I love my dumb watches | Hacker News Reader

I love my dumb watches

gary.onl

97 pointsabnercoimbre92 comments

Not sure he researched his options well enough. The Garmin watches that use a MIP display only require a charge about once a month, probably even less if you turn off the Bluetooth, which gives him the other thing he wants, no distracting messages relayed from the phone. Battery life is potentially even longer for the models with solar charging.

I also find the reasoning in "Why track your sleep at all? If you’ve had a crap night, you’ll wake up tired." weird. That's the equivalent of saying "Why track your blood pressure at all? If you've had a problem with high blood pressure, you'll wake up with a stroke." Not that the sleep tracking on smartwatches seems to be worth much but I just don't agree with the logic.

I love digital watches and have a few Casios, including a protrek like the G-Shock he mentions at the end, that syncs to a radio signal and has solar charging.

I switched to a Garmin with oled screen for running, sleep, and Garmin pay. I liked the functionality but hated having to charge it every few days. Especially coming from Casios that you never need to take off your wrist. And I hated having to choose between being able to always see the time at a glance and needing to charge it every day due to always on display.

I recently caved and bought a solar powered instinct 3, with MIP display and I love it. I can go over a month without charging, and without turning off features, and I can always see the screen outdoors, when cycling or doing some activity.

So yeah, the first one was probably just not the right watch for me.

You might really like the solar or non solar ones with MIP and full topo maps - still have insane battery life with the right settings.

Then again I still love my dumb watches for lightweight or style

So whats the point of wearing a garmin if you disable bluetooth? It doesn't seem like he needs GPS tracking or maps.

Every time I read one of these articles it sounds like the author was forced to adopt a smartwatch at gunpoint.

My cheap dumb watch requires battery change once in 4 years and counting.

> also find the reasoning in "Why track your sleep at all? If you’ve had a crap night, you’ll wake up tired." weird. That's the equivalent of saying "Why track your blood pressure at all? If you've had a problem with high blood pressure, you'll wake up with a stroke

These are not nearly comparable. If you have issue, regular blood pressure measurements mean you get more drugs if it is persistently up. It is not like being tired at all.

Casio has just released W-221H watches that talk about 10 year battery life:

* https://www.casio.com/intl/watches/casio/product.W-221H-1AV/

If you're willing to spend a bit more, there are solar powered watches (digital and analog faces).

Casio’s classic F91W often lasts more than 10 years, I guess they just didn’t want to advertise it til they could stand behind it.

I really like my new F91W modded by CW&T, embedded in a brick of resin so there’s no buttons, no way to change the time, no changing the battery, just a watch that will tick for 10ish years and then die.

https://cwandt.com/products/solid-state-watch

Might as well use this comment to also share somebody stuffed an ARM processor into an F91W

https://www.crowdsupply.com/oddly-specific-objects/sensor-wa...

True but these examples illustrates how fitness watches' underlying value prop, their pitch, is to convince users to make it a daily lifestyle. There's a spectrum of practicality though: there's less reason to monitor blood pressure on a minute-by-minute basis, with graphs and trends and metrics, but an initial novelty wears off after a few weeks of monitoring sleep that way. It's cool and interesting at first, but hard to justify it as a constant lifestyle. Maybe insulin / glucose is interesting from a data-heavy perspective, but diabetics eventually gain an instinct for what meals spoke what and when, and start to lay off the data and metrics. The novelty wears off.

The heart-rate monitoring on my Garmin gives highly accurate tracking of calories burned, better than anything I could do by hand. Very valuable, I was able to lose 50 pounds and I was able to do minimal calorie counting. Basically I ate a very consistent weekly diet and used the watch to tell me if I had done enough exercise that I could eat something else. It's still very useful, I look at my calorie count regularly to guide how much extra to eat before and after activities.

I've also found some of the other ML-powered derived metrics surprisingly useful. There's a "training status" that has "productive/maintaining/strained/recovery/detraining." When I've got a bad cold/flu/covid type illness it often says "strained" which I can feel in my body but it's nice to have that objective external metric of "yes, your body is not working right and you should take it easy."

Similarly when I am working out it's nice to be able to look at my heart rate at a glance and know if I am over/under exerting myself.

