If there are 100 million people who wear an Apple Watch, it’s not surprising that less than .02% of that number would like something as niche as the pebble.
It’s like the iPod Classic people. Billions of people want music with them wherever they go. 12 of them like it in MP3 form on a little brick that’s not their phone.
It’s interesting to me that when the Apple Watch was coming out (and maybe more broadly when fitness bands etc. were becoming available) there was a pretty widespread sentiment that younger people didn’t want watches because why would they? They always had their phones.
Honestly, I still don't see the value in a smartwatch. Paying with nfc with your wrist? That's probably the only use case I can see. But then it's not worth it having to charge yet another device daily
I like it because it lets me be on call without having my phone on me, which lets me avoid using my phone too much and give full attention to kids or whoever I am with.
Also, the vibrate function for alarm or calls in the middle of the night does not disturb anyone else, but still gets me up.
I like mine since I don't have to carry my heart rate monitor (HRM) around if I want to exercise. Some are good at sleep tracking too. It's a good pedometer and I can go on a run w/o my phone and the built in GPS keeps track of things. If my phone battery dies, I can still communicate with people (although many apps on the Apple Watch are badly designed to require a phone connection rather than just data).
The notifications are nice if I'm on the subway and don't want to pull my phone out of my pocket to see what's up.
It doesn't take long to charge the watch, whenever I take a shower I put it to charge and it's full battery by the time I'm back at my desk.
I also like turning off alarms by using the watch rather than pulling out my phone.
Pretty locked down as far as I know. I really just use it stock out of the box and connect it to my Strava account. Strava does have a pretty cool API though.
The Coros I have was around $400USD refurbished on Amazon. I considered the Apple Watch Ultra which was nearly 2x the price but wanted something made by a company focused on runners rather than a consumer products company making a running watch.
Overall I’ve been extremely happy with it as a semi-serious runner.
I have a use case for a watch. I like being able to just look at my wrist.
Especially when traveling and doing activities like hiking, I do find watch modestly useful. Hiking distance etc. Apple Pay as you say. Calendar events and other notifications.
It is for me modest benefit and I often wear a cheap Timex at home. And yes the charging is the big downside although there are quite a few things I do daily that are a routine.
Charging it isn’t really a difficultly. I don’t like to sleep with a watch on so I take it off and put it on my side table. Where the magnetic charger snaps on. Basically no more effort than not charging it.
I was in this position as well but after about a year of a FitBit Luxe, I'm a convert. Fitness-wise, I like the heartrate and GPS tracking for walks and bike rides, and length-counting for lane swims. I like that it's an easy interface to input my weight and see that as a trend over time. And I like the sleep tracking and smart-wake alarms quite a bit.
Notifications I could take or leave; they're not super reliable but have occasionally been useful.
Battery life is IMO fine; I charge it once or twice a week while sitting at my desk or having a shower.
I know I could cobble together these capabilities from a suite of other apps— Strava, Apple Health, whatever. And I get annoyed that certain things on the watch aren't more customizable. But the overall package is more than good enough for my basic needs, and has motivated me to make (and stick to) real lifestyle changes, which is ultimately the point, at least on the fitness side.
No, you can't— it's only the large-screen devices that support custom JavaScript-based apps. For example, using https://github.com/200Tigersbloxed/FitbitHRtoWS to get realtime heartrate data, for example to display as a Twitch stream overlay.
And it doesn't have its own GPS; it piggy-backs off the phone for that. Which is fine for cycling and running, but obviously doesn't work for open water swims where you could use GPS for position but wouldn't normally bring your phone.
I do own a smart watch, but I don't use it in the typical manner.
I don't ever want to see notifications on my wrist. People seem to think it's ok to read notifications in situations where looking at a phone would be rude, such as at dinner or whilst having a conversation.
I wear mine when doing sport. I like that I can play music and track my activity without my phone.
And I wear mine when navigating cities. I like that I can pay for public transport and check map directions without making myself a target by getting my phone out.
Other than that, I don't wear mine. I don't see the point of wearing it day to day.
Best use case I've found is as a phone for kids. We recently got a cheap one for our 10-year old with a $10/mo plan so he can call/text us. Gave him a great sense of security, and us as well. (We can use FindMe to locate him if necessary, he can only test/get calls from contacts we add, so no robocalls, etc.)
My mom, in her 70s, uses hers for calls a lot -- though in her case it's tethered to her phone so the phone has to be within range (I don't see how that's very useful, might as well use the phone).
Just as phones are conveniently charged overnight, a smartwatch usually charges fast enough that you can usually just put it on the charger for 30-40 minutes before bed (or overnight if you don't care for sleep tracking).
For me telling the time is the least valuable aspect. It's convenient for email notifications, particularly since I don't tend to keep my phone in my pocket (or often even in sight), it's a convenient way to control music playback when out and about and things like weather reports are also neat info to have on a wrist.
But even more valuable are the health related features, I tend to get too easily absorbed in work so the reminders to stretch when I've been sitting too long and the water consumption tracking is very useful. I also often have trouble sleeping, where the sleep coaching functionality is pretty useful for identifying what I need to do to fix things. Additionally having things like step count on my wrist has gotten me to try to walk more as it's a constant reminder of how little I walk. It's also a very convenient morning alarm since it stays on your wrist and can just use vibration to wake you instead of playing a loud sound and making you dig around for the phone while half asleep.
If it works for you, why would you migrate to a different product with features or performance outside of your needs? We are so deep into a disposable society that we eagerly await the NEXT BIG THING (TM) without ever evaluating what our need consists of or whether we have any need for an upgrade to begin with.
Well, the threat of the service going away is a pretty big one. Until we have devices that can work from our own hosted systems, this will always be a concern.
The pebble was a bit of a gimmick. It was the start of the future but on its own it was kind of worse than a regular watch. It looked ugly, had a terrible screen, didn’t have any of the stuff you mostly do with a smartwatch now. And half the features no longer work.
And it had an insanely long battery life, I could respond to, and read text messages without opening my phone. It didn't have unnecessary stuff- it was simple and met my watch needs. I don't have a smartwatch now, because I'm not interested in having yet another computer on my wrist. I guess I've just decided to settle for a gimmicky automatic watch, it doesn't even have an alarm! And it dies if I stop using it for a few days.
I don't know of any official name, but it would be adjacent to the Rachet Effect [0]. Where the Rachet Effect is a steady increase in expectations, rather than a steady decrease, they both derive from the same limited time frame used for comparisons.
For me, I didn't wear watches before. Pebble got me into it. And now I wear watches with no batteries, so maybe reverse Stockholm syndrome?
I loved my Garmin, but I hated the notifications. And I couldn't disable the fitness related notifications. I'm at a point where I hate all notifications though, and have them only enabled for work and my wife. Everyone/everything else can wait.
I don't think these are apples to apples comparisons. Yes, watches had much longer batteries, but they didn't have smart features. So you're really comparing the Pebble to something with a comparable feature set, like another smart watch.
Phones used to be powered directly from the wire and work even during a power outage and now they have batteries and die, but I'm still willing to trade that feature to have a GPS and text messaging.
Some of it has to do with existing experience. I suspect many people in this thread have not worn something other than a smart watch with regularity in at least 15 years, possible longer if they were below watch wearing age when cell phones became common. Additionally, I'd argue that the pebble is closer to an apple watch than even a digital watch and certainly closer than an automatic watch. You chose to compare a smart phone to a flip phone rather than a POTS phone? Likely you either have very limited experience with POTS phones or you view the smart/flip comparison as more apt. Either way, I think context is important when making comparisons so I still think it's entirely fair to say "the Pebble has good battery life".
And those Casio watches were terrible. Even without a comparison to anything else, they just didn't work reliably.
I agree with the existing experience point, I hadn't worn a "dumb" watch since middle school (~12 years ago) until I finally ended up buying a smart watch last month, which I wear nearly 24/7.
If it's just for telling the time I don't exactly need a watch, I'm almost always looking at or within reach of some device that can tell me the time anyway. A smart watch is useful for other purposes.
Also while weeklong battery lives would be nice, even needing to charge daily isn't too bad, I just stick it on the charger at night while relaxing and getting ready to sleep.
> Is there a term for complementing something that is objectively much worse than what came before only because it's better than what we have now.
What kind of smartwatch came before it, that had a battery that held for more than a week? And no, a simple watch is not a smartwatch, so that doesn't count.
