a rigid geometric shape tumble like a die and settle on the exact right face reads more like a magic trick than a timekeeping mechanism.

Behind that motion sits a fairly modest set of electronics for what the mechanism achieves. An ATmega8 chip runs the control logic, paired with a pair of DRV8833 driver boards handling the stepper motors that push each ball forward. Three Hall effect sensors track motor position in real time, giving the system enough feedback to know exactly when a face has rotated into the correct spot and stop turning at precisely the right instant.

It definitely wasn’t a walk in the park to get that precision. An early prototype of the mechanism suffered from rough printed surfaces and enough friction that the small motors struggled to turn the balls at all. Adding bearings to both shafts solved that problem, smoothing out the rotation enough for modest motors to reliably drive a solid printed ball without stalling partway through a cycle.

Solving the mechanism turned out to be the easier half of the project. A later prototype had both balls fully working inside a plain, solid base built purely to test function, and it looked the part of a lab bench rig rather than an actual object worth keeping in a living room. That gap between working and looking finished pushed a redesign of the base itself, treating the enclosure as its own separate design problem once the moving parts finally behaved.

That order of operations tells you something about what makes a project like this hold together. The mechanism has to work before anyone can judge whether the object looks any good sitting out in a room, and OVODYO nails the harder half first. A desk clock built on two tumbling dice sounds like a novelty right up until you watch it settle on the correct hour with mechanical certainty, at which point it just looks like the obvious way a clock should have worked all along.

The post The Clock That Works Like a Music Box, With Dice Instead of Bells first appeared on Yanko Design.

Apple’s Coolest Watch Feature Has Nothing To Do With Health… It Lets You Rewind Time.

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“Could you come again?” “Pardon?” “Huh?” “Wait, say that one more time?” These are examples of phrases that make you seem dumber than you really are. Nothing destroys aura more than unironically asking someone to repeat something they said because A. you weren’t listening, or B. you were but just didn’t happen to comprehend what they were saying. Apple has a solution for that, and it’s wrapped up in their latest smartwatch. The new Live Rewind feature, powered by Apple’s new S11 chip, allows you to instantly transcribe the past 15 seconds of any conversation and read its chat logs. Press the digital crown on the new Watch twice, and you pretty much get ‘subtitles’ for the past 15 seconds, so you don’t have to “excuse me” your way into a repetition.

Your watch, just like your phone, earbuds, smart speaker, and smart home hub, is always listening. It’s waiting for the magic words “Hey Siri” or Alexa, or Google depending on which ecosystem you’re tied into. The point is, it’s always listening, so Apple simply created a way to package that into a feature that feels impressive rather than invasive. Think of how a dashcam can auto-log the past 3 minutes of video AFTER an accident occurs (using a feature called loop recording), Apple just brought that to your watch, packaged as a part of its new Audio Intelligence suite of features. Impressive, no?

Designer: Apple

Once you’ve got the transcript, you can ask Siri about it directly, or save it into the new Siri app to dig up later. Say your coworker rattles off a Wi-Fi password or a colleague mentions a book recommendation mid-hallway chat. Instead of fumbling for your phone, you catch it on your wrist and move on. Apple says none of this gets recorded in the traditional sense. Audio flows into a secure buffer inside the S11’s Secure Exclave, a hardware compartment isolated from the rest of the system, and once the transcript is generated, the raw audio is gone. No file, no clip, nothing to subpoena, because nothing exists.

Sitting next to Live Rewind is Siri Recap, which does the same basic trick but for an entire conversation instead of a 15 second clip. Turn it on before a meeting or a parent teacher conference, and Apple Intelligence quietly builds a title, a summary, and a list of key points you can review afterward in the Siri app. You control the boundaries here more than you’d expect. Leave it running all day, schedule it for work hours only, or flip it off entirely from Control Center whenever the conversation turns private. Summaries auto delete after seven days unless you save them, and saved ones sync end to end encrypted, so not even Apple can read them back.

Audio Intelligence isn’t just built for eavesdropping on your own life. Sound Recognition listens for sirens, alarms, doorbells, and crying babies, then buzzes your wrist even when your phone is nowhere nearby, which makes it a genuinely useful accessibility tool for anyone who is deaf or hard of hearing. Shazam gets folded in too, sitting in the Smart Stack and naming whatever song is playing around you without you having to pull out a phone. Four features, one microphone, and one chip doing the quiet work behind all of them.

