There’s a Casio F-91W sitting in my desk drawer right now. It cost $15, tells the time with quartz precision, has a stopwatch, an alarm, and a backlight. It will run for seven years on a single battery. By any rational measure, it’s a better timekeeping device than the $3,000 mechanical watch I’m wearing on my wrist.

And yet, here we are. Mechanical watch sales are booming. The Swiss watch industry exported over 24 billion CHF worth of watches in 2025, a record high. Microbrands selling handmade mechanical watches online are thriving. YouTube channels reviewing watches have audiences in the millions. Something interesting is happening.

It’s not about telling time

Let’s get the obvious point out of the way: nobody buys a mechanical watch because they need to know what time it is. Your phone does that. Your smartwatch does that. The microwave does that. We are surrounded by devices that display the time with perfect accuracy.

Mechanical watches are less accurate, more expensive, and require regular maintenance. They need winding — either by hand or through wrist movement. They lose or gain several seconds per day. By any functional metric, they’re inferior to a $15 quartz watch.

And that’s precisely the point. The appeal of mechanical watches has almost nothing to do with function. It’s about something else entirely.

Craftsmanship in a disposable world

A mechanical watch movement contains anywhere from 100 to over 800 individual parts, many of them smaller than a grain of rice. These parts are machined, finished, assembled, and adjusted by hand (or by extremely precise machines supervised by humans). The tolerances are measured in microns.

In a world where most consumer products are designed to be replaced every few years, a mechanical watch is built to last generations. Many people wear watches that belonged to their grandparents. Try saying that about any other consumer technology.

There’s something deeply satisfying about owning an object that was made with that level of care. Not printed by a machine in a factory, but crafted by people who’ve spent years learning their trade. It’s a connection to a tradition of precision engineering that stretches back centuries.

The anti-screen movement

I think the mechanical watch resurgence is partly a reaction against screens. We wake up to screens. We work on screens. We socialise through screens. We relax by staring at screens. Adding another screen to your wrist — a screen that buzzes with notifications and tracks your steps and reminds you to breathe — feels like too much.

A mechanical watch does one thing. It tells you the time (and maybe the date). It doesn’t ping. It doesn’t track. It doesn’t demand attention. It just sits on your wrist, quietly ticking away, doing its job without asking anything from you.

For some people, that simplicity is a luxury. The absence of connectivity isn’t a limitation — it’s the entire appeal. It’s a conscious decision to have one object in your life that isn’t trying to sell you something or measure your behaviour.

The ritual of it

Mechanical watch owners develop a relationship with their watches that smartwatch users simply don’t. There’s a morning ritual of winding the watch, feeling the mainspring tension build through the crown. There’s the satisfaction of hearing the movement ticking. There’s the pleasure of watching a sweep second hand glide smoothly around the dial, rather than jumping in one-second increments like a quartz watch.

These are small, quiet pleasures. They don’t change your life. But they add a layer of intentionality to a daily routine that otherwise runs on autopilot. In a world optimised for convenience and speed, choosing to do something slightly inconvenient and slow feels like a small act of rebellion.

Entry points are more accessible than ever

While Swiss luxury brands remain expensive, the market has expanded at the lower end. Japanese brands like Seiko and Orient offer mechanical watches for under $300 AUD that are genuinely impressive. Microbrands like Baltic, Lorier, and Zelos produce limited-run pieces for $400-1,000 AUD with remarkable quality.

Not for everyone, and that’s fine

Mechanical watches aren’t objectively better than smartwatches. They’re a choice to value something other than pure functionality.

But if you want something made with intention, that connects you to a centuries-old tradition and asks you to slow down for 30 seconds each morning — a mechanical watch offers an experience that no technology can replicate.

In an age of disposable everything, there’s something quietly radical about strapping something to your wrist that was built to outlast you.