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| Meg wearing the DW5600J Casio Tough Solar Waveceptor Water resistant to 20 Bar too! |
The humble quartz wristwatch movement operating on chemical energy from small button & coil cell batteries,; alkaline, silver oxide & lithium manganese dioxide respectively; came into the world market with devastating economic impacts on the mechanical watch industry, especially in Switzerland!
Not just the Omega, Rolex, Tissot, household luxury watch brand houses, the entire Swiss watch industry & derivative precision machining & tooling industries were also harmed with sharp losses of profit, reductions in sales- the worst thing for a business. Thankfully this crisis was temporary & the mechanical & automatic watch industry fully recovered. Today the main challenge for Swiss luxury watches are knockoff or super clones or fakes made in china by dishonest cheater companies who buy all the same machining equipment, but never polish things as nicely.
These super clones are not cheap either, selling for $1000 USD 2022 for example in the case of fake Omega Seamaster or Rolex Submariner or Oyster Perpetual. You need bright lighting, a jewelers loop with 30x or better zoom & UV LED lighting & bright white LED lighting, & encyclopedic knowledge about the real luxury watch to even tell the difference. You have to know all the details & thankfully there are YouTube videos to teach you how to spot a fake. Never just look for one "tell" look for 4 or 5 distinguishing details. Start looking at the watch hands, up close with your loop. Are they perfect or are they messy with crude edges & machining marks ? A real one from a top luxury brand has ever detail finished to perfection as much as possible, especially on the front visible parts where you look at the time & day information.
Consider the supply chain that provides synthetic sapphire jewels & rubies & very highly precisely milled parts used by the hundreds in automatic wrist watches that use the wearers body movement to swing a weighted mass on the main axis that winds the mainspring of a mechanical watch movement featuring mostly low friction jewel enhanced gear-trains. The balance wheel & balance spring & dual tip fork escapement mechanism are low friction optimized with jeweled bearings & jewel tips on the escapement fork. Making these parts with expensive automated mills something that Citizen group, especially Miyota, perfected to a plastic gearing art in movements so cheap you can buy a new on on Esslinger for $9 in the case of my SKAGEN Titanium's Miyota 1L22 tiny quartz movement.
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| Seiko Astron Quartz Movement |
In the 1970's, & 1980's Japanese watch making companies began highly diffusing the world watch market with cheap highly precise battery powered quartz timing, & electric coil magnetic field magnet motor driven analog & then digital LED & finally LCD watches from Casio, Citizen & Seiko. This disrupted the mechanical watch industry so badly that nearly 65,000 people in Switzerland lost their jobs in the wrist watch industry as result of watch price depression created by cheap digital sports watches with exceptional timing precision compared to even the best hand wound or automatic jeweled enhanced movements made in America, Switzerland & German at the time.
Even Citizen & Seiko cannibalized sales of their mechanical watches with cheaper quartz versions. Thankfully this trend did not last & most watch making companies doubled down & became even more profitable. Rolex for example that had been selling egalitarian priced automatic wrist watches (they also invented automatics) in the 1950's was able to luxury enhance their branding & began selling prestigious watches at prices or costs that rival popular new passenger vehicles.
My first automatic wrist watch was a Seiko 5, from overstock.com for $50, with a white dial & self winding automatic 7S26 movement that I love. My most recent watch purchase was a Seiko Orange Monster automatic with the 4R36 movement. My current daily an Invicta 3044 Grand Diver with a Seiko NH35A self winding automatic movement. I really like automatics & also have a Chinese STURHLING ORIGINAL & much newer way better Chinese BODERRY automatic. I have 3 Citizen Eco-drive Japanese watches & two Casio digital watches.
