A Smarter Watch
I had been considering getting a smart watch.
There’s nothing wrong with the watch I have, but it’s not smart. It tells the time and lights up briefly if I press a button on the side. “Of course a smart watch would be better,” I must have thought at some point, “It will monitor my health, track my location, control my music, show me notifications, and of course it will tell time.” A little computer on my wrist is just so much more flexible isn’t it?
It’s worth considering whether that’s the right question.
All timekeeping is based on the same fundamental principle. There is something that oscillates at an assumed frequency. Someone sets the time, and the clock counts how many oscillations happen after that. With those two pieces of information it is able to report a time.
A fully mechanical device uses a pendulum or a weighted spring like a grandfather clock or automatic watches. The oscillating mechanism is connected to a gear array that drives the hands on the clock. Over relatively short times they have a tendency to slow down significantly and can be off by as much as a few seconds per day.
Electronic devices can counter this by using a tiny quartz tuning fork that vibrates at stable frequency when electricity is applied to it. The fork’s vibrations generate an electrical signal with voltage spikes oscillating at the same frequency. Small, highly specialized computer chips can process this signal, stepping its frequency down to once per second, which feeds into a stepper motor that turns the hands on the watch face.
The signal processing chips in those watches do exactly one job and are so simple that mass production factories can churn them out for pennies a piece. A battery can last for years and the mechanism is unlikely to lose enough time for a human to notice before the power runs out. They are a perfect example of electronics doing a much better job than a fully mechanical device ever could.
A computer is really just anything that does computation. It used to refer to humans who would manually do complex calculations. In the early 20th century, those were superseded by mechanical devices which used a complex array of gears and other physical mechanisms to accept input, do calculations, store data, and provide output. Those are mechanical computers, or electromechanical computers if they utilize motors that require electricity.
Some calculate continuous data, like a mechanical clock calculating the time on a clock face. These are called analog computers. Some operate on just ones and zeroes. They’re called digital computers. Digital computers are powerful because they can easily be built up into more complex devices that we call general purpose computers. With the right software, they can do nearly any calculation. They’re becoming so ubiquitous that “computer” is colloquially synonymous with “general purpose computer.”
A boring reality of the tech industry is that the way to turn something into a “smart” device is just to integrate that type of computer into it. Smartphones, smart watches, smart appliances, ATMs, automatic McDonald’s cashiers, self checkout stations, and even Tesla cars are all built up around the same general architecture: banks of memory, a central processing unit, and some sort of input and output.
A key component to every single one of those computers is the clock chip, which tells all the other components how much time has passed and is essential to proper coordination in the system. It’s fundamentally the same as the chip in a quartz watch. In terms of calculating the time, a smart watch and a dumb watch are doing the same thing.
The smart watch is capable of doing so much more, though. It can sync with notifications on your phone, answer phone calls and text messages, track your heart rate, oxygen levels, and sleep quality, and even have cellular connectivity for a truly independent device. Those features are fine, except that there is a huge cost. The power consumption of a CPU and OLED display is massive compared to just a clock chip, so the battery lasts two days at most. It would be one more thing to remember to do before bed every night. A smart watch is also much more complex so troubleshooting and repair are both harder and more expensive.
The appropriate question to be asking isn’t which device can do more, but which device does the tasks I want with the least cost, including long term maintenance and mental load. My phone already stays with me nearly all the time, and gives me all the communication and notification features I need. Despite what tech bros will tell you, having access to more health data doesn’t make you healthier. Having immediate access to more notifications and all the ways I’m supposedly not being healthy might actually make my day to day life worse.
I want something that can tell the time at a glance. A regular watch is better at that.