Yeah I tried these health trackers for a while, but I got super irritated by having to plan around them. It's objectively not a big deal, but last time my Garmin died I just put it down and never picked it up again. Been living with a Casio on the wrist uninterrupted for years now, and whenever I think about trying on the Garmin again, I don't want to because I would need to charge it first. At least with a mechanical watch it's ready to go whenever.

> I also find the reasoning in "Why track your sleep at all? If you’ve had a crap night, you’ll wake up tired." weird. That's the equivalent of saying "Why track your blood pressure at all? If you've had a problem with high blood pressure, you'll wake up with a stroke." Not that the sleep tracking on smartwatches seems to be worth much but I just don't agree with the logic.

Equating tracking sleep to tracking a diagnosed and dangerous medical condition seems ridiculous. Not even remotely equivalent. There are lots of things in life that aren't worth the effort of tracking. There was a recent post here about a guy who spent years meticulously tracking every aspect of his life so he could crunch all the data and learn something interesting about himself. He learned in the end that he learned nothing new worth knowing.

"Why track your tumor at all? If the tumor becomes malignant, you'll wake up dead". That must be equivalent too right?

> He learned in the end that he learned nothing new worth knowing.

A valuable data point for me though!

The reason to track things is simply to make cool graphs, and that is certainly a very valid reason!

Because there isn't much that is actionable with sleep tracking. You can lose weight if you have sleep apnea, and anecdotally people claim that not drinking helps, but you don't need a watch to tell you that. With blood pressure, you get on losartan and see the results immediately.

I don’t see how there is nothing actionable from sleep tracking.

If I have a week of bad sleep scores I don’t go for a long run on the weekend. I don’t indulge in things I would otherwise do, and I make an effort to get off a screen and to bed earlier until I get a solid 8 hours of sleep

But the sleep score tells you nothing. I wake up and I always know roughly what it will be because I already feel it. If my feelings and the watch disagree, the feelings are correct. I get both pieces of information at the same time. The only reason I track it at all is as a kind of memory of how I've been doing, but I could equally well make a note of my feelings.

I turned off all tracking on my Garmin besides real time heart rate. It only drained battery overnight and the tracking wasn't even that good as it even counted time I was reading or playing on Switch as sleeping.

See perhaps the essay ‘The Last Quiet Thinkg’ by Terry Godier on his Casio (and tech generally):

* https://www.terrygodier.com/the-last-quiet-thing

Modern technology is the embodiment of anxious attachment.

My parents bought an automatic Orient watch for each of them in the 70s - those that don't require batteries nor anything. My mother's watch was stolen somewhere in the 2010s and my father broke the crystal and kept stored for like 15 years or so. Just some weeks ago I remembered about it and sent it to service - now it looks and works like new and the service itself wasn't expensive. I'm pretty amazed.

Super

I started working for a clock and watch repair shop a few months ago after deciding it has better job security than computer programming :) I change batteries, replace crystals and hands etc

I thought I would like the mechanical puzzles (not all that different than debugging programs) but now my favorite part is just knowing I’m keeping a talisman going, for someone to pass on to their grandkids, and it’s true that the well-made stuff can last centuries with occasional service.

Fun article, and it hits on the main trick: buy old, used watches. eBay, watchuseek forums, wherever. You can get sweet old, mechanical watches for like $20-200 all day long. And they come in reasonable sizes, modern watches are almost always way too big IMO.

I snagged one of these on watchuseek 10+ years ago, remains my favorite watch: https://www.fratellowatches.com/citizen-homer-second-setting...

Here is my recommendation for a watch that is somewhere between a dumb watch and a smart watch.

https://www.casio.com/us/watches/gshock/product.GW-9400-1/

Casio Rangeman GW-9400 Series

It is solar powered and has a lot of passive sensors including a thermometer, barometer, altimeter, and compass. It sets the time from a radio signal. It is everything-proof. This is my "zombie apocalypse" watch.

It's a shame that 60% of it is reserved for gaudy plastic branding rather than for showing useful information.

Casio keeps pumping out these G-SHOCK clones, but I wonder who's buying them? I haven't seen one in the wild since the 90s.

They’re popular. They release gshock collabs with various design firms all the time, and they sell out quickly

Just in the past year they have released collabs for stranger things, back to the future and Pac-Man. Not to mention all the streetwear versions.

