Apple’s support for Space Grey Sport and Space Black Steel Apple Watch leaves a lot to be desired.
The Diamond Like Carbon coating on the Space Black stainless steel Apple Watch is amazing. It feels great, it’s incredibly scratch resistant, and it just looks *sexy*. It’s been described as not less than “magical” by reviewers who have it, such as Rene Ritchie with iMore.
Apple’s most popular (at least amongst the early orders) watch was the Space Grey Apple Watch Sport, likely due to it being the cheapest model and also matching the color of tech geeks’ preferred iPhone color.
So why can most of Apple’s first party bands not be bought with Space Grey or Space Black hardware?
To be fair, the sport bands are effectively metal-free, so those are a non issue, and the leather loops actually have no visible metal, so those are again a non issue. But the modern buckle, the classic buckle, and the nylon band? No such luck (technically, the black nylon band comes with black hardware, but none of the other six colors do, so…).
It’s worth noting that the Hermes bands also cannot be bought with black hardware, but this is slightly more excusable, since this is almost a third party band. I would still love a single tour with black buckle, but I’m not as displeased.
And this can all be forgiven due to Apple opening up the Apple Watch band specs to third parties, but the lack of first party support for black hardware has led to a lack of third party support for the same. After hours of searching, I was only able to find 3 manufacturers that even support black hardware on non-entirely metal bands. Of those, I would only actually trust 2 of them — Pad and Quill and Monowear. Monowear offered leather options and nylon options with black hardware, though their nylon bands are more expensive than the Apple options, and the leather bands are in slightly off colors. Pad and Quill only offers one band style with black hardware, and it’s highly stylized (and not to my taste).
That being said, it’s therefore a huge opportunity for third parties to pick up where Apple has been lacking, I’m just not sure that they will, for fear that they won’t be able to break even or turn a profit.
Additionally showing lack of support for the Space Black Watch in particular is that during the “Spring Colors” band update, the Stainless Steel Watch was updated so that it can no longer be purchased with the sport band out of the box, but rather with many other band colors, including the new Nylon band replacing the sport band at the entry level price point. The Space Black Watch cannot be purchased with a nylon or leather band initially. Only Sport, Milanese, and Link bracelets are available out of the box.
Now, obviously working against my argument is the recent black Milanese loop release, as well as black hardware only on the black nylon band. I will accept that perhaps my argument is entirely invalid. Perhaps Apple is working on applying the DLC coating to the buckles, but hasn’t figured out how to do it effectively yet.
But I have concern that this isn’t the case, being that we’ve seen now two revisions to the available classic buckles without adding the option for black hardware on even one of the band colors. Selfishly, I would really like to see this option on the saddle brown and grey options at a minimum.
Below you’ll see a really rough mockup of a Space Grey Sport watch with saddle brown leather classic buckle with a dark colored hardware. Granted, this is a terrible mockup made in 2 minutes in Pixelmator with Apple Pencil, but I think the color way looks nice. I think it would look even better on the Space Black watch.
Apple’s not supporting the grey and black colored watches. What’s up with that? What do you think?
