Four screws

There’s always that moment in the day when you raise your wrist to check the time. And if you’re something close to an Apple fanboy, like me, chances are what’s on that wrist is an Apple Watch — the latest generation or a few behind, because they age faster than we do. A thing I’ve loved since the very first one, which still sits in a drawer at home like a relic. And that, I suspect, is where this one is headed too.

Because right as I was making that automatic daily gesture, the screen that is supposed to be always-on didn’t come on. Fine, it didn’t catch the movement, it happens. So I tapped it. Nothing. I held the crown down and got the red circle: battery dead. About the same small dread the Blue Screen of Death used to give us back in its glory days. I didn’t think much of it. Pulled out the iPhone, checked the time, put it back in my pocket, got on with my day.

And it kept happening in the days that followed, until one afternoon I realised it was two o’clock and the battery was already gone. Fair enough, I charge it at night and keep it on my wrist while I sleep (I like what it does with sleep tracking). But a few weeks ago it still made it to six or seven in the evening, depending on how insistent the notifications had been that day. So there I was with a beautiful, extremely expensive piece of alloy and plastic that could no longer do the most elementary thing it was built for: tell me the time. Whatever it had spent that battery on, it wasn’t the time.

So one day, on a vague hope, I took it off to see whether I could change the battery myself. I turned it over. And there it was — the thing I already knew: these things don’t have screws. And yes, the Apple Watch is basically a computer, and a computer that sits on your wrist has to be sealed. It reads your heart. It calls an ambulance if you fall. It’s waterproof, it’s small. It taps me when an email arrives. It congratulates me for standing up. It does everything except the thing you put it on your wrist for.

The screw I was looking for wasn’t there, and that’s the point. A screw is a statement of intent: whoever puts one in expects you to open it. Sure, some of them put a warranty sticker over the screw, or hide it under a rubber foot. But that still isn’t a no. Glue is. Not a prohibition — it just stops asking you in.

It isn’t just this watch, and it isn’t just Apple. Opening things now takes tools, some of them expensive, a level of skill that keeps going up, and the willingness to ruin something you paid a lot for. And half the time you get it open only to close it again: what’s inside is soldered to itself, and the repair lives in a laboratory. So you don’t. So you never find out.

One of the first watches I ever owned was the Casio F-91W. You opened it with four crosshead screws; and maybe it was exactly that easy, because as a kid I opened mine over and over to see how it worked, until one day it didn’t go back together. One CR2016 cell, and it ran for seven years — none of it spent on anything but the time. With the Casio you had exactly one certainty: you wanted the time, you got the time. It never wanted anything back.

And it isn’t just me remembering it better than it was. The thing is still being made and widely sold, thirty-seven years later, and it hasn’t changed: same shape, same buttons, same four screws in the back. You can buy a new one this afternoon for about the price of a pizza and a beer.

Maybe this is just what getting older sounds like. But I’m not nostalgic for worse technology. Somewhere along the way the thing that told me the time became the thing that tells me everything. Nobody asked me anything; it just settled in, the way these things do. What I miss is being treated as someone who might want to look inside, and that goes for a lot more than watches.

In that drawer there’s a beautiful piece of obsolete technology, and it will have company soon enough. Last week I bought an F-91W, and it’s on my wrist. In seven years the cell will run out, and there will be four screws waiting for me.