For a week now, Instagram’s watch fans have been losing their minds over what looked like leaked product images. Vivid plastic Audemars Piguet Royal Oak wristwatches in bright colors: navy and orange, pink, yellow, and green. Captions guessed about prices and launch queues. Comment sections argued over colors. None of it was real. Every image was AI-generated.

When Swatch and Audemars Piguet confirmed their Royal Pop collaboration on May 8, the teaser campaign left just enough ambiguity to allow the watch web to fill the void with its own vision. The result has been a weeklong hype cycle built not around the actual product but an AI-generated simulacrum of it.

So, when the real Royal Pop collection dropped on Tuesday, ahead of schedule (perhaps forced by the volume of fake images circulating), yes, it turned out to be genuinely different and interesting. But for a significant section of the audience that had already fallen for the fakes, it was genuinely disappointing.

This is a new problem. When Swatch launched the MoonSwatch with Omega in 2022, publicly available AI image generators capable of flooding the zone with photorealistic versions of the watch from single-line prompts didn't exist. Even subsequent editions as recent as the Snoopy “Cold Moon” didn't elicit the social pile-on the Royal Pop has endured in the past seven days.

“The prelaunch hype has become a key part of it all, an enormously valuable part,” says Chris Hall, founder of the popular The Fourth Wheel Substack (and a WIRED contributor). “Today's audience is even more clued-in than it was four years ago. It makes it very hard for the real watch to surpass expectations or deliver a genuine shock of the new, especially when the whole world has been generating its own images of what it might look like.”

It didn't matter that Swatch had carefully tried to manage expectations by teasing the lanyards first, signaling clearly that this was a pocket watch—not worn on the wrist. Once the first few searingly vibrant plastic Royal Oak AI images hit Instagram, complete with plastic bracelets mirroring the iconic AP design, the algorithm kicked in. Soon, thousands were reposting wristwatch Royal Pops, while others set about designing their own takes, all as convincing as the last entirely unreal watch, willfully ignoring the obvious lanyard clue.

The dream was clear: Watch fans wanted the moon on a stick, fantasizing about owning a hyper-accurate low-budget version of an iconic high-end wristwatch that sells for $20,000, and no official Swatch teases leading to alternative outcomes were welcome.

The Real Deal

Disappointment aside, the Royal Pop Collection is a legitimately interesting proposal. A set of eight pocket watches made from Swatch's bioceramic composite in two styles, Lépine (crown at 12) and Savonnette (crown at 3, with a small seconds subdial at 6), and priced at $400 and $420, respectively.

Laden with iconic Royal Oak design cues, most notably the octagonal case, eight-screw bezel, and Petite Tapisserie-patterned dial, the strapless design heavily references 1979's Royal Oak Pocket Watch reference 5691. Inside is an entirely new hand-wound version of Swatch's Sistem51 caliber, a movement that is completely machine assembled. Swatch has 15 active patents on this new iteration and has also squeezed in an impressive 90-hour power reserve. There's even an antimagnetic Nivachron balance spring that was, incidentally, codeveloped with Audemars Piguet.

Swatch's 1986 POP line, whose watch heads could be physically ejected from their frames and clipped elsewhere, has been plundered here to create a design that allows the Royal Pops to ping out of their bioceramic holder clips, too.

Why There’s No Wristwatch

The simple logic of the pocket watch design authorized by Audemars Piguet, which, unlike Omega, is not part of the Swatch Group, is that it doesn't upset its existing high-net-worth customer base. Royal Oak owners will no doubt be breathing sighs of relief now that it's confirmed a version of their coveted pieces won't be coming to market for a mere few hundred bucks.

However, this doesn't mean that AP would have been financially hit had it delivered what the public so clearly wanted. Omega, which was also concerned for its sales when shown the original MoonSwatch internal prototypes, enjoyed a sizable 50 percent bump in sales following the release of its budget cousin.

The Royal Pop pocket watch, cleverly, is a sidestep designed to generate as much hype as possible yet be as safe as can be for AP's brand. The Royal Oak design language is unmistakable, but the wrist is off-limits. With Swatch, Audemars built something real for its aspirational fans; it just didn't build them what they wanted.

