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Watches - Are These the Best of Times or Worst of Times?

Jewel count was the SINAD of wrist watches. What happened to that?

It's a manual, so the count will always be lower. :)

Yikes! What's the biggest?

As a rule, I wear 46 but mostly 48. But I have bigger ones, but that can get comical. I am a sizeable guy so it fits me best. I have 2 44mm Panerais I hardly wear, I want to sell them and get one of their new 47mm.
 
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My biggest is a 48, but pictures are made with a phone from 6 inches and greatly magnify the apparent size of a watch due to perspective.

Here’s is a closeup from this morning of my 39.5mm Breguet Type XX:

IMG_0936-dsqz.JPG


And here is a 48mm Concord C1 Mk II Chronograph, but taken from about four feet (using a mirror):

IMG_2647.JPG


The Breguet actually looks a little bigger, because of perspective distortion. The Concord photo is more like how others see a watch on our wrists.

Jewel count was never the SINAD—that would be positional accuracy in seconds/day in each of five or six positions. Jewel count and metallurgy claims are more like amplifier type or the number and size of filter capacitors—not necessarily indicative of anything by itself but could be useful if appropriately applied.

All a hand-wind watch ever needed was 17 jewels—2 bearings and 2 cap jewels for the balance staff, an impulse jewel on the balance staff to rock the pallet fork, 2 jewels for the pallet fork pivots, 2 jewels on the pallet fork to engage the teeth on the escape wheel, 2 jewels on the escape wheel pivots, 2 more on the 4th wheel pivots, 2 more on the 3rd wheel pivots, and 2 on the center wheel pivots. Jewel inflation added cap jewels to the escape wheel or maybe on the barrel bridge (which is actually useful for long-term durability).

Watches intended for extreme chronometer-level accuracy would add those extra jewels to reduce train friction just that little bit more. So you might see handwind movements with 19-23 jewels, but even these were as much marketing as anything. American brands used extra jewels in railroad-grade watches which were required to be accurate to better than current chronometer standards, for example.

(Automatics add jewels in the winding train, and chronographs may add jewels in the chronograph train. My Heuer Monaco with its high-spec modular chronograph movement has 51 jewels, but an integrated chronograph would not need nearly that many. The Zenith El Primero has 31, for example.)

We really no longer have jewel inflation like we did back in the 50’s and 60’s when the USA charged a high tariff for imported watches with more than 17 jewels, incentivizing American companies to inflate jewels counts as a marketing point. My 1958 Bulova His Excellency has 23 jewels, but doesn’t really benefit much from the last 2 or 4 of them. That movement was made in Queens, NY and not subject to the tariff.

Rick “much ado about nothing” Denney
 
What have the intelligent watches (Apple, Fitbit, Garmin, etc.) done to the watch market? Have they raised the average watch price while devastating the low end (Casio, Timex, no-name) brands? Have these intelligent products also hurt the mid to high-end products like Rolex and Tag?
It's a great example of the "Starbucks Effect" which I just think is fascinating. Starbucks' meteoric rise in the 90s obviously put a lot of coffee shops out of business. But, paradoxically, the net result was.... way more coffee shops not owned by Starbucks, because they expanded the overall market with the overall number of coffee shops growing from "1,650 in 1991, to a remarkable 21,400 shops by 2005"[1] because the expanded the overall market and redefined it as a premium good worth paying premium money for.


[1] https://medium.com/@jmays4/expanding-coffee-industry-the-starbucks-effect-c83f253d50f9

Non-smart watches will never be as popular and ubiquitous as they were from ~1950-2000. In those days, most people needed to know what time it was, and most people wore watches. But from ~2000-2015 cellphones replaced watches for many/most people. They told time better, and you took your cellphone without everywhere anyway. A watch was functionally superfluous.

Then came smartwatches, which got people wearing watches again, and there has been an explosion of microbrands in the last ~10 years. Casio, Timex, Seiko, et al seem to be doing quite well, or at least well enough to stay in business cranking out new models. Haven't really heard of any brands going out of business or getting bought out. The price of new Rolexes has gone way up so they must be doing okay.

There seems to have been some shakeout in the low end. Seiko moved upmarket a bit. Casio remains dedicated to selling $15 watches (god bless them, and I don't mean that in the passive-aggressive Southern way) but also sells a lot of more premium $100+ and even $1000+ models.
 
