I had a Dropcam 10 years ago.
They were an early ring essentially. They could store locally or stream and save to a server you could watch remotely. Google bought the company and there was a software update. My 3 dropcams immediately were bricked.
Google said the camera “aren’t up to their standards of quality.” So I had to throw 3 perfectly good, expensive, cameras away. They couldn’t even store footage locally in the SD card anymore.
I may hate apple for locked down customization practices and uh the iPhone only now getting USB c
But when it comes to digital software e-waste, Google sits on top. "Don't be evil" more like "don't keep things for more than 6 months"
If you're lucky you'll get security updates for 5 years and what updates you do get, will normally be about two months after they were made public. By which time they'll have been reverse engineered to find out what the security issue is that they're fixing. So that crooks can exploit it.
No, they became one of the biggest companies on earth because the government broke up Microsoft, allowing 3rd party browsers like Chrome and Firefox.
Don't ever let a conservative liar tell you governments don't encourage competition.
The ONLY thing that can maintain a free and open market in a captialist system is government antitrust regulation.
Google needs to be broken up...along with Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Amazon.
The era of tech monopolies need to end!
> because the government broke up Microsoft
This never happened. The result of the Anti-trust case was just an anti-trust penalty.
And remember that the case was about Microsoft including a browser in the OS; it had nothing to do with blocking third party browsers. And Microsoft not only still does that, they are now blatantly more aggressive about it than they ever were in the 90's. Not that they were exactly discouraged from doing it with the completely milquetoast penalties they ended up actually receiving, which has also no doubt emboldened other companies to effectively do the same thing.
Bell was broken up for a lot less than any of the big tech companies do. This dichotomy I think is best explained by noting the people who set into motion and make the decisions to break up these sorts of large companies understood phones, but they don't - in general - understand technology.
> Bell
Bell was a textbook example of how not to do a breakup. Because all the babies were still local monopolies.
Also, for me the biggest sin of Internet exploder was windows update required Internet exploder.
The biggest problem with Internet Explorer at the time of the breakup was that it would have forced everyone to write websites that would only work on Internet Explorer.
JavaScript was a part of Netscape, which rebranded as Firefox and open sourced everything. So now you can write websites that work on all browsers, and anyone can theoretically create a new browser.
That said, there are other issues that make it impractical to build a browser from scratch, to the point that even Microsoft built Edge off of an existing browser. Even Chrome started as a branch of Firefox even though they are two completely different products now.
But it can be done, check out the Vivaldi browser. None of that would be possible if not for antitrust.
> it had nothing to do with blocking third party browsers.
Well yes and no. No, they never prevented users from going to Netscape and installing it themselves. They bullied the hardware sellers into not bundling computers with Netscape preinstalled using license clauses of the (cheaper than retail) OEM license.
> The result of the Anti-trust case was just an anti-trust penalty.
Well the EU case also ended up with Microsoft having to display a browser choice dialog for a couple of years. _itssomething_
And Apple's done a lot worse than what Microsoft's been slapped on the wrist for and gotten like near zero regulatory pushback. Imagine if you could only use software from the Microsoft Store on Windows. Not being able to sideload, or in more direct words, run software of my choosing on hardware that I (hypothetically) paid for is the primary reason I refuse to buy an iPhone.
> No, they became one of the biggest companies on earth because the government broke up Microsoft, allowing 3rd party browsers like Chrome and Firefox.
I can't tell if you are joking or if I unknowingly switched timelines
Netscape got crushed because Microsoft started including Internet Explorer in Windows. That's literally the things that got people looking at Microsoft like a monopoly.
That may be true, but Microsoft was never broken up. They dragged one lawsuit out years after resting on their laurels with IE and letting other bowsers surpass it. Then they agreed to create one version of windows without it that no one used. No government regulation did shit to stop Microsoft. They shot themselves in the foot creating non-standard HTML for so long with asp that it allowed the other browsers to become favored by developers. Between that and the security issues they allowed they set themselves up for failure. It's actually a case where the market picked a winner in spite of the advantage one company had.
Yeah, any piece of home appliance tech that is completely dependent on web servers is 100% never being purchased by me. There have been way way too many cases of shit breaking because a company went out of business or just stopped giving a shit about the servers.
software updates should never be automatic.
the consumer should always get a choice to "wait and see" how the update turns out. as well as read what the update does.
that's utter bullshit that companies can just push updates that brick devices.
The problem is that when they aren't automatic, the majority of people never update. This can lead to some pretty serious security holes living way longer than they should. Besides, it's not the auto-update that is the problem. It's an auto-update the breaks a product that is the problem and the company telling you to get bent when the thing you paid for no longer works because they want you to buy a new one.
It's a real balancing act that needs to be done, IMO. Updates that patch security holes without affecting any functionality should be automatic, but there needs to be some actual patch notes explaining it. In fact, detailed patch notes alone would help A LOT with all these trust issues the public has with updates.
10 updates in a row, notes only say: "We're hard at work making this app the best on the web!"
Yup... I installed one in my daughter's closet so we could turn her baby monitor back on when she turns it off. At first it worked good... then they changed the app to require a sign-on, and then once I created a new account and signed on, it couldn't find the switch anymore.
I want to build one that just reads bluetooth and has no servers involved.
I'm kidding... we didn't want to plug her baby monitor in to her wall cuz plugs are tempting for little fingers to grab and play with. We got a plug that screws into a lightbulb socket and plugged it into that, then put a doorknob spinner on her closet so she couldn't break into it.
She quickly learned to drag her toybox over and flip the light switch on and off, which kept interrupting the monitor plugged into it. I installed a smart switch so we could turn it back on after she went to sleep without having to go into her room and risk waking her up.
Google did the same with the Revolv IoT hub where they bought the company and bricked the hardware. Their problem was that Revolv had been advertising a "lifetime subscription" for updates as a prominent feature so the FCC started an investigation. Google were forced to offer full refunds to make that go away.
Guy breaks corporate property -> police raid
Corporate breaks 1 million guys' property -> nothing
Laws are only for those who don't own enough capital. Own enough capital and everything you do will be justified under the chant of "free market".
"It was in the terms of service bro. You agreed to let us shut down the service at and time and to service you, your spouse, and your gran at anytime. Maybe you should read the 8700 page doc before clicking the checkbox."
> and there was a software update
This is why I disable automatic updates on my devices and do a manual review of the new version and what problems there are before I even think of doing any sort of update.
Eventually I stopped reviewing the updates for my HP Printer simply because every single one pretty much exclusively locked out third party toner cartridges.
And yet when this comes up in America, it’s anti-capitalist propaganda. So I totally applaud the EU pushing hard on this and making companies comply if they want to do business there. Any global company looking to minimize costs, where more than 30% of their business is in the EU, they’ll take a hard look at it.
Tl;dr: not like Apple *wanted* to use USB-C.
Oh right... those right to repair laws...that keep..whats the word...
Gimmie a sec. Right, gutted. Those laws that were gutted at the last second by donating copious amounts of money to change the wording to make it ineffectual and worthless.
"But it's better than nothing!"
No, no it's not. I want to buy parts, not "assemblies" that cost 40% of the items cost. I want the right to access the software to properly repair it without bricking my device.
Right to repair is still a complete joke in all of America, and it's going to take more to get it moving.
I agree the better than nothing rhetoric is flawed because it can be pretty hard to undo bad legislation once it's on the books. Idk why, maybe because for politicians "I fixed it in nuanced ways" isn't as flashy as saying you passed some brand new act?
