Most Overrated Watches of 2026
When it comes to watches, “overrated” is always going to be a loaded word. Before we go any further, it is worth saying clearly that this article is not intended as a hit piece on brands, collectors, or specific models. In many cases, the watches featured here are genuinely excellent, beautifully made, and loved for very good reasons.
This article is based less on a hardline stance from us, and more on the conversations happening around the watch world right now. We have taken into account feedback from our readers, comments across forums, social media discussions, collector sentiment, and the broader tone of the internet in 2026. In other words, this is not simply a list of watches we dislike. It is a look at the models that are most often described as receiving more praise, more hype, or more attention than some enthusiasts feel they truly deserve.
That also means “overrated” does not mean “bad.” A watch can be brilliant and still be overrated. Sometimes the issue is price. Sometimes it is scarcity. Sometimes it is social media momentum. And sometimes a watch becomes so universally recommended that its reputation starts to outgrow the experience of actually owning and wearing it.
With that in mind, here we go…
1. Rolex Submariner Date
This is the king of default good taste. It is the answer most people give when they want to sound sensible, successful, and impossible to argue with. We all know those people. And that is exactly why the Submariner belongs here.
The Submariner Date is not overrated because it is a bad watch. It is overrated because it gets treated like the only correct answer to the luxury sports watch question. That is the real issue. The modern Sub wins before the contest even starts. Not because it is always the most interesting, best value, or most exciting option, but because its reputation walks into the room five minutes before the watch does.
At this point, buying a Submariner feels less like making a watch decision and more like signing up to a very expensive social consensus. People do not just buy the Sub. They buy the comfort of knowing nobody will question it. It is the horological equivalent of ordering the burger at the most expensive restaurant in town and then telling everyone it was obviously the right choice.
That is what makes it overrated. The conversation around the Submariner is now bigger than the lived experience of owning one. It is constantly praised as the perfect one watch collection, yet for many buyers the real journey involves rising prices, availability theatre, and the nagging suspicion that they bought the reputation first and the watch second. The debate is no longer about whether it is good. Of course it is good. The real question is whether it still deserves quite this much mythology.
2. Tissot PRX Powermatic 80
This one may cause a riot. Personally, this watch was one of the first I thought of when we sat with a coffee discussing overrated watches, but honestly, it might be one of the most relatable picks here.
The PRX exploded because it hit all the right modern triggers: integrated bracelet styling, strong wrist shots, recognisable 1970s cues, Swiss branding, and a price point that felt attainable enough to make people feel clever. But by the time a watch becomes the answer to every budget recommendation, it also becomes ripe for backlash. That shift is easy to spot in collector circles, where plenty of enthusiasts still defend the PRX, while others argue that the Powermatic 80 version in particular never quite lived up to the noise.
The key point here is that the PRX is not overrated because it is bad value in absolute terms. I’ve had one. They’re great. It is overrated because it was treated like a cheat code. For a while, the coverage around it made it sound as though Tissot had single-handedly democratised cool. In reality, it is a stylish, mass-market watch that looks fantastic in photos and works brilliantly for some people, but leaves others a bit cold the second they actually handle it. The PRX did not become overrated on the wrist. It became overrated in content.
That gap between screen appeal and wrist appeal is the killer point. We're at that restaurant again, and the PRX is the watch equivalent of swearing that it's the best in town, but once the food arrives, half the table is politely pretending to enjoy it.
Credit - Rolex
3. Rolex GMT Master II “Pepsi”
It’s them lot again. If the Submariner is the default icon, the Pepsi is the hype machine with a bezel.
This is one of the clearest examples of market narrative running wild. The moment there is even a whisper of discontinuation, the market behaves like someone has shouted “last boarding call” in a room full of men wearing loafers without socks.
That makes it perfect for this article because the Pepsi is now loved in layers. People love the history, the colourway, the travel watch identity, the bracelet options, the market status, the fact everyone else wants one, and the fact that not everyone can get one. At some point, the actual watch has to ask for a turn.
And when it does, here is the uncomfortable truth. It is still just a brilliant steel GMT with a very famous bezel. The hysteria around it has become so inflated that any sober assessment gets drowned out by discontinuation gossip and dealer panic. The watch is good. The collective behaviour around it is ridiculous.
4. Cartier Santos
Cartier has genuinely been on a tear with younger buyers, and the Santos sits right in the middle of that shift. It is handsome, recognisable, historically significant, and very easy to photograph. More importantly, it now gets recommended with the kind of certainty usually reserved for oxygen. Want something classy? Santos. Want a daily wearer with flair? Santos. Want a less obvious luxury choice? Somehow, also Santos.
