The World of Watches

 As my brother said to me,

"Some people would tell you watches are anachronisms."

Those people would be entirely correct. As more and more watch enthusiasts are admitting to themselves, the only rational reason to have a watch is because you enjoy having it. And as if that weren't already enough, the watches which 999 out of 1000 hard-core watch nuts really like are mechanical watches: all power provided by an unwinding spring, the way all watches were before the first quartz watches were introduced in the 1960's. Mechanical watches keep time much less accurately than quartz watches. There actually are a few mechanical watches which keep time better than some quartz watches, but we're talking about extremely expensive mechanical watches and cheap junk quartz watches.

This is not utility. It's art. 

 

 

Women have shoes, men have watches. Sure, it's weird, but hey -- life is weird.

Smart watches, from Apple etc, don't do a thing for me. As far as I'm concerned, they're just smart phones on the wrist, and I already have a smart phone. I don't feel the need to have 2.

I've actually always been into mechanical watches. I still have 2 Timex mechanical watches made no later than the 1980's. Could be 1970's. They both stopped running long ago and old mechanical Timexes can't be repaired any more than Bic lighters can be. If memory serves, they cost $8.95 or maybe less. At Walgreen's. Actually, I have 3 Timex mechanicals: I bought an automatic Timex at a yard sale in Alaska for $2. It was made in 1979 (I looked up the serial number), and it ran for quite a while after I bought it.

But all Timexes, old or new, are crap, despite the 1 in 100,000 which runs for 40 years. The new Marlin is the first mechanical watch sold by Timex in quite a long time, and a lot of people who think they're experts on the subject of watches are going crazy over it, but they're fools. You can get 6 new mechanical Seiko 5's for the price of one new Marlin ($300 and a long waiting list, unless Timex has ramped production way, way up since the launch a couple of years ago), and each Seiko would be a far, far better watch.

But the new $300 Timex Marlin reminds all those people of the Timexes they (or their Dads or Grandpas) bought at Walgreens in the 60's and 70's for $5 or $10. Timex are evil geniuses at marketing. [PS, 22 Feb 2021: I really must apologize. It would've been so easy to check BEFORE I published. It appears that the MSRP for the Marlin has fallen to $199, that it is often on sale for less than $150, and that it is now offered in a variety of colors besides the silver which gave the original its name.]

in 1990, in Germany, I bought a mechanical pocket watch for about 60 Marks -- about $40. I don't remember the brand, but it felt really solid. It seemed like a quality product, the way well-built watches feel. Then back in the US it was stolen, and I bummed over that for a long time.

A few years ago, the only watches about which I could find any info were Swiss watches costing 4 figures and up, and pure crap costing less, and antique pocket watches which are not always very expensive to purchase and which often keep very good time when they're running, but which require a lot of expensive maintenance. Plus a lot of quartz watches, which almost never interest me. Then I happened to see a headline in a Google search saying, "The Most Affordable High-End Watch." I was skeptical, but I clicked on it, and it was an article about a Seiko 5 that cost $45. Calling it "high-end" was tongue-in-cheek -- -- but only a little bit. The article explained how this $45 watch had a lot of the qualities prized by guys who buy extremely-expensive Swiss watches and was an insane value.

So that was  how I was made aware of Seiko, and it opened up the world of watches quite a bit to me. And now I'm one of a billion a-holes trying to make a living writing nonsense about watches on the Internet.

The watch world has its own rules and customs. It's different from the car world. One example of many: vehicle manufacturers loan vehicles to periodicals, which sometimes praise the vehicles and sometimes trash them. Watch manufacturers loan (or sometimes secretly give) watches to periodicals, and in return they expect that the reviewers will not write anything bad about the watch, or only enough tiny bad remarks to keep convincing readers that these are actual reviews. There is very little honest journalism about watches. The vast majority of people posing as watch reviewers amount to paid advertisers. And all of the experts in the watch world know it. And it doesn't seem it's going to change soon. And so, sadly, since I can't bring myself to write even more nonsensically than I already do, it seems that I will NOT soon be showered with free luxury watches. (Unless I become a huge fabulous superstar.)