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Comment by carsongross | Hacker News Reader

Of course. They survived the quartz crisis, they will survive this.

Smart watches will eat some quartz watch market share and some mid-range mechanical, but the cogent smart watch criticism applies: that it doesn't provide enough of a functional delta over a phone. People who want mechanical watches want mechanical watches. Otherwise they'd already be wearing a more accurate, more functional and less fussy quartz watch.

As an aside, in an ironic development, a Belgian mechanical watch maker (Ressence) has produced the best design I have ever seen for a smart watch:

http://ressence.eu/collection/type-3/

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CGmnh0_UYAANb_j.jpg

Available for the bargain price of 20-40k...

If a smart watch maker ripped this design off, and made the bezel touch-rotatable... Well, I might change my tune a bit.

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It's also that a Swiss watch isn't really designed to be replaced, rather endlessley maintained.

A lot of the higher end Swiss watches have lifetime guarantees, meaning you could even pass it down to your kid and have it fixed for free. The mechanical movements also mean they don't need batteries replaced.

This is a barefaced opposite to the 'Smartwatches'. Next year there'll be an iWatch 2 or something. Next to the smaller issue of charging many people adore these Swiss watches for their ability to 'just work' for decades and decades.

Another thing I guess, is they're likely to retain their value.

Straight from the horse's mouth: "You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely take care of it for the next generation."

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/11/luxury_branding_the_f...

Interesting article, but I suspect he's wrong about the secondary market

But yeah, having a fancy watch only matters if you have enough money to buy it AND for it to be expensive (the "Aspirationals 14%")

Bill Gates can go into a store and buy the most expensive Rolex, no problem. It's at most, as expensive to him as a PS4 for most mortals.

As a watch collector, I can assure you that the author of that blog post has no idea what he's talking about.

The secondary market for luxury watches is huge, and a Patek is about the worst example you could find in terms of a watch that doesn't hold its value over time.

The nice thing is that a used luxury watch usually holds its value really well - you buy a used Rolex in good condition, for fair market price, and you are not going to lose money if you decided to sell it five years from now.

Those double negatives man... I can't know what you're trying to say...

Patek deprecates quickly. Rolex maintain its value.

I think it's a way off that, so I took a look According to census.gov, the median net worth in 2011 for American is $68,828. Bill Gates net worth is $79.3b. A ps4 at launch was $399 Let's say a top-line swanky Rolex is $500k

A ps4 is therefore 0.58% of net worth of the median American A 500k Rolex is 0.00006% of net worth of the median bill gates.

Ignoring the amount of percentage of income available as disposable income, a 500k Rolex is .003% of a ps4 (maths check anyone?)

This comment on Bill Gates net worth reminded me of this Neil deGrasse Tyson video: https://youtu.be/B2inExgT77s

Yeah, I had done the math with more "round numbers" but I must have fumbled it somehow, you're right

By that proportion, the value of a 500k Rolex to Bill Gates is equivalent to the median net worth of an American is (drum roll): $0.42

Bill Gates has 1.1 Million times the median net worth.

I thought this was a better analysis, even if I disagree with parts of it: http://www.quora.com/Why-would-anyone-buy-a-Rolex-watch/answ... (I can't remember how to edit the Quora link to make it non-walled).

"There are people claiming that a Rolex is magnificent technology, coincidentally signalling their intelligence. There are people claiming that a Rolex is beautiful, inadvertently signalling their good taste. There are people claiming that a Rolex is reliable and an heirloom, accidentally signalling that they are respectable. And there are people claiming that a Rolex is good for business, purely by chance signalling that they are clever businessmen."

"Of course, none of this applies to me. I honestly love Van Gogh paintings, not because it signals good taste within my social circle, but because they're intrinsically beautiful. I'm certainly not trying to raise my social status, or signal anything whatsoever. Not me, no."

“The ‘quartz crisis’ killed off so many Swiss watchmakers that by the end of the 1970s, the number of workers in the industry had shrunk to 30,000 from 90,000.”

Define “survive.” The article doesn’t state what to what extent the industry recovered, but surely not to pre-seventies levels.

[edit damn but that Ressence is dope]

The first graph is pretty enlightening (Market Share by units and volume) http://www.wthejournal.com/en/pages/swiss-watch-industry-fig...

Also the Most Valuable brands graph

Thing is, smartwatches are going to mostly eat market share from quartz watches; the people who stuck with mechanicals during the quartz crisis are going to stay with mechanicals now.

That would be an interesting study. As China develops a significant upper middle class, lots of niche pursuits, like handmade shoes, fine wines and distilled spirits, hand-made clothes, fine art, etc. should experience a global boom. The expansion of pursuits like keeping horses should boost, literally, the buggy-whip industry. So maybe fine mechanical watches will come back the same way, on the wave of wealth in populous countries.

The Chinese boom has already happened, and busted. The market over there is saturated with Omegas and Audis and cases of fancy French wines.

This.

Have mechanical watches, have a smart watch. The smart watch gets worn during the day because I have a separate personal phone that stays in my bag, and it's nice to be able to get alerts on my wrist.

The mechanical watches get worn in the evenings when the work phone goes away because in 2015 they're a fashion accessory. That's not changing, and the markets that swiss watch makers serve aren't going to suddenly toss their $40k watch - unless it's for a $40k digital version from the same swiss company.

The Swiss survived the quartz crisis because of one of the greatest pieces of business engineering ever[1], organised by a complete genius.

I'm not sure there is any "of course" about it.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/billions/2010/06/29/swatch-billi...

Wow, I did not know this. Truly a business genius. Thanks for sharing.

Smart watches have the fundamental problem that their input bandwidth is tiny, and their output bandwidth is tiny.

Input: You cannot type on them, and the touch interface is not great scaled down to a square inch. If voice recognition worked reliably, it'd be a bit better but...

Output: You cannot read that much on a tiny screen, and while the vibration alerts are great, so what. Basically, notifications.

I say this with an iWatch on my wrist. It's like a watch that is less practical, durable and makes it less easy to tell the time.

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