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A Smartwatch Can't Hold a Memory

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Watches & Accessories Durability & Maintenance Spending
Neo W.
Author
Neo W.
Writing about things that intrigue me.
Table of Contents

A Smartwatch Can’t Hold a Memory
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The breaking point was notifications — even the battery warnings. But the reason the Apple Watch got demoted to gym duty rather than replaced is different: you will never keep it. Software support ends, the battery dies unserviceably, and it goes in a drawer.

The disposability problem
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A smartwatch has a shelf life measured in operating system updates. Nobody is passing one to their children.

That’s not a complaint about the technology, which does its job well. It’s a category observation — it’s a computer, and computers get replaced. Once you see it that way, wearing one as jewellery starts to feel like the wrong use of your wrist.

The alternative isn’t nostalgia. It’s that a mechanical or quartz watch survives long enough to accumulate the places you wore it.

The three technologies, briefly
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  • Quartz digital. A quartz crystal vibrating 32,768 times a second, read by a circuit. Extremely accurate — seconds per month — and with so few parts it’s more sensible to replace than repair.
  • Quartz analog. Same underlying tech, traditional hands, ticking once per second.
  • Mechanical. No battery, no electronics — gears and springs, ticking several times a second so the hand sweeps smoothly. Either automatic, wound by the motion of your arm, or hand-wound every day or two, which plenty of expensive watches still are.

Knowing which you’re buying matters more than the brand, because it determines what owning it will be like.

Where to start cheaply
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  • Casio F91W, about $22. Roughly seven years on a battery, and the closest thing watches have to a Toyota Corolla.
  • Casio A168 — the same thing with a metal bracelet and a backlight that glows across the whole face.
  • Casio Royale, with multiple time zones, which genuinely matters if you fly — no manual adjusting on landing — plus 100m water resistance and a decade of battery.
  • G-Shock, if durability is the point. One survived being dropped from a helicopter.
  • Citizen Eco-Drive, charged by light, so the battery question never comes up. One sat in a dark closed box and started ticking the moment it saw daylight.
  • Seiko 5, an automatic on the NH35 movement — a reasonable and cheap entry into mechanical watches.
  • MoonSwatch, if you want something with a story attached to it before you’ve made one.

The actual argument
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The list of watches he owns is really a list of events.

A Timex Expedition bought twenty years ago at a scout camp — the most expensive thing he bought there — used for rope climbing and swimming, and now earmarked for a child who takes up the outdoors. An Invicta given by his parents at graduation, which is what got him into mechanical watches, and which he replaced after landing a teaching job. A G-Shock bought on a boss’s advice, where every scratch recalls a specific shoot.

None of that works with a device you’ll bin in four years. The object has to outlast the occasion for the occasion to attach to it.

One caveat
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There’s a warning attached and it’s a fair one: this gets addictive. The distance between “a cheap Casio so I stop looking at notifications” and a growing collection is shorter than it looks.

The useful version stops early. One good watch that isn’t connected to anything solves the original problem completely.

A few small things to try
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  • Take the smartwatch off outside of workouts for a week and see what you miss
  • Buy a Casio F91W for about the cost of a takeaway and wear it
  • Work out which of the three technologies actually suits how you live
  • Notice which watch you’d want to still have in thirty years

Related

Simple Things Outlive Clever Ones

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Durability & Maintenance Spending Footwear
Simple Things Outlive Clever Ones # The things that last decades have almost nothing in common except what they lack — no proprietary parts, no sealed housing, no features designed to expire. Durability turns out to be mostly an absence. Five that hold up # A cheap Casio. The A158 or the F91W. Not a warranty story — just robustness, with decades of people reporting the same watches still going. The battery alone runs about ten years. Around $20–35 used, and the adjustable band means you never need a shop to size it. A G-Shock if you want the indestructible version. A Rotring 600 pencil. German, launched 1989, full metal body with a knurled grip. Takes standard 0.5 or 0.7 leads, so no proprietary anything. One weakness: drop it on the tip and it bends — but the tip is a replaceable part. The black one wears to brass at the edges, which looks better with age rather than worse. A ThinkPad T480. Widely considered the last really good one: removable battery plus an internal one so you can hot-swap, two drive slots, two RAM slots, replaceable keyboard, screen, trackpad. Standard Phillips screws throughout. A physical webcam shutter, which newer premium laptops still don’t have. Upgraded and running Linux, ten to fifteen years is a realistic expectation. An Opinel No. 8. French, made since the late 1800s, about $20. Beechwood handle, carbon steel blade, a metal collar that twists to lock. No springs, no mechanism. The warranty is nearly meaningless and it doesn’t matter, because there’s essentially nothing in it that can fail. People are still using ones from the 1950s. Goodyear-welted boots. Red Wing Iron Rangers or anything built the same way. The point isn’t the brand, it’s the construction: the sole is stitched rather than glued, so it can be replaced over and over. Buy the method, not the label — Thursday and LL Bean’s Katahdins qualify at lower prices. The pattern # Read those back and the common feature is refusal.

Nobody Advertises Blade Sharpness

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Grooming Spending Durability & Maintenance
Razor adverts sell handles, pivoting heads, lubrication strips, and blade counts. Read a few and notice what’s never mentioned: how sharp the blade is. That’s the one thing determining whether a shave is good, and nobody claims it. Why the omission makes commercial sense # A duller blade nicks you less. It also shaves worse, causes more irritation and razor bumps, and wears out faster.

Only the Limited Editions Are Investments

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Watches & Accessories Spending Cognitive Bias
People buy a Montblanc telling themselves it’ll hold its value. Mostly it just doesn’t lose much, which is a different thing. The standard Meisterstück drifts up gently. The limited editions are where the actual money moved — and you can’t use those. The gap, in one pen # A 1992 Hemingway Writer’s Edition — built on the 149 but styled after its predecessor the 139, coral-orange barrel against dark brown — launched at roughly a tenth of what an unused one goes for now, somewhere in the $3,000 to $4,000 range.