A few years I got a Casio F-91W watch (Wikipedia). I was looking for something that can double as a watch and stopwatch while explicitly not being a smartwatch. I wanted something light and sturdy. I was also looking for something inexpensive as I wasn’t sure if I was a watch person since I hadn’t worn any kind of jewelry in the broadest possible sense of that word for many years. I was primarily interested in getting a stopwatch to use while running because I don’t like carrying my phone, which is my usual timepiece.

When I researched for these parameters, there were, unsurprisingly, many options. I settled on the F-91W because it is, according to Wikipedia, the most-sold watch in the world. It was released 35 years ago, in 1989, a full five years before I was born, and is still going strong, so it has clearly stood the test of time. I bought this watch five years ago, around the beginning of a certain pandemic, for about 12€. I just rechecked the prices, and at the time of writing, it’s now about 20€ on Amazon, which is interesting.

A 35-year-old relatively simple piece of technology, which probably had a very healthy profit margin at 12€, has now increased in price to around 20€. I can only imagine the reason being that the design has become somewhat iconic (and inflation may have had a hand in it to a minor degree). It looks decidedly like 80s or 90s technology. I wouldn’t use the words beautiful or sophisticated to describe it. Nerdy captures it better, I think. My wife is not impressed.

I don’t wear this watch most of the time. It turned out that I’m not a watch person. But I do use it for what I bought it for. It’s my companion while running, and for that, it works flawlessly. The watch is light and comfortable to wear. Cleaning of the sweat from the resin band is easy, and it keeps the time. It’s a bit unfortunate that the stop timer rolls over to zero once I’m out for more than an hour on a longer run, but since I’m not going for multi-hour runs, it’s still easy to keep track of time.

Aside from running, its primary purpose is waking us up in the morning. Since we decided to remove all phones from the bedroom a couple of years ago, the little Casio has been our alarm, and it does its job well. Sure, it doesn’t support different alarm times for different days of the week, but shutting off the alarm on a Friday evening has become part of my weekend ritual. Surprisingly, I haven’t yet forgotten to turn the alarm back on each Sunday; it has really become part of my routine.

Even though I’ve used it for that purpose for years, I frequently press the wrong button first to stop the alarm in the morning. Come to think of it, I couldn’t tell you what the right button is. I just mash them until it gets quiet. You’d think that this gets annoying, but strangely it doesn’t. Or maybe I’ve just gotten used to it. Strangely, this is one of the few pieces of technology in my life that I haven’t been annoyed about since I got it.

Yes, this watch is by no means perfect. Some alternatives offer more creature comforts, a refined design, additional features, or sturdier housing. Somehow, I don’t care about all of those things. This watch does what I need it to do, and it just works. The battery life is advertised as seven years, and I haven’t changed it in five years, so I’m optimistic. I’m actually looking forward to changing it because there are just four screws to unscrew, and then it’s good for another seven years.

I wish more technology was like that. Not having to think about it because I know it will work is something I’ve started to value more. I still like tinkering and exploring, but I prefer being able to choose when to tinker and not having the necessity thrust upon me.

— Maurice

I recommend you read the Wikipedia article about this watch. Apparently, possession of a Casio F-91W could contribute to ending up in Guantanamo Bay because it was supposedly favored by al-Qaeda as a time-trigger for improvised explosive devices. Absolutely crazy, not only because using the most-sold watch in the world as a potential indicator for detention must yield many false positives.

Cover Picture by Ashley Pomeroy on Wikimedia (CC-BY-SA-3.0)