Why Every Watch Collector Owns a Casio F-91W (2026). 13 minutes.
My first proper watch was an Omega Speedmaster Professional, which is around £7,000 used. My second was a Casio F-91W, which is £15. I bought two of those, and I only still own one. The contrast is not an accident, it is most of the point.
Forty years without a single design change
The F-91W came out in 1989, which makes it two years younger than me and coming up on forty years old. In all that time the design has not changed once. Try to name another product you use where that is true. That is what iconic actually means, and it is why it turns up everywhere from Stranger Things to a fairly famous photograph of Barack Obama.
The numbers are the part people do not believe. Rolex sells somewhere around a million watches a year. Casio shifts roughly three million F-91Ws a year, and has sold over 100 million of them. If you take the Apple Watch out of the conversation, this is the most sold watch in the world, and it costs less than lunch.
23 grams, and the freedom that comes with it
It weighs 23 grams. You forget it is there, which sounds like a small thing and is not. It is quartz, so there is nothing to wind and no complications to reset. It goes in the watch box, comes out when I want it, goes back. It is water resistant to about 30 metres, which covers everything short of deliberately swimming in it.
The real feature is psychological. When you wear a nice watch you cannot help worrying about it. You catch yourself buffing it with your shirt sleeve, and every time you hear it clip a door frame your heart drops slightly. Maybe that is a me problem. The Casio removes it entirely. If it gets scuffed, cracked or smashed, it is £15. Watches are meant to be worn, and anyone telling you they are an investment should be ignored, but this is the one where you genuinely stop thinking about it.
The hourly chime is the feature I did not expect to care about
It beeps on the hour, very quietly. I thought that would annoy me. Instead it has turned into the thing I value most about wearing it, because it keeps pulling me back into the day. It goes off, I notice it is five o’clock, and I work out what actually needs finishing by seven. I lose track of time constantly. This is the cheapest fix for that I have found.
The stopwatch earns its place too. I used it to time the three hour window between Luna’s feeds while I was walking round the Trafford Centre looking at watches, which is a fairly good summary of my year.
How to check yours is real
At £15 you would assume nobody bothers counterfeiting it. They do. Casio built in a check: hold the bottom right button for between three and five seconds and the screen spells out CASIO. That is the authentication. It is a strange thing to need on a watch this cheap, but in markets where £15 is genuinely significant money, the fakes exist.
The three criticisms, and whether they hold
People say it is too small. On a smaller wrist it is fine, and on mine it simply disappears, which I like. I own chunky watches too and enjoy those for different reasons, so this has never bothered me.
People say the light is useless. It is a tiny glow from the top left corner that barely reaches the display. The flip side is that it does not light up your whole face, which is exactly why it has a following among people who need to check the time without announcing themselves.
People say you cannot replace the strap. You cannot, it is not designed to be replaced. This is the same strap the watch shipped with in 1989 and I have no interest in changing it.
Why mine stopped being a £15 watch
Around the start of July, Luna met her grandma for the first time. We stayed with my mum’s friend, who has two boys, and one of them is mad about anything Japanese. So I bought two F-91Ws, one for him and one for me, and I did not open mine until I got there so we could open them together. I told him the history, the Japanese engineering, the fact that it is the most sold watch in the world once you set the Apple Watch aside.
Then we set a target together. If he hits it, he gets another watch, and the bigger the target the better the watch. Because that is the one I was wearing the day my mum met my daughter, it is now not really a £15 watch any more. That is the part of collecting I did not see coming, and it cannot be bought back at any price.
Building something related. This one went straight into Pulso, the watch collection tracker I am building. Type a watch’s name and it researches the reference, the photo and the live price, then keeps it current. Have a look at Pulso.
If you have arrived here from the other direction and are wondering why someone leaves a smartwatch at all, that is the twelve years of Apple Watches story. And if it is the fitness tracking holding you back, here is the setup that replaced mine.
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Full transcript
Lightly edited from the auto captions for readability.
The Casio F-91W. This is a watch that watch collectors with watches that are over £10,000 or more, £20,000 of value, still own. I bought two of them. I still own one. I want to tell you a little bit about the Casio F-91W, why I think it is such a great watch for a collector, why I purchased two, what happened to the other, and also why, when I am moving away from wearing and using an Apple Watch every single day, I feel like this is the absolute best watch for you to buy.
