Short Answer:

The Present is a silent, battery-powered annual timepiece that completes one full revolution every 365.24 days.

Long Answer:

The Present is a single-hand “annual clock” created to reveal time at the speed of nature; slow, consistent, steady, and without noise.

Instead of dividing life into seconds and minutes, it displays the entire year as one continuous circle.

You glance at it and immediately sense where you are in the arc of the year, which reframes your experience of the present moment itself.

It’s not a gadget or a smart device. It’s a handcrafted, long-lasting time instrument made in Vermont.

Longer Answer:

The Present is a time instrument designed to change your relationship with time itself.

On the surface, it’s simple: a circular face, a single hand, a smooth gradient that represents the cycle of a year.

Behind that simplicity is an intentional choice: to step back from the demands of the industrial clock—seconds, minutes, hours—and return to the largest natural rhythm we live inside every day: the year.

Traditional clocks answer one question: “What time is it?”

The Present is interested in a different question: “What is time?”

Instead of racing around the dial every 12 hours, the hand on The Present makes one complete revolution every 365.24 days—the same period as Earth’s orbit around the sun.

That means every position on the face corresponds to a real point in the year: solstices, equinoxes, the long slope of summer, the gathering quiet of winter at all the right angles of the clock face.

This is not a gadget. It doesn’t ping, buzz, or sync. There’s no app, no Wi-Fi, no settings menu.

It’s a physical anchor on your wall that gently reminds you that you’re moving through something larger than your inbox or your to-do list.

People use The Present in different ways:

• Some treat it as a quiet companion in their living room or studio, a visual sense of the year’s “weather.”

• Some hang it near a work desk to keep their ambitions in perspective.

• Some treat it almost like a secular liturgical object—something that gives shape to the intangible feeling of time passing, without any dogma attached.

• Some say it's the most dynamic conversation piece possible, others have called it the ultimate perspective provider.

• Most long-term owners who participated in a research survey by the University of Edinburgh in 2024 shared that they cannot imagine living without it.

What unites all of these uses is a simple shift: from fragmented, industrial time to a continuous, cyclical sense of time.

The Present doesn’t tell you when to arrive. It reminds you that you’re already here.

Short Answer:

It’s engineered from the ground up to run for an incredibly long time on the included lithium batteries.

Long Answer:

You won't believe us but on paper, the movement inside The Present is efficient enough to run for nearly three centuries on the two Energizer L91 lithium AA batteries it ships with.

In practice, battery chemistry and real-world conditions introduce uncertainty, so our most conservative claim is that you will never have to change the batteries.

Longer Answer:

This may sound outrageous at first, so it’s worth unpacking what it actually means and why we’re comfortable stating it.

The ultra-short version is this:

• The electronics inside The Present draw so little power that, mathematically, they could run for well over 290 years on the pair of high-quality lithium AA batteries pre-installed before it ships.
• The batteries themselves slowly lose capacity just by existing—this is called self-discharge—but even that loss is very slow.
• When you combine those two facts, you end up with a system where the batteries age out before the movement drains them.

Here’s a more intuitive way to think about it:

Most devices you own are wasteful with power. Screens, radios, Wi-Fi chips, and constant microcontroller activity all add up to a high, continuous draw. That’s why phones and laptops live on chargers.

The Present does almost the exact opposite:

• The microcontroller is asleep almost all the time, drawing less than a microamp (a millionth of an amp).
• It only wakes up briefly when the RTC chip says, “It’s time to move the hand forward.”
• That brief wake-up pulls a small pulse of current to drive the motor, then everything goes quiet again.

When you run the math on those pulses plus the tiny idle draw over an entire year, the total energy used is less than the batteries discharge rate.

Meaning, the batteries will lose energy faster from sitting on the shelf than operating The Present.

What this means in practice is that by 2045, the batteries will have lost 5% of their power almost completely from simply existing.

