Patek Philippe vs. Audemars Piguet: Elite Luxury Watchmakers Compared

Both Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet are widely recognized in watch enthusiast circles as representing the highest echelon of watchmaking excellence. The venerable Swiss maisons are in fact two of the three revered as the Holy Trinity of Watchmaking (the third being Vacheron Constantin), so a comparison between the two is almost inevitable for enthusiasts stepping up to this elite level of watch appreciation. Here we compare and contrast them in several key areas.

[toc-section heading="Origins and Historical Legitimacy"]

Patek Philippe

Patek Philippe traces its foundation to 1839, when Polish watchmakers Antoine Norbert de Patek and François Czapek partnered to form the original company, Patek, Czapek, & Cie, in Geneva. The firm produced pocket watches for a relatively brief period before disagreements between the two founders led to the dissolving of the partnership in 1845. That same year, Patek began a new partnership with a French watchmaker named Adrien Philippe, whose historical claim to fame was the invention of the keyless winding system for watches. Together, they established a new watchmaking company, Patek & Cie., which officially became Patek, Philippe, & Cie. in 1851. It has been known by that name ever since.

The modern era of Patek Philippe began with brothers Jean and Henri Stern, who had owned the company’s dial supplier, acquiring it in 1932. That same year, Patek launched the original Calatrava, the watch that would become its signature (details below) and whose design was inspired by the ancient Calatrava cross that had served as the maison’s logo since 1887. The following year, Patek Philippe made timekeeping history when it commissioned a record-setting complicated pocket watch for American banker Henry Graves. The so-called “Graves Supercomplication” was for decades the world’s most complicated watch, eventually selling at auction for $24 million in 2014. Patek continued to push the envelope in the area of complications — including multiple high complications in the same watch — in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Among its many horological milestones during this period are the first annual calendar watch and the first wristwatches with perpetual calendars and split-seconds chronographs.

Audemars Piguet

Audemars Piguet began making watches in 1875, when founders and childhood friends Jules Louis Audemars and Edward Auguste Piguet (below) first registered the brand in Switzerland’s Vallée de Joux. Now headquartered in the town of Le Brassus, it remains one of the very few privately owned firms in the watchmaking industry, still in the hands of the Audemars family. 

Renamed Audemars Piguet & Cie in 1881, the company primarily manufactured movements for other firms in its earliest days, including Tiffany and Co., but later gained renown for milestones like the world’s first-minute repeater movement for wristwatches in 1892, and the first jumping-hour watch in 1921. The company prospered throughout the 1920s, until the Great Depression took a heavy toll on its workforce. However, the second generation of the founding families steered the company through the difficult years by refocusing its expertise on the emerging horological arts of miniaturization and skeletonization, both of which Audemars Piguet has excelled in over the years. 

[toc-section heading="Watchmaking Milestones and World Firsts"]

Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet have, of course, gained historical renown not only for their longevity, but also for what each has contributed to the evolution of watchmaking and watch design. Both reached a pinnacle of cultural relevance in the 1970s (more on that later) but each company could boast several industry firsts well before then. 

Patek Philippe

Patek Philippe’s notable watchmaking firsts include several complications adapted for the first time to a wristwatch — like perpetual calendars and split-seconds chronographs — but perhaps the accomplishment for which it doesn’t get quite enough recognition is inventing, basically, the template for the modern men’s dress watch. In their early years of owning the brand, the Sterns broke from many of their peers in the watchmaking business by embracing the wristwatch not as a passing fad but as the wave of the future, supplanting the pocket watch. To this end, the first new Patek Philippe watch created under their auspices was the now-historic Ref. 96, today regarded as the foundation of the modern Calatrava, Patek’s signature dress watch, and the inspiration for many round, elegant wristwatches that would follow it.

Its central elements are now so ubiquitous that it’s hard to imagine how revolutionary they were at the time. The watch’s softly rounded case middle was designed to flow seamlessly into the lugs, setting it stylistically apart from most other wristwatches of the era, which were still adaptations of pocket watches, with the lugs distinctively separate from the midcase. The diminutive case dimensions — 31mm in diameter and 9mm thick, much too small for a pocket watch — also helped in this regard. Finally, It was one of the first watch designs to bear strong influence from the Bauhaus movement, which had emerged from Germany in 1919.

