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Comment by KingOfCoders | Hacker News Reader

For decades I wanted mechanical watches. Then I had some and I learned that I wanted the image of mechanical watches but not reality.

I gave my mechanical watches to my wife and bought an UHF quartz, which as an 80s kid is much more to my liking I've learned to my suprise.

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I wear a mechanical watch and I love it for a few reasons.

First and foremost, I like how it looks. It's jewelry.

I also love that it's a little self-powered machine that captures energy from me living my life and stores it in a little spring. When I hold it very close to my ear and listen carefully, I hear the 4 Hz ding-ding-ding-ding-ding sound that can calm me down almost instantly when I'm feeling a lot of anxiety. If I don't want to hold my wrist to my ear, just watching the second hand moving around the dial has a similar effect.

I feels alive, it's an engineering marvel, a work of art, and useful.

I also have a digital watch I wear for similar reasons. It lacks the kinetic qualities of the mechanical version, but it too is beautiful, a technical marvel (to me), and useful.

A f91-w will keep better time, never breaks, and costs about 2-3 coffees. You cannot beat the utility.

And the F-105W will do the same but with a usable night light.

I have an F-91 and the thing I dislike about that watch and watches like it are the 3-button design. There's a pad for the fourth button and some functions could have been easier with a fourth button, but it probably increased the bill of materials by $1. Not sure why, but the 3-button asymmetry just feels wrong to me.

Timex has a similar watch with 4 buttons and when my Casio dies, I'll probably buy one.

I also have a (little more expensive) GWM5610-1 and I think it is the best watch (for what is important to me, solar, sleep mode, radio, gshock, waterproof) - it will probably outlast me.

I have one too, but find myself favouring the much lighter and simpler F-105 anyway.

Then I need to get that one too ;-)

Same. I have the Withings Steel Hr, which looks mostly analog except for the small screen.

The mechanical watches started breaking down and becoming unreliable, and fixing Russian (Poljot mentioned in the article) and Chinese watches is a challenge, apparently.

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