It's a great example of the "Starbucks Effect" which I just think is fascinating. Starbucks' meteoric rise in the 90s obviously put a lot of coffee shops out of business. But, paradoxically, the net result was.... way more coffee shops not owned by Starbucks, because they expanded the overall market with the overall number of coffee shops growing from "1,650 in 1991, to a remarkable 21,400 shops by 2005"[1] because the expanded the overall market and redefined it as a premium good worth paying premium money for.


[1] https://medium.com/@jmays4/expanding-coffee-industry-the-starbucks-effect-c83f253d50f9

Non-smart watches will never be as popular and ubiquitous as they were from ~1950-2000. In those days, most people needed to know what time it was, and most people wore watches. But from ~2000-2015 cellphones replaced watches for many/most people. They told time better, and you took your cellphone without everywhere anyway. A watch was functionally superfluous.

Then came smartwatches, which got people wearing watches again, and there has been an explosion of microbrands in the last ~10 years. Casio, Timex, Seiko, et al seem to be doing quite well, or at least well enough to stay in business cranking out new models. Haven't really heard of any brands going out of business or getting bought out. The price of new Rolexes has gone way up so they must be doing okay.

There seems to have been some shakeout in the low end. Seiko moved upmarket a bit. Casio remains dedicated to selling $15 watches (god bless them, and I don't mean that in the passive-aggressive Southern way) but also sells a lot of more premium $100+ and even $1000+ models.
I've heard all this many times.

People wear smart watches for all sorts of reasons. My 89-year-old mother wears one because it provides a way to summon help if she falls. Her 40-year-old grand-daughter wears one because she likes to see texts without having to fish her phone out of her purse. It's the generation in between (me) that won't wear one because they are simply ugly and ubiquitous, but I've decided that the features they provide fulfill no requirements important to me.

As for cell phones rendering watches obsolete, I would argue that a surreptitious glance at one's wristwatch is much more likely to be possible than reaching over to push the button on a smart watch or a cell phone when checking the time. Polite people don't check the time when in conversation in any setting, but it's especially true in business meetings. Yet sometimes the time needs to be checked, and an actual wristwatch often provides that capability without being obvious.

It's amusing for me to observe that starting about the time of WWI, pocket watches started losing popularity in favor of wristwatches for exactly the same reason. But a hundred years later we see arguments for the modern version of a pocket watch--a cell phone--instead of a wristwatch. Whatever. I carry a cell phone because it provides a range of useful features, but it is quite often the case that fishing it out of my pocket to read the time is grossly inconvenient. Keeping cell phone batteries charged is already an annoying daily ritual that I would be happy to abandon.

I think it's more likely the case that time displays are simply everywhere now--on the dashboard of the car, in the corner of the computer display, on the microwave oven, on the TV screen, and on and on, and many people simply never got into the habit of wearing watches. Also, the casualization of dress codes and the loss of general interpersonal politeness (as it was taught decades back, and no, I'm not making a value judgment--I like plainspokenness), coupled with the ubiquity of cheap plastic watches, has lowered the value of wearing a quality ("fine") watch. Wearing a cheap watch back in the 70's often meant a bracelet that would denude one's arm of hair, one painful hair at a time, and that certainly did nothing to perpetuate watch-wearing. Even Rolex was using crappy folded-sheet-metal bracelets into in the 90's.

Rick "whose quartz watches always seem to have dead batteries" Denney
 
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My traditional :facepalm: smartwatch Withings Scanwatch 2 used when cycling/sporting for hearth registration calculating calories burning) don't like to wear a Polar breast strap. Daily watch my 36 year old vintage Casio 863.

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I've heard all this many times...

Indeed, mechanical watches have been expected to die before. And during the 70s they nearly did. It was during the late 70s that my Dad bought me a mechanical watch, a Certina:

certina and s.jpg


Many years later, in University in Germany, I was working in a large corporation as an intern, and the department boss wore a beautiful watch (I was still wearing the Certina - until it got stolen during a vacation in Greece), and during a team dinner I was bold enough to start a conversation about it. Mechanical watches hadn't quite recovered yet, but Blancpain held the flag high - and that's what he was wearing. I told myself that one day I'd get one of those. And during the 90s I started to build my collection.

People forget that mechanical watches went through that huge bump in the road, and it wasn't until the mid-90s or so that they became the more popular "man bling" they are now. And people also forget that mechanical watches have never really been about the mere function of telling time. They are a tribute to craftsmanship, to quality. A smartphone has zero lasting value in any way. We toss them away without a thought. A mechanical watch often symbolizes a moment of success, a celebration -and every day when I look at my wrist, I remember to hold myself to a standard of "craftsmanship" in my personal and professional life.

