I dive with my sea master. It’s a nice backup to have but I’m going to us a dive computer as my primary “tool” 10 times out of 10

IMHO yes, any watch is obsolete in almost all professions. Where do you need to know the exact time on a regular basis? In any office job, the exact time is only relevant for meetings. For those you usually have an alert anyway (and the clock on your desktop).

In law enforcement/rescue precise time is important (for the report), but you have actual tools (badge cam, defibrillator) that keep and document time for you.

In many cases, it maybe beneficial to know the (rough) amount of time something took, but not the precise time (“it took me 10min to do xy” vs. “I completed this task at 14:26”).

So, all in all, I can see limited value in some edge cases, but in general watches have become obsolete.

It’s a beautiful watch. Glad you use it daily even when roasting coffee :) - I bet the coffee tasted good :)

Short answer: yes, they’re obsolete.

Longer answer: yes, they’re obsolete, but for some applications obsolete technology can still be useful.

I use an automatic gmt daily. I used to either google “time in san francisco” or have to open an app, but the old school watch is so much easier, I have the time at a glance

Question OP: What can your Longines do beside telling the Time and looking good? Can you check the Weather? Or Navigate with it? Or make calls? Can you listen to Music with it? I could make a List what my Ultra can do which would be so long i would most likely run out of Characters before i’m finishing it. Yes, Mechanical Watches are great but what you’re doing is comparing the first Landline Phone to a iPhone 15 Pro Max and claiming the first Landline Phone is superior to the iPhone because you didn’t need to charge the Landline Phone…

As someone how change his Apple Watch for a machanical watch and loves his mechanical watch: Yes watches in general and mechanical watches in particular are obsolet beside the aspect of jewellery. They are as obsolet as typewriters or tube television or film photography.

A smartphone or a smartwatch or really any other digital gear does it better. Yes you can use your fantasy and imagine some horror scenarios like nuclear blast or week long power failure but thats not reality: in reality these devices work properly and for the most part you have them in your pocket and use them everyday - so you take all real risks (like hacking or fishing or…) already.

So if you look from a logical point of view there is no place for watches - and don´t argument with the speed or convenienvce: How often do you NEED to know the exact time a day? These 2 or 3 minutes a day make your work not less stressful. And convenience is just an other word for habit.

The emotional point is different…if you want a mechanical watch then by all means buy and use one. But don´t try to justify it with pseudological arguments like it could be a heirloom, the reason “I want to have it” should be enough. You heirs will be much happier if you had the smartwatch and -phone of your dreams than inheriting a 50 something years old watch that they can´t use because the last watchmaker who could service it retiered years ago.

Sure you can reach into whatever pile of lint and pull out a phone to check the time but by then I will have already set the timer on mine. It’s faster to the draw 🤷🏽‍♂️

What’s the hurry though? The argument for wristwatches being that it’s faster, I never really understood that. You save like a second per day. Wow. Amazing.

Tool vs jewelry depends on the cost ratio between the cost of the tool and the jewelry value.

A $40 casio will show time more accurately and is more legible than pretty much any automatic Swiss watch. So if you buy say a $400 watch, at most 10% of the cost is the “tool” element and the rest of the 90% you pay for the jewelry / looks element, hence it is more of a apparel item than a tool. For a 4k watch, 99% of the value is jewelry and so on.

Same goes for anything really. You need a T-shirt so it is a tool, but a branded nice Ralph Lauren shirt costs 50x what a cotton china made shirt is going for, hence it is more for looks rather than a warmth tool.

Are the beans ready when the butt plug hand hits 2 o’clock?

I’m a university professor. I’d argue that a non-distracting device that tells you the time is an essential tool of my profession and we all wear watches when we’re teaching. A smartwatch with notifications silenced is one option, but an analogue watch of some sort is considerably less fiddly.

No one really uses watches as a “tool” anymore

I meant this in the nicest way. The dude that calls a lux watch a “tool” is obsolete.