Anti-smartwatch buyer's guide

If you go out and buy a nice, normal watch, you can keep it for years and you'll get great value for money. Yes, it won't show you your emails or know your position on the planet to within a few centimetres accuracy, but it will tell the time.

Say you spend $3,000 on a watch. Yes, that's a lot of money, but it's an investment, not a tool. The right sort of watch will hold its value or even appreciate. And it'll last for decades.

No smartwatch you'll ever buy will last that long. You'll have to keep buying new ones every couple of years. And they won't ever appreciate in value. (OK, so first-gen Apple ones might.)

More to the point, they won't look good, and have a timeless (no pun) style to them.

My advice: Don't buy a smartwatch — buy an anti-smartwatch.

This is what I did eight years ago. I bought a nice watch, and I love it as much today as I did when I bought it. I could keep this watch until I die of (hopefully) old age and leave it to one of my kids. Try doing that with a Pebble smartwatch!

And it's geek cool, as well. Technology isn't just about how many gigahashes your Bitcoin ASIC supercomputer can crunch in an second. It's about how we as a society got to where we are, technologically speaking. Go back not very far at all in human history, and we couldn't even reliably tell the time! A nice watch with a proper automatic movement can ground technologists to their shared history past in a most pleasing way.

Here are a few I found at Amazon's "luxury watch store" to whet your appetite.

You may think Rolexes are expensive, but at $3,200, this classy Rolex Air King is a good way of owning a classy-looking timepiece that'll stay looking classy looking for decades.