For my birthday this year my girlfriend bought me a pocket watch. It wasn’t one of these Quartz-timed electronic numbers, it was a full-fledged mechanical model. It’s quite a beautiful artifact, and I’ve started to carry it everywhere I go. The mechanism is a stunning piece of engineering, the construction of which I find astonishing, even if the technology was invented several hundred years ago.

This isn’t about the technology though, it’s about one element of the design I find remarkable: this watch is the easiest and fastest to set of any watch or clock I’ve ever had.

Here are the instructions to set the watch:

1. Pull out the crown on the stem of the watch.
2. Turn the stem until the watch reads the right time.
3. Push the stem back in.

That’s it. It’s easy to learn and fast to do.

Compare those with instructions I found online for setting the time on a much more complex digital watch:

1. Select TIME mode by pressing the MODE button (repeatedly if necessary).
2. When your watch is in the TIME mode, press and hold the ADJUST button for two seconds. This will cause the Hour to begin flashing.
3. Use the FORWARD or REVERSE buttons to select the Hour. PLEASE MIND THE “A” OR THE “P” IN THE LOWER LEFT CORNER INDICATING AM AND PM.
4. Press MODE button to record the Hour and move on to Minutes.
5. Press the FORWARD or REVERSE buttons to select the Minutes.
6. Press MODE button to record the Minutes, and move on to Seconds.
7. Repeat these steps to set the seconds, year, month, and date. The watch automatically calculates the day of week.
8. Press ADJUST at any time to accept your changes and return to TIME mode.

I’m not trying to say that digital watches are inferior in design to analog ones. They offer much more functionality, and with those functions comes complexity. I am saying, however, that this one function of the watch is considerably slower and more complicated on the newer and “sleeker” model.

The lesson here, if there needs to be a lesson, is that newer design is not necessarily better than old, despite the sense we might have of progress moving constantly upwards.