Omnivore was the best read-later app for most people. It was quite modern yet had a generous free tier. Yesterday the team informed the world that they got acquihired by ElevenLabs. The app will go offline and all the data will be deleted by November 15th. 

It’s sad but almost should have been expected. Read-later apps are an extremely niche product, so you must be able to monetize a very small customer base successfully. I suppose the Omnivore team couldn’t, precisely because most people were drawn to the app because it was “free”. 

Omnivore famously was open source. This should work as a cautionary tale for blindly trusting the “open source” label. All it means is that the code repo is out there. For this to become a viable service, someone needs to invest resources into developing it, paying server costs, and shipping mobile apps. And while subreddits are filled with people asking anyone to do this, I doubt that it will happen or be more successful than the Omnivore itself (why would it?).

Productivity apps exist in a limbo. The basic functionality is usually covered by the OS and the browser, such as the Safari Reading List. And there are only so many people who require more, and even fewer of them will be ready to pay you $5/$10/$15 in perpetuity.

What are your options if you’re looking for another app?

Readwise Reader

Readwise Reader is a powerful read-later app from Readwise. It is a service that collects all the highlights you left in Kindle, Apple Books, and various apps to send daily or weekly digests and remind you about the stuff you read and found important or interesting. 

The biggest downside for most people is it costs $10 a month. At the same time, Readwise seems to be the only company in this game that has built a viable business you can expect to have at least some longevity. Ultimately, if you aren’t paying for a service, don’t be surprised when it dies. 

This is the best app of this kind. If anything, it might have too many features for my liking, although it’s highly customizable. And the integration with Readwise is the best part. Hoarding text like a squirrel is pretty useless unless you learn something. Readwise constantly reminds you about your highlights. Sometimes I get an email and reread the article where it came from, often with a fresh perspective. 

Readwise also added the import support for the Omnivore format, so request that backup before November 15th.

Matter

Matter is another read-later app closer to a modern take on minimalist Instapaper. It’s pretty good and has a free tier. In 2022, they moved most of the features behind a paid plan, but it’s really hard to decipher what they offer right now. There’s a $15-a-month subscription (with a steep annual discount) that offers advanced AI transcription, better speech generation for articles, and integrations with other services. 

Unfortunately, it always seemed like the app would follow the Omnivore path, but it is still chugging along five years in. You might like it if you want something simple. 

GoodLinks

GoodLinks is a read-later app for the Apple ecosystem and this is its entire differentiator. First, you get native apps for MacOS and iOS, which is awesome. Another advantage of the Apple ecosystem is that instead of running servers, developers can simply use CloudKit, which absolves a lot of costs and complexity, enabling single developers and small teams to build apps like these.

It was recently updated and now supports highlights, which was the biggest problem for me. However, it also shifted from a one-time payment to a subscription model. You pay $9.99 for the base app, and then some features are gated behind GoodLinks Premium, which adds $4.99. 

Pocket or Instapaper

For the love of God, stop using these old dinosaurs. Well, I’ve actually heard that Instapaper has received meaningful updates, but I definitely wouldn’t trust Mozilla to make Pocket a great service. 

Built-in Apps

Finally, you can simply use built-in apps. Safari has Reading List that integrates with Apple Notes and allows you to create your own free Readwise if needed. Chrome and other browsers also have rudimentary reading lists you can use.

You see the same suspects whenever there’s a discussion of over-ear wireless headphones with noise canceling. People mention Sony WH-1000XM5 (orthodox want XM4), AirPods Max, and Bose QuietComfort (Ultra). 

If you face the same dilemma, I recommend you try Sennheiser Momentum 4 Wireless. It’s an underrated pair of headphones that deserves to be on the same list. And it usually costs just $250, which is extremely competitive with other options.

What’s great about them? Sound, comfort and battery life, more or less in that order. 

The sound is fantastic. It’d be fair to say they helped me reignite my love of music (along with a more conscious approach to using Spotify). I truly enjoy listening to music in Momentum 4.

