Vacheron Constantin breaks the world record for most complicated wristwatch

You're missing the meaning where the display uses the symbols we call digits (rather than hands). I don;t think most people would call an electronic watch "digital" if the display was hands, even if the "hands" are actually an lcd display.

> And having to do with computers, with electronic as synonym.

Computers do not have to be electronic. Counterexamples: Mechanical calculators, LEGO logic gates, hydraulic logic valves, electrical (not electronic) relays. Heck, even human meatbags were called "computers" back in the day.

It would be absurd to say an analog electronic computer was digital.

>How sad. That wall map is a nice object and a good conversation piece to boot.

It shouldn't be sad to avoid adding another artifact of consumerism to one's life. I'm at a stage in my life where I've gotten rid of most of my "conversation pieces". E.g. I once had an expensive antique warship in my office as decoration. (https://www.google.com/search?q=hms+bounty+model&tbm=isch). I thought it looked really nice. But one day as I was cleaning the dust off of every crevice with an art brush to keep it from looking like a junked up antique, I realized it was an example of a possession making me its slave. I got rid of it and don't regret it. I dodged a bullet by not getting the Geochron and saving $4000 but my journey of enlightenment wasn't complete so I still got suckered into the wooden warship.

>I guess you haven’t actually tried to buy a grandfather clock. Quality ones are in the thousands at least, if not tens of thousands.

Yes, I agree that grandfather clocks are expensive and that's why I used it as a parallel example to the expensive wristwatches.

I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the price on this. $500 up front, _plus_ a subscription, and it doesn't even include the display. What are you getting for that cost? It _feels_ like something you could install as software on an RPi or any other computer.

Found a $1.99 app for Apple TV that's pretty good. Now "screen saver" for downstairs television. Will play around with a spare Pi when time permits. There appear to be several options out there. A fun waste of an hour.

I want one, but not with that terrible projection! I’d prefer one inverted at least.

>I guess I was sold the idea that I neeed notifications, weather and all this bullshit on my wrist all the time.

I understand your viewpoint but people are different. My friend is almost 80 years old and wasn't drawn to smart watches because of FOMO fear-of-missing-out on some Instagram notification or hustle culture to constantly check emails. Instead, she's always worried about "forgetting something" and the Apple Watch has reminders for medicine, upcoming appointments, etc. It was a total quality-of-life improvement. It caused a total rethink about the old mechanical watches that didn't assist her in that way.

If a mechanical watch that will be "admired 200 years from now instead of being in a landfill" -- doesn't help her take pills -- then she's not going to be attached to the romanticism of it like a watch collector enthusiast.

>Most swiss mechanical movements cost 50-100$ though.

Your clarification means you misinterpreted my comment. I was not insulting mechanical watches such as your Mido or gp's expensive IWC. My point was that it's rare and counterintuitive when a cheap disposable product causes a total rethink of previously valuable items regardless of the older item's "timeless qualities" (e.g. "200 year heirloom").

For practical purposes they are better in every way

Mostly agree, except you have to take the Apple Watch every single day for maintenance (charging). You can buy a Casio F-91W for $20 and go 7-10 years before you have to take off your wrist for a battery change. If you simply want to tell time, digital watches, quartz watches, and arguably mechanical watches beat smart watches.

>, but if there were batteries inside, those weren't Swiss mechanical movements

Yes. The Cartier Tank watch is mechanical. I just lumped in the other nice jewelry watches with batteries to talk about them as a group because they've all been eliminated from her mindset.

>Also, I think the cheap product winning is pretty typical.

When I wrote "replace", I didn't mean in terms of sales. It was more about the cheaper product replacing the previous thinking in the mind about the old product.

For example, she used to color-coordinate the different jewelry watches with different outfits... If it's a blue outfit, wear the stainless steel watch ... if it's this other dress, wear the gold watch with black face. If the shirt has starfish, wear the seashell theme watch. That whole ritual is eliminated. (I guess one could also change watch bands on Apple Watches for different occasions but she doesn't bother with it. Maybe because arthritis makes it hard to squeeze the band's release mechanism.)

