alt Hacker News>That's not why brand age watches look strange. Brand age watches look strange because they have no practical function. Their function is to express brand, and while that is certainly a constraint, it's not the clean kind of constraint that generates good things. The constraints imposed by brand ultimately depend on some of the worst features of human psychology. So when you have a world defined only by brand, it's going to be a weird, bad world.
This is a wild thing to say. Brand age watches don't look strange. They look beautiful. Incredible thought and care and intention is put into their design. The people who buy them love them. It's so funny to me to get this far into one of PGs blogs and sort of realise "Oh right, you don't actually understand beauty". It's very hard to read this as much more than a slightly autistic man not understanding that it's ok for people to like beautiful things. It is not worth it to me to spend £100k on a watch, but I don't deny it is to other people, I'm not going to pretend the watch is undesirable.
But it does make me wonder whether Paul things that YC is successful today because it has a better design than other startup programmes, or is it successful today because of it's brand?
Replies
Heh.
Just today I went to a watch repair person because the keeper on my strap broke. He said the only option is to buy the exact strap from the manufacturer.
The strap costs $120.
My watch costs $340 (although I got it on a discount for $220).
This is the most expensive watch I've ever bought. I typically would pay $50 or less (with the exception of one G-Shock that cost $80). I finally decide to buy something "pricey" and the darn thing breaks in less than 2 years - something that never happens with the cheap watches I've bought.
No thanks. I'm not paying $120 for a new strap. I'm getting a cheap watch that will last me over a decade (as most of my watches do).
I had the same experience with fountain pens. Every fountain pen I've paid more than $50 for has been worse than my favorite cheap ones.
If I were to plot quality on the y-axis, and price on the x-axis, I think I'll find a U or V curve, where on the very cheap end things are reliable and last long, and likewise on the very expensive end. But in the middle, you're just paying extra for crap.
Arguably, you could say I'm not paying enough. A $330 watch isn't expensive. I should have paid $3000. A $90 pen isn't expensive. I should have paid $250.
No thanks. When the <$50 products perform as well as the expensive ones, I'm not paying more.
They may be beautiful, but the fact remains if you could produce and sell Patek Philippe Nautilus for $200 no one would be interested in it. The same is not true for most other beautiful objects
Really?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Watches/comments/187srga/what_watch...
Clunky AF. The guy wearing this watch edited the OP's article, amongst other things. To any reasonable person the vast majority of these watches look like absolute dogshit. You know what looks good? The watches that these brands make for women!
PG described exactly the intention that goes into the design of these watches, in this very article. It's not what you say it is!
I agree. Following his x account and posts, intellectuality in PG’s content has gone massively downhill (starting from slightly earlier than his recent rants about ‘wokeness’).
Once one of my favourite writers is really hard to read now.
It feels to me like he is so overconfident now that he thinks he gets it in any topic, even on the ones he has very little understanding of.
To everyone else who reads this and thinks to themselves "Man, this guy has a refined palate that PG doesn't have. PG can't appreciate beauty", go take a look at the Nautilus yourself https://glennbradford.com/products/patek-philippe-nautilus-0...
It looks like an Aliexpress Timex.
> The people who buy them love them.
Yeah, when you spend half a million dollars on a watch, the sunk-cost fallacy has gotta hit hard.
I agree with several things in TFA but you're right that some people just love these because they look beautiful.
TFA says this:
> If mechanical watches had only been accurate to a minute a day they couldn't have made the leap from keeping time to displaying wealth.
I don't think it's necessarily about displaying wealth: we could discuss humans (not just women but also men) wearing some kind of jewelry since thousands of years, including poor people who don't do it to display wealth but just because they enjoy the look of it. There was an article about monkeys enjoying the looks of crystals the other day I think.
One example would be people who don't dress nicely and who drive a cheap car and overal look like they just don't care about what others do think, and yet wear a dive watch. There are countless dive watches, be it a cheap no-name one, a perfect chinese replica of a Rolex Submariner (some replicas have most parts that can be exchanged with real Rolexes, which created the entire "frankenwatch" thing: where some parts are from the true brand and others have been swapped by chinese parts) or a real Rolex Submariner or Sea-Dweller costing $10 K to $20 K (for the base models).
Also in an age of alienating technology, something has to be said about a 100% mechanical device that's not connected to anything and doesn't require a battery to work, however imprecisely: it's not just about the beauty of the object when you look at it. It's also the beauty in having something that's not spying on you.
Just like there are people who, for a variety of reason, only ever take out their old Ferrari for a spin at night (when there's no trafic).
I take it you could very probably say: "Most people own fancy mechanical watches and high-end sport cars to flaunt wealth". But you can't generalize to 100% of watch owners and Ferrari owners.
I disagree. It's worth asking why some people find brand watches beautiful? Where did they get their sense of aesthetic? Were they born with a congenital preference for RM 16-01 Citron?
Culture shapes our taste. Companies go on multi-decade billion-dollar campaigns to shape our culture. We like certain things because famous actors or athletes endorse them; because hip hop artists rap about them; because influencers talk about them; because Hollywood portrays them a certain way. This extends to all modern aesthetic preferences from architecture to watches to cars to furniture to dating.
I think the argument pg is making is that brand-obsessed cultures are not maximally truth/beauty-seeking and gets really weird. e.g. Japanese Ohaguro, Chinese foot binding, various cranial deformation practices from the Mayans to the Huns, high-heels, ugly (to outside observers) watches.
It's a really thought-provoking essay. But it's too heterodox and "autistic" to share with most of my friends. Socially speaking, it's best to outwardly embrace the current zeitgeist.