You probably mean the marvel of mechanical engineering that has zero dependency on the outside world, needs no software updates, and will still continue running as new for years after all the smart watches will turn into useless pucks?
Minimal dependency: you will have to get it serviced from time to time, but I find that charming—like getting a pair of shoes resoled or renewing a piece of wooden furniture. You’re extending the life of the object, some beyond your own lifespan.
Which features don't work? I'm still wearing a Pebble Time Steel every day with Rebble Services and not encountering problems.
Okay, I guess Apple integration doesn't work anymore, but that's an Apple problem. If Apple allowed sideloading & half of the things you can do on Android, Pebble would still work there. I used to be an iPhone owner (I was one of those queue-on-day-one types that got a standing ovation from the Apple employees as you walked out of the Apple Store), but I am so glad I switched to Android.
Funny that you say that, I did the exact opposite. Was quite an Android fanatic until I switched to iPhone and noticed how greatly everything was integrated. Next to the integration of my AirPods and Watch the apps on the iPhone are generally of better quality than my experiences on Android. Everything just feels a lot more native and faster. Probably caused by the fact that Apple is just a lot more stricter in what it allows developers to do + the fact that Android runs on literally thousands of different screen sizes, where there are only a couple of screen sizes that a developer has to take into account on the i(Pad)OS side.
True. But perhaps 16k people sold their Pebble because they wanted a shiny new watch, and they were bought by 16k other people who can't afford that new watch.
I'm not sure why that's relevant. You can buy a shirt that covers your body for $5, but most of us are wearing something more expensive for a variety of reasons. If you are wearing a pebble, you probably want the sort of smart features.
I would hate it if everyone (or even many people) did this, but it's nice to know someone outside of Samsung has tried them all, but then again, I guess you wouldn't ncessarily get very neutral reviews from such a person.
A lot of raw materials that go into modern electronics are produced using slave labor, and the “recycled” devices tend to end up poisoning the environments of people in similarly disadvantaged communities.
I don’t know enough about these things to know whether buying more or less of these devices directly helps enslaved people, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to observe that rampant consumerism does fuel the postcolonial economic machine that perpetrates that kind of exploitation. And I think that those of us who stand to benefit the most from this system would do well to be extremely cautious about how we are incentivized toward motivated reasoning.
It's also important to recognize consumerism has driven a lot of innovation which has benefited humanity. I venture to say one of the most impactful advancements in human history is providing access to the internet in almost every spot on the globe. That was influenced at least in part by so many people owning smart phones.
A sufficiently technologically advanced human species might be the only thing capable of stopping the next extinction event. Something that will almost certainly occur naturally without any intervention.
Sure, but another extinction event without humans is more or less inevitable - with humans it may be preventable.
So our choices appear to be wait for the bad thing to happen or continue to drive each other to improve and learn, which consumerism does in fact provide great motive and drive for humans to improve (although not the only mechanism, I'm sure, just a large one we understand today). Hopefully we strike the right balance and solve these problems.
Ok. Well there's 2 elements here, the factual and emotional.
Factually you could argue either way. I suppose broadly you could say that industrialisation is bad for those at the bottom in the short term. But after the hump things get better. Is that pain reasonable? Is it avoidable? Are we morally obligated to avoid it? Are all somewhat open questions.
The GP used the word 'reconcile' which to me is a more emotional metric. Personally I don't make the link (rightly or wrongly) between me buying X and person Y suffering. So personally I don't have anything to reconcile. That is a correct answer. It isn't the answer, but as an answer to the GP, it is legitimate.
I can also see it being a reasonable answer to say that in buying Congolese cobalt you are helping the country industrialise, which in the long term is a good thing. Again you may disagree with the reasoning or morality but it seems to me a legitimate way of reconciliation.
You tell yourself you're allowing someone else to enjoy (nth-)last years X and Y at a lower price point, being subsidised by your use first.
Everyone can reconcile almost anything, practically humanity's superpower. It's rare the person that fails to - on any issue. I think we all do it all the time for most issues.
Probably true, though to different degrees for different folks. I've always taken joy in holding out for the right component upgrades for my PC and related gear to get the best bang for the buck and biggest leaps in performance. It's a lineage that's been going since 2000 or so, where at least one part always gets carried forward, and the rest is gifted or sold at steep discount. It started as me trying to get the most from my limited money, but decades later it's more about minimizing the guilt of frivolous e-waste. My last phone of 5 years sadly got the boot from my carrier, forcing an upgrade. I know I've seen other people take pride in their slow/picky upgrades, too.
I know a guy who does this with Apple products. Half monthly salary for a phone for a year sounds extreme to me. Plus all the gimmicks that come with the phone - pad, phones and watch.
Admittedly there are tradeins. I know someone who does a fair bit of reviewing of camera gear including smartphone cameras. His approach seems to generally be to effectively rent a phone for a year.
With that said, I generally go for 3 years and use the older phone to drive my stereo, sometimes act as a travel spare, etc.
At least Apple products hold their value pretty well. I'm only just now starting to think about upgrading my 2015 Macbook Pro and it looks like I could still get $400 for it. A year old Apple device probably gets at least 60% of its MSRP back when sold.
I wouldn't do it personally (see me still using a >7 year old Macbook), but they're likely not dropping anywhere near the full MSRP every year, after they sell the old one.
Meanwhile, I've had three gaming Windows laptops during that same time, and two of them literally fell apart (one I kept using until enough of the plastic frame around the monitor cracked that I could no longer keep it in place with binder clips). The most recent one (ASUS ROG Strix G15) is still doing well, but I've only had it for about two years at this point.
I bought a Big Brand Flagship Phone (tm), the Samsung Galaxy S9, in 2018. They stopped upgrading the OS with new functionality in 2020 only two years after its release, and this year they stopped providing security updates!
Considering how much functionality and information is on that phone that could affect my life in absolutely fantastically negative ways if it was hacked (online accounts including owned licenses for software, banking), I have little choice but to buy a new phone now, even though the hardware is more than adequate for my needs and even though new phones don't really do much more much better.
Planned obsolescence, or whatever you prefer to call it, really drives this behaviour.
Interesting perspective. I have an iPad 3rd generation where Apple doesn't allow OS updates and doesn't allow installing a non-Apple browser engine. So it's essentially getting bricked as web sites start relying on features not implemented in the ancient Safari engine on it. Twitter, for instance, refuses to load. Youtube does work okayish, as long as you don't log in.
Once it's completely bricked, I'm throwing it out and not getting anything with an Apple logo. Unless something like the EU manages to make them open up.
I imagine the argument is that a less locked-down device would be able to receive community support 10 years later.
I suspect, though, that that’s optimizing for perfection in rare cases rather than doing better overall. The number of iPads that survive to 10 years is presumably puny. The batteries wear out, they get dropped, etc. I would guess that the number of 2-3 year old devices that get replaced simply because the OS updates stop or the UX gets slow is much greater. And, while community OS and firmware projects do exist, they haven’t made it into the mainstream in any meaningful way, so I doubt they make a dent in overall consumer behavior. In which case, perhaps Apple’s way of doing things is a net win (or at least the lesser of some number of evils) compared to others’ in the aggregate.
Hard to say without any hard numbers, though.
(Disclaimer: A couple months back I opted to replace the battery on my 2013 MacBook, which is still going strong, instead of buying a new Framework laptop. That may indicate some bias.)
I've always been curious about this one - what kind of exploits are you concerned about that could wind up with those sorts of consequences? Most of the security updates tend to patch things which are local only or barely exploitable in the first place. Assuming you're not installing entirely untrustworthy software on daily basis, it's probably not much of a difference. Looking at the latest Android security report, even the "Critical" vulnerability reported is a code injection in data that's usually only available to the app that wrote it in the first place.
Important applications like the browser, webview, media players, etc are patched via Play Store regularly so untrusted data is usually processed through those pipelines regardless. Perhaps hardware decode on untrusted content could still provide a vector there, but judging by the practice it's not exactly a large one.
There haven't exactly been worm-grade exploits flying around in the mobile space, even big public things like StageFright pretty much turned out to be non-starters and the targeted attacks are so far ahead that I wouldn't even worry about public exploits - the private ones have you covered already even on the latest OS.
Maybe I'm the minority here, but I wouldn't exactly rush out and blow $1000 over anything short of an unpatched and readily exploitable RCE.
Regarding installing untrustworthy software, you also have to be mindful of software which has been acquired by another entity. Your trusty file manager could turn into something entirely different just by applications automatically updating.
