Care to elaborate? It it from your watchmaker's point of view?
Well, not having a stab at anyone, but saying a Dufour is a bargain and showing a rare vintage PP for comparison is sort of missing the point of the Dufour. While both are collectible, they are so for very different reasons.
One is, for the time it was produced, a very complicated watch that was made in a rare case material for this maker, with only a few examples made. The Simplicity is not about rare materials and complications, but about...simplicity. It's about making a very simple watch, and making it as perfectly as it can possibly be made. While the finish on the PP is admirable, the Simplicity is on an entirely different level.
I've been through Patek's factory in the Plan-les-Ouates area of Geneva - it's a large corporate factory that makes widgets that happen to be watches. I know this isn't the location where this particular PP was made, but the idea here is that even though PP doesn't make a lot of watches compared to the mid-level brands, they are still a mass producer of watches on an industrial scale.
I've also been in Mr. Dufour's atelier, and it's a small shop with various machines, where a very few watchmakers (sometimes just the man himself) toil over parts at length, finishing them by hand. For example, I shot this video of one watchmaker there polishing countersinks:
The kind of work that goes on in this shop is what the marketers of all the Swiss brands who produce watches using highly automated processes want you to believe goes into their watches. Very few places actually make watches like this. No shortcut methods are used, and no corners are cut. To me, there's just no comparison.
Cheers, Al
