Author Archives: danijel

Hype and tradition

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Having nothing more useful to do at the moment, I did some research regarding the watch industry, since it’s the epitome of selling hype and illusions for inordinately overblown amounts of money.

They justify the prices by showing us the picture of an aging watchmaker patiently assembling the movement, and the idea combines low volume, skilled manual labor, and tradition.

So, let’s start with tradition. Which are the oldest watch companies currently in operation?

Blancpain, founded in 1735, is the oldest; however, it shows the typical pattern of being a dead brand revived with venture capital after the so called “quartz crisis” in the 1970s-1980s; currently owned by the Richemont group. The pattern consists of a venture capital finding and buying the dormant assets, and, sometimes, finding a grandson of the last owner and getting him to serve as a figurehead. In other cases, if the company was in a dire situation but alive, it is bought by either the Swatch group, or LVMH, the luxury goods conglomerate, or the Richemont group.

Let’s see the others. Vacheron Constantin, founded in 1755, continuously operating since, owned by the Richemont group.

A. Lange & Söhne, founded in 1845, dead, resurrected in 1990 by venture capital, owned by the Richemont group.

Zenith, founded in 1865, survived the Quartz crisis, author of the famous El Primero movement that Rolex outsourced from them to power the famous Daytona. They are the traditional in-town competitor of Jaeger-LeCoultre. Purchased in 1999 by LVMH.

Jaeger-LeCoultre, founded in 1833, famous for making not just watches, but also the movements for other famous watchmakers, owned by the Richemont group since 2000.

IWC Schaffhausen, originally founded in 1868, went under in the quartz crisis, owned by the Richemont group since 2000.

To make it shorter: Blancpain, Breguet, Certina, ETA, Glashütte Original, Hamilton, Harry Winston, Longines, Mido, Omega, Rado, and Tissot, all owned by the Swatch group, which rose to prominence in the 1980s and made a fortune on mass-produced fashion watches powered by quartz movements; they invested the money by buying up the bankrupt watchmaking companies.

A. Lange & Söhne, Cartier, IWC, Jaeger-LeCoultre, MontBlanc, Panerai, Piaget, Roger Dubuis, Vacheron Constantin, Van Cleef & Arpels belong to the Richemont group.

TAG Heuer, Hublot, Bulgari, Zenith, and Louis Vuitton are owned by LVMH.

One would be justified in asking if there are any actual watchmakers with continuous tradition that aren’t operated by the fashion brands and venture capital? They exist.

Patek Philippe, established in 1839, remains the last family-owned independent watch manufacturer in Geneva.

Rolex, founded in 1905 as a marketing brand that outsourced the actual watchmaking to others, invented some of the crucial mainstays of the watch industry, such as weather sealing and self-winding, not to forget the concept of wearing the watch on the wrist, on a stainless steel bracelet. They started as a marketing company and remained masters of hype, and regardless of that, they are actually one of the big innovators in the history of watchmaking, and the biggest, most recognizable name today.

Seiko, founded in 1881. Self owned, and the only vertically-integrated watchmaker in the world, alongside Rolex. They originally made mechanical watches, but produced the first commercial quartz watch in 1969.

Citizen, founded in 1918.

Casio, founded in 1946. as a calculator company, started making quartz watches since 1974.

So, wait a minute. If you want to wear a watch that has deep tradition of craftsmanship and innovation, your options are Seiko, Patek-Philippe and Rolex? Yup. Those three actually aren’t owned by hypemasters and have a serious tradition. One could argue that both Rolex and Patek are prime hypemasters themselves, and they wouldn’t be wrong.

But what about craftsmanship, assembling watches by hand, and so on? If you want that, your best choices would be A. Lange & Söhne, Patek-Philippe, and Grand Seiko. However, have in mind that most components today are produced by CNC grinders and similar technologies, and the manual part is usually only about the assembly. If someone makes millions of watches, of course it’s all mass produced, by definition.

