Smart devices are eating the market for accessibly-priced watches | Hacker News Reader

Smart devices are eating the market for accessibly-priced watches

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51 pointsprostoalex91 comments

No @#$^. I have a traditional quartz wristwatch that I like but that I never use anymore because my $150 Garmin smartband is so much more capable, and I'm not gonna wear things on both wrists. The Garmin does an unbelievable number of things that the wristwatch doesn't do, including: (a) telling time more accurately and automatically adjusting for daylight saving time and travel timezone changes, (b) email/text/IM notifications, (c) GPS logging of biking/running, (d) step tracking, (e) heartrate monitoring. And this isn't even the pinnacle of what smartwatches can do; there's ones that play music directly to Bluetooth earbuds so you don't even need to bring along your phone.

I like the styling of a traditional wristwatch more, but I'm not gonna give up so much functionality to continue wearing it. It's just a no-brainer to get the more capable device.

The GPS logging sounds interesting (I'm not a smartwatch/smartband user). Where do the logs go, does it get send to a companion app on the phone, or to log files?

It all gets synced to their app. They do allow you to export your data on their website, but it's not necessarily an easy process.. but the app that can do everything from monitoring your sleep cycles and reading heart rate to recording your route (and elevation change) on a hike with the ability to navigate you back to your starting position.

I have a Garmin Instinct that I bought a year and a half ago and wear it daily. It looks like a dumb-watch, and the battery lasts 2 weeks with daily tracked GPS runs... Can't say enough good things about it. Oh, it's also waterproof (I've swam and showered with it many times) and shockproof.

The privacy activist in me is pretty worried about what they can do with this data, since it's all synced (sleep patterns, exercise habbits, etc...), but I have just enough cognitive dissonance to use it anyways lol

At least they aren't in the ad selling business. Leaks are always a threat, but I can't see them selling it to advertisers.

if you're paranoid or want to use other tools, you can also just connect garmin watches via usb and access all the log gps/activity files without their app or software

I have mine hooked up to Strava, so every time I go for a run, it automatically gets uploaded.

The logs are stored to internal flash storage as FIT files and can then be synced to Garmin's cloud service or mobile app. You can also copy the FIT files directly from the USB storage device to analyze them yourself.

https://www.thisisant.com/developer/

It's not GPS logging per se, it's GPS activity tracking. You have to start a run/bike ride for it to start recording GPS, and then stop it when you're done. Then it syncs over Bluetooth to the app and I have that automatically sync to Strava.

It's not on unless you want it to be, and it drives down the battery life from roughly a week to single digit hours.

I live in the opposite side of the fence. I have a Longines I bought some twenty years ago and I consider it irreplaceable with any kind of smart watch. While the latter provide a lot more functionality an automatic watch is a marvel of engineering and as such I view them more like an accessory than something that just tells the time. I love staring at it even twenty years later.

It's been fascinating to see the rise, fall, and rise of digital watches among techies.

I remember 1990s Dilbert having an entire storyline about the engineers getting into a calculator-watch arms-race. In real life, it was pretty common to laugh about how a $50 digital Casio could do far more things than a Rolex.

By about 2010 (or perhaps even by the iPod Touch or Palm Pilot), I stopped hearing that. Watches had lost all of their unique functions to smartphones, so their raison d'etre was either "rugged and cheap" or "jewelry" and calculator watches almost vanished.

Circa 2015, we get Pebble gen 2, Apple Watch, and Fitbit Blaze: smart watches have phone integrations, fitness tracking, and don't look like hell anymore. Since then, they've increasingly aimed for design good enough to wear with a suit; the Galaxy Watch is always-on and analog.

These days, I see two splits among watch-wearing engineers: smartwatch vs not, and practical vs decorative. So the result is quadrants like:

Fitbit | Galaxy Watch

Casio | Longines

I wore a fitbit for a year or so, which was enough to tell me that I walk "many" steps a day - remarkably consistent amounts for weekdays, and then much more over the weekend.

But nothing beats a decent watch. I have no problem pulling my phone out of my pocket if I want to interact with it, and it seems like most people who have notifications pushed to their wrists still do that. It's announce-only.

