The one in my car runs slow and the one at work(plugged in) runs fast. My oven and microwave seem to stay accurate. Why do we have bad clocks?
In: 4
Because you’re not paying for good clocks
Your oven is likely set off the line frequency and there are daily adjustments to that specifically to keep clocks in alignment
But for smaller electronics, its just not worth it to put in a high accuracy crystal. Would you pay an extra $10 for a plug in clock that only drifts by seconds per year? Probably not
Everything has tolerances. You can get more expensive things that have tighter tolerances but nothing is ever actually perfect
A clock that is 0.1% accurate loses 1.44 minutes per day, its not good but it is cheap. A calibrated 0.0001% accurate clock(1 ppm) only loses 30 seconds per year but requires several dollars in hardware and calibration during production.
Like most things, if you’re asking “Why does the thing i bought kinda suck”, its almost always because you and most other people are unwilling to pay significantly more for the version that doesn’t suck
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