Marc Newson is one of the most important designers alive. The Australian created the Apple Watch alongside Jony Ive in 2014. Now he’s back doing what he does best – making beautiful, precise mechanical objects, with three new clocks for Swiss watchmaker Jaeger-LeCoultre.
The standout piece, for me, is the Memovox Travel Clock, and it’s the most accessible clock here. It’s a perfect titanium sphere, 69mm across and just 18mm thick – small enough to sit in the palm of your hand. It looks so clean and elegant, exactly what a mechanical clock from Apple would look like.
The clock features a brand new in-house movement, Calibre 256, wound by hand. Its most impressive trick is a 12-day power reserve – a huge relief for travellers who don’t want to fuss over rewinding.
The dial is a clever, graphic arrangement of circles within circles, with a colour-changing power reserve display that flips from orange to blue as the days tick down. It’s really intuitive and clever.
Newson has collaborated with Schedoni, the legendary Italian leather house famous for Ferrari interiors, to create a bespoke travel kit. The clock nestles inside a tan cowhide pouch, which slots into a larger travel pack that holds three wristwatches, plus a magnifying glass, strap tool and screwdriver. Production is limited to 100 numbered pieces per year.
Apple x Atmos?
The other two pieces are equally impressive, if slightly less accessible. The Atmos Designer 568 is a sequel to Newson’s 2016 version of Jaeger-LeCoultre’s iconic air-powered clock – one that runs indefinitely on tiny fluctuations in room temperature, needing no winding or batteries.
This new version adds sunrise and sunset displays and an Equation of Time complication to its monochromatic dial, all housed inside a hand-blown Baccarat crystal case that took nearly four years to develop.
Its moon phase is accurate to within one day every 4087 years. Only 50 are made per year.
The third clock, the Atmos Hybris Artistica Tellurium, is the most complex Atmos ever built. Its glass globe cabinet is engraved with 64 constellations and set with 539 sapphires representing the principal stars.
Inside, a three-dimensional mechanical model of the solar system tracks Earth, the Sun and Moon in real time. Just three will ever be made.
All three clocks debut at Milan Design Week this week, running until 26 April 2026.
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