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Comment by twiceaday | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the complexity here trivial when compared to the complexity of the cpu in smart watches?

I think I would view this as the watchmaker equivalent to making Commodore 64 demos in present day. It is utterly pointless, serves no practical purpose, and achieves effects that would be tremendously easier if obtained through a different method. But, it isn't there for the purpose of achieving those effects, but rather for showing off one's mastery of a craft.

This is a great analogy. There are people who still make new games for the C64:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imEKoKg1I1k

...and other companies that release new music on old long dead mediums:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unj79pzEHNQ&t=605s

It may be kinda hipster, but it's also pretty impressive.

You apply modern engineering to those old color and memory limitations and it's pretty amazing what you can get out of decades old hardware. In the same way, you can apply modern manufacturing techniques to the classic design of a mechanical watch and really stretch the amount of functionality you get with such a small space.

For me it's about the human experience being an analogue one, and having a watch that works and expressed in an analogue way is a beauty in itself and is instantly relatable, and has a meaning in itself. So this is its value that is not just about showing off craft

I think the main selling point for the people actually buying the watches is the exclusivity and display of wealth they represent. To get a sense, you could have a look at this amusing parody article. It is a parody, but there are nonetheless a lot of people who think this way.

http://www.businessinsider.com/gselevator-on-wall-street-wat...

I mean, I dig the notion of the human experience being "analogue." But the human experience doesn't normally include spending twenty-plus years worth of a normal person's wages for a useless trinket to wear on your wrist. I'm really torn about this. The device is something amazing, but the cost is extravagant in the extreme.

I can understand why you're torn, but - speaking here as someone who owns such a watch - people vastly overestimate the Veblen status potential of expensive watches, which is unfortunate because that can lead them to be quick to judge their owners. I have met wealthy people in the sort of industries you might typically associate with this kind of pedigreed excess (Wall St, Big Law), and those folks don't appear to recognize what I'm wearing at all. Often they're wearing smart watches these days.

The truth is that extremely expensive watches are a poor form of wealth signaling unless they're loud (think of a Hublot encrusted with diamonds, or something extremely iconic like a Rolex). If you walk into nearly any room wearing a Patek, Lange, Vacheron, etc. I can virtually guarantee that your watch will simply go unnoticed.

I actually like Rolex watches quite a lot for the real engineering work that goes into manufacturing them, but I don't own one specifically because I'd rather not broadcast an expensive item on my wrist. I consider watches like these to be a form of art that emerges from the idea of practicality but also frees itself from it (as do most collectors I've personally spoken to).

I own a Submariner and most people won't recognize it as there are so many other watches that look like it and those that see that it is a Rolex think it is a fake anyway, at least when I'm wearing my usual t-shirt/jeans combination.

Confirmed. Owned a real Rolex, saw a strangers copy, liked it better and bought one. Ended up selling both at a profit, so a win I suppose. But other than the other guys with expensive watches, no one cared. And after a while, I realized I didn't either. I now own a few 1800s era mechanicals, that were cheap, I can repair them (or at least try), and really seem to have more character and soul than the modern swiss movements.

I have Seiko SKX007 (https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/the-seiko-skx007-divers-wa...) and it costs less than $200. There are Seiko 5 watches even cheaper than that.

The chips in the smart watch aren't made by hand :-)

Seriously, what you're paying for here is the labor (mental and physical) of a highly-skilled artisan. It's the same thing as paying more for a painting by a skilled artist than you do for an inkjet printout of a digital photo.

By smart watch I take it you mean one of those gas guzzling things that doesn't quite manage to do anything particularly useful that the phone you probably carry as well does rather better 8)

I strapped a Citizen Eco watch on my wrist about 12 years ago. It charges itself via four solar panels behind the hands - they simply look black. The only pains are I have to do BST/GMT adjustments and worst of all: "30 days hath September ..." Oh, and its not water proof. The time keeping is good enough.

I am surrounded by more ntp daemons than you can shake a stick at if I need millisecond accuracy, eg this laptop:

$ ntpq -p remote refid st t when poll reach delay offset jitter ============================================================================== +server1.webster 193.190.230.65 2 u 237 256 377 15.144 0.081 0.713 *85.199.214.100 .GPS. 1 u 11 64 377 12.541 -1.346 0.698 -ntp3.ds.network 203.135.184.123 2 u 196 256 377 334.847 4.998 23.715 +babbage.betadom 80.94.65.10 2 u 177 256 377 10.992 -0.505 1.023

Tut! one of the servers I'm using is showing an offset of nearly 5ms but it's OK: that system has a - against it.

In a few days time I will be firing up a new member for the general ntp pool(s). I've been using it for many years and its time to give back. I'll be following this guide: https://www.ntpsec.org/white-papers/stratum-1-microserver-ho... Depending on how that goes, I may be able to fire up quite a lot of them scattered across the UK. Some internet links I look after are only for failover and are largely idle most of the time.

> doesn't quite manage to do anything particularly useful that the phone you probably carry as well does rather better

I don't have a full fledged smartwatch, but a running watch with some smart features. Its killer feature is not to pretend to be a phone. It's much simpler than that. Its receiving (only high priority) notifications on my wrist. Incredibly convenient when I can't pick up my phone.

Edit: apparently my phone strongly prefers "it's" over "its".

> apparently my phone strongly prefers "it's" over "its".

