Garmin watches look amazing. I just wish they had more smartwatch capabilities. I'd love complications on the watch face, and I feel like I should be able to start the assistant with a hotword.

I'm not sure if the Google Watch can do the latter.

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

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.

Google is first and foremost an ad company. Everything else they do is only to improve the worth of their ad business.

My pixel had issues with the screen (p7p) contacted google, within a couple of days I had an advance replacement device in my hands and a return label for the faulty device.

My watch is giving me issues currently so I'm planning on hitting up support about that too, as it's not within what I expected from the watch (won't connect via bt after a month or so, requiring a factory reset).

In AUS we have great consumer protections, if my watch continues on the way it is currently I'll be returning it for a full refund.

Unfortunately that huge shift would require a complete change in Google's corporate culture and that's not gonna happen.

I had my own experience with their customer support after purchasing 2 Pixel 6's. They were utter garbage. Both had the cellular connectivity problem and the fingerprint sensors were completely useless. Those sensors failed 100% of the time in brightly lit stores. There's no way in hell that Google was unaware of those problems, and they were in fact well documented (but not resolved) after six months and one major software "fix".

Lucky for me a request for help on Reddit resulted in multiple people saying they despised their Pixels and to return the damn things before it was too late.

They immediately lost my business with no public followup on 911 dialer bugs on Pixels. Plus there is ALWAYS a huge hardware problem on flagship Pixels, every single generation. Went iPhone SE and really why would I ever move back?

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.

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.

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

https://forum.r-selfhosted.com/

https://discord.gg/UrZKzYZfcS

Proton if you want email, privacy and cloud storage.

Edit I use murena and it comes with cloid storage and online only office suite

I 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.

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)

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.

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

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.