Review: Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore Diver

There’s a lot that doesn’t make sense in this world, and the community of people who enjoy watches and watchmaking is not immune to it. Here’s an example: these days a Rolex Submariner with a date and ceramic bezel can change hands for well north of £10,000, despite an RRP of some £3,000 less. What this means is that someone who was considering a Rolex Submariner, if they have the budget to stretch to one, can start to look at some rather interesting alternatives instead. And here’s one: the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore Diver.

I guess the first question is, why would someone want to spend over £10,000 on a Rolex Submariner in the first place? Well, it’s an iconic brand known the world over first and foremost, the creator of probably the most famous dive watch in the world, of which this is. There’s also a sense of financial security, perhaps, an appreciating asset that could potentially be enjoyed for free or even at a profit—although as we all know, this is nothing more than a gamble.

This growth in price has been incremental, the watch-buying public a frog in the increasingly hot pan of a bubbling market, and so perhaps it’s fair to say that the extremity of the price is perceivably less shocking than you would otherwise expect. That a Submariner cost a quarter of the price not ten years ago, well—I guess as they say, the past is in the past, no point crying over spilt milk.

But I think that attitude can become a bit blinkered, because £10,000 is not only a lot of money, but if it’s earmarked for a watch, it can buy a whole lot of one. The Rolex Submariner is a very nice watch, don’t get me wrong, and has earned its status—but it’s wading deep in amongst some rivals that could cause it to get a bit out of its depth.

So, enter the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore Diver, a mouthful to say and certainly a wallet-buster to buy. This is seriously high-end machinery, a three-hander in steel that will demand almost £20,000 of you and your credit card. Well, that’s twice as much as even the most expensive steel Submariner, so how is it even a contender? Depreciation, that’s how. Unlike the Rolex, whose price has been inflated by demand, the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore Diver—we’ll call it the AP Diver from now on—has been drawn down.

The Rolex Submariner was first introduced in 1953

In the isolation of these few watches, like the Submariner, that have exceeded their RRPs, this sounds like a bad thing—but it’s totally normal. Used goods depreciate ninety-nine percent of the time, it’s a fact of life. This whole watch investment business feels like it’s been around forever, but it’s only really been this bananas for a few years, really. If we knew then what we knew now, we’d have been buying up Royal Oaks whilst they were cheap and Aquanauts when people thought they were ugly and hoarding them like toilet roll.

But we don’t have to do that—not as people who buy watches to enjoy, anyway—because depreciation can still help us achieve our goals. Think of it like this—if you’d invested in a handful of Submariners ten years ago and made ten thousand now and spent the lot on a new AP Diver, that’s the same as just buying an AP Diver used that was new when you’d considered hoarding all those Submariners.

And that’s where we’re at: a ten-year-old AP Diver can be yours for the same price as that Rolex Submariner. It sounds wild to say it, because these two watches are not in the same class at all, nowhere near, but it’s true. Someone intending to buy an almost new Submariner could say, “Ah, screw it,” and become the owner of a top-three watchmaker watch instead. But should they?

A bigger, more robust case and a significant water resistance separates the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore from the regular Royal Oak

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the expression, “a Ferrari for Ford money,” but what that’s referring to is the period in the early thousands where it was not unusual to be able to pick up a two-seater Ferrari V8 for less than a new Mondeo. Sounds pretty tempting, doesn’t it? Imagine rocking up to work in your new-to-you, Rosso Corsa speed machine and parking up next to a fleet of beige commuter mobiles, feeling like a million bucks.

That’s the dream, of course, but dreams and realities are rarely one and the same. In the excitement, perhaps, it might have been forgotten that the Ferrari may have cost Mondeo money to buy, but it is still a Ferrari, and still requires Ferrari servicing to run. So, when the clutch starts to slip, the belts begin to squeak, the tyres start to bald—there’s going to be a nasty, expensive shock.

The same is true for the Audemars Piguet—at least to a degree. Rolex, for example, recommends a service every ten years, and will charge you just over £500. The AP Diver, however, requires servicing in half that time and will cost twice as much for the privilege, so you’d be looking at spending £1,500 more every decade on the Audemars Piguet than you would the Rolex.

The Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore was fist introduced in 1993, twenty one years after the Royal Oak

It doesn’t take much metal arithmetic to work out that that’s £150 extra you’d need to put aside per year, and if that’s the cost of jumping ship from Rolex to Audemars Piguet, that doesn’t sound like too big a pill to swallow. What it comes down to fundamentally is if the AP Diver is £1,500 per decade better.

I think you know what I’m going to say about that. Primarily, of course, the aesthetics will govern whether that’s even an option for you. If the chunky, 42mm AP Diver makes you feel like you’re wearing your dad’s watch, then it’s likely a no-go, but if it’s a piece you’ve got a hankering for, then well: it’s an Audemars Piguet. What more do I have to say?

It would be a pretty dull summary if I didn’t say more, however, so let’s do it. Aside from the century-and-a-half of industry-leading existence, despite redefining the market with the Royal Oak, ignoring the brand’s cultural dominance—the AP Diver is a better piece of watchmaking than the Rolex Submariner. The Méga Tapisserie dial—that is, the pronounced waffled pattern made famous with the original Royal Oak—is hewn by the centuries-old technique of guilloché on a rose engine; the polished facets on the case are mirror-finished on a lapping machine for a crisp transition; and the in-house calibre 3120 inside is finished to the highest quality and dressed with a rose gold rotor. You can’t see it, but the newer diver has a transparent case back you could probably have fitted if you wanted to.

The whole thing kind of makes the predicament of potentially not wanting to spend more money than you feel you should on a Rolex Submariner into an exercise of wondering what high-end goodness you can acquire instead. And the AP Diver isn’t the only big-name substitute; in the pre-owned market, £10,000 buys you the kind of high-end watchmaking that really blows Rolex out of the water. Question is, which would you pick?

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