this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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The sweeping motion of a mechanical watch is somewhat incidental. Yes, higher-end watch movements will beat at a higher rate than cheap ones, thus making their motion more smooth and their timekeeping more accurate. However, after a certain price point (let's say, >1k USD) that ceases to be a factor and choices like material, brand, complications (aka "features"), and finish make up most of the expense. Beyond that (>100k USD), you get to the price point of watches as high end art.
Anyway, for me as a tech guy, it's about style and simplicity. I want a beautiful, legible dial in a form factor that doesn't make my wrist look like a toothpick. I have a compulsion to always know the time, while also wanting to disconnect from my phone for certain things. A smart watch is too phone-like for me.
Often those "higher rate" movements are wasted anyway on a timekeeping device that doesn't have any way to set the time precisely.
Quartz, on a network connected watch, is able to be reliably within tens of milliseconds of the official time which is a level of accuracy you're never going to get on a watch where you manually set the time. It's physically impossible to control your fingers with timing as short as that. There's no way you can press the button within 100 milliseconds of a reference timepiece time unless you spend an hour trying again and again then check how far off you were.
This is a solved problem. I'm all for finding new and interesting ways to solve it... but I don't like the claim that this is a "new chapter" in watchmaking.