The Inquirer – 12 January 2006:
THE WRIST WATCH is fast going the way of the grandfather clock and the sun dial, as kids of today use their iPods and mobile phones to tell the time, according to the Journal Sentinel.
Apparently all the cool dudes and dudettes are refusing to wear their time on their wrists and are just looking at their cell phones instead.
I’d guess that Timex and the rest of the industry are watching this news closely.
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Time pieces are classics. They are as much jewerly as they are functional. Don’t count on them going anywhere soon.
I haven’t worn a wrist watch in years. You know why? Just about every gizmo I have has a clock! Plus, now, I have no tan line … on my wrist.
Well, as a self-proclaimed “antichronos” for years, I guess I’ve been cool without realizing it. But hey, if you can’t find someone with a timekeeping device, there’s always the sun.
In Santa Fe, we tell time with a calendar. I haven’t worn a watch since 1986.
gquaglia: Well, sure, posh watches won’t disappear. But who’s going to buy a $10 watch these days?
I’m never late, others are always early. Once you cross that delusional boundary, life gets easier.
I was cleaning house (An annual requirement for this aging bachelor) just the other day and found a wrist watch, with real hands, battery powered, under a couch cushion. I have no idea whose watch it was, but I tossed it, still running, with the correct time, in the same junk drawer with the rest of my memorable but useless junk.
I think the watch will stay. I know when I was a CS major at Pitt, some of the more geeky people had the most basic watchs. There is something great to have some of the most advance tech and on the arm something that represents the older tech.
Glancing at your wrist will always be easier than digging a phone or MP3 player out of your pocket.
Steve: Why bother buying a $10 watch at all? The article’s point is that cellphones/pdas will become so prevalent, that no one will have any need to buy a watch.
I do wear a watch on occasion, but this is only when I go walking in the mountains. The rest of the time I rely on my mobile phone for the time. It is something I think that will always be around, but it will diminish in cultrual populartity and be used for professional, rather than fashion purposes.
You know, years ago I stopped wearing a digital watch and started wearing a watch with a analog face. I did it as a way to get away from tech. It occured to me much later that people were wearing their cellphones as a techno-accessory much like the pocket watches of old. It should have also occured to me that the time functionality would cancel out the wristwatch. I have a friend that refused for many years to get a cellphone. Ironically, because of metel allergies, he carried a pocket-watch.
I do use my cell as a time-peice 50% of the time.
re: I’d choose the surgery. And I’ve yet to find a PDA that works as quickly as paper and pen.”
Steve, different tools for different purposes. And besides, we are early in the evolution of PDA’s. A keyboard is a way slower way of entering text than a microphone, but, for now, we have to use a keyboard because of the problems with “speech recognition”.
Someday (for real), you will be able to write down a note (quick: pen/paper), yet have all the benefits of technology (search/retreival, backup, etc).
As the saying goes, A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. To very geekely paraphrase, A PDA user is a pen/paper person who left their little black contact book in the wash.
I havent worn a watch since freshman year in college. By then cell phones were small enough to carry around….and well I broke my last Timex Ironman and never went to buy another.
Interesting thread…this must be a generational thing. I have a PDA, but I’m sure not going to turn it on to find out what time it is. I used to wear cheap watches, but I’ve never seen a digital watch that wasn’t ugly, so I bought a decent Swiss Army watch about ten years ago, and it still keeps time to within a second or so a day. I can’t imagine not wearing a watch…of course, I don’t own a cell phone…
I love watches. It’s the only piece of male jewelry I will wear. Something just seems so 70’s to me about a man wearing a necklace or bracelet. Plus, working in an office, a watch is invaluable to making meetings on time, etc. People look underdressed to me without a watch, especially in professional business attire. Call me a traditionalist.
You know, maybe this is partly why I find myself getting stopped a few times/week by people asking me what time it is. Weird, I never thought about that.
