[PaulCarrack]

I would argue that a watch can also be tracked but not in the sense that a phone can.

Assuming a Rolex gets stolen and reported as stolen, it can never be serviced by any reputable watch repair shop because it will be confiscated once that happens. In the case of Rolex, they will get serviced BY Rolex. Mechanical watches do need servicing otherwise they wont function properly. So even though watches cannot be tracked to the same level of fidelity as say, a phone with an antenna, it will likely still pop up eventually.

You can also make the argument that "Find My" and "activation locks" type stuff just means that the parts are going to get scrapped and sold. That could likely happen in the watch case too, so those features were never a silver bullet.

[al_borland]

>they will get serviced BY Rolex.

Gray market sales exist and Rolex will not service anything bought through the gray market, rather than directly from an AD. This leads to a lot of non-Rolex watchmakers who can work on Rolex. If they also do some check to see if they happened to be registered or stolen, I’m not sure.

I think it would be a bigger issue for less popular watches with more complicated movements, where the local watchmaker would be in over their head.

[PaulCarrack]

> Rolex will not service anything bought through the gray market, rather than directly from an AD.

Do you have a source for this? I was not under the impression that this was the case. I know they won't service any watch that's been altered or modified from factory specs.

[pie420]

There are thousands of watch shops that are not "official rolex" repair shops, but are very high quality and will never do a background check lol. And a rolex really only NEEDS a service every 10 years or so.

[PaulCarrack]

> There are thousands of watch shops that are not "official rolex" repair shops, but are very high quality and will never do a background check

How do they get official parts that need to be replaced on the watch? Rolex is super tight supply chain wise about their parts for this very reason that they want you to keep everything in house. So I suppose they are replacing parts on the watch with aftermarket?