It's hard to top the inkjet printers I've owned. I still can't believe 30 years later home printer tech is not only unimproved but worse between lower quality production and squeezing people on ink costs.
And they're making things worse as we use less and less paper at the same time..... Geniuses
Gotta protect those profit margins!
I bought an old business monochrome laser printer ten years ago. Still hasn't needed a new toner cartridge.
I bought my parents a laser printer after years of them being incredibly frustrated by inkjets. I got them the same model as me, as well as a spare toner cartridge.
I'm still on my original toner cartridge, and I've had it for probably six years or so.
My parents are in their late 40's and early 50's. I think I might have accidentally gotten them a lifetime supply of printing.
I got my parents a laser as well and evidently I picked a shitty one because they are planning to go back to the other side 😞
Hey, my Brother laser printer can see my screen, you know! Apologise now!
Laser printers are way way better than the other types
Everything is better with lasers. Prove me wrong...
Sharks with laser beams on their heads?
Fricken, better.
My Lexmark laser, from 1996, just quit last summer.
Though I think I can fix it - seems a paper jam sensor is stuck.
I got one of those Epson ink tank printers for $250au. I think it's the first time inkjet printers have become legit affordable and high capacity.
Laser still wins on reliability though, and being an Epson means it's a Tamagochi so needs to be used monthly at least so it doesn't die.
I should really get a laser printer but my need for 11x17 capacity kind of limits options. To be fair though, my brother small business type inkjet printer does pretty well! Ink costs suck but I don't want to commit seppuku after using it.
The worst piece of tech I currently own is a small server that must have hard drive issues cause it forgets everything when it restarts and I have to set it up again.
The worst piece of tech that I have ever owned in my life is a CD Cleaner I bought from GameStop back in the day. That shit was straight up a sacrificial altar. It never cleaned. Only consumed.
The worst piece of tech that I have ever owned in my life is a CD Cleaner I bought from GameStop back in the day. That shit was straight up a sacrificial altar. It never cleaned. Only consumed.
Oh shit, I remember those. They "cleaned" by using an abrasive spray to "polish" the CDs. Those things were straight-up evil.
Yes! RIP Dinocrisis. My Gauntlet: Dark Legacy survived the process though. Thing still runs today with a fucking trench etched across the bottom, it doesn't make sense really.
GameStop
That explains it.
Funny thing is, out of all the disc "cleaners" we sold while I was at Gamestop, we got very few complaints about it. Make the discs look like they went through hell but the product worked.
Was it a cleaner or one of those "Resurfacing" things with the crank that just scratched the hell out of your discs in a circular pattern?
You needed to use the lubricant that came with it. I used mine hundreds of times with incredible results.
Oh I followed all the instructions, used the fluid & all that. Still had to track down a new copy of Street Fighter EX...
Many mother boards have a battery on them that is used in retaining state. May need to be replaced.
I checked the CMOS and ended up replacing it. I thought that was it too. Same issue.
I paid 100 bucks for this server 5 years ago, came with 4TBs. Only thing I ever did with it was run private game servers on it for my friends. Maybe I'll try replacing it again just for laughs and poop.
I bought a dehumidifier off amazon that was "rated" for 800 sq ft.
Not only did it not live up to that promise, but it also served as the worlds shittiest ice maker. Ice formed on the radiator inside and stoped it from dehumidifying the air.
Thats right, you too can have a ice maker that makes ice in the shape of a radiator while ineffectively dehumidifying your home!
Best part was they reached out after I left a one star review and what they could do to change my rating.
I said "Nothing. Make a better product"
I wonder if we had the same dehumidifier. Same 800 sq ft claim, except it didn't produce ice because it couldn't pull enough moisture out of the air to do so despite it being ~80% humidity in my apartment.
After a night of running at full blast, I woke up and poured out a whopping 10 mL of water from the basin
From my understanding, a lot of the products on amazon are resellers that buy stuff from alibaba and then resell it at a markup so it would not surprise me if that was the case.
They all looked the same when i was last on there searching for one.
100%.
I'm constantly seeing the same items with different branding all at a similar price point - it's all AliExpress garbage. And if the AliExpress version suits your needs you're better off ordering from AE directly as it's significantly cheaper. AE shipping speeds have improved over the years too, I've gotten items within 1 week several times now
Came at a time when there weren't barcodes everywhere and QR codes didn't exist yet. Companies had to publish Cuecat specific barcodes, it was much easier to just type in the URL by the time you figured out you could use it at all.
The man who holds the patent legally changed his name after it failed so he wouldn't be associated with it.
Went down the rabbit hole on this guy a bit. He went on to participate in the CyberNinjas audit of Arizona's ballots after the 2020 election. He claimed to have technology that could detect whether ballots had been folded in the mail, and claimed to detect bamboo in "fraudulent Chinese ballots".
He was such a kook, the other kooks rejected him.
You can cut one leg off an IC on the board and it becomes a regular barcode reader.
A smart egg tray. It was in fact quite stupid. Mainly purchased it because of how absurd it was.
Main issues:
it was constantly wrong about how many eggs were in the tray
it was wrong about the eggs age.
it took 6AA batteries that only lasted a month at best.
The egg that stays fresh for a few hundred years is kinda lame for an SCP
I dunno, does it warp probability around it so that no matter what, the egg is always fresh? How far does the effect extend? Does it affect people or just physical interactions? If people ask these questions are they under the effect and contributing to the egg’s defense and therefore continued freshness?
That really sounds absurd. Both the idea itself and the fact that they somehow screwed up the execution of such a simple thing that much.
That sounds eggceptionally stupid, eggregious even.
A Canon printer. Not just a simple one, but a big (wide) one with real ink tanks, about 20 years ago.
Under Linux, I could only access basic printing services with that, and this only by using a default driver not made by Canon that happened to work. So I contacted Canon to get a proper user manual to create a proper device driver for this (something I could have done without problems), and basically got the answer that they would not support this, as "open source is theft of intellectual property". They also had some very choice words about Linux in general.
I assumed I just got an asshole on the phone, so when I attended Cebit a short time later (back then the biggest trade fair in Europe for things like that), I went to the Canon booth, explained my issue, and basically got the same reply. So I sold the Canon printer and bought an HP one. At least HP supported Linux and supplied working drivers. Sadly, they have really gone down the drain since that, so the next printer will be a different brand again...
Try brother. They're usually quite good, though I've only had their laser printers.
It will probably be either a Brother Inkbenefit or an Epson Ecotank model.
My last Epson is a model from 2009 and still somehow works perfectly. Every Canon I've owned was garbage.
Well, the question for me back then was printing wide, so the selection was quite limited from the start. And laser was completely out of the equation, as anything printing wider than 21cm was industrial (size of a bus and price of a house) back then.
Ink stinks, but I'll condone the toner. Inkjets are so unreliable compared to lasers. Good luck, but I worry you're stacking the deck against yourself a bit with the ink and would hate to see you lose here.
Don't worry, I consider lasers, too.
I have a brother color laser + scanner. Love it.
I've had it for 8 years now, and so far it's only on its second set of toners etc.
The only warning I give to brother printer owners is don't leave them on. The capacitors in them aren't the best and your printer will either not turn on without a long power off, or like mine it will turn on and off randomly all day and night.
So now I only turn it on at the wall when I need it, and unplug it after
Buy an industrial laserprinter. Anything consumer will fail you intentionally
I grabbed an HP 3055 that my work was throwing out almost 10 years ago, along with two spare laser cartridges.
We don't print much, but I'm still on the initial cartridge it came with.
It also has been set up in an often dusty, sometimes smokey garage, and hasn't had an issue yet.
3055 was good.
1012 and ilk were also good, from the same era. I still have one of those running.
My LJ4+ lasted 21 years, the first part in an office setting and the latter a retirement in my home (and about 12 house moves). For its 19th I got its RAM filled. Woo! But we decided "as a household" that we didn't need a reliable energy pig printer for a few pages a month. It made the lights flicker and the UPSes report a brownout. But it was a good printer.
Now we have an m404n and it's everything today it needs to be.