Patek Philippe made the first perpetual calendar wristwatch — the legendary Ref. 97975, a unique piece — in 1925, and introduced the first series-produced one (Ref. 1526) in 1941, under the leadership of the Sterns. As if to solidify its position as the horological world’s unquestioned master of high complications, Patek Philippe unveiled an even more impressive world-first the same year: Ref. 1518, the first wristwatch that was equipped with both a perpetual calendar and a chronograph. This combination of complications, a technical feat that few watchmakers have attempted, has become a Patek Philippe specialty. From Ref. 1518’s groundbreaking design sprung all of the perpetual calendar-chronograph models that followed, including the one whose look most famously defines that grand complication, the classic Ref. 5970 (above), introduced in 2004. 

Audemars Piguet

Photo: Christie's

The minute repeater, which chimes the time audibly on demand, was invented in the 18th century for pocketwatches. But it took a collaboration between Audemars Piguet and Louis Brandt & Freres (the company today known as Omega) to create the first minute repeater wristwatch in 1892, with AP developing the movement and the Brandt brothers designing the case. The milestone would be a harbinger for many forays into horological acoustics by Audemars Piguet over the years (much more so than by Omega, which found success by focusing on more practical complications). In 1934, Audemars Piguet contributed the first wristwatch to feature a skeletonized movement (skeletonization having been around since the 1760s, pioneered by French watchmaker André-Charles Caron). In later years, AP would extend the art of skeletonization (example above) even to the most complex of movements, including perpetual calendars. With all of this history, Audemars Piguet is perhaps best known in high-horology circles as a leader in bringing the tourbillon into the modern era. 

Today, nearly every watchmaker with high-horology bonafides — and even a few whose claim to that status might be questionable —  makes at least one watch with a tourbillon. But it wasn’t that long ago that wristwatch tourbillons were so rare as to be nearly extinct. The tourbillon, after all, was an 18th-century invention meant to counter the effects of gravity on pocketwatches (as I explore in much more depth in this article), and its inclusion in wristwatches was regarded for a long time as an expensive redundancy on an item — i.e., a mechanical watch — whose own obsolescence seemed inevitable during the Quartz Crisis. But then came the return of the luxury mechanical timepiece, with iconic watchmakers like AP at the forefront, and it was, appropriately, Audemars Piguet that gave the world its first self-winding tourbillon wristwatch in 1986. The watch, the now-legendary Ref. 25643 (above), was also the first series-produced wristwatch with a tourbillon. Its movement, the record-breaking Caliber 2870, was the  first to use ultra-light titanium in the construction of its tourbillon cage, which was exceptionally thin at just (7.2mm. Titanium, it should be noted, was a metal still new to watchmaking at the time.

[toc-section heading="Sport-Luxury Pioneers: Royal Oak and Nautilus"]

Often, when the discussion among watch enthusiasts turns to the topic of “Patek Philippe vs. Audemars Piguet,” what it really boils down to is a comparison between the companies’ two undisputed sport-luxury icons: the Royal Oak and the Nautilus. The watches have many commonalities yet also significant differences. Both were bold gambles for their time, both became hugely influential throughout the industry, and both sprang from the fertile creative mind of the same legendary watch designer, Gérald Genta (below). But only one is still being produced in its core iteration today.

Audemars Piguet

In 1972, near the beginning of the Quartz Crisis that was threatening to write an end to traditional mechanical watchmaking (and epitaphs for historic watchmakers like Audemars Piguet), the leadership team in Le Brassus reached out to Genta, an independent contractor, to develop a steel sports watch that would re-invigorate the brand’s somewhat genteel image. What Genta delivered (allegedly, after one furious all-nighter of sketching) was the legendary Ref. 5402, the first Royal Oak, soon to be fondly nicknamed “Jumbo” due to its large-for-the-time 39mm case diameter. It featured an unprecedented, octagonal-shaped bezel with exposed hexagonal screws at each of its corners (meant to resemble a diver’s helmet), a dial enhanced with a checkerboard textured guilloché pattern known as “grand tapisserie,” and a case that integrated smoothly into a meticulously designed, tapering bracelet with alternating finishes on its outer and inner links. 

Genta intended the watch to embody a nautical aesthetic, hence the dive-helmet elements and also the name: Royal Oak, a reference to the British naval warships named after the oak tree that sheltered King Charles II during the English Civil War. The watch contained what was at the time the world’s thinnest mechanical watch movement with a date indication, Caliber 2121, which measured a mere 3.05 mm in height. The original model was made of stainless steel rather than gold, unthinkable for a high-priced luxury watch at the time, though that model has since spawned an entire family of Royal Oak models that encompass an array of complications and materials.

