Google says it can’t fix Pixel Watches, please just buy a new one | With no official repair program and no parts, broken Pixel Watches are just e-waste.::With no official repair program and no parts, broken Pixel Watches are just e-waste.
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“But… but… Apple USB 2 ports!”
If you are a google product adopter in 2023 then you deserved to be relieved of your money.
Interestingly, even Pine64’s smart watch requires you to silly cone glue the two case halves together if you want it to be waterproof. It does give you that option, though, which is cool.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Google makes a big deal out of its partnership with iFixit and the availability of replacement parts for its products, but one Google product that doesn’t seem fixable is the Pixel Watch.
After spotting some posts from Pixel Watch users seeking a remedy after cracking the glass and coming up with no clear answers, The Verge got Google to confirm that, even 11 months after launch, there is no repair plan right now.
Google can’t fix your watch.
The whole top half of the watch is one big glass hemisphere, so it’s not difficult to bang one of the glass corners into something and shatter the watch.
This might all seem like it’s against the spirit of Google’s big repairability announcement in 2022, but that blog post says the program is for Pixel phones, not any of the other stuff Google sells.
With the Pixel Watch 2 coming out soon, we’ll be sure to ask Google if there are any repair plans this time.
The original article contains 216 words, the summary contains 164 words. Saved 24%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
The amount of E-Waste our society generates is truly abhorrent. It will take hundreds of thousands of hours and countless amounts of money for future generations to fix this.
Pretty clear stuff like this is why we’re speed running to a dystopian future. Hopefully Googles profits can survive. /s
On the other hand, a Garmin Fenix can be easily opened with an inexpensive tool and replacement parts are easily found online.
Garmin watches look amazing. I just wish they had more smartwatch capabilities. I’d love complications on the watch face, and I feel like I should be able to start the assistant with a hotword.
I’m not sure if the Google Watch can do the latter.
There’s plenty of watch faces with cool shit on them in the store, same as with Google
And having had watches that do respond to “hey Google” they were super iffy and inconsistent. Buttons are easier to avoid frustration, which the Garmin has.
As far as “smartwatch capabilities” I haven’t missed anything from my Wear watch. I certainly don’t miss charging it every day or having it die by 5pm because I actually used it
I’m charging my Garmin this morning. Haven’t charged it since Sunday… a week ago Sunday
Buttons on smart watches are a must. I really appreciated them on my Pebble.
The Venu has 3. Forerunner 5. I use both (buttons and screens, not both devices)
What kind of smart watch doesn’t have complications? Does it at least have sleep tracking?
Fitbits. AFAIU, Garmins don’t.
My Garmin most certainly has sleep tracking
I was referring to complications.
I’m lost - what is a complication? From my initial Google, it does seem like my Garmin can add additional things to the face but I’m still kind of unclear as to what a complication is. For reference I have heart rate, step count, mileage, body battery and weather on my vivoactive3 face.
Complications are additional snippets of information displayed right on your watch face, such as activity tracking, battery life, media controls and more.
From https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.google/products/wear-os/5-ways-to-personalize/amp/
Basically, I’d like to know if I have unread messages by looking at my watch. My Fitbit can’t do that. AFAIU, Garmins can’t, but I could be wrong.
They should be customizable by third party developers, but I think I’d be happy just knowing about SMS, Gmail, and maybe upcoming appointments.
EDIT: also the high/low temperature for the day. It’s helpful for choosing kids clothes for the day.
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On the other side of things. I’m super happy that garmin watches don’t have more smartwatch capabilities. Their laser focus on sports wearable is what keeps them massively competitive there and keeps me on weeks of battery life instead of hours of battery life
I’ve got an OG Garmin vivoactive. Besides the naming bullshit of this being vivoactive and there now being a “vivoactive 1”, it’s great. It’s a sidegrade to thebpebble, which I never thought I’d find. So now I just swap between this and the pebble when the mood suits me.