I got an HP printer and it's prints reliably when connected via USB but that's about it.
Samsung appliances. Fridges. Washing machines.
Got them as part of the rental unit. They're very new looking. But every month is some new mess up.
God I would replace them if I owned this place.
I used to be a big fan of Samsung, but over the past couple years it has become a do not buy brand for me. They keep doing anticompetitive stuff with their phones so my next phone won't be one.
Start of 2024 my Samsung TV that wasn't that old up and died. And my less than a year old Samsung monitor is flickering.
My watch 6 classic is my favorite smart watch I've ever had, but in order to get it working well on a non Samsung phone you need to go through a bunch of bullshit hassle.
I used to be a Samsung galaxy note diehard, but I stopped at the 10+. The quality just gets worse every time.
Got a Xiaomi Redmi Note and it's basically everything I used to love about Samsung phones.
The friggin ice maker on the fridge. Plus the drawers are falling apart and it's only been 7 years.
smart doorbell that takes 25+ seconds to fire up a video feed, and errors out most of the time. (Original Ring doorbell, received when they bought out my kickstarter Doorbot and bricked it)
or the Lockitron smart door lock from Kickstarter which took like 6 AA batteries and couldn't muster the strength to unlock the door more than like 3 times.
but least they worked together in failure.
My ring used to do that shit. I stopped using it for like a year. Then I was bitching about it and someone said they just got one and it worked great. So I tried it again out of spite to show what a piece of shit it was and now it works within a couple of seconds. shrug
I can't speak for ring but I know as long as my Google nest is connected to WiFi it will update software automatically.
At first I thought your doorbell was a eufy. The failure sounds similar.
i tried the eufy afterwards and it wasn't better. when the eufy crashed daily, it doesn't restart itself. but when it worked it was super fast.
Google Home. Bought them for $40 CAD and back then they were great. Responsive, did quick google searches, played my music all over the house.
Over the years they’ve lost functionality. Mine no longer accurately respond to voice queries and no longer complete google searches. I can still play music on them manually from my phone but when I ask it something, it responds back in French or does something completely different than what I had originally asked.
Worst part is that I ask it something, it does something different, and then when I say “hey Google stop” it just keeps going and going. Have to manually pull the plug for it to stop.
Used to love it, had too many weird promptless experiences, unplugged it and now it's gathering dust on a shelf.
Though it was nice to say "Hey google, tell me today's news" and get a few different news updates while making coffee.
Edit: Out of sheer curiosity, have you tried factory resetting it?
I’ve factory reset every Google home of mine multiple times over the years. Never had any effect.
Have you tried "arrete?"
I have the ring doorbell and a home blob which I only use to play the doorbell tune in the house. It is 50/50 luck if the tune plays when someone presses the doorbell button.
"Sony MDRXB55AP Wired Extra Bass Earbud Headphones/Headset with Mic for Phone Call, Black"
Biggest pieces of shit I have ever disgraced my ears with. I'm not even an audiophile or a gear snob or anything. These were just so ridiculously bad that it was offensive. I've owned earbuds from the dollar store that sounded better than these.
Probably won't help, but I find that headsets sound much worse when they're connected as a headset. My (completely different headphones/headset) sounds a lot better in headphone mode.
Yeah, there are different bluetooth audio profiles, one for high quality audio intended for media consumption, and one for bi-directional audio intended for telephony (and some others, but these are the relevant ones here). The "gotcha" is that in general, any attempt to consume the mic feed from a bluetooth headset will switch it to the telephony mode, so if you have them paired to a PC and an application is listening to the mic for any purpose you get stuck with much lower quality 64kbps PCM audio.
Or worse: it's in telephone mode now, so obviously you only want the sound from the "call" because there's no other reasons the microphone could be on.
Good to know, thanks!
Thank you for explaining that far better than I could!
Imagine your grandmother ordering one of these from QVC and calling her grandchild to come over and show her how to work it...
I remember that thing... My grandpa had one. It was ... Interesting.
I had this one and the upgraded one since we were too poor to buy a real PC. It worked decent for web browsing at the time and I spent a lot of time in IRC chat rooms. I think (may have been later on a real PC) I even started doing Geocities/Tripod/Angelfire pages on this and learning basic HTML.
Oooh I had an Intel Atom Vaio Netbook as my first ever computer I actually owned, given to me as a gift by parents for school. I asked for a gaming laptop, so I was real bamboozled by it.
Somehow though I managed to grief my friends' Minecraft server with /set 0 and enderdragon spawn spam while talking to them on Skype, but it was painful, opening a web page took literal minutes sometimes and my internet wasn't the fastest back then but it wasn't too bad either like 5-10mbps easily. But it wasn't the worst.
That honor goes to an MSI gaming laptop. It was actually really powerful, quad core, 16GB RAM, 8GB VRAM, MSATA SSD and a 1TB HDD that is still alive and in a JBOD setup with mergerfs in my server today serving me shows to watch thru Jellyfin.
In 2014 it was nothing to scoff at, the 880m ran GTA V on almost the highest settings at 1080p and it had tons of storage.
But as a computer it was just fucking terrible, the screen is the dimmest, most TN LCD blue filter shit you've ever seen, it was all I had so I watched things on it, and it just always made me depressed that I was watching beautiful films and shows and playing games through this awful blue filter that had no warmth, everything looked like some movie dementia flashback.
USB port melted itself and made some random parts of the case have an electric surprise for you sometimes, keys popped off if you breathed on em but not like you would want those keycaps to stay on because they were disgusting, speakers sucked in dust and vibrated it inside, making all audio feel like earrape at any volume, headphones jack flew out, touchpad was off to the side because of the dumbass numpad, ethernet port fried entire cables, DVD drive wouldn't read disks, dumbass UEFI firmware locked down to shit, took forever to disable secureboot and the setting would get lost randomly.
About 3 years later, the AC port fried itself and would work like a pair of dodgy earbuds and I had to sit there rotating it like I was finding a radio signal in class, battery was long gone by then so it would shut off at random, which made android app dev I was doing at the time on it somehow even worse of an experience.
Still have many fond memories of my times with it but man did I not miss it at the time.
I replaced it with a 2010 ThinkPad X201 I got for 50 bucks and loved it, I proudly used and abused it and showed it to everyone like it was my first dress with pockets until I eventually blacked out on xanax and procedurally took the entire thing apart and flashed ??? onto the firmware chip and couldn't put it back together ever again.
Just writing to say that I admire your tenacity
ThinkPad X201
I still have mine, what a great machine! I once accidentally stepped on it when hastily getting out of bed and nothing happened, it just continued to work.
I have a x220 that fell 1 meter lid first (and open) on the floor and... all I got was a crack on one of the posts inside the lid. Still fine to this day, in fact, still my number one laptop lol.
Those Vaios had a monumental amount of bloatware slowing them down too.
My wife has a dress with pockets and she didn't notice that for months because she didn't think to look for them and they weren't obvious. Same with a nightie. As someone who wears cargo pants, I was amused at her excitement.
and couldn’t put it back together ever again.
I did this to my X201. Somehow i have like 7 screws that I couldn't find where they belonged (even though I tried to document each screw). I also broke part of the bezel. So I did put it back together again, but with poor structural integrity. The thing still works but I do not use it. Sadly that era of laptops just run too warm and the fans are too noisy.
Power Glove
It's so bad.
Having issues hacking time?
Ya but it looked cool as hell imo and I still want one.
So did I, until I tried to use it a few times.
HTC Vive. Not necessarily this specific tech itself, but VR gaming more broadly. My friend and I were ginning ourselves up for years before it came out. I dropped a lot of money on a gaming rig for it. And when I put the googles on... I fucking hated it. I didn't like standing and gaming. I didn't like being so isolated from everyone else in the house. And the games were glorified tech demos slapped together with unity assets. By the time Half Life Alex came out, I had no more fucks to give.
The porn was fun though.
I liked it. Unfortunately aside from valve, no serious studio has put any resources into making a good vr game.
Sitting games could be big on vr. Flight/space sims could be awesome.
