You want a gold Apple Watch, you say? Then it's going to cost you... a lot.
The vanilla variant of Apple's newest wrist-worn wearable device only costs $349. However, if you're willing to spend big cash on something that has the Apple logo on it, the company would be more than willing to accommodate.
According to analyst John Gruber, the gold version of the upcoming device may cost about as much as the monthly salary of a middle-class worker in the United States. Gruber predicts that the gold Apple Watch would cost $5,000. The figure is basically just a guess. However, it's not an uneducated one.
"Most people think I'm joking when I say the gold ones are going to start at $5,000. I couldn't be more serious," Gruber wrote in a blog post. "The lowest conceivable price I could see for the Edition models is $1,999 -- but the gold alone, just as scrap metal, might in fact be worth more than that."
Gruber claims that Apple told him that the gold version of the Apple Watch is made of solid 18-karat gold. It is not gold-plated. This caused him to revise his guess on the price of the device.
He based his estimate on the going rate for solid gold watches from other manufacturers. Challenging people to find a solid gold watch that costs less than $20,000, he cited a leaked price list for Rolex from 2012. Luxury watch companies don't set prices for their products; they leave that to their authorized dealers. This means that the products on the price list may have ended up being sold for a higher price. In the list, an 18-karat gold Rolex had a price tag of $34,250.
Gruber suspects that the reason Apple has been mostly silent about the specs for the device is that they don't know what the capabilities of the finished product would be.
"What does Apple Watch actually do? Or, rather, what does WatchKit allow? We don't know. And Apple is not talking, even off the record. One factor is that the software (and perhaps the hardware internals remain a work in progress). It is far from a finished product," he said.
Aside from the gold version, Gruber also predicts a stainless steel version of the device that costs $999. It's not clear whether fancier variants of the device would be available with the sport version at launch. Nonetheless, the Apple Watch is expected to ship in early 2015.