This is the duality of automatic updates, on one hand you don't automatically get security updates, on the other, you don't automatically get exploits from new owners or compromised accounts.
In a software project this is really a responsibility I think people don't appreciate that they have, especially in regards to package managers.
But for end user devices it's encouraged to have automatic updates on. I think this is a personal responsibility as no-one really has your back on your device, except the highly automated app store verification. Which in fairness to them, likely stops a lot of exploits/malware making it to user devices.
To be fair the situation regarding updates is starting to improve now that new phones bring very little to the table besides faster processing and marginal camera improvements and similarly OS updates don't do much besides change the UI slightly.
Samsung (and IIRC Google) now promises at least 4 years of regular updates and 5 of security.
Agree. I'm still using the original iphone SE from 2016. I've replaced the battery four or five times and see no reason to upgrade, even though it's officially out of support now.
Funnily, when I meet people now with the latest and greatest iphone and they see my old phone they often express they wish they still had one of them.
I had an original Pebble that I handed down to my son years ago when it stopped getting official support and I bought a smaller faced Garmin smartwatch to replace it.
He still wears it most days today. Not sure if this is the software he's using today or not. I'll have to find out if he's one of the 16,000.
Same, I just got solar + radio sync watch as replacement, not having to do anything ever with it beats having to charge for some extra features, even if it is just once a week, "modern" one that I'd need to charge every day or two just sounds annoying...
Runs one week on a charge, I wrote a custom time-tracking app for it that I have been using for years, syncs with google calendar, shows TOTP auth codes, weather and notifications, controls music playback in the house, all without having to take my phone out...
I was only forced to swap because the battery started inflating.
Currently on an Amazfit Bip S, fills in all my needs really, and has even better battery life.
After the disaster that was the Galaxy Watch 4, I've given up completely on Android Wear - it is just too slow, even right out of the box, and the battery life is abysmal. Going flat at 7pm without anything extra installed and with 4G off is unacceptable.
So I'm trying to move to a simpler watch with just basic smart features and longer battery life, but one where I can customize the watchface with code.
And it's cool, but it's extremely basic, a bit bulky and ugly, and has all the drawbacks of E-Paper.
Pebble would have been perfect. If they still sold them I would buy one today. It's tragic the company went under so quickly.
Maybe I should get a Pebble. But I don't really want to buy a second hand smartwatch, and I don't see the point in investing into something that will never be updated and has no official support. All this update does it make the phone companion app work on a Pixel 7.
RIP Pebble. I hope someone makes something similar.
You might want to look into the Amazfit and Mi Band Devices that are supported by Gadgetbridge[1]
I haven't looked into the process of watchface creation but there is a huge collection[2] that can be installed via Gadgetbridge. It also has the benefit that its privacy friendly without any cloud connections and fully opensource.
And it's cool, but it's extremely basic, a bit bulky and ugly, and has all the drawbacks of E-Paper.
Can you elaborate a bit about the e-paper part? I always believed that watches were the perfect place for e-paper. Low power, durable, always-on, wide viewing angle, no need to constant refresh.
I thought the smaller the display, the better suited it was for e-paper.
Wait...what?? I've used all the Samsung watches, with 3G/LTE, and the 4 is leaps and bounds better than anything that preceded it (and is for me quite usable and hassle-free).
What features are you looking for? I moved away from the 'Smartwatch' arena to the fitness watch (Suunto Baro or Garmin Fenix). It allows notifications/messages, music streaming, fitness tracking. And the battery last 5-7 days (depending on what you use and how often, for example if I fitness track often the battery life decreases due to extra monitoring, etc..) I found it a good middle ground between a full blown smart watch and a dumb watch.
I'm looking at buying readily available a cheap programmable smartwatch. PineTime was easy to write programs for and that Casio replacement board [0] discussed here earlier also hade a nice tool chain, but with shipping and taxes it's just too bothersome.
I bought into the Bangle.js 2 Kickstarter and I have to say, I'm incredibly happy with it. Granted, I've done nothing with it besides design my own watch face and take advantage of the GPS to set the time occasionally, but I know it's capable of a lot more. It was very easy to write the watch face code, and I feel like it would be pretty easy to do whatever I wanted to do. Ecosystem for it is probably a bit more developed than it was at launch, too- they were supposed to follow up with some apps that made interfacing it with your phone easier, dunno where that ended up.
To be fair- I've also got PineTime bookmarked for if my Bangle.js 2 ever breaks, or I just want to mess around with some lower-level aspects of watch firmware.
There is an emulator on the web, so develop something simple and the order one. I wanted to buy ten watches so Bangle.js was not an option, but if you just want something programmable I do recommend it.
Their "app store" is online [0] and you can actually review the source code for all of the apps on it by clicking the github icon on each entry, here's one for example [1]
I don't get it, many smartphones and smartwatches can be read by Barcode scanners never had any problems with it. (I used a few different samsung phones and watches)
Don't know about the Apple Watch, I'm out of Apple's walled garden.
My experience with bright screens is that low density bar codes work ok mostly. But some high density codes don't work well. One of them is Plessey, still used in Europe.
Apple Watch's OLED seems great with even the densest QR code profiles. (I have an older Series 5, I think, and have never had a problem scanning a QR code from the watch.) I think Apple tests it heavily, too, because a lot of the codes on "Apple Wallet cards" for things like a store's rewards program get scanned as QR codes, and at least several of those are extremely dense. (I haven't done the debugging myself, but I believe I read on HN elsewhere that at least one was just stuffing a full bloated JWT into a QR to explain its extreme density.)
> And I have one more with a wasted battery that I intend to replace.
I wish Rebble would offer a paid mail-in service to replace the batteries, to have someone trusted & reliable do the work. I'm down to about 2-days battery life on my Time Steel. I do have a replacement Time Steel that I bought on eBay, but I'd love to get this one fixed.
I love Rebble, but I wish they did more to round out the service. I'm really surprised they don't have their own web store for new-old stock & certified-Rebble refurbished Pebbles. A Discord channel really doesn't cut it, at least not for me (even eBay is a better experience).
Totally agree. I’ve been looking into replacement and it’s not something I’m comfortable doing on my own.
One tip: put your Pebble in airplane mode each night. For me, it extends my battery life substantially. I mapped long-hold left button to toggle this setting, for ease of use.
We'd love to offer something like that, but there's all kind of considerations around liability with repairs. Plus we're entirely run by volunteers, and watch repairs take a lot of time.
That being said, a store for refurbed Pebbles might be doable, but it would be a big time and cost overhead.
That's fair - I hadn't realized Rebble were volunteers. I'd hoped the subscriber money might stretch to also compensating people involved. I certainly wouldn't expect volunteers to be working on repairs out of the goodness of their hearts.
I guess my dream is for Rebble to be like a cross between Framework & iFixIt - somewhere you can buy all your spare parts (and accessories?), maybe find repair guides... and then to continue the Pebble mission by making new models that can run Pebble software on modern designs. I guess it's just a dream. But if there's only about 2k of us Rebble subscribers, I'm proud to be one of those 2k!
Most Garmins (Fenix, Forerunner series) can do all of your "only Pebble" parts. In fact I replaced my touchscreen smartwatch with Fenix 6 precisely for not having one and relying on buttons instead.
Have a pebble and a fenix, I got all of those set up on my pebble, and all but one of those things set up on fenix. Unfortunaltely the opensource barcode app for connectIQ only supports 1D barcodes and not QR codes.
Pebble user here as well! I moved from PTS to PTR (fall on the ground - dead) now back to PTR and it is amazing: long battery life, the apps on it are great. I use: Rain, Checklist, timer, LMS controller and alarm and torch. You?
Count me in! In my mind my smartwatch doesn't need more computing power or complexity than your average microcontroller, so as long as it lasts I'm keeping mine in good use
As a big Pebble fan, I was really sad to see the company go without any similar alternatives in the market (at the time). My watches ended up having various hardware issues over the years, so I switched to something else. The efforts Rebble has put in to keep these devices alive is amazing. If they grow bigger, I'd love to see them do hardware.
In the meantime, I'm wearing a Withings ScanWatch [0]. Not as extendable as a Pebble, but it has some features I care about and doesn't distract me.
Are there any comparable alternatives to Pebble even now? I’ve yet to see one, but I haven’t followed the market very closely since I stopped using one.
Strange, when I looked before I didn't really see anything but I could be getting mixed up with the Bip. Well I'm going to be all over that this weekend!