The only game I really liked in VR was Euro Truck Simulator 2 which wasn't even a VR game.
Can't you already fly with VR in MS flight sim?
Also I believe Asseto has VR support.
Yeah you can. Although it's hard on the computer, and depending on the type of plane, it might not be really playable in terms of controls (an airliner for instance)
Games like Elite Dangerous or Star Wars Squadron are really fun in VR though
I played a lot of Elite Dangerous until I realized there was not much to do besides "do the profitable thing over and over before it gets nerfed." And by the time Squadrons came out, I also ran out of fucks to give.
VR is too expensive and too rich white boy centric. Let me tell you something; if your business is gaming and the teenager children in China and India can't afford it, your market will NEVER be able to compete with mobile gaming and PC (M&K) gaming
Right now? I'd say first alert smoke alarms. The batch we bought all has failed in an "alarm always, and don't stop" kind of way. They are only two years old, and I'm frustrated.
First Alert, ask questions later
Failing to an alarm on state is preferred to an alarm off state. So at least no fire can sneak up on you. I think they sell ones now that are 10-year sealed battery with a 10-year warranty.
I agree. If it fails by alarming constantly you replace it. If it fails by not alarming at all you never know, because who actually tests their alarms?
My building has these and 2 of them failed in the first year. Can't replace the battery so had to replace the whole thing.
A self mowing lawnmower, it moved so randomly and was so specific for its operation parameters that I ended up just going back to manually mowing.
If your yard was just a perfectly level, medium sun, no rain, obstacle free, rectangle you wouldn't have any problems.
I don't know, we put in a lot of effort to make our living room clear for our robot vac. We lifted the sofa we got shelves with a space at the bottom but roomboi still just gets stuck on it's own in the middle of a hardwood floor
You need that RTK EPOS tech bruh
Every piece of hardware I've used past 2010 or so seems to have just gotten worse and worse, I honestly think I'm cursed.
2013 (? can't quite remember), Sager gaming laptop with sli gpu config, gpus drew too much power for the battery (I believe), leading to black screen and reboot. Company feigned ignorance, ran unrelated tests on RMA, Socially awkward at the time and was scared to ask for a refund. Convinced to this day it was a scam.
2015, desktop computer I built randomly powers off during usage, no errors, not the power supply, unsolved to this day.
2020-2022 5 cheap ebay thinkpads, all with one hardware problem or another. My beloved T60p was the last to go.
2022-present Framework laptop, ports suffer intermitent failure, webcam microphone stopped working. Replaced webcam/microphone, works for a day, breaks again. Unsolved.
2022-preset Steam deck, had to RMA 3 times for various hardware issues, works now, but the right trigger still rubs against something but I can live with it. Spilled coffee on the left trackpad so it's sticky; that's my fault though so I can't blame it on the curse.
2015, desktop computer I built randomly powers off during usage, no errors, not the power supply, unsolved to this day.
Possible capacitor fault or a DOA chip -- try checking the components with a cap checker and a multimeter
You have a technology curse. Time to start gardening.
I had a laptop a while back with a fingerprint scanner that would work for one day, then stop working completely. I reinstalled the drivers, and it would work for a day and then stop again. I eventually gave up using the fingerprint scanner until I "upgraded" the laptop to Windows 11, and it worked again. No idea if it still works, since I rarely use that laptop now
You could either have the world's worst luck, or you are genuinely cursed
Alternatively, you keep spilling coffee on your devices and going into a blind fit of cleaning rage that blocks out the memory of the original coffee spill
I usually buy Asus for computers, and I go for a mid-range business model with dedicated graphics. They're cheaper than the gaming counterparts, still have good specs, and they are much more reliable and easy to work on.
Had a secondhand Alienware, circa 2017, and that thing looked nice, but it was heavy, bulky, and you had to remove the back cover, drives, battery, WiFi antenna, and a bezel just to swap the CMOS battery. But that's everything Dell IMHO.
Everything Dell is just garbage.
I remember subbing to r/dell and all you ever saw was people with problems with Dell/Alienware hardware.
I might be exaggerating a but I've never been a real fan of Bluetooth headphones or earphones. Sound quality never matched cabled ones (I also have the popular Sony one) and battery life sucks for the time I want to use it
I always wanted to be the cool hipster with cabled headphones and getting mad about phones without audio jack.
Truth is, my cables always got tangled up, especially at work. It was getting really annoying. I bought some open ear headphones from aftershokz because i often listen to music wherever and i don't want to be isolated. These things absolutely fuck. Battery life is fantastic. Even if they are empty, i can throw them into the pocket charger for 15 minutes and they go for hours again. The sound is good. It's not full blown headphone quality, obviously. But they are so comfortable and you don't have to stick anything into your ears. I saw that bose has a similar product and i kinda wanna try them.
I understand it's a very subjective experience. And tbh, one thing that bothers me about cabled ones is the cable noise when moving. Or accidentally pulling off the headphones from my head, although that's not a common issue,but for sitting experience they're perfect. Aside from that, my music preference is very eclectic, so e.g. the level of bass really needs to adapt properly to the genre I'm listening to atm, so the boosted bass Bluetooth headphones just don't work for me. I've never experienced a Bluetooth pair that doesn't have too much bass.
Ya, bass is always the downside of these things, but i'm not super into that. Also i don't really like to listen to music very loud. I really don't like when i feel the cable brushing my arms or something. And i rip them out every time i stand up. It's so bad.
A huge plus for me is also that i can leave my phone somewhere and i can still listen to music.
My jabra 85 elite last me for a solid >12h of continuous play
I have $25 wired IEMS that sound better than my most expensive Bluetooth tws sets. I've taken to just listing to podcasts and YouTube videos with my Bluetooth sets at work.
All true. All good points.
I'm running out of places to buy a phone that offers a jack, though.
But my home rig is a USB sound dongle to wired earbuds usually. Occasionally a set of ANC buds for the bad days.
Or my apple watch. The apple watch step counter is just plain broken. I can say hey siri a dozen times it may or may not respond.
Tablets. I've owned 2 so far, plus fucked around with a third, fancier one that was borrowed from someone else (in case you care: a very old Samsung one, a Xiaomi model from the late 2010s, and a new-ish Apple iPad for the borrowed one).
They suck as smartphone replacements because they are too big.
They lack button inputs, so they suck as gaming devices or as computer replacements.
You can browse the web... But if you decide to type anything, the large size plus the touchscreen keyboard make for an awkward experience (in ways that it's not on a smaller phone)
They have lit screens, so they suck as eReaders.
They're sorta okay as like, personal screens for watching movies or whatever, but like, at that point just use a television??
They can make sorta good drawing tablets, the ones that are pen-compatible I mean... Because I mean, yeah. But the lack of a keyboard is a bummer with how I learned to draw with my other hand on Ctrl+Z, though that's more a muscle memory issue than anything.
In general, every tablet I used felt like a less-good verion of a dozen other devices, yanno?
I use my tablet for 2 things"
Consuming media. Not sure what TV you have but mine would be a little unwieldy for taking it on travels.
Taking notes during conferences, meetings, presentations, etc. So much easier if all the notes are digital from the beginning
Wait, wait, wait. You're telling me people leave their homes?!
In my case it's more that I get car/airsick very easily -- So when I'm out and about, I won't be watching media on a portable screen. At most listening to music or an audio-book.
And if I'm in like. A hotel. Most of them (at least here in my country) have SmartTVs that will accept broadcasting from my phone. :P
As for note-taking, I can see the appeal but refer to my comment about typing in a Tablet being uniquely awful.
Absolutely. I use my tablet almost exclusively as a media device but I do feel it could be so much more. It is nice though to use it while my phone is charging overnight and not wasting battery on the phone while traveling.
I felt like this until I bought a legit tablet, not some sub $100 tablet. it's night and day. and it's not even super high end, just not cheap
Same. I used to make fun of them as they're 'too big' for mobile stuff but too small for computer stuff, but after getting a killer deal on a Tab S7+, it's super useful for casual games, watching youtube/plex, drawing, and web browsing. It's also great to use in the kitchen while cooking or doing other stuff
See, I thought it might have been my tablets being cheap things.
