[doomroot]

Because oftentimes you think in chunks of time not dates. If a meeting is in 3 hours in instantly know what kinds of things I can do before that meeting. If a meeting is at 4:45pm. I have to know the current time, calculate the difference then I can start planning my time.

[mvdtnz]

Seriously? Your complaint is that you have the extra mental overhead of having to know the time?

[johnnyanmac]

For the average person, yes.

Less trivial is taking into account time zones. if you're traveling and have some jet lag, "10:30" may not actually mean 10:30 to your biological clock. but "in one hour" is universal (even if your body is confused).

[funcDropShadow]

You know, you can dumb down stuff too much.

But if I am travelling it is even more error prone for my computer to compute the correct difference.

[0fox]

The main complaint in this thread seems to be that the chunks of time reported are misleading.

[dotnet00]

Almost every device you're viewing the web page on has the time showing in a corner (which, come to think of it, is surprising, by now I would've expected UX "people" to have ruined that too for everyone).

[sevrinsky]

This is exactly the distinction that needs to be drawn:

Relative time is only useful within the next or past few hours. For pretty much everything else, the absolute time is more informative and clear.

[watwut]

I have current time constantly on the right bottom portion of the screen. I do know the time literally any time I want to.

[loloquwowndueo]

There’s this wonderful thing called a “watch”…