A $500 watch has the best movement. Buy the $6000 watch anyway...

A watch is made up of two parts. The outside, the case, the dial, the bracelet, everything you see with the naked eye. And it's made up of the inside, the movement, the thing that makes it tick. Some people will tell you that it doesn't matter whatsoever about the inside. If the watch looks good and it's just reasonably accurate, you don't really need any more. Paying for some intricate movement just isn't worth it, or is it? We're going to talk about watch movements, what makes one better than another, what makes a watch movement more expensive, and what's the point of paying more and more and more for movements? What do you get from $500 to $1,500 to $5,000 and onwards? Those are the questions we're going to go over. Let's dive in. Starting under $500, there is, of course, quartz. The most accurate, most reliable watch with the longest power reserve in the world is quartz. Quartz is also usually, by a very small number of exceptions, the cheapest technology to keep time. Quartz was what almost killed the Swiss watch industry in the 1970s, flooding the world with vastly more reliable and accurate watches. But quartz, which is just a battery-powered movement with a quartz oscillator, is rarely associated with horology. Why? Well, marketing. The Swiss did their very best to convince the world that mechanical watches were finer, more appealing, and an expression of art and engineering. As far as I'm concerned, they're right. Just like Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond, I find combustion engines in cars more exciting, more interesting, and more emotionally appealing than any electric vehicle from Tesla, BYD, or Xiaomi. For some people, a car's a car, and an EV is the way they go because that's what's modern. And for some people, a mechanical watch has no appeal. In a lot of ways, that's how mechanical movements distinguish themselves from quartz movements, that in many ways are actually technically superior. But you can still get mechanical movements under $500. You'll easily get 41 hours of power reserve and a stated accuracy of minus 20 to plus 40 seconds. They will be relatively shock-resistant. They'll have decent anti-magnetic properties. They'll be easily serviceable, and they could last for five, 10 years without needing a service. What's important to understand is that mechanical movements have been around for hundreds of years, and if you open up a watch today, it's going to look remarkably similar to a 50 or even 100-year-old watch. The plates are still made out of brass. They have a galvanic coating today, but underneath, it's still brass. There's a barrel with a spring that delivers power. There's a set of gears. There's an escapement and a balance wheel, and that's it. Under $500, you get stock movements from big manufacturers like Seiko with the NH35, Soprod, Miyota, similar movements. These are simply designed, tried-and-true movements that are easy to produce and consistent in their performance. There's one more movement that I really care a lot about, and that's the movement of my subscribers. I'm a little bit ambitious, and I like to have a lot of subscribers. It tells me that I'm doing a good job in terms of the content that I'm making, so if you are new here and you haven't subscribed yet, click the subscribe button. It means a ton. Thanks. Above $500 and up to about $1,500 or so, the performance gets a little bit better, but it's mostly about guarantees. The movement might be a Sellita now, but it will still only have 41 hours of power reserve. It will still be plus minus 30 seconds of accuracy, and you know, that kind of thing. But two things start to happen when you move through this price point. The first is quality control, quality assurance, and some level of regulation. These stock movements will come from a manufacturer, and the manufacturer will state a certain performance for different specs. Accuracy is going to be one of those. Up to $1,500, you start to see companies that don't just trust that the movement lives up to the stated specs. They'll spend more time checking, and they'll regulate the movement so it can perform within a tighter range. These are generally manual, human-intensive steps that deliver small but meaningful benefits to the user. Now, I know that inevitably there'll be a comment from someone saying that they have a $300 mechanical watch that has a accuracy of plus minus four seconds. And that's likely true. It's even plausible. But what you don't get is a manufacturer that guarantees it. They guarantee the stock accuracy of minus 20 to plus 40 seconds. The fact that that movement in that one person's watch is more accurate is coincidental. It's the luck of the movement lottery, and not something that is delivered through quality control and guarantees. The second thing that happens is that some of these stock movements get small but meaningful upgrades. The manufacturer of the watch may deliver the movements with their own high-quality control standards with testing in more positions. And in some movements, certain parts will be of a better quality, like the shock absorber. The movements don't change dramatically, but better accuracy is common. Better shock absorption and better anti-magnesism are also more standard. Moving on to $1,500 to $2,500, those stock movements start to get another layer of improvement, and that's decoration. Why? Because at $1,500 and up, people start to ask the question, if I'm getting a nice watch, then everything should be nice, right? They're not going to buy a Ferrari on the outside and a coal-fired Tin Lizzy on the inside. So to match the expectation, brands start to decorate to make the movement look nicer. It's perlages, which are those circular patterns on a movement. It's Anglaise, which is those beveled edges of bridges. It's Cote de Genève, which is striping. It's DLC coating. It's laser engraving. And it's custom brand-specific rotors. It's mass production decoration, but it is there to give you that premium feel. New players also start to make their entrance into the stock movement space here. Sellita have upgraded higher-end movements. Le Jouperet and others start to show up as well. These movements have different architectures, but they typically get chosen because the feature set is better. So they've got higher power reserve, better power transmission, that kind of thing. Again, small performance improvements, but a lot of it here is about aesthetics. This is also typically where you start to see the first brands coming up with their own movements. Now, why would they do that? They do it because they want to make a movement that is entirely to their specifications and to their needs. Above $2,500-ish, it's about refinement, not massive improvement, just refinement. At $1,260, you're going to find a Christopher Ward diver that delivers plus five to minus 12 seconds of accuracy. At $6,500, Tudor will offer you a Metas accuracy, which is of zero to plus five seconds. That's a 12-second range improvement, and that's not really that much. And apart from the most fastidious of you guys, you likely won't ever notice. Power reserve