It's New Year’s Eve and the countdown has begun. Yet you are vaguely aware that the count on TV, your DVR clock and even those people counting the seconds around you are ever-so-slightly off. Does anyone really know exactly when 2015 ends and 2016 begins? If you ask Apple VP of Technology Kevin Lynch, he'll tell you your Apple Watch does.

"With New Year’s coming, those who have the Apple Watch will be the most accurate watch in the room.... There will be no question about when New Year's Eve actually is now," said Lynch, who is widely regarded as one of the chief architects of Apple's $1 billion-dollar-selling Apple Watch. In an exclusive discussion with Mashable, Lynch explained that not only is the Apple Watch extraordinarily accurate, but take any two Apple Watches and hold them side-by-side and you will see the second hands moving in perfect unison.

That kind of claimed accuracy does not come by accident. Lynch described a complex system that runs from deep inside the nearly year-old wearable technology to, quite literally, space.

Clock accuracy, by the way, is not just a problem of wind-up mechanical watches. Digital systems suffer from something called "clock skew" in which systems that are supposed to be synchronized and delivering signals simultaneously still deliver them at different times. The only way to address this is to cut down on distribution and have all systems derive their time settings from a centralized server.

In a way, this is what Apple has done.

"First of all, we’ve curated our own network time servers around the world," said Lynch. There are, by his count, 15 such "Stratum One"-level Network Time Servers (NTP) (one level down from an atomic clock), scattered around the world. They're all housed in buildings with GPS antennas on the roof that talk, you guessed it, to GPS satellites orbiting the earth, which all get their time information from the U.S. Naval Observatory. In other words, those satellites are all getting their times from one, big orbiting system.

The servers then communicate with iPhones around the world, via the Internet, which in turn communicates with Bluetooth-connected Apple Watches. Of course, even that hand-off has to be managed. "We do do corrections for time delay in communication," said Lynch.

Will you be watching your Apple Watch second hand on New Year's Eve? Image: Apple

Apple also designed the Apple Watch to be an exquisitely accurate timepiece, building in what's known as a crystal temperature-control oscillator. Its job is to manage the vagaries of extreme temperatures, to compensate for drift and keep the Apple Watch time-accurate. Lynch actually told us that "as a piece of hardware, [Apple Watch is] far more accurate as a timekeeping device than the iPhone," said Lynch. It's actually four times better, he noted.

"Through the whole stack, we’ve really paid attention to the accuracy," Lynch said, adding that Apple actually tests that accuracy with high-speed cameras that watch, frame-by-frame, as the Apple Watch second hand moves around, watching closely for even a hint of latency.

"Apple's claims about timing accuracy is impressive, but it isn't what I would consider really innovative given that it is logical to have your connected watch feed from your mobile phone's clock which itself is based on GPS signals or the network (which probably relies on an atomic clock somewhere along the line)," said aBlogtoWatch Editor-in-Chief and watch expert Ariel Adams in an email to Mashable.

He noted that there are a number of "exotic watches from brands like Bathys and Hoptroff that actually contain chip-sized atomic clocks which are, to date, the most accurate electronic watches in the world."

Ultimately, Adams thinks the Apple Watch is just as accurate as your iPhone, which, of course, also "benefits from receiving updated time information from signals that originally come from atomic clocks."

Adams is actually an Apple Watch fan, telling us that even though he's asked to wear dozens of watches each year, "I can't think of another timepiece in 2015 that enjoyed more wrist time than the Apple Watch — which I think is a remarkably impressive product."

Without multiple Apple Watches in the room and, perhaps, access to an atomic clock, all these accuracy claims can be hard to prove or disprove, but if Lynch and Apple are right, millions of Apple Watch owners will at least be ringing in the New Year at the exact same time.