So yes, the argument against the quartz movements, that they are mass-produced, is supremely silly, considering how Rolex, ETA, Sellita, Miyota and Seiko movements are all mass-produced, and almost nothing else is used anywhere. That’s fine, because a mechanical watch movement is a solved engineering problem, that doesn’t need to be solved again. As for quality, quartz movements are solid state, no moving parts other than what moves the indicators. They should outlive everything, and they usually don’t require servicing. They are also orders of magnitude more accurate. So, why are we being told that quartz is low-quality trash and mechanical is precious? Because of marketing. Billions of dollars depend on us believing that story, or nobody would buy a $10000 Rolex over a $200 Seiko. They convinced us that accuracy doesn’t matter, that accuracy is somehow a worthless feature since every quartz movement excels at it, and “we all know” quartz is crap. Well, pardon me, but in the 1970s and early 1980s I was taught to believe that accuracy is the central feature of a watch, and the expensive watches were expensive primarily because they were more accurate. That’s why the entire industry went nuts when quartz movements were more accurate. They thought it’s all over for them because there was no reason for the existence of mechanical watches any more. Even Rolex went nuts and started making quartz watches, and thought their mechanical watches were now trash. Everything else is just marketing hype that was slowly built since.

They spent 50 years and billions of dollars convincing us that the superior technology, that literally erased Swiss watchmaking, was cheap trash. If for some reason quartz watches weren’t that easy to mass-produce, the industry might have gone the other way and quartz would now be known as super expensive space tech, while mechanical watches were for the plebs.

To add insult to injury, most “traditional” brands that make mechanical watches today have almost no claim to a horological tradition if compared to someone like Seiko, who are generally assumed to be a newcomer to the industry, while in fact they are a seriously old brand with incredible legacy in watchmaking. Honestly, if you want a watch with a claim to tradition, craftsmanship and innovation, buy a Seiko. It’s not going to be a status symbol in a sense that it’s very expensive and few can afford it, but status symbols are a tricky thing anyway. People think Rolex is a status symbol, but sometimes it’s merely part of the uniform, something people think they need to have in order to be “taken seriously”, like a suit and a tie. Also, I’ve seen that the reaction to people who have a Rolex is usually negative – yes, a Rolex is recognized, but it’s usually recognized as something wannabes, snobs and people without taste wear to show how much money they have. On the other hand, I never saw a negative reaction to a Seiko, or, for that matter, IWC or Zenith. If they are perceived, and they seldom are, they are perceived as “a nice watch”. If a Rolex is perceived, it marks you as an asshole with a Rolex. So yes, it’s a status symbol alright, but not of the kind I find worth acquiring.

Some thoughts

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We hiked up our local hill yesterday after the summer heat had cleared, and we got some nice sunset colours.

Most pictures ended up being the typical sunset shots, because that stuff seems to be irresistible, but I got some that are different; sunset merely illuminating the things and giving them a 3d glow. I ended up liking those the most.

Trump, being himself, let it slip that the West has for the most part no more than 4 weeks of oil reserves, which is unsurprising since they’ve been using them up foolishly in order to prevent the oil prices from going up too much, which would reflect poorly on the popularity of the politicians and their foolish wars. Since the current “agreement” between Iran and the USA is of such flimsy nature that the sides can’t even agree enough to publish the same version of what’s supposedly being agreed upon, there’s not much chance of any peace there taking root, at least until Israel gets its way, nukes Iran and gets wiped off the map in return.