Though it was far from an overnight success, the Royal Oak had essentially invented what we now know as the “luxury sports watch.” Its most groundbreaking design elements, like visible screws, octagonal bezels, textured dials, and integrated bracelets, would be emulated by legions of watches in the decades to come, some but not by any means all of them designed by Genta.

Patek Philippe

Four years after the Royal Oak’s momentous and somewhat controversial debut on the market, Patek Philippe took a similar roll of the dice by hiring Genta — who had previously worked with Patek on the Art Deco-inspired Golden Ellipse dress watch — to develop another game-changing steel sports watch, the Nautilus. The original model, Ref. 3700/1A, sported a smoothly beveled octagonal bezel inspired by the portholes on an ocean liner; a sunburst-finished, horizontally grooved dial reminiscent of a wooden boat’s deck; and a meticulously finished integrated bracelet. The Nautilus’s stainless steel case was huge for the era — 42mm in diameter, with unusual ear-like projections on each side, possibly aping the look of those portholes’ window hinges, and water resistant to an uncommonly robust 120 meters. Also huge at the time was the price, north of $2,000 in steel. For Patek Philippe, until then known exclusively for precious-metal dress watches, a chunky, steel sports watch with an eye-popping price tag was impossible to ignore.

The Nautilus, whose name referenced Captain Nemo’s vessel in Jules Verne’s classic novel, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. contained the same movement as the Royal Oak: Caliber 28-885, based on the Jaeger-LeCoultre 920, which also ended up inside another of the era’s sport-luxury pioneers, the Vacheron Constantin 222, in 1977. It even garnered the same nickname (“Jumbo”) among collectors. Like its predecessor from AP, Patek’s Nautilus spawned a slew of other versions over the subsequent decades, including chronographs, annual calendars, and even a perpetual calendar. Its core three-handed model, Ref. 5711, has gone on to become one of the most coveted timepieces in the world, even more so since Patek’s recent decision to discontinue that watch.

The Nautilus followed the Royal Oak chronologically but has never been in its shadow, arguably establishing an even more influential presence over the years. Like its predecessor, which redefined the identity of its parent brand, the Nautilus took Patek Philippe from its elegantly dressy roots into an entirely new “sport-luxury” realm.

[toc-section heading="Building on Icons: Royal Oak Offshore and Aquanaut"]

The runaway success of the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak and Patek Philippe Nautilus has, inevitably, sparked both these Swiss luxury watchmaking titans to spin off other iterations of the core families. Both came into being in the 1990s, as the return of the mechanical watch was kicking into high gear, and both succeeded in not only expanding the appeal of the brands to a younger, more adventurous audience, but in becoming iconic product families of their own. 

Audemars Piguet

By 1993, the renaissance of the mechanical luxury watch after years of quartz dominance was starting to show some promise. As it was back in 1972, Audemars Piguet was among the boldest leaders, introducing a bigger and brassier version of the Royal Oak that would appeal to the tastes and trends of a new generation, the Royal Oak Offshore. Whereas the “Jumbo” was notable for its thinness and its classical three-hand dial, the Offshore projected an aggressively sporty spirit, with a 42-mm case, an even more in-your-face tapisserie textured dial, and, for the first time ever in a Royal Oak watch, a chronograph movement. The design, which was executed not by Genta but by in-house AP designer Emmanuel Geit, spoke to a growing trend in the watch market toward bigger, bulkier designs. (Genta, for the record, was not a fan of it.)

The market embraced the Royal Oak Offshore, including a roster of celebrity wearers, like movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger, auto racing legend Michael Schumacher, and NBA icon LeBron James, all of whom have collaborated with the watchmaker on their own specially personalized editions of the Royal Oak Offshore. Schwarzenegger, in fact, even worked directly with Audemars Piguet’s design team to create the watch now known as the Royal Oak Offshore “End of Days,” a massive, all-black timepiece that he wore in the 1999 blockbuster film of the same name. In keeping with the Royal Oak’s history of sparking trends, it was instrumental in ushering in an era of massive, all-black watches that would remain prominent in the first decade of the new millennium. Like its parent model, the Royal Oak Offshore has since proliferated in its complications, materials, and colorways, and even spawned its own subfamily, the rugged, ISO-certified Offshore Diver, in 2010.