Both Live Rewind and Siri Recap need Siri AI to function, and Siri AI is still in beta, so expect this to roll out gradually starting in English before other languages follow. You’ll also need an iPhone 16 or newer paired to the Watch, so the 16e and anything older is out of luck. Apple Watch Series 12 itself starts at $399, is available for preorder today, and ships September 18. The health sensors got a real upgrade this generation too, but for once, that isn’t the headline. The mic is.

The post Apple’s Coolest Watch Feature Has Nothing To Do With Health… It Lets You Rewind Time. first appeared on Yanko Design.

A Clock That Refuses to Just Tell You the Time

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I check the time roughly forty times a day, and I couldn’t tell you what any of those glances felt like. A phone screen lights up, a number flashes, and I move on before the information even registers. That’s the strange thing about how we live with time now: we have more ways than ever to know what hour it is, and less reason than ever to actually notice it. Digital displays don’t ask anything of us. They just report, and we absorb, and nothing about the moment sticks.

That’s the gap a new piece from Istanbul studio Omora Lusso seems built to close. Instead of showing the hour as flat information, it makes you wait for it, watch for it, and experience it as something closer to a small performance than a readout. The studio calls it Muvaqqit 60, and as the press materials put it, it’s a 60-centimetre kinetic time artwork that transforms the reading of time into a recurring physical ritual.

Designer: Omora Lusso

The name itself carries weight before the mechanism even moves. Muvaqqit takes its name from the historical timekeeper responsible for determining and regulating time through astronomy and exact observation, and in Ottoman cities, muvakkithanes were dedicated timekeeping rooms, often associated with mosque complexes, where prayer times were calculated and astronomical knowledge was practised. I appreciate that Omora Lusso didn’t try to costume this piece in false antiquity. The studio does not reproduce the instruments or forms of these spaces; instead, it reinterprets their culture of precision, contemplation and measured time through contemporary kinetic design. That distinction matters. It would have been easy, and a little lazy, to slap old astronomical symbols onto a modern object and call it heritage. This is a harder, more honest route: borrowing the spirit of a tradition rather than its skin.

The piece itself only reveals what it can do once a minute, and that restraint is the whole point. Once each minute, Muvaqqit performs a time-indication sequence: a comet-like progression of light moves through its layered scales as a mirror-silvered kinetic bird rises into position, while the hour, five-minute interval and minute increment are read across three curved scales, with an AM/PM display and an illuminated moon-phase arc completing the temporal composition. The rest of the time, it stays quiet on purpose. Between these moments, the work remains visually restrained, allowing anticipation to become part of the experience. There’s a kind of confidence in a product that chooses to stay dark and still for fifty-nine seconds just so the sixtieth means something. Most gadgets are terrified of silence. This one leans into it.

Omer Fatih Sevinctekin, the studio’s founder, frames the whole project as a question rather than a solution, which I found refreshing given how many product launches arrive dressed as answers. He describes it as beginning with the question of whether time can be experienced as a ritual rather than simply read as information, wanting the work to connect Istanbul’s culture of precise timekeeping with a contemporary language of motion, light and material.

Materially, the Noir Silver edition plays a straightforward but effective contrast game. It pairs a soft-black metal frame and anthracite inner dial with a hand-polished, mirror-silvered brass bird, presented behind a four-millimetre glass front, with a controlled palette designed to sharpen the contrast between stillness and movement, and between the dark architectural body and the brief illumination of the time ritual. Nothing about it is loud until the moment it needs to be.

This isn’t a mass object, and it was never going to be. Muvaqqit 60 Noir Silver is limited to 50 pieces worldwide, offered at USD 6,000, with each work produced in Istanbul and accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity, a dedicated wooden presentation case, art-handling gloves and operating materials. That price and scarcity will keep it out of most homes, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But the idea underneath it, that time deserves a moment of attention instead of a passing glance, doesn’t require owning the object to land. The studio’s broader collection treats time not as a static reading but as an event, a sequence that can be anticipated, observed and remembered, and that’s a quietly radical stance in a culture that mostly wants its information delivered instantly and forgotten just as fast.