I've got a 20 year old rolex I wear most days, and a couple of other mechanical watches, including an old Soviet piece made the year I was born. Each of my watches is used for a specific thing, which keeps them in regular rotation. (For example I have a sauna-watch, a photography watch, a swimming watch, a posh-event watch, etc. My only digital watch is a Casio F-91W which is used in the sauna.)

Sure mechanical watches aren't perfect, and if you have one with a date you need to reset it if is one of a rotation, but they're classy, they're fashionable, and they're so much more practical than most smart-watches (largely due to the charging issues).

Smartwatches are far more practical if you need more than time / date / stopwatch / timer. Some smartwatches can go several days on a charge depending on how much you use the GPS tracking or apps.

I like that my $300 automatic watch tells me the time and nothing more, not even a date. I don't want it to listen to me; I don't want it to log my location; I don't want it to store my health information on someone else's servers: I just want it to tell me the time.

In five years I'll still have my watch; will you? In a decade I anticipate still having my watch; will you?

Simplicity is luxury.

You want more than that, because all of above can be done by a $30 watch.

Fair enough! I think that the mechanisms (called movements) are really cool too. I also like not having to change a battery.

And I like the style I got for more money.

Regardless, I like having a mechanical watch rather than yet another piece of electronics. I see it as a positive rather than a negative.

I like the styling of traditional wristwatches more as well.

Have you seen the Fossil Hybrid watches? They look like a normal watch but can do ALMOST everything a smart watch does, including display text messages.

https://www.fossil.com/en-us/products/hybrid-smartwatch-hr-c...

The downside is that all these "smart" devices contain radios which you can't put off, with firmware you can't upgrade, and contain batteries you can't replace. They were never made to last as long as your Quartz. Full disclosure: happy owner of a Fossil Hybrid HR (which spits out Bluetooth signal, has e-ink yet has a traditional look).

I have a $1200 Garmin smartwatch on my wrist, which will likely need to be replaced in 3 years time.

With that same money, I could have purchased an entry-level ETA Swiss-made automatic watch, that would last me a lifetime.

I’m lucky enough to own both. On the weekend I wear my Swiss watch, and during the week I wear my smart watch. As someone who’s worn smart watches since the Pebble, the utility of a digital device can’t be replaced by nostalgia.

Maybe there’s a place for both.

I think the chance of you wearing the latter for more than three years before it's lost or you're bored of it or it's forgotten in a drawer somewhere is pretty low.

Longevity is overrated. People don't want to wear the same watch for a lifetime, no matter how fancy.

I don't know - at some point the age and history of the device itself become the dominant factor, not the fanciness. E.g. as I'm writing this, I'm wearing a relatively low-end watch (a Seiko Kinetic) that was a gift about 20 years ago, and even that tiny bit of history provides me with a fair bit of nostalgia and joy. I get the advantages of smart watches, but it _is_ a shame that they can't really be timeless in the same way.

Personally, I'm just not a fan of having to keep charging those smart watches every other night.

Especially when taking them off to charge at night means losing access to sleep tracking, which for me is the only killer feature smart watches have going for them over the smartphones that I already have.

I've got a Fitbit versa which has a 4-ish day battery life. I sleep with it on, and take it off to shower. I charge it when I shower and I've never once had it run out unexpectedly (since I started doing this)

My amazfit bip lasts for over a month on a single charge

Meh, I tend to wear the same things -- clothes, glasses, shoes, backpacks, until they're unusable. I don't wear them for fashion.

I'd love a carefully crafted mechanical watch, maybe with a compass (if such things exist).

These days I don't carry a watch but I'm kinda starting to want one because I hate using the phone.

I've worn a Casio F-91W for 15 years.

I don't know, the longer I wear my Swiss watch the more I want to keep it on - but I did choose it to match both my skin tone and my wedding ring.

Smart watches however, I have a small collection that didn't make it past the three month mark before they ended up in the back of a cupboard (charging them is super annoying and after every experiment I have had with them, I still find just being able to tell the time quickly is the feature I value the most)

You're presuming that because some (or even most) people grow bored easily, people who appreciate mechanical watches do.

That's a extreme generalization. When you wear it for utility and not for fashion, you couldn't care less how your watch looks as far as it fulfills your needs.

My partner bought me a nice but not expensive Skagen watch as the first present she ever bought me.