I noticed one thing changing in my attitude towards the Apple ecosystem, and Apple Silicon in particular. I no longer see them as an experiment, a thing I’m testing to see if it’s long term viable, while maintaining a backup Intel based system that could take over in case it all fizzles out. It became my primary system, while everything else is essentially obsolete. I know exactly how that came to be. When I was writing the last book, and especially when I was proofreading it, I pretty much exhausted myself to the point of almost passing out, and I noticed that I removed that margin that I always maintain – if the computer breaks, dies, crashes or fubars the data, I am usually always ready to do something. This time, I was so tired that I relied on the computers – the 15″ M4 Air, and the Studio M2 Max – to do everything perfectly because I was simply too tired to do anything about it. And they did – they were both incredibly fast, reliable and good, and nothing went wrong in any way. One would think that after all the decades of IT progress that would be expected and unsurprising, but it isn’t. My Windows desktop, the Ryzen machine, is unreliable to the point of randomly bluescreening whenever I really push it. It probably means that the CPU is damaged and can’t handle the thermal load, or something; but since a machine bluescreening under load means loss of data, I simply stopped using it for anything other than games. I had to push the machines when I was finishing the book – not care how many things I left open, not care how big images I imported into Photoshop for the covers, not care how many layers I had; I just needed to get the job done, and I did the covers after proofreading for multiple days in a row, and had the machine crashed during that, I’d probably throw it out the window and make it a lawn ornament. But it didn’t crash. It didn’t slow down, it didn’t glitch, didn’t do any of the stupid shit I came to expect from both Windows and Linux, and I could rely on both the OS and the hardware to pull me through when I was half-conscious from work. As a result, something changed in my attitude; I now treat Apple Silicon machines as serious stuff I rely on, and I treat everything else as toys. I bought another laptop, the 13″ M5 Air, the 16/512GB model. It’s not that the 15″ did anything wrong; to the contrary, it’s the best laptop I ever had. I wrote almost the entire book on it, and it did everything flawlessly. It’s just that I like having 13″ laptops for some things, and all my other 13″ machines are either old and expected to fail sooner rather than later, or they are much, much worse than Apple Silicon in almost every way. For some things, such as making the covers or editing photos, I use the Studio with a 43″ screen. For some things I use the 15″ laptop, and for some things I use the small one. I think it’s similar to how guitar players have multiple guitars they use for playing different things.

Over the years, I experimented with different kinds of laptops, and I discovered that a very powerful desktop replacement machine is the least useful for me, because I rarely need that kind of power on a laptop. I need it where I need the big screen for editing pictures, and that’s a desktop. I need a laptop to have an excellent keyboard, touchpad, screen and battery, and to be fast enough for all the things I run on a laptop. This ends up being everything other than photo editing, so basically I have photo editing machines and “everything else” machines. This explains why I prefer the Macbook Air to the Pro – the pro models have active cooling and more power, but they are thicker, heavier and more expensive for the virtue of being great for the things I don’t actually use the laptop for. As a result, I managed to “cook” the 15″ Air only twice, and both cases took place in a hotel when I was importing a batch of 350 or so 61MP raw files into Lightroom. To its credit, it actually managed to hold its own and be as fast as my Studio for the first 100 or so pictures, but then it throttled itself to less than half its nominal speed and it was pegged at 100°C. Also to its credit, it managed to actually import everything just fine, and I proceeded to edit everything on the hot laptop and functionally speaking, I got the job done. Would I like doing it regularly, no. But also, would I like buying a 5000 EUR machine that is better at something I do twice a year, while also being so much bulkier and less practical for everything else I actually use it for? Hard pass.

On the other hand, the Studio is a complete opposite. The Air has incredible speed and power, until it hits the thermal limit. The Studio M2 Max is actually somewhat weaker in that range. However, it never hits the thermal limit. It can keep going at 100% load, for hours, days, weeks or years, and it will never give a single fuck. The machine is under-specced for my new 61MP cameras because I bought it for processing 24MP files, so things that used to run instantaneously now take time. The thing is, I don’t necessarily care. I have it import the files while I take a shower, it gets stuff done, and I never have to think about overheating it, stressing it by having it work for too long on 100%, or anything like that. It’s like a rock crushing machine that just crushes rocks for years and doesn’t give a fuck. Also, unlike other powerful machines, it is always completely silent. And unlike my equally powerful Ryzen machine, it never bluescreens.

No wonder Apple ate everybody’s lunch. It’s the thing you need when you’re done with everybody else’s shit and you just need to rely on things to do their job because it’s important, and you don’t have the patience for drivers acting up or the OS update locking up the machine just when you need it, or something crashing and taking your files with it. When you need a rock crusher that works 24/7, and you really depend on it doing the job, maybe it’s not the time for solutions that require you to reserve a part of your mental capacity for fixing the mess after the machine inevitably shits itself.

So yeah.

