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Comment by __loam | Hacker News Reader

You can get a watch that's more accurate and more complex than one of these for under $1000 in an Apple watch or a Casio.

For me, this feels like one of the less harmful things rich people do. Ultimately you're paying a bunch of skilled labor in a developed state to maintain an artistic craft that uses very little energy and material, for a device that has worse functionality than one under $100. The only issue is where you got your money I suppose, and whether that money would have been better spent elsewhere.

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You can get a Casio F-91W and replace the movement with a Sensor Watch board. The watch then becomes a water resistant temperature compensated quartz wristwatch. It's a literally world class time piece. I calibrated mine and now it deviates a few seconds per year. It's insane how good this thing is. Low power, battery lasts over a year.

It's a fully programmable ARM microcontroller. You can write "watch faces" for it. There's a 2nd factor codes face that lets you log in like you're James Bond on the Nintendo 64. One of the coolest projects I've ever worked on. I made it possible to calibrate the pulsometer, a feature I use frequently at work.

https://www.sensorwatch.net/

They even developed a custom LCD that's even more awesome than the original.

The point of these is to signal you have money and are enough of an insider to know the high-status brands - or at least high-status enough for that particular social group, who use them to reassure each other they're not in the vulgar Rolex set.

They serve the same function as a designer handbag - although you can at least put things inside a handbag and carry them around.

This is overly cynical. The target demographic for a really complicated Vacheron Constantin is a rich person who is a HUGE nerd about watches. Think about people who get into really high levels of nerd hobbies and acquire super expensive gear. It's not primarily about showing off.

Not that I am wealthy enough to participate, but you see the same thing in cars and the same issue too. Sometimes status signalling and taste end up in the same product, and people who don't care about cars end up with the finest of the cars, almost coincidentally.

If it was about the nerdery the watches wouldn't be sold with huge margins through a rarefied dealer network located in exclusive shopping locations.

This is an item of jewellery, not a high-end custom PC.

I'm not sure buying the super fancy handbag is primarily about showing off, either, and I think people who consume a lot of these goods have a lot of brand knowledge.

I mean, I think you're right in that watch nerds usually have more domain knowledge, but I don't think it's inherently dissimilar.

What's "hobby" about it? Is the owner going to open the watch and make modifications as a weekend avocation?

Just like those collecting stamps, figurines, comic magazines, paintings and so on the watch hobbyist pretty much _never_ makes modifications to their items. Why do you consider it a requirement for it to be a hobby?

For a rolex, yeah.

For virtually any other watch, not so much as to the normal person they are just a watch

> They serve the same function as a designer handbag

Keeping EU trade imbalances from getting too far out of whack?

Switzerland is not part of the EU lol

Like yeah, purely from a utility standpoint, a $50 Casio destroys a mechanical watch in accuracy and durability. But not everything people value is about utility - sometimes it's about beauty, craftsmanship, or just the joy of making something wildly unnecessary really well

There is its own beauty and craftsmanship in cramming billions of transistors on a 4nm die.

Sadly we don't consider things that are economically efficient as craftmanship :)

Casio F-91W: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43636954

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