Whilst others have stuck with tried and true designs and incrementalism. If we stick with that appreciation of the traditional generation of watchmaking, ALS would be my vote to replace AP (side note: surprisingly, sales of CODE alone recently equalled ALS global unit sales - pretty impressive for a few years!).
Anyway, I do feel AP may deserve to join a new category - as unlike the others it has done a lot more to provide more modern and avant garde approaches to its original innovations, and made significant changes to design and materials philosophy.
It's a shame that AP is a bit under appreciated as the first to make AND modernize its approaches to a Minute Repeater, Automatic Tourbillon, Skeleton, Starwheel, Ultra Thin, etc etc - and my guess is that we will see a modern interpretation of a PC with Leap Year pretty soon...The Universelle was an astonishing achievement and more complicated than the Patek 6300 and equally as complicated as the VC Celestia, yet because it was in a modern CODE case brings the worthiness down. Oddly the Universelle is water resistant (just like the VC), usable, and wearable.
My suggestion - I think next year with the 150th of AP, is probably a year where AP does diverge from the "traditional" holy trinity. Besides, it's already exceeded PP and VC in terms of demand, maybe it's time for the old definitions to go?
Besides, with Independents now leading in terms of desirability, does
anybody care about these old monikers anymore?
Cheers
Peter