5d ago

In the not too distant past this was a thing

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If we're doing watches today, here's what I'm rocking lately.
I stopped using my Garmin smartwatch because they finally fell into the enshittification trap and recently tried adding AI slop and a subscription scheme into their watch app. That's a big old nope from me, dawg.
- I’m rocking a $5 Ali watch with a nice rainbow watch band.
  
  Nice. It is astounding what you can get for just a couple of bucks, and even more astounding that they genuinely work.
  
  I would have bought something from a real brand but a red watch that matched the band at all was either this or like $10k, no in between it seemed.
  
  Wow I love this!
- I'm not really a watch person, but that one looks totally great!
  
  It's also approachably yet suspiciously cheap. I think I paid $20 for this close to 15 years ago, and Sinobi is apparently still at it making mechanical watches in the $30 range.
  This one does two things: Tells you the time, and does so while not needing batteries.
  
  All of those seem to be quartz and not mechanical.
  
  I just took a more detailed look. They do still make quite a few mechanicals but they have indeed shot up in price. $80-90 nowadays, it seems.
  My old one is definitely mechanical. I wind it up every morning.
  
  That sounds like the right price range. Maybe yours was just massively discounted for whatever reason.
  
  I bought it on Dealextreme back in the day, which was kind of the precursor to our current Aliexpress/Wish/Temu/Shein arrangement. It's therefore possible that it is a knockoff (or a knockoff of a knockoff?) but the fact remains that it was absurdly cheap, is fully mechanical, and against all expectation and reason it continues to function and also keep pretty good time. It's actually just a hair fast, and requires me to knock a minute off of it about once per week.
  If you're not squeamish you can get a thoroughly generic -- or perhaps heavily "inspired" by some particular name brand -- wind-up timepiece from any of the usual suspects for pocket change. $10-20, and other poster in here mentioned they bought theirs for $5.
  
  Cool, I don't need another watch, but I'm interested to see what kind of mechanical movement one can get for $5.

85 comments