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Comment by vinay427 | Hacker News Reader

Thanks to better technology, quartz watches are now cheaper, easier to maintain, almost always more accurate, and often more robust to shocks and damage. Even the cheapest quartz watches are often more accurate than a $500 (or more) mechanical watch today, and more expensive digital watches are certainly more accurate than anything mechanical no matter the price.

For functionality, then, it seems to me like affordability of watches has been significantly progressed or even attained.

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That's very true. My two quartz watches, a Seiko and a Timex are both reasonably cheap, accurate and save for the odd battery change maintenance-free. My mechanical Seiko on the other hand.... it's beautiful but it seems to have a mind of its own. In the 8 months that I had it it started gaining about 5min a week. I understand automatics do gain or lose a couple of minutes a week, but even so. After being spoiled by the accuracy of quartz, that bugs me.

Just give them a couple of decades. Chances are your quartz watches will no longer work, whereas your mechanical watch will happily tick along, and can still be repaired if it ever breaks down.

But 42 seconds a day is quite a lot. You could try to have it regulated (or do it yourself if you're feeling adventurous).

Not sure I'd buy that - my old quartz from my childhood (analogue and digital) still work excellently, and keep great time, and only need a battery replacing every 10 years or so.

My Chinese automatic lost time after the first year and wasn't worth repairing. My vintage seiko 5 recently had a service/repair - which cost £120 - and yes it works pretty well now, but they replaced the whole automatic innards - just the face/dial/hands and body/strap remain. And it still loses a couple of minutes a week. Unless I take it of for a few days and it stops completely.

I love it though and it makes me very happy to wear it - and it looks and feels great. But I wear a Xiaomi mi band on my other wrist for accurate timekeeping (when I need to be sure to make the train or something).

I will attempt to regulate it myself. I have an interest in horology and watch making so it will be a learning curve if nothing else.

All of my sub-$30 digital quartz watches are still working and are within a few seconds of the current time around 10 years after being purchased and set. A mechanical watch would likely need much more maintenance in that period, perhaps even to keep it running.

I still have an automatic mechanical watch, for what it's worth, and in theory it should last longer when maintained but will likely cost far more every year than one of my digital quartz watches would cost to replace even every few years.

I'd say a major quality problem in cheap watches is water resistance. Before I knew much about diving, I tried snorkeling with a couple really cheap watches. They both died. There are some good cheap dive watches, like the Casio MDV106-1A. But in general I wouldn't want to get a cheap watch wet. 30m WR just won't cut it.

Hackaday story on waterproofing (700m) the casio f91w by hand... does not look difficult at all! https://hackaday.com/tag/casio-f-91w/

In general quartz watches seem to have a lifetime of 20-30 years.

Mechanical watches without factory defects should easily run 10 years without maintenance, but it's advisable to have them serviced every few years.

But yes, even with their longevity, it's a given that replacing a cheap quartz every few years would probably still be cheaper than a mechanical watch.

That sounds like its been magnetized, which is easy to have happen and cheap to repair. You can DIY with a tool from eBay or amazon.

One of the big problems with mechanicals in this day and age is the prevalence of rare earth magnets in all sorts of places, e.g. the iPad has 11 of them, as do many bags. It’s quite easy to accidentally magnetize your watch, and amagnetic movements are still uncommon. (Omega, new ETA, some Rolex).

Thank you for your knowledgeable reply. I must admit it's not something I considered!

A couple of minutes a week is excessive. Something’s wrong with the watch.

When a solar flare finally hits us (or the Ruskies and the Yanks decide to nuke the world), however, your Seiko will still be a minute/week off. Your quartz watches will be week/week off.

Should that happen, if I am lucky/unlucky enough to survive a nuclear exchange, being on time to catch the train will probably be the least of my worries.

Having said that, I still have an Olympus Trip 35 in my collection and since it uses a selenium cell and a basic galvanometer to measure exposure, I should be okay to use it and document the aftermath as soon as the dust has settled!

Edited for clarity

If it’s consistently losing or gaining time you can adjust the regulator pretty easily. If it’s random then minimizing thermal cycles helps.

'Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.'

I don’t see watches as very functional compared to smartphones. Mechanical movements have a lot of charm though.

I can check my watch without having to pull my phone out my pocket, depending on what you are doing that can make a huge difference.

Practicality and functionality mean different things to do different people.

I have to say, last time I had a phone break, the first thing I dug out was my watch. You really notice a distinct lack of visible clocks these days when your phone dies and you don't have a watch and people these days seem to look at you like there's something wrong with you if you ask them the time.

Being able to start and stop a chronograph/stopwatch to time events without having to look at it whatsoever can be life-saving at best, amusing at worst. Even a watch with a simple minute-gradiated bezel is so much better than relying on my memory to remember a start time.

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