What does Swatch get out of this? Valuable PR as well, but far more importantly, the potential of a much-needed sales hit. In 2025, the group posted a 6.75 percent drop in sales and a staggering 55.6 percent decline in operating profit, primarily attributed to a sharp drop in demand for its watches in China, Hong Kong, and Macau. Swatch Group shareholders are not happy.

How China Will Come to the Rescue

Here is where the story gets interesting for reasons neither Swatch nor AP planned. As Swatch resurrected its POP design, allowing the Royal Pop to be removed from its housing, within hours of the Royal Pop announcement, third-party strap brands seized on this prospect, looking to quickly fashion adaptations that convert the timepiece from pocket to wristwatch. As Royal Pops were designed to snap in and out of lanyards and desk stands, they should just as easily clip into bracelets and straps made specifically to receive them.

The market recognized in real time that the pocket watch from Swatch and AP tantalizingly contained all that was structurally needed to deliver the very wristwatch that the AI concepts had promised. All that was required now was something to connect the case to a wrist.

Brands are already announcing their concepts to fill this wristwatch-shaped hole. Singapore-based Delugs was one of the first to do so, posting its concept design thoughts on Instagram and putting up a wait list on its site for what it is calling Project WristPop. Founder and CEO Kenneth Kuan confirmed that he has “asked the production team to give it top priority.”

“We're targeting a release before the end of 2026,” Kuan tells WIRED. “The ambition is to be first to market with something credible and properly made. There will be—and there already are—other people racing to get something out given the market opportunity here, but we want to be the ones who get out the product that's actually worth your money.” Delugs has form here. It was first to market with rubber straps for the Tissot PRX when it launched.

Kuan says Delugs is making a case-strap system, not a single strap, as the Royal Pop's case isn't designed to take one. “So we're engineering both the case interface and the strap that attaches to it. The two parts will likely be made of different materials, but the strap itself will be rubber. The design language will be coherent with the Royal Oak,” Kuan says. “We want this to feel like a natural extension of the watch, not a workaround.”

It was only 24 hours since the reveal when I contacted Kuan, but the watch market has already responded to Delugs. Kuan says distributors are already asking to carry the Delugs straps, and customers want to put down deposits now on something that's still just a concept.

Others seem to be planning ways to attach third-party straps they already produce, or are considering making integrated bracelets that may mirror the complicated AP version on the Royal Oak. But it's China that will likely move fastest. Alibaba vendors and Temu sellers can realistically produce injection-molded or machined adapters and matched straps within weeks of the May 16 launch, possibly faster. Quality may not be assured, but speed will.

Paul Midler, author of Poorly Made in China: An Insider's Account of the Tactics Behind China's Production Game and a consultant to companies with business interests in the region, is sure we'll see China mods for the Royal Pop imminently.

“The manufacturing processes involve some injection molding for plastic and silicone, and perhaps some CNC machining for metal parts," he says. "All are well within the wheelhouse of Chinese producers, and they move fast. Given the buzz around this, Chinese manufacturers might have working prototypes available within a couple of weeks after obtaining specifications. From there, we could realistically see online listings in under a month.”

Aaron Alpeter, founder and CEO of supply chain specialist Izba Group, says that he'd be surprised if some kind of strap system isn't already under development in China. All that's really needed are those dimensional specs. Alpeter recounts a meeting with a Taiwan exporter 10 years ago who already had the specs for the then-new iPhone from a contact in a Chinese factory.

“They were already designing and building stock for a case and screen protector that was going to launch the same day Apple announced their iPhone,” he says.

Will Swatch Step Up?

“The best thing Swatch can do is give the people what they want and own this design,” Alpeter says. “There will be a large ecosystem of knockoffs for people who want something that looks just as good but doesn't carry that name value.”

The MoonSwatch had the good fortune to be evaluated on its own terms in 2022. Not only did it arrive as a genuine surprise, but Swatch had complete control of the images in circulation. The Royal Pop landed in a world that had already decided what it was. The actual product now has to fight for attention against a phantom that will very soon be made real by companies outside of the influence of both Swatch and Audemars Piguet.

AI generated the expectation. Chinese manufacturing will fulfill it. And the pocket watch that Swatch and Audemars Piguet have spent years secretly developing may, in the end, be best remembered as the chassis for a $15 wrist adapter from Shenzhen that finally made good on the promise of colorful plastic Royal Oaks everyone wanted.

Queues are already forming outside Swatch stores. Whether they're there for the pocket watch or for the parts, only time will tell.