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How sad. That wall map is a nice object and a good conversation piece to boot.

I guess you haven’t actually tried to buy a grandfather clock. Quality ones are in the thousands at least, if not tens of thousands. Even cheap ones are hundreds of dollars.

To my mind an apple watch is a fundamentally different product from a watch. They just both happen to be worn on the wrist.

>How sad. That wall map is a nice object and a good conversation piece to boot.

It shouldn't be sad to avoid adding another artifact of consumerism to one's life. I'm at a stage in my life where I've gotten rid of most of my "conversation pieces". E.g. I once had an expensive antique warship in my office as decoration. (https://www.google.com/search?q=hms+bounty+model&tbm=isch). I thought it looked really nice. But one day as I was cleaning the dust off of every crevice with an art brush to keep it from looking like a junked up antique, I realized it was an example of a possession making me its slave. I got rid of it and don't regret it. I dodged a bullet by not getting the Geochron and saving $4000 but my journey of enlightenment wasn't complete so I still got suckered into the wooden warship.

>I guess you haven’t actually tried to buy a grandfather clock. Quality ones are in the thousands at least, if not tens of thousands.

Yes, I agree that grandfather clocks are expensive and that's why I used it as a parallel example to the expensive wristwatches.

How can it be true that they're really expensive and you can't even give them away for free on Craigslist?

Probably if you want a good one it's expensive and nobody wants bad ones.

>How can it be true that they're really expensive and you can't even give them away for free on Craigslist?

I tried to give away an 30+ year old Ethan Allen grandfather clock (cost about $2500 new) on Craigslist. Nobody was interested in picking it up. To most young people, grandfather clocks are "dated" and it's only something they see at their grandparents house. It used to be a rite of passage to buy a grandfather clock to the house but that trend is gone now. Like expensive china cabinets, it's just not something a lot of people desire these days.

I suppose if I had left the grandfather clock on Craigslist for a year instead of a month, and if I offered to deliver it instead of requiring pick it up, eventually somebody would have wanted it.

The only way I finally got rid of it was bundling it with an old curio cabinets I was selling. Taking the grandfather clock as a complete package was a condition of the sale. Maybe like vinyl records, grandfather clocks are making a comeback and I got rid of it too early.

> Nobody was interested in picking it up.

When you’re one rent hike away from packing up and moving, this type of thing is not very appealing

A 30 year old Ethan Allen was probably a quartz movement with a fake pendulum? Yeah that’s not interesting. Or was it still a real mechanical clock with weights or a spring you had to wind?

Easy. Think specialist equipment: a nice high-speed factory machine to put caps on bottles may be more than $100K new, but I doubt you can give it away for free on craigslist. It is huge, heavy, and has no practical value outside of soft drink factory.

The old clocks are getting the same status: it's specialist equipment for very rare circumstances.

I think of my watch the same way a lot of people think of jewelry, or suits, or things like that. While it does serve a purpose (telling time), the primary reason I wear it is because I like it. It's functional, but mostly decorative.

I inherited my watch from my father, and I almost certainly wouldn't spend thousands to buy one myself; but I wear it every time I go out to dinner for anything fancier than that.

A watch with batteries that can die is by definition not a mechanical watch like this one.

Damn you HN, I went down the rabbit hole on Geochron. No, I don't need this. Yes, I want it, but not the old version - this one: https://www.geochron.com/product/geochron-digital-atlas-2/

Certainly someone has hacked/recreated this with a Raspberry Pi. I must now go waste a weekend...

I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the price on this. $500 up front, _plus_ a subscription, and it doesn't even include the display. What are you getting for that cost? It _feels_ like something you could install as software on an RPi or any other computer.

Corporate money - if all you have is software engineers getting $250_000/year , the company likely pays ~$250/hour with all the overhead. So you are not paying "$500", you are paying 2 FTE hours. This is pretty small, corporate-wise: a single 1 hour meeting with 10 people in it is 10 FTE hours, and most managers won't think twice before organizing it.