What do these cheap automatics miss that the luxury watches costing 10 or 20x more have ? a lot! You can't get something for nothing in physics. Sure, with Rolex you pay a huge premium in pice & the Invicta line offers stuff that looks & works very similarly, without any of the brand prestige of owning something exceptionally expensive that can also appreciate or go up in value while you own it. Not just anyone can buy a Rolex sadly, at least not new & buyer beware if you are looking to buy a "used Rolex" as you are very likely to encounter a highly similar clone, called a hyper clone or super clone, that only a watch nerd with a jewelers loop can distinguish from the original. Thankfully with a YouTube education on how to spot a fake Rolex, you can learn the pro info & go online & buy a jewelers loop & then when you are looking at a "Rolex" you can look for the "Tells" of a fake, & be aware that many sellers will try to pawn them off as the real deal for very high prices, much higher priced than the super clone if you bought one directly from china.
One of the problems is that many watch brands are actually made in China. Luxury brands often sell bridge products in the $500-$1500 with Swiss quartz movements, while the rest of the watch made in south east Asia. Not just luxury watches being cloned either. All sorts of products designed in Europe or America are blatantly ripped off in China where clones of those products sell at fractions of the price of a real iPhone or similar. I have seen lots of clones of the Apple Watch for example, with cloned graphics & cloned form factors, probably made by the same contract manufacture, in closed door wings or back room facilities, dark manufacturing, clandestine cloning operations. I wish these despot operations were struck by astroid impacts & destroyed.
I don't like copy cat companies that clone other peoples hard work. Rolex spend decades perfecting self winding automatic watch movements & exceptional watch production methods & tooling. Seiko also spent a lot of R&D funding & time & effort to refined their watches. Citizen too, with their eco-drive. Sadly, China made a lot of economic progress by selling mass produced fake clone products passed off as the real deal, with lower quality materials, shorter lived lower quality parts. My brewing buddy & I actually call some of these cheap Chinese products "Chinesium" made of a cheap low quality metal alloy from waste scrap never purified or cleaned up properly.
Given the cost of the real luxury items, I am not surprised that people clone these products. There are crooks & liars in the world & these low quality people have been around all throughout history! To be fair, Japan copied a lot of things they learned in America during the times after the Second World War. The whole Japanese auto industry for example, started when the executives that founded those companies traveled to America to study GM, the real OG modern car manufacturer, though I would never buy a vehicle made by GM for quality control issues, glitches & defects & prefer Toyota/ Lexus by far // higher quality, longer lasting, better up time, less annoying to own, cheaper overall, lower total cost, more energy efficient, etc // With some historical irony, GM should send its executives & engineering leaders to Japan to study how Toyota does it & bring that knowledge back to improve GM's products now :) lol
In watchmaking the industrywide upheaval created by quartz wrist watches caused radical declines in the Swiss watch making industry & much of the worlds watch production also shifted to Japan, where the newest electronics are culturally embraced. Japan has a clean, precision oriented culture with fanatical obsession praised & encouraged, from sword making to traditional Japanese woodworking or art styles or architecture, to exceptional sanitary fresh sushi making & bathroom cleanliness & hygiene unrivaled elsewhere in the world. Even the toilet a 7-11 sparking clean & cleaned every time after its used! I saw this in first person, near Yoyogi Station, Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan in 2010. Cheap high quality & mass produced also a Japanese market miracle for export creation of Government initiatives to rebuilt the Japanese economy after it was destroyed by nuclear bombs & other impacts of WWII. Today, the Fukushima reactor meltdown clean-up providing Japan with a challenging set of problems to solve. I am disappointed that Toyota & Honda have not contributed more to clean up efforts at Fukushima. Similarly other highly profitable Japanese robotics & automation companies could offer up some industrial humanoid robots for use in decontamination in areas with higher radiation levels toxic to humans.