The new Apple Watch alters the psychological relationship with the previous jewelry watches so thoroughly that it makes her impervious to gp's praise such as, "Vacheron-Constantin [...], it will still be a testimony of the refinement and engineering of a fine craft that few can achieve, [...] you'll be very lucky if your Casio can last as long. Your mass commoditised Apple watch will likely be worthless."

Her comeback to the gp's "timeless" qualities is that she likes lifting the Apple Watch to her face and asking, "Hey Siri, how many inches is 5 centimeters? (when sewing clothes) ... Or how many cups in a liter? (when cooking from a recipe with metric quantities)." She thinks it's a miracle that a little watch can understand her voice and give her answers. Yes, everybody at HN is jaded and we all know Apple's Siri is the worst voice assistant technology out there but yet she loves it. If that means it's wearing a mass-produced watch that nobody cares about in 200 years after she's buried in the ground, that doesn't matter at all. Her "dressy watches" phase is over.

That's the type of rare product replacement situation I'm talking about. Usually, the opposite happens: we all get on some hedonistic treadmill with various consumer products and the next better thing we desire is more expensive. In the 1980s, CDs were actually 2x more expensive than vinyl records and cassette tapes. Vinyl was about $6.99. CDs were $15.99+. It took over 10 years for CDs to gradually lower in price such that Walmart was selling them for less than $10. The new CD players themselves were about $1000 in 1980s. Record players were $100.

A158 (Obama) for the upgrade to steel, A168 for EL backlight.

I went thru a couple of F91W and the bracelet kept breaking. I since got a A158WA-1. Check it out.

All the F-91Ws I have gotten through Amazon have been fakes.

Museums don't operate objects that are 200 years old, so it doesn't really matter.

But also, it's not like a mechanical watch is going to work for 200 years without maintenance and repair either. Lubrication, springs, bearings... these all degrade over time.

Adapting to whatever battery exists 200 years from now to the form of a CR2032 battery would be simple. A Casio just takes a round battery shell that contacts with the positive and negative terminals on each side.

Hell, I can make one from scratch in my workshop trivially, from basic materials.

Finding high-end mechanical watch technicians? Not so easy. And hardly so cheap.

I'll just ask the ruling AI to summon one into existence from the required atoms?

> No, because the achievement, the mastery behind it is not obliterated in the next few years, by the upcoming iterations of newer smartwatches.

Just like a Casio F-91W, or the $50 mechanical Swatch.

> It's a piece of art

Yes, that's the only argument really, it's a good looking wearable piece of art. It won't last longer than a waterproof gshock, it isn't more precise than a $5 quartz watch, &c.

> No, because the achievement, the mastery behind it is not obliterated in the next few years, by the upcoming iterations of newer smartwatches.

That's just another way of saying that there is no real innovation in end user benefits in mechanical watches. The marketing is all about how difficult they were to make.

Look at the functionality that the watch described in the article has to offer:

* It can show the time — to an accuracy of 8.5 seconds a day, apparently: https://www.reddit.com/r/VacheronConstantin/comments/1aiyjeb... Technological marvel, innit?

* It can show the date (with squiggly hands, for some unfathomable reason). It probably can even account for different lengths of months, and leap years (I was flabbergasted when I learned that there are watches being sold today for hundreds or thousands who require a manual adjustment at the end of every month that doesn't have 31 days).

* It can show the phase of the moon. Awesome if you're a werewolf running a hedge fund, I guess. It has a ton of other astrological indicators (Zodiac signs, etc.)

* It can chime every hour (presumably to remind the people around you that you exist and wear an overpriced watch).

* It works as a chronograph.

That's it, as far as I can tell. Nothing a $10 watch on Aliexpress could not do. It does not even seem to have an alarm, apparently. You get three actually useful functions (time — inaccurately, date, chrono) in a package that is 15mm thick.

No payment functionality, step counter, agenda, calculator.

