This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
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.
Even simpler: If you sell it, and it breaks or becomes useless, you're expected to take it back and dispose of it responsibly. Electronics retailers can charge a deposit, just like the supermarket does for beer and Coke.
Just imagine if things worked that way —
Find the broken husk of an iPod Shuffle on the beach? Take it to an Apple Store; they give you five bucks.
Find a roadkill Dell laptop on the side of the road? (I did earlier this summer.) Take it to any big-box store that sells Dell laptops; they give you five bucks.
Pixel Watch turned into e-waste? Mail it to Google; they give you five bucks. (Probably on your Google Pay account, yeah, but that's better than nothing.)
But before that make it like a tire. Bought a pixel watch and it died in a year an a half? If the device should have lasted 3-5 years, you should be able to send it back to the manufacturer for a percentage of the cost back. Sure, google can say it's watches only last 12 months, but as a consumer would you buy such a disposable item?
Probably both tbh
Let’s mint a new razor: assume both malice and incompetence
Casmael's Razor. Has a nice ring to it!
Their support is infamously hard to contact, they discontinue projects very often, and now this. Google makes some very interesting products, but there would have to be a huge shift at the company, which won't happen, for me to buy them.
Google is first and foremost an ad company. Everything else they do is only to improve the worth of their ad business.
My pixel had issues with the screen (p7p) contacted google, within a couple of days I had an advance replacement device in my hands and a return label for the faulty device.
My watch is giving me issues currently so I'm planning on hitting up support about that too, as it's not within what I expected from the watch (won't connect via bt after a month or so, requiring a factory reset).
In AUS we have great consumer protections, if my watch continues on the way it is currently I'll be returning it for a full refund.
Unfortunately that huge shift would require a complete change in Google's corporate culture and that's not gonna happen.
I had my own experience with their customer support after purchasing 2 Pixel 6's. They were utter garbage. Both had the cellular connectivity problem and the fingerprint sensors were completely useless. Those sensors failed 100% of the time in brightly lit stores. There's no way in hell that Google was unaware of those problems, and they were in fact well documented (but not resolved) after six months and one major software "fix".
Lucky for me a request for help on Reddit resulted in multiple people saying they despised their Pixels and to return the damn things before it was too late.
They immediately lost my business with no public followup on 911 dialer bugs on Pixels. Plus there is ALWAYS a huge hardware problem on flagship Pixels, every single generation. Went iPhone SE and really why would I ever move back?
I've had a lot of pixels in my family and the only one that had major issues was the Pixel 4.
I think you may be buying into overblown anecdotal nonsense.
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.
Definitely falls under the “evil” company vibe.
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. :/
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.
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.
Proton if you want email, privacy and cloud storage.
Edit I use murena and it comes with cloid storage and online only office suite
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
My solution is to steer clear of Google products. They excel at producing disposable… everything.
I will continue to go to them when I’m buying Android phones because 3rd party manufacturers still suck at getting OS updates onto their phones. Even the best manufacturers have delays of weeks / months.
Same, but I will not buy direct from them because of the their absolute shit customer service.
Apparently the replacement parts for their phones are significantly cheaper than almost every other manufacturer. (I have just been hearing this so I don't know for sure if it's true, correct me if I'm wrong.)
Overall their phones seem to just be to a high standard. 5 years of support and other components that make them the choice for GrapheneOS (Privacy/Security focused rom that has greatly contributed to upstream Android)
I think I will stick to my dumb watches, thanks. Mechanical or quartz.
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".
I know a hardware guy that lives on a farm and uses raspberry pi for his garden hoses.
Yeah that tracks. Doubt they are buying the apple solution for water management.
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.
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.
Cool i'll just buy a watch that can be repaired then
i bought a P-Watch due to the circular aesthetic, have been wearing mine since release. it's "OK" but last week i fell on my bicycle and scratched up the watch face pretty badly, so QUITE annoying that there is no repair program.
doesn't matter though, switching to a classic Cassio watch soon anyways. "Smart Watches" aren't that helpful for me, ultimately i don't understand the appeal. it's just PHONE ON WRIST, seems like another way to "PLUG INTO THE MATRIX"
I don't wear mine anymore really, but the use case for it for me was to see notifications quickly and easily without taking my attention away from whoever I am with. You can quickly just glance at your watch to see if the text/phone call/email is important or not and then just twist your wrist to dismiss.
So they should be labelled "disposable" and priced accordingly.
Oooooh, that's a neat idea in light of the current EU legislation concerning the Right to Repair: Introduce a mandatory, highly visible, and standardized seal that all electronic devices have to display on the front of their box:
Repairable
or
Disposable
Then tax the shit out of disposable products please as we already waste way too much
I would also suggest mandatory price caps on disposable products, to incentivize the elimination of production of such devices.
Yeah fuck all of that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I get Google bad but what watch face is that in the thumbnail of the link?
Concentric!
Aren't all smart watches just e-waste? Always found them ridiculously redundant and wasteful. I mean my gshock is still on the same battery after 11 years and it's still precise, has a calendar, alarm clocks, timers, backlighting and went through hell and back. I used to swim and take showers without taking it off, crawling in a desert, all sorts of abuse with not even a scratch.