I plan to keep that for the rest of my life

Addendum: y'all like to list the one or two items that have sentimental value, but have you considered the vast graveyard of junk that you've left behind that has zero value to you sentimental or otherwise? Your hoard of long-term personally-significant items is probably fewer than you can count on one hand. Where's that old t-shirt you bought five years ago? How many USB-chargers have you lost track of?

You could wear both: https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/doing-the-two-wrist-tango-...

It looks a bit unusual at first but I've gotten used to a coworker doing that.

If conspicuous consumption weren't enough, now you can wear it with with your accessible consumption too!

I have a $200 Skagen, which didn't last a lifetime - it's only 12-years old, but I recently had to replace the cover glass because it broke (which cost me all of $25, +$5 for a battery change which could likely wait another couple of years, but ... it was already at the watchmaker's, so ...). It is incredibly light (lighter than most e.g. Swatches) but still looks timeless, ageless and (IMO) elegant.

Next time it breaks, which I expect to takes less than 10 years, I'll likely get a new $200 watch.

I don't particularly like to throw away working things, but I also feel that 6 times $200 watches throughout my lifetime makes a lot more sense than one lifetime $1,200 watch.

That said, the spending optimum is likely one $5-$10 watch every couple of years, perhaps even if you had to pay for externalities -- I understand that everyone has their own "sweet spot" for longevity, and your is obviously different than mine (and we are both far away from the spending optimum).

I'm very happy with a middle way, the 200 EUR Withings Steel HR Sport, considered a "hybrid". Good usability and excellent 20 ... 25 day battery lifetime. Will run even longer if you synchronize it sparingly.

It looks like a regular mechanical watch at 40mm, with two complications: a step counter, and an AMOLED screen for notifications and other readouts. Supports the usual functionalities: pulse meter, step meter & other sports tracking, visual & tactile notifications and Bluetooth synchronization with smartphone.

About the only think I would add to it is time synchronization from atomic sourced radio signals, to make it truly independent from a cellphone for extended periods of time. Mine tends to drift about a minute ahead after about a month without phone synchronization.

Wow, that's exactly what I've been looking for. What's the size of the face on those? I have small wrists and regular men's watches look comically huge on me.

There are 40mm and 36mm variants; some patterns available in only one of the sizes. Frankly even the 40mm model is optically small thanks to its understated design; it's got two rather unobtrusive complications, and one side button. The maximum thickness is significant, but the back side is convex and the rim is reasonably thin, so against your arm it looks about the same as an average self-winder. FWIW, I'm very happy with an alternative wristband - the black/gray silicone one which normally goes with Sapphire version.

I'm also a huge fan of my Withings Steel (not the HR). Classic looks, step counter, sleep tracking, and a battery life of 9 months with an easily replaceable traditional watch battery. I've had it for years, and it's never failed.

Every once in a while I flirt with the idea of moving to Apple Watch, but I just can't justify it when I realize that all I really need is basic quantification, and thus motivation, of activity.

Amusingly, the Casio G-Shock has been made more expensive. That thing solved timekeeping. Rugged, solar-charged, corrected from radio time signals, and under $100. At last, the zero-maintenance accurate watch.

But not expensive enough, so they now have models up to $500.

For what it's worth, there's still a <$100 model with all those features.

https://www.amazon.com/Casio-G-Shock-GWM5610-1-Tough-Solar/d...

It's worth noting that not everywhere has a time signal to sync from. Notably, Australia. In those places, if you want a watch that doesn't need manually setting you either need to get one that syncs with your phone, or one that can receive GPS signals. Both exist.

The watch you linked has the 3159 module which really hits the sweet spot for features. You get radio sync, daylight savings, world clock, stop watch, 4 alarms, snooze, and countdown timer.

It is my beater watch but I end up wearing it more than any of my automatics. I keep my world time set to UTC which is great to have while digging through server logs. The alarms are nice. I use the countdown timer for pomodoro. Best part, it is always accurate and I never have to set it.

My only complaint is the backlight only stays on for 1.5 seconds.

There is a similar module with bluetooth, but I think the only feature you get is the ability to make the backlight last longer and to manage alarms.

Anyway, I highly suggest that one if you need to add a square to your collection. There are some better looking ones, I'm going to buy the all black, negative display one next. Searching gw-m5610bc should get you to it (but make sure you get the one with the radio. there's a cheaper all black one that doesn't have the 3159)

>At last, the zero-maintenance accurate watch.

