Is the engineering/logistics behind Mechanical watches really
costlier than Oneplus phones ?
Yes and no, right?
Altogether, there are probably orders of magnitude more engineering involved in a mobile phone. But a lot of the "hard stuff" when it comes to a OnePlus phone is not done by them: they are not running their own chip foundries, designing their own silicon, researching their own battery tech, mining their own rare earth elements for the batteries, writing their own kernel from scratch, etc.
Which is not to say I personally find a Tissot to be worth $700, relative to other watches.
But! This stuff is all just "functional jewelry" anyway; even a Rolex doesn't keep time as well as a $15 quartz Casio. Could a Tissot provide $700 of happiness to somebody else, who isn't me? Maybe! Heck, I'm not even familiar with their whole catalog, perhaps they have a bunch of watches I'd love.
It's also worth noting you can get a perfectly nice mechanical watch from Seiko or Orient for $100-$500USD. For me, that starts to approach some kind of reasonable value. Not on purely functional terms, but as something I will wear and enjoy for hundreds and possibly thousands of hours? I can't justify it on logical terms, but there are worse ways to spend disposable income. Barring disaster a watch will also work for decades, which is not likely to provide much joy to the owner beyond five years or so.
(In fact if you don't mind buying from non-authorized dealers you can actually get a Tissot for cheap as well - I've seen them for not much over $100)
Altogether, there are probably orders of magnitude more engineering involved in a mobile phone. But a lot of the "hard stuff" when it comes to a OnePlus phone is not done by them: they are not running their own chip foundries, designing their own silicon, researching their own battery tech, mining their own rare earth elements for the batteries, writing their own kernel from scratch, etc.
Which is not to say I personally find a Tissot to be worth $700, relative to other watches.
But! This stuff is all just "functional jewelry" anyway; even a Rolex doesn't keep time as well as a $15 quartz Casio. Could a Tissot provide $700 of happiness to somebody else, who isn't me? Maybe! Heck, I'm not even familiar with their whole catalog, perhaps they have a bunch of watches I'd love.
It's also worth noting you can get a perfectly nice mechanical watch from Seiko or Orient for $100-$500USD. For me, that starts to approach some kind of reasonable value. Not on purely functional terms, but as something I will wear and enjoy for hundreds and possibly thousands of hours? I can't justify it on logical terms, but there are worse ways to spend disposable income. Barring disaster a watch will also work for decades, which is not likely to provide much joy to the owner beyond five years or so.
(In fact if you don't mind buying from non-authorized dealers you can actually get a Tissot for cheap as well - I've seen them for not much over $100)