They prey on nostalgia, but the rugged aspect also speaks to me.
Casio watches, Nokia cellphones (formerly, now Huawei or Xiaomi), Thinkpad latops and Panasonic Toughbooks - if you have one, you are likely to have one of the others.
Looks like people are getting defined by their lifestyle. (I guess Rolex and Apple would be on the other end of the spectrum)
Casio's g-shock watches are pretty strong but their other watches, particularly the cheaper ones, are very much not rugged in my experience. Perhaps they were in the past relative to other inexpensive watches, but they seem capable, but not particularly rugid in my experience.
Granted that's a given for the price, but I wouldn't associate all Casio watches with rugged necessarily.
The nostalgia, I get that, I bought an old f-91w out of nostalgia recently if only because I wore it 30 years ago ;)
I have a Thinkpad and a featurephone, but I specifically dislike Casio's insistence on big, chunky, over-featured watches. I wish they'd go back to making the kind of watch they made in the 90s.
The one I had had an 8 year battery life, time/date alarms, timer, stopwatch, back/forward buttons. 30 phone number storage, heh. Nothing else. The only thing it was missing and could have used was a backlight.
Many of their newer watches also have this awful thing where if you hold own one of the buttons for a few seconds, it does a DST transition. Which is terrible, because suddenly your watch is off by an hour.
Timex Ironman might fit your needs. You can disable some features that you don't want. Indiglo backlight is excellent. They are cheap ($35) but not always durable
Good point. FWIW in 1966, when I was 18 years old and a freshman in college, my first girlfriend happened. We broke up in the spring of that first year. I was heartbroken. I thought, that's it, I'll never fall in love again or meet anyone as wonderful. I decided that since I wouldn't need money for dates and such any more, I might as well use the money I would have spent on going out and buy something nice to distract myself from my misery. I took a bus to Beverly Hills (I was at UCLA on scholarship) and went to a jewelry store that carried Rolex and bought a beautiful new stainless steel Oyster Perpetual Datejust with a Jubilee bracelet. It cost $250. I loved it for about six months, it indeed distracted me for a while as intended. Then I gradually tired of its weight and retired it to a drawer. I sold it (in excellent condition) in the spring of 1969 to help raise money for a post-graduation Europe trip with a new girlfriend. The pawn shop gave me $50 for it and I was fine with that. I just checked StockX and saw they now sell there used for about $3,500.
An entry-level Rolex costs about $5000, or 5x the price of an iPhone Xs. That iPhone will be a worthless piece of e-waste after five years or so when it stops receiving iOS updates. With regular servicing, your old Rolex will make a handsome graduation gift for your great-great-great-grandson. The Rolex might be more expensive, but I think it's something of a bargain.
The Let's Note series being very conservative with I/O, with optical drives and analog VGA output, speaks volumes both about how pragmatic they are and also how painfully slow the average Japanese business scene changes in regards to tech (what with the persistence of fax machines and all...) :/
I wear one too, one of perhaps 25 I've owned since it came out in 1989. I have 7 or 8 of them scattered around my house. I love the fact that the one you buy today is identical to the first one. Very few products go 30 years unchanged.
I have a G-Shock which syncs with the atomic clock. It is the best watch for international travel -- you will always know the correct time anywhere without any tweaking. It is a Casio -- so it does not attract the wrong kind of attention.
Casio watches, Nokia cellphones (formerly, now Huawei or Xiaomi), Thinkpad latops and Panasonic Toughbooks - if you have one, you are likely to have one of the others.
Looks like people are getting defined by their lifestyle. (I guess Rolex and Apple would be on the other end of the spectrum)