From the legendary movie ‘Grand Prix’ in 1966 to controversial Breaking Bad TV series, TAG Heuer watches are presented as objects of desire. Today’s ad campaigns feature select number of actors, race drivers, F1 teams, pilots and the like, all touting the precision brought by TAG Heuer. Yet, the most precise watch you can buy is one of digital, not the analogue kind. Secondly, there is not one, but two generations of people that are growing up using a mobile phone to check for time, reducing the need for watches in its entirety.

Not even a week after Apple’s event, Reuters passed the comments made by Jean-Claude Biver, founder of Hublot and current head of watchmaking for LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy) . His statement “We want to launch a smartwatch at TAG Heuer, but it must not copy the Apple Watch.” confirmed that the LVMH concern will make a smartwatch using the TAG Heuer brand. We believe this will not be just one product but a ‘platform’ which guarantees its reappearance in multiple watches not just in TAG Heuer, but across LVMH brands. Furthermore, the company is also pushing its electronics team to create another six-figure smartphone to rival Vertu.

Today, most avid watch buyers are ones that grew up in 1980s, with Casio G-Shock and Swatch creating a generation of buyers that are in their 30s and 40s – going for the collectable editions with prices measured from thousands even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Generation growing up today would probably skip on watches entirely, until we start seeing wearable devices such as FitBit followed by Pebble, LG and Samsung smartwatches, and now Apple entered the frame with its Watch (does the lack of ‘I’ means Apple’s 2015 phone will simply be called – Apple Phone? Apple Pad?). All of the smartwatch/wearable device push from the manufacturers is bringing horologie back into fashion, and if you are a smart manufacturer (pun intended) – you will have to react.

We don’t expect the smartwatch to make appearance before annual watch gathering in Baselworld (March 19-26, 2015) while the new smartphone is planned to make an appearance at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona (March 2-5, 2015).

All in all, luxury giant LVMH is reacting. The question is, how long until every other watch vendor starts following? We can only hope they won’t engage into a race to the bottom, like the standard consumer electronic companies.

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Apple has been pushing heath and fitness heavily with their most recent campaign for the iPhone. This can be most noticeable in their recent ad campaign featuring Apple’s iPhone and a series of fitness applications and accessories, which include a multitude of wearables. Their campaign states, “You’re more powerful than you think.”

So, what is Apple getting at here, exactly? That the iPhone, and Apple, can be at the very core of your physical and health success. Surely, there are plenty of people that are already using many of these devices on both their Android and iOS devices, so that doesn’t necessarily set Apple apart from the rest. What will set Apple apart from the rest is how they will very likely incorporate a lot of these different wearables’ functionality into a single device.

According to some of our sources, Apple is looking to make the iWatch a very health-centric device rather than one that is about accomplishing tasks and being an extended digital assistant (See: Google Now + Android Wear). However, there are concerns that Apple’s focus on health with the iWatch may actually hurt them and could have sent the company back to the drawing board in order to increase the overall daily ‘usefullness’ of the device outside of health applications. But even so, Apple is rumored to be purchasing certain types of sensors that will be able to measure your heart rate and sweat in addition to movement data. They’re also becoming ever more serious about how they test these sensors and the functionality of their platform as they’ve been rumored to be spending millions on medical equipment from various manufacturers. The idea that Apple is buying medical equipment should be a pretty ridiculous one, but once you think about how serious Apple is about launching their first new product line in over 4 years, you’ll realize that they don’t want to make any mistakes.

So, there’s no doubt that Apple’s iWatch is going to have a health focus. The real question will be whether or not the iWatch will be almost entirely health focused, or if they will try to build in Siri integration and make the iWatch both functional and health conscious. Because, right now, Google and Microsoft don’t really have much by ways of health applications of their own, let alone hardware. So if Apple can build an iWatch that is health focused, they may already have a significant leg up on Google and Microsoft. Now, if you add heavy Siri integration and other helpful features there’s a good chance that Apple could once again set the standard for a new type of technology, but this time in wearables.

As of right now, I don’t think anyone has any concrete idea of when Apple will launch the iWatch, but from what it looks like it is still majorly in development and we probably won’t see it until next year. Obviously, if they launch sooner, it will put a greater burden on their competitors, but as of right now most of the smart watches from their competitors either haven’t launched yet or lack a native health functionality. Samsung and Qualcomm certainly have the lead in terms of health focus with their smartwatches, but it remains to be seen how far they’ll go and how they’ll compete against an Apple iWatch.

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