Some of you may have noticed the slogan of TooMeta.com: Nobody Wears Digital Watches. It’s the fastest way I could think of to summarize what I see as the major theme of this website; namely, the failure of technology as savior. But it’s also an interesting point to think about.
There are some people who stubbornly maintain that digital watches are infinitely superior to analog watches, and that analog watches prosper solely because of the sheep mentality of consumers, which leads them to choose status over functionality. And, to some extent, that guy in the link is right: that $22,000 unreadable watch does exist solely as a status symbol. And yes, the dials are pretty cluttered on the ‘help, my barometer had sex with a dashboard’ watch. But I think there’s more to it than that.
Standards: most computer users love the existence of standards, unless they’re proprietary, except when they are usable for free, but not if Microsoft likes them. Worrying about the subtle politics of standards isn’t relevant to this argument, though, because, in digital watches, they don’t exist. Everybody knows how to set the time on an analog watch. Everybody. You pull out the little knob on the right, and you turn it until the hands are pointing to where you’d like them, and them you push it back in. If it’s a pocketwatch, the knob may be on the top. “Oh come on,” a digital watch fanatic will say, “It only takes a few minutes to learn how to use a digital watch. I bet your VCR still flashes TWELVE TWELVE TWELVE, you moron.” And they’re right (about the few minutes, not about the VCR), but a) it’s an extra hassle, b) you’ll have to re-learn obscure features every time you need them (b-sub-1: you might have to learn how to cancel obscure features when you enable them by accident), and c) digital watch interfaces, even after you learn them, are clunkily slow. To set the time on a digital watch, you’ll typically follow a sequence like, ‘Hold the TIME button for 5 seconds, at which point the LCD should time start blinking. Press MODE until the hour is set as desired. Press ALARM to advance to the minutes. Press MODE until the minutes are set as desired. Press ALARM to advance to seconds. At this point, pressing MODE resets the seconds to 00. Press TIME to save the changes and exit, or press ALARM to go back to the hour.’
My boss has a Rolex that gains five minutes a week. If I’d paid as much as he did for a watch that couldn’t tell time, I would be pissed the fuck off. But it’s not really a problem to him. He just pops the knob, twiddles it for a couple seconds (sub: dials are wonderful input devices, because they support both frobnicating and tuning; Apple figured this out for iPod and look where it got them), and pushes it back in. Just like you do with every other analog watch. Here’s a brilliant idea for digital watchmakers: use a digital knob that just happens to function exactly like a regular old analog knob. It’s the year 2005; don’t tell me it’s too complicated because I built more complicated circuits than that in college.
Design: digital watches tend to be ugly. I know a lot of geeks will say that only brainless masses follow trends in clothing and so forth and so on, but I think there’s a difference between being trendy and having a frickin’ sense of aesthetics. And all that chunky black matte plastic is god damn bitch-ass ugly. OK? It is. And why are digital watches covered with ads for themselves? Sure, laptop computers have all kinds of ENERGY STAR COMPLIANT INTEL INSIDE POWERX 3D ULTRA WIZARD stickers on the actual computer body… but they’re just stickers. You can take them off if you aren’t a total retard. Digital watch? You’re stuck advertising UBERQUARTZ PANEL 100M DEPTH SHOCKPROOF ACCUROSCOPE 3000 for as long as you’ve got the damn thing.
Some companies do make digital watches with steel cases and wristbands, trying to go for a ‘classier’ look. Then they make the digits an inch tall and warped and distorted, complete with scrolling animation as the seconds tick, so reading your watch is like reading an odometer through a fish bowl. I’ve seen a digital watch that would have looked perfectly respectable, if only it didn’t have a matrix display that looped an animation of a DRAGON BREATHING FIRE THAT TURNS INTO KANJI. Hey man, can I get some V-TEC stickers with that?
There are plenty of good reasons why nobody wears digital watches. We’ll be sure to talk more about them later.