Audemars Piguet’s Biggest Watch Release of 2025 Is Inspired by the iPhone

Lucas Raggi, Audemars Piguet’s director of analysis and growth, helps to domesticate the esteemed watchmaker’s many complicated tasks involving new problems, dial colours, and designs. There is a comforting and predictable circulate, Raggi says, to creating most watches: He and his group get a quick to develop a selected new watch or motion, they construct prototypes, choose those they like, after which put them into manufacturing.

But to create AP’s newest launch—the Royal Oak “Jumbo” Extra-Thin Selfwinding Flying Tourbillon Chronograph RD#5 (or just “RD#5” for brief), which was formally unveiled right this moment—Raggi’s acquainted process went out the window. It’s a totally surprising watch (with iPhone-style buttons on the aspect!) that required a completely new mind-set to create.

Here’s all the pieces you want to learn about this revolutionary timepiece.

What is Audemars Piguet’s RD collection?

Since 2015, Audemars Piguet has launched a few of its most audacious tasks by means of its RD—analysis and growth—umbrella. With every launch, the group has got down to set up a brand new business normal or discover a new resolution to age-old watchmaking challenges. RD#1 was about jazzing up the sound of a minute-repeater, the uncommon complication which makes use of a collection of dings, chimes, and gongs to inform the time by means of sound. RD#2 managed to suit all of the parts of a perpetual calendar on a single stage to scale back the watch’s thickness, whereas RD#3 equally slimmed down a tourbillon. Finally, RD#4 was about pure showmanship—with 23 problems and 17 “technical devices” packed inside, it was essentially the most difficult watch AP had ever produced.

What was the problem of RD#5?

Oh, nothing too loopy…simply utterly overhauling the operation of the chronograph, the built-in stopwatch operate that has labored roughly the identical manner for 200 years.

Why, what’s the issue with it?

The buttons have been too exhausting.

Huh?

You sometimes function the chronograph operate on a watch by means of using buttons—or “pushers”—alongside the aspect of the case. The group at AP seen that on classic watches, the pushers have been “softer” than those on fashionable iterations—which means you didn’t should press down very exhausting to begin, cease, and reset the stopwatch operate. “The challenge came out of our frustration of feeling the sensation you could get in the vintage pieces,” Raggi mentioned. They got down to recreate that feeling.