[Bartweiss]

It's been fascinating to see the rise, fall, and rise of digital watches among techies.

I remember 1990s Dilbert having an entire storyline about the engineers getting into a calculator-watch arms-race. In real life, it was pretty common to laugh about how a $50 digital Casio could do far more things than a Rolex.

By about 2010 (or perhaps even by the iPod Touch or Palm Pilot), I stopped hearing that. Watches had lost all of their unique functions to smartphones, so their raison d'etre was either "rugged and cheap" or "jewelry" and calculator watches almost vanished.

Circa 2015, we get Pebble gen 2, Apple Watch, and Fitbit Blaze: smart watches have phone integrations, fitness tracking, and don't look like hell anymore. Since then, they've increasingly aimed for design good enough to wear with a suit; the Galaxy Watch is always-on and analog.

These days, I see two splits among watch-wearing engineers: smartwatch vs not, and practical vs decorative. So the result is quadrants like:

Fitbit | Galaxy Watch

Casio | Longines