How many complications does your watch have?

I still wear a wristwatch. I have two of them. One has been my everyday watch for the last nearly 21 years, a Breitling Aerospace titanium analog/digital. It was a wedding gift from my wife. I got her a nice Seiko watch as a wedding gift, but it lasted about five years and then it was misplaced.

My backup watch is a Citizen solar and atomic watch. Never needs a battery, and it auto corrects every day. I wear that when I’m going to get messy or dirty or could otherwise damage the Breitling.

Breitling Aerospace —

Citizen solar and atomic —

Is Rolex using silicon balance springs yet?

My favorite daily watch is this guy, which has none. Three hands and numbers. I like nice watches, and I’ve become a bit of a nerd about them, but I put a lot of value in readability.

Nice watch. My Tissot is sometimes hard to read in the wrong light.

I don’t know. I bought the GMT Master II new in 2001. Haven’t looked into any others since then.

Nice!

My watch has time, day, date, alarm, count up and count down counters. I’ve never once used the last three, but they make setting a major PITA (or pain in the fingers since it requires pushing some tiny but stiff buttons). The watch gains almost precisely 4 seconds a week. When I set it to standard time on Nov. 7, I made it 30 seconds slow and now it has just caught up. On the other hand, it does know about leap years. I wonder whether it knows that 2100 is not a leap year. Well, I won’t be around to find out.

Thanks. I love the Breitling. That Citizen is a little pricey for a burner watch. I’ve had it 2-3 years after I got tired of dead batteries whenever I needed my backup watch, but I’m growing to really like it. If I had to choose only one watch to fight through the zombie apocalypse with, sorry Breitling but the Citizen wins out because it’s solar.

The timepiece in the OP is amazing. Not for me, and I don’t even (want to) know how much it costs, but I can appreciate the pursuit of accuracy.

That word, accuracy, reminds me of a quote I like:

“Fast is fine but accuracy is final.” — Wyatt Earp
(gotta love that one)

Readability is key, especially when riding an older motorcycle and one needs to quickly tell the time.

I like clean, readable watch faces, which my backup watch doesn’t really do all that well.

Speaking in general terms, probably the most common thing would be high-end jewelry.

Sorry for the double-post, but I’m partial to Casio digital watches. This is my current model. (Mind is in better shape than this one.)

I love the use of the word “complications”. That’s how I feel about them.
As a result, I’m not a fan of heavy, expensive bracelets. I’m so sick of certain guys trying to look… what? Nouveau Riche? Nouveau Cool? Macho? Too important for normal, functional accessories?

My elderly mom just gave me her car. A vintage Oldsmobile that’s full of “complications”.
Seriously, I’m poring over the owner’s manual trying to figure out “C-Mode Control” of the radio… turns out it’s a default “category” setting that only plays “Country” or “Sports” radio stations. Complication.

Oh, and every time you open the car doors, the mirrors all reset to some “ideal” setting, so you have to adjust the left, right, and rear-view before you pull out.

Damn complications! Give me a simple '90s Miata and a basic three-hands watch.

Let’s see…

  • plain everyday dress, date window only
  • plain everyday dress, day+date
  • Diver (automatic), day+date
  • Chronograph – subdials for 24h, elapsed minutes, running seconds; + date window

So the last one is the one with the most going on, and I don’t see myself going for anything more involved than that – though I can see myself going for some more refined level build in each category if I had the cash to splurge (e.g. Cartier Tank, Omega Speedmaster).

My new Horologio dual time watch has either two or three complications, depending on how you count them: a date and two time zones. To say “dual time zones” is maybe stretching it a bit, as one time zone is the same time to which the main watch time is set. (This is the little orange hand in the right hand subdial. However, the other subdial (the little black hand on the left) can be set to a completely different time zone. I got this in the hopes that it would be useful when we resume travelling overseas and I want to quickly check what time it is at home. Of course I can get the current time in any time zone in the world on my phone, but this can be inconvenient.

The watch came with no instructions as to how to set the second time zone, with none available from the manufacturers’ web site. (It’s not an expensive watch – I didn’t pay anywhere near the price shown in the image linked above.) The auction site from which I bought it had completely misleading instructions about how to do this. I eventually worked it out when I discovered that the watch had a common Seiko movement; I then did a search on that. It is actually a very nicely made watch for the price, well finished and heavy.