Love Garmin smartwatches.
I’m leaning this direction because I don’t really use any smart features in my watch. Just my fitness shit.
Any recommendations on Garmin watches for a guy who likes to bike/bike but not crazy sports level enthusiast?
Whichever one you like the look of and is cheap. Garmin watches are just divided into styling and features. If you don’t need specific features you can just get the cheapest one that fits your styling.
I started out with a vivomove because I liked the hybrid look (real watch hands) and only needed basic health stuff. Did notifications which is all I really care about for smart stuff.
I totally understand that. They look perfect for their target market.
As far as I know, they’re the only wearable that does realtime stroke/length tracking for swimming, which is really cool. If I was more serious about exercise, that’d be the perfect
excusereason to buy one.That’s exactly why I have my Garmin Descent.
It’s a dive computer, with basic smart watch features like notifications and general health tracking which are the only ones I need.
I happily paid 1k for it.
The sonar tank regulators that work with the Descent are the coolest fucking things ever. Sonar, on your wrist! Its madness.
Their customer support is also aces too. I’ve got a Fenix 6s and the battery is going out on it, and they’re replacing it for free. No questions or fuss. Just a shipping label.
For as expensive as they are, I’ve been extremely happy with them. When this replacement dies in another 3+ years I’ll definitely be getting another Garmin.
yeah but then you look like a pisspants triathlete
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no, an asshole
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Former triathlete. Not a big fan of the community. I’ve moved on to other athletic endeavors.
I don’t mind that excuse about my Mi Band 6, because it was like £25.
I would mind that excuse when we’re talking about a £339 smartwatch. So I won’t buy one.
I won’t buy a Fitbit either, because the wife had one and every week was a complex dance of restarting the phone and watch several times until they agreed to connect to each other.
And they pretty much have made most of the utility locked behind an $80 subscription
No thanks
Why would a smartwatch need a subscription?? what does it even do?
Without the subscription, you have to pay 99 cents to check the time.
Same with the Google Nest Hub.
It cost me around $600 and has a known splash-screen issue which I just woke up to one morning.
No fix available when it happens. Nothing I did caused it. I just had to bin it.
It’s either planned obsolescence or just shitty design.
Nest Hub for $600? Which one is that expensive?
Probably both tbh
Let’s mint a new razor: assume both malice and incompetence
Greed and incompetence is more accurate
Casmael’s Razor. Has a nice ring to it!
It’s probably a bit of both. They save money with a worse design and they make more money on more sales.
Companies should have fines for at least as much as the revenue they generated with those devices. Designed obsolescence is something that needs to be *abandoned, even if it hurts really bad financially.
Cool i’ll just buy a watch that can be repaired then
who needs an e-watch really
I love my Samsung watch because I can do Strava tracking and listen to Spotify to my Bluetooth Buds while running without taking my phone. Absolute game changer honestly
Google support for literally anything is non existent. Same could be said about Meta.
I am slowly shifting away from Google. Gmail and Google Photos is going to be the hardest. :/
Proton if you want email, privacy and cloud storage.
Edit I use murena and it comes with cloid storage and online only office suite
I pay(my inner pirate is screaming) for proton’s subscription and so far it’s absolutely worth the cost. The only issue being, I have yet to make it work on my Orange pi. Other than that it’s all smiles.
Already thinking about proton:)
I recommend tutanota, cheap clean and few frills.
try with apple
I was considering this on and off, but never really attempted to do this.
Biggest dealbreaker was lack of USB-C cable, but here are few other issues:
- No easy & free way to sideload apps.
- No ability to install 3rd party OS.
- No proper files management.
- Clipboard and files sharing is still a joke. It works, but is uncomfortable as fuck.
- Lack of cusotmization almost for every aspect of a phone.
- Inability to self-repair. Apple made it harder on purpose.
- Overpriced smartphones & gadgets.
- Can’t simply upload & download files from my PC (both Windows & Linux).
