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Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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