Mechanical Apple Watch

Mechanical watches aren’t just timepieces: they’re miniature works of art, engineering marvels. They don’t run out of battery power and, if you look after them, they can last for decades. This author has a cheap pocket-watch made to the famously high manufacturing standards of the late USSR, and it’s still functioning to this day.

The natural thing to do with an old, useless Apple Watch then, is to replace its obsolete electronics, unsupported software, and drained battery with a mechanism that’ll tell the time without constantly annoying you with updates from social media. That’s what Jack Spiggle has done with this build, augmenting a 42 mm Apple Watch Series 1 in stainless steel with a Seiko NH38 watch movement. Jack’s donor watch had been unsupported by Apple since 2020, and the battery life was down to just four hours – he’s rescued it from the scrap-heap and put it to brilliant use.