Previously, I used Bose QC 35ii in airplanes or when it’s cold outside, but I never loved how they sounded too much. Sennheiser, on the other hand, knows how to tune their products. 

Momentum 4 are very comfortable and made of good-quality plastic. They are much lighter than AirPods Max and feel sturdier than Sony. There’s a power and Bluetooth button, and the rest you control through a flat touch-sensitive panel on the right. 

Noise-canceling is OK. Is it mind-blowing? No. You can get better results from Bose, AirPods Max, and maybe even Sony. But to me, it’s more than enough. What’s the point of best-in-class noise canceling if you don’t want to wear your headphones? And these I actually want to wear. 

On a related note, their transparency mode is worse than AirPods Pro or Max could do, but it doesn’t sound too artificial or metallic. For some reason, it can pick up and slightly amplify sounds you wouldn’t notice ordinarily, like running water or rustling plastic bags. You can adjust the headphones between full noise canceling and full transparency on a linear scale. I find them to sound the most natural exactly in the middle of it. 

But the microphones on Momentum 4 are great for phone calls. They reliably pick up your voice and isolate external noises, particularly wind, very well. 

Bluetooth Multipoint has come a long way, so they can reliably connect to two devices simultaneously. Stop podcast on your phone and click Play on that YouTube video on your laptop and it will just start without issues. My only gripe is that Bose could remember more devices, and you’d switch them in the app and tell it which ones should be active. Momentum 4 may jump connections between all the devices in the range they remember, so it is better to unpair them altogether if you don’t want them to suddenly engage your iPad.

Except for that thing, their iOS app is very good. You can adjust the equalizer and they remember the transparency setting. My old Bose QC 35 had an extremely bad app and software in general, for instance, turning them on required three button presses, because they’d always start with NC at max be default.

Momentum 4 Wireless can last up to 60 hours on a single charge, beating all the competitors we’ve been talking about. You don’t even think about charging them; one day, you just notice a low battery level and reluctantly connect a cable. 

They have autopause, which is nice when you want to quickly take them off when meeting somebody. On several occasions, I’d notice that they continued playing, but it seems to be a rare miss. 

There are a few things I dislike about Momentum 4.

First, I sometimes don’t understand if they’re on or off. Even the quick chirps they produce when you power them sound too similar. To turn them on or off, you have to push that button for a few seconds; I wish it happened faster. 

Second, I don’t have a problem with the touch-sensitive panel per se, but I wish there was a way to disable certain gestures. There are so many of them, and I don’t need most. There’s one to adjust transparency that I somehow trigger from time to time and only notice that it shifted a bit later. 

If you want to learn more, here’s the video that convinced me.

Telegram is a secretive social media platform with 900 million users. Their employees aren’t allowed to talk about their jobs. It only has one product manager in its founder. And they got to 900 million users without turning into Facebook but also aren’t earning as much.

Telegram is not really a secure messenger app. It’s one of the largest social media platforms. But certain product choices and the location of its audiences make it almost invisible to people based in the United States or Western Europe.

When you first open it, Telegram looks similar to WhatsApp. WhatsApp’s founders famously focused on keeping it simple and clean. For them this meant not adding anything else: “no ads, no games, no gimmicks”. So they added nothing to the app, even years after Meta bought it. About a year or two ago I noticed WhatsApp started adding very specific features that were obviously lifted from Telegram, like channels. But still much slower.

Telegram can get incredibly complex. On top of DMs and group chats, it can host super groups of up 200,000 people. Anyone can create a channel, a publicly-facing broadcast similar to a Facebook page. The largest one now has 55 million followers. You can save anything in your own personal space, and you can organize chats by folders. In addition to channels, Telegram pioneered other UI paradigms, like video circles, which are vastly superior to voice notes (lifted by WhatsApp again).

