Patrick Schwarzenegger wears an Apple Watch

The Ratliffs cross the resort together one evening in the third season of The White Lotus, and the camera catches Saxon's left wrist as his hand drops toward his pocket: a black rectangle of a watch, its digital crown and side button glinting. It is an Apple Watch. Patrick Schwarzenegger plays Saxon, the eldest child of a wealthy North Carolina finance family vacationing in Thailand, and the household's self-styled alpha, the kind of son who tracks his protein intake and his portfolio with the same seriousness.

The Apple Watch is the cheap one. Saxon's other watch, the one GQ's watch editor singled out when the season aired in 2025, is a Hublot Big Bang, a five-figure Swiss watch built to be noticed; his mother Victoria wears a Rolex Day-Date. Against that hardware the Apple Watch is the timepiece anyone can buy, which is exactly why it suits him. It is the optimizer's instrument, the thing that closes his activity rings and grades his sleep, then hands him a verdict each morning on whether he measured up.

So the man with the loudest watch in the family spends this scene wearing the cheapest thing on his arm. His Hublot runs to five figures and does nothing but keep time. The Apple Watch he has on tonight cost a few hundred dollars, and it is the only one of the two that keeps score.