Piaget Altiplano: Ultra-Thin Guide, References, Calibers and Pricing
The Piaget Altiplano is the ultra-thin dress watch that most other ultra-thin dress watches are measured against. Piaget has been chasing thinness since 1957, when it introduced the hand-wound caliber 9P at just 2mm, and the Altiplano name has carried that obsession forward for decades. The modern collection runs from clean 38mm and 40mm hand-wound pieces you can actually buy and wear every day, up to record-setting exercises like the 900P, the automatic 910P, and the Altiplano Ultimate Concept, which is the thinnest mechanical wristwatch in the world at 2mm total. From behind our counter on 47th Street, the Altiplano is a watch we respect and one we watch carefully on the secondary market, because Piaget pricing behaves differently from the steel-sports crowd and you need to know that going in. We buy and sell Piaget every week, so what follows is written from the check-writing side, not from a catalog.
Specifications
History
Buying Guide
Pricing & Market Data
Cultural Significance
Collector's Lore
The number every Piaget collector knows is 1957, the year of the caliber 9P at 2mm, because that single movement is the origin point for the entire ultra-thin race that the industry is still running today. The Altiplano Ultimate Concept carries a piece of that history in its own dimensions: the finished 2mm watch is the same total thickness as the bare 9P caliber alone, which is the kind of detail that makes watchmakers quiet. The Ultimate Concept also filed five patents on the way to production, with gear wheels as thin as 0.12mm and a sapphire crystal down to 0.2mm, and its absolute slenderness came from fusing the mainplate, the case, and the bezel into a single component. It took its first beat on February 7, 2017 at 7:47pm, a date Piaget records precisely because the R&D ran four years. The other piece of lore worth knowing is the 900P trick: to hit 3.65mm in 2014, Piaget did not thin down a normal movement, it turned the caseback into the mainplate, so the geartrain bolts directly into the case. That is why servicing these record pieces goes back to Piaget, and why a collector who owns one treats the caseback as part of the movement, not as a lid.
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