Jony Ive, Watches and Web Stats

I ran across an article in Hodinkee featuing an interview with Jony Ive on Apple, watches and design^[1].

The article is a fun read if you're interested in technology, design and Apple in particular.

It's interesting to read interviews with folks like Ive, from a different perspective that you might get in the usual tech venues like Ars, Wired, or FastCo. Here, the audience is people who love high end watches. It's clear the author has a viewpoint, and wants to push back against the perception that Apple and other companies creating electonic watches are "the enemy" of high-end mechanical watch lovers and makers. It's an interesting read just for that perspective.

A few things about the article prompted me to post something here. The first was that one of the things Jony Ive said reasonated with me:

I think the liberty that the Apple Watch has given us is astonishing. And because of that – it’s a little sad – but I don’t find myself wearing many of the watches I’ve collected over the years. The Apple Watch is part of my life now and it’s hard to live without it.

I have a mechanical watch, and know exactly what he means^[2]. One of the things I loved about wearing a mechanical watch was it's physicality and mechanical design. Sometimes I would notice it on my wrist, and feeling this sense of wonder that something so small, made of tiny gears and springs, could keep accurate time continuously over the course of years. I rarely took off my watch, wore it everwhere -- from the beach to the office -- and never had to wind or fiddle with it. It just worked.

The other reason I wanted to post this was that I really liked the live counter at the bottom of the article^[3]:

The internet is covered with "Over the last N minutes, such-and-such has happened M times" counters because they humanize otherwise incomprehensibly larger numbers. But relating your read time to stats about how much of the product being discussed has been sold since you started reading struck me as clever.