Do I actually need a zillion computers? Does Mike Oldfield actually need a zillion guitars? Yes, in fact. It’s weird how that works, but this is no place for minimalism.

Dystopian prophecy

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There are a few movies that started as light comedy, but they unfortunately turned out to be prophetic.

I read a tweet by Trump today and I remembered “Idiocracy”. Unfortunately, we’re living that.

If there was a movie playing in the theatres called “Ass”, with nothing but ass on the screen, people would come to watch it. Only, the movie screen would need to be made vertical, to resemble a phone, because they got so used to looking at phones their brains probably no longer recognize the concept of horizontal.

Also, “The Demolition Man” was supposed to be light comedy and turned out to be a dystopian prophecy about a totalitarian dictatorship of the clean, gay, polite and politically correct, and if you want to be normal you’d need to live in the sewers and eat rat-burgers because the gay totalitarians have taken over the civilization and you need to have electric self-driving cars that drown you in foam for safety in case of a crash.

I commented something along those lines to Biljana and she said “don’t forget Wall-E”, and I thought – sure. We’ll drown in trash while AI grows us to be docile, overweight, completely ignorant and incompetent consumers, while the shopping chain “Buy n Large” ends up being the government, for all intents and purposes.

There were other dystopian sci-fi movies of that kind before: The Planet of the Apes, Logan’s Run, Soylent Green and so on, but somehow, they don’t strike as hard because they are trying to be a serious warning. When light comedy ends up hitting as hard as “1984”, it’s somehow more real.

No news

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Not much to report on – I’m spending terrible karmic stuff in great quantities and I’m barely functioning. The summer is upon us, so it’s hot. I’ve taken some pictures of the butterflies on the lavender, because that’s still the best motive around. The difference is, I now used an ultrawide lens to do it, because I don’t want to become too repetitive with the telephoto/macro setup.

It’s getting too hot to take walks during the middle of the day. It was 34°C in the shade today, we went out to have lunch and we’re cooked. This means we’ll have to switch into summer mode, which means walks in the late evening. It is what it is. Also, I’m allergic to something that’s in the air currently, and I don’t know what because there are too many candidates – half the island is under flowers of some kind or another. Tiny annoyances in addition to the big problem.

 

The five year cycle

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The fact that every piece of IT gear needs to be replaced every five years is something I find increasingly annoying. It’s as if I’m on a five-year subscription.

Recently, Biljana and I had to replace phones – not only because the battery was on its last legs, but also because the 12th-gen iPhones have weak batteries by default and it was kind of a problem since we bought them, so merely changing the battery wouldn’t do anything useful. Also, the new operating system is designed to strain the battery more. Also, the radio transceiver (wifi/bluetooth) is slow and we had issues connecting to it via hotspot mode. It all kind of accumulated to the point where we had to do something about it.

Also, the first-gen Apple Silicon gear that we bought in 2021 is now five years old. My M1 iPad pro has a cracked screen in the corner, because I put it on something unstable when I was working, and it fell corner first on the concrete floor. Yeah, not great. However, that was when it was less than a year old, and I refused to do anything about it, seeing it as a punishment for not paying attention, so it’s still cracked. Also, the touchscreen is acting up lately, and there’s yellowing in the edges of the amoled screen – 2-3 cm. I’d replace if it were important, but I use it as a secondary device, for reading books, playing silly mobile games and occasionally surfing the web and taking handwritten notes. The M1 air is also banged up – I destroyed the tab key, probably by pressing it too violently when something wasn’t working, and I had to remap tab to caps lock in software. Also, the battery started showing signs of age in the new OS, which is probably running all kinds of useless garbage in the background, but I solved that by turning on the low power mode. This helped the battery life significantly, and I don’t see any bad side effects. The machine has only 8GB of RAM, which was always its weak point, and it gets worse as they fill the OS with all kinds of slop. I bought the 15″ M4 air a year ago so it’s been “replaced”, but the thing is, I never throw away the “replaced” gear, at least until it’s worn out and broken to the point of being completely useless. I just repurpose it for some secondary task. The M1 air is in the bedroom, and I use it for checking the mail and text messages in the morning, and for writing things down when I have ideas while in bed. It’s actually useful. People use phones for that, but I find phones almost completely useless, since they don’t have a keyboard, and if I have ideas, I need to write them down quickly, and my patience for technological innovations that limit me is non-existent. To me, computer is something with a keyboard and an OS that’s designed for switching between applications quickly and getting things done. It’s interesting how both the M1 tablet and the M1 laptop are essentially the same computer, but the lack of a keyboard on the tablet makes it significantly less useful to me.

