AUDEMARS Royal Oak Offshore DIVER 42MM

AP has given their Royal Oak Offshore Diver AKA ROO DIVER a bit of tweak for 2021 with a home improvement or two that will for starters make strap changing a whole lot easier plus one or two cosmetic enhancements that truly bring the watch which is now over a decade old into the 2020s. Released in three colors; blue, grey and khaki the 2021 ROO Diver’s first noticeable change is in the shortening fattening of its gold appliqué indexes which can be found against what AP proudly refer to as Méga Tapisserie AKA “waffle”. For the life of me I really can’t decide if they look better or worse for it the new stubby markers that is. I would imagine that they are using the latest in lume technology so will at least provide just as much glow as before. Also on the new khaki variant the hands and indexes make use of yellow rather than what was white gold – in addition to this the 15-min scale on its internal dive-time bezel is in a matching gold tone. Okay so what else has changed? The crowns are made of ceramic these days – on the version I have they’re rubberized but I feel this update was made a few years back already perhaps when they started equipping the ROO Divers with exhibition case-backs – which leads me to the next update.

Traditionally the ROO Dive has always come with a solid gold rotor which on the older models might as well have been made from solid lead because they’re hidden away behind a steel case-back; 

however for 2021 the watch no longer uses gold for its oscillator rather it has a new high-tech look and is semi-skeltonized in a graphite grey material – not sure what it is, sorry.

And finally the 2021 ROO Diver now comes with a modern quick-release strap changing system so that faffing about with fiddly strap changing tools, scratching the lugs to buggery etc. etc. is a thing of the past. 

Once AP’s lovely new Royal Oak Offshore Diver gets its official release (hopefully by early summer) it will have an MSRP of circa 21’000CHF.

Thoughts? Still not sure about those stubby new dial markers, but I do like the new rotor design and strap changing system, and for sure the Khaki variant is sexy as while the Grey variant is boring as. But what do you think?