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""If you're in a room on New Year's Eve wearing one, you will be the best reference for when the New Year actually begins,"

I guess he's never heard of atomic timekeeping thats been around on g shocks for the last ten years, and g-shocks have GPS waveceptors that has also been around..
Atomic timekeeping watches usually have about 1 second of error. Its time is originated from atomic clock, but transmission delay is at ~1ms per 300KM distance to the radio transmitter. So, the signal itself is about 10ms late to begin with. Also, watches has its own delay because they are more interested in power saving then keeping accurate time. When they sync with the radio transmitter at night, they would just receive the data and correct itself at the next second.
 
Kevin Lynch was a really bad hire for Apple. Over many years at different companies bad things always happen with the product he was working on. They tend to dry up and go away. How many use ColdFusion on their web servers? How many remember how he killed most every product when Macromedia brought him on? And then Adobe. Ugh. I truly fear for the Apple Watch just because of him. I'll of course buy v2 and try to forget he is in charge.
You do know that Steve Jobs tried to hire him.
 
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Even as an owner of an Apple Watch that I wear daily I think this is ridiculous.

It's a digital watch that syncs time with NTP time servers. Just like my Windows PC, my Macintosh, my iPhone. It's hardly special.
 
Kevin Lynch was a really bad hire for Apple. Over many years at different companies bad things always happen with the product he was working on. They tend to dry up and go away. How many use ColdFusion on their web servers? How many remember how he killed most every product when Macromedia brought him on? And then Adobe. Ugh. I truly fear for the Apple Watch just because of him. I'll of course buy v2 and try to forget he is in charge.

Wasn't he the bozo who was making blog posts disputing Job' Thoughts on Flash letter?
 
iPhone has GPS chipset in it. Can't it just use the GPS to update its time? Using time from the GPS would give you precise time in hundreds of nano seconds scale.

That's actually the true reason why the iPhone needs very precise time. If the phone is closely synchronized to GPS time, the chipset can do less searching for the GPS signal, making position acquisition much faster and saving power. If you check the iOS logs, you can guess that it syncs first via the Internet, then uses that to acquire the GPS signal, and then keeps time based on that.

I bet the synchronization error is mostly in software from that point on. Unless you specifically engineer in high precision clock hardware, you can't get better than a few milliseconds.
 
50ms is not Stratum One accuracy, not by a factor of several ten thousands (over four orders of magnitude).



Cute, but that would likely be true of any set of clocks in the same room, because they're all likely using the same network path out of that room, to the same NTP server.

It'd be much more meaningful if they said, "two Apple watches on opposite sides of the globe talking to two different NTP servers, one from an African cell site, and one over WiFi in NYC, would move in perfect unison."

It's Apple reality distortion field in practice. it's the same as saying "magical" and "innovative" before everything. It makes buyers feel good.

And people will lap it up as reality because someone at apple said it
 
The phone does the same thing and it syncs with the phone. Nothing special here.

I find a watch with a bunch of mechanical parts such as gears, springs, balance, far more interesting then one with a chip that practically everything has in it these days even if it is less accurate. The Apple watch is a disposable watch that will be useful for about 3-4 years max before its tossed. Many will replace it every year . A nice Submariner will last a lifetime and go up in value. Yes I do have the Apple watch but it gets about 1 day of wrist time a week and when I wear it I miss the mechanical Swiss ones.
 
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Milliseconds...Schmilliseconds.

Just give us a watch with a round face so we don't look like we have a computer attached to our wrists, will ya?

A round face once you are displaying time in more than a traditional circular clock layout is incredibly limiting. I hoe Apple doubles down on a square screen and just works on making a better looking watch. When it comes to smart watches a circular screen feels like a failure to me.
 
Even as an owner of an Apple Watch that I wear daily I think this is ridiculous.

It's a digital watch that syncs time with NTP time servers. Just like my Windows PC, my Macintosh, my iPhone. It's hardly special.

Actually, the fact that they have thermocompensated quartz in the watch is interesting. "Typical" quartz watches are accurate to a few minutes a year. High-frequency thermocompensated quartz can be accurate to 5-10 seconds a year. This is all without any atomic time syncing, mind you. From the description, it sounds like Apple went with high accuracy Quartz even though they sync atomically. This is complete overkill. Even the crappiest Quartz movements are accurate to less than a second a day, so there is little reason to use a good one if you're syncing to an atomic clock.

Basically, between the frequent syncing, latency compensation, and high accuracy Quartz, it really is impressively accurate. They could have not bothered with any of that and it would still have been within a few seconds at any given time from atomic syncing alone, but they went above and beyond.
 
This is BS considering the the watch connects to the internet through iPhone. Which obviously syncs to a centralized server maybe theirs or straight to the atomic time clock server. Besides I'm still gonna clock-in to work just right the time they needed me. Or show up to a group of friends arguing that I got there right in time to the most accurate seconds. :rolleyes:
 
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Each Apple Watch has a temperature-controlled crystal oscillator inside to combat time drift that clocks and watches see. The oscillator also makes sure the Apple Watch remains warm enough to keep accurate time in very cold climates.

This is the bit that's interesting to me. I find that my iPhone becomes nearly useless in very low temperatures. When I go skiing or backpacking and it's 10 degrees Fahrenheit or lower, even with 100% charge, within an hour or two the battery goes dead and that's with it inside my coat where there's body heat. I learned a long time ago that even a relatively cheap Timex Ironman watch will fare better than my iPhone in these conditions.

Does anyone with an apple watch know how long the battery lasts in very low temps?
 
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My beef about almost all the smartwatches I've had, is that they usually don't have any way to manually set the time.

Nothing dumber than having the battery die, then recharging the watch so it can work again.. BUT without a phone or hotspot nearby for it to sync to, the watchface shows some random time that cannot be set manually to match a nearby clock.

Doesn't happen often, but in the woods or if your phone has died, it's just ridiculous. All the accuracy in the world doesn't help if it cannot get a base time. (Does anyone know of a manual time setting app for the Apple or Android watches?)
 
I find it strange that a culture so obsessed with tracking the accurate time actually wastes so much of it.

Sure - obsessed with working hard to be able to afford that :apple:watch. Not too many people are actually wasting time, although to someone who has no family ties, it might appear that spending time with one's family is a waste of time.
 
So we're to believe that the iPhone receives the pretty accurate time signal via the internet, like any mobile phone, then it uses software to adjust for the time lag in getting the signal through the internet and onto the Apple watch.
My guess is the Apple watch and iPhone must stay on the same time and the iPhone is just as accurate.
 
I'm usually okay if I'm 50 milliseconds late for something. It's cool and all...but maybe they should focus on things that matter more? I think maybe Apple is trying to convince us that there is a problem (that they fixed) when there never really was a problem to begin with. I don't know. Just my 2 cents.

#trustnoone
 
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