New Tudor Heritage Black Bay Fifty-Eight 925 Replica Watch 79010SG-0002

Tudor 2022 Watches and Wonders: Black Bay Professional Edition

Tudor has announced several new watches for 2022, including the controversial Explorer II riff called the Black Bay Pro.

Black Bay Pro
Curiously not named "Professional", the Black Bay Pro is a 39mm diameter GMT sports watch reminiscent of a Rolex Explorer 1655, but with a dial more like an early 1960s Submariner. This isn't the first time we've seen this combination. The 42mm Rolex Explorer II uses large orange hands and sub-dials in a fixed steel bezel case. This is the right-sized version with a retro dial with a small minute track.

What did the Tudors do right?
There's a lot to like here:

39mm is a good size
The old Explorer II bezel was excellent, even with Tudor's blockier font on it (also found on the Tudor GMT bezel)
The GMT MT5652 movement has a true traveler's GMT hour hand (separate from the minute and 24-hour hand settings)
chapter ring on minute track
What the Tudors did wrong
14.6mm thick. With the Tudor flat side case, it feels really thick.
bracelet. Why can't the Tudors make a beautiful bracelet?
Snowflakes everywhere are not great.
The triangle at 12 is much smaller than other Tudors. shame.
Why is everything "Black Bay"?
Tudor has named every sports watch it has sold over the past few years as "Black Bay." This is confusing because some are larger at 41mm with a rotating bezel and some are 36mm without a bezel at all.

Because of the existence of the Black Bay 41mm with a diving bezel, 41mm as a chronograph, 39mm as a Black Bay 58, and 36mm as a Black Bay 36, we can assume: Black Bay simply means, "It has a diving watch index. A dial, we sprinkled some snowflake hands on it.”

That's it. "Circle and bar dial, snowflake hands." The snowflake index is Pelagos.

All I can say is what I said repeatedly on the Hourtime Show podcast: Naming is hard. Maybe it's too hard for Tudor to come up with a name to differentiate a smooth bezel watch from a small diver, a small diver from a big diver, and any diver and a chronograph?

Tudor lives in fear
For a company whose motto is #BornToDare even after its ambassadorial relationship with Lady Gaga ended, Tudor has a very narrow path. They had nearly failed in the American market, and with their revival, they decided the way forward was vintage style watches, and steel and gold models.

In contrast, Rolex makes modern, shiny jewelry watches. Every chance to make something more reflective, shinier, or catch light as the watch spins, has been caught. Rolex also lived in fear and had to take a very narrow path, conservatively making shinier versions of past models.

The index is platinum. The hands are curved or slanted, not flat. The bezel is ceramic chrome and filled with platinum. Whenever they make a mistake, clients and fans tell them: the 214270 with short-handed syndrome, the Air-King they doubled down on, the 41mm DJ and Day-Date, and even the new left-handed GMT Master II.

Tudor was founded to make watches affordable to the average person, men's watches that work in harsh conditions, with a water-resistant Oyster case and a permanent self-winding movement, at a "medium" or "more modest" price. ". The original ad featured an illustration of a man using a jackhammer and claimed that the Tudor had survived a million blows from the chisel unharmed.