I also noticed that the laptop form factor matters a lot. The 13-14″ laptops fit in my lap better, leading to a better hand position which makes typing easier. The 15-16″ models on the other hand are much better when I have to do anything photography-related, or view some web sites where javascript misbehaves on smaller screens. Yes, unfortunately that’s a thing. I have all sorts of laptops, mostly old and obsolete, and one would ask why do I have that many. The answer is, I often have to do things quickly, for instance unload a complex article from my head. I need to have a computer available the second I have to do that, and I don’t have time for messing around. Sometimes, I need two computers, side by side, because I’m running chat on one screen, writing text on the other, and the Mac OS seamlessly connects them both into a single working unit. Being able to do things more effectively because the computers actually help is very beneficial. But it’s sometimes not even that – sometimes, I need a cheap/obsolete/easily repairable laptop when I go out and sit under a pine tree that can drip resin on the keyboard or the screen. That’s what the T14 gen1 Thinkpad is for. If something messes it up, screens and keyboards are cheaply available on ebay and I can install them myself. With a Macbook, it would be a total loss of an expensive device. So, a cheap Thinkpad gives me a peace of mind when I want to have the laptop outside because I want to finish some line of thought without being always at home. Also, the Thinkpad has the advantage of not feeling like I’m on a 5 year lease cycle – the battery is cheap and easy to replace. The SSD is easy to replace. The RAM is socketed and easy to replace. The keyboard, screen and touchpad are easy to replace. All parts can be sourced from ebay. The machine is significantly less pleasant to use when I’m pouring thoughts into the computer compared to the Macbooks, but it feels like it’s going to last forever and it’s repairable.

But here’s the thing: yes, the Apple stuff is on a 5-year renewal cycle, but after 5 years the technology usually advances enough for me to actually consider upgrading not just because the old device is on its last legs, but also because you do actually get something for the money. The iPhone 17 is significantly faster and battery lasts for multiple days, which is a serious upgrade from iPhone 12. The new generation of laptops is amazing, but the M1 Air is also good enough that the only real reason for replacing it would be the accumulation of wear and the lack of RAM. The tablets, on the other hand, all do the same thing and I’d replace that one only when it literally stops working, because otherwise it would feel like a terrible waste of money. Basically, my iPad pro M1 is fast and good, it does everything well; it’s just somewhat broken and the battery is worn out, so it won’t be a replacement because technology got better, it would be replacement because of the unfortunate 5-year cycle.

I feel like complaining about it and saying that technology should last longer than that, but honestly, it doesn’t actually come up as a problem as often as one would think, because I tend to use my devices hard, and my keyboards and mice tend to look like they went through a war after five years. Monitors accumulate quite a bit of working hours too. The SSD drives accumulate wear. Sure, the LiIon batteries artificially limit the life cycle, but I had several situations where I replaced the battery, trying to prolong the life of a phone or a laptop, but I had to replace the device anyway because of other reasons – either wear or the fact that new computers got much faster.

So, what am I saying here? Mostly complaining because it’s been five years since 2021 when I bought most of the gear, and replacements cost money. I hate spending money on gear, but I like having new gear. 🙂

Compared to computers, photography is much more reasonable. I still have lenses from the 1980s and 1990s. I have all the lenses I bought with the Canon 5d in 2006, except the one I sold. They all work on the new gear just fine. The lenses I bought recently, the new and optically superb stuff, are also expected to last forever. My camera replacement cycle is 9-10 years, and that’s because of technology development, not stuff breaking. Cameras have removable batteries and storage, so when that wears out I just buy new batteries and memory cards, not the camera. It’s all modular, quite repairable, and very durable, and I think it’s the example of how things can be done.