Some of the movements of the higher end Seiko's and Citizens have power reserves in the 1 year and more category and are all solar powered. The first watch I posted has a 1-1.5 year power reserve fully charged. I much prefer that, because time is kept even if I don't wear it for months. No winding needed. no needing to set the time OR date, just press a button and it syncs to within a second of the Atomic time. And that time is kept very accurate as it is quartz, and on top of that synced via GPS or radio waves to the Atomic time. I think that is far superior to any automatic watch.
That being said I respect the craftmanship in an automatic and I will buy one some someday as I do like many of the models from the higher end watchmakers, and they are all automatics. But as far as keeping time convenience, give me a high end solar powered GPS or radio watch any day of the week and twice on Sundays.
The thing is, how accurate do you need it to be? Yeah, I have to adjust the date every other month so as long as it only loses 30 seconds or so during that time it doesn’t bother me. There are some complications that have an annual calendar, which also interests me.
I just checked my watch with hodinkee and it is off by 4 seconds. I don’t remember the last time I checked it either but it has been a couple weeks. I never have to wind it because I rarely take it off. It has a 48 hour power reserve though so I could take it off every night and it would still keep working.
I had a clock that was supposed to synchronize itself to the atomic clock but it never worked right. I would set it and a few hours later it adjusted itself to some other time zone so it was off by a few hours. I never could get that clock to work right. I finally threw it in the trash. I have a small battery powered analog alarm clock, it even has a sweeping second hand but I don’t think it has anything to do with the timekeeping of the clock. It is a quartz movement.
I have a key wound mantle clock, that took some adjusting to get it to be fairly accurate, to within a minute a week, which is about how often I need to wind it. It takes some devotion to keep it running but I enjoy that and it is a beautiful time piece. It chimes every quarter hour, I have it set to Westminster chimes, it is completely mechanical.
I have one of those Citizen watches that is solar powered. It stops after a certain amount of time but seems to work fine once I set it and start wearing it, which I haven’t done in years.
Yeah, I have a cell phone, and it tells the time but I don’t always have it with me and I’ve gotten used to having a watch. Those smart watches don’t interest me either. What’s the point of a watch you have to plug in every night? To me, those devices make less sense than a phone.
My fascination with mechanical timekeeping probably isn’t typical of most people, I’ll admit that. I think it stems in part from my grandfather on my dads side. He had a number of mechanical clocks, a few mantle clocks, a grandfather clock and a cuckoo clock. They always seemed to chime at various times or not at all, I guess he wasn’t that devoted to keeping them all running or all that accurate, at least not later in life. It always fascinated me as a child. I have one of his mantle clocks but I don’t wind it. I did for a while but when we bought the wall clock I stopped using the mantle clock. Maybe if I find another place in the house for it I’ll start using it again.