Telling time? I never look at my smartphone to tell time. It buzzes with a reminder and I immediately know what that's about. But yeah, I look at my watch often. And sometimes I think "we've come a long way from being that student that nearly fainted when he saw the price of a Blancpain on the shop window at Wempe in Munich" :-D But... it also keeps me grounded and I am still that exact guy. :)

And I have zero snobbery in me, I would never judge anyone because they dismiss mechanical watches as something obsolete. Like many things in life... either it's your thing or it isn't. Sure one can go make the argument that in case of a catastrophic EMP a mechanical watch would have advantages, but it's not a scenario I envision... :)

On my wrist today:
20250220_082105.jpg
 
As for cell phones rendering watches obsolete,
As a watch guy I 100% agree with everything you said. :) A wristwatch is a more convenient way to check the time than the phone in your pocket - and more polite to boot, which is a severely underrated aspect. Unfortunately.

But, yours and my opinions aside... for better or worse... cell phones really did render watches obsolete in the eyes of many/most people. I don't really agree but it's what happened.

Although it does have to be said: as far as pure timekeeping goes, a cellphone does outperform a wristwatch. If you're on a network it always has the correct time with no additional effort required by the user. By extension, so do smartwatches that sync with a mobile phone. That's not a small benefit.

A watch (like the G-Shock I'm wearing now) with radio time sync gets you close, but not quite. Syncs can be finicky depending on distance from the transmitter. And a cellphone can automagically grab the correct time as soon as soon as your plane lands in a new time zone. Doesn't mean I prefer them, but, they *are* really good timekeepers. But they're no fun...:)
 
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And people also forget that mechanical watches have never really been about the mere function of telling time. They are a tribute to craftsmanship, to quality. A smartphone has zero lasting value in any way.
Amen. I look at a mechanical wristwatch and I think about how many thousands of years it took humankind to progress from sundials to a mechanical watch that anybody can afford and I am filled with awe.

(A path literally paved in blood at some points, with WWI and WWII driving the mass production and affordability of modern wristwatches...)

A cellphone is an equally amazing achievement, if not orders of magitude moreso, but... it doesn't inspire the same awe. Maybe it's *too* opaque, figuratively and literally? We can't look inside and see the little gears turning.

Mechanical watches also give me some of the same joy as hi-fi because they're, well, solved problems. A Seiko or Rolex bought today is, by any practical measure, the pinnacle of this long journey of mechanical timekeeping. The endpoint. Same with hi-fi. We're still cranking out marginal improvements but realistically, two-channel audio can't improve much more in ways that humans can hear.
 
....
Although it does have to be said: as far as pure timekeeping goes, a cellphone does outperform a wristwatch. If you're on a network it always has the correct time with no additional effort required by the user. By extension, so do smartwatches that sync with a mobile phone. That's not a small benefit.
...

To me a smartphone is a productivity tool during the day, and a reading device on the go. I spent enough time in front of computer screens. The 50% German in me likes to (1) always be on time, and (2) keep a weekly "Stammtisch" with my closest 3-4 buddies.

On (1): my watches are always set 2 minutes ahead. I want to set my own time. Try that with a radio time sync. :) It actually annoys me how often people with -supposedly- utterly accurate ways to tell the time are a few minutes late to stuff. :)

On (2): A Stammtisch means that there's a designated place where you meet once a week at a designated time. It's rare everybody shows up, but one regularly also invites other acquaintances to it. And there are rules to it - and a key one to ours is that smartphones are turned off and put away or at the center of the table. A rule I also enforce on date nights with my GF, who is addicted to hers (she's also an avid mechanical watch collector herself).

Smartphones are great, but they are also a curse when it comes to true social interaction. When discussing a topic with friends, I don't like the other person boosting their argument by looking up something online (unless we both deem it necessary). As to telling time, I truly never ever use my smartphone for that. I know when it vibrates one way or the other or gently chimes it is either a text from my GF, my family, my boss or a meeting reminder.
 
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I can't speak for larger market in general, but to me personally, these are two different applications for two different purposes. If I'm tracking my steps or doing some other exercise, I'll wear my smart watch. BTW, I mostly use it as a semi-dumb watch. This way the battery lasts me 1 month between recharges.
Now, if I'm going out and dressing up a bit, I will wear one of my mechanicals. This is akin to wearing jewelry, so it can't really be replaced by a typical smart watch with its hi-tech looks.