- Shitty media format support.
- Apple wallet does not support discount cards.
- Buying an Apple device means I would literally support anti-consumer company with shitty behavior towards its users.
Apple doesn’t allow “questionable” apps like emulators, bit torrent clients on its store and of course you can’t sideload them either.
Yes, that’s what I am saying. Apple decides for you. You are not the one who decides how to use your phone.
I have an iPhone, but I will say for me the biggest deal breaker with it is absolutely not the lack of USB-C support (though that sucks and THANK GOD they’re switching)… The lack of sideloading for apps is a much bigger problem IMO, because it’s really hard for free and open source apps to even exist on iOS (which makes paid apps, subscriptions, and advertising much more common). Honestly, I’d care a lot less about the lack of sideloading if it wasn’t for the other inconvenient facts, like the a $100/year developer license to publish anything on the App Store, or the fact that you pretty much need to have a Mac to develop for the iPhone… The $100/year developer license is just a death sentence for any open source apps and hobby / passion project apps. It’s not thaaaat much money, but it’s a lot to pay on top of putting in a bunch of free work to build an app in the first place.
- No ad blocking.
Mostly done by ad-blocking DNS server at home (or via VPN when I am away), but yeah - no ability on Apple. Also impossible to root.
I don’t do root anymore, but I would love to have this available as an option. Opens much more possibilities.
This just, isn’t true? You can just download the Ad Block Plus Safari extension, just like you can on a desktop/laptop machine. You could even add a user script manager to block ads yourself if you’re so inclined. This has been in iOS for years, at least 4.
That only blocks Safari, no? Whah about the rest of the apps?
You can also use the system-wide ad blockers that function via iOS’s built in VPN functionality. That’s how Android does it too.
I’ve had acceptable support for the pixel phone. I forget what went wrong, but I had a problem with one of my pixels, needed repair and they replaced it when it was just shy of two years old.
It sucked, because I had to send it to Hong Kong from Australia, and they then promptly sent me a replacement. But I was 5 days without a phone.
With Apple support, they have local presence and I’ve had same-day repair.
I have no intention of shifting away from Google. Their cloud service is great. I pay for it and my only complaint is there are stricter privacy policies on gsuite accounts that mean some Google services are incompatible. Which is a very clear endorsement of the old adage ‘if you aren’t paying for the service, you’re the product’.
I’ve heard this story: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-csam-account-blocked
Imagine your primary email is no longer accessible. Your memories (images/video) is no longer accessible that dates back to 2014.
I am scared it might happen to me, so I am strongly considering moving away from Google products.
Yes, writing this from my pixel. Luckily, I can flash alternative OS to my Pixel, so I don’t really mind having Pixel, but Google services? Nooo…
I am in the Apple ecosystem, but this strategy is universal. Every month I am reminded by my calendar to make a backup. That means:
A Photos export to flat file format for photo and video
An iCal backup (easily imported elsewhere)
A vCard backup of contacts
A bookmark backup
A to do list export by pasting to a .md
Same for notes
I like the easy way an ecosystem lets all my things play nice together, but I don’t want to be beholden to it. This is an acceptable workaround to me.
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LoL…so you gotta pay for a service? That’s just crazy!?!
S/
For Gmail, I switched to fastmail. For google photos, I switched for immich.
The services that I still use from them are google maps, YouTube and SSO. They are all services that I wouldn’t mind them shutting down. It’s just that I find them much better than any alternatives.
For SSO, are you talking about Google Authenticator? I was able to switch to Aegis, which is just an open source alternative, but does the same thing, except you are not forced to back up to Google.
This is TOTP. I use my password manager for that. I used to use Bitwarden, but I recently switched to 1password.
SSO means single sign on. If I sign on to Google, it automatically sign me on other apps. I use a forward auth on my self hosted services. I used to use authentik but I switched to google since it just works much better. If Google makes a shitty move in that department, I can always fall back to authentik.
