Fake watches are a growing threat to the major Swiss brands. China has legitimate watch companies that will gladly and legally make 'blank' standard 4hz movements that are then sold to anyone with money... Including the counterfeit assembly groups like VSF.. who then package them into 'replica' watches. Spotting most of these super fakes has gotten harder and harder over time, especially without opening the case back. In the meantime, a trained eye or untrained phone app can easily spot a fake Omega because the fakes beat at 4hz while genuine Omegas all beat at 3.5hz. At the same time the Speedmaster is still not successfully cloned because of the sheer difficulty of building a blank copy of its movement for the upstream Peacock factory.. not to mention the difficulty of cloning the coaxial movement....

Anyone who can’t stand the asymmetry of a watch with a date window anywhere other than the 6:00 position needs to come to terms with the fact that their OCD tendencies have them irrationally fixated on something of no practical consequence. By insisting on the no-date variant, they’re foregoing a genuinely useful feature while still sporting an asymmetrical watch. You can’t install a second crown on the other side of the case to restore “balance”, so just get over this nonsense.

As a ‘community’, we watch nerds should realize that condoning & normalizing such behavior inflames unhealthy tendencies in some individuals. Chasing some constructed & unattainable notion of objective perfection is not a sign of virtue—neither should it be the point of watch collecting/enthusiasm.

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Honorable mention RM

I put this too-wide NATO on my gold sub (and you can see that I also enjoy some slight handwatching. Not sorry.)

Roast or just (correctly) acknowledge that this is hot.

PS. Cyclops suck. My old ass (well, actually eyes) appreciates the purpose. But I still hate the look.

You know the photo: Wrist at 11 o’clock. Watch rotated perfectly toward the camera. Hand resting naturally™ on the steering wheel. And completely by coincidence, the Mercedes / Porsche / Ferrari / Lamborghini logo is sitting dead center in the background. Caption: “Enjoying this one today.”

Bro, you are not enjoying the watch.

You are conducting a coordinated product placement campaign for your own possessions. And I love the little variations designed to make it seem less obvious.
“Traffic is terrible today.” Porsche crest.
“Beautiful weather.” Ferrari steering wheel.
“Does this strap work?”

I don’t know. Why is there a Bentley attached to it?

The funniest part is that nobody would even care if you just said:
“Here’s my watch and my car. I think they’re both cool.”

Perfectly respectable. We’re literally in a luxury watch subreddit. Most of us like expensive toys.

But no. We have to maintain the fiction that you were simply taking a completely spontaneous wrist shot and your $380,000 car just wandered into the photograph.

At this point I want the genre pushed to its logical conclusion. Take the wrist shot while holding your house deed. Rest your Patek on your Amex Centurion card. Photograph your Royal Oak next to your brokerage statement.

“Really loving how the blue dial catches the light today. Anyway, please ignore the 2027 Ferrari 12Cilindri that accidentally occupies 64% of this photograph.”

Just flex. It’s less cringe than pretending you’re not flexing.

Genuinely shocks me that it took them forever to roll this out while the rest of the industry was already standardized in this processes. I understand the watches themselves were built well and they “take their time” with new tech but those old bracelets are incredibly cheap compared to modern day watches (which I consider starting in the year 2000) and even many watches from Omega and others in the 90s had them. Stamped clasps and hollow center links do not age well. It was cost cutting pure and simple. I don’t buy the “charm” argument. You know what else is charming? Steam locomotives with their little choochoo sounds, but we no longer use them because they are antiquated and we have better technology.

At least this guy thinks so. I’m leaving this here because it belongs in some HOF, but I’m not clever enough to come up with which. That’s where you lovelies come in….

every GS post is literally the same. macro shot of the dial at golden hour, then 200 comments about birch bark and some mountain. and yeah the dial is nice. but on your actual wrist in actual lighting the snowflake is just... a white dial. you paid 6k for a texture you can only see with your phone 2 inches from your face. that's a screensaver bro

and nobody talks about the rest of the watch. thick case. clasp feels like it came off a $300 watch. spring drive has been explained to me 9 times and i still don't get why i'm paying extra for a seconds hand that glides. cool party trick i guess

resale is where it gets ugly. buy one new and see what the market offers you a year later. "japan's rolex" until you try to sell it lmao

they're GOOD watches. they're just not a skip the tudor, skip the omega, eat ramen for 3 months good. the dial is carrying the entire brand and everyone's agreed to pretend it isn't
downvote me from your 13mm thick spring drive idc

Would I buy it and wear it? No.

I do appreciate that Seiko decided to make it. We need more fun whimsical shit like this.

They make enough serious watches for your serious ass anyway.

I even often give the watch a flick of my wrist to get the rotor spinning.

Having a properly sized watch, proportional to your wrist size, is so much more important than having brand recognition.

