The engineering and craft is beyond reproach, beautiful, involved, unique.
The market in which it needs to exist is exclusive, arrogant and elitist. So there is a bittersweet response to it. Makes me think of Royal arts of the past, made to adorn the palaces and display wealth. beautiful, but they're better now at museums. I believe this watch shall too.
Strongly disagree. Pilfered artefacts are usually safer in a Western museum. But they’re more beautiful when left in their natural environment. In any case, if there is one thing sillier than someone with no respect for fine watches treating them as a status symbol, it’s getting upset about it as a bystander.
You can get a watch that's more accurate and more complex than one of these for under $1000 in an Apple watch or a Casio.
For me, this feels like one of the less harmful things rich people do. Ultimately you're paying a bunch of skilled labor in a developed state to maintain an artistic craft that uses very little energy and material, for a device that has worse functionality than one under $100. The only issue is where you got your money I suppose, and whether that money would have been better spent elsewhere.
You can get a Casio F-91W and replace the movement with a Sensor Watch board. The watch then becomes a water resistant temperature compensated quartz wristwatch. It's a literally world class time piece. I calibrated mine and now it deviates a few seconds per year. It's insane how good this thing is. Low power, battery lasts over a year.
It's a fully programmable ARM microcontroller. You can write "watch faces" for it. There's a 2nd factor codes face that lets you log in like you're James Bond on the Nintendo 64. One of the coolest projects I've ever worked on. I made it possible to calibrate the pulsometer, a feature I use frequently at work.
The point of these is to signal you have money and are enough of an insider to know the high-status brands - or at least high-status enough for that particular social group, who use them to reassure each other they're not in the vulgar Rolex set.
They serve the same function as a designer handbag - although you can at least put things inside a handbag and carry them around.
This is overly cynical. The target demographic for a really complicated Vacheron Constantin is a rich person who is a HUGE nerd about watches. Think about people who get into really high levels of nerd hobbies and acquire super expensive gear. It's not primarily about showing off.
Not that I am wealthy enough to participate, but you see the same thing in cars and the same issue too. Sometimes status signalling and taste end up in the same product, and people who don't care about cars end up with the finest of the cars, almost coincidentally.
I'm not sure buying the super fancy handbag is primarily about showing off, either, and I think people who consume a lot of these goods have a lot of brand knowledge.
I mean, I think you're right in that watch nerds usually have more domain knowledge, but I don't think it's inherently dissimilar.
Just like those collecting stamps, figurines, comic magazines, paintings and so on the watch hobbyist pretty much _never_ makes modifications to their items. Why do you consider it a requirement for it to be a hobby?
Like yeah, purely from a utility standpoint, a $50 Casio destroys a mechanical watch in accuracy and durability. But not everything people value is about utility - sometimes it's about beauty, craftsmanship, or just the joy of making something wildly unnecessary really well
Yeah, I was just thinking that our B2B SaaS has been trying to churn out as many features and integrations as possible, with customers constantly wanting more and more.
If you asked someone what a "feature" is, in almost any context, they will probably give you the answer we all expect.
If you ask someone what a "movement" is, they might well refer to the poop they had that morning, or Eurythmy (which I had as a subject at school!), or almost anything.
That's not a statement about how basic language has become, but rather intentionally lofty vagueness (like "bespoke" instead of custom) people invent for things perfectly well described by expressions anyone can use like "high precision timekeeping", but not-so-subtly signaling a higher price.
Real perspective shift from your comment, thanks! Reading more about usage of those terms now, but I still can't help but feel there's a deliberate "fancypants nonstandard language" signalling going on in the marketing of these "timepieces".
There's an easy parallel to make with the audiophile industry, which uses all kinds of colourful but ultimately vacuous language.
> You’re reverting to your priors despite evidence to the contrary.
Eh, I don't think what he's saying now is unreasonable.
Certainly no one feels a pressure to use a modern term that might have less perceived value-- to say "functions" or "features" instead of "complications."
A big part of the product of a fancy watch, or a bespoke suit, is the traditions. When tradition or sounding fancy is opposed to accessibility, the former will win.
> no one feels a pressure to use a modern term that might have less perceived value-- to say "functions" or "features" instead of "complications
Methods in OOP. Every term in functional programming. Rolex does a little bit of the Apple game, renaming jargon. But the watch industry mostly uses the term the first person to use it deployed. (“Complications” makes more sense than “features” when working multilingual across French, German and Italian.)
I’d also argue that “features” is a bit misleading. Complications aren’t about utility. They’re about art. It’s intentionally overcomplicating something.
> Complications aren’t about utility. They’re about art. It’s intentionally overcomplicating something.
This is not the original usage; "complication" does not imply "grande complication."
> ..."features"...
None of your criticism applies to "functions" which is the first term used.
> Methods in OOP. Every term in functional programming.
Yes... I'm saying in a niche, luxury industry based upon exclusivity and tradition, the marketing pushes towards old, foreign, and exotic language. All these things in commodity digital watches are "modules" and "functions" instead of "calibre" and "complications." (With Apple, on the high end, choosing "complication" for some reason ;).
This is a baffling criticism. Why would you expect a niche not to have its own jargon? Not that "bespoke" is (it is an older usage than "custom" and is used widely).
>people invent for things perfectly well described by expressions anyone can use like "high precision timekeeping"
What is "high precision"? Why are you using engineering jargon when you could say something simple like "accurate"? Why are you using such lofty elitist language?
It's true that niches have their jargon, but I tend to be suspicious when the jargon makes its way into marketing pitches.
It's one thing if your software vendor writes the software in Haskell, but if their pitch to you is that the software has 40 patent protected monads and is entirely dotless and lambda lifted, you're probably being taken for a ride.
I (surely I'm not alone here) know many people who would say the same thing about software development "scene".
Hell, even _inside_ the software development "scene" you can easily find similar cases.
Like when web developer who builds (relatevily) simple web apps on top of Rails earns notably more then someone who works with a complex hardware.
I agree, you could have an Apple-like interface that lets you tune a single frequency with a particular modulation, but nothing there seems like it's a constellation viewer that has almost no practical use.
Everything about the high end "movement" scene rubs me the wrong way (I had a friend into it), but most of all, the pompous terminology.