I have a casio pro trek. It’s fantastic in general, though the band is unfortunately getting gooey after five years or so. No wifi or telemetry.

That's the ugliest, gaudiest watch I've ever seen.

It's indestructible! It could save your life!

I like my Apple Watch loads. Yes, it tells me the time and the date. And the weather. It has a timer. (It can't make a call by itself.) It will tell me if I have AFIB. I'm getting older -- it will detect a fall, or a car wreck. And I only have to charge it up once every day and a half or so...or for about 15 minutes to get me through a night of sleep monitoring.

Watches of all sorts are cool. I often have watch envy.

> Watches of all sorts are cool. I often have watch envy.

Hard not too. You can only really wear one, after all.

I also love them and wear an analog watch every day. Something funny I've noticed (anecdote warning) is that a lot of tech-savvy people I know wear an analog watch, and a lot of people who are not really tech savvy love to wear every digital gadget they can get their hands on, including smart watches.

And since there are more non-tech-savvy people than tech-savvy people, the market for smartwatches is booming.

I encourage people to wear non-smartwatches, and the biggest rebuttal I get is fear of missing messages and calls.

My friend, that’s entirely the point :)

A lot of people view tech as magic and are wow'd by it. But many people that work in tech, based on their experience working with it, view it more as an eldritch horror. There's something comforting about a mechanical watch that people have been making by hand for hundreds of years.

Citizen makes great dumb watches. They're built well, reasonably priced, and completely solar powered. Promaster is maybe the best dumb watch you can get for that price point, you just need to put a sapphire glass in it. I wish they'd do a "Promaster Pro" model though, with a higher frequency quartz crystal and magnetic resistance. That would be asymptotic with perfection.

I work at a watch repair shop and wish I could fund public service announcements that the eco drives will not last forever if kept in the dark, ie stored in a jewelry box or a drawer longer than a few months. They use capacitors that become ineffective if allowed to die all the way. You need to keep them exposed to light, and even then ~15 years is the optimistic end of the capacitor’s lifetime.

IMO you’re better off with a cheaper Casio that can last ten years on a 5 dollar battery. When the capacitor fails in a solar watch due to being kept in the dark we charge 85$ to replace it.

Also the older eco drives are unserviceable and you’ll have to buy a new watch if something goes wrong in the electronics or mechanics.

I appreciate the heads up. I tend to keep mine by a sunny window when I'm not wearing it...letting a watch's movement come to a halt just feels wrong somehow.

I love that everybody can enjoy watches differently :-).

There are people thay get a rolex. And good on them and they certainly send a message O:-)

There are people who like obscure Soviet watches, or hyper expensive ridiculously over complicated modern marvels, or just a few solid units from citizen and Seiko, etc etc.

I have a nice citizen blue angels navihawk with a tremendously useful ;) circular slide rule - but have much more enjoyed finding cool weird little Chinese semi-brand-name watches. Most of them will have a Seiko movement anyway, but without the brand / prestige surcharge. They're really the only jewelry / vanity thing I do - I have ten copies of same t-shirt because it's comfortable and fits me well, but I also have a watches for every occasion to match when I want to "dress up", and dozen of them cost me as much as that single citizen.

Everyone enjoys watches differently, but for the "spirit watch" of modern HN, I'd nominate the Ressence Type 3: https://ressencewatches.com/products/type-3-black

https://youtu.be/HtQ2pRMZUGE?t=212

An half-air/half-oil filled watch that looks like a smartwatch, but is fully mechanical. No bling, somewhat understated, but still quite visually interesting with a modernist design.

And all kinds of interesting technical quirks like using a magnetic coupling to transfer motion from the air filled half to the oil filled half, tiny bellows that open and close to allow the oil room to expand, the little temp gauge etc.

It's very expensive, but not cartoonishly expensive. And the expense isn't tied to speculation or hundred year old pedigree like some other watches, instead it feels like you're paying for people who really enjoyed skirting along the edges of their craft in a time-intensive way the same way a hacker does

(I don't think the pick has stayed the same over time though: early days would have been some Casio calculator watch, then the Apple Watch/Pixel Watch, and now this)

Is that USD? Fifty two thousand dollars for a watch? You can buy two Chevy Bolts for that.