But despite all this complexity, Telegram hasn’t turned into the infamous Facebook main page. All these features are carefully hidden. Pavel Durov says that he is the only product manager and personally oversees how the app looks. It certainly looks like it. Despite being a social platform, there’s no unified feed, even though it’d provide the best possible ad space.

Compared to Signal or any Meta’s messaging app Telegram provides the most seamless and polished experience. You can instantly switch between conversations. You can quickly find anything shared inside these conversations, including images, files and links. And there are specific searches for all of these categories. Back in 2017, I often had to look up some old files and images in Facebook Messenger, and it was atrocious. Most importantly, you can easily use it on multiple devices with great desktop apps (there are two, for some reason), and everything is synced through the cloud.

Meta provides you with half-baked web-based apps. And with WhatsApp, you have to relink it to the phone constantly. But Telegram can only do this because the messages aren’t encrypted end-to-end. Telegram started as a “secure messaging app” (they launched quite a bit before Signal). But they aren’t using this tagline anymore since it’s not a differentiator, and it’s not true. With Telegram, you have to trust the team not to peek and keep their servers safe and secure. You can create dedicated E2E chats, but only manually, and their functionality is as limited as you’d expect; they’re tied to a particular device and don’t sync at all.

But most users don’t care. This trade-off makes Telegram easy to use, and the team focuses much more on social features anyway. In regions where Telegram is popular, channels replaced newsletters as a form of revolt against algorithmic feeds. They’ve recently revamped user profiles to make them more public-facing and let you pin your channel right there. You can write long texts, share images, and not worry about links being suppressed. On the other hand, you will never get any algorithmic boost. You must proactively look for these channels or get a link elsewhere. In a world where social platforms demand specific content and try to commoditize all content, Telegram feels like a remnant of the old web.

Telegram did add Stories, and I think that was one of the rare misses by the team. Having someone as your Telegram contact is a weaker signal than following on Instagram. Imagine discussing your upcoming partnerships while your stories show how you left the bar at 4 am. Considering the “messaging” part with groups and DMs, they should have made stories visible to “Close Friends” only and asked you to choose the list manually. Then, it could have worked.

Telegram has a notoriously lenient approach to moderation, so you can see accounts from both sides of the Russia-Ukraine war. But unlike modern Twitter, Telegram doesn’t shove it in your face, so even Zelenskiy is happy to use it. While each channel has a URL, the reading interface on the web is extremely basic, and aggressively pushes you to go to the app instead. They definitely could have improved it but chose not to. Telegram is its own kingdom. That’s one of the reasons you rarely see links to its content. Social media apps often use built-in browsers to keep you there, but Telegram goes beyond and provides reader views for most websites, especially news media. No reason to leave the app. Last month they even added its own multi-tasking to Telegram, where you can collapse the browser and continue talking to people or reading channels.

Telegram is the app people use for everything. Talk to their partner. Set up a dinner party. Discuss work projects. And read the news, of course. You can create a group with dedicated threads that look like a Discord/Slack server. I know companies with a few thousand employees that use Telegram as their internal comms tool. It has downsides, of course, as you don’t control your employee’s accounts, and they can mix and match their personal conversation or easily forward messages. Companies write bots to accommodate (like deleting the person from all chats, but it’s still clunky).

With Telegram, you need a phone to set up your account, but you don’t have to share it. Instead of giving out your phone with iMessage, Signal or WhatsApp or sharing your personal Instagram page, you can send a nickname. This made Telegram especially popular among crypto people who prefer to stay semi-anonymous. It is the default communication app for crypto projects, both for their internal ops, connecting to other businesses and community management. They could use no other single service for all of these things instead.

How does Telegram make money? It’s complicated. I’ve seen Durov’s previous project, VK, and have used Telegram since its early days. I think this team is opposed to ads and what it takes to make them work on some philosophical level, and they don’t want to learn. That’s part of the reason Telegram feels nice. There are ads, but they’re pretty unobtrusive since there’s no global feed, and they operate mostly by context with minimal targeting. Telegram also doesn’t have much data on you, so I can’t imagine that CPM is too high. You see these ads in channels, and most of them are for other Telegram channels.

