Soul

If you see this coming out of your watch, mechanical or quartz, this is how you know it has a "ghost in the machine":

Man, you actually scared the **** out of me with that GIF... I watched it till the end, like "Uh, will the GIF be censored or will it include the creepy part"? 
Curiosity, mankind's best and worst friend

But what of the Mecha-Quartz?!? 🤣

Cars made after 2013 don't have soul. This is a hill I'm willing to die on. Its just an Ipad on wheels

I might be WAY off base here, but I think that thought process stems from resentment of the haymaker punch quartz landed on mechanical watchmaking back in the 70's & 80's and more broadly, the move of society to more & more computerization. 

Or I'm just getting old...

So quartz it's like redheads 🤔

My computer at work has a soul, and it f**ing hates me.... but not as much as the printer does.

All my watches have souls and personalities.... and names.... and birthdays.... and different voices when I talk to them in my head...

Prepare yourself for the end. You must mean non-mechanical - I do believe on the basis of the intracacies, tolerances, and hand work on some not all- mechanical watches have a soul and require care and feeding. Yet digital watches (even with analogue displays) generally have the quality of accuracy and can have more exotic casing and variations celebrating our ingenuity when merging engineering and industrial design. I do believe many haute and luxury manufacturers are repeating themselves and that’s lame whereas quartz- especially self sustaining- e.g ., solar charging - are also great machines we wear.

Well if I don’t have a soul then I hold no hope for my watches, we will all be dammed together 🤣

It's poppycock. In the world of motorcycles the same hooey is used to justify fondness for inferior machinery. Certain brands of motorcycles have "character" or "soul" as demonstrated by excessive vibration, leaking fluids, erratic noises, and frequent maintenance demands. Other brands just perform flawlessly with no bother or drama, and are somehow deemed boring and uninspiring for it. 

It's a tenuous rationale that often seems disingenuous. I'd say that the truth is that there is more involvement needed, so there is this parental or codependent feeling (Tamagotchi effect) that develops whereas the thing that, you know, just works can be blissfully ignored and disappears from mind.

The thought experiment nobody ever answers is: Pretend that mechanical movements are cranked out by machine en masse (never mind that many are) and that quartz movements are meticulously handmade with expert labor. The finished products are each indistinguishable from what exists today. Does it make a difference?

Soul = the romantic sense of nostalgia for a simpler time when mechanical devices were proudly built to last by skilled craftsmen and appreciated and treasured by their owners. The mechanical watch has an audible ticking heartbeat, and the reassuring, slow steady motion of the seconds hand gliding along. As opposed to a mass produced chunk of plastic and silicon assembled by the thousand, with identical components placed by robots and packaged by machines for mindless, disposable consumption by the masses. Its cold, silent, digital numbers changing in stark, drab contrast on an uninspired LCD panel.

Yes, quartz watches can have souls too.

Whether your watch is powered by an automatic or quartz movement, or the eventual nanobot designed and made movements of the future (maybe?) - ALL that matters is whether you like the watch or not. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You might not like Electric Vehicles, and prefer the raspy roar of a V8 IC engine...but that doesn't make the Tesla or Prius any less of a "car" than your Mustang GT, for example. 

From a design/engineering perspective, attributing more value or your own appreciation for the fine craftsmanship that goes into a Rolex automatic movement, than to a "simple" Casio quartz- that's fine- it's a person choice for you. I am amazed at the typical automatic watch innards, and follow a variety of watch repair/rehab YouTube channels, but that doesn't mean I am not equally appreciate of the engineering that goes into a $20 quartz watch with unbelievable accuracy.

I have to agree! I may be the only one, but I see a soul in this early solar digital watch from Citizen, even if my wife calls it my ugly brown turd. 😂

Those who claim that watches have souls also say that watches sing to them.

Exercise care when dealing with them.

It's a fine line.

@Springdale wrote:

Why are there people who still like fountain pens? They should just buy plastic Bics! Probably because of Big Ink marketing to them, right? 

As someone that cleaned up and fixed a 1940's Waterman from a flea market this weekend,I can totally go off-topic and answer! Fountain pens are refillable and last forever. You can use any, any color ink that exists. The best part is that you need apply zero pressure to make them write, so they are smooth and effortless. Standard ink is water soluble, so it washes off way better than oil-based ballpoint ink. If out of ink, diluting with water will make it through the day.

There are more debatable points, like the refillable lighter vs. disposable amortization cost efficiency, environmental impact, effect on handwriting, and the that any nondisposable product is treated as personal rather than community property.

The benefit of a ballpoint, to my knowledge, is that you can leave the cap off or have a retractable mechanism and probably leak resistance. Oh, and that the oil-based inks are more permanent (but iron gall ink is better still).