The post A Clock That Refuses to Just Tell You the Time first appeared on Yanko Design.

Urwerk Built a Hand-Carved Pocket Watch That Tracks Time for 1,000 Years

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Florian Güllert spends most of his working life engraving shotguns. His bench sits in Klagenfurt, in Carinthia, an Austrian province with zero watchmaking history and a four-century run of decorating hunting weapons. Urwerk handed him a raw titanium blank and asked him to bury the most sci-fi pocket watch ever built under Baroque ornament. He said yes, spent roughly 500 hours over three months, and produced the UR-1001 Amadeus, a piece unique that looks like a cathedral swallowed a computer. Gun engraving exists because a tool meant to outlive its owner gets decorated, which turns out to be this watch’s entire argument.

The Amadeus measures 106 by 62 by 23mm and shows satellite hours, retrograde minutes, an annual calendar, day and night, and a 39-hour power reserve on the front. The hinged caseback adds an oil-change indicator that turns red through years four and five, a counter tracking 100 years of running time, and a linear scale that climbs to 1,000. Güllert laser-cut the contours before touching it by hand, since titanium galls and work-hardens under a graver in ways precious metal does not. Every engraved surface stops at the sapphire. Inside, Urwerk’s matte black instrument panel carries on as though the ornament never happened.

Designers: Martin Frei and Florian Güllert for Urwerk

Titanium punishes a graver the way a stubborn hinge punishes a screwdriver, so Güllert’s first move was unfamiliar territory for a man used to steel. He rough-cut the relief with a laser, then went back in by hand with pneumatic chisels and files, balancing thick strokes against thin ones until the pattern read as depth rather than line. Backgrounds got textured, dotted, satin-brushed, or left matte depending on how he wanted light to catch each panel. Every edge was filed and rebalanced until the boundary between case and decoration effectively disappeared. That is a genuinely different skill set than cutting a scroll into a shotgun receiver, and it shows in how uneven the difficulty was across the piece.

The flanks and bezel run pure Baroque, scrolling acanthus leaves that could sit on an 18th century snuffbox. The caseback centerpiece is something else entirely, a quatrefoil rose-window panel with cusped Gothic arches framing the movement aperture, and the winding crown at 12 has been carved into an actual fluted coronet. Baroque excess on the outside, ecclesiastical stonework on the back, industrial sans-serif labeling the instruments inside. Three separate design languages sharing one case, none of them arguing with the others.

Three-armed satellite hours hand off to a retrograde minute display, three running-seconds hands split a minute into 20-second stretches, and a satellite annual calendar runs on three Maltese crosses riding a 93-tooth date wheel. Flip the watch over and the oil-change dial, calibrated for five-year service intervals, feeds a counter that advances in five-year steps toward a full century. Every hundred years, that counter sends a pulse to a linear scale on the caseback graduated all the way to 1,000. Yes, this pocket watch has a mechanical millennium indicator, and yes, it is exactly as absurd and wonderful as it sounds.

The UR-1001 has been Urwerk’s flagship strange object since 2011, when eight AlTiN-cased examples sold out at CHF 340,000 each, a number early buyers reportedly called cheap for what it did. We covered Urwerk’s other engraved oddities before, including the UR-210 Amadeus that first paired Güllert with the brand back in 2017, and the ambition here is visibly larger. Urwerk has not disclosed a price for this one, which tracks for a commissioned piece unique. Felix Baumgartner named it for Mozart, calling the composer a brilliant madman, and says he wanted a case as daring as the mechanics inside it.

Here is the part nobody selling this watch will say out loud. The 100-year and 1,000-year counters only advance while the movement is actually running, and a piece unique this expensive tends to spend its life in a safe rather than a pocket. Baumgartner’s own language calls the eventual buyer a custodian rather than an owner, which is a lovely way of admitting the millennium scale may never move past zero. A gunsmith spent 500 hours making sure it would look magnificent the whole time it doesn’t.

The post Urwerk Built a Hand-Carved Pocket Watch That Tracks Time for 1,000 Years first appeared on Yanko Design.

