Old is the New New, and Why Some of Us Think that Wrist Watches Are Neither Useless Nor Doomed
I was recently asked if wrist watches were possibly becoming “useless” or “doomed”. There are several layers to the subject, but I honestly think that they are neither.
The first reason is that Consumer Electronics and Computer Science are moving so fast that they might be moving too fast for the good of smart watches.
At the moment, tech giants are focused on miniaturising a computer to put it on the wrist. The current Apple Watch has significantly more processing power than the computer that was used to send men on the moon (Your Mobile Phone vs. Apollo 11’s Guidance Computer | RealClearScience). But smartwatches themselves might become obsolete once that it becomes easy to enable always-on Internet access on wrist devices.
In 1980 IBM believed that the future of computing was in hardware, so they neglected the operating system and agreed to let Bill Gates sell Microsoft software to third parties.
In 1995 Bill Gates believed that the future was in the operating system and apps, so he neglected the Internet and allowed startups to move everything to the cloud.
When you browse Google maps, stream Netflix or get answers from your virtual assistant, the only thing that your phone does is to serve as an input and output interface. The computation is not done on your phone but on remote servers.
Soon, wrist devices will reach the stage where they no longer compute any data internally. It will no longer serve a purpose to cram fast processors into a wrist device. They will only need to be able to handle the bandwidth of the input and output data.
Wrist watches on the other hand will continue to serve their role as a fashion accessory, which quite frankly hasn’t yet been successfully challenged by smart watches. Honestly, can you think of any smart watch that will still look stylish 60 years from now like a 1960s Cartier watch does today?
Image credit Galerie Media Group
The second reason is sustainability or demand despite offering features that appear outdated.
I recently went down the rabbit hole of another analogue product that should have been made redundant by its electronic replacement: digital cameras. The way of capturing the image might have changed (instead of having an image captured by silver halide crystals, it is captured by an electronic sensor) but what has not changed is the way of projecting the image on the receptor.
For that reason, useless manual lenses from obsolete analogue cameras have found a new use with photography buffs. The premium Hasselblad lens in example below (Etsy seller name pixelized) is the same kind that was selected by NASA for the Apollo Mission. All photographs of the moon landing were shot with a comparable lens.
There is a vast choice of adaptors that cost less than a fast food menu and allow to mount those lenses on the latest digital camera. So a good lense can go a long way and remain usable for decades as long as it is taken good care of. The camera body will probably be replaced every couple of year, because again, consumer electronics technology is almost moving too fast for its own good…
And as this Hasselblad example shows, these type of lenses are still worth their weight of gold: the amount in circulation is finite (since production stopped at some point in time) and is slowly shrinking because some get damaged or stolen over time.
The amount of potential buyers keeps increasing as they fall in love with manual digital photography, and the resale value of those lenses remains stable, if it doesn’t even appreciates over time.
These seemingly “useless” analogue products were extremely well built and often deliver a service that is hardly rivalled by contemporary products. Furthermore, photography buffs actually don’t mind having to focus manually, as it allows them to take part in the process. Just like winding up a mechanical watch makes you take part in keeping it running.
Here’s the Omega Speedmaster, a faithful modern day rendition of the watch worn on the Apollo Mission. It is one of the Swiss brand’s crown Jewels and just as the Hasselblad lens it maintains a very good value on the second hand market.
An analogue, repairable watch such as the one above can be completely dismantled, cleaned up, put back together and work like on day one. That is not the case of smart phones and smart watches.
Tech companies like to cut corners by welding or glueing components, which often makes repairs fairly tricky. A Dutch startup tried to make repairable phones from the get go (Fairphone | The phone that cares for people and planet), but not cutting corners means that you cannot churn new phones as fast as possible and they cost substantially more.