But yes, you have a $100K or whatever watch that you can leave to your great-grandchildren so they can be assured that prior generations overpaid for gimmicky crap as well.

Wristwatches are fetishized but not buggy whips.

To each his own I guess.

The mechanical watches are not open source at all - most (all?) of them do not come with engineering drawings nor with list of materials.

Even if you have a watch in front of you, it does not mean you can create a copy of it without a lot of work - you need to measure every gear, guess the materials used (how stiff should this spring be?), and re-draw mainplate and dial.

Compare to things like old electronics, which came with full schematics, service manual and sometimes even debugging guide.

Yep. I have 40 watches, from tudors, omegas, iwc, zenith, dunhill, nomos, oris, grand seiko, panerai.

I still love the shit out of my g shock. The only reason it doesn't get worn much is it was replaced by my garmin.

> perfect ASMR for nerds.

Haha yeah I like to have this on it the background when I’m doing other things.

Back on New Years Eve 2016 I wanted to see once in my life one of these leap second which got inserted every few years. Emerald Time was the only clock app I found which displayed the deciseconds: https://imgur.com/a/r1d6OkW

(00:59, because of UTC+1)

If maintenance is an issue and do not want subscription, why not try open source and patron …

> beautiful, but they're better now at museums

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.

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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.

For a rolex, yeah.

For virtually any other watch, not so much as to the normal person they are just a watch

> They serve the same function as a designer handbag

Keeping EU trade imbalances from getting too far out of whack?

There is its own beauty and craftsmanship in cramming billions of transistors on a 4nm die.

Yes! I will be there in person.

The word "movement" for a watch movement is old. Ditto for "complication". Or "calibre". They come from the late 1700s and early 1800s.

They were the normal words for the items described. They only sound fancy now that they have fallen into disuse.

Actually, ditto for bespoke, now that you mention it.

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?

At the very least, I think they could change some of the design elements to make more effective use of space

Where did I say that any of it was unnecessary?

What item on a wall would have more utility I wonder.

It's simply a description of the style of the watch. Just as most people wearing a bomber jacket aren't flying B-52s, and most trench coat wearers aren't fighting in trenches, most dive watch wearers aren't diving. They are still useful terms, despite their relative professions moving on to newer tech.

I will say there is a easily noticeable jump in build quality from a $300 Orient or Seiko to something like a Tudor Black Bay, or even some of the microbrands in the 2-4k range. You can especially feel it by rotating the bezel and feeling the play in either direction.

But after that tier the quality increase to price ratio pretty much drops to zero.

Panerai is a good example to estimate margins. When they were unknown, watches costed $1-2k. This was in the mid 90s. Same models now, distributed by a big luxury conglomerate, cost 5-10x more. Quality and components on comparable models are virtually the same.

Likewise, long ago, Rolex was a toolwatch brand and their products were relatively affordable. They are still great, but prices are insane. Vacheron Constantin is on a different class, though, as they sell lots of watches in the high horology category. Insanely complex and difficult to produce. Some similar brands have had financial issues or gone bankrupt.

These are luxury products. That's not the point. They use precious metals when steel would work just as well, and the really high end ones take hundreds of hours of hand labor to very finely decorated the dials and movements. Why? Because it's luxury. It's art.

And let's not even get into how much money they spend on marketing and sponsorships ..

The labor and design are probably the most expensive parts. Think hundreds if not thousands of hours of many ultra specialized people's time.

The actual raw material has to be a fraction of the worth.

>How expensive are the parts?

They make the parts.

Is that for an homage, or a superrep?

The novels always had a lot of wealth signaling from Bond. E.g. in 1953, he ate an avocado, which to British consumers at the time was virtually unknown.

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You will notice at Grand Slam tennis matches the first thing the winner does — even before walking out for the interview — is put on the watch made by their sponsor.

I don’t see how it isn’t word play? If watch features weren’t called complications then I’d agree with you.

Features in the software world do sell, and they're cheap up to a point. But then complexity and technical debt lead to the hockey stick explosion of cost.