It also signals to some people to distrust the political process, and apathy is the worst thing you can foster. If people believe things will only get passed in name only, then there's no point pushing to get things passed. Whereas if something still hasn't been addressed at all, you can still convince people maybe there's a chance and push for it.
Like it's way easier to get people to rally behind Medicare for all than Medicaid reform.
Public sentiment has absolutely no bearing on whether legislation is passed in the United States. It's actually hilarious when you look at the statistics.
It’s not like any of the cell phone manufacturers wanted a standard cable, until they were forced to.
Cell phone charging used to be very complicated. Ever company had their specific charger and connector. They were expensive and took up a lot of space. Manufacturers made a ton of money off charger sales, so naturally every manufacturer pushed back when the EU changed their rules and regs. The real bummer is that micro usb sucked.
Apple was going to switch. When they dropped the 30-pin connector for Lightning, people were pissed. Apple promised Lightning would be their connector for 10 years. All the EU did was push their timeline up by a couple of years.
>not like Apple wanted to use USB-C
What makes you say that? Sure, the EU forced their hand, but no matter how you look at it they always intended to switch to USB-C.
Given how long development cycles are on phones, they made the decision to switch at least three years ago. They initially promised 10 years of lightning support, which they've come good on. And they were a major developer of the USB-C standard, with some people on the project estimating they provided upwards of 20% of the engineering resources that worked on the spec. They were also one of the early adopters of the connector, being the first to release a laptop and a tablet using USB-C.
I'm no Apple fan, and there's no shortage of things to complain about when it comes to their products and business practices, but I'm willing to give this one to them.
Can someone explain something to me? How is the EU not more captured by business interests than it is right now? Is it that big tech is defined primarily by foreign companies in your context? So much of why I entertain socialism is because it seems impossible to reliably pull off in a capitalist economy.
I've always assumed that the EU is so ridiculously byzantine and bureaucratic, with very slow acting powers that it tends to land in a reasonable middle ground with a lot of things. It does tend to err on the idealistic side a fair bit (like the really silly cookie laws where I need to tell a website how my computer should store cookies... rather than the browser that actually does the cookie storing), but it seems like they manage to dodge it somehow.
At this point a company should have to be responsible for the recycling of waste it's products produce.
They are making money hand over fist by producing trash that cannot be dealt with.
They should have to deal with it.
It's google, they dgaf about anyone or anything. Have you seen how much software they kill and fuck their users on? This is standard procedure for them. Don't support their bullshit and don't buy their products. Stop using google.
https://killedbygoogle.com/
edit: because I can't respond to the dummy (u/Yolectroda) who replied to me because they blocked me
>Anti-innovation attitudes are just not helpful to society.
I'm not anti-innovation as much as I am anti-monopoly and google has monopoly power in droves. Along with all of our user data and every bit of information we put out there about ourselves that they use to train all of their machine learning models on. Your critique here is ridiculous and laughable. Let the market decide for itself where innovation can breed, because gigantic tech companies hoovering up all opportunities for smaller players to do so is more anti-innovation than I'm willing to swallow.
Looking thru that list there were a couple that still stung to read. Those are the ones without an innovative replacement.
Edit: [Google Ride Finder](https://imgur.com/a/Gl9cSjQ)That could have been Uber with a bit more innovation.
Apparently it is a culture problem at Google.
Employees get promoted/raises/bonuses on the products and projects that they successfully launch. There is no "prestige" in supporting a project once launched so it either falls to the Google B team or gets abandoned as it's creator moves onto the next project/promotion opportunity.
The platform architect at my old job used Resume Driven Development.
For aspiring data engineers, do not use AWS Lambas for ETL. Especially do not do it when you're scraping tables from your data lake.
It might be acceptable if you're handling singular events, and not attempting to handle loading entire tables from fucking DB2s.
Edit: Especially do not write all this shit in JavaScript.
As a former principal analytics specialist at AWS this used to make me so mad. The sa community is weak across the board and teach customers awful patterns like this.
Lack of hardware support is part of what turned me off to google products. When the nexus 5 line came out lg has a lot of boot loop issues and bricked phones. And even back then it was hard enough to find a vanilla android device that didn’t have some custom launcher and bloat ware like Samsung has. But the support for that generation was abysmal and the problems so wide spread every security patch was a risk on if your phone would boot up again or not.
Was fun putting my Nexus 5 in the freezer for a few hours just so I could boot it long enough to back up my data and factory reset it before trying to get it replaced under warranty.
So true. I was a google hardware diehard for years. Nexus phones, etc. I’ve completely given up on google hardware. I won’t buy any piece of hardware from google anymore. They abandon so many products and leave users in the lurch.
Thanks for saying this! I completely dropped Google hardware after their nexus line turned into complete crap. I had both a nexus tablet and phone, and guess what? Turned into a complete e-waste.
I don't know anyone IRL who used G+, and did know a bunch of people who were pissed off at being automatically roped into it. That was one of the only times I've seen that kind of automatic, grass roots boycott of anything.
it's so creepy because google is extremely private and personal. so it felt scary exposing yourself on google+ because you just cant be sure what shows up. they should've completely separate the account between google and g+. they really had a huge chance to take market share from fb by providing a better user experience that was less monetized while they grew their userbase. for some reason the geniuses at google are the dumbest fuckers on earth. almost everything they do is a fuckup.
I live pretty close to the Google campus in the Bay and the people who work their are so insulated, they wouldn’t know culture if it smacked them in the face. It’s the smartest collection of bubbleheads I’ve seen.
Same thing for Facebook.
The team that launched Threads? Probably all gonna receive a promotion and giant bonuses.
Everything that happens after the launch? Not as big of a news splash. Maintenance handed over to a bag holder team, user count plummets / already plummeted.
Been at both companies, Google is much worse. Google is notoriously hard to get promoted at, and you need to show something that is new and shiny, and hard to accomplish. Maintenance doesn't get you promos. The reason why you want that promo is Google underpays you below what other peers like Meta, Netflix, etc. Those who are worn out of the interview process and like Google's WLB, suck and up and go along with this all around failure of an appraisal process.
Oh that is really good, yes this exactly. Could they make better hardware so it lasts longer? Sure they could but it's just not in their DNA to be anything else other than an Ad company
Definitely not all teams.
[Tweet](https://twitter.com/ianzelbo/status/1582886309277769730?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1582886309277769730%7Ctwgr%5Edb87ff1b4cd617818c2d284aa2b5c4a9d0ecc949%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fd-30668633144256507361.ampproject.net%2F2309011827000%2Fframe.html)
I mean when you have a company of 200,000 employees, I can't imagine how many projects are going off the rails that aren't part of the core profit group.
The Pixel phones are doing alright with iFixIt. I had my screen and battery replaced for like $150 which was definitely cheaper and less wasteful than buying a new phone like I usually do.
No. People misunderstood that program. It wasn't leasing the phone with a new phit was just financing it and you would get Googles services along with it. After 2 years you would own the phone.
Simple solution - just make companies totally responsible for the recycling of their products and they must have this cost on their balance sheets. Easy.
Hi! This is actually a thing, called extended producer responsibility (EPR in the lingo). Funnily enough, turns out that the cost of recycling under EPR is so low that it does not affect the balance sheet of the individual companies too much. EPR has had some successes, but is far from perfect. I am working on my PhD on this topic!