I don’t mind using proprietary softwares if they’re good, I just prefer to think about an alternative in case I need to switch.
How is immitch for you? I’ve been considering this for quite awhile.
I installed this week, so I’m not a long time user. But it’s by far the best self hosted photo app that I’ve used. Before that I used nextcloud, but the user experience isn’t as good Imo.
The only things that I miss are automatic albums based on face recognition and pet recognition. I still use google photo to share with family though.
You could look at trying immich. I haven’t set it up yet, but it seems to be the solution to me moving away from Google photos. https://github.com/immich-app/immich
You can find more info on these
https://matrix.to/#/#selfhosted:selfhosted.chat
Yup, I am aware about it. It’s just dislaimers that look a bit scary (not production ready), even tho multiple users reported using it without any issues.
I did set it up. Survive multiple upgrade in place just fine.
I can say it beats all my apps until now. The best part to me is delete from app request to delete from my Android as well. So unlike most, it works ironically like iPhone. And I prefer that
I moved from Gmail. I’ll link to my previous comment to save trying it out again…
https://lemm.ee/comment/3347046
If I ever move away from Protonmail it will take about 5 mins for all my 300 websites to start sending emails to the new mailbox.
For those thinking of moving away from Gmail… I strongly recommend buying your own domain name so you actually own your address and can switch e-mail services whenever you want without needing a new e-mail address. Hell, I’d recommend this even if you’re planning on staying with Gmail for a while.
Honestly, aside from having to point people at your new e-mail address… Gmail is not particularly hard to move away from, especially if you already use an external mail client. I don’t really miss it, anyway. The only pain point I experience is that if somebody sends you a Google Doc / Sheet you need a Google account to edit it, but that’s not a huge concern for me personally.
I’m self hosting my personal e-mail right now, and it’s pretty great if you know how to do that stuff. Super cheap to host, and I can have as many aliases and send as many e-mails as I want. It’s not for the faint of heart, but it’s very doable if you already host your own stuff. Otherwise there’s a bunch of e-mail services like Proton (kind of expensive, and a little annoying in that it’s not just IMAP), Tutanota (dunno much about it), Fastmail, etc… But it’s also worth mentioning that if you have a domain / VPS already your VPS provider and your registrar may both provide e-mail services that you can use… And if you just want to get out of Google and you have an iCloud+ account already (which is very possible if you have an iPhone and wanted more iCloud storage, but otherwise it’s $0.99/mo) you can also use iCloud+ for e-mail with a custom domain.
How do you deal with your custom domain emails being flagged as spam? I did all the requirements (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and there still are some (e.g. old-fart gov or finantial institutions) that need a gmail address to communicate with.
Often times when people complain about this there is some misconfiguration somewhere, which is admittedly hard to notice a lot of the time. One big gotcha with DKIM, for instance, is that TXT records have a limited size in DNS, so if you have a large key you likely cannot fit it within a single TXT record (an RSA 2048 key is too big, unfortunately). In theory you can split the key in DNS, but I’m not sure if every mail server will handle this correctly. Anyway, people will make an RSA 2048 key (or larger) and try to stuff it into a single TXT record and they might not notice that it doesn’t fit (e.g., their DNS provider’s interface may truncate the record silently). So, it’s good to confirm after the fact that the records are good and working (there’s a number of free services that will do that, e.g., https://www.learndmarc.com/).
The other thing that’s a bigger deal than I think it should be is rDNS. The rDNS on the mail server really needs to be the same as the MX record or certain spam detectors flip out. If your MX record is mail.example.com, it seems like the spam detectors really want the rDNS to be mail.example.com and not example.com, for instance. You’ll see some advice online that suggests that the rDNS record just has to exist and doesn’t have to match exactly, but this has not been my experience.
Beyond that I have also registered for Outlook’s SNDS and Google’s Postmaster services, and I’ve also added myself to the whitelist here: dnswl.org/. I’m not sure how much of difference that makes, but it’s something else you can try.
