I agree that the marketing of some very expensive watch brands is over the top, and that some of the people wearing those might be rather smug. But you're overlooking a large market of watch enthusiasts who just like mechanical watches because they think they're cool, who buy decent quality watches that don't cost that much.

I got into it after reading the book Longitude. As someone who grew up sailing, who'd learned celestial navigation as a kid, I thought it'd be nifty to have that tech on my wrist. Plus I like that it's possible to understand exactly how it works. Now I have a small collection.

One of my watches, a Hamilton, cost me $700 and as long as I wear it, keeps time within a couple seconds a day, which was good enough to win the Longitude Prize in the 1700s with essentially the same tech. Lots of really expensive watches don't do any better. Hamilton is a brand that goes back to the 1800s, just like the expensive guys.

My only watch that cost over $1000 is from a guy in Denmark, a watch reviewer who decided to make his perfect watch. He hired a designer, spent a couple years blogging about the whole process, made it the best quality he could, produced 300 watches, and sold them at at a modest profit for $2700 each. I wore it in my wedding. To anyone else it's just another anonymous watch.

Lots of mechanical watch enthusiasts like quartz watches too. I have one I quite like that's solar powered. Just like a mechanical, I won't have to replace the battery in a few years.

I usually don't need to know the time to the exact second, and I generally have my phone with me anyway. But when I wear the Hamilton, for fun I usually check against time.gov every day or two to see how it's doing, and adjust to the exact time if it's off by more than a few seconds. I've seen it be exactly accurate after a week.

Yes, that’s the marketing working. People are basically purchasing a dream in the same way Rolex actually sell the idea of James Bond and Roger Federer. The brand wants people to somehow think that owning a random bunch of expensive metal connects them to people who did compete from the Longitude Prize more than just thinking about them.

It’s completely fine if it makes people happy but it’s also in a lot of way manipulative and disingenuous. That’s why I hate industries which are purely marketing based.

I don't think I'm connected to those people. I think it's a nifty device and I like how it looks. I learned about the Longitude Prize from a history book, and I doubt that it was commissioned by the watch industry.

Not everything is some ugly marketing conspiracy. People have appreciated beautiful, clever things for as long as they've been making them.

I like watches where I don’t have to change the battery. I have a kit to change them, but I appreciate the elegance of the purely mechanical solution, and my mechanical watches are generally my favorites for that reason. None of them are luxury goods or particularly expensive.

Even though I am not the kind of person who would spend an insane amount of money on a watch, I still think the elegance of the manufacturing of a piece like the one under discussion is really impressive and interesting.

Don't you trade battery-every-5-years to "adjust time weekly"?

In the other comment, someone mention Vacheron Constantin watches can be off by as much as a minute per week! This is bad enough that I'd call a watch like that "unusable".

Having to change the battery every now and then doesn't bother me, but I'm not at all jazzed at having to charge my watch every day or or so. Plus I just don't like wearing watches: I'm no steampunk, but they do need to bring back the form factor of a pocketwatch on a chain.