NOMOS Glashütte
The Watch Steve Jobs Would Have Designed
NOMOS Glashütte
The Watch Steve Jobs Would Have Designed
I walked into our Revolution offices here in London last week to find a watch, on my desk (better than any birthday or Christmas for a watch geek like myself). The watch was from a brand I have long admired: Nomos – the Ahoi dive watch to be specific. Why is this important? Well, when I mentioned to Nomos that I’d love to cover the watch, I wasn’t quite sure what to write about it. Then it hit me. On a damp, cold Wednesday morning, I looked down at my wrist and then glanced at my Macbook Pro. A lightbulb went off as I realised that these two products could have been from the same company.
Now before I continue, there are a few things I have to clear up. No doubt Steve Jobs would have wanted a watch to have an element of technological innovation built in. I am sure he wouldn’t have gone for a fully in-house, mechanical movement like Nomos. However, for the sake of this article I am going to put this small matter to one side. Instead, my argument comes from a design and ethos perspective.
Jobs’ Seiko was round and not the rectangular shape we know the Apple watch to be. Jobs was fascinated by minimalism, he even wore identical black turtleneck jumpers and trainers every day. He deeply appreciated the Bauhaus movement. He always looked to reduce products to their simplest form – a reduction of the unnecessary. We see this at Nomos.
Diving deeper into the comparisons between Jobs and Nomos, I came to find that Jobs was a Buddhist, converting in 1974 on a trip to India. Buddhism became the basis for his aesthetic expectations, justifying his constant demands for nothing less than “perfection” in himself, in others and from the products he would create. As well as exacting this same level of painstaking perfectionism in its products, Nomos is based in Glashütte, a tiny German town near the Czech Republic border that is now a centre of horological excellence and that was founded by a Buddhist monk centuries ago.