Not in my opinion. The closest I’ve found are hybrid watches which will forward alerts (but generally with no text), but certainly nothing with the screen, battery life, and OSS vibe.
Pinetime is new to me, going to dig in more. But at first glance, I'm not sure I like the IPS display, honestly. The always-visible e-ink Pebble display was one of the biggest features to me.
I had a fossil hybrid for awhile, and actually rather enjoyed it (gods below it was huge though - 44mm face). The problem was, if it wasn't my daily driver (that is to say, always within communication range of my phone), the battery would drain so fast. And it was a relatively uncommon coin battery, not a rechargeable battery.
I wish that hadn't been the case, but after replacing the battery 3x in one month because I swapped out watches occasionally, it went into retirement.
I can confirm that it's pretty good, but mine often loses track of time and needs to be calibrated via the app. I don't have it constantly connected to my phone, and only connect it ocasionally to sync, so maybe that could be the cause. I've even once had the calibration refuse to work, which required a hard reset of the watch to fix.
It's elegant, and the smartwatch features are unobtrusive, but I wouldn't trust it for any precise tracking, or even time tracking.
One problem with the smartwatch market is that it's hard to know what "comparable" means to any given person.
I've found an Amazfit Bip to be a totally satisfactory replacement for my Pebble Time, but it doesn't cover every single usecase. It does have a battery life measured in weeks though (usually 3-4 for me, less if I use the GPS to track a bunch of exercise), which is a pretty nice selling point.
Do you build your own apps for it? I'm interesting in understanding how hackable it is? For example, can you write an app that pulls the GPS data from a run off it, or is that data readily accessible somehow?
Not OP, but you can't really make your own apps for it. There are third party clients for it, though, and you can export data through them.
I like mine, except for the fact that the front fell off and I had to glue it back on. The battery lasts for 3 or 4 weeks, you can receive notifications (but not respond to them) and it looks fairly stylish.
I haven't done any hacking of any of my smartwatches. If that's important to you, then I don't really have any recommendations for you (and it highlights my point about different people's definition of "comparable").
I want my watch to have time/date, alarms, timers/stopwatches, the ability to read phone notifications, always-on screen, and battery life measured on the scale of weeks. Step and heartrate tracking are also nice perks that the Amazfit Bip also includes.
The "closest" I found that filled the void Pebble left are these hybrid watches like the ScanWatch I mentioned. All fully digital ones just go overboard with features, I find them too gimmicky and they come with an awful battery life. I don't want another smartphone on my wrist that I need to charge every night...
I miss the simplicity, yet the huge amount possibilities (via their store and SDK) and watch faces the Pebble had. They still managed to keep the device distraction free along with a good battery life. I'm all ears for any good Pebble-like smartwatch if anyone knows one.
Fossil Neutra, I think. They have an eink display and 2 week battery life. I don't use one though, been enjoying my citizen ecodrive for the past few years.
Fossil has a couple hybrid smartwatches, under their own brand and under Skagen. They also license the technology to Citizen.
I’ve used a few Fossil watches and found the battery to be very good, but the software to be lacking. One example is that if you receive a notification, you have to click the center button to select it, and then the down button to scroll down. The buttons on some models are quite mushy, which makes navigation even more frustrating. The light is also unimpressive and hard to trigger.
I don’t love the styling of the current Fossil models. The Skagen version looks nicer to me, but sadly the software forced you to display a Skagen logo instead of one of the four complications that’s available on the Fossil-branded version.
I don’t know what I’m going to do when my Fossil dies. The battery is down to 4 days if I remember to put it in airplane mode every night. I’m considering the Apple Watch Ultra, which should get around 5 days of battery in low power mode but I don’t love the styling, don’t need the sporty features, and don’t love the price.
Surprised this hasn't been mentioned on this thread yet. Hardware wise the closest is probably the Pine Time from Pine64. Software and services wise this isn't on pebbles level though. https://www.pine64.org/pinetime/
As others mention hybrid watches are probably the closest alternative.
I own a Pinetime, and I agree it's close to the Pebble (I used to own a Pebble Steel). My Pinetime gets around 3ish days battery life, usage dependent.
I wanted a watch that I could control my media player on my phone with, gave me notifications, and didn't cost me an appendage. The Pinetime was $35USD shipped (IIRC), and while I can't dismiss phone notifications from my watch, it does at least show me the notifications from my wrist. I'm very happy with mine.
Oh wow I did not realize they were just $35, I expected a price around $150. I've never been a smartwatch person because I couldn't see myself wearing one over some of my mechanical pieces, but for $35 i'm very tempted to try.
Early PineTime adopter here. The lack of physical buttons is such a massive downgrade that I can't really bring myself to use mine anymore. The apps are also very lacking compared to the Pebble. Specifically timers, stopwatch, alarms. I have no other watch to recommend, I just stopped wearing one. I do occasionally update the firmware and see if things have improved, but they're still not as good as I'd like. I do support them and what they're doing. The hardware itself is maybe just too flawed. I hope that we see more stuff get support from the same OS. Something with more buttons.
With the Pebble I had app shortcuts on the long press of most of the buttons and could pretty much navigate it blind to start a stopwatch ASAP and lap as needed without looking. I had tons of saved timer presets. The alarms could actually wake me up (before the vibration motor broke). PineTime won't let me save timer presets, set timers over an hour or so long, and it's not obvious enough when the timer ends. I think it vibrates once instead of doing it until dismissed. These are basic things, and to me they matter even more than seeing notifications from my phone appear. I even used my Pebble without a phone for months at a time before.
The bangle.js:
- ships significantly faster
- has an always-on display with similar 4 week maximum battery life
- can be updated without flashing
- has a thriving app ecosystem
I have a bangle.js. It's... alright. Does the job. Feels cheap. OS is nightmarishly slow. Only one physical button, so annoying and fiddly to set with a touchscreen (interacts badly with the slow OS). Has GPS, but doesn't really work. Has heart monitor, but doesn't really work. Not terribly stable.
I've been using a Garmin Vivoactive 3 for a few years after owning a Pebble Time that eventually stopped working. I've been pretty happy with it: it also has a retroreflective screen that's always on and perfectly visible in sunlight, the battery can last about a week depending on usage, and Garmin's IQ app ecosystem is solid.
The notification functionality is not as customizable, but otherwise I haven't really been missing the Pebble much.
I've been using a Garmin Instinct for a few years, and it's never let me down. It has a monochrome display that is not affected by sunlight with incredible battery life even when using the GPS. It's also tough as a brick
These are marketed as fitness devices first, which they are, but the smart watch features are comparable to the Pebbles. The lack of a touchscreen, the long battery life, and the epaper-like display are all there.
Yes, Withings things are cool, including the Scanwatch in lieu if what Pebble could have been given the right funding and guidance. I'll get mine if/when they add blood pressure monitoring.
Withings is great if you're looking for "health" watch but not really good as fitness tracker.
For years, I used my steel HR (got a weird one branded Nokia because they had purchased Withings only to resell Withings to the founder a year later), loved the sleep tracking, health report etc... But the activity tracking wasn't the best, especially running.
However the battery's life is out of this world. I loved the mix between tech and good old watch.
I bought a Scanwatch and have found the health data to be so inaccurate as to be completely useless. I explicitly wanted SpO2 and sleep tracking and it's just very wrong. It would wake up multiple times at night and the watch would tell me I was asleep all night. I'm sure it's just some limitation of the sensors, but the tech just isn't good enough to be useful
That's a common problem. If you search google scholar for sleep tracking accuracy you will find that many smart watches are good at detecting sleep, but not so great at detecting you waking up, so they overestimate sleep time and sleep efficiency. And any sleep phase "measurements" are best ignored entirely.
The Fitbit Alta HR and the Apple Watch are worth mentioning for tracking sleep time and wake ups fairly accurately.
That Withings watch looks pretty nice. What I would really love to see is a Pebble revival with that monitoring tech in it. Like if I saw that end up on Kickstarter, I would easily drop in $1k to help fund the development and production (as long as the project was run by someone who will definitely be able to make it happen).
I wasn't a huge fan of Pebble, the company - they didn't sell replacement parts, for instance (the watch for geeks? yeah, sure).
For some crazy reason, though, to this day, this watch is still almost the only one that gets such a basic thing right: Telling the damn time.
