The new Casio Vintage is here to track your steps while pretending it's 1988

For a long time, strapping a Casio Vintage to your wrist was a quiet declaration of independence. It was the horological equivalent of buying a flip phone. You wore it to signal to the world that you were not the sort of person who needed to read emails on your forearm, and that you possessed an enviable, zen-like immunity to the closing of digital rings. The appeal was the sheer, unadulterated absence of features. When the new A140WE series finally arrived in the US on June 27, it delivered exactly this promise: a 39mm resin case, a stainless steel bracelet, an EL backlight, and a gloriously stupid seven-year battery. It tells the time. It lights up in the dark. That is the end of the transaction.

But purity is a hard thing to maintain when you have an audience of modern neurotics to cater to. We claim we want the simple life of the late eighties, but we also want to know exactly how many steps we took while walking to the artisanal bakery.

Enter the inevitable compromise. Casio is now expanding its ABL-100 Vintage series—including the incoming navy dial ABL-100WE-2A—by hollowing out the retro shell and stuffing it with a step tracker and Bluetooth. It is a very funny sleight of hand. The exterior remains fiercely, defensively analogue in its digital aesthetic. It still looks like the watch your secondary school maths teacher wore to invigilate exams. But inside, it is quietly talking to your iPhone.

There is something darkly amusing about paying for the privilege of stealth connectivity. The gold-tone A140WEG-9A runs you $130 for the pure, unbothered retro experience, and $110 will get you the standard navy or gray. But the ABL-100 expansion represents where we actually are as a culture: desperate for the aesthetic of disconnection, but completely unable to endure the reality of it. We want to look like people who don't care about their daily step count, which requires a highly specific accessory that secretly counts our steps.

It is, in fairness, the perfect accessory for our current flavour of hypocrisy. You get to maintain the aura of someone who calculates tips in their head and leaves their phone in the other room, all while your wrist quietly logs your physical activity to a cloud server. The battery might not last seven years when it's constantly hunting for a Bluetooth signal, but that is a small price to pay for a watch that lets you lie to everyone, including yourself.