But messing around with that borrowed iPad (possibly a Pro, the person who lent me it was filthy rich and likes premium stuff) made me go "... This is like, a high quality laptop but worse in every way?"
The screen was drop-dead gorgeous, and it was clearly a powerful (if locked down, cuz Apple) device -- but it felt like everything I tried to do on the device was in some major way a compromise to accomodate for a less-than-ideal form factor.
One of the funniest memories from when I was travelling (around 2017) was many tourists holding up their giant tablet devices, fumbling with them to try take photos of things.
I've seen this at Disneyland. People walking around using a fucking tablet to record videos like people do with selfie sticks.
A Surface RT ... Slow, barely any software support. Totally lost whatever trust I had for Microsoft.
The wonderful result of Microsoft and Qualcomms exclusivity agreement.
That garbage tablet gave me lasting resentment for ARM processors.
Welcome to the Abandoned By Microsoft club. For me it was Windows Phone 7.
Maybe not this exact model, but 20 years ago when I was a young gun in college for the first time, I got one of these because I hated cleaning the fucking shower and tub.
It worked about as badly as you'd expect. I don't know if modern versions are any better, but holy shit they're a lot more expensive than they used to be. I remember spending like $40 at the time.
I quickly learned to just wipe down the shower after use and clean it more often. Thing was fucking worthless.
Oh, yeah, those are crap. I went with scrub brush attachments for the battery-powered drill I already own. It cost like $20 for half a dozen heads of different sizes that chuck up like any normal drill bit. It's not as automated, but it's way easier and more thorough than scrubbing by hand.
That's dope, I've got one of those, I'll look into that. Thanks so much for the suggestion!
No problem. Pretty sure I got the idea from someone here on Lemmy. Look at that, it's already been more useful to me than reddit.
I went from a cheap mp3 player that I could just plug in to my computer and drag in music to an iPod which forced me to download the iTunes bloatware create an account and then took 100x longer to transfer music because of the pointless conversion each file had to undergo. This was my first and last experience with a personal Apple device. Ended up putting some old pop music onto it and giving it to my grandmother after 2 days. Uninstalled iTunes and went back to using my cheap mp3 player until I replaced it with a smartphone.
Coming in as a close second place, an all-in-one Sony Vaoi computer that cost a fortune and had shit performance. Took daily nags to Sony before they took it back and gave me a refund. I find that Sony's hit and miss though. My favourite smartphone (Xperia Play) was Sony, and I love my Sony Bluetooth earbuds. The Sony Smartwatch was shit.
I had to buy a Clicker for college in a day when any number of phone apps, or even the Smart board, would have done exactly the same thing. I think it cost about $150 and the only thing it did -- THE ONLY THING IT DID -- was serve as an expensive and drastically crippled version of Kahoot. Abject waste of money for all parties involved.
Amazon kindle. It didnt let me plug it into my computer and upload books to use it without internet access. Everything needed sending through amazon. I should have expected this but it was so locked down and filled with ads to the point it was unusable. I attempted to jailbreak it and it bricked so i threw it away and went back to using calibre on my computer. I would really like an offline open source ebook reader.
Get a boox, runs android.
You can even install the Kindle app. But seriously, there are bunch of good ereader apps.
I love that you've set that boundary there and stick with it. Admirable.
I found a paper weight at Goodwill about 2 years ago, and haven't seen one ad, and I have an email address for it that I can mail any file format. I have not had any issues.. maybe because I was a late adopter?
If you can get one of the early Kobo ereaders, you can flash this Libre OS on it, that would be better.
Also, those early Kobo ereaders (glo, nia, mini and some other models) can support up to 32gb sdcard, that's a lot of books and out goes the need for cloud storage
i've been desperately trying to get my hands on one of those, but I live in a third country and import duties are a pain
Wow. Okay, I misread it before, but still tell me more. What's your story ?
It was nothing more than an off the shelf ARM SBC inside. Some third party designed and made the board. Nobody had the bootloader keys to unlock the units. It was easily bricked. No keys to recover it. They had sold it as a device for "hackers" but nobody could really hack it. The whole concept was dead on arrival.
Several years later people discovered weaknesses in Nvidias bootloader code. The Ouya is vulnerable. So they're finally wide open hackable. But nobody cares anymore.
The games were actually really fun....but the console was basically a really slow phone. And the controllers had sticky buttons. But worst of all, all games lagged badly. Like half a second or more on some games.
I tried making it work for a month! I even tried to hack it to put retro stuff on it. My tiny gaming pc at the time had better capabilities and was easier to work with...so I gave up on that too. Tried to use the controllers (they were Bluetooth, they could technically work with other machines) but they lagged and felt terrible.
These things were trash and the concept was even worse.
Fun fact. The guy that made this was the "forensic expert" that claimed he could detect bamboo fibers in ballots in Georgia and Arizona. The GOP tried to put him in charge of their investigation.
If you count cars: A Skoda Octavia PHEV.
I love Skoda. I love the Octavia. It was my fourth Octavia and I already ordered two more for my staff. PHEV would have been ideal for our use case.
Well,things didn't go as planned.
The whole car was bugged with software and hardware problems from day one - controll units randomly crapping out, when my dealer wanted to replace them he often had to get 5 units because four would be DOA and the one that worked kicked the bucket before I left his premises.
Highlights:
A steering wheel coming loose (only slightly,but still)
The main display that shows your speed,etc. randomly shutting down. (Especially nice as I live close to Switzerland with their exorbitant speeding tickets)
Randomly playing a screeching sound at full volume (especially nice at 3am or when on a highway)
Randomly shutting of AC, some motor controls
, etc.
It took 12 months for VW to take that steaming pile back, and only we sued them (Shortly before the hearing).
Second place goes to LG which sold me a OLED TV for 2k that randomly showed faulty pixel lines exactly 3 years and 3 days after I bought it (so it's out of the extended warranty programs as well). And when asked for a quote for the repair they had the audacity to ask for almost the new price for the TV back then, aka 150% of the current market value - without even looking at it first.
Good way to make sure that I never buy LG anymore.
VW really dropped the ball on software, no wonder they're buying now into other car manufacturers like Rivian, in hopes to use someone else's more developed software.
Yeah. Both hardware and software, sadly.
Their QA is going down the drain.
Happy Hyundai customer now.
Is there actually any car manufacturer that has decent hardware and software? I have never driven a really "modern" car but from all that I've seen so far the interfaces are typically horrible to interact with and laggy to the point where I prefer my car as dumb as possible
Really can't complain about Hyundai/Kia and Volvo (Android) so far.
VW really dropped the ball on software
Why bother with software, then? Late-80s and 90s Type III Jettas can be absolutely bulletproof if you find them in not-bagged and well cared for condition.
Košs KPH30i headphones. Those fuckers are an actual health hazard. They will make your ears suffer for the crime of putting them on.
Really sad cause Porta Pros are incredible. And I usually see people suggest getting the KPH30i instead. Don't do that.
Anything KOSS or PYLE is straight dog shit. Been that way for at least 25 years. I bought many of their products as a broke teenager.
Maytag dishwasher and gas dryer. Maytag had always purported themselves to be a top brand. However, both of these products would not last more than 4 years. I should have bought the Bosch dishwasher like consumer reports told me.
Gotta have one from 30 years ago. My dad's secondhand Maytag dryer survived 4 moves, and 35 years. We had it serviced twice in that time. First time was at 30 years. It stopped running because it filled up with pocket change. Some of the coins were polished almost completely flat. Second time, the heat quit working. Bought a new dryer after that. It's going strong, but it's got a long way to go just to be half as good.
Yeah, it's a common fallacy in appliance brand discussions: "my grandma has a and it still works! You should buy one, too!". First of all it's survivorship bias and almost always the quality has degraded a lot in the past decades (greed and consumers that don't want to pay the price for reliable appliances).
It's probably a bit of both here. We didn't have the "disposable" lifestyle 50 years ago that we have now, and a stronger push for efficiency and features has had trade-offs in complexity and reliability.
