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Comment by cityhall | Hacker News Reader

You moved from high-end automatic watches to a smartwatch. In the long term, it's worth considering whether people will move from smartwatches to mechanical ones. If people get used to the features of an iWatch in their 20's, will they ever decide it's worth spending many thousands of dollars on a piece of jewelry that displaces all that functionality? If not, automatics may go the way of film cameras.

Whatever their merits as engineering marvels, expensive watches are Veblen goods that are worn to display wealth. Similar mechanisms can be put into pocket watches, but that's a much smaller market. Expensive watches have the appeal they do because they fall on the same continuum as everyone else's watch. Change the middle of the watch market and the current high end will look as absurd as a Vertu brick phone.

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> If not, automatics may go the way of film cameras.

I think you're missing the fact that the mechanical watch industry is already post-apocalypse (i.e., the Quartz Crisis that started in the 70s).

The current mechanical watch industry does not exist for anything other than emotional reasons and won't see that much of an impact from another $400 electronic watch.

As a collector myself I think it's an interesting development for the industry and I'm sure I'll buy some version of the Apple Watch. I doubt it will replace one of my mechanicals as a daily wear.

I'd not go that far - look at the Seiko 5, which I find more attractive than most of the Kinetic models anyhow, and gray market in the US, its much much cheaper, several years ago I bought two identical ones for my 30th birthday, should last me my lifetime.

The Seiko 5 has an amazing ecosystem of customized parts by the way, showing that mechanical watches can be a dream for tinkerers.

Oh how I didn't know about the Seiko 5 at all? Was looking for a sports-appropriate watch recently, would prefer it to the eventually chosen Timex IQ Compass. Though the compass proved to be an useful complication!

See also http://www.seiko5finder.com (not affiliated)

Thanks for the link (41 yr old site creator).

I only recently got interested in mechanical watches. It's fun to have a mechanical marvel on my wrist for those times when I don't want to reach into my pocket to tell the time using an electronic marvel.

I'm not sure if I'd ever get a smart watch. Perhaps. I actually feel kind of attached to my automatic. If I stop wearing it for more than two days it will stop running. That just seems cruel to the little guy.

I guess his point is that the high-end mechanical watch market only exists at all because of, as you say, collectors. It's older people with a bit of cash to spend on a luxury item. But those 40 year-old people grew up with cheaper versions of the same thing, and so there was a recognizable appeal in the higher-end watches. If today's 20 year-olds all buy smart watches, will they want to spend four figures on a mechanical watch when they're 40 with a bit of cash?

Expensive watches are pointless vanity goods. I would hope that as a society we are educated enough in 20 years that people will use their excess resources to help others instead of purchasing expensive jewelery with virtually zero utility.

I recommend diversifying your hopes for the future into a few more buckets, because any eggs you put in this particular basket aren't coming back.

I am in it for the karma not the eggs.

This is a really toxic view of consumption. What level of consumption is moral to you? Can I buy a pack of chewing gum if I earn $100k? What if buying a $100k watch is a smaller percentage of my income than that pack of chewing gum?

Chewing gum aids in oral hygiene, it has utility. The opportunity cost is hardly anything. The opportunity cost of something that exists purely for aesthetic purposes is 100% of the cost of the good. In this case you're talking $1,000+ for a watch. I am always reminded of the scene in Schindler's list where he looks at the additional things he could have sold or gone without to save lives. On my death bed I don't want to look back with regret and wonder how much more I could have done to help people if I wasn't acting selfishly.

To me the moral level of consumption is as close to the minimum required to survive and make an optimal economic contribution to society. Everyone needs happiness and entertainment in their lives. The struggle is avoiding excess.

How does one hope to define "excess" if there's a carveout for "happiness and entertainment"? Beyond our Maslow needs, most of what we spend money on is arguably for "happiness and entertainment", no?

By attempting to make optimal entertainment choices. For example, watching a classic film that is in the public domain on archive.org instead of going to see the latest Disney production in the theater and paying $10 for a ticket. Borrow a book from the library. Have friends over for a game night instead of going out for drinks. There is no best solution. My hope is that people will at least try and make better choices.

I agree that most of what people spend their money on is the pursuit of happiness and entertainment. My view is that the path to true happiness does not lie in material goods or personal experiences. Rather, helping others in their struggles and seeing their lives improve leads to fulfillment.

So the moral amount of consumption is the amount you do and no more.

"Optimal entertainment choices" is so vague as to be meaningless. If I can spent 25K on a vacation and not feel it hurt my wallet, isn't that an optimal entertainment choice?

Not to pick on you, but this attitude always frustrates me. Should all artists give up their work because creating it serves no "practical" purpose? There is a middle ground in all things, but who is to say where to draw the line?