I imagined this to be the case when purchasing my $500 solar G-Shock, but it needed the battery replaced every 3-5 years, and the work had to be done by an authorized Casio repair center; local watch repair people refused it.

The rechargable battery for one of these is literally $10 on eBay, and I can't believe there wasn't anyone around you willing to fit it. I can believe larger chains refusing it, but come on, a small jeweler or watch repair shop would have done it I'm sure.

Anecdotally - I've had my solar powered Edifice watch for 10 years now and the battery still works fine.

>The rechargable battery for one of these is literally $10 on eBay, and I can't believe there wasn't anyone around you willing to fit it. I can believe larger chains refusing it, but come on, a small jeweler or watch repair shop would have done it I'm sure.

I went to a Macy's watch repair department, a well-known jewelry store, and two small watch repair shops (the "old man in a tiny office in an office building" type) highly ranked on Yelp. All refused.

>>All refused.

Did they say why? I'm not surprised the large store did, but the "old man in a tiny office" type shouldn't have - why did they refuse? The only reason I can think of is if the battery is soldered on, but otherwise how is it different than replacing any other type of battery. I know my Edifice watch uses a regular button-type battery, it's just rechargable, but it's not soldered on or anything.

>Did they say why? I'm not surprised the large store did, but the "old man in a tiny office" type shouldn't have - why did they refuse?

If I recall correctly, they said that they could not remove the case back and guarantee its waterproof integrity.

So it had nothing to do with that specific watch or its rechargable battery then - clearly none of those people repair any waterproof watches.

A number of watch stores in my area won't replace a battery in any watch. It's not because they're not able, it's because they've been burned by people who claim that the store ruined an expensive watch while changing the battery.

It's a liability issue, not a capability issue.

That's....crazy to me. Here in UK we have a chain called Timpsons and all they do is repair watches, shoes, keys etc, smaller jobs like this.

If it really is a liability issue, then it's solved the same as with literally anything else in the world - you sign a little piece of paper that releases them of liability. Done. When I bring my own brake pads to fit to my car at a nearby garage they just make me sign a paper that they don't and won't accept any responsibility for fitting my own pads. Problem solved.

Yeah when I got the battery in my gf's Galaxy S8 changed, the repair shop had me sign that there's a chance the phone won't be 100% afterwards and that I accepted this risk. Seemed reasonable enough, if I hadn't liked those terms I could have walked out the door.

That doesn't surprise me. Back in the dim and distant past, I worked in a store where one of my jobs was changing watch batteries. I was given a Watch Back Remover tool and shown once how to use it: that was the full extent of my "training".

So, if we got a watch that didn't have a standard back, we just wouldn't bother with it. However, for the G-Shock, it looks like it's a really straightforward job that should take you 5 mins to do yourself. Looks a lot easier than any laptop repair/replacement job for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGkFYVpDv-k

It also had the problem where it was larger than my arm, but some people like that?

Funny that. I used to never wear a watch. I had a phone after all. One day I decided I might get myself a 'smartwatch' (primitive, it was about 5 years ago or so!) but not being sure I'd like 'wearing' a watch at all, I bought a cheap chinese automatic watch on Aliexpress for £9 shipped.

Guess what? I never bought a smartwatch, instead, I bought a whole collection of real watches, some vintage, some modern, some expensive, some cheapos and I love accessorising with them. Must have 20 of them by now.

The "crown" of my collection is a Bulova Spaceview in 18K gold. It's the nerd's nerd watch, it has A TRANSISTOR in it, a resonator, it 'humes' a 360hz faint hum, and was made in 1964 before Quartz was invented; that movement was onboard the Apollo missions. And that watch has no 'face' so all you see is the innards with the tuning fork in the middle, and a pair of tiny coils around it. </orgasm>

For a survey of a few watches I have owned:

- $50-60 Fossil: Would break in under a year.

- $500 Automatic Tissot: after a couple of years, it couldn't keep time (it added minutes in a period of a week).

- $400 Quartz Citizen: something on it died after three years, and it wasn't the battery. Not worth it to save.

- $4000 Automatic Omega: keeps time amazingly (off by ~7 seconds a week). No issues after two years.