Example: My current dryer (and my dad's new dryer) both have a lot more plastic in them. The motors are smaller, and quieter, while making the same power (or more). They are loaded with temp, humidity, weight and wobble sensors, and my dryer has 4 dials, 5 different temperatures, and 2 different modes. The old one, had a dial to control the heat, and a timer.
As for disposable, I think older generations had an expectancy that you would buy an appliance once or twice in your life. I've got a 1000 dollar poket shit-posting device that I'm going to get rid of because it is pushing 4 years old. We just accept that these devices are uneconomical to repair, and we toss them out. I think the only things American's bother to fix anymore are cars, and that's going away because every year, they get harder and more expensive to repair.
Also, it's not even the same corporation or factories behind them. It's just a brand name at this point, and the product has nothing in common with the old, good one. For example, Maytag bought Amana, and then Whirlpool bought Maytag. (It's enlightening to read the list of Whirlpool-owned brands.)
I have two Bosch dishwashers and have been very happy with them so far. Avoid Samsung appliances at all costs.
When I was a child in the 90s I somehow scored a voice role in a hotdog commercial for the radio. I was paid a king's ransom for this, half of which my parents made me put in savings (wise), and half of which I spent on a brand new Sega CD (not wise).
The magic of postage stamp-sized full motion video took about three days to wear off, at which point all that was left was basically pure shit. They jacked me. At least I learned that lesson early.
You know what's funny? Nintendo put expansion slots on the bottom of all of their consoles prior to the Wii. In Japan, they were used for the Famicom Disk System, the Satellaview, the N64DD and the Gameboy Player. The latter was the only one that made it to the West. They never released an expansion for a console outside of Asia. They even had to retool several games that were released on Famicom diskettes for cartridges in the West, including inventing on-cartridge save files via battery-backed RAM for The Legend of Zelda in order to release them in the West.
Given Sega's track record with console expansions, Nintendo might have been just as well off. Well, except for how the SNES optical drive add-on played out.
More directly. The playstation was developed as an expansion for supernes. Then nintendo changed their mind and sony decided to keep developing it as their own device
iPad
can't open anything, keeps crashing. (relatively new)
You mean files? Or apps? Or mails? …
all of it, well mail works.
I know I mainly used it for VLC which atleast 2/3 times I tried opening a file, my ipad would just restart, same with some apps.
Your iPad sounds pretty broken, that's not normal.
That or the files he has are badly corrupted…
they're not, work fine on any non-apple device, (iPhone had a similar problem, although not as bad.) those devils devices have been collecting dust for a while now.
I purchased a razor branded Smartwatch, way back when. Thing could barely connect to my phone, it's battery life was atrocious when it did, and all it did was show the time and track steps. It didn't have any built-in notifications so you had to use a separate app. This was fairly early in smart watches though, it was pretty fad-esque.
Smart watches are still pretty useless for most
None of them do what I want, which is to check my blood sugar via UV light. They've been talking about it for at least 15 years. I know why too. They want to be able to sell all our info, and medical stuff is protected by HIPPA.
Samsung M540 "Slyde" phone - The software was incredibly buggy including things like just randomly typing the wrong letter. Randomly bad tech is so much more irritating than tech you know is bad.
Google Nexus 7 (2012) - The tablet had defective chips that slowed down over time. Turned into a horrible slow piece of shit over time.
Metal detectors, just in general. My BF has one and the metal detectors just don't like me for some reason, I could never achieve success with it, like everything was a needle in a haystack. He was always "the detector" and me "the photographer" and I guess stuff just doesn't transfer over well.
Reeder tablet that came as a promotion with something. Could barely keep a single app open, sometimes. At some point low spec just means e waste
Fuck the surface pro 3, you'll never get another cent from me Microsoft you fucking cunts! ( Except for halo mcc and infinite BUT NO MORE (unless the next halo is actually good but even the ONLY ON SALE))
Nintendo Wii: as a loyal Nintendo purchaser here from the Game & Watch, to the Super Nintendo, N64 and GameCube, but the Nintendo Wii never let me back up my purchased downloaded games in a way I could transfer to another Wii without online access. I get that that's now standard but it was the first time I was burnt by it.
Worse than that. You bought software licenses specific to that Wii, not to an online account. If it died, you lost all your purchases.
Yes that's right, and I realised I could no longer be a historic game hardware collector with that generation of consoles which killed my main hobby at the time. Years of Nintendo loyalty and, dare I say it, fandom, were betrayed and the Wii itself was just awful.
My current Amazfit smartwatch. The only good thing about it is the long battery life.
It's a piece of crap otherwise. Requires the data harvesting app to always be running in the background or it loses connection to my phone. It's slow, has ugly watch faces and the custom ones are awkward to install. I can't get it to work with Gadgetbridge. The always on display is so dim that it's useless. Pinging my phone doesn't work.
I don't know why I let the Internet convince me that spending £120 on this thing was a good idea. I'm going Casio or something next time around.
I bought something on eBay for 10 dollars that was supposed to be able to copy key fobs. Didn't work.
A lot of those are very dependent on which tech is in the key fob. They can easily copy old hid prox which just broadcast the UUID of the fob, but struggle with newer tech that does a challenge and response.
Any Bluetooth headsets on Windows 11. On Windows there are two modes for Bluetooth headsets: One with high quality audio and no microphone, one with lower quality and mic support. On Windows 10 was able to change the mode, but on Windows 11 you can't actively change it anymore, because "the software decides" this mode. So ever few weeks my headset switch to the output only mode, get stuck, and I cannot make a call with my team mates. The workaround is time consuming and frustating.
Too bad I have to use Windows for work. Most companies do not have Linux option, even for devs.
You can still switch, if I'm thinking of what you are, in the legacy "sounds" menu. Just turn off all their universal app shit and 11 is ok :)
Amazon Fire Tablet 7in. I bought it literally just to read PDFs, and it was so slow that it was basically unusable. I tried switching out the launcher to something more minimal (Niagara launcher I think), and I figured out how to disable the ads that were all over the place. It helped a bit, but not enough to overcome the hardware and Fire OS. (I think I needed ADB for both of those fixes; I had to put in some real work to unfuck that tablet.) Plus the screen was too small for my pathetic human eyeballs.
Was it worth $30? At the time, yeah, because I literally couldn't afford anything else, but I now have an $80 10in generic Android tablet that's wildly faster.
Have to add, I came across mine the other day in a drawer and the soft touch finish is sticky now, and the thing was so bad to begin with I feel like it's that way on purpose just to be a dick.
They are pieces of shit but for the price it's actually pretty decent. $30 is the price of a couple McDonalds meals. We used to buy them for the kid to use since it didn't really matter if it got destroyed. I also bought a new one to use as a smart home touch interface but I haven't quite finished that due to ADHD and too many projects.
An early Samsung phone my spouse bullied me into taking over from him. I don't know how anyone likes those. I went to Google phones and they're the only good thing about Google.
iPhone 4, nexus5, samsung7, samsung10, and all I can say is the Samsungs aren't like the nexus5 but at least they're not apple, whose keyboard and features I just hate. Good earbuds though.
Nexus 6 was a hell of a phone. I still miss it even three phones later.
The Cybiko. Got it for Christmas and my father threw out the box before I could get the rebate for the mp3 player attachment. Didn't know any other kid with one, so the wireless communication was useless. The games all sucked anyway. Gaming on rubber buttons was always a terrible idea
Yoo a lot of nostalgia for the Cybiko! My mom wouldn't let me get a gameboy but my sister managed to find one of these somewhere. That was my only way to do handheld gaming for years! The games sucked but it was better than homework =)
A smartphone
Good call, never come across one that isn't a dreadful user experience and I'm confused as hell as to why they've become so popular.
My first two smartphones were keyboard phones that I had a love-hate relationship with. The rest were all a hate-hate relationship, except my current phone which is back to love-hate. How many smartphones has the average person owned now? I am up to 12...oh god.
Holy shit. I was around before the Internet and I've owned four smartphones.