The formula is as simple as it is unreplicated:
- Always telling the time
- Good battery life
- Buttons
Why nobody else makes such a watch is a mystery to me. The Amazfit Bip comes close, but it requires touch interaction and doesn't look as nice as the Pebble Time Steel. It's also supported by GadgetBridge though and also does heart rate tracking while having much better battery life (while being smaller!). When my Bip broke after a few months I bought another (5 years old at this point!) Pebble and am pretty happy with it. I could use some heart rate tracking, though.
Basically the only reason I got the smartwatch I got, is because it always displays the time, even if it runs out of battery, that it can vibrate when I receive phone calls, it keeps track of my heart rate and sleeping activity. The battery also lasts days rather than hours, which is pretty nice.
I don't exactly know which model it is, but it's a Garmin watch with the traditional hour/minute arms and a tiny little screen. But it really kicks ass at telling me the time :)
> There are more Pebble users out there using Gadgetbridge for example.
There could also be many more users using neither. For example, my wife is still using the OG Pebble (the monochromatic one) with the official app and stock firmware, today. I was using my Pebble Time with the OG app/firmware as well, until couple months ago when I broke my phone and couldn't transfer the app to the new one, at which point I decided to go the Rebble route.
It has more buttons than an Apple Watch and is a lot simpler with less functionality, which for many is a draw.
I had two Pebbles and was very sad when it shut down - my Pebble devices are no longer functioning but I've been using an Apple Watch for maybe 6 years now and am very happy with it. Sometimes I miss the battery life, but I never feel like it's a restriction and the UI on the Apple Watch is really very good.
This is the killer feature for me and why I still use mine daily. I don't know why nobody else is doing this. With media controls on a shortcut slot I can pause whatever media I'm playing, switch songs, etc without even looking at the screen. No other smartwatch I've used comes close to that convenience.
I'm not so sure this is "unreplicated". Since bailing on Pebble I've had 2 Garmin watches which always tell the time, and have good battery life and buttons.
Tactile buttons, easy replies, and the epaper display. Such a simple combination, but I don't think we'll ever see a new one again. Seeing the time without having to shake my wrist like a maniac was such a game changer.
Haven't used a smart watch in 6ish years, so maybe they're better. From what I understand though, they still don't have always on displays for time, right? I hope I'm wrong and that they do.
From what I understand though, they still don't have always on displays for time, right?
Apple is on the fourth version that has an always-on-display, and Google's new Pixel watch has it. Can't say about any others with any confidence, but I'd be surprised if Apple/Google are the only ones.
Garmin Fenix/Forerunner/Instinct meets all of these, though at a significantly higher cost than the pebble. It's worth it for me because I'm into the fitness tracking but hard to justify otherwise.
Garmin watches do all of those things well, including heart rate and fitness tracking/etc. Take a look at the Vivoactive line. My Vivoactive 4 gets >1 week battery life depending on the number of notifications I get (vibration vs battery life).
Right. Apple sold 46.1 million Apple Watches last year alone.
There are always people who mourn the Pebble and I understand why. But the market has clearly shown you don’t need a week of battery life to be successful.
But in all seriousness it's the general public's lack of foresight to care about the direction these products go, they don't know what they're sacrificing all they see is shiny oled, whizzbang animations.
Same as the general apathy towards right to repair, the general public doesn't give two shits because they can't connect the dots: right to repair---->I can take it to the repair shop around the corner. Normies that hear about it will just think "well I'm not repairing stuff myself anyway".
I'm one of them. Still love it. The built-in compass and the third-party app that integrates with Google Maps are priceless to me.
Using physical buttons as opposed to touchscreen is another great feature.
I bought (ages ago) the _Nav Me_ companion app. It parses Google Maps notifications and shows you directions on the watch. Also vibrates and turns the light on for every step.
Wonder how many are still using an iPod nano as a watch.
I still use my iPod Shuffles a couple of days a week, so there's probably someone out there.
Every time I upgrade macOS, I'm amazed that even the ancient iPods are still supported. I bunged my launch day Shuffle (17 years old) into my new Mac over the weekend, and it works fine, still syncs, and Finder even still shows the icon for it.
Same with my also 17-year-old iPod Video. Man, 17 years went by quickly.
My iPod nano battery expanded and cracked the whole device open. I almost literally cried, as I loved that little device too much.
Getting a replacement is not an option as any iPod nano battery is about 10 years old now. A sign of what will happen to all the Apple Watches out there.
The SSD adapter and drive are available but I can't get hold of the iPod back. The instructions I saw say that the edges of the case get damaged ... and I'm clumsy.
OG Pebble is how many years old now? (EDIT: ten. Ten years old.) Modern hardware rarely lasts that long, but this one does; my wife is still happily using it, and it is still better than Apple Watch in terms of UX / actually useful functionality.
I still have 3. They have everything I want in a watch: vibrating alarm, long battery life, calendar functionality. I also use an app that stores my 2FA tokens/passcodes, so that if i ever lose or am away from my phone, i still have access to critical accounts.
same here with Amazfit Bip, had few months stint with AMOLED smartwatch which was necessary to charge twice a week until I got fed up with that (plus unreadable display in sunlight unless maximum brightness) and bought again second Amazfit Bip (1st broke) which cost me less than 20USD used and I have to charge it once a month plus it has perfectly readable transreflective display not requiring any backlight, which looks better with more sunlight, it's shame almost all companies switched to nice looking but extremely power hungry AMOLED displays, I wish there were cheap options for simple watch with transreflective display or e-ink
I would be perfectly content with something like Casio F91W if it could display notifications through bluetooth from my phone, I don't really need any sleep tracking or any other features just watch with notifications so I don't have to turn on phone screen
I'm like you, down to getting a second Bip (Lite in my case) for $20 after the first one broke (Let me guess: Case popped open?). There is nothing else on the market with its combination of
I mean there are watches with good battery life and transreflective display, BUT they are huge/thick (I like Bip size, would not mind even Casio F91W) AND expensive, Bip had great combo of amazing dimensions, amazing battery life and very reasonable price. If my Bip crap out and I won't be able another used one I might as well ditch smartchwatch completely and just move to F91W for time and check notifications on phone again, for sure not buying anything thicker than 10mm which needsa to be charged more than twice a month and display must be always readable at least since morning till evening without some dumb hand gestures.
I love my pebbles. Especially with notification center on Android, I can set complex regex filters for what messages get sent to my watch, vibration patterns etc.
Sadly mine has a dead battery, and I'm afraid to replace it and damage the seal. I switched to multiple "cheap" smartwatches (Mi Band, Amazfit Bip) before settling on the bangle.js2, but despite the specs being similar, the OS on the Pebble feels way more responsible and faster. Hopefully that improves over time, and the main developer (Gordon Williams, who is also the main dev for Espruino upon which the bangle.js firmware is based on) is easy to reach out and talk to :)
Loved my Pebble, and I appreciate my bangle.js2 more and more.
Yeah I've been agonizing about the bangle for months now (thanks HN) and I saw a recent post from Gordon[1] that says the cutting edge builds are getting much faster.
Pebble was a great watch; mine's been in my drawer for years as I ran into some issues with updates after the company went away. Switched back to my trusty analog (Citizen World Time Eco Drive) for years, and recently got a Withings Scanwatch for the ECG feature (afib detection). It's pretty much what I want in a "smartwatch" -- analog, discrete notifications, HR during cycling/workouts, long battery life. I don't need a fully computer on my wrist.
I've wanted a smartwatch, but times I'd looked into smart watches, especially for activity/sleep tracking, I couldn't find a single one with a reasonable privacy policy. In the US, unless the data are self-hosted or covered by HIPAA, there's nothing binding about a privacy policy. Even if the privacy policy currently prevents the data from being sold, the policy can be changed, the company could be bought, or the company could go bankrupt with the databases sold at auction. Because HIPAA covers medical companies rather than medical data, it does nothing to prevent this. Until this loophole is closed (or a miracle happens and the US passes something akin to the GDPR), the lack of privacy prevents me from getting one.
And every time I hear about the Pebble and self-hosting, I get disappointed that it no longer exists.
I have a pebble time and a og pebble steel in the drawer. Recently wanted to start using the steel but unfortunately it suffers from the dead button syndrome... I can even accept the onboarding pairing.
Apparently I may be able to fix this if I try some soldering, but I'm an inexperienced solderer...
Seeing as several folks have recommended the Amazfit Bip as an alternative, and I’m considering getting one, I’m wondering if anyone who owns one can comment on: 1. How well it plays with iPhone and 2. Do you have any privacy concerns? I don’t know much about Amazfit as a company.
Im ex-pebble user that now uses a GTS 2. For a while I only cared about personalized watchfaces and alarms on my wrist so that model was more than enough.