Now layer in the batteries:

• The Present ships with Energizer L91 lithium AA cells—a premium battery chemistry chosen precisely because it has extremely low self-discharge and a vanishingly small leakage rate.
• Independent testing and manufacturer data both show that these batteries retain most of their capacity over decades, especially at room temperature, and are far, far less likely to leak (0.01%) than standard alkaline batteries.

If you start with a typical 3,000 mAh rating and model the clock’s actual draw, you end up with a theoretical runtime in the hundreds of years.

Even if you deliberately underestimate the batteries’ capacity (for example, starting at 2,600 mAh) and overestimate the clock’s draw, you still land around 290 years.

So why not advertise “300 years”?

Because batteries, environments, and real human life are messy.

Temperatures vary. Humidity exists. People move houses. Accidents happen. At that time scale, the unknowns matter more than the math.

That’s why we say this:

On paper, the movement could run for well beyond a century on its original batteries.

In other words: if nothing interferes, the clock doesn’t “run out” in your lifetime. It just keeps tracing the year, long after your other devices have been recycled.

You don't have to.

The Present is set in the studio by the founder, Scott Thrift, during assembly.

It will arrive already on. All you have to do is install it securely with the included hardware.

If for some reason you need to alter the hand position, it can be moved by way of a manual blue wheel located behind the magnetized backplate.

Hours are irrelevant at the scale of the year.

Time as we know it now, the time that was handed down to us, is ubiquitous.

This ubiquity opens the door for new ways of seeing, thinking about, and experiencing time.

And so here we are.

Short Answer:

A custom movement advances the hand in tiny steps so that it completes exactly one revolution per year.

Long Answer:

Inside The Present is a custom, ultra-low-power timing mechanism built specifically for this timepiece. A temperature-compensated clock chip keeps very accurate time.

Every few hours, it wakes a small motor, moves the hand forward by 1/3600th of a circle, and then goes back to sleep.

You never see or hear it move, but over 365.24 days, those tiny steps add up to one full revolution.

There’s no Wi-Fi, no software updates, just a quietly reliable mechanism following the pace of our planet.

Longer Answer:

Mechanically, The Present combines familiar clockmaking with an original piece of electronics designed for one purpose: to move a single hand through one full revolution per year, using almost no power.

Here’s the simple version of what’s happening inside:

• At the heart of the mechanism is a German UTS gearbox—a proven clockwork unit that has been modified specifically for this project.
• The gearing has been changed so that instead of driving an hour hand once every 12 hours, it now needs only 3,600 “steps” to complete a full circle.
• Attached to that output shaft is one hand—the one you see on the front of The Present.
  

Behind the gears is a custom circuit board and a tiny electronic brain:

• A temperature-compensated real-time clock (RTC) chip keeps highly accurate time internally. Temperature compensation is important because ordinary quartz crystals can drift as the ambient temperature changes. This chip adjusts for that, so the long-term drift is very small.

• A simple microcontroller spends almost all of its life in deep sleep, drawing virtually no power.

• At precise intervals—programmed differently for the year, day, or moon modes, but for this edition, focused on the year—the RTC sends a “tick” signal. The microcontroller briefly wakes up, energizes the motor, moves the hand one minuscule step, and then goes back to sleep.
  

Each step is incredibly small—1/3600th of a revolution—so you never actually see the hand move. You only notice that its position is different from last week, last month, or last season.

There are no radios, no screens, no updates, no sync events. The entire system is designed to do one thing:

Keep track of the year quietly, accurately, and with as few moving parts as possible.

By stripping away everything that isn’t necessary, the movement becomes extremely robust. Less complexity means fewer failure points.

The reward is a timepiece that doesn’t demand attention, doesn’t compete with your phone, and doesn’t need your input.

It just keeps tracing the orbit you, and everyone you know, and every living thing on Earth experience.

Short Answer:

Under normal conditions, no—you should never need to change the batteries in your lifetime.

Long Answer:

The Present ships with two lithium AA batteries already installed. Because the mechanism draws so little power, and lithium cells age very slowly, you should not need to replace them.

If you’re curious, you can check in 2060 and you’ll likely find it still running. The design target is at least 100 years of operation on the original pair.