A Sony mobile phone that couldn't remember the time when it was switched off.
True it's going back a while. But not so far that battery backed clock chips were uncommon.
Microsoft surfacebook (or whatever the fuck that thing was called) that died after like 13 months. Motherboard went to shit and MS offered me a $100 discount on a new one. Yeah fuck that, I bought a MacBook Pro.
In ear earbuds. I blimmin' hate them but my Audio Technica over ears are too bulky for the gym.
Bit off topic, though if anyone could recommend cheap but decent wireless headphones, for the gym, that are not in ear I would appreciate it a lot (I'm in the UK).
Not cheap and i already said it in another comment. I absolutely love my aftershokz open fit. My ear hurt like hell when i use in ears and they never seem to fit. These i wear sometimes 10 hours a day. I went to the shower multiple times because i forgot i was wearing them. They sound really good imo, battery life especially with the charging case is fantastic. It's perfect to cycle or in areas where you still need basic awareness. Like i can talk to people at work while i have some music in my ears.
Do they hurt the backs of your ears? I've had some cheap in-ear headphones that also had curved plastic to fit around the shell of your ear for stability. I'd have to take them off after an hour or two in pain, but not because of the in-ear component.
I know you're looking for on or over ear, but for the gym, it might make more sense to get the non TWS earbuds like the LG Tone or similar. They're light in your ear as all the battery weight stays on your neck.
My son picked up a refurbished Ipad mini that we were going to use as a screen for our quadcopters. Well, you can't load any software on it so it's just a worthless piece of shit. Way to go apple.
I back a running trainer on Kickstarter called Vi. When I got it is was insanely uncomfortable, drained my phone battery on an hour via the companion app and did not work for runs longer than 10 minutes. It was absolutely dog shit.
Should have used Vim
Watch out, you might upset the emacs crowd.
Handheld sewing machine. Not sure if all are like this or just the cheapo one i bought, it can't sew anything thick else it will get stuck often and can't make the loop. End up shelving it and never use it since then.
I was willing to put up with a lot of sacrifices for a $100 smartwatch but I was not expecting the level of trash I received. Unappealing and cheap looking silver colored case, typos in menus, and navigating the painfully underperformant UI made me immediately regret my purchase. There were many other issues I’ve since pushed out of my memory. I packed it up for a return within 24 hours.
The ONLY positive was supposedly the battery lasted weeks but I didn’t want to use the damn thing for more than 5 minutes.
FM radio receivers for the car.
Never could find a radio station that would work. When you did, it only worked for about 1/4 mile down the road and then had to find another station.
If your car is old enough to have a tape deck, they have cassettes that connect via Bluetooth. Just about perfect sound quality since there is no interference.
I remember when those things first came out and used a headphone jack so you could plug in your CD player. (those were the days...)
I was actually kinda pissed when I had to switch to a car with a CD player and couldn't use it anymore.
I changed cars in January and the car I previously drove, an 05, Jetta had a tape deck. I bought this to connect my phone. Surprised that it handled calls as well.
Yeah those worked way better than the fm transmitters. Only problem was my car introduced a humming sound into the signal that got worse with speed lol.
Where do you live? I don’t listen to the radio anymore but when I did, I could get my favorite station 50 miles away no problem.
It's not the radio that didn't work. These were fm transmitter/receivers you used to play mp3 players/cd players back in the day when vehicles didn't use aux cables. It sent the signal over short range fm signal to your radio.
The alternative was the cassette adapter, but some vehicles had swapped to cd
Also hated the Macbook Pro with the Butterfly Keyboard.
And probably a lot of smaller tech that I forgot about.
Not sure if it is was the worst but I had a Ngage Q. You know the taco shaped gaming phone? Only that it was the less taco shaped version. And it was in 2009, several years after those things failed. It was a decent phone actually and it had tony hawk pro skater, very playable.
But yeah ugly as fuck and hard to hold as a phone plus lack of colours on the screen unless it was a game.
My Seat Leon car. VW really shat the bed with their latest gen cars.
Airpods 3, i got these as a gift.
basically, you put them in, and they hurt like hell, they are meant to inflict damage BY DESIGN.
My wife got the air pods pro 2 I think. Can't tell one from the other. She preferred the Samsungs so she got those and gave these to me because I liked them
And I do. It's the only piece of apple tech I have.
For me they fit REALLY well. And I want people to be happy like me so I'm thinking all of the usual things you've been asked or recommended before. Because I want you to like yours like I like mine.
You know: try different tips, go watch a YouTube to confirm it's fitted right, etc. All ye things you've done or thought of doing, try it again with an open mind. And then sell them off, but yeah.
I hope, since this is probably a ways ago, that your current earbuds are working well. Phones seem to be incapable of a headphone jack, despite my startac-7800 fitting one in, so it's got to be fucking radio earbuds all the way, so you gotta find some that fit and make you happy.
That means they're not for your ears. Not that they're designed to inflict pain. I've had those AirPods, they were fine for me - and my ears don't like most earbuds that get shoved in there, and sometimes even start hurting from over-ear headphones. I now have the Airpod Pros and they're even better, all that goes into your ear is the silicone bud, no rigid plastic in the mix.
A Xiaomi smartwatch. I never found any good use for its "smart" features and I had to charge the fucking thing all the time. So I ended up dropping it after a year in favor of a regular digital watch.
A Dell Inspiron laptop.
It just kept dying. Typing a Word document one moment, black screen the next. I bought this thing in August because I was going back to school and I needed a new laptop. By December I finally convinced them to replace the machine outright. I got a different model that lacked a lot of the features I had ordered.
I'm no longer a Dell customer.
My last ever Nokia phone, a half way house between old Nokias and smartphones circa 2008.
No touch screen, but could play music, videos, had a calendar etc.
Absolute piece of garbage. Got super hot at times doing who-knows what, and had a software bug where the audio would completely stop working until you rebooted it… which meant that multiple times my morning alarm went off completely silently and I was late for work.
Bought an iPhone 3GS as soon as my 1 year contract was up, Nokia were never relevant again after that era.
N95?
No, I was still being cheaper with phones at that stage.
I remember my friend getting an N95 and how that was a big deal back then haha.
After looking through an extremely long list of Nokia phones on Wikipedia, it might have been a 6120 classic.
Rechargeable beard trimmer. They last six months , then the charge is less than 5 minutes.
Any and all dishwashers and refrigerators I've ever owned. Fuck planned obscelence.
Manual lawnmower.
The surface RT and windows ME e-machine computer were both a close second.
The joycons that came with the Nintendo Switch, both failed within 3 months of owning it, and might as well include the entire console cause all the cheap plastic bits are falling apart.
I’d replace it with a Steam Deck, but the Switch’s biggest strength is being such a piece of junk I wouldn’t care if it gets stolen or destroyed
I've had my joycons for 5 years and they still work fine. Tbh I mostly use it as a handheld and probably only play about 100 hours per year, but I think the switch is pretty neat
The Asus Transformer Prime.
It was an Android tablet circa 2011, right at that time they were actually making 10" Android tablets. I bought one as soon as Android Honeycomb launched which had an improved UI and lot of new tablet focused features. I bought the optional keyboard/battery attachment and planned for it to be my tiny laptop replacement that could also play emulators and be used for reading comics. I wanted to like it so bad.
It never really panned out though, a large majority of which was because of the faulty Nvidia Tegra 3 chip. Awful performance issues, terrible wireless connectivity, overheating, battery drain and nonexistant software updates from Asus. I ran custom ROMs trying to squeeze it as much as I could but that meant I was constantly tinkering with it and having yet more problems. Eventually I even broke the screen (my fault) and painstakingly went through a whole botched screen replacement before finally deciding that it had been a huge waste of time and money and sent it to it's grave.
Ipod touch 5.
I keep my electronics for long, so seeing my iPod turn slow and not being able to do anything about it really pushed me away from apple.
LG Optimus 2x, the first dual core smartphone.
What a piece of shit, never bought LG again. It kept randomly crashing and rebooting, along with a host of other problems.