- $60 GPS Soleus: perfect watch for running/working out/rough activities.

When two of my sub $500 watches fail like they did in under give years, I am very hesitant to want another one. On top of that, there are many watches that are just branded watches from another company (e.g. a Burberry Watch is really a branded Fossil Watch).

I can see why someone would prefer a smart watch based on those experiences. The reason I don't get a smart watch is primarily that I dislike having yet another devices to charge. Well...that and I really like my Omega.

> $500 Automatic Tissot: after a couple of years, it couldn't keep time (it added minutes in a period of a week).

Sounds like it got magnetized (https://wornandwound.com/watches-and-magnetization/), which can happen quite easily. For instance, the magnetic closure of Mac laptops did that to one of my watches, from resting my wrist next to the touchpad.

The good news is it's easy to fix with an ~$10 watch demagnetizer.

I took it to an authorized repair shop, they said the cost of repair was more than the watch. I'm guessing they would have taken it into account?

> amazingly (off by ~7 seconds a week).

We only think "7 seconds a week" is amazing because we've somehow decided that mechanical watches are still worth buying.

I have a Bulova Precisionst that cost 10% the price of your Omega and it's accurate to ~10 seconds a YEAR. I adjust it exactly twice a year - for DST. And even that is considered an expensive model.

shrug I like the look and feel of it. If you looked, I have had a quartz watch that was ~10% of this price. I prefer the Omega. I also know that it isn't as accurate. It doesn't bother me.

Why nobody is eating the market by making affordable (sub $50) hackable watches? The most widespread MT626x devices are so paranoidly closed that even changing clock face involves mucking with ROM image using third-party tools. Installing apps? Forget about that.

Curious to what you think that would achieve market wise. Hackable does not seem to matter much. Everything in the sub $100 dollar range I've tried is crappy (battery life, as well as functionality wise) because that's all that particular market segment is willing to pay for, those that want access to one of the viable app ecosystems seem to be prepared to pay the usual markup. Don't get me wrong, I love tinkering with the hardware form factor myself but that doesn't mean I'll create apps, no less an app ecosystem, that make this more viable to the manufacturing side of things. Maybe low cost devices with access to the Android ecosystem become more viable in the future but other than that changing this niche seems relatively hard and producing hackable devices historically goes counter to the approach of any company I can think of in the space. I could see somebody like Arduino creating something appealing and approachable for the rest of us but that would be unlikely to make a dent market wise.

What sort of 3rd party apps do you find yourself using?

Looking through my list the only two I (barely) use are PCalc and DarkSky, which if I didn’t have, I’d just use the stock calculator and weather apps. I’ve tried maybe 20 other apps and none are compelling.

None really I'm afraid. I enjoy having notifications on my wrist sometimes but most days I just slap on a regular watch instead since they're more fashion than utility item for me honestly.

Pine is working on a watch but by no means will they be eating the market.

https://www.pine64.org/pinetime/

I wish it had GPS. All of the Garmin devices have basically the same hardware, but the Forerunner 245, 745, 945, and Fenix have a price difference of a factor of 4 - not to mention the 35/25 on the used/refurbished market. Within the Fenix lineup, product segmentation is exactly the "printer with the speed inhibitor turned off" [1].

A jailbreak on the Garmin devices that enabled Fenix Pro features on the entry-level models would also eat the market.

I actually played with the TI 430-Chronos smartwatch development platform [2] a few years ago, but all the interesting features to me are tied to GPS.

Note: I currently am coveting the Fenix 6 Pro for my hobbies and covering it for hitting the right point in the Casio-F91 to smartphone-on-my-wrist continuum. I just wish some of its software features were available cheaper.

[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...

[2]: https://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/EZ430-Chronos

Yeah my killer feature is a microphone, which the PineTime doesn't have...

Well, look what I just found on AliExpress:

https://aliexpress.com/item/4000527495064.html

It looks like ESP32 + display + real-time-clock + gyroscope/accelerometer/compass + battery + buttons, all inside fitness tracker body. Just waiting for whatever you can code it into

How long does the 80mA Battery last? The ESP32 is a thirsty chip.

To take your question literally, it's probably because you don't eat the market by offering hackability. It doesn't hurt, and it can probably only help, but it's not going to help very much when you're talking about the mass market.