Urwerk Built a Hand-Carved Pocket Watch That Tracks Time for 1,000 Years

Posted on by

Florian Güllert spends most of his working life engraving shotguns. His bench sits in Klagenfurt, in Carinthia, an Austrian province with zero watchmaking history and a four-century run of decorating hunting weapons. Urwerk handed him a raw titanium blank and asked him to bury the most sci-fi pocket watch ever built under Baroque ornament. He said yes, spent roughly 500 hours over three months, and produced the UR-1001 Amadeus, a piece unique that looks like a cathedral swallowed a computer. Gun engraving exists because a tool meant to outlive its owner gets decorated, which turns out to be this watch’s entire argument.

The Amadeus measures 106 by 62 by 23mm and shows satellite hours, retrograde minutes, an annual calendar, day and night, and a 39-hour power reserve on the front. The hinged caseback adds an oil-change indicator that turns red through years four and five, a counter tracking 100 years of running time, and a linear scale that climbs to 1,000. Güllert laser-cut the contours before touching it by hand, since titanium galls and work-hardens under a graver in ways precious metal does not. Every engraved surface stops at the sapphire. Inside, Urwerk’s matte black instrument panel carries on as though the ornament never happened.

Designers: Martin Frei and Florian Güllert for Urwerk

Titanium punishes a graver the way a stubborn hinge punishes a screwdriver, so Güllert’s first move was unfamiliar territory for a man used to steel. He rough-cut the relief with a laser, then went back in by hand with pneumatic chisels and files, balancing thick strokes against thin ones until the pattern read as depth rather than line. Backgrounds got textured, dotted, satin-brushed, or left matte depending on how he wanted light to catch each panel. Every edge was filed and rebalanced until the boundary between case and decoration effectively disappeared. That is a genuinely different skill set than cutting a scroll into a shotgun receiver, and it shows in how uneven the difficulty was across the piece.

The flanks and bezel run pure Baroque, scrolling acanthus leaves that could sit on an 18th century snuffbox. The caseback centerpiece is something else entirely, a quatrefoil rose-window panel with cusped Gothic arches framing the movement aperture, and the winding crown at 12 has been carved into an actual fluted coronet. Baroque excess on the outside, ecclesiastical stonework on the back, industrial sans-serif labeling the instruments inside. Three separate design languages sharing one case, none of them arguing with the others.

Three-armed satellite hours hand off to a retrograde minute display, three running-seconds hands split a minute into 20-second stretches, and a satellite annual calendar runs on three Maltese crosses riding a 93-tooth date wheel. Flip the watch over and the oil-change dial, calibrated for five-year service intervals, feeds a counter that advances in five-year steps toward a full century. Every hundred years, that counter sends a pulse to a linear scale on the caseback graduated all the way to 1,000. Yes, this pocket watch has a mechanical millennium indicator, and yes, it is exactly as absurd and wonderful as it sounds.

The UR-1001 has been Urwerk’s flagship strange object since 2011, when eight AlTiN-cased examples sold out at CHF 340,000 each, a number early buyers reportedly called cheap for what it did. We covered Urwerk’s other engraved oddities before, including the UR-210 Amadeus that first paired Güllert with the brand back in 2017, and the ambition here is visibly larger. Urwerk has not disclosed a price for this one, which tracks for a commissioned piece unique. Felix Baumgartner named it for Mozart, calling the composer a brilliant madman, and says he wanted a case as daring as the mechanics inside it.

Here is the part nobody selling this watch will say out loud. The 100-year and 1,000-year counters only advance while the movement is actually running, and a piece unique this expensive tends to spend its life in a safe rather than a pocket. Baumgartner’s own language calls the eventual buyer a custodian rather than an owner, which is a lovely way of admitting the millennium scale may never move past zero. A gunsmith spent 500 hours making sure it would look magnificent the whole time it doesn’t.

The post Urwerk Built a Hand-Carved Pocket Watch That Tracks Time for 1,000 Years first appeared on Yanko Design.

Hermès weaves time on Arceau Cheval Natté watch using 400 silk threads and lots of diamonds

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Henri d’Origny designed the iconic luxury wristwatch Arceau first in 1978. Ever since, it has been Hermès’ most preferred collection for experimentation. This continues in style with the introduction of the new Arceau Cheval Natté, a limited-edition Hermès watch whose dial is entirely woven from silk.

