Oi. APPLE fanboi! You with the $10k and pocket on fire! Fancy a WATCH? High-end models of Apple's Watch, which apparently has its official release tomorrow, could carry a price tag of at least $10,000. But the 18-carat gold wristputer won't have additional fancy features, according to the Financial Times. Instead, it will apparently come loaded with the same functionality as Cupertino's Apple …
I had an awesome Casio watch at school - clock, date / time, alarm clock, stop watch, timer AND calculator. And a battery which lasted years. This was over 3 decades ago.
Anyway, Casio have a G-shock watch which probably qualifies as the only smart watch to be worth a damn at this time. It has low power bluetooth and an app for phones that can make it vibrate and display a text message and other than that it's just a fancy LCD watch. So the battery lasts ages.
For the longest time (nearly a decade) a TS-150 thermometer watch
Then I got a TSR-100 infra-red thermo-scanner watch
After that a CMD-40-1ZT infra-red remote control watch
Now I got a smartphone for my time telling needs... but I still have those watches (and many more with built-in games)
F-91W
It's still an experiment in progress but F-91Ws seem to be costing me approximately £11 per decade to run. Being the Bic Cristal/Honda Super Cub of watches I'd imagine that they'll still be rolling off productions lines 20 or 30 years hence in very similar form.
Do we need watches to tell the time? If I look around my desk, the time is on my monitor screen, my mobile phone and my desk phone. The office wall clock is superfluous. If I go out into my car there is a clock that is kept accurate by RDS signals over the air. In town there are enough time telling devices to cover the time where there isn't one in sight (a few minutes max). I'm generally aware of the approximate time anyway without seeing a clock. At home, the time is on my TV, kitchen cooker, hifi, DAB radio, alarm clocks.
Why do I need a watch?
Back in the old days, the only sources of time out of the home were the position of the celestial bodies (not reliable in UK because they often hide) or a clock on a church tower. People carried a small pocket watch on a chain in a pocket. Looking at the time required them to pull the watch out (using the handy chain) open the front casing, observe the time, close the case, replace it in pocket. Then, in the 20th Century, advances brought us the little clock that could be strapped on your wrist and observed by just turning a wrist towards the face. Even with busy hands - brilliant!
The other step forward was the quartz watch with the eternal battery life -eliminating daily winding.
Then, in the 21st Century **** me, people regressed back to using the old retrieve from pocket, open case, observe time etc etc, but this time without the handy chain to help them! And all this in a world where the correct time is everywhere and we don't need to look at the time! And daily winding (charging) is back too!
So what are watches useful for? Well, these mobile phones can give us personalised information, that isn't a common and the same for all of us and ubiquitous. Our feed of information and communication that arrives through our phone. The smartwatch is the step forward from the pocket watch on a chain to a quickly observed wrist twitch that happened with the introduction of the wrist watch.
But it isn't. Because most of them are impractical devices using inappropriate tech, that need a button press with the other hand. Only Pebble have got it anywhere near right so far.
Wow! Just turn your wrist to see the time. What WILL they think of next?
Incidentally, rumour has it the Gear already does that. In binary time display if you so wish. As an aside, since I installed the binary face I've had to extend the display timeout to give myself enough time to work out the errrm time.
No ... you don't really need a watch any longer ... unless you find yourself needing to use a sextant and almanac to find your position several hundred miles from land. That's where my Casio GW-500A proves its worth. Resets itself every day, and bang-on accurate to the second.
Or you could dispense with the timepiece and try it with your sundial ... !
Just before Christmas, I brought a health/sleep tracker. Battery lasts ~5 days. Cumbersome, not very ergonomic, kept running low when I did not have a charge cable. It's been sitting at the bottom of my sports bag for the last 2 months... I predict somthing very similar happening to the iwatch...
Men wear watches for 2 reasons.
1 : To tell the time ( This is the obvious one)..
2 : Because it is the only piece if jewellery a man can wear whilst retaining some dignity.
That piece of jewelery can climb to a very tidy sum of money. It can be kept in good condition and where necassary sold for quite a large part of it's initial value. We're talking Philip Patek, Vacheron Constantin etc not Casio here. ( Nothing wrong with Casio, I have one, it's just that Casio usually belongs in the option 1 group )
Apples iWatch thing will initially cost a lot and then when the "usual Apple hype" wears of, it will be worth next to nothing. Kind of akin to pying for a solid golf neklace, only to learn that it is just shiny silver plated necklace from the pawn shop owner who just keeps laughing when you ask for anything above scrap value.
Like most things Apple, there is no intrinsic value, just some hype and then all you are left with is a half eaten piece of fruit.... Before the Appletards get all butthurt, it's Ok not to love Apple, they are just another commercial entity that are very successfull at shafting their customers... Steve jobs didn't design good prducts, he designed good marketing...
If they really sell this for $10K, you don't think people are going to buy it and be left to twist in the wind, do you? Seems pretty much dead certain anyone who buys one of those will get some sort of specialized service with it that will either trade it in or replace the insides for x number of years with every Watch upgrade. The guts will cost Apple less than $100, pretty simple to do.
The only risk with buying the initial model is, what if the Watch flops and there are no future versions? Then you have to hope that someday the handful of gold Watches sold become a collector's item for the same sort of people who collect Edsels or Tuckers.
"Kind of akin to pying for a solid golf neklace, only to learn that it is just shiny silver plated necklace from the pawn shop owner who just keeps laughing when you ask for anything above scrap value."
Your solid golf necklace will be worth more than scrap value, so long as it has an MOT.
So the only logical solution is to buy a fake Rolex/Omega from a market stall in China.
You get the accuracy of any other quartz watch and not only do you get the same respect from anybody stupid enough to care about how much your watch costs, but you get to laugh at them behind their back.
And if you get mugged for it - you have the last laugh.
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