Telegram also has a Premium subscription at $5/month. The subscription removes ads and raises some artificial limits in the interface (the number of chats in a folder); it also gives you a unique check mark and animated emojis. Some people buy it because they like it, and people who use Telegram heavily in their work buy it because it’s just easier than fighting the app. Back in January, Pavel reported 5 million paid subscribers. If we don’t take churn into account, that’s an annual runrate of $300 million. Very impressive, but I’m not sure if it still covers the expenses alone.

Running Telegram takes a lot of money. Partly because they store everything in the cloud, so your mother potentially doesn’t have to figure out how to move her WhatsApp messages from her Android phone to a new iPhone (saying from a personal experience). In 2017, Telegram raised $1.7 billion from investors and announced they would launch their own blockchain TON. The SEC considered their tokens to be unregistered security, so Telegram backed off. They spun off TON, made it open-source, and integrated with it later.

Crypto is a big part of Telegram right now (but you might never see it like other complications). Both Twitter and Instagram canceled their NFT avatars. But in Telegram there’s a crypto wallet, there are web-based mini-apps, and a very basic appstore. The Hamster Kombat game was launched on this platform and gathered 300 million users.

There aren’t too many useful apps yet, but it’s interesting to watch it develop. For years, people were looking for the WeChat of the West. I don’t believe there will be such an app, for many reasons, but Telegram is the closest thing, and it’s curious both use the web stack for these mini-apps.

We don’t know much about the team. Telegram says they have only a few dozen employees working on the core app. The fact that they were able to get to 1/4th of Meta’s userbase is incredibly impressive. Still, we can only rely on their words, as nobody else can share anything about their work. And if you read any stories about Elon’s dreams for X, Telegram might be much further along this path. Telegram Premium probably has more paid users than X Premium. But that’s not all.

Pavel Durov is obviously unhappy with Apple and Google. He’s been at them for years. iOS and Android are critical platforms for Telegram, as the app completely depends on their rules and whims, from content moderation to limitations on what and how they can sell inside the app. You can buy Stars to pay for goods and services inside the Telegram ecosystem, but Apple takes 30%.

But inside this crypto wallet (which isn’t available in the US as many crypto things), you can store USDT, which is the next best thing to a digital dollar. And it’d take a flick of a switch to let users pay for content and services with USDT that they can buy anywhere. This would simultaneously solve Telegram’s problem and push its audience toward crypto.

Telegram is in an unstable equilibrium. They need to perform a careful balancing app with SEC, which already destroyed their original plan and forced them to return most funds, and with Apple, which can destroy their app as they did with Fortnite on iOS. I believe they’re betting they can do this, and their lives will be made easier with the rising pressure on Apple from regulators and the growing adoption of crypto itself. And Telegram might have the best chance to ride both waves.

Running your own blog in 2023 is still needlessly complicated, especially if you have any kind of taste. Why have one in the first place? This particular blog is more like a series of essays I wanted to get out. I also have another blog which is more like an online journal of my life. I was never able to have an actual journal on paper or use apps like Day One. But when it’s online, and other people can see it, I get an incentive to share more, even though I still mostly write for myself.

Social apps and networks are obviously the easiest options, but they’re geared toward vastly different things, and I just don’t trust their longevity. Having your own platform enables flexibility and portability, so your content can be kept online practically forever.

There are many options out there, ranging from WordPress and Ghost to static blogs to managed online platforms and Micro.blog. How do you choose between them?

First, here are things I’d like to have in the ideal world:

• Modern and minimalist yet functional design
• Markdown support to ensure the content is portable
• Accessible via mobile
• Photo galleries for particular posts and the blog itself
• Email subscriptions
• Affordable enough, so you don’t care about running it forever
• Effortless backups
• Connected to your personal domain

Turns out, it’s hard to find all of these things combined. Pricing is important to me at the ideological level. I can afford to pay $10+ a month, but I’m more likely to start wondering if I need to continue unless I suddenly have a very popular blog on my hands.

