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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

TBH the benefits of a watch face with arms is that you read it via geometry without parsing. You don’t even need the numbers in the first place.

If you absolutely must know that it's precisely 14:22:04 it's not the device for you. But typically you only need to know that it's around 9, or it's not that close to 9 so you have some time to finish up before you leave.

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The article isn’t saying that watchmakers should improve the legibility of the fonts used on the watch face though, it’s arguing that pride in craftsmanship seems to end at the font selection when there is a huge world of possibilities. I didn’t know that even Patek Phillipe has used Arial, that was amusing. These are easily $10k+ watches.

I’d say that it requires good arm design for that to work. This might seem obvious, but I have a watch that I like as an accessory because the “arms” make cool hatch patterns, but the minute and hour hand are not distinct enough to be read at a glance. Now, I purposefully bought the watch as a fashion piece so I’m satisfied, since I always have my phone, but it turned out to be a lot less legible than I thought!

> If you absolutely must know that it's precisely 14:22:04 it's not the device for you.

I think that's false. Railroads used precise watches and published timetables to coordinate train movements well before signals were invented; your watch is wrong, you hit another train head on. So if you want to know that it's 14:22:04, the watch has been your device for 200 years.

They used it because it was the best technology available at the time. And many regulations were put in place to ensure watches for the railways were more accurate than the ones built for the masses, because of those crashes you mention. The railways really drove improvement in watchmaking.

I’m sure the railroads would not bother relying on syncing mechanical watches today, there are much better and more accurate tools. I say this as a fan of mechanical watches.

I was writing in this case about 2024. My analogue apple watch face is synced either via nntp or perhaps directly from the GPS stratum 0 time, but typically I simply glance at it and perhaps walk a little faster. Or not.

We used to have various rituals for syncing clocks and precision timepieces before the advent of quartz digital watches, NTP, and such. Fun as such things were to watch in the movies and at the Olympics, I never needed such precision in my daily life.

That’s only due to extensive synchronization and much more accurate timekeeping. Modern extremely high quality mechanical watches today are only accurate to something like +/-5 seconds per day. If you wear one for months it may be off by minutes.

Today’s quartz watches are accurate to something like 1 second a year (for really good ones), but those didn’t exist back in timetable railroad days.

Perhaps this is why the canonical designed clock/watch face comes form Swiss Railways:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_railway_clock

There was a huge uproar when Apple used it in early iPhones. Also, TIL, trains in Switzerland always leave stations on the full minute mark.

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