In Praise of Quartz

I really love watches. Specifically, I love quartz watches. It’s not particularly popular to love quartz watches at present. Since the Apple Watch came out, it’s popular either love your smartwatch or to have always loved mechanical watches, even before the Apple Watch came out.

This trend doesn’t work for me. I kinda sorta want an Apple Watch, but my intensely physical job precludes my running habit. Once I’m running again, I’m sure I’ll get an Apple Watch. Till then, it doesn’t do anything I need.

Mechanical watches great. They don’t require a battery, just a spring and cogs. The trouble is the ones I can afford tend not to keep great time. The ones that do keep good time, I can’t afford.

Enter the modest and magical quartz watch movement. Quartz watches came out in the late 60s or early 70s, depending on what scale you use. They use a battery and piece of vibrating quartz crystal to keep time, and it’s a technological advancement that brought hella accurate watches down in price such that anybody can afford one.

The huge drop in price quartz brought allows watchmakers to experiment with styles: fonts, colors, faces, case materials and shapes, and so forth. Heck, watchmaker Nixon has an entire Star Wars-themed line of watches, and they’re awesome (I’m partial to the Stormtrooper Time Teller P and love but don’t want the C-3PO Sentry SS SW). But if the experiment is a flop, it’s not that big a deal to the company’s bottom line. Heck, most of Nixon’s Star Wars watches are either $125 or $250, though there are some notable outliers.

 

Nixon may have the coolest fashion line of watches out there, but they’re not the only company experimenting with cool design. Fossil has a lot of sub-$200 watches that are seriously cool; legendary designer Deiter Rams’ Braun has a collection of supremely minimal watches and they’re all quartz; MVMT Watches is a new company that makes only quartz watches and was “founded on the belief that style shouldn’t break the bank.”

There are hundreds of other examples out there, and I haven’t even mentioned the somewhat ubiquitous and supremely inexpensive Timex or Casio.

My 6th grade niece shows off her beloved Casio calculator watch; also in her collection is a Timex Weekender.

Mechanical watches are astonishing feats of engineering and human ability. They have centuries of history and their ability to work over a span of years with no need to replace a battery is amazing. It may even be fair to call a quality mechanical watch an apex of human achievement.

But the position that mechanical watches — and let’s be honest, here: mechanical watches that keep accurate time and are, consequentially, very expensive — are the only watches worth having is a lot like saying a Ferrari is the only car worth driving, the Mac Pro is the only computer worth using, Glenfiddich 50-year-old is the only whisky worth drinking, or that purebred dogs are the only pets worth loving.

It might even be more true to say that if quartz is dismissible, there’s similarly no point in driving a Honda or Toyota. That a Mac Mini isn’t worth owning. That Jameson is valueless. That your pound puppy sucks.

I can’t get behind this thinking.

My quartz watches look great, keep accurate time, and bring me a great deal of joy to swap bands on, to choose what to wear based on the clothes I’ve picked for the day. Quartz allows me the freedom to buy a watch based on its design and features, without having to save for months or choose between a watch or a camera lens.

By the way, if I spent $8,000 on a Rolex Submariner, my wife would never look at me the same again, and she would divorce from me financially forever. And I’d probably be shamed into never wearing it. So I’m all about the $250 Nixon, and you should be, too.