Think about when the last time you used a wall clock or even a public clock pole/tower or something. My brain doesn’t even register them anymore, I just look at my phone and reset brain to whatever magic hand box says.
To think there used to be a time where you had to physically go outside and look at a clock tower if you wanted accurate ish local time
edit: hourly workers who live by the time card, disregard this post
Watches: Am I a joke to you?
Yes because it is a reproduction, with much error, of your phone time for the vast majority of watch owners.
I have a bunch of mechanical watches that are varying degrees of inaccurate by their nature, but I do have one that isn’t inaccurate at all. A square Gshock that uses six band radio towers to update itself nightly. Just as accurate as a phone, and I use it as my reference to set my mechanical watches.
So there’s at least that alternative. Silly I know, because I’ve always got my phone close by, but I just think they’re neat.
And what time do you use to set your watch?
Maybe reread my comment? The Gshock watch sets itself daily to the atomic clock via radio broadcast. I use that watch as my reference to set the others when they’re a little off.
Edit: here’s the link from Casio explaining the technology https://gshock.casio.com/intl/technology/radio/
They use that guy’s phone to set the atomic clock though, checkmate atheist
What error are we talking about here?
I don’t think most people have a seconds clock up on their phone when they set their watch to their phone time (also meaning OP is correct that phone time is base time for people).
That means they aren’t syncing the seconds hand and there is ± 60 seconds of error. Also probably some error in ± 1 minute of hand placement error, especially for small watch faces, plus mechanical timing error for all but the high end mechanical watches. There are tons of sources of error. NTP time is accurate to the 10s of milliseconds, so around 3 orders of magnitude difference for most people.