I should begin with a confession: I have been an Apple fan for a very long time. My attachment became particularly strong after Apple acquired NeXT and Steve Jobs returned to the company. I did not merely admire the products that followed. I believed in the why behind them: the conviction that technology should become understandable, personal and humane through the careful integration of hardware, software and design.
Over the years, Macs, iPods and iPhones became natural parts of my life. Each product seemed to extend the same philosophy into another area. When Apple introduced the Apple Watch, putting one on my wrist therefore felt almost inevitable. It was not merely another device. It was the next extension of an ecosystem—and an idea—I had already followed for years.
For more than a decade, the Apple Watch seemed to make a traditional watch difficult to justify. It could tell the time while also displaying messages, tracking exercise, monitoring health, navigating and connecting me to the rest of my digital life. A mechanical watch, by comparison, appeared almost absurdly limited.
Then I bought a Victorinox I.N.O.X. Automatic. It is a substantial hunk of metal containing an elaborate mechanical movement whose main purpose is to tell the time less accurately than the computer on my wrist. It cannot display a notification, install an application or acquire a new capability through an update. In technological terms, it was already an anachronism when it left the factory. Yet it gradually became the watch I wore all the time.
The two watches may occupy the same place on the body, but they perform fundamentally different roles.
The Victorinox is partly an instrument for telling time, but it is also jewelry—not in the sense of superficial decoration, but as an object whose materials, architecture and manufacture are central to its reason for existing. Considerable effort has gone into the faceted steel case, the textured dial, the applied markers, the hands, the finishing and the mechanical machinery inside.
That machinery is both advanced and archaic. It depends on sophisticated engineering and precise manufacturing to perform a function that electronics solved more accurately decades ago. Its limited functionality is not a flaw awaiting correction. It is part of the object’s identity.
The Apple Watch is something else. It is a wearable computer and an extension of the smartphone. In many situations, it could even replace the phone, although I have never really used it that way. For me, it remains a convenient interface to the larger digital system around it: useful, responsive and deeply integrated, but not entirely independent.
Its design is unmistakably Apple—pragmatic, coherent and carefully resolved. Yet I find it less captivating as a physical object. There is a seemingly endless choice of watch faces, but every one of them appears on the same flat screen. Colors, complications and graphic styles can change instantly, while the underlying object remains visually much the same.
The Victorinox offers almost no such variety. It has one dial, one set of hands and one composition of physical elements. But those elements possess depth. Applied markers cast shadows. Polished and brushed surfaces respond differently to changing light. The hands move above a textured dial rather than being rendered onto it.
Perhaps that is the distinction:
The Apple Watch can display countless faces. The Victorinox has a face.
One offers visual variation through software. The other offers a single physical composition that can continue revealing details through observation.
The two watches also live on different timescales.
An Apple Watch lives on the timescale of software. Its value can increase through new releases, new services and new capabilities. The hardware may remain unchanged while an update substantially changes what the watch can do. At the same time, continued progress eventually leaves older devices behind. A watch may still perform everything it did when it was purchased, yet gradually become outdated because the surrounding platform continues to evolve.
My Apple Watch Series 8 illustrates that tension. It remains capable, but it will no longer receive (major) software updates. My Apple Watch Ultra 3 will eventually face the same reality, even if that moment is still, hopefully, years away.
The Victorinox lives on another timescale. Its capabilities were effectively complete when it left the factory. It will not become more useful next year, but neither does it depend on a changing software platform to remain relevant. It may require maintenance, and its mechanical parts will eventually need attention, but its fundamental purpose will not become incompatible with a new operating system. Its limitations are stable.
Paradoxically, those limitations help protect it from obsolescence. Because it promises so little, technological progress has fewer opportunities to leave it behind. It can instead acquire scratches, memories and associations while remaining recognizably the same object.
At the moment, the Victorinox is winning. It offers physical depth, mechanical presence and the feeling of wearing an object that is already complete. It earns its place through what it is.
But the outcome is not permanent. The Apple Watch competes through usefulness, and usefulness can change suddenly. A genuinely capable assistant on the wrist, more meaningful health functions or greater independence from the phone could make it compelling again.
The next important Apple Watch generation may not even require new hardware. It could arrive as software, transforming the Ultra I already own into something substantially more useful. The same physical watch might suddenly earn its place on my wrist again because of what it has become capable of doing.
That reveals two different value systems. The Victorinox does not need to improve to remain relevant. Its value lies in permanence, craftsmanship, presence and attachment. The Apple Watch must continue to evolve. Its value lies in what current technology allows it to do—and in what the same hardware may still become through software.
One wrist becomes the meeting place of those two systems: timelessness and usefulness, permanence and progress, completion and continuous development.
Neither side wins forever. For now, I prefer the object that no longer needs to become anything else. Tomorrow, a software update may tilt the balance.
The I.N.O.X. wins through what it is. The Apple Watch may win through what it becomes.
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