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  • G-Shock Takes On The Apple Watch With Fitness Tracking, Swatch Continues To Troll With The MoonSwatch, Mr Jones Prove They Are Kings Of Meta Timekeeping and The Cult Watch MIH Is Revived

G-Shock Takes On The Apple Watch With Fitness Tracking, Swatch Continues To Troll With The MoonSwatch, Mr Jones Prove They Are Kings Of Meta Timekeeping and The Cult Watch MIH Is Revived

92% of smartwatch owners wear one for the fitness tracking abilities. Casio is offering a regular watch with the same functionalities

Author

Vuk Radic
May 08, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 17 minutes

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. It’s Monday and we have some good news, and some annoying news, you decide which is which. Let’s get to it.

In this issue:

  • Swatch continues to troll with the MoonSwatch

  • Casio takes on the Apple Watch with a new G-Shock

  • Mr Jones Once Again Prove They Are The Kings Of Meta Timekeeping

  • Cult Watch MIH Revived With Designer’s Wet Dream Mechanik2 Model

  • And… invite your friends to win a Seiko Alpinist

Today’s reading time: 7 minutes and 38 seconds

Everybody needs a green faced watch in their life. That’s why we have a new giveaway - it’s the Seiko SPB121J1, aka the Seiko Alpinist in a wonderful shade of green. In fact, we’re giving away two of them!
All you have to do is click the button below and have five of your friends subscribe. Both you and one of your friends will be eligible to win one of the watches
We only have two conditions when entering this giveaway - invite 5 of your friends to subscribe and live somewhere were you can buy the Alpinist, so we can get this for you and ship it to your address. That’s it!

👂What’s new

1/ 

The OG MoonSwatch launched in 2022 and while many criticized it, it was clear that this was perhaps the greatest marketing move of the decade. Swatch took the iconic look of the Omega Speedmaster, stuffed it into a plastic case (or, bioceramic, if you prefer) and gave it crazy, bold and interesting colors. Lines formed around dozens of blocks around the world with people willing to give swatch a bit over $250 for a plastic watch. Swatch sold a million of them in nine months, and the watch is still sold out.

Then, Swatch went off the rails. Instead of upping production on the OG MoonSwatch and selling it online, like they initially said they would, in March they introduced a new version of the MoonSwatch - Mission to Moonshine Gold. OK, no big deal… They dipped the chrono hand into Moonshine Gold and called it a new special edition. It would be fine, if Swatch did not decide to consult a fortune teller for their strategy - now they’ll put out a new special edition with every full moon and sell it only during said full moon.

Their lates edition is called Mission to Moonshine Gold: Pink Full Moon. Don’t think it’s a cool full hot pink MoonSwatch. It’s the exact same Moonshide Godl version but with a touch of pink on the lume. And they sell it for $285. A lot of people lined up for them, but who really cares?

Tell me this - the fact that MoonSwatch will not sell you the cool OG version but will release a new bland version every full moon (still can’t believe somebody could seriously suggest something like this) - isn’t the biggest troll move you have seen?

2/

I found a poll that says the vast majority, almost 92%, of smartwatch users use them for health and fitness reasons, and 88% say their watch has helped them achieve a fitness goal. The fitness tracking functionality of smartwatches is what made the Apple Watch such a hit. In fact, the same study shows that most people just want two functionalities - a watch and a fitness tracker. Enter Casio and their new G-Shock Move DWH5600.

The Move DWH5600 is a brilliantly simple proposition - a sporty G-Shock that we all know and love, with all of the capabilities of a modern fitness tracker, including step counting, heart rate monitoring, blood oxygen level measurement, and more.