They do. It's called the Seiko 4R35 ;) edit: this is a stupid watch joke

I have a Casio F-91W watch. Like $15. The strap started disintegrating (a known issue) in a year or so, but I replaced it with an awesome NATO strap ($10) and it has served me for years.

Ultra minimalist. Super cheap. Love it.

This isn't the first time this has happened. I stopped wearing watches in normal situations when I got my first Nokia brick, in the late 90s.

Amazfit Bip. $60 for GPS, heart rate monitor, step counter, notifications, 25 days of real battery life, more than 20,000 user-created watch faces, multiple third-party software that runs on the paired phone, and work moving forward on a third-party OS (BipOS).

Unfortunately, the Bip would always randomly crash for me during GPS recording. I got it to record tracks when hiking, and was never able to record more than 5h without it crashing and losing all data.

Too bad, because it was great for the money otherwise.

I'll give you my Casio A168WA-1YES when you pry it from my cold, dead left wrist.

I prefer the terrorist edition, Casio F-91W. But I agree, truly the patrician's choice.

I need the luxury of "ElectroLuminescence", otherwise the F-91W is of course the choice of a true Spartan.

There must be a mod for that, flipping the polarising filter already does wonders.

I'm frustrated enough that smartphones have a battery life that can barely last through the work day. Call me from your smartwatch once we've made enough advancements in battery technologies.

In the age when everyone, even the lowest-income people have some kind of a mobile phone (not even a smartphone), the market for affordable watches all but disappears.

I went back to my automatics when I found myself checking notifications and such too much. I had this fed up moment with my cell phone a few years ago where I felt like I was being programmed like a Pavlovian dog and I put the thing on silent permanently with a few custom settings for important people like my wife and parents etc. When I received a smartwatch (Samsung) I found myself slipping into the same habits and swapped back to my automatic watch. Full disclosure I also just love automatic watches, I find them fascinating and beautiful, but the ultimate driver was not wanting my cell phone/computer on my wrist.

I had a smartwatch for a while, and to my surprise I actually found it less stressful!

For me, one source of smartphone stress is that moment when its screen is out of view (in your pocket, sitting on a desk, etc.) and it makes a noise. At that moment, I have to choose between ignoring it or checking it.

If I ignore it, I have a little bit of worry in the back of my mind that I might be missing something important. If I check it, I have the interruption of figuring out where the phone is and grabbing it. And maybe of unlocking it.

With a smartwatch, the display is always within easy reach. I can check the notification very quickly and move on. I don't worry that maybe I ignored something important.

Also, it's cumbersome to do anything substantial on the smartwatch. On a smartphone, I am tempted to open up another app and get sidetracked with something. With a smartwatch, I don't have that temptation. Its limited usefulness is actually an advantage.

Still waiting on SwatchOS (From 2018):

https://www.swatchgroup.com/en/swatch-group/innovation-power...

Swatch itself was born from the desire to keep the Swiss Watch industry alive against low cost quartz mechanisms. Not likely the same strategy will work twice (government propping up the entire industry).

There's still quite a while to go before I'd consider replacing my trusty Casio wristwatch with a smartwatch. The Pebble got close to what I was looking for, and I have some hopes for the PineTime, but the ideal smartwatch for me has a nice balance between hackability and reliability.

If you just want to tell time: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000GB0G7A/?coliid=IM29FNJPX2F5S&c...

I was confused by the headline until I read the article. Here "accessible" means "affordable", and specifically <US$500, and not "usable by people with disabilities".

Maybe not having $500+ to drop on a watch is considered a disability in that world

<$500 USD is considered an affordable watch? My casio cost <$10, and I doubt smart watches are eating into that market.

Got a phone that does way more. Don’t need a watch.

And if, for some reason, mechanical watches become necessary, I probably have way more immediate problems anyway.

I also got a phone that does way more. Then I got Apple Watch. I like how it greatly reduces the need to reach for the phone. Also, I am one of those guys who have their phone always on silent mode, so those subtle taptic notifications on a wrist don't hurt either.

An alarm/phone that doesn’t wake up your spouse has been one of the most amazing features and has made Apple Watch worth it for me.

Annoying ringtones in the office have declined a lot in the last couple of years, and part of that seems to be due to smart watches.

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