In fact, none of the options out there seem ideal to me – they range from mediocre to acceptable. Especially if you want anything more than a series of relatively long text-focused posts. Choose the one you like the most and stick with it as long as possible.

WordPress

The most popular CMS in the world, and yet I just can’t stand its admin page. Generally, WordPress can fit most of these requirements, but the paid hosted options are usually slightly more expensive and geared toward professional bloggers and content creators. Well, they’re targeted at businesses that can mentally afford to spend much more.

WordPress even supports Markdown and has countless plugins for photo galleries. The basic tier is €8 unless you pay annually, but it doesn’t include backups – for those, you’d need to pay €25 a month for the Business subscription.

The look of most WordPress blogs is just very dated and immediately recognizable. Of course, there are thousands of themes, but very few were meticulously designed, and building one yourself is no easy challenge. And you’ll need to self-host or pay for the higher tier again.

Webflow

Webflow is fantastic for corporate blogs as it allows managers to adjust not just the content but the website itself quickly. But such blogs aren’t really portable, and the CMS tier is quite expensive, so it’s not a great option. I’d skip it.

Ghost

Ghost is basically the modern WordPress in terms of its prevalence. Ghost is much more simple and straightforward, yet it comes at the cost of customizations. More recently, the platform has shifted its focus toward paid communities and newsletters. While it’s still possible to simply run a personal blog, Ghost’s official catalog has about two or free themes that fit this purpose, and it became even harder to find something suitable with modern updates like dark mode. And it’ll be bugging your readers to subscribe with an annoying button. And you can’t really change any major settings or adjust the website in a major way.

But if this particular look works for you, it could actually be a great option. Ghost is likely to stick around, supports Markdown (in a more convoluted way now). Also, please note that their support on mobile is intermittent at best, they had mobile apps working a few years ago but it doesn’t seem to be solid right now.

Ghost was known for the high price of their managed instance at $25, but recently they introduced a new Starter package at $9 (these prices are for the annual tier). But the Starter package is even more limited in terms of options, such as themes.

Thankfully, just like WordPress, you can run Ghost on your own instance. Most people recommend a $6 DigitalOcean droplet (plus the price of backups).

Hugo and Other Static Blogs

Static site generators (SSG) compile your content and design into static HTML pages that can be easily served online with minimal effort. Hugo is probably the most popular right now, but there are also Jekyll, Gatsby, Hexo, VuePress, and others.

With SSG you usually keep all the content in a GitHub repo and use Vercel, Netlify, or GitHub Pages to compile and serve the website. This isn’t the most consumer-friendly option, and it definitely helps to have developer experience. But this enables effortless backups.

There are a few ways to write content with SSG. The most low level is by writing Markdown directly using any text editor and making commits to GitHub. You could technically even do this on iOS with certain apps. If you also want to upload images for your posts, this immediately gets complicated. People often recommend content management systems that run on a third-party service, let you write posts and publish them, such as NetlifyCMS or Forestry. In my experience, they are quite clunky and certainly not mobile-friendly.

Email subscriptions are hard to set up, although you can use a third-party service like Buttondown or MailChimp to serve emails based on the RSS feed.

FYI, this blog runs on Hugo and Forestry but this only makes sense because I don’t post too often. To me it simply was the most straightforward option which gave me the most control and fantastic portability in case I switch to another platform later.

Micro.blog

Micro.blog is a service for microblogging combined with a social platform. In fact, it runs on managed Hugo instances coupled with an online CMS, mobile and desktop apps, and an ecosystem of other apps and services. You also get access to a social layer of Micro.blog’s users who can leave comments and respond to your posts.

Micro.blog costs at least $5 a month. You can participate in the community for free and broadcast your posts from other platforms through RSS or ActivityPub, but hosting is only available on paid plans. The top $10 plan also gives you email newsletters and digests of your content.