Longer Answer:

In a typical product, it would be irresponsible to suggest that batteries never need changing. Devices are inefficient. Batteries leak. Things wear out.

The Present is built around the opposite assumption: maximize lifespan, minimize draw.

A few key points:

1. Ultra-low power draw

The electronics inside The Present spend almost all of their time asleep. The always-on part (the clock chip) and the sleeping microcontroller together draw around a microamp between ticks. When it’s time to move the hand, the motor pulls a short burst of current, does its job, and then everything goes quiet again.

2. Lithium instead of alkaline

Most wall clocks use cheap alkaline batteries, which are fine for a couple of years and then become a leakage risk. We use Energizer L91 lithium AA cells because:

• They have a much higher energy density.

• They self-discharge very slowly over time.

• Their leakage rate is extremely low compared to alkaline.

That means they hold useful charge for decades and are far less likely to damage the movement.

3. The math vs. the message

When you calculate the movement’s actual energy use, you end up with theoretical runtimes in the hundreds of years. But battery labels and engineering calculations can’t account for every real-world variable—temperature swings, storage conditions before installation, and so on.

So instead of promising something mythical, we’ve chosen a very grounded claim:

The Present is engineered to run for a century on the batteries it ships with.

Could you technically change the batteries in the future? Yes. The back opens, the batteries are standard size, and the movement doesn’t “lock” to one set forever.

But the honest expectation is: if it’s installed once and left alone in a normal indoor environment, you should never need to touch the batteries at all.

If you’re still around in 2125 and want to email us about how it’s doing, we’d love to hear from you.

Short Answer:

If it ever stops under normal use, we’ll repair or replace the movement; you just cover shipping.

Long Answer:

The Present comes with a limited lifetime warranty on the movement. If it stops for any reason other than obvious damage (falling, fire, water submersion, etc.), you can send it back to Burlington, Vermont. We’ll either repair the mechanism or replace it so it runs as intended. You pay for shipping; we cover the work.

Longer Answer:

There are two separate questions hiding inside “What happens if it stops?”:

1. What if something inside fails?
2. What if something outside happens to it?

We handle these differently.

1. Internal failures (what we stand behind)

If, at any point in your lifetime, The Present simply stops:

• It doesn’t respond.
• The hand no longer moves over time.
• There’s no clear sign of impact or damage.

Then as far as we’re concerned, something inside did not live up to its design.

In that case:

• You email us,
• ship the clock back to Burlington, VT,
• and we repair or replace the movement at no cost beyond shipping.
  

We’ve been making versions of The Present since 2012, and we intend to support these instruments for the long haul. The entire point of this design is longevity. If the inner workings don’t live up to that promise, we fix it.

2. External damage (what we can often fix, but can’t cover)

There are a few scenarios that fall outside the warranty:

• The clock is dropped or knocked off a wall.
• It’s stored or installed in extreme conditions (heavy sawdust, soaking humidity, direct water exposure).
• It’s damaged in a fire, flood, or similar event.
• It’s deliberately disassembled or modified.
  

In many of these cases, the movement itself may still be fine, but the body or hand has been damaged. When that happens:

• We can often refurbish the clock at cost—replacing parts, rebalancing the hand, cleaning or swapping the movement if needed.
• Or, if the damage is extensive, we’ll help you replace it with a new timepiece.

We don’t cover these scenarios under the “free movement repair” promise because they’re outside what any mechanism can reasonably be built to survive. But we do care about keeping these objects in circulation, and we do our best to make repair or refurbishment possible.

The simple version

If it stops and you didn’t abuse it, we fix it.

If life happens and it’s damaged, we’ll still try to help you bring it back, or help you start again with a new Present. We prioritize the needs of existing customers.

An annual clock is a timepiece that completes one full revolution every 365 days.

Unlike a standard clock that tracks hours and minutes (Industrial Time), an annual clock tracks the seasons, solstices, and equinoxes (Nature's Time).

It is designed to help you see "right now" as a part of a larger cycle of life, rather than a countdown.