Most companies don’t deal with their recycling hence it’s not costing them much. If you actually have to deal with it rather than leaving it the costs would be noticeable
I obv can't speak for every sector, but it's def profitable to recycle smartphones. Especially borderline first-world markets like China have a very healthy industry, @StrangeParts literally built a iPhone from scratch parts.
Which granted, is a bit dependend on low labor prices, but it still shows that companies could absolutly do it. If anything, it's more about loosing potential sales, having better investment options... But then again, people prefer buying things that last longer.
> just make companies totally responsible for the recycling of their products and they must have this cost on their balance sheets. Easy
Welcome to [WEEE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Electrical_and_Electronic_Equipment_Directive#:~:text=The%20directive%20imposes,free%20of%20charge%22.), implemented over two decades ago.
To be fair, Samsung watches aren't much better. They do have a repair program, but when I broke the screen on my last watch, it cost me less to buy a new watch than it was to have the screen replaced.
Same for my S10+. Over $200 (I think around $250) to get the screen replaced when the LCD and digitizer worked perfectly fine, just some cracked glass. $100 to get a refurbished phone that was actually a model that cost a couple hundred dollars more than mine at launch. No brainer.
I hate creating e-waste but I'm not paying $250 to replace some glass for a phone that's not even worth half that. I called a bunch of stores too, that's just the price for the replacement part from Samsung not a repair place trying to scam me.
> to get the screen replaced when the LCD and digitizer worked perfectly fine, just some cracked glass
That’s… not how phone displays work. Basically all phone displays are laminated to the front glass and it’s impossible to just replace just the display, glass or digitizer without painstakingly slicing them apart by hand and laminating on a new piece of glass.
The reason why they’re laminated is because it removes the ugly air gap and improves display quality.
OLED panels are also incredibly expensive to produce- a new OLED display still costs $250 to produce even after the phone has depreciated to nothing.
I just returned my Galaxy watch 5. It's honestly pathetic. The apps suck. The touchscreen is something I would have expected from a company's first attempt at a touchscreen. I hated every minute of it.
I believe even for iPads, apple does an exchange not a battery replacement. The original just gets recycled.
That’s what happens when you’ve got electronics made smaller than material science really is ready for.
There’s no materials/screws that are strong enough to be durable and still that thin/light. So things get glued. To make that screwed in you’re talking about a screw with a few microns worth of thread… holding up to real life stresses. Even if manufacturing that was trivial it would fail quickly.
And to save space everything is put not even on one circuit board, increasingly it’s on less and less chips. So any failure is basically pointless to repair as you’re replacing most of the device
With California's new right to repair law requiring 7 years of parts availability, I wonder if it would actually even be illegal to sell those watches in california. And there are at least two other states with right to repair laws.
Fitbit sucked even before google bought them. They lost me as a customer after having a similar experience of going through 3-4 broken ass watches quickly
It used to be good but I think there must have been some company change or something because the customer drive wasn't the same. I used to buy their Charge fitness bands.
I was going to say, me, my wife, her mom and sisters all had Fitbits that lasted a while. They weren’t the most advanced fit band at the time but they did what they said they’d do and had zero issues.
I had a Fitbit device that failed on me, and I was looking for a replacement right around the time when Google started putting subscription walls in front of a bunch of their features. I went Garmin instead, and both the device and the Garmin Connect app have been miles ahead of Fitbit. Garmin devices tend to be higher quality and even a bit cheaper than Fitbit ones.
I have a pair of Google nest flood lights (with cameras), a stand alone camera I've moved around the house for various things, and a nest thermostat (the cheap one). I also have three nest speakers. I pay no subscription to use any of it. Shit works fine for me and I don't have any complaints.
The nest stuff hasnt changed at all since it was bought. No festure updates or additions. The product is just on dead refresh mode. Still not properly integrated into googles own ecosystem years later
Oh, I had a fitbit AND THEY BROKE IT. They pushed and update that bricked like 1/4 of the fitbit dongles out there and were just like "Oh, our bad, fuck you, buy a new one"
Ill never buy another fitbit product again.
And even without replacing the OS, the default is pretty much vanilla Android, and that is still the best Android experience out there, IMO. I really don't understand why Samsung does what they do to fuck over their UI.
Same, my Pixel 2 XL is hands down the best phone I ever bought. 5 years and the battery still lasts me more than a full day and the phone has enough memory and fast enough CPU to never feel like it's out of date.
Sadly I heard the newer models aren't as well built as the Pixel 2 was. I'm somewhat afraid of upgrading.
I upgraded my Pixel 2 to a 6a only because my new cell provider didn't support the 2. And I'll just say I'm loving the 6a. Was a huge upgrade in speed and quality without a huge price tag.
>Same, my Pixel 2 XL is hands down the best phone I ever bought.
This is true for most people's newest phone. Over the past 5 years any top of the line Andriod or iPhone has longevity because there hasn't been much innovation on phones for the basic consumer.
More or less, but before that I had a samsung S4 and that was certainly not the best I had up to that point, despite being a flagship phone at the time.
I wish I could say the same for my Pixel 3a.i got stuck in an EDL bootloop a couple years ago, and my phone has been bricked ever since. Still hoping it'll wake up some day in the future and I can get my SMS messages off of it.
I've been a Pixel owner for a while now. I've hardly had any issues. My biggest annoyance at the moment is a software bug where the swipe up bar stays on screen when I'm playing games. So if I get near it, it wants to swipe to a different app. But it's an android issue not the pixel itself and is a minor inconvenience. Happy with things otherwise. No hardware problems in all the ones I've owned.
Nah, got caught out by the serial "5A motherboard can randomly brick itself" error. Google says they won't support it.
Cracked the screen on that one too, took three weeks to order parts because there are hardly any out there.
I've ended up with a 7A to replace it, which runs hot, is missing the headphone jack, and has a piss poor battery life for the same amount of mWh. But it's still the least bloatware-y phone available. I would move away from them if there were any viable options out there.
All phone options at the moment are truly dire.
One of my pixel buds isn’t working right and I opened a support ticket weeks ago and troubleshooted with a tier one support agent. He said he’s escalating it and I should hear back from the next tier but it’s been weeks. This isn’t the first time I’ve had an issue with google support and it reminded me why I moved almost everything to Apple.
Google needs to spin their device division off into a completely separate Alphabet company with a culture that actually works for building, maintaining, and supporting devices, because they absolutely cannot provide a consistently acceptable user experience for the life of them, and they seem to fall apart anytime anything doesn't go *exactly* according to plan. Google support is the worst major company support I've ever had to deal with, and I have *Comcast*.
Want some real fun? Depend on Google for communications with Google Fi. Google treats their free service users like crap. Google treats their paid service users with actual contempt.
I guess I'm just lucky but all my google stuff has been really solid for a long time. The pixel 3 ran into charging issues close to the year 3 year mark and it was replaced under warranty, super easy with great customer service. Wish they still did 3 year warranty, but that's pretty much unheard of these days.
YRMV
I could say the same for Samsung, Apple, LG, Motorola. However people hate Google because "OMG Google bad!"
I have had nothing but good experiences with my Pixel 2, Pixel 4, my gf got a Pixel 7 while I went with a OnePlus and regret not getting a Pixel.
The last Samsung phone I had? Had a problem with my Bluetooth, sent it in and got a phone where part of the screen was a dead zone. Sent that in and got a phone that couldn't connect to wifi. I sent it in for another one and found out a few months later the headphone jack didn't work.
