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Comment by keeganjw | Hacker News Reader

Watches are a weird market in that a $30 one from Walmart keeps better time than pretty much any watch from a luxury brand costing $5000 or more. $500 is way more than the average person will spend on a watch but once you get into the watch world a little bit you start to become numb to prices and all of a sudden $500 seems dirt cheap. I don't think this is targeted to a normal person, but the type of people who already own tens of thousands of dollars in watches and will buy this as a novelty with out even blinking. It's a weird and very rich (elitist) market.

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It can be elitist, but honestly what clothing accessory market doesn't have that cohort? There's so many decent options under $1000 it's insane (a little research to avoid upsold Chinese crap like MVMT Watches is necessary though).

A thermally compensated crystal is one or two orders of magnitude more accurate than a ten dollar Casio or Timex. Less than one second per year.

That said, mostly you are right, a 5 million dollar patek will sell a few copies to someone...

It's good to be king I guess.

http://www.sapphytimes.com/movement/ephoto_show.asp?PhotoID=...

This is just "normal" price. For a large production you can get an even larger discount. It's still a cheap movement.

And that's a standard quartz; the specs say -10 to 20 s/month.

Still ~10x more accurate than a mechanical watch, but not ~200x more accurate as thermocompensated ones are (as mentioned in the message you were replying to).

Your body heat makes an excellent oven for a wristwatch.

I've found the opposite. A cheap Casio lost less than a second in two years sitting on my desk, but a whole second in the month I wore it.

What. Both of those are insanely good numbers.

> I don't think this is targeted to a normal person, but the type of people who already own tens of thousands of dollars in watches and will buy this as a novelty with out even blinking. It's a weird and very rich (elitist) market.

Yeah, and this "weird and very rich" market pretty much exclusively steers clear of anything that says "Quartz" on it. Hell, even state of the art mechanical movement like Seiko Spring Drive suffered from being associated with Quartz watches, even despite the fact that it had nothing to do with them. So there goes that theory.

More likely this looks like some executive at Timex finding some Shinola garbage at some local mall and going "Do that, just replicate whatever these guys are doing!" without first asking themselves "Is this business model even viable or profitable?"

> Hell, even state of the art mechanical movement like Seiko Spring Drive suffered from being associated with Quartz watches, even despite the fact that it had nothing to do with them.

They have a quartz oscillator controlled by an integrated circuit! Replacing a motor with a generator is neat, but the real trick is that there's no way for mechanical imperfections to affect the rate, making it easier to manufacture.*

* Caveat being that I haven't made them, power reserve is the real game there, and they don't seem to be cutting corners.

The thing with Spring drive is that Quartz oscillation in it while used for the same purpose (time keeping) is used in an entirely different fashion. Being a mechanical watch admirer I consider it more in the realm of automatics than in the realm of mechanical watches. I wouldn't give the same distinction to Seiko Kinetic though.

We did a tour of Shinola a few years back. They almost bragged about being unprofitable.

>> Despite bringing in $124 million in annual revenue, Shinola is not yet

>> profitable. “We’re bleeding cash,” Panis admitted blithely. “It’s

>> costly to do what we’re doing. Everything is at top-of-the-line

>> quality. We’re cutting no corners.” However, Panis said Shinola has a

>> strategy for reaching profitability within the next few years, if

>> everything goes according to plan.

We had the most confusing ride home.

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