Anything that accesses Expedia.com
August wifi smart lock. Originally wanted the zigbee version for my home but apparently they stopped making those in favor of wifi, however wifi needs more energy to communicate and would go through they special batteries in a week's time. Even replacing the unit with another one didn't solve the issue, so I just returned it and deleted my account.
I have the same lock. I didn't want it but it was the only lock I could find that would work on my sliding door.
The key is to buy rechargeable batteries. Mine last maybe a month before they need to be replaced.
That is fucking dumb that you have to replace the battery every month.
We have low power mcu that can go down to a few uA and make battery last for years, but this company decided that it was beneath them.
Bad engineering overall.
I think it is more about the power required to run the lock motor.
I have several z-wave door locks as well. They all need battery replacement within a few months. Unless I don't open/close them very often. They can go much longer.
But it really isn't to big of a deal. Home Assistant tells me when they are getting low and I just swap the batteries in a few minutes.
To this day I don't know what problem smart locks are supposed to solve that hasn't already been solved by the good old lock and key combo. Requires no electricity, no internet, just works.
Letting people in without giving them a key (or if they forgot their key) is the use case. Also if you have smart home stuff like home assistant, you can program it to lock on its own based on conditions (like night time or your phone leaves the house).
Re the first part: nobody enters my house if they don't have a key and I'm not present. Re the second part, I don't trust any software-based technology near enough to rely on that kind of stuff without double-checking. . Turn the key, done.
It's better to spend 2 sec plugging a charging cable than wait freaking hours for your phone to charge with Qi.
Soft disagree. I use the Qi charger to charge my phone overnight or while it’s sitting on my desk. The USB cable is when I need it charged quickly.
This way, my phone’s charging port is protected with a plug when I’m not using it and it is immaculate and unlikely to fail while I have it.
(My previous phone’s charging port almost failed and would stop working if I used it for all charging. Using Qi for the bulk of the charging kept the port working for when I needed it, like in the car or to the computer.)
I do the same, including plugging the usb-c port. I specifically got a 5-watt qi charger over the 10 or 15 watt ones so that my phone would slow charge overnight. The phone doesn't get warm when charging that way, unlike when I use the usb-c port.
Second this. When I sit at my desk, the phone's on the Qi pad. I don't need it all the time, and it's fine to stay there 30 min. When I sleep, same thing. I actually use a smaller charger brick so it charges more slowly overnight. I don't know what it's a better charge for the battery if it stays lower temp but it feels right.
I bought a phone mount one, it charges quite fast and it is so much easier to place my phone in the dock and have it charge. It does get quite warm but that's easily remedied by pointing an AC vent to the back of the phone.
Honestly it sounds like you got a low wattage one and yes those do charge much slower.
portable swamp cooler. it leaked and makes your carpet a swamp and maybe cooler. also luggable.
roller-type kitchen knife sharpener. the finer edge sharpener actually dulls the knife more.
tile tracker. it was so big, I didn't lose it. I also hate the concept because it works like insurance does.
I think the Thinkpad X130e with the AMD E-240 CPU. That processor, really, was the bad part. Every little single thing you wanted to do was absolutely CPU-bound, even when it was contemporary and new (c. 2011-2012). The amount of time I wasted waiting for the fully hammered CPU to do literally anything was too much.
I bought the laptop used because I figured a tiny Linux laptop would be great. And other aspects of it were fine, such as the display, keyboard, trackpad, build quality, etc. But that stupid CPU totally killed the device. Such a regret.
Nokia Lumia 620 (Windows Phone)
As someone who runs a Windows phone launcher to this day, I think you're wrong 😂 had they actually pursued them, and supported them better. I think we'd still have Windows phones today, The app store was truly the killer.
iPod shuffle, sometime around 2003 or 2004. Died in three weeks. Ordered a replacement. Died in two weeks
Pioneer ddj400
Where do I start first off it comes with record box, for better effects or features you have to buy a subscription . The knobs come off in your hand and are made out of plastic crossfader sucks made out of plastic buttons stick, pads stick. It's just horrible
Years ago I owned a pioneer dgm 1000 the thing was built like a tank and held its value well. I sold it for something else about 3 years 4 years later and got the same price I paid for it..
I expected the pioneer 400 to at least be manufactured somewhat sturdy, and not feel like a Fisher Price toy..
Ended up finding a numark ns7Ii for a decent price.
Made out of metal, more buttons than you can shake a stick at very high quality. It's almost 10 years old and nothing's wrong with it..
The cheap pioneer mixerswill be E-Waste within a few years
An iBook. I had the GPU replaced twice under warranty. I sold it after the second time. Never again.
Nintendo virtual boy.
Really? Despite how much of a flop it was, if I owned one I feel like I'd find it fun?
Though now that I think about it...did it even have many games?
I was fun for a moment and then the headaches and nausea would kick in. And yeah, very few games. At the time it was pretty innovative as Nintendo always is. Still a terrible experience however.
It wasn't really fun, and I could never see properly in it.
Hmm, good point. I have an astigmatism and slightly different vision in both eyes so now I'm questioning if it would even work for me.
Yeah I have the world's smallest astigmatism in my left eye and even that was annoying for me as a kid using it.
HTC Droid Incredible.
It kept telling me its storage was full when it was nowhere close, and then because it only allowed over the air factory resets, it couldn't even erase and reformat itself. It was the top rated Android phone at the time and it's why I've never gone back.
This stogie sized covert camera. The photos looked like a screenshot of the game snake.
For society? A smartphone
A Huawei MediaPad M5 Lite.
Their own lower-end APUs are sooo slow (even worse than Samsung) and the bloated stock ROM doesn't help. The tablet was borderline unusable without limiting background applications (which for some reason reset every time you reebooted the thing), and it's not like it ever got any updates.
It's hard to top the inkjet printers I've owned. I still can't believe 30 years later home printer tech is not only unimproved but worse between lower quality production and squeezing people on ink costs.
And they're making things worse as we use less and less paper at the same time..... Geniuses
Gotta protect those profit margins!
I bought an old business monochrome laser printer ten years ago. Still hasn't needed a new toner cartridge.
I bought my parents a laser printer after years of them being incredibly frustrated by inkjets. I got them the same model as me, as well as a spare toner cartridge.
I'm still on my original toner cartridge, and I've had it for probably six years or so.
My parents are in their late 40's and early 50's. I think I might have accidentally gotten them a lifetime supply of printing.
I got my parents a laser as well and evidently I picked a shitty one because they are planning to go back to the other side 😞
If you've owned more than 2, those are on you! 🤣
But yea, consumer printers suck.
Hey, my Brother laser printer can see my screen, you know! Apologise now!
Laser printers are way way better than the other types
Everything is better with lasers. Prove me wrong...
Sharks with laser beams on their heads?
Fricken, better.
My Lexmark laser, from 1996, just quit last summer.
Though I think I can fix it - seems a paper jam sensor is stuck.
I got one of those Epson ink tank printers for $250au. I think it's the first time inkjet printers have become legit affordable and high capacity.
Laser still wins on reliability though, and being an Epson means it's a Tamagochi so needs to be used monthly at least so it doesn't die.
I should really get a laser printer but my need for 11x17 capacity kind of limits options. To be fair though, my brother small business type inkjet printer does pretty well! Ink costs suck but I don't want to commit seppuku after using it.
The worst piece of tech I currently own is a small server that must have hard drive issues cause it forgets everything when it restarts and I have to set it up again.
The worst piece of tech that I have ever owned in my life is a CD Cleaner I bought from GameStop back in the day. That shit was straight up a sacrificial altar. It never cleaned. Only consumed.
Oh shit, I remember those. They "cleaned" by using an abrasive spray to "polish" the CDs. Those things were straight-up evil.
Yes! RIP Dinocrisis. My Gauntlet: Dark Legacy survived the process though. Thing still runs today with a fucking trench etched across the bottom, it doesn't make sense really.
That explains it.
Funny thing is, out of all the disc "cleaners" we sold while I was at Gamestop, we got very few complaints about it. Make the discs look like they went through hell but the product worked.