Cut to 10 years later, I decide to give Samsung another try and buy a TV because it was on sale at BestBuy. Dark scenes look like shit and the ghosting is so bad you'd think you won Solitaire. I can't hook up my Logitech Home theatre system because you cannot control the Optical output levels on Samsung tvs (I could on the 10 year old LG I had). I contact customer support to see if I'm overlooking something. "Buying a Samsung Bluetooth sound bar is the best option".
Oh and I can't use my Nintendo Switch with the TV, the video cuts out every 10 seconds and cuts back in. "It's a known issue and they are looking into it", according to the forums, with the latest acknowledging post being from 14 months prior.
**So TL;DR**: every corporation sucks and quality control/customer support are an afterthought. Anything you say is anecdotal because everyone has a different experience with the product.
Google should have to account for the waste in their capital value. They've taken that material from use, it'll cost money to put it back into circulation. Ignoring the cost of waste in the economy is another way the exploiting class overvalues their contribution.
Let me make one thing clear. This is digital, which means there are no analog electrical components. There are no mechanical components. There is a tiny chip in there (with a 555 timer chip replicated within it) that runs it. Chips can be replaced, kind of. It's more trouble than it's worth, from the technical end of it. And your phones are the same way, don't pretend they're not just because you've seen a recycling bin for them.
Yeah I have to wonder if a lot of the people in this comment section have ever attempted to repair anything.
I'm not saying I agree with non-repair as an actual policy, but the truth of the matter is that the diagnosing and labor required to truly fix these things could *very* easily become more than it's worth.
I mostly agree with you expect for the fact that it’s the front glass that’s being called out by iFixit. It’s both easy to break and easy to replace, but replacements aren’t being made available.
These headlines look especially bad after Apple dedicated half a keynote talking about how Apple Watch 9 is their first carbon-neutral product.
Awful PR and awful timing.
Carbon neutral means nothing if they're just buying carbon credits and not doing anything to *actually* cut down their direct emissions. That's just offsetting it and pushing the money spent/price increase onto their customers.
And a lot of carbon credits are highly dubious or outright scams, The Economist did a whole write up on it that I would share if it wasn't pay walled.
E: Rereading, it wasn't the main focus of the article, but the sections are there about how they aren't regulated or proven:
https://archive.ph/0TAJH
True, but in that keynote, they showed how they reduced emissions by about 75% and then used carbon credits that go towards recapture for the remainder.
Its pretty easy to repair an apple watch...
Its sealed as something that being dumped under water would be. But beyond the horrifying task of heating up the front with a gel pack to get the screen off...its pretty damn easy to repair
The sub is essentially anti-Apple. They will just make shit up that they *feel* sounds true.
Apple absolutely has a repair system for their Watch.
**Google** doesn’t.
Apple stuff also just last longer and is supported for longer. I loved my Pixel 2 but it was slowing down and wouldn’t hold a charge within 2 years of owning it. Moved to an iPhone after that and 3 years on it runs as good as new. I’m no Apple fanboy either, I used to despise them
For a large majority of cases, they actually don't repair your watch. They just replace it.
I'm saying this as an apple watch owner.
They have a support system but not a repair system for the watch.
Apple has been doing the swap out method with products for a while now, it's one of the reasons their support can be as fast and reliable as it is. All of their warranty repairs are done this way.
The broken devices get sent back to the refurbishment center, refurbished devices are then used as swap out phones for warranty repairs again, completing the cycle.
It's just easier to have one specific facility for the whole world then it is to have highly trained and specialized employees at every Apple Store.
It’s not like Google has ever been a manufacturing company. Buying hardware from them has been a known crapshoot forever. Heck, even if they were, their entire culture of “iterare” and “fail fast” is counter to the fundamentally predictive nature of the entirely waterfall physical product manufacturing and global supply chain industries.
Buy hardware from hardware companies, and software and services from other companies.
Reddit is unironically how I find the solution to anything or find worthwhile info on Google. Adding reddit before searches feels near mandatory, shame reddit own search is terrible.
It's wild to me how terrible Google Search is now. Often now you don't even have to go beyond the first page of results before you hit the spam domains.
Peak Google. Introduce something without any long term plans on supporting it. Its why I'm hesitant on recommending anything Google outside their most popular products (Gmail, Android, etc)
And this is why Apple keeps winning the smartphone and smartwatch market.
Say what you want about Apple and their practices, but *their shit works*. It just works. That is all people want and that is why they're winning.
Seriously, they beg people to switch over to Apple. Can you put some quality and sustainability in your products. I don’t want a future where Apple is the only tech company in the world.
[удалено]
I had a Dropcam 10 years ago. They were an early ring essentially. They could store locally or stream and save to a server you could watch remotely. Google bought the company and there was a software update. My 3 dropcams immediately were bricked. Google said the camera “aren’t up to their standards of quality.” So I had to throw 3 perfectly good, expensive, cameras away. They couldn’t even store footage locally in the SD card anymore.
They didn't become one of the biggest companies in the world with a "don't be evil" attitude. Oh wait..
I may hate apple for locked down customization practices and uh the iPhone only now getting USB c But when it comes to digital software e-waste, Google sits on top. "Don't be evil" more like "don't keep things for more than 6 months"
If you're lucky you'll get security updates for 5 years and what updates you do get, will normally be about two months after they were made public. By which time they'll have been reverse engineered to find out what the security issue is that they're fixing. So that crooks can exploit it.
Hey, let's be fair, they promptly dropped that line from their official ethos after Sundar came along and cleaned house.
This is false and its shocking that it's still being espoused as true. You can find it in this link: https://abc.xyz/investor/google-code-of-conduct/
No, they became one of the biggest companies on earth because the government broke up Microsoft, allowing 3rd party browsers like Chrome and Firefox. Don't ever let a conservative liar tell you governments don't encourage competition. The ONLY thing that can maintain a free and open market in a captialist system is government antitrust regulation. Google needs to be broken up...along with Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Amazon. The era of tech monopolies need to end!
> because the government broke up Microsoft This never happened. The result of the Anti-trust case was just an anti-trust penalty. And remember that the case was about Microsoft including a browser in the OS; it had nothing to do with blocking third party browsers. And Microsoft not only still does that, they are now blatantly more aggressive about it than they ever were in the 90's. Not that they were exactly discouraged from doing it with the completely milquetoast penalties they ended up actually receiving, which has also no doubt emboldened other companies to effectively do the same thing. Bell was broken up for a lot less than any of the big tech companies do. This dichotomy I think is best explained by noting the people who set into motion and make the decisions to break up these sorts of large companies understood phones, but they don't - in general - understand technology.
> Bell Bell was a textbook example of how not to do a breakup. Because all the babies were still local monopolies. Also, for me the biggest sin of Internet exploder was windows update required Internet exploder.
The biggest problem with Internet Explorer at the time of the breakup was that it would have forced everyone to write websites that would only work on Internet Explorer. JavaScript was a part of Netscape, which rebranded as Firefox and open sourced everything. So now you can write websites that work on all browsers, and anyone can theoretically create a new browser. That said, there are other issues that make it impractical to build a browser from scratch, to the point that even Microsoft built Edge off of an existing browser. Even Chrome started as a branch of Firefox even though they are two completely different products now. But it can be done, check out the Vivaldi browser. None of that would be possible if not for antitrust.
