I saw this on the Bloomberg review of the Apple watch. I thought it was so cool that on every Apple watch the Mickey Mouse feet will tap his feet in sync. I think that means the second hand will be in sync on all the other faces too?
It's a small thing but something pretty neat to show the evolution of the modern day wristwatch. Or I'm just crazy and really antsy to get an order update #
Eh, you're being misled a little by that poorly written review. UTC (abbreviation for Coordinated Universal Time) is basically a time zone. Little more (like clearly defined rules for leap seconds and such). What really makes the synchronized foot tapping possible is that all of the devices are using NTP to synchronize against the same remote clock. The accuracy of this process depends on the speed of your network connection but usually lands around 20-30ms. That's close enough to defeat human perception of error in something like the tapping animation.
So yeah, it's kind of cool, but, it's nothing magical or even remotely new. I've been keeping my clocks in sync with NPT against NIST's clocks for decades.
Apple's really leveraging just how much better computer clocks have been vs. mechanical clocks for a long, long time for keeping accurate time to appear impressive in the scope of horology. But, anyone watching that game for more than a few decades knows that cheap quartz watches have also been vastly superior to mechanical watches for accuracy in most cases. With the watch, it takes advantage of regular synchronization.
Just like Macs, PCs, Linux computers, smart phones, tablets, and even dumb feature phones have for years.
Again, not discounting how nice that capability is, just, pointing out it's nothing new and I'd have been shocked had it not been part of the watch's capabilities.