Anyhoo, I think it a bit premature to foretell the death of the watch just cuz “all the cool kids” no longer wear them. Next we’ll be seeing everyone walking around with ipod buds jammed in their ears or cellphones stuck to the side of their face and… oh wait, too late…
I rarely wear a watch and have been an anti-watch aficionado for years. I simply find them annoying to wear. I have been using my cell phone and mental clock lately…
watches have long time been a fasion statement. in my area, kool kids wear watches. most of my tech friends do not wear them because they have gadgets to tell time and a watch on their wrist gets in the way of the keyboard.
i’m 22 and i have a grandfather clock in my living room that i inherited from my grandfather.
do we honestly want to trust time.windows.com?
Everywhere you go you see clocks. They’re on my computers, VCR, microwave oven, car, iPod, television, cell phone, answering machine, coffee maker, kitchen timer, thermometer, pen cup, in store windows, on street corners and on buildings. Do I need to be so damn aware of the current time that I can’t wait 0.75 seconds to turn my head and look at a clock? Do I need to cut down that wait time to the 0.6 seconds needed to lift my wrist up to my eyeballs? I think not. I gave up wearing wrist watches nine years ago and have never looked back.
Oh crap. Is it 1:30 already? Back to work.
In this day where everyone wants things yesterday I still wear my watch because as a lot of you have said it is much faster to see what time it is plus it doesn’t need recharging every day or so. I have no tanline either because when I am in the sun I don’t care what time it is so I don’t wear one. I also don’t have to carry a recharger.
I always wear my wristwatch (a Casio, incidentally), even though my cell phone, PC, and iPod also keep time. Why? The watch is almost always on my wrist, where the other timepieces aren’t always there. Besides, the Casio is a “fishing watch” that tells me whether the fish might be biting (simulates the Solunar Tables), when sunrise and sunset will occur, and the current phase of the moon. Cute toy for a guy with a fishing pole and a telescope…
I grew up with parents who collected clocks, but never bothered to wind more than half of them. At one point we had over two dozen clocks in the living room – none of which were correct more than twice a day. I always pitied my non-watch-wearing friends when they tried to figure out the time at my house.
I use my phone to talk and my wristwatch to tell time–what could be more simple?
It would make me crazy to worry about recharging my watch, or fishing for my cell phone (which I’m always misplacing), and then turning it on (because I don’t use it constantly), instead of just looking down at wristwatch (which lights up if I want to see what time it is if I wake up in the middle of the night). Technology should conserve physical movement–not increase it–for everyday needs.
B. J.
I went for about ten years without a watch until I saw a review of a watch with a catapult on it. I had to have it and have now been wearing the watch for about 3 weeks. Although it bugs my wrist and I take it off when I’m at my desk.
I work with a guy who wears his cell phone in a case on his belt. Whenever I ask him the time, he fiddles around with the case, opens the velcro tab at the top, shimmys the phone out, presses a button to turn on the light, and tells me the time. He swears by it. I see watches less and less these days.
I never thought of watches as jewelery… That just strikes me as weird… But I wear one every day, and if I don’t, I’m totally lost, even though I have an iPod, cellphone and PDA on me.
I suppose if you’re one of those superconnected hypergeeks that never goes to the bathroom, out to shovel snow, or swimming without your cell phone attached (you can identify these people because they’re the ones wandering around the grocery store with one of those laughable earpiece things on, shouting aloud to no one at all “HONEY! THE FROZEN PEAS ARE ON SALE FOR FIVE CENTS OFF! SHOULD I GET TWO BOXES?), a cell phone or a PDA might do the trick.
For the rest of us who want to know what time it is, a watch is just peachy.
Sorry, Jack if you wear a watch every day why do u even have to ask this guy for the time? Anyhoo, I think watches are unnatural, it’s just jewelery. I can understand it if you have to have the time for your profession though.
>>I think watches are unnatural, it’s just jewelery.
And what are cellular phones and PDAs? A god-given part of our natural anatomy? The controversy here is not between those who care what time it is and those who don’t; it’s between those who care and want to twist their wrist to find out, and those who care and want to unsheath and then boot up a minicomputer they lug around with them everywhere to find out.
I’m finding this comment section pretty entertaining today! People have some hilarious things to say – like about the guy calling his wife for the peas sale – this time around without taking shots at each other…
Mustard – “unsheath and then boot up a minicomputer they lug around” was too funny!