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.
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.
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 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 excuse reason to buy one.
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?
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.
What kind of smart watch doesn’t have complications? Does it at least have sleep tracking?
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.
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.
Probably both tbh
Let’s mint a new razor: assume both malice and incompetence
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?
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.
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.
Do you mean Pixel 7 by chance? I’ve heard problems with it’s sensor. I have the 6 and haven’t noticed anything. Just curious mostly.
Pixel 6. From Android Authority:
Hate is a strong word to use in any context, so I’ll try my best to avoid that language. I very strongly dislike the Pixel 6’s fingerprint sensor.
Glad your experience is better than ours. Maybe Google fixed the problem.
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.
As have I, and my experience is similar to the other guy.
Fingerprint on the 6 drove me nuts.
On 7 pro now. My tap to pay goes away randomly sometimes until I restart the phone. 7pro camera is hit and miss, mostly missed. Takes very detailed photos, but the quality is far worse than pixels older than pixel 6.
There were multiple public reddit posts about the a Pixel 911 dialer bug - NOT the Teams one that we already had, but a new one. No follow-up on that and from what I’ve heard it’s more productive to scream into the void than contact Google support, so I picked up and left. Glad I did too, Android is death by a thousand laggy cuts compared to iOS. For me, the choice was simple: I need rock solid 911 support, immediate attention on critical bugs, and a phone that didn’t lag. iPhone is the only major flagship that can do everything on that list
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.
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.
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.
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
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’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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Inability to self-repair. Apple made it harder on purpose.
Can you repair android phone nowadays? Afaik, they are just as hard as apple
Clipboard and files sharing is still a joke. It works, but is uncomfortable as fuck.
Never had a problem
No easy & free way to sideload apps.
this should come before March 2024
Overpriced smartphones & gadgets.
True for the gadgets, smartphones are just in line with other android phones but at least the phone is supported for 5-6 years and it doesn’t go to shit after a few years of use
Shitty media format support.
Preach.
Buying an Apple device means I would literally support anti-consumer company with shitty behavior towards its users
Then buy no phone and remove google, etc. For a computer, buy a System76 et similia -but do not use Nvidia/AMD/intel GPU/CPU; no Samsung for SSD, no Intel network card etc.
Apple wallet does not support discount cards.
But you can?Maybe it’s new, idk
Can’t simply upload & download files from my PC (both Windows & Linux).
True. I use iCloud webApp on Linux or transfer the files on Mega
No proper files management.
It works for the most basic use cases
No ability to install 3rd party OS.
True, but on the other hand iOS is the reason you would buy an iPhone. I’m a power user on desktop but I can’t be bothered on mobile: back when I had an android, I used the stock apps too and never did anything “”“weird”“”. I’m a desktop user throughout, so if I have to do anything I will just use my PC instead of relying on my phone
– That said, if you don’t mind paying:
- try protonMail, there is the auto import and forward for gmail;
- MEGA has a sync feature for the photos. I use it but on iOS it’s not that great, for example the photos never get deleted but just uploaded;