Even DIY solution might not be more economic: sure, if you are familiar with RPi and have one on hand, and someone already wrote the software, you can do it in under 2 hours. But a single problem, like a defective SD card, and the pre-paid solution is now cheaper. Same goes for subscription: $80/year, or 20 FTE minutes. Yes, you can find those layers for free. Will this take you >20 minutes per year to setup and maintain? Probably not.

I was at my first job when I discovered "corporate money" and this was a real eye-opener... That $2000 tool that can only do one super-specific operation? Pays for itself if you can have two fewer defective assemblies.

Sorry, I didn't ask my question well.

Your answer seems to speak to the idea of "we need this in order for our offices to be able to function, what's the most cost effective way acquire it. I can't imagine _any_ office that would need such a thing. It seems to be purely decorative in nature. And the (quality of the) monitor (which isn't part of that cost) is the majority of the decorative part.

I was asking more from the individual perspective; why someone would spend $500 + subscription on something like this, when it should be relatively trivial to just run software that does something like it yourself. Given that it doesn't come with the display, picking a nice display and hooking it up seems like the majority of the work involved.

Offices don't only spend money "to be able to function" - there are all sort of expenses which are entirely optional. Workers' morale, manager's morale, "prestige", etc.. Have you ever heard about management ordering pizza for workers when something goes well? Do you know how much this costs? It's $50 in pizza + 10 people x 1 hour = $2500 in wages, for total $2550 for that pizza party. A totally optional spend, which is not required for offices to be able to function. And yet it happens all the time in many many offices. And don't get me started on cost of all-hands meetings.

And that's why most offices won't think twice about buying that $500 box. A random manager, or even a senior programmer wants it? Sure, get it, no need to even get any approval since it is under $1000. There are exceptions, but that's the thought in many US-based software organizations.

From individual perspective, you are right it makes no sense. If this was my house, I'd do it all myself. But this is not marketed to individuals, it is marketed to people working in companies.

Found a $1.99 app for Apple TV that's pretty good. Now "screen saver" for downstairs television. Will play around with a spare Pi when time permits. There appear to be several options out there. A fun waste of an hour.

I want one, but not with that terrible projection! I’d prefer one inverted at least.

The fact that she had batteries in those Cartier and Omega says a lot, and explains why the Apple watch had such an appeal.

I have somewhat different store.

Moved to Garmin (for sports and outdoor activities) and Mido as an everyday watch from Apple Watch (had 3 and 7 versions). Can't really imagine going back.

I guess I was sold the idea that I neeed notifications, weather and all this bullshit on my wrist all the time.

At some point I realized I've disabled notifications completely and basically the only thing I was using my Apple watch was paranoidal heart rate monitoring.

>Swiss mechanical movement yada yada yada...

Most swiss mechanical movements cost 50-100$ though.

>I guess I was sold the idea that I neeed notifications, weather and all this bullshit on my wrist all the time.

I understand your viewpoint but people are different. My friend is almost 80 years old and wasn't drawn to smart watches because of FOMO fear-of-missing-out on some Instagram notification or hustle culture to constantly check emails. Instead, she's always worried about "forgetting something" and the Apple Watch has reminders for medicine, upcoming appointments, etc. It was a total quality-of-life improvement. It caused a total rethink about the old mechanical watches that didn't assist her in that way.

If a mechanical watch that will be "admired 200 years from now instead of being in a landfill" -- doesn't help her take pills -- then she's not going to be attached to the romanticism of it like a watch collector enthusiast.

>Most swiss mechanical movements cost 50-100$ though.

Your clarification means you misinterpreted my comment. I was not insulting mechanical watches such as your Mido or gp's expensive IWC. My point was that it's rare and counterintuitive when a cheap disposable product causes a total rethink of previously valuable items regardless of the older item's "timeless qualities" (e.g. "200 year heirloom").