Wanna swap phones? Mine always writes "its" which I almost never want -.-

It's also super handy to just put on your running gear and start running... I don't want a phone in my hand or in my gym shorts when running. I just need the watch to track my movements and when I get back home, I can sync it up to my smartphone, who will take the data, upload it to some running website and analyze everything (including heart rate data). That's still one of the best use cases to justify buying a smart watch at the moment

Adding two spaces to the start of text code-formats it. One single newline (eg, aaa\nbbb) converts to a space (aaa bbb).

I was both curious about the ntpq listing and mildly fidgety about its current presentation, so I fiddled with it to see if I could reassemble it.

  $ ntpq -p
  remote           refid           st t when poll reach   delay   offset  jitter
  ==============================================================================
  +server1.webster 193.190.230.65  2  u  237  256  377   15.144    0.081   0.713
  *85.199.214.100  .GPS.           1  u   11   64  377   12.541   -1.346   0.698
  -ntp3.ds.network 203.135.184.123 2  u  196  256  377  334.847    4.998  23.715
  +babbage.betadom 80.94.65.10     2  u  177  256  377   10.992   -0.505   1.023

I recently purchased an Eco that has an atomic clock receiver to self correct every night. Auto charging and auto setting is very helpful. Even the dates are always right.

It's a beautiful thing and I've gotten so used to having perfect time on my wrist that I actually feel strange when I don't have it.

Kinda missing the point, I think.

I'm sure the complexity is not what drives the price so high...if you would replace Vacheron Constantin with Foxconn you wouldn't sell it for $1000 regardless of its complexity. Many luxury brands place ridiculous prices on specific items so that they can increase the sales of less expensive models.

A five-year-long project involving some of the finest watchmakers in the world surely cost far more than $1m, and that watch will sell for much more than that at auction some day.

If it was priced to reflect its complexity it would be probably more on the order of $10m or more. Much simpler movements frequently cost $1-2 million to develop, often higher.

Yup. They will be rare and fetch good auction prices.

I gave my watch collection to my son, keeping just a Citizen. He had them appraised and they have all pretty much retained or increased in value.

Is there value to these devices beyond timekeeping and resale?

No, and there isn't really value in its timekeeping either. It's designed as a form of art, not for practical utility.

It's for one-upping your rich friends.

And if Hollywood is to be believed, an expensive watch may be traded to a minor speaking-role character for a plot-necessary object in an emergency. By that theory, this watch is not only a watch, but also a canoe, a pair of shoes, or even a motorcycle.

It's jewelry

Fashion, novelty, and conversation all spring to mind.

Except Foxconn cannot make a watch like this for $1000, or even $10000. We currently do not have the infrastructure/tools to mass produce something like this yet. It's not just the parts, it's the assembly of hundreds of tiny parts to the highest precisions, the finishing details, the engraving.

Modern assembly lines simply can't pull off something like this. And this is why even the cheapest Chinese Tourbillion watches cost about $5k USD.

I think this is an excellent point, but I'll add that we don't have the economies of scale for it either. If there was enough demand for a tourbillon, an Apple-esque company would emerge (maybe Richemont or Patek) and drive the costs down for manufacturing.

Other than that, part of the appeal is the handcraftsmanship involved in these pieces. The engraving and setting work on my own Lange is a thing of beauty to look at under a magnifier, and it can't (yet) be achieved by a machine, even if the design and modeling can be done in software and the tools themselves can be mass manufactured.

Vacheron Constantin and less expensive in one sentence ...

A hand crafted digital watch could be a thing of beauty. Especially if the circuitry of the CPU was visible under a magnifying face.

Not QUITE the same but this guy[1] makes Nixie Tube watches. Steve Wozniak has one.

[1] http://cathodecorner.com

Perhaps, but the ratio of number of people involved to complexity is much higher in making a watch like this.

I am inclined to agree with twiceaday on this, even with the qualifier of people involved to complexity. Obviously, if you factor in the entire supply chain for the whole industry, the semiconductor/electronics/plastics industry is higher, but I expect there are several ties in the quartz watch system where there are few people involved but huge amounts of complexity. The layout and routing of the microcontroller and the hard real-time operating system that runs on a moderately feature-rich watch have orders of magnitude more lines of code (not a precise measure of complexity, but it's close) than even the entire count of teeth on the gears of this watch.

In fact, the argument that this involves fewer people seems to point to it being less complex. If one guy with a CNC micro lathe and some metal stock could make a precision clock like Chris of Clickspring, and a quartz watch takes huge industries with thousands of people, isn't the latter definitely more complicated?

The way this article is written suggests that the whole clock was modeled on a computer, and that they even used a constraint solving system to figure out the gearing:

"I rely on these equations and the powerful software to find a solution with our input. It's a question of using these tools to find new solutions."

Also notice the quote towards the end that they were able to redesign the whole drive train just to make it a bit thinner.

What I'm trying to say is that this watch has little in common with what people assume is a "hand made and designed watch".

So this watch feels more like your later example, where you have the huge (computer) industry behind it.

It's not a secret that the industry uses software for modeling. But it still has skilled staff operating that software.

When people emphasize the artistry and craftsmanship of mechanical timepieces at this price point, they're talking about two facts:

1. Most such watches are designed in-house according to rigorous specifications and long R&D cycles, with the majority of tooling and manufacturing processing being wholly original and unique to the firm,

2. The watches are assembled and serviced entirely by hand with a sophisticated precision that takes watchmakers years to learn.

On the upper end of the spectrum you have independent watchmakers like F.P. Journe who singlehandedly design and build entirely new systems in their movements.

For those wondering about Clickspring, here is a link:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?list=PLZioPDnFPNsETq9h35dgQq80Ry...

I advise you not to click on it. It will eat up your time and it takes your complete attention.

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