But now I want some basic apps (ie TOTP) but this model doesn't support apps...
If you're at all concerned about privacy with the Bip, you can use the open source Gadgetbridge app[1] instead of Zepp for collecting metrics/syncing/uploading faces/etc.
Every time Pebble is brought up it brings a tear to my eye, and I wonder what would have happened to the brand if they had accepted the offer from Citizen, who were obviously interested in continuing the line.
The Pebble Time 2 was so far ahead of its time, I promise you I would still be rocking it (or whatever came after it from Pebble) if they had shipped it to me.
Never got my Pebble Time 2 either and I'm still sad about it today.
The continuous trickle of articles about how great these second generation Pebbles turned out, and my ongoing wait for an alternative that comes even close certainly haven't helped me forget!
I've seen a lot of smartwatches that can match maybe 80-90% of the functionality of the Pebble, but miss something important. I occasionally wish my Pebble Time Steel had a slightly larger screen and a heart rate monitor (like the Time 2 would have) but other than that it's been nearly perfect. If/when something happens to it I'll probably give up on smartwatches and go back to wearing mechanical or solar analog watches again.
One of the dumbest Pebble rumours I heard after everything went down - 'Citizen was interested in buying us for $740m'. No one at the time noticed that this was more than Citizen's entire market cap https://twitter.com/ericmigi/status/1513737199287627779
397 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 280 ms ] threadIf there are 100 million people who wear an Apple Watch, it’s not surprising that less than .02% of that number would like something as niche as the pebble.
It’s like the iPod Classic people. Billions of people want music with them wherever they go. 12 of them like it in MP3 form on a little brick that’s not their phone.
Also, the vibrate function for alarm or calls in the middle of the night does not disturb anyone else, but still gets me up.
The notifications are nice if I'm on the subway and don't want to pull my phone out of my pocket to see what's up.
It doesn't take long to charge the watch, whenever I take a shower I put it to charge and it's full battery by the time I'm back at my desk.
I also like turning off alarms by using the watch rather than pulling out my phone.
* Consuming notifications without potentially being distracted once you unlock your phone
* Haptics for notifications - I'd like to be notified of some things, but 'vibrate' is a little too much
* Fitness/sleep tracking
https://developers.strava.com/
The Coros I have was around $400USD refurbished on Amazon. I considered the Apple Watch Ultra which was nearly 2x the price but wanted something made by a company focused on runners rather than a consumer products company making a running watch.
Overall I’ve been extremely happy with it as a semi-serious runner.
Especially when traveling and doing activities like hiking, I do find watch modestly useful. Hiking distance etc. Apple Pay as you say. Calendar events and other notifications.
It is for me modest benefit and I often wear a cheap Timex at home. And yes the charging is the big downside although there are quite a few things I do daily that are a routine.
Notifications I could take or leave; they're not super reliable but have occasionally been useful.
Battery life is IMO fine; I charge it once or twice a week while sitting at my desk or having a shower.
I know I could cobble together these capabilities from a suite of other apps— Strava, Apple Health, whatever. And I get annoyed that certain things on the watch aren't more customizable. But the overall package is more than good enough for my basic needs, and has motivated me to make (and stick to) real lifestyle changes, which is ultimately the point, at least on the fitness side.
And it doesn't have its own GPS; it piggy-backs off the phone for that. Which is fine for cycling and running, but obviously doesn't work for open water swims where you could use GPS for position but wouldn't normally bring your phone.
This is why the Pebble was good. Charge it once a week.
I do own a smart watch, but I don't use it in the typical manner.
I don't ever want to see notifications on my wrist. People seem to think it's ok to read notifications in situations where looking at a phone would be rude, such as at dinner or whilst having a conversation.
I wear mine when doing sport. I like that I can play music and track my activity without my phone.
And I wear mine when navigating cities. I like that I can pay for public transport and check map directions without making myself a target by getting my phone out.
Other than that, I don't wear mine. I don't see the point of wearing it day to day.
My mom, in her 70s, uses hers for calls a lot -- though in her case it's tethered to her phone so the phone has to be within range (I don't see how that's very useful, might as well use the phone).
For me telling the time is the least valuable aspect. It's convenient for email notifications, particularly since I don't tend to keep my phone in my pocket (or often even in sight), it's a convenient way to control music playback when out and about and things like weather reports are also neat info to have on a wrist.
But even more valuable are the health related features, I tend to get too easily absorbed in work so the reminders to stretch when I've been sitting too long and the water consumption tracking is very useful. I also often have trouble sleeping, where the sleep coaching functionality is pretty useful for identifying what I need to do to fix things. Additionally having things like step count on my wrist has gotten me to try to walk more as it's a constant reminder of how little I walk. It's also a very convenient morning alarm since it stays on your wrist and can just use vibration to wake you instead of playing a loud sound and making you dig around for the phone while half asleep.
I remember this, too.
But good companies plan for the future, not the past. And all of those young people get older. That's one of the few certainties of life.
So what Apple did (intentionally or unintentionally) is create a market, and then let its customers mature into it.
Financial institutions do this all the time.
We already do: https://pine64.org/pinetime.
(I like my pine book pro; honest question.)
Is there a term for complementing something that is objectively much worse than what came before only because it's better than what we have now.
Stockholm syndrome?
Watch batteries used to last month's/ years / didn't need batteries at all.
It's the same with phones, they used to last a week easily, now we get excited when they last 2 days.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratchet_effect
I loved my Garmin, but I hated the notifications. And I couldn't disable the fitness related notifications. I'm at a point where I hate all notifications though, and have them only enabled for work and my wife. Everyone/everything else can wait.
Phones used to be powered directly from the wire and work even during a power outage and now they have batteries and die, but I'm still willing to trade that feature to have a GPS and text messaging.
Further Casio made a range of smartish watches back in the day. I don't know battery life's but they weren't measured in days.
And those Casio watches were terrible. Even without a comparison to anything else, they just didn't work reliably.
If it's just for telling the time I don't exactly need a watch, I'm almost always looking at or within reach of some device that can tell me the time anyway. A smart watch is useful for other purposes.
Also while weeklong battery lives would be nice, even needing to charge daily isn't too bad, I just stick it on the charger at night while relaxing and getting ready to sleep.
What kind of smartwatch came before it, that had a battery that held for more than a week? And no, a simple watch is not a smartwatch, so that doesn't count.
You probably mean the marvel of mechanical engineering that has zero dependency on the outside world, needs no software updates, and will still continue running as new for years after all the smart watches will turn into useless pucks?
Which features don't work? I'm still wearing a Pebble Time Steel every day with Rebble Services and not encountering problems.
Okay, I guess Apple integration doesn't work anymore, but that's an Apple problem. If Apple allowed sideloading & half of the things you can do on Android, Pebble would still work there. I used to be an iPhone owner (I was one of those queue-on-day-one types that got a standing ovation from the Apple employees as you walked out of the Apple Store), but I am so glad I switched to Android.
That's kind of a tenuous link at best. You could make the case that buying more increases the opportunities for those at the bottom.
I'm not even necessarily making a factual statement here, but personally I don't feel that there's anything to reconcile.
I don’t know enough about these things to know whether buying more or less of these devices directly helps enslaved people, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to observe that rampant consumerism does fuel the postcolonial economic machine that perpetrates that kind of exploitation. And I think that those of us who stand to benefit the most from this system would do well to be extremely cautious about how we are incentivized toward motivated reasoning.
A sufficiently technologically advanced human species might be the only thing capable of stopping the next extinction event. Something that will almost certainly occur naturally without any intervention.
So our choices appear to be wait for the bad thing to happen or continue to drive each other to improve and learn, which consumerism does in fact provide great motive and drive for humans to improve (although not the only mechanism, I'm sure, just a large one we understand today). Hopefully we strike the right balance and solve these problems.
Can you confirm this for Apple products? I couldn't find anything recent.
Factually you could argue either way. I suppose broadly you could say that industrialisation is bad for those at the bottom in the short term. But after the hump things get better. Is that pain reasonable? Is it avoidable? Are we morally obligated to avoid it? Are all somewhat open questions.
The GP used the word 'reconcile' which to me is a more emotional metric. Personally I don't make the link (rightly or wrongly) between me buying X and person Y suffering. So personally I don't have anything to reconcile. That is a correct answer. It isn't the answer, but as an answer to the GP, it is legitimate.