One of the top stories on HN yesterday was about a company that paid 4-5 average people's wages per person for a team that sat on their butts 8 hours a day and wrote meeting scheduling software for a decade. This was done so they could then sell, not even the software, but... the right to their institutional knowledge for an additional few thousand years worth of average wages.

And of course they're permanently deleting the fruits of that decade's worth of work with 1 week's notice.

And this is the 2nd time the team's leaders have run this play, with the same buyer paying each time: seemingly they can just leave again and keep doing this ad nauseum. (Clockwise)

If you put the value we assign to software engineering in terms of other things it really doesn't make sense either. At least what these people did is something mechanically interesting, unique, and enduring vs the average CRUD app.

I see where you're coming from and I'm glad you've had a successful career, but $52,000 for a watch is absolutely cartoonish money lol. It is definitely a cool piece though, no question.

>"It's very expensive, but not cartoonishly expensive."

When I click the link it said about fifty thousand dollars.

That's not $50,000 of small-scale engineering and manufacturing to you?

Especially in an industry that runs off fuzzy stuff like "pedigree" to sell 50 year old designs for as much used: https://subdial.com/listing/audemars-piguet-royal-oak-extra-...

It's just a subjective perception of what makes something "cartoonishly expensive".

These types of watches are interesting, clearly making things hard for the sake of being hard. 60 years ago the quest for accuracy got pretty extreme but there was theoretically a practical goal. After quartz movement, that pretence disappeared. I'm in the mindset that up to several hundred bucks, you're paying for something in a watch - accuracy, options, durability, style, whatever it may be. At some point afterwards, and certainly at 50k, you're paying price for sake of paying the price. I don't see the problem that watch is trying to solve, I see it as what can we do for 50k. And that's cool and all, some of them are interesting, but for me, definitely in the cartoonishly expensive category :-)

They are both cartoonishly expensive. This kind of watch culture to me is even more unpalatable than country club culture. At least those people are getting quite a lot of service for what they’re paying.

I think if there's ever a day I prefer country club culture to the result of an industrial designer deciding to spend a decade coming up with all the engineering hacks to make something that cool work, I'm just going to walk out into the blizzard.

I love my (now third) Amazfit Bip watch with MIP display I wear since 2018 when my new phone lost LED notification indicator.

I charge it ONCE A MONTH, it has perfectly readable display in sunlight (more sun the better, opposite of AMOLED), at same time it tracks my sleep (bonus feature, not really necessary) and I can see incoming notifications on my wrist without taking it the phone, and of course it has much more accurate time than any dumb watch.

Author is some iphone addict who chose poorly apple watch and makes his opinion based on them.

Nobody force you to use smart features if you don't want, but they are there if you need and used Bip cost me like 20$, is thinner than any smart watch in market and saves me lot of time from looking at phone.

The function of the watch is that it gives me one less reason to touch my phone.

Reducing the cost of looking at a notification from taking something out of your pocket to just glancing at your wrist sounds like a superpower. I immediately jumped in and was an early adopter of smart watches back when the original Pebble was released.

Turns out being interrupted by a buzzing in your pocket gives you much less information to be distracted with than being delivered the actual message directly, and it was terrible for my mental health.

Mechanical watches are cool and look great but for most days I just use a Casio A158WA. It’s small and weight almost nothing and has a battery that could be measured in half-decades.

I know it's an anachronism, but I just can't like square watches- that round shape is just "right" to me, even though it's a terrible form factor for displaying most things like maps and apps.

I have a Tag Heuer I bought back in 2005 that I wore almost daily until I got my first Apple Watch (second gen). Since then it’s been collecting dust except the ultra rare occasion I have to dress up.

I recently bought a cheap G Shock on a whim thinking I might wear it. It’s also collecting dust. I probably have even less reason to wear it than the Tag.

My wife wants to buy me a Rolex as a belated wedding gift but I keep on insisting no because I feel it’s also going to join the Tag in the dustbin.

I don’t understand how you can say a smart watch isn’t, on top of all the smart features, also the best watch there is when it comes to keeping time. It keeps perfect time, always, even over DST changes, even when you change time zones. You never even have to set them!

Also your Apple Watch is defective if you have to charge it all night. I’m up to my third, I always wear it while I sleep, I only charge it when I’m getting ready for bed or getting ready in the morning, and the battery never runs out.