Smart watches created a brand new niche/market - a lot of people who wear them never really wore a traditional watch before. And the main reason they want a smart watch is because it's an extension of their smartphone and not necessarily to tell time. On the other hand, those who appreciate the craftsmanship of their mechanicals will probably not be able to replace it with a smart watch. However, those folks may still buy a smart watch as a second watch for all the benefits/convenience that it provides. It's almost like vinyl vs MP3/streaming. :)
I do the same and I've actually decided I don't care what time/date my mechanical watch says. It's not there to tell time so I don't bother to set it.
 
As a watch guy I 100% agree with everything you said. :) A wristwatch is a more convenient way to check the time than the phone in your pocket - and more polite to boot, which is a severely underrated aspect. Unfortunately.

But, yours and my opinions aside... for better or worse... cell phones really did render watches obsolete in the eyes of many/most people. I don't really agree but it's what happened.

Although it does have to be said: as far as pure timekeeping goes, a cellphone does outperform a wristwatch. If you're on a network it always has the correct time with no additional effort required by the user. By extension, so do smartwatches that sync with a mobile phone. That's not a small benefit.

A watch (like the G-Shock I'm wearing now) with radio time sync gets you close, but not quite. Syncs can be finicky depending on distance from the transmitter. And a cellphone can automagically grab the correct time as soon as soon as your plane lands in a new time zone.
Thanks for the vote of agreement, but I'm afraid I cannot fully reciprocate. Perhaps I just remember different things than you do, but clearly in my memory wristwatches were already on the way out before people started carrying cell phones. I think blaming cell phones for the trend may be a bit of ex-post-facto reconstruction, though the phones become an easy target for watch nuts. Digital time displays were ubiquitous in our lives before cell phones. My first cell phone (a Motorola bag phone) didn't even have a time display.

Catching timezones is indeed handy. I travel all the time (85 hotel nights last year just for work trips), an occasionally that feature is handy, such as when my destination is confusingly close to a timezone border. But after the first time on landing, I still don't use the cell phone for checking time--I reset my watch.

And as far as accuracy goes, who cares? Very few people need accuracy--if it's within a minute it's plenty accurate enough and I can hardly get people to show up on time for meetings within ten minutes, cell phones notwithstanding. People who need greater accuracy than that have specialized equipment for what they do--equipment that moves the time from the timekeeping device to the system that needs the timing automatically to avoid control errors.

There are those for whom accuracy is part of the hobby. I have a Certina DS1 in my collection that has a high-accuracy thermo-compensated quartz movement accurate to ten seconds a year. It's fun to think about, I suppose. I also have a railroad-approved Hamilton 992B pocket watch from 1946 that was inspected weekly for accuracy (more than 15 seconds error and it was required to be serviced at the employee's expense, but employees were not allowed to reset the watches and they were lever-set just to keep the setting job away from the stem). That was, of course, a professional requirement. I thought it was neat that the Hamilton QED that I received as a graduation present back in the 70's was accurate within 15 seconds a month, and I would tune in WWV to set it routinely. But I was a geek and that was part of the hobby--nothing in my life then or now needed that sort of accuracy for more than a day.

But I did design, operate, and manage systems that demanded precision time-of-day reference, and have specified everything from WWV clocks to Cesium-61 atomic clocks for the systems I designed. In those systems, power-line frequency, which is usually accurate enough for even high-accuracy use cases, wasn't good enough. Nobody used manual retiming from a wristwatch for those systems, ever.

Rick "in the timing business" Denney
 
As a watch guy I 100% agree with everything you said. :) A wristwatch is a more convenient way to check the time than the phone in your pocket - and more polite to boot, which is a severely underrated aspect. Unfortunately.

But, yours and my opinions aside... for better or worse... cell phones really did render watches obsolete in the eyes of many/most people. I don't really agree but it's what happened.
I concur. We gave my daughter a wristwatch when she was 8 years old and she wore it for years until the day she got her first cell phone. At that point she said she didn't need the watch anymore because she would always have the phone with her and it has a clock. I asked her the usual questions: what if your phone battery dies, what if it has a software crash, what if it falls out of her pocket and breaks, or gets immersed in water, etc. She acknowledged the possibilities but didn't care. I admire her pragmatism, minimizing the stuff she carries around every day. Many young people share her perspective. But I still wear a wrist watch for many of the reasons already stated in this thread.
 
