Yesterday in Northern California Apple filled in some of the details on its new Apple Watch. And according to the Guardian, its 18 karat solid gold edition can be yours for the low, low price of $17,000.
It’s hard to argue with that, isn’t it? I mean, did you see the gold-encased iPhones a couple years ago? Tell me they weren’t cool. No wait, don’t, because they were cool. They were really, really cool.
Seriously, what else are you going to do with $17,000 in today’s economy? I mean, that’s not even enough money to pay for a year of college anymore (let alone four). You go to an open house and offer to put down $17K as a down payment and they’ll be like, “Uhh, for the dog house, maybe.” And let’s remember, if you only made $17,000 in a year, you would be considered poor. Point being, it’s nothing. Get back to me when you’ve got billions.
And here’s the other thing—who doesn’t get annoyed by all those rich people flashing their luxury at the rest of us? Yes, you drive a Lexus, I get it, you’ve got so much money you can afford to waste the cost of a whole additional car just to make the rest of us terrified of the possibility of leaving a mark when we open our doors.
As of today, we no longer have to take that. We don’t need to wonder how we can accumulate servants and stock portfolios and houses we use for three weeks out of the year while whole countries of people live in shacks made out of cardboard. The $17,000 Apple Watch is the Lexus for the rest of us. But cooler, because it’s fricking gold.
(Seriously, I had dreams for weeks about that gold iPhone. Just staring at it. And then sometimes in the dreams I would eat it, and it tasted like dark chocolate. And then I’d wake up surrounded by wrappers for Frango mints. I don’t even know how they got there. That’s how cool it was.)
There are other models of the Apple Watch, too. Cheaper models—there’s even one for just $350, if you can believe it; seriously, who in their right mind is going to settle for something less expensive that still does all the same things as the 18k, like monitor your heartbeats and store the information forever without your permission on Apple’s servers, or keep time within fifty milliseconds of atomic clock time, which you may not think you’ll ever need, but then when does one ever really know ahead of time that they’re going to have to defuse a bomb, pull off an intricate heist or race a bullet train?
The paupers, that’s who. They might as well just buy a Timex and donate the difference to a charity, like the Jesuit Refugee Service, which runs camps and provides health care, education and other programs to refugees and asylum seekers throughout the entire world. Believe it or not there are over 50 million people in the world—roughly the populations of California and Illinois—who have been forced to leave behind their nice cars and their multiple homes and their MacBook Pros at a moment’s notice, to escape death or maybe just starvation.
Or they could give their money to Red Cloud Indian School, a Jesuit-run K-12 which provides a great college prep education to Lakota kids on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in rural South Dakota at no cost to the students. Every year the school has to raise $12.5 million dollars just to keep the doors open. Seriously, that’s like an urban school having to raise $50 million. It ain’t easy. (And yet every year its tiny, 200 person high school in the middle of nowhere produces Gates scholars who win full tuition to the school of their choice.)
Or they could just pick a local charity, like a soup kitchen or a food bank or a homeless shelter. For instance in San Jose there’s a whole community of homeless people who live in a sort of shantytown called “The Jungle.” In December the police shut it down. Some of the people living there got temporary housing. Some didn’t. Might be nice to find a non-for-profit that’s trying to help, like the San Jose Family Shelter Program, which provides 90 days of shelter in individual apartments for families; or the Social Ministry Office of the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Joseph, which helps 200 people every day; or HomeFirst, which has tons of different programs for the chronically homeless, for homeless veterans and youth.
Yeah, if you’re one of those suckers that has to settle on the el-cheapo Apple Watch, seriously, you might as well not even bother. Because sister, if it ain’t gold, it ain’t bold.
For the rest of us, the release date is April 24th. You want to be smart, you’d best reserve your 18k today.
And you know, when you’re standing in line to pick yours up, if you get the chance, be sure to stop and punch a street person in the face. Because seriously, if you’re going to waste $17,000 on a watch, you pretty much are anyway.
Think different indeed.