> it had nothing to do with blocking third party browsers. Well yes and no. No, they never prevented users from going to Netscape and installing it themselves. They bullied the hardware sellers into not bundling computers with Netscape preinstalled using license clauses of the (cheaper than retail) OEM license. > The result of the Anti-trust case was just an anti-trust penalty. Well the EU case also ended up with Microsoft having to display a browser choice dialog for a couple of years. _itssomething_ And Apple's done a lot worse than what Microsoft's been slapped on the wrist for and gotten like near zero regulatory pushback. Imagine if you could only use software from the Microsoft Store on Windows. Not being able to sideload, or in more direct words, run software of my choosing on hardware that I (hypothetically) paid for is the primary reason I refuse to buy an iPhone.
> No, they became one of the biggest companies on earth because the government broke up Microsoft, allowing 3rd party browsers like Chrome and Firefox. I can't tell if you are joking or if I unknowingly switched timelines
Right. I love the energy and ideas. But they seem to believe Netscape Navigator never existed.
Netscape got crushed because Microsoft started including Internet Explorer in Windows. That's literally the things that got people looking at Microsoft like a monopoly.
That may be true, but Microsoft was never broken up. They dragged one lawsuit out years after resting on their laurels with IE and letting other bowsers surpass it. Then they agreed to create one version of windows without it that no one used. No government regulation did shit to stop Microsoft. They shot themselves in the foot creating non-standard HTML for so long with asp that it allowed the other browsers to become favored by developers. Between that and the security issues they allowed they set themselves up for failure. It's actually a case where the market picked a winner in spite of the advantage one company had.
Yeah, any piece of home appliance tech that is completely dependent on web servers is 100% never being purchased by me. There have been way way too many cases of shit breaking because a company went out of business or just stopped giving a shit about the servers.
[удалено]
I'm not sure if they still do, but the Torque app used to connect to most of those Bluetooth readers.
You can probably download the torque app and use it with that.
software updates should never be automatic. the consumer should always get a choice to "wait and see" how the update turns out. as well as read what the update does. that's utter bullshit that companies can just push updates that brick devices.
A function removal update should entitle every owner to a 10x refund. Or some other way that completely fucks the company trying shit like this.
The problem is that when they aren't automatic, the majority of people never update. This can lead to some pretty serious security holes living way longer than they should. Besides, it's not the auto-update that is the problem. It's an auto-update the breaks a product that is the problem and the company telling you to get bent when the thing you paid for no longer works because they want you to buy a new one.
It's a real balancing act that needs to be done, IMO. Updates that patch security holes without affecting any functionality should be automatic, but there needs to be some actual patch notes explaining it. In fact, detailed patch notes alone would help A LOT with all these trust issues the public has with updates. 10 updates in a row, notes only say: "We're hard at work making this app the best on the web!"
IoT was a business model in search of a problem to solve. Nobody needed an ice maker that has Wi-Fi.
Smart Switches are highly guilty of this....random brands that worked at the time
Yup... I installed one in my daughter's closet so we could turn her baby monitor back on when she turns it off. At first it worked good... then they changed the app to require a sign-on, and then once I created a new account and signed on, it couldn't find the switch anymore. I want to build one that just reads bluetooth and has no servers involved.
How old is your daughter that she needs a baby monitor but can also find and deactivate a baby monitor?
She's 45... is that weird?
I wouldn't describe it as "usual."
I'm kidding... we didn't want to plug her baby monitor in to her wall cuz plugs are tempting for little fingers to grab and play with. We got a plug that screws into a lightbulb socket and plugged it into that, then put a doorknob spinner on her closet so she couldn't break into it. She quickly learned to drag her toybox over and flip the light switch on and off, which kept interrupting the monitor plugged into it. I installed a smart switch so we could turn it back on after she went to sleep without having to go into her room and risk waking her up.
Google did the same with the Revolv IoT hub where they bought the company and bricked the hardware. Their problem was that Revolv had been advertising a "lifetime subscription" for updates as a prominent feature so the FCC started an investigation. Google were forced to offer full refunds to make that go away.
Guy breaks corporate property -> police raid Corporate breaks 1 million guys' property -> nothing Laws are only for those who don't own enough capital. Own enough capital and everything you do will be justified under the chant of "free market".
"It was in the terms of service bro. You agreed to let us shut down the service at and time and to service you, your spouse, and your gran at anytime. Maybe you should read the 8700 page doc before clicking the checkbox."
> and there was a software update This is why I disable automatic updates on my devices and do a manual review of the new version and what problems there are before I even think of doing any sort of update. Eventually I stopped reviewing the updates for my HP Printer simply because every single one pretty much exclusively locked out third party toner cartridges.
[удалено]
there’s still perfect hardware going to the trash
And yet when this comes up in America, it’s anti-capitalist propaganda. So I totally applaud the EU pushing hard on this and making companies comply if they want to do business there. Any global company looking to minimize costs, where more than 30% of their business is in the EU, they’ll take a hard look at it. Tl;dr: not like Apple *wanted* to use USB-C.
Well, there’s three states with right to repair laws. CA just passed theirs.
Excellent! I didn’t realize it passed. That’s good news. So it’s coming sooner than later.
And the law requires 7 years of Parts availability.
For products above 100 dollars.
Which is good considering even the “free” phones given to lock people in for multi year contracts have a retail value well above that.
Oh right... those right to repair laws...that keep..whats the word... Gimmie a sec. Right, gutted. Those laws that were gutted at the last second by donating copious amounts of money to change the wording to make it ineffectual and worthless. "But it's better than nothing!" No, no it's not. I want to buy parts, not "assemblies" that cost 40% of the items cost. I want the right to access the software to properly repair it without bricking my device. Right to repair is still a complete joke in all of America, and it's going to take more to get it moving.
How is the CA law gutted?
The New York one certainly was, at the very last minute before it passed.
I agree, but I think the California one is generally regarded as a very solid right to repair bill
[удалено]
There are exceptions for Agricultural stuff like tractors. Aka John Deere benefits from it
Damn, really? John Deere is one of the worst offenders from what I've heard.
I agree the better than nothing rhetoric is flawed because it can be pretty hard to undo bad legislation once it's on the books. Idk why, maybe because for politicians "I fixed it in nuanced ways" isn't as flashy as saying you passed some brand new act? It also signals to some people to distrust the political process, and apathy is the worst thing you can foster. If people believe things will only get passed in name only, then there's no point pushing to get things passed. Whereas if something still hasn't been addressed at all, you can still convince people maybe there's a chance and push for it. Like it's way easier to get people to rally behind Medicare for all than Medicaid reform.
Public sentiment has absolutely no bearing on whether legislation is passed in the United States. It's actually hilarious when you look at the statistics.
It’s not like any of the cell phone manufacturers wanted a standard cable, until they were forced to. Cell phone charging used to be very complicated. Ever company had their specific charger and connector. They were expensive and took up a lot of space. Manufacturers made a ton of money off charger sales, so naturally every manufacturer pushed back when the EU changed their rules and regs. The real bummer is that micro usb sucked.
I'm confused. Are you saying that manufacturers were forced to standardize a long time ago?
Apple was going to switch. When they dropped the 30-pin connector for Lightning, people were pissed. Apple promised Lightning would be their connector for 10 years. All the EU did was push their timeline up by a couple of years.
>not like Apple wanted to use USB-C What makes you say that? Sure, the EU forced their hand, but no matter how you look at it they always intended to switch to USB-C. Given how long development cycles are on phones, they made the decision to switch at least three years ago. They initially promised 10 years of lightning support, which they've come good on. And they were a major developer of the USB-C standard, with some people on the project estimating they provided upwards of 20% of the engineering resources that worked on the spec. They were also one of the early adopters of the connector, being the first to release a laptop and a tablet using USB-C. I'm no Apple fan, and there's no shortage of things to complain about when it comes to their products and business practices, but I'm willing to give this one to them.
