On Tuesday, like the rest of the watch-wearing, iPhone-checking world, I’ll have my eye on whatever highly intelligent and highly expensive “smart” watch Apple releases, and how, if at all, it changes the world.

A number of digital companies, big and small, are targeting your wrist. These often unfortunately-designed devices have entered the marketplace with increasing frequency, with all manner of unfortunate sounding names – Martian Passport, Toq, i’m Watch – in an effort to win the war for so-called “wearables”.

However, one nagging question has been on my mind for quite some time: Why don’t people just wear, you know, a watch? A plain (or not-so-plain) mechanical watch tells the time just fine, thanks very much, without all the extra bells and whistles.

Think about it: do people really need a reminder of how many calories they’ve burned throughout the day? Of how they’ve missed their “sleep goal” consistently over the past week since they were busy being ... human? They do not.

I won’t pretend to be immune to the allure of shiny new gadgetry. Who isn’t? And for the more athletically inclined, biometric sensors can be incredibly useful tools for training regimens and, I guess, keeping track of your Rem cycle.

But there isn’t much that can be done in the “wearable device” sector to compel large swaths of people, across so many different cultures and aesthetic preferences, to somehow actually start wearing the same device. Because it’s one thing to own an iPhone; it’s another entirely to put it on your person.

I’m not saying the iWatch is going to make you into the equivalent of someone with a belt holster for your cellphone – Apple knows better than that. But choices in clothing and accessories (and even the choice not to care) will always be strong indicators of personality and preference. Outside of rigidly defined social circles (pretty much just tech-heads), I don’t think that anyone remotely interested in, you know, personal appearance will find this rumored device so universally applicable to all their outfits, moods and circumstances – even if it can be slipped under the cuff of a shirt.

This is precisely why Switzerland, home to so many mechanical watch manufactures, has nothing to fear.

You may think of mechanical watch enthusiasts and collectors as obsessive compulsive oil barons who have tons and tons of money to spend on toys. And in some cases you’d be right. But in many cases, watch lovers are just normal people with a passionate interest. And it’s a fairly democratic pursuit as well: the sheer range of vintage and modern mechanical watches on the market today is staggering for the almost endless number of options a person (on any budget) can have in choosing a personal timepiece.

There is something undeniably special about mechanical watches. Show any self-professed tech guru the inner workings of an FP Journe Resonance and the harmonious, almost poetic interplay of gears, screws and jewels will keep him up at night, sleep goals be damned. The same can’t be said about the assembly-line circuitry inside any watch you might call “smart”.

Sure, wearable devices will have their place in the market; they are inelegantly useful in the same way that a Prius is inelegantly useful. But I’m pretty sure, even as a biased watch enthusiast, that landfills will soon be beeping, buzzing and blinking, while wrists will keep on ticking.

So, being the anachronistic curmudgeon I am, I started imagining an alternative to the iWatch and its ilk – a different mechanical watch for each and every one of the tech-obsessed smart-watch lovers I know.

On my coworker with the Jawbone? I saw her wearing a tasteful vintage Rolex Day-Date. For the 9-to-5 drone? I imagined him expressing his work-a-day personality by way of a Nomos Tangente instead of that bulky Martian Passport. I thought about all these people wearing something not so predictable – about them wearing something beautiful, something personal.

Oh, and none of those watches use a battery, which means they’ll last forever. A battery powered smart watch won’t make to your newborn’s first day of pre-school. In my smart-watch-free imagination, everyone seemed happier, more alert and more attuned to their humanity. Maybe they weren’t able to calculate their ideal night’s sleep. But they were able to find a kind of beauty in that – in relinquishing a bit of control over every aspect of their lives, all the better to live ... and live well.