also goes up, but it doesn't go up four times the price with four times the power reserve. Tudor use something called a free-sprung balance. This makes regulation of a movement easier, and because you aren't adjusting the hairspring on the balance wheel, you don't get amplitude fluctuations. Omega, they use two barrels in their Metas automatic movements. Two barrels here solve the problem that accuracy usually fluctuates depending on how wound a movement is. With two, you get a consistent power delivery and thereby consistent accuracy at the entire power range of the movement. You see these refinements everywhere. Bigger barrels for massive power reserve, silicon hairsprings to further counteract magnetism, that kind of thing. In the real world, those effects of those things are minute, but it's optimizing the maximum out of several hundred-year-old technology for ultimate precision. So if you're into audio, you know that buying a high-end pair of Bose and Wilco speakers or Focal speakers isn't because they play louder. It's about refinement. That refinement also starts to show in quality control because usually this is where it goes through the roof. So remember, at the low end, a brand would likely just chuck in the movement into the watch and assume that if it ticks, it works. That doesn't happen here. Now, take Breitling as an example. They test every single individual barrel for every movement as it arrives from the supplier. They visually inspect every single balance wheel for flatness. They test every movement several times before casing. They adjust the jewels of the escapement. They test the movement in all six positions. And for a lot of brands, they send these movements off to external vendors like Kosk and Metas to get them further certified. They test and they test and they test, and then they test some more. And it's not just about batch testing. It's every single individual movement. As for decoration, it stays machined and not artisanal, but the quality just goes up. Perlage on a stock Sellita movement is nowhere near as smooth and consistent as on an Omega movement. If you can be bothered to look and you have a little loop, you will see it often. Things are just sharper, more crisp, more refined. It's the difference between the plating of your meal at a decent restaurant versus a really good restaurant. A little more time has just been spent on making it look good. And then we get to $10,000 and up. This is where things go bonkers. Here, you are paying for artistry in decoration, artistry in engineering. The Glashütte panel model, which is around $13,000, has a hand engraved double swan neck regulator. Now don't worry, you don't need to know what that is. All you need to know is that some dude sat with a teeny tiny chisel type tool and handed that. Englache, which is the beveled edges, they aren't done by the machine anymore. Now someone has done that by hand. And yes, you can tell, especially where the edges meet. You get black polished screws. This is a really rare technique and you're not gonna see it at $10,000, but it involves taking a single component, like a screw or a bridge, and polishing it until it reflects entirely black or entirely white, depending on the angle of light. It's a literal perfect polish and it's ridiculously slow going work. Now you won't get all of these things at $10,000, mind you. At 10K, some of these detail techniques start to show up here and there. But if you want it throughout the movement, then you are paying a whole lot more. Hand hammering, guilloche, engraving, the Breguet 7225, the amount of aesthetic detail that goes into a movement like that is so ridiculously time-consuming. It's literally ridiculous. The Geneva Seal is basically a standard for finishing and decoration of movements and other things that a number of high-end brands adhere to. But to assume that it's only aesthetic would be wrong. AP did a special one-off R&D chronograph movement last year where one of the things they wanted to achieve was an instant-click chronograph pusher. So if you've used chronograph pushers, some are squishy, some require a lot of force. AP just thought, how do we do a soft touch button? Breguet, they wanted to make a 10 hertz movement with plus minus one second of accuracy range per day. There are all sorts of innovations and engineering decisions in that movement that are entirely pointless in practical day-to-day use. But they are like the party trick of a Rolls-Royce engine. And I'm sure you've heard of the story. They open up the bonnet and then they place a cup of water on top of the engine. Then they turn the engine on and not a drop of the water is spilled. The smoothness of that Rolls-Royce engine is bragging rights. But at this price point, that's worth it to somebody. The higher the price goes, the crazier the innovations get. Richard Mille are, in my opinion, almost universally the ugliest watches out there. They are in contention with Jacob & Co for sure, but Richard Mille throw money at those weird movement features. Thinness, shock resistance, all that kind of stuff. A thing that's also really underappreciated is all the custom tooling that goes into highly complex movement production. It's just a whole other level of complexity and a whole other level of cost. So where does that leave you as a consumer? Well, if all you care about is reasonable accuracy and reliability to 90% of what you can get, then don't spend more than $500. You have to remember that from 40 hours power reserve to 80 hours power reserve, that's a 2x improvement. Your Chinese watch to a Rolex is 20 times more expensive, not just two times more expensive. Now, obviously the accuracy from 60 seconds deviance to four seconds deviance is bigger, but for a lot of people, that's just not that important. But if you want to guarantee that your watch is as accurate as a mechanical watch can be, then you need to go up to at least the high end of $2,500. And if you want the best of the best, moving from 98% to 99%, you need to go somewhere around four to $10,000. It's down to how much those things mean to you. If you want something where someone had aesthetic considerations about the movement, you have to start around $2,500. If you want something that is just ridiculously beautiful in every way thinkable, then you're paying tens of thousands of dollars. Movements rarely just become the same movement just in gold. As price goes up, those little marvels get better. It's just a question of whether or not you personally value what goes into them. For me, gold and diamonds don't get me to pull out my credit card. But for me, when I turn over the case of the Breguet 7225, or admire the free-floating Parmigiani logo of the Rota Ornatondo Chronograph Mysterios, then, unfortunately, more and more, I'm willing to pay for that. If I had all the money in the world, I would spend it on the best movements visually, but also where the brand has produced something technically impressive. I really admire that quest for the extreme. Not just the good, but the chasing of that last 1%. That's what gets me more and more these days. So where's value for you? Share in the comments, like, subscribe. Cheers.