Patek Philippe

In 1997, Patek Philippe took a similar tack with its own sport-luxury icon, aiming at what it perceived as an underserved niche in the market — namely, a more “accessible” version of the Nautilus for a younger generation of consumers made newly affluent by the era’s dot-com boom. Debuting that year, the first Aquanaut (Ref. 5060A) fit the bill, with a three-part case that was simpler and less elaborate than the Nautilus’s two-piece “porthole” construction, and was mounted on a durable composite rubber strap — a sportier and less costly alternative to the integrated metal bracelet of the Nautilus. The Aquanaut’s slightly rounded octagonal bezel, with vertically satin-finished flat surfaces and chamfered, polished edges, was similar to that of its Genta-designed “big brother,” but not paired with the latter’s signature “ears” on each side of the case. 

The modest 35.6mm steel case, soon to be expanded in future versions, contained the automatic Caliber 330 SC. Replacing the parent model’s horizontal wave textured dial, with baton hour markers, was a dial with a distinctive, embossed checkerboard pattern (repeated on the strap) and bold, applied Arabic numerals that helped forge for the Aquanaut a distinct identity of its own. The Aquanaut (annual calendar version shown above) remains a powerhouse in Patek’s collection today — even outliving some popular models of the parent Nautilus collection that inspired it, which certainly would have surprised many back when it was launched.

[toc-section heading="Bold 21st Century Moves: Code 11.59 and Cubitus"]

Both Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet could lean almost entirely on the red-hot appeal of their sport-luxury timepieces and the families around them to remain successful and relevant. However, each of these watchmaking houses (still family owned) continues to innovate, and to bring forth new models and even entirely new collections, that still reliably shake up the industry. Below are the two most noteworthy examples of this continuing spirit of innovation.

Audemars Piguet

In 2019, Audemars Piguet made its first and most audacious attempt in years to diversify its Royal Oak-dominated collection with a new series called Code 11.59, which features its own distinctive design and dedicated movements. Taking its name from the minute before midnight, an allusion to the anticipation of a new day, the Code 11.59 collection channels some of the most successful design innovations from AP’s past, namely the octagonal shape of the emblematic Royal Oak bezel, used on the Code 11.59 models instead for the case middle, while the bezel and caseback are rounded. Another defining aesthetic feature of the family, which ranges from three-hand timekeepers to high complications (like the flying tourbillon model above), are the cases’ open-design lugs, their upper segments welded to the round bezel while the lower segments lean into the caseback.

Audemars Piguet continues to honor its innovative history by pushing the envelope on technical triumphs like the Star Wheel (below) introduced into the Code 11.59 collection in 2022, a gold-and-ceramic timepiece that reveals the time on a series of satellites that orbit the dial's minute scale in an arc. This "wandering hours" style of timekeeping actually originated in the 17th Century, but making the ancient seem avant-garde is one of the things that the brand does best.

Patek Philippe

Despite its modern popularity, the Nautilus, as alluded to earlier, was controversial at its 1970s launch, and the watch that most recently continues its design legacy, 2024’s Cubitus, followed in those footsteps. Essentially, the Cubitus transfers many of the signature Nautilus elements to a new, squared case that represents a distinctively different look for a modern Patek Philippe men’s watch. (My colleague Danny Milton offers insight into the Cubitus, and what its launch means for Patek and the watch industry at large, in this article.) Just shortly after its launch, the Cubitus has met with something other than universal acclaim from the watch enthusiast community, but it’s easy to overlook that the same was true of the Nautilus when it debuted in the Swinging Seventies. 

With the unveiling of the Cubitus, its first new men’s collection in decades, Patek Philippe also continued its longstanding tradition of introducing new innovations in horological complication. The Ref. 5822P-001 (aka - deep breath — the Cubitus Instantaneous Grande Date, Day and Moon Phases) carries inside its 45mm platinum case an all-new, in-house movement with six patent applications, which powers the nearly unprecedented combination of an instantaneously changing large date and a moon-phase and day-of-the-week display that also change at the same time. It’s a user-friendly and deceptively “quiet” complication that nevertheless required a great deal of technical savoir faire. Every night at midnight, all the displays — the two coplanar date disks, the moon-phase disk, and the analog weekday — jump instantly within 18 milliseconds, using the energy accumulated during the day by the movement. The stage for all of this is a sunburst blue dial with white-gold baton hands and markers, framed by a rectangular case whose thinness belies its functionality, just 9.6mm. 

In a hypothetical match-up of Patek Philippe vs. Audemars Piguet, both iconic watchmaking houses bring a lot to bear, from high-complication savoir faire to sport-luxury design DNA that is not only unmatched across the industry but widely emulated across it as well. And the fact that both have maintained private ownership in our era of corporate consolidation should be lauded by any watch enthusiast who prizes family heritage and true independence of spirit. You can discover more about each brand, including their current offerings, at www.patek.com and www.audemarspiguet.com.