Google did its big hardware thing this week, the "Made by Google" event out in Mountain View, and by now you've probably seen forty different YouTube thumbnails of the Pixel 10 lineup with a red arrow pointing at the camera bar. I'm not going to do a spec dump here. Every gadget site on earth already ran that post, complete with the chip diagrams and the "here's every color" gallery, and honestly reading five of those in a row made my eyes glaze over.
The thing that actually stuck with me from this week's coverage wasn't the phone. It was the watch.
Pixel Watch 4 came out alongside the phones, and the teardown folks got their hands on one almost immediately. Word is it's glued together in a way that makes the battery basically impossible to swap without cracking the display doing it. Not "annoying, needs a heat gun and a spudger and forty minutes of patience" hard. More like "you will probably destroy the screen trying" hard. Google's apparently leaning on the dome-shaped glass and a sealed case for the water resistance and the slimmer profile, which, fine, I get the engineering tradeoff. But it's a two-year-old battery problem waiting to happen, on a device that already has a battery life reputation that's shaky at best.
I own a Pixel Watch. The first one, the 2022 model, the one people made fun of for lasting barely a day on a charge. Eighteen months in, mine started dying by 3pm most afternoons even with the always-on display switched off. I looked into getting the battery replaced and the quote I got back was close enough to the price of a new watch that it wasn't worth bothering. So I just bought a new one, which is exactly the outcome that should bother you about a sealed, glued battery on a $350 wearable. It's not a hypothetical for me, it's just what happened.
What gets me is the timing. Right-to-repair has had actual momentum the last couple years, states passing laws, Apple begrudgingly making iPhones easier to open, Samsung doing self-repair kits nobody really uses but at least they exist on paper. And then a company ships a watch that's harder to open than the phone sitting next to it in the same announcement. The Pixel 10 phones themselves are apparently fine on repairability, comparable to past generations. It's specifically the watch that took a step backward, which is a weird thing to bury inside a launch that's otherwise being sold on how thoughtful the design is.
(Small tangent: I also noticed the new phones picked up magnetic charging, Google's calling it Pixelsnap, built on the Qi2 standard. Which, sure, great, glad you got there. Apple's had this since 2020. iPhone accessories with magnets in them have been a whole ecosystem for five years and Android is just now catching up on the official hardware side. Feels less like innovation and more like finally doing the thing everyone already had.)
None of this is going to stop people from buying the watch. It looks nice, the display is genuinely gorgeous in the hands-on photos, and Google's AI health coaching stuff sounds like it might actually be useful instead of just a marketing slide. I'm not trying to talk anyone out of it. I just think it's worth sitting with the fact that "sealed for durability" and "sealed so you can't fix it yourself" end up looking identical from the outside, and companies get to pick which framing shows up in the press release.
I've been running this blog since November 2011 and I've watched this exact cycle happen with laptops, then phones, then earbuds, and now it's the watch's turn. Glue goes in, repairability goes down, somebody writes a teardown, everybody nods along for a day, and then the next product cycle starts and we do it again. At some point I'd like a device that ages the way my old ThinkPad did, where you just pop a panel and swap the part. I'm not holding my breath for that to be a smartwatch anytime soon.
If you're eyeing the Pixel Watch 4, budget for the fact that in two years you're probably buying a new one outright rather than fixing the old one. That's not a guess, that's just what the last watch taught me.