A New Tag Heuer Feature Wants to Lure You From Apple Watch

The problem with luxury smartwatches is that they won’t last forever—a point WIRED’s reviews editor Julian Chokkattu raised as Tag Heuer launched its Connected watch back in 2020. High-end brands are asking you to pony up well north of $1,000 for a watch with a battery that cannot be replaced and will eventually degrade. But with the latest Connected Calibre E4 watch, Tag Heuer has smartened up.

Like Apple (and unlike most other smartwatch rivals), Tag Heuer is introducing a battery replacement service—available at any of its retail stores. The service is offered for Connected models released from 2020 and will be available for five years after the launch date. The replacement will be a like-for-like swap, rather than an upgrade, and cost £85 (US pricing TBC). Tag Heuer plans to offer this service for every generation in the future.

“Durability is very important,” says Tag Heuer CEO Frédéric Arnault. “Yes, we have some obsolescence with these products. We don't want to deny that. Eventually, it will stop working. So we want to make sure it can continue to function as long as possible. Today, we still have a few thousand people wearing the first Connected we launched in 2015. And the first component that runs out is the battery. That's why it made sense to extend the lifetime—to offer that possibility.”