I whole heartedly agrees with all the things you have pointed out and not only that I fear the exact same thing as you have pointed out about the manufactures marketing scheme which sucks us in to buying their watches at a premium price.
Just like diamonds, their extremly high value are all due to debers excellent marking and also their monopoly of the diamond market all over the world. If you do your home work and do some deep research on diamonds you will see how they have acheieved in making something out of nothing because the price of diamonds are not supposed to be what they are now.
Buying an luxury item is all about status. Status you say? Exactly it is all about status.
To show that we are better than others. We are more special than others. For what? For the women ofcourse(atleast from the mens part because I am not sure why women wants status except to show off and make other women jealous). Ofcourse we want to look grand and rich. This doesn't apply to watches but it applies to everything you own or buy in this world. Luxurious items are there for a purpose only and that is to show you have something differen than others and most importantly show the women you have money and show the other man to back off because you have more money than others. Maybe some of you might not agree but then you are just lying to yourself.
There is no advantages of owning an automatic. None. The most fundamental funtion of a watch is to keep accurate time and since the beginning we have strived to achieve keeping accurate time.
On that basis alone the quartz has beaten autmatic long time ago just like you said in the 1960s.
However, I got discontended with the quartz watches because of a long article I read somewhere(can't remember the site). The summary of that article is about the advances of quartz and since 1970 we are stuck with the same quartz technology. Most quartz watches you buy now keeps time +-15/sec/months. Throughout the years I bought myself a few quartz and I was facinated with the Seiko kinetic and also the citizen eco drive. I owned them both and more then just one watch. As time passes I was extremly unhappy even with +-15/sec/month. I thought to myself after all these years and the accuracy of the quartz hasn't even improved?
True to my horror they havn't since 1970. The most accurate quartz watch belongs to citizen with +-3sec/year. So how come we can hardly find or even buy one? Because the manufactures doesn't bother with things thats is not economy of scale and left us with second generation quartz which was produced in the 1970s. The omega quartz are like that one citizen are in the thrid generation but even then the +-10 sec/year of the omega quartz already exsisted in the 1970s as well.
Till now since 30 plus years have passed they didn't bother to advance. Not only that they make us pay for preimum watches on nothing. From the day I knew about the history of quartz I was so sad about the my 350 pounds purchase of an seiko kinetic. From all I know the primum I have paid all gone into the design of the watch more than anything technical. And I am not the person that wants looks over technical. Looks matter but being a watch I want to pay for something that is of technical marvel more than anything else. You may say I paid for their kinetic but I already have bought one 5 years ago and the kinetic technology is exactly the same.
This is the story of how it has led me to own an omega smp. Since the technology of quartz has stopped for so long why should I even considering buying? I might as well buy an automatic and marvel the beauty of an mechnical watch wish are purely keeping time with little tiny springs and all the little pices that makes this watch run. Even if I do change a watch in the future to an radio watch the automatic I own will always have a place in my heart.