The apps aren’t perfect, and the experience is sometimes a little bit rough, but it’s one of the best options for your online journal. Imagine having your own private Twitter, Instagram, and a long-form blog on a single website. That’s Micro.blog for you.

If something happens to Micro.blog as a project or if you want to leave it, you can always just deploy your blog as a standalone Hugo instance. And it allows you to tweak basically anything in your blog.

My other blog actually runs on Micro.blog because I post more often and quite often use my phone for this. Just like with plain Hugo, I had to intervene in the underlying code quite a few times to make it work nicely for my goals.

Tumblr

Tumblr, a once popular social network, is now also owned by the same company as WordPress. In my opinion, it was always an underrated blog platform, specially tailored to personal online journals.

Tumblr blogs are very customizable – in addition to choosing a theme, you can edit its code directly. And it supports a range of different post categories: long texts, images, quotes, etc. Finally, it’s free and, to my surprise, allows you to connect your own domain. Email newsletters are only available if you serve via a third-party service and RSS.

Any disadvantages? People will know it’s a Tumblr blog.

Substack

Substack positions itself as the newsletter platform, but at the end of the day, you still have a website with posts. The design is basically standardized and very recognizable, and your readers are constantly pushed to subscribe to the point of churn.

Also, there’s the very question of the kind of content people expect on Substack. I’ve seen some people using it for their personal blogs, but they’re certainly in the minority.

Managed Platforms

There are several less popular managed platforms for personal blogging, such as Write.as, Proseful, Blot, Bear, and others.

Most of these are projects led by enthusiasts, so there’s always a good chance they will get tired and have to sunset the platform. This is a risk that you have to always keep in mind and think about backups and export options.

Write.as and Profesul are both simple and stylish blogging platforms. Write.as has a dedicated Snap.as project for photo galleries. Bear promotes itself as the most minimal blog platform. And Blot can look very different but deploys from a Dropbox/Drive folder or a GitHub repo. Unfortunately, in my experience none of these tools are truly polished, you’re facing rough edges all the time.

***

Figure out what features you definitely need and which ones are just nice-to-have. See what is used by the blogs you like and follow. Although you might end up surprised with their technical choices, but it’d still be a good reference of what you might be able to achieve with each option.

Having the right tool certainly helps, but at the end of the day, what matters is what you write there. Focus more on the content and just ensure the process of writing and posting is simple enough.

I’ve always been into watches and for the last 5 years, since Series 2, I’ve been almost exclusively wearing an Apple Watch. Recently I pulled a trigger on a mechanical timepiece I wanted a long time ago and have been enjoying it since. There’s a lot of people who went in the opposite direction but I haven’t seen too many people who got out. In the end, mechanical watch movements are an obsolete technology and a basic quartz watch can challenge Rolex for its accuracy, while an Apple Watch can provide you with unique complications and features, such as notifications, weather, or calendar alerts.

But first, why wear a watch in the first place? We all have precise atomic time on our phones. Well, to me that’s simply not enough, I want to be able to just glance and get a feeling of time. Not sure how you can be punctual without that. Therefore, I need a watch.

Apple Watch has some amazing capabilities for a $400 device. Let’s start with easily-accessible powerful complications with a user-friendly interface like timers, stopwatches, and alarms. And then there are unique complications you won’t find on any other watch: weather, calendar, notifications from your phone. Yet, in the end, I wasn’t compelled.

Below are five reasons one might prefer a classic watch instead.

Distractions

Apple Watch wants too much from me. Unless you proactively disable and mute notifications you’ll be bombarded with every alert you’re getting on the phone and watch-induced requests, like suggestions to stand up, exercise, or marvel at your partner’s fitness achievements. Sometimes you want that but in the evening I just wanted to get rid of it.

Having a “dumb” watch allows me to separate contexts. I can put off my phone and nothing will disturb me, unless it’s something truly urgent – then people will probably call me. You can go and disable all notifications on the watch, but it kinda raises the question of whether you wanted it in the first place.