And that is where the overrated case comes in. The Santos has moved from being a great option to becoming an internet-approved personality. It gets praised not just for what it is, but for what owning it says about you. It signals taste. It suggests you are above the usual steel sports clichés. Which is funny, because once a watch becomes the universally approved way to show individuality, it is not individuality anymore. It is uniform with screws.
That is the key point. The Santos is not overrated because it is a bad watch. Far from it. It is overrated because it has become a safe choice.
None of that makes it undeserving. It just means the applause is now slightly louder than the performance. The Santos is the watch world’s favourite way of saying, “I’m not following the crowd,” while standing in quite a large crowd.
5. Omega x Swatch MoonSwatch
The MoonSwatch was one of the biggest watch stories of the decade, and three years on, it is still dividing collectors. Looking back, the conversation around it has been brutal in places. Plenty of people still praise it for bringing new buyers into the hobby, which is fair enough, but just as many have questioned the quality, the durability, and whether the product itself ever really justified the absolute circus surrounding it.
And that is exactly why it belongs here. The MoonSwatch is arguably the clearest modern example of hype overwhelming product reality. It was sold as democratic fun, and there is nothing wrong with that. But the way people spoke about it during peak mania, you would have thought civilisation had finally solved luxury. At its peak, people were queueing for it like it was the second coming, only to get home and realise they had essentially bought a very charismatic souvenir.
That is the heart of the argument. The MoonSwatch made the Speedmaster conversation bigger, louder, and far more accessible. What it did not necessarily do was make the product itself worthy of the cultural weight people piled onto it. The MoonSwatch is not just overrated. It is perhaps the most successful example of an event being mistaken for a watch.
6. The Homage Market
Right, let’s stop dancing around it. Homage watches are massively overrated and just wrong.
Not legally wrong, usually. Not mechanically wrong, always. Spiritually wrong. Morally adjacent to wrong. The sort of wrong that sits in the same family as taking your own teabags on holiday.
Because that is the real issue with the homage market. It is built on the idea that you can borrow all of the charm, identity, and design language of an iconic watch without doing any of the hard work, creative risk, or brand building that made the original desirable in the first place. It is watch collecting for people who want the applause without the performance.
And yes, we know the usual defence. “It’s just affordable design.” “It’s an accessible alternative.” “I’m buying it for the specs.” Fine. Lovely. But let’s not pretend most homage watches are being bought because somebody was gripped by a deep appreciation for handset finishing and bezel action. They are being bought because someone wants to look like they bought something else.
That is why the whole category feels so off. A good affordable watch stands on its own feet. A good microbrand creates its own look, its own personality, and its own reason to exist. A homage, by contrast, walks into the room wearing somebody else’s name badge and hoping no one reads it too closely. It has the same energy as those blokes you see at military parades wearing medals they clearly didn’t earn. From a distance, it might pass. Up close, it is just a costume with ambition.
That is why the homage market deserves a proper slamming. It is not just overrated. It is fundamentally wrong. It reduces watch collecting to an exercise in visual shorthand, where looking vaguely like the thing matters more than actually buying into what made the thing matter in the first place.
At best, a homage is a compromise dressed up as cleverness. At worst, it is cosplay for men who want a Rolex-shaped outcome on an AliExpress budget and the moral high ground thrown in for free.
Winding Things Up
The funny thing about overrated watches is that most of them are still good. Some of them are excellent. That is what makes the whole subject interesting. Nobody cares about a bad watch being ignored. What gets people talking is when a good watch gets elevated to untouchable status, wrapped in so much hype, status, scarcity, or online approval that saying “it’s not for me” suddenly feels like a rebellious act.
And that is really the thread running through this list. The Submariner is trapped under the weight of its own reputation. The Pepsi has become a rumour you can wear. The Santos is now as much a social signal as it is a design icon. The PRX spent too long being sold as the answer to everything. The MoonSwatch proved that marketing can be more powerful than metallurgy. And the homage market, perhaps most shamelessly of all, continues to thrive on the fantasy that looking like the thing is basically the same as buying the thing.
None of this means you are wrong to love any of them. If a Submariner is your dream watch, brilliant. If the Santos makes you smile every time you glance down at your wrist, even better. If your PRX gets more wear than anything else you own, that is what matters. The point of this article is not to police taste. It is to puncture certainty.
Because in 2026, the most overrated watches are not always the ones with the worst specs, the weakest finishing, or the highest prices. More often, they are the ones people are no longer allowed to judge honestly. The ones that arrive with the verdict already written.
And in watch collecting, that is usually the moment a watch stops being interesting and starts becoming content.