To me a smartphone is a productivity tool during the day, and a reading device on the go. I spent enough time in front of computer screens. The 50% German in me likes to (1) always be on time, and (2) keep a weekly "Stammtisch" with my closest 3-4 buddies.

On (1): my watches are always set 2 minutes ahead. I want to set my own time. Try that with a radio time sync. :) It actually annoys me how often people with -supposedly- utterly accurate ways to tell the time are a few minutes late to stuff. :)

On (2): A Stammtisch means that there's a designated place where you meet once a week at a designated time. It's rare everybody shows up, but one regularly also invites other acquaintances to it. And there are rules to it - and a key one to ours is that smartphones are turned off and put away or at the center of the table. A rule I also enforce on date nights with my GF, who is addicted to hers (she's also an avid mechanical watch collector herself).

Smartphones are great, but they are also a curse when it comes to true social interaction. When discussing a topic with friends, I don't like the other person boosting their argument by looking up something online (unless we both deem it necessary). As to telling time, I truly never ever use my smartphone for that. I know when it vibrates one way or the other or gently chimes it is either a text from my GF, my family, my boss or a meeting reminder.
My local Stammtisch buddies are also into watches, so the evening always includes a wrist check.

For us, cell phones are allowed, but only for showing one's own pictures if relevant to what's being discussed. But not for research--what makes those conversations fun is what we already know well enough to talk about, not what we can read from Wikipedia in real time.

Rick "whose wife also has her own watch collection, but she prefers the jewels on the outside" Denney
 
... I also have a railroad-approved Hamilton 992B pocket watch from 1946 that was inspected weekly for accuracy ...
Nice! I have an old Ball 999B from similar era. After some cleaning and careful adjustment on the timegrapher, it tracks to 1-2 seconds per day. I find it amazing that a mechanical device retains such precision after so many years.
 
Nice! I have an old Ball 999B from similar era. After some cleaning and careful adjustment on the timegrapher, it tracks to 1-2 seconds per day. I find it amazing that a mechanical device retains such precision after so many years.
Mine would need a bit more than that to run that well, but perhaps my watchmaking skills will develop to the point where I'd be willing to tackle that watch.

Rick "probably a bit too much end shake in the balance staff after nearly 80 years" Denney
 
... But I did design, operate, and manage systems that demanded precision time-of-day reference, and have specified everything from WWV clocks to Cesium-61 atomic clocks for the systems I designed. In those systems, power-line frequency, which is usually accurate enough for even high-accuracy use cases, wasn't good enough. Nobody used manual retiming from a wristwatch for those systems, ever. ...
Funny you mention that. It reminds me of manually setting clocks to receive satellite data, and I vaguely remembered posting that story before. Here's the link: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...atches-in-the-21st-century.30246/post-1063905
 
And as far as accuracy goes, who cares? Very few people need accuracy--if it's within a minute it's plenty accurate enough and I can hardly get people to show up on time for meetings within ten minutes, cell phones notwithstanding.
I was thinking less of the (extremely small) drift on quartz watches (which had almost entirely supplanted mechanical by the time cell phones became ubiquitous) and more about the error involved in setting the watch in the first place. You either had to wait for the hourly tone on the radio, or (more commonly) people set it based on some *other* clock in their house, which was itself a few minutes off, etc.

I'll have to take your word for it when it comes to whether or not wristwatch prevalence was already in a long, slow, decline by the time cell phones became ubiquitous. I remember them being really ubiquitous on adults... but I turned 18 in the middle of the 90s, so you have more years of adulthood to look back on than I do....
 
I You either had to wait for the hourly tone on the radio, or (more commonly) people set it based on some *other* clock in their house, which was itself a few minutes off, etc.
All that was needed was dialing 844-(any 4 #s) and there would be a recording announcing the time in 10 second increments.

"At the tone the time will be ... Four thirty-one, and 20 seconds.... ...BEEEEEEEEP"
 
All that was needed was dialing 844-(any 4 #s) and there would be a recording announcing the time in 10 second increments.

"At the tone the time will be ... Four thirty-one, and 20 seconds.... ...BEEEEEEEEP"
Hah! I never knew that. Thank you for the knowledge. My parents always set their clocks by the radio so that was a good enough "sync" for me. By the time I was living on my own I just used The Internets.
 
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