The quarts crisis was part of the third industrial revolution 3IR or Digital Revolution that emerged with compact computing required by NASA. The Seiko Astron (December 1969) was the worlds first Quartz wrist watch & very expensive when it launched, about the same price as a new car back then. Today we are living in 4IR or the fourth industrial revolution or Information Age as it were. This means artificial intelligence & wearable smart electronics like smart watches & even smart rings are now a thing. IoT or internet of things means that more chips are going to be integrated into more things that were traditionally basic or did not have compute elements. Micro-controllers & integrated chipsets are the themes. Battery operated & energy efficient, made on 10nm, 7nm & 5nm processing nodes using Deep Ultraviolet Lithography commercialized by dutch firm ASML, with their excimer mirror mask mirror optics EUV machines that take years to develop & months to assemble & months more to test & setup for manufacturing, at TSMC the worlds largest chip factor for example or FAB as they are known in the chip making industry.
If you think my Skagen titanium wrist watch is thin at 4mm thickness, they are going too sell electronic flexible OLED wrist watches that look more like a plastic bandage than the Apple Watch's or Samsung Gear of today. Flexible thin film solar bands will make electricity to power the watch, they are also optically clear & comprise the entire outer surface of these tough thin polymer smart watches. With endless runtime as long as the watch gets some light exposure, a thin flexible sodium ion battery will give weeks of runtime per charge, even if no light reaches the solar PV surface. If you place this wrist foil band onto a hold dock, it can charge like that too, just like the Apple Watch! I suspect stuff like this will launch within 10 years. Eventually all electronics will be laminate polymer, special recyclable e-waste that you deposit back into the vending machine or locker where you retrieved it form in the first place. Purchased online using your currency of the future, you can get if from your mailbox or they can put it in an Amazon locker for you to go pickup.
Rich Men's Toys
Luxury automatic watches are not going away, they are becoming fashionable & popular! Available from $40 Chinese flavors up to as much as anyone willing to spent crazy prices, there's something for everyone in the automatic watch space now :) I shelled out ~$250 total for the Seiko Orange Monster. For me that's a lot! Especially because of how many other watches I already own!
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| Seiko Orange Monster 4R36 Movement Exceptional :) |
Back to the Rise of Quartz watches & watch movements starting 1962, when 20 different Swiss watch manufacturers formed a consortium to develop the first quartz wristwatch. In Japan, Seiko was working on developing quartz technology. The QC-951 was a portable quartz crystal chronometer used as a backup time in at events of the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Japan. By 1966 prototypes for the worlds first quartz pocket watch were unveiled by Japanese Seiko & Swiss Longines at the Neuchatel Observatory competition. By Dec. 25, 1969 Seiko unveiled the Astron, the worlds first quartz watch & the start of the Quartz Crisis. Ebauches SA Beta 21 debuted a the 1970 Basel Fair. By 6th of May, 1970 Hamilton introduced the Pulsar, the worlds first electronic digital watch.
In 1978 quartz watches overtook mechanical watches in popularity, as the Swiss watch industry plunged into an ocean of insolvency, as more than 1000 Swiss watch firms eventually went bankrupt. Watch company employment in declined from 90,000 in 1970 to just 28,000 by 1988. In the USA Texas Instruments, Fairchild Semiconductor & National Semiconductor began mass manufacturing increasingly cheaper electronic quartz watches. By the early 1980s, most of the American firms involved with watch making withdrew from the watch market, except Timex & Bulova, but eventually Citizen purchased Bulova 2008.
By 1983 a consortium of failed Swiss watch makers & titans that survive the quartz crisis emerged to create Swatch, or what became the Swatch Group, the worlds largest watch maker. Today Swatch a fashion brand of Swiss made watches with their in house designed & made System51 Irony with 90 hrs of power reserve & only 51 parts with one central complex screw, a modern marvel & holds up well in metal cases that do not flex the movement like some of the polymer case models featuring this amazing movement.
