Two Sizes, One Beast: Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak Offshore Goes Bold for Summer

27 June, 2026

There’s something fitting about Audemars Piguet timing its latest Royal Oak Offshore drop to summer — this is, after all, the watch that earned the nickname “The Beast” back in 1993 for being too oversized, too brash, too much. More than three decades later, that defiant spirit is very much alive in two fresh capsules: a trio of 37mm chronographs and a trio of 42mm chronographs, each leaning hard into colour as a statement.

Start with the smaller of the two. The 37mm Selfwinding Chronograph collection marks the debut of Calibre 6401 in the Offshore line — a new in-house movement that’s already been doing the rounds in the regular Royal Oak Chronograph, now filtering down here. It replaces the venerable Calibre 2385, a workhorse that powered the line for nearly thirty years, so this is a genuine generational shift rather than a cosmetic refresh. The new calibre is slimmer, which has allowed AP to shave down the case itself, and for the first time on this size, the movement is visible through a sapphire caseback — Côtes de Genève finishing and a rhodium-toned 22-carat pink gold rotor included.

Colour does the heavy lifting on the dial side. A turquoise titanium piece kicks things off, joined by a pink titanium version with a diamond-set bezel, and a pastel light-blue model in 18-carat pink gold, also diamond-rimmed. Small but telling tweaks — enlarged Tapisserie squares, redesigned hands, the date shifted from 4:30 to 6 o’clock for cleaner symmetry — show how much thought went into making these feel new rather than just recoloured.

The 42mm trio takes a different, more motorsport-flavoured approach. Powered by Calibre 4404 — an integrated flyback chronograph rather than the simpler vertical-clutch construction in the 37mm — these watches lean into a dashboard-inspired aesthetic. Pops of pink, turquoise, yellow and orange appear on the tachymeter scales and sub-counters, deliberately echoing the instrument clusters of racing boats and cars, which is a nice nod given the Offshore’s own origin story in high-performance offshore racing.

Three colourways here too: a stainless steel piece in black with pink accents, a titanium version contrasting yellow and turquoise against dark grey, and a steel model where orange energises an otherwise monochrome silver dial. All three come on textured calfskin straps rather than rubber, colour-matched to their respective dials, and all are notably more robust on paper — 100m water resistance versus 50m, and a punchier 70-hour power reserve compared to the 37mm’s 55 hours.

Taken together, the two capsules read less like a single release and more like AP covering both ends of the Offshore’s identity at once: the 37mm pieces softening the Beast’s edges with precious metals and diamonds for a more jewellery-adjacent crowd, while the 42mm keeps things unapologetically sporty and oversized. Different calibres, different intentions, but the same restless, slightly provocative DNA that’s defined this collection since Emmanuel Gueit first sketched it in the 1980s. Whichever size you gravitate to, this is the Offshore reminding everyone it was never really built to behave.