There’s keeping time, and then there’s keeping time without me babying it making sure it never dies, but yes having an internet uplink is a very good way to be on time to the second.

I also like the GShock G-LIDE with Bluetooth to set the time from the phones, but then you can put the watch on airplane mode and not worry about it for a few years. It adjusted for DST without uplink by knowing the date and location. It’s got sunrise and sunset without internet too.

https://www.casio.com/us/watches/gshock/product.GBX-100S-1/

My Fitbit died two weeks ago. I had purchased it because I can set multiple silent alarms. I could replace the battery but then it’s likely that the watertight seal would be compromised. I’ve put on my analogue watch, learned to live with my phone for alarms and so far so good. No worrying about the charge state every few days. No syncing with apps etc.

I've had mixed luck with that auto 31 jewel Vostok movement - one still going strong (although it did have to be sent back to RU for attention), and another that completely gave up the ghost

Prior to certain geopolitical events they could be had for under three figures, which is a steal if you got a good one

The danger with the older ones is that the rubber seals might be toast - if it's an Amphibia this kind of defeats the object of a dive watch

I've received many compliments for my Rolexes, and only ever a question about my Pebble. Nobody has ever expressed any interest in my Apple Watch.

A rolex is jewelry, meant to be flashy and catch the eye. Pebbles and apple watches are some of the least interesting things you could put in your wrist lol

My watch monitors my long-term heart rate trends across lifestyle and medication changes. I get enough compliments and interest from my wife.

And think about it. EVERY SINGLE person that died before 2015 never wore an apple watch. Coincidence? I dont think so.

Great, but I like my Apple Watch for its one killer features: not tell time, but tap to pay. I gave up wearing my Tissot watch for this.

This genuinely saves me time and adds fluidity to my day. Tap for subway. Tap to for vending machine. Tap for restaurant bill. Tap for shop purchase.

I genuinely don't look at my phone not much, so it's always deep in my winter coat pocket. Fishing it out takes 2-3 seconds each time.

I sometimes feel I got tricked by Apple though, as the main reason I got a watch was because the phones got too big to easily pull in and out of my pocket. Go back to a iPhone 4 sized phone and I'd probably go back to using it instead.

Interesting, I’m the opposite. My phone is always easily accessible, whereas the watch is under my long sleeve shirt which is under a couple layers of coats, so it’s more of a hassle to make it available to tap.

There's a non-obvious fact that people with good sight might not realise. You need decent eyesight (or spectacles) to actually use smartwatch functions beyond just telling the time. As I've got older, I need reading glasses for small print, which I don't always have on when I'm away from my computer or not reading. That's killed smartwatches for me.

I'm enjoying my Sensor Watch Pro so far. That's all the sensors I need in a watch as of now

I had the casio and loved it. But I now have a garmin instinct 3 solar and wow! Love it even more for tracking sleep and activity. But no notifications of any kind, nor any maps to try to squint and read. Just some more numbers I occasionally want and great battery life!

To the author I’d recommend a Casio Oceanus. The same tech as a G-Shock (solar, atomic, Bluetooth) with the polish of a Grand Seiko at 20% of the price. Better to get one in Japan as the US retailers charge a lot more.

Found that I prefer mine over watches that cost 5x as much.

Good recommendation, also shout out the Casio Lineage. (solar, atomic, sapphire crystal, titanium case/band). I got mine sub-$200. This one: https://www.casio.com/europe/watches/casio/product.LCW-M100T...

Looks nice. $4,800 USD

https://www.casio.com/us/watches/oceanus/product.OCW-SG1000C...

Here's a basic one: https://www.sakurawatches.com/casio-oceanus-ocw-s100-1ajf

Titanium, atomic clock sync, solar powered, $368.

"a few seconds a day" why is that accuracy even needed? Sure, if you work with computers (that can tell time too), or are a mariner without GPS. But otherwise, just live with it.

Over a week or two that will accumulate enough error to make me miss a tram. Of course, you could just re-set the time every week, but there's your downside.

It's a watch. It's an item that literally has one single job: tell the time accurately. It goes without saying that it should do a pretty good job at this and be accurate.

Watches are jewelry. Telling time isn't even their main purpose, nevermind telling it accurately. Of course, maintaining accuracy is part of what makes them cool to the people who like them, but even if they lost several minutes a day, I suspect my watch wearing brethren would continue to wear them.