If that sounds unheard of in a watch, it’s because this is, for the first time, a watch dial that features a horse’s head woven geometrically using 400 silk threads. The way the threads are used on the timepiece is beyond the ordinary. Each individually selected silk thread is laid one by one, in a precise direction, by hand. This is done meticulously to ensure that when light moves across the surface, each woven section behaves differently, creating an eye-catching interplay of light, depth, and texture.

Designer: Hermès

This silk thread motif was originally created for Hermès home accessories by designer Tong Ren, and has been for the first time interpreted on a watch dial as horse’s head, which honors Hermès’ association with horses, which started with its days crafting high-quality leather harnesses and saddles. The silk dial, enhanced with the use of 123 diamonds and champlevé engraving, sits within a 38mm rose gold case.

The watch also has a bezel to look out for. Complementing the unique dial is the bezel embedded with 70 diamonds and a crown on the side adorned with a single diamond. The Arceau Cheval Natté is powered by an in-house, self-winding H1912 movement. Hermès states, it’s crafted in Switzerland, and that the calibre measures 23.9 mm in diameter and 3.9 mm in thickness, and operates at 28,800 beats per minute. It offers the watch a 50-hour power reserve.

The watch has a see-through sapphire crystal caseback, which provides a clear view of the signature sprinkling Hs on the movement. Besides the embellishment and the dial, the Arceau Cheval Natté is a simple horological instrument. It has only the primary hours and minutes hands and is made in two versions. One of them is a luminous model, which is pretty close to the vivid colors of the original design. The second, on the other hand, is a variant with more intense black, red, and brown tones.

Each version of the Arceau Cheval Natté, Hermès notes, is a limited edition of 24 pieces. Water-resistant to 30 meters, the watch comes paired with either a dune or black matte alligator strap secured with a rose‑gold pin buckle. Straps are also made in Hermès’ own workshops. The new Hermès watch does not intend to present time through complication, it chooses to weave time in silk for $95,200.

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Apple Watch Ultra 4 May Finally Add Touch ID This September, Along With A Thinner Case

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Fingerprint readers are on phones, laptops, door locks, and gym lockers. They are on tablets, car dashboards, hotel room entrances, and even some credit cards. The one place you still cannot use one in Apple’s ecosystem is the watch on your wrist, and the Apple Watch Ultra 4 is reportedly the device that might finally change that. Leaks suggest Touch ID could be integrated into the Action button or side button, bringing biometric authentication to the Apple Watch for the first time in the lineup’s eleven-year history. Apple is expected to announce the Ultra 4 at a fall event in September 2026, and the fingerprint sensor question is the detail that has dominated the pre-announcement conversation.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman expects no major design changes to the Ultra 4 this cycle, which would likely include a new biometric button, making the Touch ID rumor more aspirational than confirmed. MacRumors has flagged it as increasingly unlikely as a result. Gurman does foresee a chip upgrade, health and fitness improvements, and efficiency-driven battery gains from the same-sized cell. Other leaks sketch out a thinner titanium case, a redesigned rear sensor array with up to eight sensors, and watchOS 27 with a smarter Siri and new women’s health tracking. Touch ID may or may not make the cut, but the Ultra 4 is shaping up to be a meaningful update either way.

Designer: Apple

Apple Pay authentication on the Ultra currently requires a double-press of the side button, which is fine at a checkout counter and genuinely irritating mid-trail with trekking poles in both hands. A Touch ID sensor in the Action button would solve that in the most direct way possible. The Action button already handles flashlight toggling, workout starts, and dive computer modes depending on configuration, so adding biometric capability would make it the most densely functional physical control on any Apple device. Building a reliable fingerprint reader into a button that regularly encounters water, mud, and cold is the engineering challenge that may keep bumping this feature to a future generation. That tension between the obvious use case and the real manufacturing difficulty is likely why this rumor has had such a short lifespan in reliable reporting.

Current leaks point to as many as eight sensors on the back of the Ultra 4, compared to the existing array that handles heart rate, SpO2, wrist temperature, and ECG. The shift Apple appears to be making is away from software-compensated estimations toward hardware-grounded measurements, which matters most for use cases like altitude training and longitudinal hypertension monitoring. The chassis is also expected to get thinner, and that matters more than it sounds: the Ultra 3’s profile is comfortable during workouts and just present enough during overnight wear that some owners skip sleep tracking altogether. A slimmer build addresses that without touching the rugged character of the product. Together, the sensor overhaul and the thinner case are the two changes most likely to make existing Ultra owners seriously consider upgrading.

