I'm a huge fan of Casio's gshock solar powered and atomic time setting watches, I own 4

I really love solar powered watches. I have 3 (Citizen eco-drives) and the g-shocks. The fact that the battery never needs replacing.

I solar have a g-shock too, but that atomic time setting (by radio) never worked for me. The g-shock is so thick though, I actually find it a little off putting sometimes.

I wear a ladies watch (I am a man) for this very reason, thickness, as well as heaviness. I didn't realize how much it affects your movement and coordination having a substantial weight on your wrist, until I got rid of it.

I backed the first and every subsequent Pebble KickStarter.

When they sold out to Garmin* and refunded my last order/pledge, I spent _some_ of that refund on a 1957 Russian Kirovskie Sputnik Commemorative mechanical watch.

I know none of my Pebbles or any Apple Watch is going to still be keeping good time 70 years from now... (it gains just under a minute a day - resetting it off my phone's clock when I wind it in the morning has become part of my waking up ritual...)

Edit: * It was FitBit not Garmin, as pointed out in replies by dugfin and spike021 elsewhere in this thread. Thanks.

How is the Apple Watch that inaccurate? Does it not have a quartz crystal in it? Even mediocre mechanical watches do better than a minute per day.

One of my favorite things about the Apple Watch is that it keeps uncannily good time. Put two next to each other and you'll see what I mean.

I always found it disappointing that even the best mechanical watches drift by around a second a day. I guess growing up with software has given me unrealistic mechanical expectations :)

No no - my 70 year old Russian mechanical watch is "that inaccurate"... (My Pebble's, and presumably the Apple Watch, sync themselves from what I assume is one of or some combination of ntp time, GSM/LTE time, or GPS time - from the phone they're paired with...)

I think an obsolete apple watch will still be able to at least mirror the functionality of any 'dumb' watch.

Not when the battery finally dies.

Not true at all. The battery isn't replaceable, other parts are more likely to break, and it's not clear to me that the Apple Watch even has a high quality quartz crystal inside it for accurate time-keeping. It might simply be grabbing the time off the linked cell phone, which grabs the time off the cell network. Do Apple Watches work well independently of linked phones for months on end? Years? Because that'll be necessary if you want to keep using one decades down the line long after they're no longer supported by whatever phone replacements have come down the line next.

Be properly waterproof, never need a charge, and take abuse for 30 years like a $150 automatic?

I've got a 70 year old mechanical watch on my wrist right now. I bought it second hand from eBay, but paid significantly under $150 for it...

Quartz watches tend to have better longevity than mechanical watches, owing to having fewer moving parts (zero in the case of a digital watch).

I don't know how much servicing that watch has had over the past 70 years, but it's probably significant.

At this point they don't look anywhere near as good though.