I want to live in a world where watchmakers (and other artists) are free to make any awesome and expensive thing that they can imagine. Man does not live by bread alone.

To paraphrase Admiral Adama:

It's not enough to just live. You have to have something to live for. Let it be mechanical watches.

I actively support artists and view creative contributions to society as extremely valuable. I think that a large portion of the future economy is in digital creative work. By contributing to kickstarter and indiegogo I help enable people to fulfill their creative dreams.

For things that can be digitally distributed at virtually no cost, or can be bulk produced at low cost (books, music, board games, etc.) I am fully supportive. For things that have a high economic opportunity cost, such as extremely complex watches, luxury cars, things of that nature, I have a very low tolerance because the cost is human life. As a species we have not yet reached a point where every human has the necessities of life. Once everyone has access to food, water, shelter, and internet (education), then I am all for exploring the limits of our potential in every regard.

Where do you get the idea that there's no economic opportunity cost without physical items? The whole idea of opportunity cost is intangible -- it's the difference between what you got by doing what you did versus what you could have gotten by doing something else. Distributing a book may be free, but writing a book requires maybe years of effort. Why are you giving that author a free pass for not spending that time building wells and schools in the South Sudan?

That's a very good point about the opportunity cost of time. I will reconsider my position.

I think that someone like you should figure out how to implement "conspicuous charity" - figure out a socially acceptable way for people to compete on displays of wealth and taste based on what charities they give to, and how much they give.

As an aside, I think it's your money, and if you want to spend more than I would spend on a server (which is to say, way more than I'd consider spending on a car) on a fancy watch, well, I'm going to make fun of you a little bit, but ultimately, it's your money, and your judgement. But, if fancy watches are primarily signaling, which I believe to be the case, it seems to me that you could figure out how to get the same signaling value out of proving that you gave a certain amount to certain stylish charities.

High end brands could release limited edition colors of their products at a higher price with the additional money going to some efficient charitable organization. Who wouldn't want to have an EFF themed Tesla to show off?

This is a completely naive and subjective approach. Please enlighten me as to how you intend to tell the time in the absence of a compatible power supply and/or power grid. Or when that severely limited lithium ion battery stops taking a charge after a year of use. Even if you had acceptable answers to those questions, it still leaves one to question the need for something which implements a subset of the features my phone has at the same cost.

Mechanical watches are moving art and are rarely purchased out of need. With the advent of perpetual automatics, they approach the ideal of mechanical perfection - a miniature machine which can accurately track time (and many other features) in extreme environments without the need of a power source. As such, they continue to appeal to many different people - with higher end, more complicated designs continuing to come about at higher prices. I'm a software developer and I love my automatics for both their technical merits as well as their aesthetic beauty. To each his own

Mechanical watches don't require sacrificing many features vs. quartz. Other than not having to wind or set it as often, the only real advantage of quartz is price.

That's what may change if these new smart watches find their killer app. No one really needed a calculator, heart beat monitor, or other gimmick on his wrist, so digital watches never pulled away on features. That might change now.

Would I rather wear an intricate piece of jewelry or see why my phone vibrated without reaching into my pocket? It starts to be a different calculation.

I find your analogy particularly fitting, albeit you miss the point, perhaps because you are not into either cameras or watches.

Compact cameras are not doing too good, because you can shoot pictures with your phone. DSLR and mirrorless though, are doing swell, with even better projections.

In the same way, I think low end watches (mechanical+smart) will suffer a big hit, but high end watches ($1k+ will not see any difference at all). It's just different market segments. You don't see Martinelli worried about Ikea opening a factory every eayr. They just sell to different people.

I've tried to make that point to people who claim that Apple has ever shrinking market share in the smartphone market. It might seem so to a person who has no idea about marketing, but in reality, Apple's share in the high end segment of the market is increasing.

The difference between cameras and watches is you can carry a smartphone and a DSLR. Unless you're going to start wearing two watches, you'll be giving up all the utility of a smartwatch for your wealth-indicator, which yes many people will be happy to do now, but that market can only shrink as the high-end smartwatch market grows.

Although you have almost all of that functionality on your smartphone already.

I know several people that own $10K+ watches, and a larger group who own $1K+ watches None of them own only one super expensive watch... and a lot of them carry like three or four in a bag for different situations.

On the other hand, Leica and Hasselblad switched to digital along with everyone else. There's still a high end but it has to compete on technology, not just exclusivity.

Watch purists may go the way of vinyl purists, slowly dying out as the competing technology offers more and more convenience.

there is always Android wear SDK, free and waiting for Swiss watchmakers, when they decide to integrate alarms and notifications from your android handset

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