I always find it funny when people call watches jewelry as if they aren’t still the most convenient way to tell time and do other things.
Sure you can reach into whatever pile of lint and pull out a phone to check the time but by then I will have already set the timer on mine. It’s faster to the draw 🤷🏽♂️
Then what if you work a job with long hours? Are you supposed to take your smart watch off to charge it?!
Lastly to help me better appreciate the mechanical mastery that is a good time piece, I changed the font on my Home Screen to unreadable so I have to check my watch rather than my phone. It helps me disconnect from digital and value time more.
Just my two cents. P.S I’m roasting coffee here which is extremely time sensitive and happens super fast.
No one really uses watches as a “tool” anymore
Ever heard of racing, diving, piloting, navigating or cooking? I would use my smart watch but it’s dead….
I have. People have come up with diving computers, smartwatches, or even just digital watches for those.
An exception there however is racing: I still see, believe it or not, Tag Heuer watches being used in racing
Tool vs jewelry depends on the cost ratio between the cost of the tool and the jewelry value.
A $40 casio will show time more accurately and is more legible than pretty much any automatic Swiss watch. So if you buy say a $400 watch, at most 10% of the cost is the “tool” element and the rest of the 90% you pay for the jewelry / looks element, hence it is more of a apparel item than a tool. For a 4k watch, 99% of the value is jewelry and so on.
Same goes for anything really. You need a T-shirt so it is a tool, but a branded nice Ralph Lauren shirt costs 50x what a cotton china made shirt is going for, hence it is more for looks rather than a warmth tool.
I think I get where you’re going and I agree. What I’m saying is watches have been around for a hundred plus years. If I need to know the time in that moment it doesn’t matter whether it’s mechanical or digital.
We haven’t even begun the conversation on navigation either. Just saying.
I’m a university professor. I’d argue that a non-distracting device that tells you the time is an essential tool of my profession and we all wear watches when we’re teaching. A smartwatch with notifications silenced is one option, but an analogue watch of some sort is considerably less fiddly.
I dive with my sea master. It’s a nice backup to have but I’m going to us a dive computer as my primary “tool” 10 times out of 10