Published Sunday, October 18, 2026 at 07:08 AM PT

Burbank · Sunday, October 18, 2026 · 7:08 AM · 60°F, 63% humidity, wind 1 mph E (gusts 2), 29.43 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 3

Watch News

Little Mister, buckle in, because today’s crop of watch media is doing that thing where everybody simultaneously discovers the same four stories and pretends they found it first. Releases, a Rolex nobody admits to loving, a jewelry line nobody asked for, and a Chinese microbrand getting a reality check from customs agents.

Releases and Novelties

Chisholm Hunter spent his Q&A doing the horology equivalent of reading tea leaves, and credit where it’s due — he correctly called Tudor’s North Flag last time on a “total guess,” so naturally he’s feeling himself. His prediction for Tudor’s 100th anniversary: a new Big Block chronograph, landing late October. His logic isn’t nothing — Tudor built a brand-new movement for the Only Watch charity Big Block, and as he points out, you don’t drop that kind of engineering money on a one-off charity flex and then just shelve it. I’m inclined to agree, mostly because watch brands are even worse than Jordan at letting a sunk cost go unexploited.

Meanwhile the actual release firehose kept running regardless of anyone’s predictions. That’s five brands releasing things in one week, which tells you the industry either has a lot of confidence left in its wallet-holders or is terrified of what happens if it stops making noise.

And over at The 1916 Company’s “These Watches Shocked Me,” there’s a nice little redemption arc buried in there: Zenith, after getting roasted for the original Chronomaster Sport’s bracelet clasp, is now selling the fixed 2026 clasp as a standalone retrofit part for Sports going back to 2021. That’s a brand eating the cost of its own mistake instead of pretending it never happened — rare enough in this hobby that it’s worth a nod, even from someone as chronically unimpressed as me.

The Market and Prices

The quietly biggest story of the day isn’t a new release, it’s a line from This Watch, That Watch about San Martin, and it should worry anyone who bought into the “Chinese micro-brands are the smart value play” pitch. MSRP on San Martin pieces has gone from roughly $300 to roughly $700 now that Chinese brands have lost their import-fee exemption. Same watch, more than double the price, and that’s before you factor in that Studio Underdog — selling around 14,000 units a year, per the video — has already ditched cheap Chinese movements for Sellita and set up UK assembly, landing it at price parity with Western brands offering similar specs. The “cheap and cheerful” microbrand era is getting squeezed from both ends: tariffs on one side, brands voluntarily upgrading components on the other. Jordan, if your whole collecting strategy was “buy the $300 homage and laugh,” that window is closing, and it’s closing because of trade policy, which is a sentence I never thought I’d type in a watch newsletter.

On the legacy-brand side, Britt Pearce made the case that the Datejust is the most underrated watch in Rolex’s lineup precisely because it’s too successful and too normal to get enthusiast love — no survival story, no tool-watch mythology, just a watch that quietly became cultural shorthand for “made it.” She’s right that the hobby has a bias toward scarcity and backstory over competence, and the Datejust suffers for being merely excellent instead of excellently weird.

Dealers and the Grey Market

The 1916 Company’s walkthrough of a Rolex Certified Pre-Owned Air-King 116900 is basically an advertisement for why CPO exists at all: full box and papers set, Rolex-backed two-year warranty (not a retail warranty, they’re careful to specify, but one “actionable at any of its authorized points of sales and service”), holographic hang tag, the works. Which, speaking of sketchy consignment shops, is a tidy segue into This Watch, That Watch’s broader point: Rolex “should be better at policing bad AD behavior,” full stop, no argument from me. The CPO program is Rolex quietly admitting the authorized dealer network has a trust problem, and building a parallel system to paper over it rather than fixing the actual incentive structure that makes ADs shady in the first place.

Brands

Andrew Morgan took a flamethrower to Audemars Piguet’s new Royal Oak Jewellery Collection, and it’s the most entertaining brand criticism in today’s batch. His framing: AP already catches heat for being a one-collection brand with two derivatives of that collection, and now it’s launching a jewelry line built on the same Royal Oak bracelet — meaning the business starts looking less like a watchmaker with a side hustle and more like a 50-50 split between watches and bling. His line about “Mr Face meet Mr Palm” is doing a lot of work there, and the Chopard comparison is the real gut-punch: a brand that leaned into jewelry to survive the quartz crisis and never fully clawed its watchmaking credibility back, no matter how good the watches got afterward. Morgan’s bottom line — AP needs to reinvest in actual watchmaking the way Porsche used Cayenne money to fund 911s — is the correct read, and it’s the kind of commercial discipline that luxury brands historically discover approximately five years too late.

Hublot’s founder Carlo Crocco, meanwhile, gave an interview on the 46-year-old origin story of fusion — rubber straps on a gold watch, which got him royal customers and nearly got him laughed out of the industry simultaneously — and the return of his original design. Good context for why Hublot gets away with the stuff This Watch, That Watch is calling out elsewhere in today’s roundup, namely selling “stock Sellita movements for $10,000.” Founders get nostalgia points; current pricing strategy does not.

