Keeping time

I remember my first watch. It had Mickey Mouse in red shorts on the dial, his gloved mousey hands pointing out the hour and minutes. Getting that watch was a much-awaited event. I had to prove to my mom that I could really tell time on an analog timepiece, and not just guess depending on what was showing on TV. Sadly, I lost that beloved Mickey Mouse watch just a few weeks after because I put it in my sweater pocket while I was playing in Burnham Park—and my sweater had a hole. Cue nostalgic, melancholy music.

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These days, however, getting your first wristwatch doesn’t seem like such a big deal anymore, much less a rite of passage. Heck, people seem to barely consult watches to tell the time anymore. I mean honestly, when someone asks you for the time, what do you usually do? Pull out your mobile phone, right? But non-traditional time-telling hasn’t hindered the Swiss watch industry though. In 2013, they declared a turnover of US$23.3 billion in exports; and 27 percent of the total number of watches exported were mechanical. Now, that’s a lot of wristwatches.

With the recent launch of smartwatches, however, the Apple Watch in particular, there’s rumbling to be heard in and around the Watch Valley, that fabled arc of the Swiss Jura running from Geneva to Basel, bastion of the Swiss Luxury Watch Industry (and yes, we must capitalize it, and kowtow when we say it out loud).

There are three general camps in the smartwatch issue. There are those like Nick Hayek, CEO of the Swatch Group (owner of watch houses that cover both ends of the market, such as prestige brands like Breguet and Omega, high to mid-range ones like Longines and Certina, and the iconic mass market watch, Swatch), who won’t be bothered by some fresh upstart in the contest for that small area of wrist real estate. At least not yet. This group believes that the smartwatch isn’t actually a watch, but rather a wearable piece of tech that hey, also happens to tell time. In a survey done, most people use smartwatches to track fitness and activity; telling time is only its third most used function, coming in after making calls (which I imagine would look strange, you alternately holding your wrist to your ear and furtively talking to it, much like it’s still strange to see Bluetooth-equipped people walking around, seemingly having animated conversations with themselves). While there are a few known brands working on the smartwatch—Tag Heuer has already made an announcement—at this point, they aren’t getting themselves worked up over anything. Of course, there’s also the fact that as with anything prefixed with “smart,” the software and tech inside the smartwatch will constantly change, prompting wearers to dispose of the old to upgrade to the new model in as short as a year—something you wouldn’t do with a luxury wristwatch costing upwards of five digits.

Then there are those of the opposite persuasion, like Elmar Mock, co-inventor of the legendary Swatch watch that saved the entire Swiss watch industry back in the 1980s. He, on the other hand, is appalled by the insouciance of the industry to possibly threatening new technology. While the smartwatch won’t necessarily kill the mechanical watch, it can easily overtake it in terms of value of turnover. Mock fears that the Swiss Watch industry will once again be blindsided, the way it was during the Quartz Crisis in the 70s, when the Japanese managed to make the quartz watch an ubiquitous object that nearly wiped out the Swiss watch industry. He sees a future for a programmable watch, one that has “incredible potential for constant regeneration.” Xavier Comtesse, one of Mock’s co-founder of the first Swiss watchmaking think tank, Watch Thinking, says that the next step should be training watchmaker-programmers, those who are capable of merging the traditional watchmaking craftsmanship with killer app making. While they believe that smartwatches aren’t quite all there yet, they think that the Swiss watch industry should already be taking steps to keep relevant.

Finally, there are those who believe that the advent of smartwatches will actually drive up the interest in traditional wristwatches. As previously noted, people don’t really wear watches these days, and the smartwatch may make this new generation realize that wearing something functional on your wrist is cool, and wearing something that has been around for centuries is even cooler. Some, like Harvard Business School professor Ryan Raffaelli, believe that the values offered by smartwatches and luxury Swiss watches are entirely different, so you can’t exactly conclude that the rise of the first will lead to the demise of the other. And while low to mid-range watches may feel the pinch, if they stick to their value proposition—that of a fashionable accessory, or an emotional purchase, rather than a functional gadget—they should be fine.

At the moment, there’s no compelling reason for me to have a smartwatch. For one thing, the battery life isn’t great. I don’t want another gadget to charge daily; and I have enough cables growing in the jungle that is my desk. And while, theoretically, it’s great to have all the important information on a single interface—my heartbeat, calories consumed, all my text messages, friends’ status updates, and yes, the time—I can’t imagine how all that is going to be pleasingly legible on such a small screen. I’m pretty sure that at this point, there are still a lot of glitches in the apps, so in the off chance I’d get myself a smartwatch (I’m still holding out for a mechanical dual time zone watch), I’d wait a bit more for the technology to mature.

And to be honest, I haven’t really thought about smartwatches vs wristwatches. But the way I see it, your wrist doesn’t have to be monogamous. You can have more than one watch, you know. And while it is rather tacky to wear multiple watches at one time, there’s no law against changing watches every day—or even several times a day.

But what do I really know? I’m just that girl pining after a lost Mickey Mouse watch.