AI Promised the Audemars Piguet x Swatch Wristwatch. China Will Deliver It
Loaded with iconic Royal Oak design elements, including the octagonal case, eight-screw bezel and Petite Tapisserie motif dial, the strapless design strongly references the 1979 Royal Oak pocket watch, reference 5691. Inside is an all-new hand-wound version of Swatch’s Sistem51 caliber, a fully machine-assembled movement. Swatch has 15 active patents on this new iteration and also boasts an impressive 90-hour power reserve. There is even an antimagnetic Nivachron hairspring which was also co-developed with Audemars Piguet.
Swatch’s POP line from 1986, whose watch heads could be physically ejected from their frames and clipped elsewhere, has been plundered here to create a design that allows the Royal Pops to also pop out of their bioceramic support clips.
Why there is no wrist watch
The simple logic of the pocket watch design authorized by Audemars Piguet, which unlike Omega is not part of the Swatch Group, is that it does not upset its existing wealthy clientele. Royal Oak owners will no doubt breathe sighs of relief now that it’s confirmed that a version of their coveted pieces won’t be released for just a few hundred dollars.
However, that doesn’t mean AP would have been hurt financially if it had delivered what the public so clearly wanted. Omega, which was also worried about its sales when introducing the original internal MoonSwatch prototypes, saw a whopping 50% increase in sales after the release of its budget cousin.
The Royal Pop pocket watch, cleverly, is a step designed to generate as much hype as possible while being as safe as possible for the AP brand. The Royal Oak design language is unmistakable, but the wrist is off-limits. With Swatch, Audemars has built something real for its ambitious fans; it just didn’t allow them to build what they wanted.
What does Swatch get out of it? Valuable PR too, but much more importantly, the potential for much-needed sales. In 2025, the group recorded a 6.75% decline in sales and a staggering 55.6% drop in operating profit, mainly attributed to a sharp decline in demand for its watches in China, Hong Kong and Macau. Swatch Group shareholders are not happy.
How China will come to the rescue
This is where the story gets interesting for reasons neither Swatch nor AP anticipated. As Swatch resurrected its POP design, allowing the Royal Pop to be removed from its case, within hours of the Royal Pop’s announcement, third-party strap brands seized on the prospect, seeking to quickly create adaptations that transformed the pocket watch into a wristwatch. Since Royal Pops were designed to slide in and out of cords and desk stands, they should just as easily clip onto wristbands and straps specifically designed to accommodate them.
The market recognized in real time that Swatch and AP’s pocket watch tantalizingly contained everything structurally necessary to produce the wristwatch that the AI concepts had promised. All that remained was to connect the case to a wrist.