Battery life is expected to hold steady or extend slightly through chip efficiency gains rather than a larger cell, with the Ultra 3’s 42-hour standard and 72-hour Low Power Mode serving as the baseline to beat. watchOS 27 brings a more context-aware Siri with a dedicated watch app, Apple Intelligence across first-party apps, and new perimenopause and menopause tracking in Health. Apple is separately developing a more significant Watch redesign for a later generation, with reports pointing to a round case and a screenless fitness tracker. The Ultra 4 arrives before any of that. Touch ID would have made this generation an easy, quotable pitch; without it, the sensor upgrade, the thinner body, and the software stack carry the argument instead.

The post Apple Watch Ultra 4 May Finally Add Touch ID This September, Along With A Thinner Case first appeared on Yanko Design.

Apple Watch Ultra 4 May Finally Add Touch ID This September, Along With A Thinner Case

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Fingerprint readers are on phones, laptops, door locks, and gym lockers. They are on tablets, car dashboards, hotel room entrances, and even some credit cards. The one place you still cannot use one in Apple’s ecosystem is the watch on your wrist, and the Apple Watch Ultra 4 is reportedly the device that might finally change that. Leaks suggest Touch ID could be integrated into the Action button or side button, bringing biometric authentication to the Apple Watch for the first time in the lineup’s eleven-year history. Apple is expected to announce the Ultra 4 at a fall event in September 2026, and the fingerprint sensor question is the detail that has dominated the pre-announcement conversation.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman expects no major design changes to the Ultra 4 this cycle, which would likely include a new biometric button, making the Touch ID rumor more aspirational than confirmed. MacRumors has flagged it as increasingly unlikely as a result. Gurman does foresee a chip upgrade, health and fitness improvements, and efficiency-driven battery gains from the same-sized cell. Other leaks sketch out a thinner titanium case, a redesigned rear sensor array with up to eight sensors, and watchOS 27 with a smarter Siri and new women’s health tracking. Touch ID may or may not make the cut, but the Ultra 4 is shaping up to be a meaningful update either way.

Designer: Apple

Apple Pay authentication on the Ultra currently requires a double-press of the side button, which is fine at a checkout counter and genuinely irritating mid-trail with trekking poles in both hands. A Touch ID sensor in the Action button would solve that in the most direct way possible. The Action button already handles flashlight toggling, workout starts, and dive computer modes depending on configuration, so adding biometric capability would make it the most densely functional physical control on any Apple device. Building a reliable fingerprint reader into a button that regularly encounters water, mud, and cold is the engineering challenge that may keep bumping this feature to a future generation. That tension between the obvious use case and the real manufacturing difficulty is likely why this rumor has had such a short lifespan in reliable reporting.

Current leaks point to as many as eight sensors on the back of the Ultra 4, compared to the existing array that handles heart rate, SpO2, wrist temperature, and ECG. The shift Apple appears to be making is away from software-compensated estimations toward hardware-grounded measurements, which matters most for use cases like altitude training and longitudinal hypertension monitoring. The chassis is also expected to get thinner, and that matters more than it sounds: the Ultra 3’s profile is comfortable during workouts and just present enough during overnight wear that some owners skip sleep tracking altogether. A slimmer build addresses that without touching the rugged character of the product. Together, the sensor overhaul and the thinner case are the two changes most likely to make existing Ultra owners seriously consider upgrading.

Battery life is expected to hold steady or extend slightly through chip efficiency gains rather than a larger cell, with the Ultra 3’s 42-hour standard and 72-hour Low Power Mode serving as the baseline to beat. watchOS 27 brings a more context-aware Siri with a dedicated watch app, Apple Intelligence across first-party apps, and new perimenopause and menopause tracking in Health. Apple is separately developing a more significant Watch redesign for a later generation, with reports pointing to a round case and a screenless fitness tracker. The Ultra 4 arrives before any of that. Touch ID would have made this generation an easy, quotable pitch; without it, the sensor upgrade, the thinner body, and the software stack carry the argument instead.

The post Apple Watch Ultra 4 May Finally Add Touch ID This September, Along With A Thinner Case first appeared on Yanko Design.