Done with Apple Watches for now

[Reggaenald]

I use a shortcut to toggle AOD on and off.

Just saw you can actually have a shortcut action for wake on wrist as well. Very neat. I don’t know when those have been added but apparently I didn’t or didn’t thoroughly check

 

[skeptech]

If you’re not interested in having a watch that does any of that (and, of course, an insane amount more!) — if all you want is the time and the date on your wrist — then, obviously, you want a device that excels at just giving you the time and the date. Which would be a Rolex or any number of other mechanical watches.

Mechanical watches do not keep good time - COSC mechanical movement chronometer certification is +4/-6 seconds (drift) per day. Rolex manufactures to a ±2 second per day standard, but if you want to maintain that accuracy, you'll have to have it regularly & expensively serviced. The vast majority of mechanical watches don't meet COSC chronometer standard (they keep time even more inaccurately).

Typical cheap quartz movement drifts ±15 seconds per month, or about ±0.5 seconds per day. That's your $20 to $50 Casio digital or analog-face quartz. This technology obsoleted all mechanical movements as of the introduction of the Seiko Astron 35SQ on Christmas Day, 1969, and precipitated what the Swiss call "the Quartz Crisis" which resulted in 60% of the Swiss watch industry going bust in the succeeding decade.

Subsequent refinement of quartz watch movements has resulted in the category of "high accuracy quartz" (HAQ) watches, which drift no more than ±10 seconds per year, the most extreme example of which are the solar-powered Citizen "Caliber 0100" quartz movement which is specified to drift no more than ±1 second per year.

On top of that, now add radio-controlled (a.k.a. "atomic") quartz watches which nightly receive terrestrial time signal broadcasts from national time service broadcasting stations like WWVB (USA), JJY (Japan), DCF77 (Germany), MSF (UK), BPC (China), and thus maintain even closer synchronization (adjusted for time zone and daylight saving time changes) to Universal Coordinated Time (UTC), which is in turn based on International Atomic Time (TAI).

On top of that, there are GPS-receiving quartz watches which can receive GPS broadcasts (the satellites broadcast all their data all the time basically covering everywhere on Earth from medium Earth orbit (MEO)). The terrestrial time signal broadcasts have more limited coverage.

Into this milieu in 2015 comes Apple Watch … which Tim Cook stated during the press event in September 2014 when Apple Watch was announced: "we set out to create the best wristwatch in the world: it will keep time within 50 milliseconds of universal time."

It does this with a HAQ-quality quartz at its heart, and then radio synchronization via WiFi, Bluetooth, and with GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System - the generic category to which Global Positioning System (GPS, USA) belongs, alongside GLONASS (Russian), Galileo (EU), Beidou (China), and over East Asia, QZSS (Japan)) - any watch (or device) providing satellite positioning & navigation is also receiving & keeping very accurate time because accurate time is required for geolocation & navigation. See also https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-watch-accuracy-offline.2390305/post-32184045

Apple Watch really is the best wristwatch ever made, superior to every other timepiece ever made … and provides an astonishing number of other supremely useful functions also. Oh, and it's obviously acceptably beautiful, given its sales volume: best-selling wristwatch in the world, outselling the entire Swiss watch industry every year since 2019.

Mechanical watches do not "excel at just giving you the time and date." They haven't in many decades.

 

[seek3r]

Mechanical watches do not keep good time - COSC mechanical movement chronometer certification is +4/-6 seconds (drift) per day. Rolex manufactures to a ±2 second per day standard, but if you want to maintain that accuracy, you'll have to have it regularly & expensively serviced. The vast majority of mechanical watches don't meet COSC chronometer standard (they keep time even more inaccurately).

Typical cheap quartz movement drifts ±15 seconds per month, or about ±0.5 seconds per day. That's your $20 to $50 Casio digital or analog-face quartz. This technology obsoleted all mechanical movements as of the introduction of the Seiko Astron 35SQ on Christmas Day, 1969, and precipitated what the Swiss call "the Quartz Crisis" which resulted in 60% of the Swiss watch industry going bust in the succeeding decade.

Subsequent refinement of quartz watch movements has resulted in the category of "high accuracy quartz" (HAQ) watches, which drift no more than ±10 seconds per year, the most extreme example of which are the solar-powered Citizen "Caliber 0100" quartz movement which is specified to drift no more than ±1 second per year.

On top of that, now add radio-controlled (a.k.a. "atomic") quartz watches which nightly receive terrestrial time signal broadcasts from national time service broadcasting stations like WWVB (USA), JJY (Japan), DCF77 (Germany), MSF (UK), BPC (China), and thus maintain even closer sychronization (adjusted for time zone and daylight saving time changes) to Universal Coordinated Time (UTC), which is in turn based on International Atomic Time (TAI).

On top of that, there are GPS-receiving quartz watches which can receive GPS broadcasts (the satellites broadcast all their data all the time basically covering everywhere on earth from medium Earth orbit (MEO)). The terrestrial time signal broadcasts have more limited coverage.

Into this milieu in 2015 comes Apple Watch … which Tim Cook stated during the press event in September 2014 when Apple Watch was announced: "we set out to create the best wristwatch in the world: it will keep time within 50 milliseconds of universal time."

It does this with a HAQ-quality quartz at its heart, and then radio sychronization via WiFi, Bluetooth, and with GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System - the generic category to which Global Positioning System (GPS, USA) belongs, alongside GLONASS (Russian), Galileo (EU), Beidou (China), and over East Asia, QZSS (Japan)) - any watch (or device) providing satellite positioning & navigation is also receiving & keeping very accurate time because accurate time is required for geolocation & navigation.

Apple Watch really is the best wristwatch ever made, superior to every other timepiece ever made … and provides an astonishing number of other supremely useful functions also. Oh, and it's obviously acceptably beautiful, given its sales volume: best-selling wristwatch in the world, outselling the entire Swiss watch industry every year since 2019.

Mechanical watches do not "excel at just giving you the time and date." They haven't in many decades.

So, 2 thoughts:

1) I actually learned a lot from your post that I didnt know, thank you

2) re: “excel at just giving you the time and date” I think you may have read that slightly differently than I at least did and spent more time on the excel part and less on the just part then the op meant lol