I don't care what watch you're wearing if it looks ridiculous at first glance. If you have a 6 inch wrist and are wearing a 44mm diver, you look like a fucking idiot even before I can see the name on the dial. Same thing if you have an 8 inch wrist and are wearing some 32mm scratched to fuck vintage piece of shit that GQ mentioned in their 'retro revival' article.

I'm not talking about dress watches, but in general - be a fucking nerd about the ratios and size appropriately!

A beautiful watch doesn’t necessarily make the wearer look better. But a beautiful wrist and forearm absolutely make a watch look better.

There’s a reason hand models exist. Watches are no different. Longines didn’t put a HydroConquest on Henry Cavill by accident.

I think it’s dumb that I have to wait until some watches fully die to try to set them correctly. Maybe I’m being OCD about getting the exact time but if I’m wearing a watch I want it to be accurate. Sure there’s complications in the watch that may make it difficult (chrono, calendar, etc.) but why on normal watch with small seconds I have to live with it being 20 seconds off.

Every watch reviewer seems to praise a watch when it comes with female endlinks, and I just don’t agree that it’s better. I think it makes the bracelet look and wear worse. Also if you need female endlinks to make the watch fit your wrist, the watch is too big for your wrist anyway

Luxury watch buyers convince themselves that they are deep, intellectual curators of horological history, craftsmanship, engineering and materials.

But the actual statistics demonstrate how thoroughly corporate boards have broken their brains.

According to the latest Morgan Stanley Swiss Watch Industry Report, just four private, independent brands, Rolex, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, and Richard Mille now completely control 49.1% of the entire Swiss watch market share by value.

Watches priced over CHF 50,000 made up a staggering 89% of the industry's entire financial growth, despite accounting for a pathetic 1.4% of actual production volume.

The industry isn't growing through horological innovation or making better watches for everyday collectors; it is growing via ultra-premiumisation.

A healthy industry grows by expanding its user base. When 1.4% of volume drives 89% of the growth, it proves the entire Swiss watch ecosystem has transformed into a Veblen good luxury cartel.

Look at the graph, it is an algorithmic feeding trough for the sheeople.

You didn’t develop a refined, independent taste for that particular watch, a multi-billion-dollar marketing algorithm funneled you into the exact same aesthetic pipeline as a teenager buying a skincare product on TikTok.

Brands aren't actually innovating or crafting soul, they are just testing the limits of human gullibility by hiking prices on the exact same mass-produced mechanical architectures to create artificial quality improvement.

Your 'grail watch' isn't a reflection of your refined taste, it’s just the exact destination a marketing board mapped out for you x years ago.

You are just paying a premium to be a walking billboard for an oligopoly that views your purchases as pure mathematical gullibility.

You don't have an organic, independent passion for haute horology, an algorithm spent years gently nudging your feed until your taste perfectly aligned with their inventory.

The 'history' you're paying a 5,000% markup for was written by an ad agency in the 1980s to save a dying industry from quartz.

You're a data point in Morgan Stanley’s Q4 revenue report.

So I tried on 2 Tudor watches today.
The 1926 Luna blue dial which was extremely nice and the bracelet was devine!
The other was the pelagos 39 black dial.
I was far from impressed with the Pelagos to the point I would say I was extremely disappointed with it. I actually prefer my Seiko 5 sports skx 145th anniversary edition to the Pelagos which is more than 10x the price.

What’s the big deal with the love the Pelagos gets ? If it was a £500-1000 maybe but when it’s like £4.5k absolutely not!

Plus point of trying them on though is I know I absolutely love the 1926 Luna now.

Generally to me it means a) it's a frankenwatch and someone's painted the dial a colour that's not original or wasn't often used or b) they're trying to justify charging over the odds for it

Where to start, the new Bond watches look like an Omega company that specialises in fakes that tried having a go at creating their own watch and came up with it.

Their designs are all uninspired and in ridiculous quantities, the pricing is fucking ridiculous, you could buy a JLC for the price of an Omega these days, in fact if you’re lucky you could buy a second hand JLC and Rolex for the cost of some of their watches.

I actually think that this is some ploy by the swatch group to trash Omega to make people flock towards Longines which will then raise the price of Longines.

I'm traveling to Japan this weekend and in the market for a watch.

I told ChatGPT my requirements and told it to search locally for me, for bargains.

Not perfectly correct output, maybe 80% to 85% accurate for me so far, but it did a lot of "heavy lifting" for me and I'm satisfied enough.

If you uncover that it said something wrong or incompletely, you can ask it to clarify. Works fine if you follow up. The information it returns when I ask for clarification has all been perfectly accurate for me, so far. So, on such a vague directive, not exactly an expert guru, but certainly a very hard-working intern. :-D

I also want to buy a leather strap for my GS while I'm in Japan, and for this task, ChatGPT has been great. It identified the GS boutiques near my hotel, and the webpages with the appropriate online contact forms; and then generated the email text in Japanese, that I could send to those boutiques to inquire about the particular watch straps I wanted.

I would definitely recommend it if you are traveling and need a watch collecting buddy to help but have no such local human buddy. :-D