The Connected line launched in November 2015 at $1,500, built on Android Wear through a partnership with Intel and Google, and pitched as a luxury answer to mainstream wearables, per Trusted Reviews. A decade is a long run for any smartwatch platform, let alone one competing against companies that ship new silicon every year.

By the time The New York Times surveyed the category earlier this year, TAG Heuer was the only one of those four Swiss luxury brands still putting out new smartwatch models. Watch-industry consultant Oliver R. Müller, who runs the consultancy LuxeConsult, told the paper the category had become "a niche, loss-generating business with no emotional context and no prospects," adding that "the war is over" and the train had left the station for Apple, Samsung and Garmin. That's one consultant's reading, not an industry audit, but it tracks with what TAG Heuer's peers were actually doing: quietly stepping back rather than renewing.

Viewed that way, the story isn't TAG Heuer abandoning a market that was working for everyone else. It's TAG Heuer being the last company still showing up to a party the other guests had already left.

CEO Frédéric Arnault laid out his priorities a few months before the reported shutdown, telling WatchPro that his focus was "a gradual repositioning and move upmarket in traditional watchmaking," citing mechanical projects like Plasma and Solargraph. Connected didn't come up as a centerpiece of that vision. Neither did software.

Around the same time, TAG Heuer cut 25% of its global points of sale, shrinking its retail footprint to under 3,000 locations while, in Arnault's words, "strengthening our partnership with the points of sale that we have kept." He called brand desirability the company's "cornerstone," with marketing leaning harder into motorsport heritage through Monaco and Formula 1.

That's a strategy built on scarcity, exclusivity and decades of heritage. It sits oddly next to a product category that, almost by definition, needs annual hardware cycles and constant software support to stay relevant. One side of the business is trying to feel timeless. The other needs a firmware update every few months just to keep working with the latest iPhone.

Arnault told Europa Star, in comments reported by WatchPro, that Connected watches made up 15% of TAG Heuer's turnover, calling it "a good ratio." He also noted that traditional watchmaking was growing faster, meaning Connected had to expand just to hold its share of the business. If the shutdown report holds up, that 15% figure suggests scale alone didn't settle the strategic question. Revenue share isn't profitability, and nothing in the public record shows what it actually cost TAG Heuer to keep Connected running, or whether that cost was climbing faster than the revenue it brought in.

What makes the reported exit harder to square is the timing. TAG Heuer launched the Connected Calibre E5 in October 2025, replacing Google's Wear OS with its own in-house TAG Heuer OS, a substantial technical undertaking less than a year before production reportedly stopped, according to Trusted Reviews. The E5 also earned Apple's Made for iPhone certification, reflecting the company's own figure that roughly 70% of its smartwatch customers carry iPhones. That's not evidence of customers drifting toward Apple's hardware. It's proof that even a fully proprietary luxury OS still has to play nicely inside ecosystems TAG Heuer doesn't control.

Arnault flagged this tension years earlier. In a 2023 interview with SJX Watches, he said he didn't believe mechanical and connected technology could be merged without compromise: "If you want the best in Connected technology, it has to be fully Connected. If you want the best in mechanical technology, it has to be fully mechanical. And we don't like compromise." Building a full in-house operating system didn't resolve that tension so much as raise the stakes, since owning your own OS means owning every future update, every app-compatibility fix, every shift in iOS or Android that might break something. It's hard to look at a company simultaneously closing retail doors and funding mechanical watchmaking and conclude that an expanding software commitment was still the priority.

None of this means Connected watches vanish overnight. Existing inventory, including the Calibre E5, is expected to stay available through the end of 2027, and the E5 still appears in TAG Heuer's catalogue, per Trusted Reviews. Anyone buying one today isn't buying a dead device, at least not yet.

The open question is what happens after that. TAG Heuer hasn't said how long it plans to maintain software updates or after-sales servicing, and basic hardware repairs, batteries and straps are a separate issue from software support that the company also hasn't addressed directly. The risk isn't that these watches stop working the moment support ends. It's the slower kind of decay: security patches that stop arriving, companion-app features that quietly break, compatibility gaps that widen with every new iPhone or Android release. Because TAG Heuer OS is proprietary rather than built on a widely maintained platform like Wear OS, that risk is real, and nothing in the reporting confirms a timeline for it.

This is where the gap between luxury watchmaking and consumer tech stops being abstract. A mechanical TAG Heuer keeps running on a mainspring and a balance wheel, no server required. A smartwatch is only as good as whoever is still writing code for it, and right now nobody at TAG Heuer has said how long that will be.

The evidence doesn't prove TAG Heuer planned this exit from the start. The reporting remains unconfirmed, and the company was still shipping new hardware and software months before production reportedly stopped. What the evidence does show is a decision that lines up cleanly with everything TAG Heuer had already said about itself: a move upmarket, a smaller and more exclusive retail footprint, and a smartwatch category its closest peers had already stepped away from.

For anyone who already owns a Connected watch, the next few months matter more than the last decade did. Watch for an official statement on production, a stated end date for software support, clarity on what happens to app and account data, confirmation that repairs and battery service will stay available, and warranty terms for any E5 units still sold through 2027. TAG Heuer built its reputation on watches that outlast their owners. Whether that reputation survives contact with a product that needs a software team behind it is the question this reported exit actually raises.