I was walking by the San Francisco Swatch store and dropped in to take a look at the Blancpain collaboration. The Swatch employee said they still only had limited colors of the MoonSwatch available but every color of the Blancpain was in stock. I’m not interested in either but it confirmed my suspicions that the Blancpain isn’t nearly as popular as the MoonSwatch, especially at the higher price point.
Is swatch manufacturing the Blancpain differently than they do most of their other watches with the Sistem51 movement? I have owned a couple and the cases are sealed shut, not able to be opened without damaging or breaking it.
In my opinion if it’s glued shut that means it’s non serviceable, they do not intend for you to open the watch which again supports my first point that once it dies it dies for good.
Some metal case Sistem51 models since 2016 have had removable casebacks, so serviceable models have been around for a while. The older plastic models were not serviceable.
This site claims that Swatch told them the FF case back was removable.
Supposedly the FF is glued to be able to get to the “50 fathoms” depth rating, probably it’s less a less expensive/complicated option compared to a screw-down back (the indentations on the case back look decorative, I don’t think they’re deep enough to survive being gripped by a tool). FWIW, Fratello’s blog post quotes Omega’s VP of Product as saying the case back can’t be removed, but I’m not sure how reliable the source is given the supposed statement from Swatch that it can be removed. To reconcile these two statements, I’d speculate that the Omega VP is erroneously applying the MoonSwatch’s reality to the FF, but who knows…