There’s a moment when you first put on the APS Factory RM055 that doesn’t make sense. You’ve seen the photos. You know the dimensions — 49.94 by 42.70mm, a tonneau case that should dominate the wrist. You brace for it. And then it lands on your arm and you think: that’s it?
Not because it’s underwhelming. Because it’s almost weightless.
This is the first thing the RM055 does to you, and it does it before you’ve even looked at the watch properly. The black NTPT carbon case — that dense, cross-layered material that looks like it should be heavy — sits on the wrist like it isn’t there. You keep glancing down to check. It’s still there. It just doesn’t feel like a watch is supposed to feel.
Richard Mille built the original RM055 around a single obsession: Bubba Watson needed to forget he was wearing a watch while swinging a golf club. The forces at the bottom of a pro golf swing exceed 500G. Most watches would disintegrate. The solution wasn’t to make the watch tougher in the conventional sense — it was to make the entire object so light, so structurally integrated, that mass itself became the enemy. NTPT carbon. Skeletonized movement. Titanium hardware. Every gram interrogated and either justified or removed.
What you end up with is a watch that feels philosophically different from anything else on a wrist.
The APS Factory Richard Mille RM055 version reviewed here takes that philosophy seriously. And the first real test isn’t the movement or the case finishing — it’s that carbon.
NTPT isn’t just carbon fiber. It’s carbon fiber produced by layering ultra-thin plies at varying angles, then compressing them under heat until the layers fuse into a single material. The result is a surface that doesn’t behave like other carbons. In direct light it develops a faint sheen, almost metallic, the weave lines catching and releasing reflections as the angle changes. In shadow it goes completely flat and black, absorbing everything. The APS case reproduces this behavior accurately. Run a finger across the surface and there’s a directional texture — not rough, but not smooth either. It has a grain to it. You can feel which direction the layers run.
Most people who pick up this watch spend the first two minutes just turning it in the light. That’s not an accident. It’s what the material does.
Then you look through it.
The RM055 doesn’t have a dial in any meaningful sense. What it has is a movement that you’re looking directly at, framed by a case that exists mainly to hold everything in place. Bridges. Gear trains. The barrel. The balance wheel ticking away at the edge of the structure. The whole mechanical argument of the watch, laid out in three dimensions, visible from the front and partially visible from the side.
The clone RMUL2 movement inside the APS version handles this exposure without embarrassment. The architecture is correct — bridges positioned where they should be, the gear train following the right layout, the overall visual weight of the movement matching the original’s proportions. Finishing on individual components is clean. There are no obvious machining marks on visible surfaces, and the hand-winding feel has a positive engagement that doesn’t feel like you’re fighting the movement.
What it isn’t is a Swiss-certified manufacture movement. Anyone who’s handled the original extensively will know the difference in finishing depth. But for a watch where the movement architecture is the visual experience, getting the layout and proportions right matters more than it would on a conventional dial watch — and APS gets them right.
The spline screws deserve a paragraph of their own.
On most watches, case screws are either hidden or decorative. On the RM055 they’re neither — they’re structural, part of the actual assembly system that holds the case together, and they’re displayed openly as a design element. Six of them sit along the bezel, shaped like tiny flowers, each one a small exhibition of what the watch thinks is worth showing off.
APS renders them correctly. Correct geometry, correct surface treatment, sitting flush with the carbon in a way that reads as integrated rather than applied. It’s one of those details that matters disproportionately because it’s one of the first things anyone familiar with the reference will look at. Get it wrong and the whole watch looks wrong. Get it right and it anchors everything else.
The RM055 — original or APS Factory super clone Richard Mille — isn’t a collection of components. It’s an argument. The argument is that a watch can shed every conventional idea about what a watch should look like and still be entirely coherent. No dial. No applied indices. No hierarchy between “the part you read the time on” and “the part that makes it work.” Just the mechanism, housed in something that weighs almost nothing, on your wrist.
Whether the APS version is worth your attention depends entirely on whether that argument interests you. If it does — if you find yourself drawn to movement architecture, to carbon construction, to the specific visual logic of a fully open watch — then this is one of the more serious Richard Mille RM055 replica watches available. It earns that assessment not through a checklist of features but through the thing that matters most with this model: it makes you want to keep looking at it.
That’s what the original does. And that’s not easy to replicate.