Design

Apple Watch is by no means terrible, but unless you buy a stainless steel version it still looks like a fitness gadget. I just don’t enjoy looking at it, especially compared to my quartz and mechanical watches. Whether it’s a $50 G-Shock or a $1000 mechanical timepiece, they just have a lot more character in them. And since you’re going to replace it in a couple of years I feel a bit weird paying for that steel and sapphire.

That is also part of the reason you might want a mechanical piece. Most esteemed watch companies, with the exception of the likes of Grand Seiko, are focused on mechanical watches. If you want something truly beautiful and exquisite you likely will go mechanic.

Readability

The same applies to watch faces. Apple Watch is fantastic in the way it allows you to build your own watch using the design you like and the complications you need at the moment.

When I was a kid, I did have issues with reading analog watches – simply because for the first twelve years of my life, I didn’t have them at home. But I’ve learned and now I can read analog watches with a single quick glance. Apple Watch has gotten much better since Series 5, when Apple added an always-on display. Still, I realized I need to spend a few tenths of a second more to grasp it. Unfortunately, Apple’s watch faces just aren’t great. Marco Arment wrote a pretty extensive post 4 years ago and not much changed since then. Designers at Apple clearly know watches and recreated many classic designs like Divers and Chronographs. But they often lose important nuance making it’s quite hard to read the analog time quickly. For instance, all hour markers are usually the same, both hands have the same thickness, and so on. The only good analog watch face is California.

Apple Watch is clearly better as a digital watch, and I believe there’s an opportunity to improve. You either have Infograph Modular with a clock that’s rather small or artsy faces where digits take the entire screen with no place left for complications.

What I want is something like this. On Apple Watch Nike there’s a similar watch face but it’s not pretty, has visual bugs, and one slot is always taken by Nike Running, which I don’t use.

Longevity

To me, my watch is almost like my friend (don’t worry, I have friends). It’s with me all the time. I change my clothes but I wear the same watch. It might very well still be on my wrist in 20 years’ time. And from that we got the most massive disadvantage Apple Watch has – it’s short-lived. Even if you replace the battery on your Watch, in a few years it’d look painfully slow and you’d have to upgrade. It’s a replaceable gadget.

Both mechanical and quartz watches can survive for decades with basic care and maintenance. With mechanical watches, you need to have them serviced and while that can be quite expensive, especially in the case of in-house movements powering complicated watches, it’ll at least work perfectly afterward. Quartz watches are easier, you just need to replace the battery and ensure they won’t leak. Even some of the first quartz watches from the 70s are still running. Although, if something does break inside finding a replacement part might be challenging. With simpler mechanical movements it’s a bit more obvious.

And if you do that, your kids can wear the same watch. Whether you cherish that idea or not is entirely up to you, but I like it. My father had a collection of mechanical watches and I enjoyed looking at them as they were telling me about his life.

Battery Life

Apple Watch needs to be charged every night to operate properly. If you go out late at night you might end up with a dead watch. If you travel, even only for a weekend, you have to bring a dedicated charger.

Quartz watches live between 2 and 10 years on a single battery. There are some fantastic pieces that operate on solar power so you only need to replace the accumulator when it’s just dead – most outlive the 10 years period stated by the manufacturer. Mechanical watches usually live between 40-80 hours, but most of them are automatic, meaning they utilize the kinetic energy of your movement to charge. It’s a fantastic device, both mechanically and philosophically, as it’s literally powered by your own body.

The fact I can trust my watch to continue going however late it is, take it off my wrist, and just put it on in the morning while it’s still running is a blessing.

***

Maybe this isn’t forever. Maybe Apple Watch Series 9 will be able to track my blood pressure and glucose 24/7 and it will become a necessity for sustaining health and I’d switch. And I’m still using Apple Watch for training and sleep tracking (mostly for the silent alarm feature). But for the moment I’m enjoying watches that don’t add anxiety in my life.