Spring Drives are pretty rare outside of Japan. Most mechanical watches today tick 8 times a second. On a small watch it's pretty smooth to me.

The balance wheel oscillates at 8 beats per second, but it requires 2 beats to complete a full second "tick", so most modern mechanical watches actually tick at 4 times per second.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_wheel#Period_of_oscilla...

It is 8 ticks per second. Look at this video of the hand up close (it's a 28800 bph movement):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxgahvNH3q0

It's a bummer that video plays at 30fps. This is a case where 60 (does YouTube do higher framerates?) would pay off.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9344766 ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7ZmyWO-QU8

> The guy has probably never heard of the Seiko Spring Drive

Gruber is the unpaid wing of Apple's PR team. I doubt he cares.