Expecting companies to be good citizens is crazy. Expecting consumers to be informed consumers is crazy. Our gov’t needs to pass regulations about repairability for just about any consumer product. But expecting voters to be informed voters also seems crazy.
And expecting our government to have the knowledge to regulate is crazy. I agree with you but our current government doesn’t have the slightest clue what technology is.
It seems to run on some form of electricity!
I understood that reference!
It’s not just some truck you can dump things on… it’s a series of tubes!
They’ve got the internet on computers now, eh?
Ever since the eu repair bill came out, my goal is to not buy electronics until i can get electronics that comply with that law.
Definitely falls under the “evil” company vibe.
I think I will stick to my dumb watches, thanks. Mechanical or quartz.
(Almost) my entire house is smart, but nothing talks to the cloud anymore.
So nobody can get that data except me. Some exceptions are that I dont have or want smart locks, that just seems to insecure and unreliable.
I always see the software working people go nutty for the new hardware and dohickies.
Meanwhile a lot of people I knew who worked on hardware live in the woods “off grid”.
If by “software” you mean Web or Java or something like that, then, well, for the purpose of this conversation they are enthusiasts.
While people working on hardware are forced to get some understanding of how the world around us works.
I think the difference is simply between who has to go on site to fix an issue and those who “theoretically” could.
I know a hardware guy that lives on a farm and uses raspberry pi for his garden hoses.
Programmed with an open source application, no doubt.
I tried to set it up but couldn’t keep it from leaking and spent more than I would’ve on a smart hose timer.
Eventually I hope to get my garden smartened up with water and rain sensors and an open sprinkler controller.
Yeah that tracks. Doubt they are buying the apple solution for water management.
My dream life.
So true. The more I work with all these services and social networks the fewer of them I have. More to the point, I have bunch of devices around my home which are IoT and similar but almost none have access to internet, printer included. Funny thing is, my friends keep asking why am I slowly removing my presence from all of tech even though I am on forefront of it… but when I go and explain how each search can be exploited and abused they laugh and say naaah that will never happen or “I don’t have anything to hide”… and it keeps happening and privacy keeps leaking.
Some people have a hard time imagining bad outcomes or “thinking like a bad guy”. I guess that’s why infosec people are needed lol.
Though in IT, I do have a (limited) smart home but also old tech like a 40s Western Electric phone, a few 1920s-40s typewriters, a few vintage woodworking tools, myriad vintage and new fountain pens (I use them to take notes… you know, on paper gasp). I have and wear lots of budget watches (err, but, one at a time) … from the 1890s - present, mechanical and quartz.
The nicest oldest ones are a 1895 Elgin hunter pocket watch (ladies size 6) and a 1930s Hamilton open face size 10. I often wear vintage wristwatches: Bulova, Elgin, Waltham, Timex, and Seiko. I have more modern ones including Fortis, Orient, Casio, Bulova, and more.
I wear a Shark Leash every day. I lost my Apple Watch and haven’t missed it at all.
My G Shock is super reliable and will never need a battery. No way I’m swapping it out for some fragile piece of junk screen that mostly displays a clock that dies every few days.
This is peak “smart” watch for me: Sony-Ericsson MBW-100
Having something similar with modern technology the battery life would be much longer, I don’t need a wrist phone.
Yup, some great g-shocks out there. I have dw5600. Awesome watch. Some day I will get the 5610.
I have had the same automatic (self winding) for over a decade. Wear it almost everyday, it gets beat up and used hard but still works great. And no batteries is nice.
Nice, what brand?
I like mechanical watches a lot although I don’t like the service cost lol.
Well this one is more of a happy accident. It is a Fossil, and was a warranty replacement for a battery watch I bought. Have had not much luck with the battery Fossils but they seem to make a solid (or did not sure if they still do) automatics.
Sweet. I’ve heard good things in the past about 'em over on watchuseek forum.
