The default setting for money
By Priya Nair, Singapore ยท
Buy the 15510 if you want the Royal Oak everyone recognises from across a restaurant. Don't buy it if you want to feel clever.
That isn't an insult. At 41 mm and 10.4 mm thick, this is the Royal Oak in its most obvious form: blue Grande Tapisserie, the octagonal bezel with its eight hexagonal screws, and a bracelet that tapers from 24 mm at the case into something that drapes rather than clamps. Calibre 4302 gives you 70 hours, so it survives a weekend in the watch box and is still running when you reach for it before the Monday 8 am call. The open caseback is pretty. Nobody at dinner will ever see it.
Where I'm less charmed: 50 m of water resistance on the watch that supposedly invented the luxury sports category. Fine for the hotel pool, not something I'd wear snorkelling off Tioman. And 41 mm wears bigger than it sounds, because there are no lugs to soften the edges. On my wrist it sits flat and wide, like a small cufflink box.
Then the list price of roughly 29,000 to 31,000 dollars, which is mostly theoretical. Allocation for this reference is a relationship game, and the grey market has spent years telling you exactly what it thinks the watch is worth. Prices have cooled from the madness, but this is still one of very few steel watches I'd expect to hold its own over ten years. Buying it as a store of value? You're not wrong. Buying it because you've wanted one since you were nineteen? Even better.