- cross-posted to:
- android@lemmy.world
- hackernews@lemmy.smeargle.fans
- hackernews@derp.foo
- cross-posted to:
- android@lemmy.world
- hackernews@lemmy.smeargle.fans
- hackernews@derp.foo
Google says it can’t fix Pixel Watches, please just buy a new one | With no official repair program and no parts, broken Pixel Watches are just e-waste.::With no official repair program and no parts, broken Pixel Watches are just e-waste.
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I don’t mind that excuse about my Mi Band 6, because it was like £25.
I would mind that excuse when we’re talking about a £339 smartwatch. So I won’t buy one.
I won’t buy a Fitbit either, because the wife had one and every week was a complex dance of restarting the phone and watch several times until they agreed to connect to each other.
And they pretty much have made most of the utility locked behind an $80 subscription
No thanks
Why would a smartwatch need a subscription?? what does it even do?
Without the subscription, you have to pay 99 cents to check the time.
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. :/
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.
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
I did set it up. Survive multiple upgrade in place just fine.
I can say it beats all my apps until now. The best part to me is delete from app request to delete from my Android as well. So unlike most, it works ironically like iPhone. And I prefer that
I moved from Gmail. I’ll link to my previous comment to save trying it out again…
https://lemm.ee/comment/3347046
If I ever move away from Protonmail it will take about 5 mins for all my 300 websites to start sending emails to the new mailbox.
For 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.
How is immitch for you? I’ve been considering this for quite awhile.
I installed this week, so I’m not a long time user. But it’s by far the best self hosted photo app that I’ve used. Before that I used nextcloud, but the user experience isn’t as good Imo.
The only things that I miss are automatic albums based on face recognition and pet recognition. I still use google photo to share with family though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m pretty sure almost everything they make these days simply exists to obtain data from users first and foremost. They don’t want long term support or products that stick around forever; they want to add more and more vectors to build those profiles and record behaviors.
who needs an e-watch really
I love my Samsung watch because I can do Strava tracking and listen to Spotify to my Bluetooth Buds while running without taking my phone. Absolute game changer honestly
Pretty clear stuff like this is why we’re speed running to a dystopian future. Hopefully Googles profits can survive. /s
My solution is to steer clear of Google products. They excel at producing disposable… everything.
Their phones are up there in software support at least. Only true contender at this point is Samsung.
Samsung phones are so full of bloatware, I’ll never buy them again.
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.
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.
I get Google bad but what watch face is that in the thumbnail of the link?
Concentric!
Definitely falls under the “evil” company vibe.
I think I will stick to my dumb watches, thanks. Mechanical or quartz.
