The sight of people wearing smart watches is seen often. Lots of people say they prefer smart watches over mechanical ones! Why is that? Lets get further into it.
Personally, I don’t like the idea of smart watches replacing the original mechanical or even quartz timepieces in this case. You may double wrist (wearing two watches at the same time) them with normal timepieces but never as a replacement. Smart watches are basically a mini version of your phone on your wrist, I wouldn’t count it as a timepiece. There are many smart watches out there for sale in all price ranges, the Apple Watch being among the most popular ones along the Samsung smart watch. Smart watches tend to have features like checking your heart rate, taking pictures, phone calls, calculators etc.
As we saw on the last paragraph, smart watches are pretty functional and there is no question about this. Do you think it’s right to wear them as a replacement of mechanical watches? First let’s talk about how they look, starting from their cases. The case (what protects the components) of lots of smart watches is plastic, some are from stainless steel and some are from aluminum. Although you do see some jewelers turning the apple watch’s case into gold and some even put diamonds in it, I don’t think they look good that way. Smart watches can look simple and clean, but not elegant. Mechanical watches have actual dials instead of screens, so I feel like they’re more pleasant to the eyes instead of either a pitch black screen or a bright one. Secondly, smart watches from five years ago look very outdated, but you see some 200 year old watches that look timeless and great!
Now that we mentioned aging of smart watches, lets talk about that. Smart watches are like smart phones, they have softwares. Softwares get updated, and just like smart phones, if you don’t have the latest devices you can’t get the update! So that weakens the point of long-term functionality. However, a mechanical watch only has one function or more depending on how many complications (for example, the date and day) which is why they’re called TIMEpieces. First and most obvious is time, you can add date and chronograph if the watch has these. But smart watches on the other hand, has tens if not hundreds of functionalities and purposes. You can use your smart watch to contact people, entertain yourself with games, watch videos and look up things. But they use a motherboard and satellites to achieves all this!
So now we figured out how smart watches become smart watches, let’s see why that can be a bad thing. A motherboard is a printed circuit board containing the principal components of a computer or other device, with connectors for other circuit boards to be slotted into. While a mechanical watch uses a mechanical movement made up of gears, levers and strings! So the fact that gears, levers and strings can tell you time just fine is far more fascinating to me than getting time from a satellite and a motherboard with a software.
Finally, lets talk about the emotional side. Mechanical watches are mostly built by hand, which makes them more expensive. They’re harder to make, which makes them more expensive. Some have precious metals, which makes them more expensive. They have history, which you guessed it, makes them more expensive. Mechanical watches are conversation starters, you can talk about your watch’s history and how you got it and for what reason and then you can talk about how it was made and by what brand with what heritage. While smart watches are functional they lack the heritage and age. So which would you choose?
To conclude this, said smart watches can be good and mechanical watches can be great. Pick whichever you like, but think carefully when you choose sides.