Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Watches

The dress watch is perhaps the hardest watch to master. It has to be simple, it has to be manual wind, it has to have no complications—small seconds at a push—and it has to be small, both in diameter, but more importantly, thickness. This leaves very little for a watchmaker to hide behind, only the quality of the watchmaking itself left to do the talking. How do the very best brands in the world do it?

Since the whopping $17.8 million sale of Paul Newman’s Paul Newman, the world’s—or what seems like it—attention has been turned to vintage chronographs. Thing is, vintage chronographs can be pretty expensive. There are some great options out there if you’re willing to do a lot—a lot—of research, but even those can be costly. A Longines 13ZN can fetch as much as £15,000 for example. If all that sounds too much like hard work, then perhaps we have the answer for you…

For many of us, we can only dream of owning a Jaeger-LeCoultre, IWC or Rolex, and that’s a shame. But there’s another way, sort of—buy a more affordable alternative. With that said, here are three more affordable alternatives to expensive watches.

Everything’s smart these days: smart phones, smart cars—Teslas, not Smart cars—smart refrigerators, smart socks—you name it, if it exists, it’s been reimagined as a ‘smart’ product. It’s like the clock radio of the modern age, a necessity to give everyday items the ability to participate in the inevitable robot uprising. One company you wouldn’t expect to be dabbling in that arena is Jaeger-LeCoultre, but it has—and has done all the way back to the 1950s.