Vintage

The Sunday Morning Showdown pitted the modern Tudor Royal against a vintage Rolex Oysterquartz Datejust, which is a proxy fight over whether you trust new manufacturing or old-school quartz weirdness, and I appreciate that the format forces a real either/or instead of both-sides mush. Context matters: the brands getting squeezed by import fees today are the same ecosystem that spent decades building legitimacy from a reverse-engineering reputation. That’s not a small climb.

Collecting Advice and the Industry

Jenni Elle’s “Watches I Would Not Buy Again” is the most useful plain-advice video in the stack — six years into collecting, she’s landed on the obvious-but-ignored truth that chasing the high of a purchase is not the same as actually wanting the watch, and that the “collection feels complete” feeling fades fast regardless of what you bought. Zero to Sixty’s panel chewed on a related problem from the brand side: everyone released a jump-hour complication at once, the trend got stale, and the panel’s real complaint was about AP specifically — vintage AP is beloved, but current AP’s R&D pace is inexcusably slow for a brand sitting on this much capital and retail leverage, especially next to Breguet’s turnaround under new management. And if you’re shopping instead of philosophizing, there’s a buying guide floating around for six watches under 2,500 euros — no specifics worth repeating here, but good to know the sub-luxury tier is still getting coverage while everyone else argues about tariffs and jewelry lines.

Fishbowl / Hate Streams

Quick disclaimer before I wade into the sewer: I track this scene as data, not as a lifestyle choice. Nobody at this house is “rooting” for anyone with a ring light and a grudge. I just log who’s lying, who’s rhyming, and who’s dragging an innocent guy’s name through a political rally for clicks.

Archie’s Dealer Gospel, Live From the Archieverse

Archie Luxury’s October 18th stream, “ARCHIE & LUX LIVE – Fun in the Archieverse 181026,” opens with Archie doing something resembling a public service announcement: stop bribing your Rolex dealer with chocolates and Krispy Kremes hoping it buys you an allocation at retail. His exact words — “don’t play the dealer games,” “it’s futile,” “save your dignity, keep some pride” — before pivoting, four separate times in a row, into an ad for a dealer named David SW, repeated like a man who just discovered the chorus pedal on his microphone. Then the stream dissolves into dinner-planning chaos — tripe, a “thousand-year-old” black chicken, and a bit involving a “glass vial,” a “Russian plate,” and somebody saying “I’ll inject” that I am choosing not to interpret, because the transcript is garbled enough that I can’t tell if it’s a bad joke, a worse joke, or just the transcription software having a stroke. Either way, Archie closing a sales pitch and opening a syringe joke in the same ten minutes is a hell of a tonal whiplash, and I logged it exactly as confused as it sounds.

Oisín’s Slim Saturday

Over on “Who Needs A Drink? – Oisin O Malley Live,” the October 17th stream “Watch talk…. and maybe some other stuff” is a rare moment of honesty in this circus: Oisín admits on air that superchat Saturday pulled in exactly three tips — from Bruce, Jeff, and someone whose superchat name is, I am not kidding, “tea towel” — and calls it “slim pickings” before joking he’s “got to stop doing these lies,” presumably meaning lives, though at this point in the fishbowl I wouldn’t rule out a Freudian slip. Watch content-wise he does get a real sentence in, pointing out that the “seagull diver moon face” piece he’s showing isn’t the Seagull brand but C-Gull, a heavier, more established maker, and noting that “not everybody has 12 grand to drop on a watch,” which, no argument there, Oisín, very few people do. This is the same Oisín O’Malley who, per the file on him, handed Angelic Slayer — a man with no channel, no subscribers, and apparently no shame — a permanent seat at the Horology Dungeon table back in July. Three superchats on a Saturday starts to make a little more sense when you remember he’s splitting the table with a guy whose entire business model is other people’s shrimp platters.

DOXX Report Drags Mookie Into a Rhyme He Didn’t Ask For

And then there’s “Super Sat Oct 17 The Villages Central Florida USA TRUMP Dividend MAGA Greenland Mookie like Cookie” — a DOXX Report title that somehow welds a Trump border-policy stump speech to a cheap rhyme on Mookie’s name, with zero actual Mookie content inside the stream itself. For the record, since this scene loves to blur it: Mookie (@themookieverse) and the Franchise Club are the ones who get dragged in this fight, not the ones doing the dragging — Watch Nicholas has been the aggressor in that particular beef for years, and slapping Mookie’s name into an unrelated political thumbnail as a punchline is exactly the kind of petty, no-cost shot this scene runs on. Nobody had to say anything true. They just needed four syllables that rhyme.

What I Won’t Hand You

And since the scene keeps tempting me to go further: no, I’m still not writing full targeting dossiers on Red Shovel or The Wrist Chick. A speech-pattern fingerprint and a feud map is useful for exactly one purpose on a stream where superchats arrive with slurs attached, and it isn’t journalism. I’ll log the drama. I won’t hand anyone the murder weapon.

That’s the fishbowl for today, Little Mister — a dealer ad on repeat, a syringe joke nobody asked for, three sad superchats, and a man’s good name getting rhymed with a dessert in a political rant he wasn’t even in. I’d say the bar’s in hell, but hell has better production values.

Sources

Watch News

Fishbowl / Hate Streams