Google Glass..... Part 2??

Apple made a play for the truly affluent Monday with a watch — priced as high as $17,000 — that is aimed at shaking up not Samsung or Microsoft, but some of the most iconic fixtures of the fashion world.

The computer company has long priced its gadgets and laptops at a premium over other electronics. Some middle-class consumers may have had to stretch a bit to buy the latest gear. Yet the products were still affordable enough to become common fixtures at home and work.

But with a timepiece wrapped in 18-karat gold, Apple is now aiming to create something no consumer electronics company has ever tried before: a status symbol for the 1 percent. That aspiration makes sense for a company that is trying to portray itself as a luxury goods maker and perhaps because of the increasing spending power of the super wealthy around the globe, retail analysts said.

Still, the $10,000 starting price tag of the gold watch provoked audible gasps in the audience when it was announced by Apple chief executive Tim Cook at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Apple appeared to be going for a different reaction when it introduced the watch with a film of fashion model Christy Turlington Burns wearing the device while speaking to a sick mother in an African hospital and then running a half-marathon near Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.

Retail analysts are split on whether Apple, for all its success, can cast itself as the Silicon Valley equivalent of Rolex, Louis Vutton or Chanel. That fans of the computer company camp overnight for the next version of its iPhone or iPad may discourage the affluent from visiting a store to buy a gold watch.