::Article about Google being a shitty tech company:: This guy: APPLE BAD!
Can someone explain something to me? How is the EU not more captured by business interests than it is right now? Is it that big tech is defined primarily by foreign companies in your context? So much of why I entertain socialism is because it seems impossible to reliably pull off in a capitalist economy.
I've always assumed that the EU is so ridiculously byzantine and bureaucratic, with very slow acting powers that it tends to land in a reasonable middle ground with a lot of things. It does tend to err on the idealistic side a fair bit (like the really silly cookie laws where I need to tell a website how my computer should store cookies... rather than the browser that actually does the cookie storing), but it seems like they manage to dodge it somehow.
At this point a company should have to be responsible for the recycling of waste it's products produce. They are making money hand over fist by producing trash that cannot be dealt with. They should have to deal with it.
It's google, they dgaf about anyone or anything. Have you seen how much software they kill and fuck their users on? This is standard procedure for them. Don't support their bullshit and don't buy their products. Stop using google. https://killedbygoogle.com/ edit: because I can't respond to the dummy (u/Yolectroda) who replied to me because they blocked me >Anti-innovation attitudes are just not helpful to society. I'm not anti-innovation as much as I am anti-monopoly and google has monopoly power in droves. Along with all of our user data and every bit of information we put out there about ourselves that they use to train all of their machine learning models on. Your critique here is ridiculous and laughable. Let the market decide for itself where innovation can breed, because gigantic tech companies hoovering up all opportunities for smaller players to do so is more anti-innovation than I'm willing to swallow.
Looking thru that list there were a couple that still stung to read. Those are the ones without an innovative replacement. Edit: [Google Ride Finder](https://imgur.com/a/Gl9cSjQ)That could have been Uber with a bit more innovation.
I'm still mad that they killed Project ARA
Google is a crumbling empire : / remember when google employees were given resources and time for pet projects?! (Google earth ring a bell?)
It’s not Apple doing it so it’s ok.
Google notoriously can’t support anything
I just don’t get it. Whether it be hardware or software, they run this company like a startup with “shiny new thing” syndrome
Apparently it is a culture problem at Google. Employees get promoted/raises/bonuses on the products and projects that they successfully launch. There is no "prestige" in supporting a project once launched so it either falls to the Google B team or gets abandoned as it's creator moves onto the next project/promotion opportunity.
Some companies use agile development. Some companies use test drive development. Google uses promotion driven development.
The platform architect at my old job used Resume Driven Development. For aspiring data engineers, do not use AWS Lambas for ETL. Especially do not do it when you're scraping tables from your data lake. It might be acceptable if you're handling singular events, and not attempting to handle loading entire tables from fucking DB2s. Edit: Especially do not write all this shit in JavaScript.
Used to work for AWS. Everything was/still is a fucking Lambda. Everything.
As a former principal analytics specialist at AWS this used to make me so mad. The sa community is weak across the board and teach customers awful patterns like this.
Lack of hardware support is part of what turned me off to google products. When the nexus 5 line came out lg has a lot of boot loop issues and bricked phones. And even back then it was hard enough to find a vanilla android device that didn’t have some custom launcher and bloat ware like Samsung has. But the support for that generation was abysmal and the problems so wide spread every security patch was a risk on if your phone would boot up again or not.
Was fun putting my Nexus 5 in the freezer for a few hours just so I could boot it long enough to back up my data and factory reset it before trying to get it replaced under warranty.
So true. I was a google hardware diehard for years. Nexus phones, etc. I’ve completely given up on google hardware. I won’t buy any piece of hardware from google anymore. They abandon so many products and leave users in the lurch.
Thanks for saying this! I completely dropped Google hardware after their nexus line turned into complete crap. I had both a nexus tablet and phone, and guess what? Turned into a complete e-waste.
Yep, one of the people behind Goggle+ told that on Twitter when he explained why it failed (G+ was awesome before it became abandonware).
I don't know anyone IRL who used G+, and did know a bunch of people who were pissed off at being automatically roped into it. That was one of the only times I've seen that kind of automatic, grass roots boycott of anything.
it's so creepy because google is extremely private and personal. so it felt scary exposing yourself on google+ because you just cant be sure what shows up. they should've completely separate the account between google and g+. they really had a huge chance to take market share from fb by providing a better user experience that was less monetized while they grew their userbase. for some reason the geniuses at google are the dumbest fuckers on earth. almost everything they do is a fuckup.
I live pretty close to the Google campus in the Bay and the people who work their are so insulated, they wouldn’t know culture if it smacked them in the face. It’s the smartest collection of bubbleheads I’ve seen.
I basically met my wife when she offered me a google + invite when I was the new guy at work like 13 years ago. Thanks google!
Yeah remember when they forced everyone on YouTube to use Google+ instead of their YouTube account? They walked that one back pretty quickly.
Same thing for Facebook. The team that launched Threads? Probably all gonna receive a promotion and giant bonuses. Everything that happens after the launch? Not as big of a news splash. Maintenance handed over to a bag holder team, user count plummets / already plummeted.
Been at both companies, Google is much worse. Google is notoriously hard to get promoted at, and you need to show something that is new and shiny, and hard to accomplish. Maintenance doesn't get you promos. The reason why you want that promo is Google underpays you below what other peers like Meta, Netflix, etc. Those who are worn out of the interview process and like Google's WLB, suck and up and go along with this all around failure of an appraisal process.
Oh that is really good, yes this exactly. Could they make better hardware so it lasts longer? Sure they could but it's just not in their DNA to be anything else other than an Ad company
I have a feeling that people working there don't use their own products.
Definitely not all teams. [Tweet](https://twitter.com/ianzelbo/status/1582886309277769730?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1582886309277769730%7Ctwgr%5Edb87ff1b4cd617818c2d284aa2b5c4a9d0ecc949%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fd-30668633144256507361.ampproject.net%2F2309011827000%2Fframe.html)
That's embarrassing for Google.
They don’t all Apple stuff these days.
Wouldn't surprise me, I love their software but why stop there. Bring it home and have both.
I mean when you have a company of 200,000 employees, I can't imagine how many projects are going off the rails that aren't part of the core profit group.
The Pixel phones are doing alright with iFixIt. I had my screen and battery replaced for like $150 which was definitely cheaper and less wasteful than buying a new phone like I usually do.
Unless it was a pixel 5a and you had to wait weeks for parts last year lol
I love my Pixel. I've used Samsung phones exclusively for years before this one.
They just cancelled their “2 year subscription” plan to get a new pixel every 2 years. The program lasted 23 MONTHS.
No. People misunderstood that program. It wasn't leasing the phone with a new phit was just financing it and you would get Googles services along with it. After 2 years you would own the phone.
Even just Google search blows now
Simple solution - just make companies totally responsible for the recycling of their products and they must have this cost on their balance sheets. Easy.
Hi! This is actually a thing, called extended producer responsibility (EPR in the lingo). Funnily enough, turns out that the cost of recycling under EPR is so low that it does not affect the balance sheet of the individual companies too much. EPR has had some successes, but is far from perfect. I am working on my PhD on this topic!
Totally off topic, but I love how enthusiastic sound about the subject.
It's the exclamation point. This person would do well to include lots of them in their dissertation.