It is quite the contrast, isn’t it? Going from owning an Apple Watch Ultra, which you can see in my previous video, and wearing a Whoop, to replacing my Apple Watch Ultra, first purchase being the Omega Speedmaster Professional, which is a watch that buying used is around £7,000, and then my second watch that I purchased is this Casio F-91W, which is about £15 here in the UK.
First of all, let us start with why this is a great watch. At 23 grams this is a very light watch, and that is incredibly practical. The fact that it is a digital watch also means I do not have to wind it, I do not have to change the complications, the date, the time, none of that. I can just put it into my watch box, and when I want to use it, take it out, put it on, and when I am finished with it, put it away.
The first thing I will say about it is that it is a really iconic watch, and that is one of the things that really drew me to it. When I started collecting watches and decided to go down this journey, I really wanted to do some research on what watches are incredibly iconic at affordable prices, as well as the more expensive prices. What makes this watch incredibly iconic is that it came out in 1989, coming up to forty years ago. It is two years younger than me. When the watch came out it really made quite an impact.
What is amazing about this, and what makes a design iconic, is the fact that in the almost forty years of its existence the design has not changed once. Can you think of a product that you own right now that you use every day where, since it was launched, that design has not changed? That is iconic status. In fact it is so iconic you can find it in really pop culture TV shows like Stranger Things, and if you watch any movies or TV shows back in the nineties, this again was shown everywhere. If you go on Google you can find this really iconic photo of Barack Obama wearing one of these watches. You can also find one of Osama bin Laden wearing exactly the same watch. Needless to say, it is an incredibly iconic piece.
One of the things I really love about it, and one of the reasons I got into this watch once I understood its history and heritage, which is something that is becoming incredibly important to me as I collect watches, is the fact that it is incredibly affordable at £15. Which means that if something happens to it, if it gets scuffed, if it gets cracked, if it gets smashed, it is okay, you can buy another one. It gives you a sense of freedom. When you wear a nice watch, if you own one, you know what I mean. You cannot help but worry that you have scratched it, and maybe this is a me thing, but you are constantly getting your shirt and giving it a little clean to keep it nice. You take a certain level of pride, and any time you hear it make a ding, your heart drops a little bit. Watches are designed to be worn, you should not worry about it, and anybody who tells you watches are for investments, do not listen to them. But you want to keep it in really great condition, whereas this presents a level of freedom where you do not have to worry about that.
It is also incredibly practical. Because it is quartz it is water resistant, for about 30 metres, and it weighs in at around 23 grams, which is incredibly light. For some people they may feel the watch is a bit small for them, or a bit small on their wrist.
It is also quite practical. I had to time something and I needed to see exactly how many minutes had passed. I think it was between feeds for Luna. So I just went into the stopwatch, pressed start, and started the clock, so I could keep an eye on when the three hour window had elapsed, because I popped to the shopping centre, to the Trafford Centre, to have a look at watches, but I needed to keep an eye on when the three hours had elapsed because I needed to feed Luna again. So the stopwatch is really useful. What is also really good when you move into the world of mechanical watches and away from something like an Apple Watch is that I can see the day. I cannot tell you how much I value that. The date, the time.
There is a feature I really like, and if you feel the same way about this I would love to hear from you in the comments, and it is the fact that it chimes every hour. It is incredibly subtle how it does it, and it makes me feel a bit more present. It is like, right, another hour has elapsed, what hour is it? Quite often I look at the time and I have lost track. That makes me regain track of time. I recentre. It is five o’clock, right, what do I need to get done by seven? Just that one thing for me is incredibly valuable.
Unbelievably, at the price that it is, you would think nobody is going to try and replicate this or copy this when you can buy it for £15, but they do. Because Rolex every year sells around a million watches. The Casio F-91W, you are looking at three million a year. They have sold over 100 million of these, so they are very popular. So what Casio did is build into the watch that if you hold the bottom right button for between three to five seconds, you will see the screen then starts saying the word Casio, and that authenticates that this is a legitimate and authentic watch. Although I do not know who would spend £10. I guess for a country where £15 is actually quite a lot of money, and they can make it even cheaper and sell them in those countries, I understand. But there is something about the fact that this is an actual Casio watch.