You are basically getting a regular G-Shock 5600 - same design, 200 meter water resistance, flat mineral glass crystal, and you can get it in two colors: black and blue/gray. The watch comes with Bluetooth so you can hook it up to you smartphone to sync your training data. There’s a slight change to the display, as it gets a high-def Memory in Pixel (MIP) LCD for increased visibility, and a huge difference on the back where they house all the sensors and a connection for the charger. Speaking of charging, you will have to charge it, despite the fact it has solar charging. The sun will only top off your battery. Keep it in the dark and you will get up to 35 hours of battery life when using its heart rate tracking and activity functions, approximately one month of autonomy with its heat rate measurement feature turned off, and around 11 months of timekeeping when using its power saving mode.

All of this will set you back $299. The cheapest Apple Watch you can get now is the SE which costs $249, so do with this info what you will. I think this is a great deal for people who don’t want to wear a smart watch (or a fitness tracker + a traditional watch), but still want to get fitness tracking.

3/

You know Mr Jones. They make affordable art watches that are renowned for not telling the time. They are a joke on your wrist. A joke that often makes you rethink your life. I recently wrote about my favorite of their watches, the Perfectly Useless Afternoon, to which they added a mechanical movement. But that watch has now been dethroned by the “Berry Late!”, designed by Ana Dias, perhaps the most meta of watches.

at practically any time you glance at the “Berry Late!”, you will see a pastel alphabet soup with two strawberries around the perimeter of the dial. The whole strawberry indicates the hour, while the chomped one is the minute hand. Once an hour, the two will find themselves on opposing sides of the dial, which aligns the letters to spell out the message of the watch: “Fuck it! Time is just a social construct.”

Pretty much everything else about it is irrelevant, but here you go: it has a nice steel case that measures 37mm, a sapphire crystal, water resistance down to 50m, a quartz movement and comes on a grey suede strap.

The watch is a bargain at €245, but there’s one issue - they only made 200 of them. And they’re all sold out. However, the good news is they will be making more for the summer.

4/

Back in 2005, industrial designer Christian Gafner and two watchmakers, Paul Gerber and Ludwih Oechslin (who went on to start his fantastic brand Ochs und Junior), launched MIH, a simple watch (it used only nine pieces instead of the usual 40 to run an annual calendar) that became an instant cult hit. For the CHF 6,000 price at the time, it was a lot of watch and the design was a home run. However, not a lot of them were made, even though they made them for a long time - they shut down production in 2020 and no more than 100 were made per year.

Now, Gafner is bringing back MIH with the Mechanik2. It features a linear annual calendar (which only needs to be reset once a year at the end of February) at three o'clock like the original, displaying the AM/PM, day, month, and date. There's also a chronograph operated by a monopusher. In an update from the original – which had its chronograph counter displayed via a special window on the back of the watch – the Mechanik2's 30-minute counter is on the dial at 12 o'clock, with red dots filling up each minute as the chronograph runs.

The Mechanik2 uses a titanium case that's bead blasted and measures 42mm across. Like the case, the black dial is also matte in finish. The watch is thick, sitting 13.7mm in height. Like the old MIH watch, is powered by a Valjoux 7750 that's been heavily modified to power the annual calendar complication. It has a 44-hour power reserve at beats at 4Hz. It also has 100 meters of water resistance.

All this will cost you CHF 6,420 (about $7,300). You can preorder it now.

5/

I love indie watchmakers that aren’t shy. While some might introduce variants to a model line one at a time over a period of weeks or months, Squale goes the other way and slaps you in the face with five new models - subtle, technical updates on subdued variants to extravagant, brightly colored new models.

First up is the Squale 1521 COSC, the first chronometer-certified 1521 that was released quite recently but is already getting an update. Although powered by the same Sellita SW200-1 as the rest of the collection, here we have a COSC-certified version of it, as denoted on the dial. The biggest difference, however, comes in the case finishing. The 42mm 1521 case was always fully polished, but the 1521 COSC models are now brushed with broad polished chamfers. The COSC model is available in black or the famous Squale sunray blue, priced at CHF 1,475 (without VAT). Each comes on a black Tropic-style rubber strap with an additional vegetable-tanned brown leather strap included.

