It’s the same story as the Casio F-91W as well as the AK-47. Terrorists (or just any armed paramilitary group) who live in the back country far from common supply lines have a great need for standardized, rugged, reliable, and repairable technology. By living that life, they’re basically forced to think about these issues as a matter of survival.

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duxup an hour ago | parent [-]

Well I think the F-91 is durable, it’s probably not repaired as much as discarded as it is cheap. Disposable is likely the advantage there.

	▲	chongli 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I've read that it's quite usable as a spare part itself, in order to make a cheap and reliable time-bomb IED. It has a built-in alarm and it's apparently not too difficult to use the alarm's beeper signal to set off the bomb at an exact time of day. This would otherwise be quite difficult and time-consuming to build out of a box of off-the-shelf electronic components (not to mention a UI for setting the alarm). The fact that the watch is so ubiquitous means the paramilitaries can write and distribute a standard field manual explaining how to do this, knowing that anyone wanting to build an IED ought to be able to acquire some of the watches on their own.