Cost of Servicing an Automatic Wristwatch vs Replacement of the Movement from Esslinger
I was puzzled by "premium" watch servicing costs that typically range from $100 to $500 for many luxury wristwatches. So I looked for a discussion thread about this topic comparing mechanical watches made by Seiko in Japan with movements like the 7S27 in my older smaller Seiko 5 or the 4R36 in my latest Seiko Orange Monster. I paid $50 for the smaller Seiko 5 on Overstock.com back in 2006 & it still works great, having been worn a fair amount & banged around, it keeps good time. Any cost to service it above the purchase price would seem out of line, especially given that I have the tools to replace & can buy a new 7S26 movement on Esslinger for ~$26 & just replace the movement when & if it dies during the time that I own it. The $243 Orange monster contains a 4R36 movement that costs $58 from Esslinger, so why on earth would I pay more than that to clean & lube the existing movement ?
Now, If I had an $14,000 Rolex & wanted to keep it running as a daily for many years, a $100-$300 service every few years sounds like a reasonable value. There it is, the purchase price & value reason. Consider the $999 iPhone. If someone drops & breaks the front & back glass, if the replacement cost down the road $799 & the repair cost $499, who in the right mind would spent half the purchase price repairing a device that has a design life of 36 months, when the phone already 14 months old when it breaks? My 2020 iPhone SE with 256GB was $549 new & if I break the screen a new one as a part from IFIXIT.com only costs about $46 & I am a professional device repair tech, so that would be a no brainer to fix the screen vs buying a new iPhone. If the back broke too & I had to get a new frame & spend 2 hours to Frankenstein the repair & the parts cost $300, then I would get the latest budget value oriented iPhone SE revision or entry model & replace the too expensive to repair damage.
Consider the following analysis by EnderW on watchuseek.com Nov 16, 2016 <- link to source //Japanese vs German vs Swiss - it depends on a watch or a brand more than country of origin
Generally speaking - yes, Japanese watches are more "disposable" and harder to service. But not because they are Japanese.
Consider - on average, Japanese watches focus on more affordable market segment. If I own a $100 Seiko 5 or a $400 SARB and service costs can approach or exceed a cost of a new watch replacement - why would I bother servicing it? I'll just let it run until it dies a peaceful death.
Similarly with Swiss - if it is a Hamilton Khaki or Tissot Visodate - chances are I'm not servicing them if price of service exceed 50% of watch replacement (which it often does unless you are lucky enough to know a great watchmaker who'll do it on the cheap).
If I have a $10K Swiss watch - hell yeah it makes sense to spend $500 to keep it running.
This is not Japanese vs Swiss, but simple economics. Cost is a factor in serviceability.
Another consideration, for Japanese watches of higher quality and price-point... It is way harder to find a watchmaker capable of fixing it than one skilled w Swiss watches. Swiss have produced many ubiquitous movements (ETA) that can be serviced by most watchmakers, and many watchmakers are certified\trained by brands to work on their watches.
With Japanese - not always so. And if you have a Spring-Drive (arguably THE high-end Japanese movement) - it has to go to Seiko for servicing. Which is simply a PITA. Convenience is a factor in serviceability.
Finally, it is a policy of Seiko to have parts available for up to 10 years after watch goes out of production (although I have heard people quote 20 as well). Which does mean that a nice Seiko may not be serviceable (if parts need replacement and watchmaker can't make them himself) after 10-20 years (after watch is discontinued).
Rolex provides parts for up to 20 years after watch goes out of production (although I have heard people quote 30 as well). Somewhat better.
But many high-end Swiss brands will service\repair any watch, no matter how old. Of course this assumes they are still in business (many great brands like Universal Geneve are long gone) and that customer is willing to pay for it (Patek will service a 100 year old watch, but it may cost as much as a car). So yeah, generally speaking - Swiss offer longer parts availability for servicing, but at significant cost and with usual brand life expectancy disclaimer.
It all boils down to what you paid for the watch & how much the service costs & if parts or service even available down the road in 5, 10, 20, 30, 50 years. Mass produced Seiko movements are made in such high volumes that obtaining one to replace the OEM movement relatively affordable via Esslinger.com, watch parts & tools e-commerce retailer that can supply you with a new 7S26 or 4R36 for your Seiko automatics in the future.
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