On the other hand, a Garmin Fenix can be easily opened with an inexpensive tool and replacement parts are easily found online.
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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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.
Probably both tbh
Let’s mint a new razor: assume both malice and incompetence
Casmael's Razor. Has a nice ring to it!
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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?
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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.
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.
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Ya, that and taking pictures of moving objects. I tried Samsung but the camera couldn't do kid photos unless I was outside on the brightest of days.
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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)
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Definitely falls under the “evil” company vibe.
Cool i'll just buy a watch that can be repaired then
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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
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I would also suggest mandatory price caps on disposable products, to incentivize the elimination of production of such devices.
It'd be more fitting to mandate every product to include its ecological price. Disposable vapes, for example, would disappear instantly.
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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.
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I wear my smart watch exclusively at work because when I'm on or around heavy machinery, I need to know if that little alert was something important or not. Otherwise I'd be checking my phone every five minutes. But I don't have to stop or slow down to check my wrist.
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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.
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I get Google bad but what watch face is that in the thumbnail of the link?
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.
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Pixel Buds are the same way. IIRC from a teardown vid, those earbuds (and I'm guessing most of their competitors' too) are designed to be quasi-disposable in this way. They're glued together, the only way to open them up destroys them, warranty support consists of replacing defective earbuds.
This business model does create an e-waste issue... More lithium ion batteries ending up in landfills, more gold extracted from components by kids in developing nations burning them and breathing the carcinogens...
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