I wouldn't say that's the opposite conclusion. Plenty of people have switched from mechanical or quartz watches to Apple watches for their daily wear. But a decade from now the watches in the jewelry drawer will have retained their value more than the watch that's on her wrist today.

Of course there's nothing wrong with wearing a smart watch. For practical purposes they are better in every way. They just have a different lifetime. It's a similar situation with cars. Some like the constant maintenance that a 60 year old car requires, others want a Toyota that will reliably get them to work, and others want a sports car with engine that can go three times as fast as they'll ever drive.

Also, I think the cheap product winning is pretty typical. CDs replaced vinyl records and were then replaced by music streaming. Few people buy cameras now that smartphones exist. And these mechanical watches were already replaced for the most part decades ago by quartz watches.

Despite the existence of more practical alternatives, there are people who still like to buy grandfather clocks, vinyl records and mechanical watches. They are certainly in the minority and you won't find a grandfather clock or record player in every home, but there is a market there.

(I kind of hate to be that guy, but if there were batteries inside, those weren't Swiss mechanical movements)

For practical purposes they are better in every way

Mostly agree, except you have to take the Apple Watch every single day for maintenance (charging). You can buy a Casio F-91W for $20 and go 7-10 years before you have to take off your wrist for a battery change. If you simply want to tell time, digital watches, quartz watches, and arguably mechanical watches beat smart watches.

>, but if there were batteries inside, those weren't Swiss mechanical movements

Yes. The Cartier Tank watch is mechanical. I just lumped in the other nice jewelry watches with batteries to talk about them as a group because they've all been eliminated from her mindset.

>Also, I think the cheap product winning is pretty typical.

When I wrote "replace", I didn't mean in terms of sales. It was more about the cheaper product replacing the previous thinking in the mind about the old product.

For example, she used to color-coordinate the different jewelry watches with different outfits... If it's a blue outfit, wear the stainless steel watch ... if it's this other dress, wear the gold watch with black face. If the shirt has starfish, wear the seashell theme watch. That whole ritual is eliminated. (I guess one could also change watch bands on Apple Watches for different occasions but she doesn't bother with it. Maybe because arthritis makes it hard to squeeze the band's release mechanism.)

The new Apple Watch alters the psychological relationship with the previous jewelry watches so thoroughly that it makes her impervious to gp's praise such as, "Vacheron-Constantin [...], it will still be a testimony of the refinement and engineering of a fine craft that few can achieve, [...] you'll be very lucky if your Casio can last as long. Your mass commoditised Apple watch will likely be worthless."

Her comeback to the gp's "timeless" qualities is that she likes lifting the Apple Watch to her face and asking, "Hey Siri, how many inches is 5 centimeters? (when sewing clothes) ... Or how many cups in a liter? (when cooking from a recipe with metric quantities)." She thinks it's a miracle that a little watch can understand her voice and give her answers. Yes, everybody at HN is jaded and we all know Apple's Siri is the worst voice assistant technology out there but yet she loves it. If that means it's wearing a mass-produced watch that nobody cares about in 200 years after she's buried in the ground, that doesn't matter at all. Her "dressy watches" phase is over.

That's the type of rare product replacement situation I'm talking about. Usually, the opposite happens: we all get on some hedonistic treadmill with various consumer products and the next better thing we desire is more expensive. In the 1980s, CDs were actually 2x more expensive than vinyl records and cassette tapes. Vinyl was about $6.99. CDs were $15.99+. It took over 10 years for CDs to gradually lower in price such that Walmart was selling them for less than $10. The new CD players themselves were about $1000 in 1980s. Record players were $100.

Perhaps we're reading gp's comment differently. I don't think he's telling your friend she should be wearing this Vacheron Constantin (or any luxury watch) instead of her Apple watch. He's rather defending its achievement in engineering and craftsmanship despite everything it does being trivial for a smart watch. I read it as appreciation rather than a sales pitch.