That’s only the case for expensive watches. I use my cheap watch to tell the time.

Define "accuracy".

What, if anything, in your life needs to be done with-in ±5 minutes? If the analog minute hand "should" be on 2, but it's closer to 1 or 3, how many things will fall apart in your life?

Catching a train.

Frankly it's a total non-issue because you now have your train ticket on a mobile app on a mobile device with synchronized internet time anyway. Most people are wearing mechanical watches today as jewellery and a physical piece of craftsmanship that's nice to keep time that's directionally correct, but if it's out by 30seconds it's no big deal and you just reset it against the time on your phone and get on with your day.

I still use paper tickets and many others do too! At any rate though, I agree. It doesn't matter to me that my mechanical watch is often out by 30 seconds. I don't mind checking and adjusting it every now and then so it's never off by ±5 minutes where it would cause problems for me.

Any meeting? I wouldn’t want to be the guy that is always 5 minutes late

Of course, that inaccuracy isn't a problem for most uses.

But for me, having an accurate watch reduces cognitive overhead and mental noise: I never worry whether the watch is wrong, and I never wonder about the last time I set the watch. Combine good accurary with a 10 year battery or solar and we're in full zen mode.

few seconds a day is literally a minute per month or 12 minutes per year, that's a lot, even cheap Casio clone from skmei I bought for daughter has much higher accuracy like 15 seconds per 2-3 months which seems fine considering I set time twice a year anyway

if you tolerate minutes inaccuracy from watch, then there is no point in wearing them at all

Best thing is you don't have to charge them every day!

Except automatics require you to wear them semi-regularly, or else they will stop running.

Winding and setting a watch you haven't worn in a while is part of the charm.

There is not a lot of jewelry for men. The watch is pretty much the main thing besides a ring and a chain.

I like mine because sometimes I want to know what time it is without being reminded I have 72093 unread messages....

I was a smartwatch skeptic for a long time but finally traded my Timex out for a Garmin a little over a year ago. I paid way too much money for it but was able to get one that matched the Timex as close as reasonably possible: about the same size and weight, and the MIP display that's always on. It's one of the smaller ("S") models so the battery is fairly crap (physically smaller means way smaller battery), but unless I'm extremely active it does just fine by charging when I'm in the shower. Not charging I get about a week of normal activity (including GPS on for actual activities), maybe a bit less? It does much better if I'm not tracking anything but what's the point of that?

It's made a huge difference in my life, for the positive, and that's really surprised me. I kind of expected to hate it. It only notifies me when my phone vibrates, and I've got my phone set to be particular about notifications, so that doesn't happen often. But it does mean I miss notifications and messages way less often. I used to never notice vibration alerts if I was out walking and my phone was in my pocket. Now I can respond to people moderately quickly!

The sleep tracking is kind of worthless, but it's nice to have stats. It's mostly useful to notice longer-term trends or if something went horribly wrong (as it did last night for me), you just have it there and have something to look at, already collected.

It tells the time accurately: no more mentally compensating in my head for the drift of the watch (admittedly, my last Timex, despite being great in all other respects, was the driftiest quartz watch I've ever owned).

But the fitness tracking... the fitness tracking has genuinely been effective in actually getting me to go out and do things. I really love seeing maps of where I've been when I take a city walk, or getting run stats as I slowly level up as a runner. I don't take it particularly seriously and I think that's just about right.

I really expected to hate this thing, but instead I love it. Maybe that's because I treat it as a dumbwatch plus fitness tracker and notification bell for my phone? The idea of having games, much less a web browser, on it really does sound ghastly.

I have both a fancy smartwatch (first-gen Ultra, which is still a great piece of kit) and a severalness of old-school mechanicals from both fancy makers (Rolex, Omega) and decidedly more approachable makers (most recently Traska).

Having a watch on that's just a watch is a lovely thing. Having a watch that tells time with springs and gears is super fucking cool to me. And in 2026, it's nice to have zero notifications if that's what you want. But they all have their place.

Working at home, at my desk all day? I'm almost certainly wearing an old-school watch.

Riding my motorcycle, I'm 100% wearing the Ultra for a host of reasons (easier phone unlocking, fall detection, etc).

This guy disposable incomes

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