This opened up a world where I now have my most worn weekend watch, which I will share in a future video, and it opened up the world of Casio as a whole, that I saw in a very different way to how I had previously. You have got Casio on one hand and Citizen on another. Both of them make incredible watches. So if you are considering getting into this hobby, or you are already in this hobby and thinking about what would make a great watch to have in your collection, the Casio F-91W holds a bit of that.
The other thing I like about watches is the meaning you can give to them. Around the start of July it was time for Luna to meet her grandma for the very first time, and I stayed with my mum’s friend who has two boys. One of the boys is mad about anything Japanese. So I decided I was going to buy him a gift, which is a Casio F-91W, one for him and one for me, and I did not want to open mine until I got there so we could open it together. I told them about the Japanese history behind Casio, behind this watch, how if you take the Apple Watch out it is the most sold watch in the world, and for a reason. We both opened it together, and there and then I told him, let us set a goal, let us set a target together for you as an individual, and if you achieve that target you will get another watch at that stage, and the higher the target the more special the watch. Because this is the watch that I purchased, took with me, and wore for the first time when my mum met Luna, it now holds a special meaning to me. That is something that really cannot be replaced.
There are a couple of negatives that people do speak about and I want to address those. Number one, as I mentioned earlier, some people think it is quite small. If you have got a smaller wrist this is perfectly fine, but what I find really good about it is that you just forget you are wearing it, so it is not a big deal for me. I can wear bigger watches if I want to, and I actually do like wearing chunky watches. The next thing is the light. When it is dark and you put on the light, it is a tiny little light that comes from the top left hand corner that just about shows you the time on the screen. It is not illuminating the entire display. However, the counter to that is that you are not over illuminating yourself, and I think for a lot of people who work in special forces that is actually a tactical reason why they also own this watch. And lastly, it is not a strap that you can easily replace. It is designed not to be replaced. Again, I do not have an issue with that. This is the exact design of the strap as it came out in 1989. I have no desire to change it.
The F-91W comes in a whole ton of colours, so you can get orange, white, blue. I have seen on Reddit some people that have an entire case of watches just of F-91Ws. It has such a cult following that you can find an entire subreddit just for the Casio F-91W. So I think this is a really great watch for you to consider, and there is a reason that whether you own a watch collection with watches that are five or six figures in value, you would still own at least one of these, because it belongs in the iconic status of watches.
I added this watch into my app that I am building right now called Pulso, and that allows me to track all the watches that I own, the ones I have last worn, and it lets me set the time because I get a nice clock inside there. You can find out more about Pulso and go and check it out for yourself. It is an app I have been building that I am really passionate about.
I want to wrap up with this. One of the comments I got in my last video is that people talked about the value of having the Apple Watch to track their fitness. Totally fair, I get it, which is why my next video is going to be exactly that, how I tracked my fitness journey and how I lost around 23 kilos of weight over a six month period. It is actually probably faster than that, but I have been really getting into exercise at home, so it is not just about losing weight, I am now through the recomposition phase. I will tell you a lot more about that in that video, and how I tracked it, what technology I used to do that, including what the fitness device was, what the watch was that I wore at the time, and why that was important to me.
I just want to remind you that this channel has just been relaunched. We have done one video so far and I am going to cover multiple things. Yes, my passion for watches, but also the weight loss journey I went on, which I feel was transformational for me. I am not really looking to pick a niche right now, I am just looking to share content that I have found value in. I also love building things with AI. Pulso I built purely inside of Claude Code, so if you are interested in videos like that too, I am totally happy to do so, although you can find out a lot about what I have done and how I built it in my build log on my website at yeison.co.uk.
I reply to every single comment that you have left. I am so grateful for all your messages and support. At the time of recording this video we are almost at 10,000 views for the last video, shot only a week ago, which is just unbelievable. I jinxed myself in a positive way by saying that the last video may only get 100 views, and it did not, it got quite a bit more than that. I do not know how many people are going to watch this Casio F-91W video. I am going to be really surprised if it is even half the amount as the last one, and that is okay. If even five of you, two of you, one of you watches this video and finds value in it, that is amazing.
Thank you so much for being part of this journey. I am making this up as I go along and I am trying to be as authentic and natural and true as I can be. Ciao.
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