Google did the whole song and dance in Brooklyn last week for the Pixel 10 launch: new camera bar, a chip called Tensor G5 that's finally built by TSMC instead of Samsung, a feature called Magic Cue that's supposed to guess what you need before you ask for it. Fine. Phones are phones now, they're all good enough, I've stopped getting excited about megapixel counts sometime around 2019.
The thing that actually stuck with me wasn't the phone. It was the watch.
Pixel Watch 4 shipped alongside it, starting around $349 for the 41mm Wi-Fi model, and within a day or two iFixit had it cracked open on camera. The verdict was rough. The battery sits close enough to the back cover that prying the thing open the normal way (the way you'd have to, to replace a cracked display or a dead battery) risks puncturing it. Google's own support documentation basically tells you not to remove the back cover yourself. Not "void your warranty," not "we don't recommend it." Don't do it. That's the manufacturer telling you the device is not meant to be opened by the person who owns it.
I still have my original Pixel Watch from 2022. Battery's shot. I'm down to maybe eight hours before it's begging for a charger, which for a thing that's supposed to track your sleep is a special kind of useless. I took it to a local repair place here that does phone screens and battery swaps, figuring it'd be a twenty-minute job like it is on an old iPhone. Guy took one look, said no, said he wasn't touching a smartwatch battery unless I wanted to sign something acknowledging he wasn't responsible if it caught fire. I did not want to sign that. So the watch sits in a drawer and I bought a Pixel Watch 3 last year like a chump, and now apparently that one's also basically a sealed unit with a shelf life.
This isn't just a Google problem, to be clear — Apple Watches aren't meaningfully more repairable, and Samsung's Galaxy Watch line has the same glued-shut philosophy. It's an industry-wide shrug. But Google gets to be the one I'm annoyed at this week because they're the one who just did it again, in public, with a press event and a keynote and everything, and nobody on stage mentioned the part where the watch is designed to make you buy a new one in three years instead of a new battery in ten minutes. $349 is not nothing. That's a real number for a device that's engineered to become e-waste on a schedule.
Here's the tangent, and I promise it's related: Eric Migicovsky, the guy who originally built Pebble before it got bought and shut down by Fitbit back in 2016, has spent this year building new Pebble-style watches through his company Core Devices. They ran a Kickstarter for it back in the summer, funded it in something like minutes, and the whole pitch is deliberately the opposite of everything above: replaceable battery, open source software, a screen you can actually see in sunlight, week-long battery life because it's not trying to be a tiny phone strapped to your wrist. I backed it mostly out of nostalgia if I'm honest, I had an original Pebble Kickstarter unit back in 2012 and wore it until the strap disintegrated. But the timing next to the Pixel Watch 4 news felt almost too pointed. One company is quietly proving you can build a smartwatch that doesn't treat repairability as a hazard warning, while the big players keep gluing things shut and calling it design.
I don't think Google's doing anything malicious here, for what it's worth. I think it's just the path of least resistance — thinner watch, tighter tolerances, nobody in the boardroom asking "but can a normal person open this in five years." That's the boring, unglamorous version of planned obsolescence, and it's the one that actually happens, not some evil-genius scheme. Just a hundred small engineering tradeoffs that all point the same direction, toward you buying a new watch instead of a new battery.
Mine's staying in the drawer a while longer. I'm curious if it'll outlast the excuse.