I can also see it being a reasonable answer to say that in buying Congolese cobalt you are helping the country industrialise, which in the long term is a good thing. Again you may disagree with the reasoning or morality but it seems to me a legitimate way of reconciliation.
Everyone can reconcile almost anything, practically humanity's superpower. It's rare the person that fails to - on any issue. I think we all do it all the time for most issues.
-Benjamin Franklin
Also being shamed for everything you do as bad for the environment or bad for human right does not work.
I'm not going to buy a new phone today and it sounds like you probably won't either, I'll check back in tomorrow and see how the environment is doing!
With that said, I generally go for 3 years and use the older phone to drive my stereo, sometimes act as a travel spare, etc.
I wouldn't do it personally (see me still using a >7 year old Macbook), but they're likely not dropping anywhere near the full MSRP every year, after they sell the old one.
Meanwhile, I've had three gaming Windows laptops during that same time, and two of them literally fell apart (one I kept using until enough of the plastic frame around the monitor cracked that I could no longer keep it in place with binder clips). The most recent one (ASUS ROG Strix G15) is still doing well, but I've only had it for about two years at this point.
- Security: hackers constantly find new vulnerabilities. And depending on the kind of device, it can be a big deal.
- Services shutting down, it can be direct (if the device connects to the internet), or indirect (if some "companion app" is no longer available).
- Or just plain obsolescence. The device may be incompatible with modern standards, irrelevant, unfashionable, etc...
Considering how much functionality and information is on that phone that could affect my life in absolutely fantastically negative ways if it was hacked (online accounts including owned licenses for software, banking), I have little choice but to buy a new phone now, even though the hardware is more than adequate for my needs and even though new phones don't really do much more much better.
Planned obsolescence, or whatever you prefer to call it, really drives this behaviour.
Once it's completely bricked, I'm throwing it out and not getting anything with an Apple logo. Unless something like the EU manages to make them open up.
I get the annoyance, but I just don’t know of viable alternatives.
10 years is a dang good run for a tablet; only thing that really can hope to compete would be actual computers.
I suspect, though, that that’s optimizing for perfection in rare cases rather than doing better overall. The number of iPads that survive to 10 years is presumably puny. The batteries wear out, they get dropped, etc. I would guess that the number of 2-3 year old devices that get replaced simply because the OS updates stop or the UX gets slow is much greater. And, while community OS and firmware projects do exist, they haven’t made it into the mainstream in any meaningful way, so I doubt they make a dent in overall consumer behavior. In which case, perhaps Apple’s way of doing things is a net win (or at least the lesser of some number of evils) compared to others’ in the aggregate.
Hard to say without any hard numbers, though.
(Disclaimer: A couple months back I opted to replace the battery on my 2013 MacBook, which is still going strong, instead of buying a new Framework laptop. That may indicate some bias.)
Important applications like the browser, webview, media players, etc are patched via Play Store regularly so untrusted data is usually processed through those pipelines regardless. Perhaps hardware decode on untrusted content could still provide a vector there, but judging by the practice it's not exactly a large one.
There haven't exactly been worm-grade exploits flying around in the mobile space, even big public things like StageFright pretty much turned out to be non-starters and the targeted attacks are so far ahead that I wouldn't even worry about public exploits - the private ones have you covered already even on the latest OS.
Maybe I'm the minority here, but I wouldn't exactly rush out and blow $1000 over anything short of an unpatched and readily exploitable RCE.
This happened with ES File Explorer.
In a software project this is really a responsibility I think people don't appreciate that they have, especially in regards to package managers.
But for end user devices it's encouraged to have automatic updates on. I think this is a personal responsibility as no-one really has your back on your device, except the highly automated app store verification. Which in fairness to them, likely stops a lot of exploits/malware making it to user devices.
Samsung (and IIRC Google) now promises at least 4 years of regular updates and 5 of security.
Funnily, when I meet people now with the latest and greatest iphone and they see my old phone they often express they wish they still had one of them.
He still wears it most days today. Not sure if this is the software he's using today or not. I'll have to find out if he's one of the 16,000.
This is timely for me as I’m now in the doghouse for missing a reminder to take my kid to the dentist yesterday :(
So I'm trying to move to a simpler watch with just basic smart features and longer battery life, but one where I can customize the watchface with code.
I ended up going with Watchy: https://watchy.sqfmi.com/
And it's cool, but it's extremely basic, a bit bulky and ugly, and has all the drawbacks of E-Paper.
Pebble would have been perfect. If they still sold them I would buy one today. It's tragic the company went under so quickly.
Maybe I should get a Pebble. But I don't really want to buy a second hand smartwatch, and I don't see the point in investing into something that will never be updated and has no official support. All this update does it make the phone companion app work on a Pixel 7.
RIP Pebble. I hope someone makes something similar.
I haven't looked into the process of watchface creation but there is a huge collection[2] that can be installed via Gadgetbridge. It also has the benefit that its privacy friendly without any cloud connections and fully opensource.
[1]https://www.gadgetbridge.org/ [2]https://amazfitwatchfaces.com/
Can you elaborate a bit about the e-paper part? I always believed that watches were the perfect place for e-paper. Low power, durable, always-on, wide viewing angle, no need to constant refresh.
I thought the smaller the display, the better suited it was for e-paper.
Wait...what?? I've used all the Samsung watches, with 3G/LTE, and the 4 is leaps and bounds better than anything that preceded it (and is for me quite usable and hassle-free).
[0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/oddly-specific-objects/sensor-wa...
To be fair- I've also got PineTime bookmarked for if my Bangle.js 2 ever breaks, or I just want to mess around with some lower-level aspects of watch firmware.
https://www.espruino.com/Bangle.js2
https://www.espruino.com/ide/?emulator https://www.espruino.com/Bangle.js+First+App
[0] https://banglejs.com/apps/?c=game [1] https://github.com/espruino/BangleApps/tree/master/apps/blac...
And I have one more with a wasted battery that I intend to replace.
And I'll still buy some more, because I want to have them available for the rest of my life.
There are things that only the Pebble does:
- button only interface that you can handle in the dark without glasses
- a screen that barcode scanners can easily read for authentication into the gym and library
- a TOTP app (authentication tokens) that you can access with only a button press, etc.
Only Pebble can do this? Apple Watch does that too, like literally I use mine for the same cases you described
My experience with bright screens is that low density bar codes work ok mostly. But some high density codes don't work well. One of them is Plessey, still used in Europe.
I wish Rebble would offer a paid mail-in service to replace the batteries, to have someone trusted & reliable do the work. I'm down to about 2-days battery life on my Time Steel. I do have a replacement Time Steel that I bought on eBay, but I'd love to get this one fixed.
I love Rebble, but I wish they did more to round out the service. I'm really surprised they don't have their own web store for new-old stock & certified-Rebble refurbished Pebbles. A Discord channel really doesn't cut it, at least not for me (even eBay is a better experience).
One tip: put your Pebble in airplane mode each night. For me, it extends my battery life substantially. I mapped long-hold left button to toggle this setting, for ease of use.
That being said, a store for refurbed Pebbles might be doable, but it would be a big time and cost overhead.
I guess my dream is for Rebble to be like a cross between Framework & iFixIt - somewhere you can buy all your spare parts (and accessories?), maybe find repair guides... and then to continue the Pebble mission by making new models that can run Pebble software on modern designs. I guess it's just a dream. But if there's only about 2k of us Rebble subscribers, I'm proud to be one of those 2k!
Interesting. And it also has an sdk in C.
Although it costs almost 4 times what I'd pay for a Pebble on eBay.
But it is the best Pebble alternative I've seen so far.
- Authenticator - TOTP authorization tokens
- Skunk - barcodes
- Time Tracker - I work remotely as a contractor
- Pebble Controler - a remote control for my laptop
I also use a lot the standard apps on the Pebble:
- alarm, to wake me up by vibration, without waking up my wife
- canned messages - to answer phone calls when driving
- notifications, notifications
- hang up phone calls I don't want
- steps counter, when running
Yeah the multitimer is nice - it’s a watch after all.
Once in a blue moon I buy a hot new smart watch, but nothing lasted more than a week before being resold.
In the meantime, I'm wearing a Withings ScanWatch [0]. Not as extendable as a Pebble, but it has some features I care about and doesn't distract me.
[0] https://www.withings.com/ch/en/scanwatch
However it looks like Google is killing that in newer iterations...
I've enjoyed it, although I am really missing the ability to write my own apps. Everything else is great.
