The Apple Watch just got announced on Apple’s latest keynote as the “One more thing…”-product. It seems pretty impressive, but I wondered why it shows 10:09 all the time. Well, here’s the answer!
First, there is a myth that it is to commemorate the deaths or assassination of Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and/or Martin Luther King Jr. In short: This is not true. Lincoln was shot at 10:15 p.m., JFK at 12:30 p.m. and MLK shot at 6:01 p.m.
Actually, it comes from a very old and still practiced habit: Aestetics. The 10:10 position has a few benefits:
- The hands are not overlapping, so they’re fully and clearly visible and their styling can be looked at and admired
- The arrangement of the hands is symmetrical, which is more liked by most people than asymmetry, making the product more appealing to customers
- The logo of a watch is normally placed below the 12, where the hands of the watch would create a nice frame for it
- Other parts of the watch, like the date windows or secondary dials (stopwatch) which are mostly positioned at the 3, 6 or 9, will be clearly visible
- Timex, a producer of watches, says that the standard setting used to be 8:20, but this made it look like the watch was frowning. Timex puts their watches at 10:09:36 exactly.
So, none of these reasons apply to the Apple Watch of course, because it’s a digital device with no standard clock face, but this seems like a small easteregg added by Apple to all their images and videos. Maybe as a kind of honour to the old, mechanical watches which will soon become obsolete if it’s up to the tech firms. We will never know for sure, but it is clear that Apple is just continuing an old practice.
