Comment on In the not too distant past this was a thing
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 1 day agoIt’s also approachably yet suspiciously cheap. I think I paid $20 for this close to 15 years ago, and Sinobi is apparently still at it making mechanical watches in the $30 range.
This one does two things: Tells you the time, and does so while not needing batteries.
sevon@lemmy.kde.social 1 day ago
All of those seem to be quartz and not mechanical.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I just took a look. They do still make quite a few mechanicals but they have indeed shot up in price. $80-90 nowadays, it seems.
My old one is definitely mechanical. I wind it up every morning.
sevon@lemmy.kde.social 23 hours ago
That sounds like the right price range. Maybe yours was just massively discounted for whatever reason.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
I bought it on Dealextreme back in the day, which was kind of the precursor to our current Aliexpress/Wish/Temu/Shein arrangement. It’s therefore possible that it is a knockoff (or a knockoff of a knockoff?) but the fact remains that it was absurdly cheap, is fully mechanical, and against all expectation and reason it continues to function and also keep pretty good time. It’s actually just a hair fast, and requires me to knock a minute off of it about once per week.
If you’re not squeamish you can get a thoroughly generic – or perhaps heavily “inspired” by some particular name brand – wind-up timepiece from any of the usual suspects for pocket change. $10-20, and other poster in here mentioned they bought theirs for $5.