I understand that the Versa 4 is generally worse than the 3. Insane, why would you remove music controls?
It's totally usable, but it doesn't have a vibrant app store like Pebble did for example.
I wish that hadn't been the case, but after replacing the battery 3x in one month because I swapped out watches occasionally, it went into retirement.
It's elegant, and the smartwatch features are unobtrusive, but I wouldn't trust it for any precise tracking, or even time tracking.
I've found an Amazfit Bip to be a totally satisfactory replacement for my Pebble Time, but it doesn't cover every single usecase. It does have a battery life measured in weeks though (usually 3-4 for me, less if I use the GPS to track a bunch of exercise), which is a pretty nice selling point.
I like mine, except for the fact that the front fell off and I had to glue it back on. The battery lasts for 3 or 4 weeks, you can receive notifications (but not respond to them) and it looks fairly stylish.
I want my watch to have time/date, alarms, timers/stopwatches, the ability to read phone notifications, always-on screen, and battery life measured on the scale of weeks. Step and heartrate tracking are also nice perks that the Amazfit Bip also includes.
https://github.com/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge/wiki/Amazfit-...
I miss the simplicity, yet the huge amount possibilities (via their store and SDK) and watch faces the Pebble had. They still managed to keep the device distraction free along with a good battery life. I'm all ears for any good Pebble-like smartwatch if anyone knows one.
I’ve used a few Fossil watches and found the battery to be very good, but the software to be lacking. One example is that if you receive a notification, you have to click the center button to select it, and then the down button to scroll down. The buttons on some models are quite mushy, which makes navigation even more frustrating. The light is also unimpressive and hard to trigger.
I don’t love the styling of the current Fossil models. The Skagen version looks nicer to me, but sadly the software forced you to display a Skagen logo instead of one of the four complications that’s available on the Fossil-branded version.
I don’t know what I’m going to do when my Fossil dies. The battery is down to 4 days if I remember to put it in airplane mode every night. I’m considering the Apple Watch Ultra, which should get around 5 days of battery in low power mode but I don’t love the styling, don’t need the sporty features, and don’t love the price.
As others mention hybrid watches are probably the closest alternative.
I wanted a watch that I could control my media player on my phone with, gave me notifications, and didn't cost me an appendage. The Pinetime was $35USD shipped (IIRC), and while I can't dismiss phone notifications from my watch, it does at least show me the notifications from my wrist. I'm very happy with mine.
With the Pebble I had app shortcuts on the long press of most of the buttons and could pretty much navigate it blind to start a stopwatch ASAP and lap as needed without looking. I had tons of saved timer presets. The alarms could actually wake me up (before the vibration motor broke). PineTime won't let me save timer presets, set timers over an hour or so long, and it's not obvious enough when the timer ends. I think it vibrates once instead of doing it until dismissed. These are basic things, and to me they matter even more than seeing notifications from my phone appear. I even used my Pebble without a phone for months at a time before.
The bangle.js: - ships significantly faster - has an always-on display with similar 4 week maximum battery life - can be updated without flashing - has a thriving app ecosystem
My Pebble Time Steel was vastly superior.
The notification functionality is not as customizable, but otherwise I haven't really been missing the Pebble much.
These are marketed as fitness devices first, which they are, but the smart watch features are comparable to the Pebbles. The lack of a touchscreen, the long battery life, and the epaper-like display are all there.
For years, I used my steel HR (got a weird one branded Nokia because they had purchased Withings only to resell Withings to the founder a year later), loved the sleep tracking, health report etc... But the activity tracking wasn't the best, especially running.
However the battery's life is out of this world. I loved the mix between tech and good old watch.
The Fitbit Alta HR and the Apple Watch are worth mentioning for tracking sleep time and wake ups fairly accurately.
I wasn't a huge fan of Pebble, the company - they didn't sell replacement parts, for instance (the watch for geeks? yeah, sure).
For some crazy reason, though, to this day, this watch is still almost the only one that gets such a basic thing right: Telling the damn time.
The formula is as simple as it is unreplicated:
- Always telling the time
- Good battery life
- Buttons
Why nobody else makes such a watch is a mystery to me. The Amazfit Bip comes close, but it requires touch interaction and doesn't look as nice as the Pebble Time Steel. It's also supported by GadgetBridge though and also does heart rate tracking while having much better battery life (while being smaller!). When my Bip broke after a few months I bought another (5 years old at this point!) Pebble and am pretty happy with it. I could use some heart rate tracking, though.
I don't exactly know which model it is, but it's a Garmin watch with the traditional hour/minute arms and a tiny little screen. But it really kicks ass at telling me the time :)
There are more Pebble users out there using Gadgetbridge for example.
There could also be many more users using neither. For example, my wife is still using the OG Pebble (the monochromatic one) with the official app and stock firmware, today. I was using my Pebble Time with the OG app/firmware as well, until couple months ago when I broke my phone and couldn't transfer the app to the new one, at which point I decided to go the Rebble route.
I had two Pebbles and was very sad when it shut down - my Pebble devices are no longer functioning but I've been using an Apple Watch for maybe 6 years now and am very happy with it. Sometimes I miss the battery life, but I never feel like it's a restriction and the UI on the Apple Watch is really very good.
This is the killer feature for me and why I still use mine daily. I don't know why nobody else is doing this. With media controls on a shortcut slot I can pause whatever media I'm playing, switch songs, etc without even looking at the screen. No other smartwatch I've used comes close to that convenience.
Real watch hands, buttons and an e-ink display. 7-10 days battery life.
It's a really nice watch.
> - Always telling the time
> - Good battery life
> - Buttons
I'm not so sure this is "unreplicated". Since bailing on Pebble I've had 2 Garmin watches which always tell the time, and have good battery life and buttons.
Haven't used a smart watch in 6ish years, so maybe they're better. From what I understand though, they still don't have always on displays for time, right? I hope I'm wrong and that they do.
Apple is on the fourth version that has an always-on-display, and Google's new Pixel watch has it. Can't say about any others with any confidence, but I'd be surprised if Apple/Google are the only ones.
"Why nobody else makes such a watch is a mystery to me."
There ya go.
There are always people who mourn the Pebble and I understand why. But the market has clearly shown you don’t need a week of battery life to be successful.
But in all seriousness it's the general public's lack of foresight to care about the direction these products go, they don't know what they're sacrificing all they see is shiny oled, whizzbang animations.
Same as the general apathy towards right to repair, the general public doesn't give two shits because they can't connect the dots: right to repair---->I can take it to the repair shop around the corner. Normies that hear about it will just think "well I'm not repairing stuff myself anyway".
https://www.coros.com/pace2
All these years, I haven't found a replacement.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1104350651/tiktok-lunat...
I still use my iPod Shuffles a couple of days a week, so there's probably someone out there.
Every time I upgrade macOS, I'm amazed that even the ancient iPods are still supported. I bunged my launch day Shuffle (17 years old) into my new Mac over the weekend, and it works fine, still syncs, and Finder even still shows the icon for it.
Same with my also 17-year-old iPod Video. Man, 17 years went by quickly.
Getting a replacement is not an option as any iPod nano battery is about 10 years old now. A sign of what will happen to all the Apple Watches out there.
The final smartwatch.
Sleep monitor is perfect and notifications really help so I never miss anything important without disturbing anyone else.
I would be perfectly content with something like Casio F91W if it could display notifications through bluetooth from my phone, I don't really need any sleep tracking or any other features just watch with notifications so I don't have to turn on phone screen
you might like the Withings
* incredible battery life
* tens of thousands of watch faces
* HR
* always-on transflective display
* notifications
Loved my Pebble, and I appreciate my bangle.js2 more and more.
[1] https://forum.espruino.com/conversations/381203/
And every time I hear about the Pebble and self-hosting, I get disappointed that it no longer exists.
Apparently I may be able to fix this if I try some soldering, but I'm an inexperienced solderer...
But more likely than not you will manage to wrangle it back together somehow :)
Good luck!
But now I want some basic apps (ie TOTP) but this model doesn't support apps...
I don't use the official app, which has mostly alleviated my privacy concerns.
https://gadgetbridge.org/
The Pebble Time 2 was so far ahead of its time, I promise you I would still be rocking it (or whatever came after it from Pebble) if they had shipped it to me.
The continuous trickle of articles about how great these second generation Pebbles turned out, and my ongoing wait for an alternative that comes even close certainly haven't helped me forget!
Just noticed the Kickstarter page is still up https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/getpebble/pebble-2-time...
:(