I wear a Seiko that’s very similar to that one except without the ElectroLuminescence (just regular dim backlight).

It’s compact and doesn’t get caught on things, and it’s cheap too.

Just a plain old Timex here. Three hands, and a small window for the date. A very small window; I cannot see it without my strongest glasses. As a result, I never use the date function. But the numbers on the dial are nice and big, and the hands are obvious. The watch also has a backlight function. So, not very complicated.

That Citizen watch looks like you could pilot an expedition across the Pacific with it. :slightly_smiling_face:

Basic watch, which I wear to the gym and for traveling: Tag Heuer Alter Ego with time and date, bought about 20 years ago. As it has a battery, I can skip wearing it and not worry about putting in a winder.

Daily wear is a Longinnes Master, bought this year, which has time, date and moon phase.

Hijack: My guess is that you need to adjust your mirrors and then save that as the new default.

Back on topic: I hadn’t worn a watch in years until my first Apple Watch, and now wear the Ultra every day. Not really the kind of watch this thread is about, but it sure does have a lot of complications. and it’s a phone! Let’s see that monster in the OP do that!

I do have a couple traditional watches, my favorites being the watches created by M&Co, the great Tibor Kalman’s design agency. They were originally meant to be given away and were very hard to find. They’ve since been reproduced and seem to regularly show up in the gift shops of museums showing modern art.

My favorite, the Askew. No complications other than the inbuilt difficulty in reading it…

https://bookofjoe.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c5dea53ef014e8bd01037970d-pi

That’s awesome. I want one.

Obviously it’s a conventional analog movement just with jokey numbers at the 12 points of the hours. So the watch is presently set to just shy of 10:10, despite the hour hand being partway between the points labeled “3” & “8”.

Then I began to think of how you could make such a watch really work in accordance with its number markings. Easy enough as a computer graphic, not so easy as a collection of gears. We’re already used to the idea that the minute hand’s meaning ignores the numbers 1 through 12 arranged conventionally on a conventional clock. So we’re only trying to decide how to display the hours.

I decided we’d ignore the twelfth-of-a-circle segments AKA “intervals” where the number change moving clockwise is negative. So the hour hand will never appear in the 9-6, 6-1, 10-5, 11-7, or 7-2 intervals. Meanwhile an hour hand will appear in each relevant interval at the appropriate analog angle.

So at the times between noon/midnight and 4 o’clock an hour hand will be in the first 1/12th of the face with 2 o’clock sharp being halfway between the “12” & the “4”. And between 2 o’clock & 3 o’clock another hour hand will appear between the “2” & “3”, with 2:30 being the midpoint of that hour hand’s movement.

Once it gets to be 4 o’clock things change again. The first hour hand slows down, now taking 5 hours to get from the “4” to the “9” whereas it took only 4 hours moving through the same angle to get from the “12” to the “4”. During the 4 o’clock to 9 o’clock interval another hour hand will appear 20% of the interval past the “3” and move towards the “8”. To be joined by a third hour hand at 5 o’clock that appears at the “5” and move towards the “11”, taking 6 hours to get there. etc.


You actually only need the upper third of the watch to display the hour: 0-9 in the first two twelfths of the circle and 3-12 in the last two twelfths. With the hours from 3 to 9 displayed with a hand on both sides. But it’s more fun to also include the additional redundant hour hands in the 1-10, 5-11, and 2-3 ranges when appropriate. Most of the time it’s 3 or 4 hour hands. Between 11 o’clock and 1 o’clock there’s just one hour hand. Booorrriiiing!! :slight_smile:

Of course this wacky idea could be generalized to have minute hands behave similarly under the usual convention that the hour number is counting minutes by 5s. As in the “3” on a conventional clock face means 3 hours or 3 * 5 = 15 minutes. So between the hour and 4 *5 = 20 minutes after the hour there’s a minute hand in the first interval.

As a matter of cognitive psychology & human factors mind-f***ery I’m not sure whether having the minute hand be consistent with normal convention or having it be consistent with the wacky hour hand(s) would be more confusing. Thoughts?

Seconds could be done the same as minutes of course. So for a clock with second hands you’d have as few as 3 hands of various sorts displayed or as many as 12 at any given moment. With second hands blinking in and out of existence every few seconds at different points around the circle and moving at different angular speeds.

Probably not worth sharpening my rusty coding skills to develop it, but it would make a fun screensaver or widget or something.