TL;DR: comfort, serviceability, personalization

The notion that replacing a battery every few years is a greater risk, cost, or inconvenience than total disassembly and reassembly at a somewhat lesser interval never made sense to me, but I live in a modern civilization.

While I'm at it, I find the term "character" preferable. 

Dang, I'll have to read up. Thanks!

I feel personally attacked by this statement. What is it James Acaster said? "Never before have I been so offended by something I 100% agree with"

Very interesting! Thanks for sharing. I was being sarcastic in that part of my previous post, so hopefully that came through. 
The idea of having fewer, nicer things that I maintain over the long haul is appealing to me. That’s why I  slightly disagreed with the notion on this thread that we fell for marketing if we like mechanical movements because they are objectively worse time-tellers than cheap quartz.  

there are many examples of things that used to be tools that are now considered luxury - not just Rolex watches. in today’s world, where things are made by machines, it’s a luxury to have something that is hand made / assembled / regulated. Be it handmade leather boots, a fancy fountain pen, handwoven wool shirts, or mechanical watches (be it hand made or assembled). I don’t think we‘re “falling” for marketing if we place value on things that are difficult to make when compared with similar things that are easy to make. 
 

I agree. A handmade watch is amazing. If you have 13 grand to spend, you can get one of these. élégante by F.P.Journe 48 mm Titanium | Calibre 1210 (fpjourne.com)

It's pretty incredible. It also happens to be a Quartz.

If your wife is into watches, the Patek 24 hours is damn nice.

Also a Quartz.

Or if you just want to spend $50 on a watch, AliExpress has a ton of cheap mechanical watches to choose from.

Quality is always something worth having. You thinking a mechanical movement is synonymous with quality, is Marketing. No one wants to feel they have been marketed to and manipulated. I get it. But the only reason corporations spend billions on marketing, is because it works :)

Oh, and unless you are in the $100,000 market for watches, I am confident you don't have a watch of the same quality as this one, and it's Quartz. 
 

I'm quite confident I have watches of similar quality to that Credor, and I didn't spend even close to $10,000. It probably retails for about $3000, which is about the the price of Grand Seiko quartz, and I presume about the same quality (though design-wise I would much rather have a Grand Seiko). 
https://www.credor.com/lineup/detail/?no=GCAR063

Here's a mechanical Credor for about $4500, again, about par with Grand Seiko. 
https://www.credor.com/lineup/detail/?no=GCCD989

Don't assume Credor is automatically super high end. They're mostly not. 

Trotting out my Citizen Chronomaster quartz yet again, I'd put it half a step down from Grand Seiko/Credor, but just half, and it's it's also a little cheaper. And yes, I think it has soul.

I think we may be talking past each other. In no way did I say that all quartz watches are poor quality. I also did not state that a mechanical movement is synonymous with quality. I've had a Seiko 5 with a 7S26 - that aint quality! lol but it was interesting and I liked to turn it over to see gears turning and the rotor swinging. To me, it was different than the ecodrives I had had up until that point and I was fascinated by it. 

For what its worth - I generally like quartz watches. high accuracy quartz movements like those in The Citizen or in GS models are amazing and certainly take lots of time and expertise to create - hence their value. I especially want the 9f quartz GMT (SBGN005) that GS has, but way out of my price range.

I still think that liking mechanical watches over cheap quartz watches is not the result of marketing, even if cheap quartz watches are better time tellers. Personal preferences/interests exist and they are not all completely driven my marketing. I disagree with the notion that if choosing between two identical watches, one quartz and one mechanical, choosing the mechanical version is purely a result of marketing. That would suggest that no one has personal taste/interests. That's all I'm saying. 

Given that human beings are electrically operated, ......

Yea, I think we are saying different things. I love mechanical watches. The idea of all the complexity on my wrist. The fact that it all works is pretty amazing. Even though the tech is hundreds of years old, it still fascinates me. As a hobbyist, they offer a lot to me.

However, in every way, other than appreciating what they are, my overpriced watches are inferior products to a citizen eco drive.

If not for marketing, the watches we love would either not exist, because the only people who would want them, are the 2% of their current customer base who think like you and I, or we would still have a handful, and they would cost a lot less then they do now.

I can see the same thing happening in a few years with cars. We are really close to electric cars being better in every way than combustion engine cars. And as the tech improves, the costs will go way down and cost far less to make and own. So car companies will need to do one of two things. Make electric cars, or find a way to market combustion engine cars as something special.

And to be honest, I can really see quartz coming back into fashion in the next 10-15 years.
 

@Omeganut BRO!  YOU have the BEST comments EVA 🤣😆😂

Cars after 1999.  

I thought this thread was going to be all about Marvin Gaye’s watch collection. 

I have a couple Seiko Kinetic watches, love the movement and some of the designs that Seiko came out with.

Yes, I have a couple myself. I really like my Kinetic GMT.

That's a glorious dial, I want to pick up a GMT for myself soon.