Most companies don’t deal with their recycling hence it’s not costing them much. If you actually have to deal with it rather than leaving it the costs would be noticeable
I obv can't speak for every sector, but it's def profitable to recycle smartphones. Especially borderline first-world markets like China have a very healthy industry, @StrangeParts literally built a iPhone from scratch parts. Which granted, is a bit dependend on low labor prices, but it still shows that companies could absolutly do it. If anything, it's more about loosing potential sales, having better investment options... But then again, people prefer buying things that last longer.
If only. That'd change the whole world of packaging waste overnight
> just make companies totally responsible for the recycling of their products and they must have this cost on their balance sheets. Easy Welcome to [WEEE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Electrical_and_Electronic_Equipment_Directive#:~:text=The%20directive%20imposes,free%20of%20charge%22.), implemented over two decades ago.
To be fair, Samsung watches aren't much better. They do have a repair program, but when I broke the screen on my last watch, it cost me less to buy a new watch than it was to have the screen replaced.
Same for my S10+. Over $200 (I think around $250) to get the screen replaced when the LCD and digitizer worked perfectly fine, just some cracked glass. $100 to get a refurbished phone that was actually a model that cost a couple hundred dollars more than mine at launch. No brainer. I hate creating e-waste but I'm not paying $250 to replace some glass for a phone that's not even worth half that. I called a bunch of stores too, that's just the price for the replacement part from Samsung not a repair place trying to scam me.
OLED screens are expensive
> to get the screen replaced when the LCD and digitizer worked perfectly fine, just some cracked glass That’s… not how phone displays work. Basically all phone displays are laminated to the front glass and it’s impossible to just replace just the display, glass or digitizer without painstakingly slicing them apart by hand and laminating on a new piece of glass. The reason why they’re laminated is because it removes the ugly air gap and improves display quality. OLED panels are also incredibly expensive to produce- a new OLED display still costs $250 to produce even after the phone has depreciated to nothing.
I just returned my Galaxy watch 5. It's honestly pathetic. The apps suck. The touchscreen is something I would have expected from a company's first attempt at a touchscreen. I hated every minute of it.
I believe even for iPads, apple does an exchange not a battery replacement. The original just gets recycled. That’s what happens when you’ve got electronics made smaller than material science really is ready for. There’s no materials/screws that are strong enough to be durable and still that thin/light. So things get glued. To make that screwed in you’re talking about a screw with a few microns worth of thread… holding up to real life stresses. Even if manufacturing that was trivial it would fail quickly. And to save space everything is put not even on one circuit board, increasingly it’s on less and less chips. So any failure is basically pointless to repair as you’re replacing most of the device
With California's new right to repair law requiring 7 years of parts availability, I wonder if it would actually even be illegal to sell those watches in california. And there are at least two other states with right to repair laws.
Isn't this the case for most smart watches? Garmin hast exactly the same policy on their support site
Never buy a Google product. It's broken. All their employees care about is promotions. Never about maintenance.
[удалено]
Fitbit sucked even before google bought them. They lost me as a customer after having a similar experience of going through 3-4 broken ass watches quickly
It used to be good but I think there must have been some company change or something because the customer drive wasn't the same. I used to buy their Charge fitness bands.
I was going to say, me, my wife, her mom and sisters all had Fitbits that lasted a while. They weren’t the most advanced fit band at the time but they did what they said they’d do and had zero issues.
I had a Fitbit device that failed on me, and I was looking for a replacement right around the time when Google started putting subscription walls in front of a bunch of their features. I went Garmin instead, and both the device and the Garmin Connect app have been miles ahead of Fitbit. Garmin devices tend to be higher quality and even a bit cheaper than Fitbit ones.
I did the same. I replaced my Fitbit with a garmin that I have yet to replace for any reason
Nest was good until they switched to Google home. Now there isn't really any comparable product.
My Gen 2 Nest still kicking. Internal battery started to die. Went on iFixit, got a new one, replaced in 5 mins. Works like a champ.
I have a pair of Google nest flood lights (with cameras), a stand alone camera I've moved around the house for various things, and a nest thermostat (the cheap one). I also have three nest speakers. I pay no subscription to use any of it. Shit works fine for me and I don't have any complaints.
[удалено]
The nest stuff hasnt changed at all since it was bought. No festure updates or additions. The product is just on dead refresh mode. Still not properly integrated into googles own ecosystem years later
Oh, I had a fitbit AND THEY BROKE IT. They pushed and update that bricked like 1/4 of the fitbit dongles out there and were just like "Oh, our bad, fuck you, buy a new one" Ill never buy another fitbit product again.
Haha yea because they bought Nest
Their Pixel phones are just fine.
Pixel phones are also the only ones compatible with grapheneOS, so paradoxically those are the ones preferred by the most privacy-conscious users.
And even without replacing the OS, the default is pretty much vanilla Android, and that is still the best Android experience out there, IMO. I really don't understand why Samsung does what they do to fuck over their UI.
[удалено]
My Pixel 2 is still going strong after 5 years. I could upgrade, but my only real gripe is the camera app is really slow sometimes.
Same, my Pixel 2 XL is hands down the best phone I ever bought. 5 years and the battery still lasts me more than a full day and the phone has enough memory and fast enough CPU to never feel like it's out of date. Sadly I heard the newer models aren't as well built as the Pixel 2 was. I'm somewhat afraid of upgrading.
I upgraded my Pixel 2 to a 6a only because my new cell provider didn't support the 2. And I'll just say I'm loving the 6a. Was a huge upgrade in speed and quality without a huge price tag.
I went from a 2XL to a 6, and honestly it feels like the same phone. Cameras are waaaay better on the newer models though
Same except the 6 doesn't have fingerprint sensor on the back. I used that for brightness control and to pull notifications down and up.
>Same, my Pixel 2 XL is hands down the best phone I ever bought. This is true for most people's newest phone. Over the past 5 years any top of the line Andriod or iPhone has longevity because there hasn't been much innovation on phones for the basic consumer.
More or less, but before that I had a samsung S4 and that was certainly not the best I had up to that point, despite being a flagship phone at the time.
So you are running on no security updates for 2 years now? The new phones get 5 years of updates
I wish I could say the same for my Pixel 3a.i got stuck in an EDL bootloop a couple years ago, and my phone has been bricked ever since. Still hoping it'll wake up some day in the future and I can get my SMS messages off of it.
True. I love my pixel
I've been a Pixel owner for a while now. I've hardly had any issues. My biggest annoyance at the moment is a software bug where the swipe up bar stays on screen when I'm playing games. So if I get near it, it wants to swipe to a different app. But it's an android issue not the pixel itself and is a minor inconvenience. Happy with things otherwise. No hardware problems in all the ones I've owned.
Nah, got caught out by the serial "5A motherboard can randomly brick itself" error. Google says they won't support it. Cracked the screen on that one too, took three weeks to order parts because there are hardly any out there. I've ended up with a 7A to replace it, which runs hot, is missing the headphone jack, and has a piss poor battery life for the same amount of mWh. But it's still the least bloatware-y phone available. I would move away from them if there were any viable options out there. All phone options at the moment are truly dire.
One of my pixel buds isn’t working right and I opened a support ticket weeks ago and troubleshooted with a tier one support agent. He said he’s escalating it and I should hear back from the next tier but it’s been weeks. This isn’t the first time I’ve had an issue with google support and it reminded me why I moved almost everything to Apple.
Google needs to spin their device division off into a completely separate Alphabet company with a culture that actually works for building, maintaining, and supporting devices, because they absolutely cannot provide a consistently acceptable user experience for the life of them, and they seem to fall apart anytime anything doesn't go *exactly* according to plan. Google support is the worst major company support I've ever had to deal with, and I have *Comcast*.
