Comment by georgieporgie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by georgieporgie | Hacker News Reader

In an utterly opposite-topic vein, I've recently discovered the joy of automatic, mechanical watches. No battery, no electronics, no manual winding. They're just a spring, gears, and a rotor that 'charges' the spring when you move your arm.

Sure, I have a mobile, but I feel a bit silly digging in my pocket when I just want to check the time. Plus, there aren't many non-tacky forms of jewelry for men. Finally, there's just something neat about a completely mechanical solution which is simultaneously old-tech (concept) and high-tech (execution).

Searching for "Seiko 5" on Amazon turns up a lot of options, and the core mechanism has been around since the 1960s. My absolute favorite automatics are the Seiko SKX007 and 009 dive watches, which seem to be unrivaled in value for money.

I'm very curious if this old-tech option appeals to the 20-somethings as much as it does to me, a guy who grew up when digital watches and (gasp) calculator watches were the coolest thing on the planet.

I think that there is a very strong appeal in the high-tech, vanguard crowd of HN and the like for mechanical things of this nature - this is echoed in the fanbase for steampunk, for example.

Personally, if I were to get a new watch (I haven't worn one in years, and am a current college student) I'd want a nice analog watch - digital watches are quite passe, unless you go extremely avant-garde, in which case they're rather much of a statement.

I have a self-winding watch in a drawer. I abandoned it because it wasn't accurate. I had to reset the time every day. I love the cheap quartz watch I have. Big face, big hands, can tell the time without my glasses on, incredibly accurate, $20, with a button for a backlight.

The Seikos are supposed to be accurate to within +/- 5-10 seconds per day. You can't beat quartz, though.

So it's off by half an hour to an hour over a year? That's pretty shoddy accuracy if you ask me, especially in an era where clocks accurate to the second are ubiquitous and cheap.

Sure, if you never adjust your watch for a year. The whole point is how amazingly accurate it is for a sub-$200, purely mechanical timekeeping device. Besides, it's pretty common for super-accurate quartz watches to become wildly inaccurate about once per year (dead battery)...

I am a twenty-something and the idea of a watch that never needs winding and keeps good time definitely appeals to me. For something so basic, reliability trumps flashiness - and on the engineering appeal, it's far more impressive and elegant than any digital watch (to me, a complex system of interlocking gears is less understandable, and so more awe-inspiring, than a watch that is also a computer. Big deal, I already have a computer!)

'Orient', which I believe owned by Seiko, also makes nice inexpensive mechanical watches.

I'm also a fan of mechanical watches. When I was a kid I used to take them apart and mend them - something taught by my grandfather. However, mechanical watches are more about fashion or collectability than they are utilitarian.

Not sure how they could be more utilitarian... it tells you the time which is what watches are suppose to do. They type the parent is talking about is very accurate as well from my experience as well.

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