Then there’s a new dial for the 1521 50 Atmos — green dégradé. The dial fades from a bright Spanish green in the center to a darker shade around the perimeter. Beyond the dial, everything else remans the same. That means you get a 42mm × 48mm × 12.5mm case in steel, an aluminum bezel insert, Sellita SW200-1, sapphire crystal, date at three, crown at four, and 500m water resistance. Yours for CHF 955 on a green leather strap and CHF 994 on rubber.

Squale calls its simpler no-date 1521 with painted stick markers “Militaire.” This model has now received a full-lume dial option, a BGW9 dial, making it a nice, bright white. The indices at 12, 3, 6, and 9 o’clock are done in orange. The aluminum bezel inlay is lumed as well. The new full-lume Militaire is CHF 1,250 on mesh bracelet, and CHF 1,195 on rubber

Then there’s the heavy hitter - an all-bronze version of its 1521 with a bright blue sunburst dial and orange minute hand. Although powered by the same Sellita SW200-1 and housed in the familiar case shape, the crown moved from 4 to 2 o’clock. The bezel features much coarser teeth and a brushed ceramic insert with luminous markings. The entire watch is 1.5mm chunkier than its siblings, coming in at 14mm thick. On the dial, we find different, more rounded applied indices. The 1521 Bronze comes on a blue nylon strap with bronze hardware. An additional blue leather strap is included in the Peli-style case. You can buy it now for CHF 1,475.

🫳On hand

Our selection of the best reviews we stumble upon

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⚙️Watch Worthy

A look at an off beat, less known watch you might actually like

Since launching in 2018, Trilobe has delighted and fascinated with its unique, no-hands take on telling time. Its newest collection, Une Folle Journée (roughly, "a wild day" in French), first released in 2022, takes the approach established in its first two collections to the next level. Building on the previous Les Matinaux and Nuit Fantastique, the Folle Journée places three rotating rings on pillars above the movement, stacked in a domed crystal that makes the Folle Journée look like a timekeeping orb as much as a wristwatch

⏲️Wait a minute

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

  • Have you ever heard of the Valencia, the Titanic of the Pacific? You might as well read up on it with the wonderfully designed story from the Atavist

  • I dare you to find a mountaineering story that is not breathtaking. Like this one that Outside magazine just published about an Indian mountaineer Anaug Maloo who was stranded in a crevasse on Annapurna for three days, until a team of rescuers overcame improbable odds to save him

  • I’m on an Atavist kick these days: When Johna Ramirez’s son joined a wildly popular circle of tween YouTube influencers, it seemed like he was fulfilling his Hollywood dreams. But in the Squad, fame and fortune came at a cost.

👀Watch this

One video you have to watch today

“K2 is a savage mountain that tries to kill you.” That is how climber George Bell described the infamous peak after the first American expedition in 1953 –forever giving the mountain its nickname: The Savage Mountain. Sixty-six years later, Eddie Bauer mountain guides Adrian Ballinger and Carla Perez aim to summit the 8611-meter peak and join a community of explorers fewer in number than those who have been to outer space. Even more incredible, they both will attempt the feat without the use of supplemental oxygen.

💵Pre-loved precision

Buy and sell your watches. Think of this section like old school classifieds - i don’t guarantee anything except that a bunch of people will see your ad and I’ll put the buyer and seller in touch. Want to advertise your watch? Contact us 

Want to sell your watch to a community of passionate horologists? Reach out to us and we’ll put your ad up. $15 per listing without photos, $25 with photos. 10 available slots per day, discounts for multiple slots.

Everybody needs a green faced watch in their life. That’s why we have a new giveaway - it’s the Seiko SPB121J1, aka the Seiko Alpinist in a wonderful shade of green. In fact, we’re giving away two of them!
All you have to do is click the button below and have five of your friends subscribe. Both you and one of your friends will be eligible to win one of the watches
We only have two conditions when entering this giveaway - invite 5 of your friends to subscribe and live somewhere were you can buy the Alpinist, so we can get this for you and ship it to your address. That’s it!

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or to participate.