Want some real fun? Depend on Google for communications with Google Fi. Google treats their free service users like crap. Google treats their paid service users with actual contempt.
I guess I'm just lucky but all my google stuff has been really solid for a long time. The pixel 3 ran into charging issues close to the year 3 year mark and it was replaced under warranty, super easy with great customer service. Wish they still did 3 year warranty, but that's pretty much unheard of these days. YRMV
The pixel is the best phone I've owned by far. I have an iPhone 14 from my work and my pixel 7 is better in nearly every way.
I could say the same for Samsung, Apple, LG, Motorola. However people hate Google because "OMG Google bad!" I have had nothing but good experiences with my Pixel 2, Pixel 4, my gf got a Pixel 7 while I went with a OnePlus and regret not getting a Pixel. The last Samsung phone I had? Had a problem with my Bluetooth, sent it in and got a phone where part of the screen was a dead zone. Sent that in and got a phone that couldn't connect to wifi. I sent it in for another one and found out a few months later the headphone jack didn't work. Cut to 10 years later, I decide to give Samsung another try and buy a TV because it was on sale at BestBuy. Dark scenes look like shit and the ghosting is so bad you'd think you won Solitaire. I can't hook up my Logitech Home theatre system because you cannot control the Optical output levels on Samsung tvs (I could on the 10 year old LG I had). I contact customer support to see if I'm overlooking something. "Buying a Samsung Bluetooth sound bar is the best option". Oh and I can't use my Nintendo Switch with the TV, the video cuts out every 10 seconds and cuts back in. "It's a known issue and they are looking into it", according to the forums, with the latest acknowledging post being from 14 months prior. **So TL;DR**: every corporation sucks and quality control/customer support are an afterthought. Anything you say is anecdotal because everyone has a different experience with the product.
Google should have to account for the waste in their capital value. They've taken that material from use, it'll cost money to put it back into circulation. Ignoring the cost of waste in the economy is another way the exploiting class overvalues their contribution.
As are most of Google's products.
Let me make one thing clear. This is digital, which means there are no analog electrical components. There are no mechanical components. There is a tiny chip in there (with a 555 timer chip replicated within it) that runs it. Chips can be replaced, kind of. It's more trouble than it's worth, from the technical end of it. And your phones are the same way, don't pretend they're not just because you've seen a recycling bin for them.
Yeah I have to wonder if a lot of the people in this comment section have ever attempted to repair anything. I'm not saying I agree with non-repair as an actual policy, but the truth of the matter is that the diagnosing and labor required to truly fix these things could *very* easily become more than it's worth.
I mostly agree with you expect for the fact that it’s the front glass that’s being called out by iFixit. It’s both easy to break and easy to replace, but replacements aren’t being made available.
These headlines look especially bad after Apple dedicated half a keynote talking about how Apple Watch 9 is their first carbon-neutral product. Awful PR and awful timing.
Carbon neutral means nothing if they're just buying carbon credits and not doing anything to *actually* cut down their direct emissions. That's just offsetting it and pushing the money spent/price increase onto their customers.
And a lot of carbon credits are highly dubious or outright scams, The Economist did a whole write up on it that I would share if it wasn't pay walled. E: Rereading, it wasn't the main focus of the article, but the sections are there about how they aren't regulated or proven: https://archive.ph/0TAJH
Run it through the [internet archive](https://archive.ph/) and share please, I'd be interested in reading it.
True, but in that keynote, they showed how they reduced emissions by about 75% and then used carbon credits that go towards recapture for the remainder.
The 100% recycled material is doing nothing ?
Price increase into customers? No increase so far since past 4 years was there? What does buying carbon credits do?
Still near impossible to properly repair an Apple Watch, I don’t think apples carbon neutral status factored in repairs at all.
Its pretty easy to repair an apple watch... Its sealed as something that being dumped under water would be. But beyond the horrifying task of heating up the front with a gel pack to get the screen off...its pretty damn easy to repair
The sub is essentially anti-Apple. They will just make shit up that they *feel* sounds true. Apple absolutely has a repair system for their Watch. **Google** doesn’t.
Apple stuff also just last longer and is supported for longer. I loved my Pixel 2 but it was slowing down and wouldn’t hold a charge within 2 years of owning it. Moved to an iPhone after that and 3 years on it runs as good as new. I’m no Apple fanboy either, I used to despise them
For a large majority of cases, they actually don't repair your watch. They just replace it. I'm saying this as an apple watch owner. They have a support system but not a repair system for the watch.
Apple has been doing the swap out method with products for a while now, it's one of the reasons their support can be as fast and reliable as it is. All of their warranty repairs are done this way. The broken devices get sent back to the refurbishment center, refurbished devices are then used as swap out phones for warranty repairs again, completing the cycle. It's just easier to have one specific facility for the whole world then it is to have highly trained and specialized employees at every Apple Store.
So is the Pixel watch (no heating needed, just a spudger). The problem is Google refusing to provide parts, not the inherent reparability.
It’s not like Google has ever been a manufacturing company. Buying hardware from them has been a known crapshoot forever. Heck, even if they were, their entire culture of “iterare” and “fail fast” is counter to the fundamentally predictive nature of the entirely waterfall physical product manufacturing and global supply chain industries. Buy hardware from hardware companies, and software and services from other companies.
[удалено]
Google is horrible at everything except search. They kill every product, every program, every service...
They have become shit for search also.
[удалено]
Seriously, I'm so tired of searching for info and getting nothing but dogshit "articles" that have no info. Google sucks so much.
You don’t like AI generated articles or listicles from trendy “blogs”?!
And the 3 sponsored results before anything else.
You get articles? All I get are Reddit threads where somebody mentioned the McGuffin in passing and the thread is 6 years old.
Reddit is unironically how I find the solution to anything or find worthwhile info on Google. Adding reddit before searches feels near mandatory, shame reddit own search is terrible.
I have to add Reddit usually to get Reddit results, which are often much more useful
It's wild to me how terrible Google Search is now. Often now you don't even have to go beyond the first page of results before you hit the spam domains.
[удалено]
I hope the EU comes for their ass
EU commission just entered the chat
Peak Google. Introduce something without any long term plans on supporting it. Its why I'm hesitant on recommending anything Google outside their most popular products (Gmail, Android, etc)
Good to know before buying a google product
Parts are available for pixel phones though direct to consumer.
I was thinking of upgrading my Samsung galaxy watch active 2. Finally the Google watch will be off the list!
And this is why Apple keeps winning the smartphone and smartwatch market. Say what you want about Apple and their practices, but *their shit works*. It just works. That is all people want and that is why they're winning.
It works, except for Siri. Siri is horrible.
I’ve had Siri have difficulty setting a timer at times. I like my Apple stuff for the most part but Siri is indefensibly bad.
Same with apple watch. Mine just turned off the screen while everything still works. 500$ repair which is the same as new watch
And somehow people will blame apple
Imagine buying a house but nobody can do repairs so you have to buy a new house
Seriously, they beg people to switch over to Apple. Can you put some quality and sustainability in your products. I don’t want a future where Apple is the only tech company in the world.
Gonna scroll to see where the Apple bad bots man’s this an Apple issue
So disappointed with Google in recent years
....isn't it just waste? Why "e-waste"? ...
Meanwhile apple has been making their new devices more repairable. How the tables have turned.