Was it a cleaner or one of those "Resurfacing" things with the crank that just scratched the hell out of your discs in a circular pattern?
You needed to use the lubricant that came with it. I used mine hundreds of times with incredible results.
Oh I followed all the instructions, used the fluid & all that. Still had to track down a new copy of Street Fighter EX...
-- forgets everything
Many mother boards have a battery on them that is used in retaining state. May need to be replaced.
I checked the CMOS and ended up replacing it. I thought that was it too. Same issue.
I paid 100 bucks for this server 5 years ago, came with 4TBs. Only thing I ever did with it was run private game servers on it for my friends. Maybe I'll try replacing it again just for laughs and poop.
I bought a dehumidifier off amazon that was "rated" for 800 sq ft.
Not only did it not live up to that promise, but it also served as the worlds shittiest ice maker. Ice formed on the radiator inside and stoped it from dehumidifying the air.
Thats right, you too can have a ice maker that makes ice in the shape of a radiator while ineffectively dehumidifying your home!
Best part was they reached out after I left a one star review and what they could do to change my rating.
I said "Nothing. Make a better product"
I wonder if we had the same dehumidifier. Same 800 sq ft claim, except it didn't produce ice because it couldn't pull enough moisture out of the air to do so despite it being ~80% humidity in my apartment.
After a night of running at full blast, I woke up and poured out a whopping 10 mL of water from the basin
From my understanding, a lot of the products on amazon are resellers that buy stuff from alibaba and then resell it at a markup so it would not surprise me if that was the case.
They all looked the same when i was last on there searching for one.
100%.
I'm constantly seeing the same items with different branding all at a similar price point - it's all AliExpress garbage. And if the AliExpress version suits your needs you're better off ordering from AE directly as it's significantly cheaper. AE shipping speeds have improved over the years too, I've gotten items within 1 week several times now
The Cuecat: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat
Came at a time when there weren't barcodes everywhere and QR codes didn't exist yet. Companies had to publish Cuecat specific barcodes, it was much easier to just type in the URL by the time you figured out you could use it at all.
The man who holds the patent legally changed his name after it failed so he wouldn't be associated with it.
Went down the rabbit hole on this guy a bit. He went on to participate in the CyberNinjas audit of Arizona's ballots after the 2020 election. He claimed to have technology that could detect whether ballots had been folded in the mail, and claimed to detect bamboo in "fraudulent Chinese ballots".
He was such a kook, the other kooks rejected him.
You can cut one leg off an IC on the board and it becomes a regular barcode reader.
I completely forgot these existed until you just mentioned it!
I think I still have one somewhere in a box of "I might need this" along with a parallel port ZIP drive and a bunch of FireWire cables.
Ha, I had one and it's what first came to mind too. Pretty useless.
A smart egg tray. It was in fact quite stupid. Mainly purchased it because of how absurd it was.
Main issues:
it was constantly wrong about how many eggs were in the tray
it was wrong about the eggs age.
it took 6AA batteries that only lasted a month at best.
The egg that stays fresh for a few hundred years is kinda lame for an SCP
I dunno, does it warp probability around it so that no matter what, the egg is always fresh? How far does the effect extend? Does it affect people or just physical interactions? If people ask these questions are they under the effect and contributing to the egg’s defense and therefore continued freshness?
That really sounds absurd. Both the idea itself and the fact that they somehow screwed up the execution of such a simple thing that much.
That sounds eggceptionally stupid, eggregious even.
Wow. Nicely done.
eggcellent
Hahahahaha omg that is horrible
A Canon printer. Not just a simple one, but a big (wide) one with real ink tanks, about 20 years ago.
Under Linux, I could only access basic printing services with that, and this only by using a default driver not made by Canon that happened to work. So I contacted Canon to get a proper user manual to create a proper device driver for this (something I could have done without problems), and basically got the answer that they would not support this, as "open source is theft of intellectual property". They also had some very choice words about Linux in general.
I assumed I just got an asshole on the phone, so when I attended Cebit a short time later (back then the biggest trade fair in Europe for things like that), I went to the Canon booth, explained my issue, and basically got the same reply. So I sold the Canon printer and bought an HP one. At least HP supported Linux and supplied working drivers. Sadly, they have really gone down the drain since that, so the next printer will be a different brand again...
Try brother. They're usually quite good, though I've only had their laser printers.
It will probably be either a Brother Inkbenefit or an Epson Ecotank model.
My last Epson is a model from 2009 and still somehow works perfectly. Every Canon I've owned was garbage.
Well, the question for me back then was printing wide, so the selection was quite limited from the start. And laser was completely out of the equation, as anything printing wider than 21cm was industrial (size of a bus and price of a house) back then.
Ink stinks, but I'll condone the toner. Inkjets are so unreliable compared to lasers. Good luck, but I worry you're stacking the deck against yourself a bit with the ink and would hate to see you lose here.
Don't worry, I consider lasers, too.
I have a brother color laser + scanner. Love it.
I've had it for 8 years now, and so far it's only on its second set of toners etc.
The only warning I give to brother printer owners is don't leave them on. The capacitors in them aren't the best and your printer will either not turn on without a long power off, or like mine it will turn on and off randomly all day and night.
So now I only turn it on at the wall when I need it, and unplug it after
Buy an industrial laserprinter. Anything consumer will fail you intentionally
I grabbed an HP 3055 that my work was throwing out almost 10 years ago, along with two spare laser cartridges.
We don't print much, but I'm still on the initial cartridge it came with.
It also has been set up in an often dusty, sometimes smokey garage, and hasn't had an issue yet.
3055 was good.
1012 and ilk were also good, from the same era. I still have one of those running.
My LJ4+ lasted 21 years, the first part in an office setting and the latter a retirement in my home (and about 12 house moves). For its 19th I got its RAM filled. Woo! But we decided "as a household" that we didn't need a reliable energy pig printer for a few pages a month. It made the lights flicker and the UPSes report a brownout. But it was a good printer.
Now we have an m404n and it's everything today it needs to be.
I got an HP printer and it's prints reliably when connected via USB but that's about it.
Samsung appliances. Fridges. Washing machines.
Got them as part of the rental unit. They're very new looking. But every month is some new mess up.
God I would replace them if I owned this place.
I used to be a big fan of Samsung, but over the past couple years it has become a do not buy brand for me. They keep doing anticompetitive stuff with their phones so my next phone won't be one.
Start of 2024 my Samsung TV that wasn't that old up and died. And my less than a year old Samsung monitor is flickering.
My watch 6 classic is my favorite smart watch I've ever had, but in order to get it working well on a non Samsung phone you need to go through a bunch of bullshit hassle.
I used to be a Samsung galaxy note diehard, but I stopped at the 10+. The quality just gets worse every time.
Got a Xiaomi Redmi Note and it's basically everything I used to love about Samsung phones.
The friggin ice maker on the fridge. Plus the drawers are falling apart and it's only been 7 years.
smart doorbell that takes 25+ seconds to fire up a video feed, and errors out most of the time. (Original Ring doorbell, received when they bought out my kickstarter Doorbot and bricked it)
or the Lockitron smart door lock from Kickstarter which took like 6 AA batteries and couldn't muster the strength to unlock the door more than like 3 times.
but least they worked together in failure.
My ring used to do that shit. I stopped using it for like a year. Then I was bitching about it and someone said they just got one and it worked great. So I tried it again out of spite to show what a piece of shit it was and now it works within a couple of seconds. shrug
I can't speak for ring but I know as long as my Google nest is connected to WiFi it will update software automatically.
At first I thought your doorbell was a eufy. The failure sounds similar.
i tried the eufy afterwards and it wasn't better. when the eufy crashed daily, it doesn't restart itself. but when it worked it was super fast.
Google Home. Bought them for $40 CAD and back then they were great. Responsive, did quick google searches, played my music all over the house.
Over the years they’ve lost functionality. Mine no longer accurately respond to voice queries and no longer complete google searches. I can still play music on them manually from my phone but when I ask it something, it responds back in French or does something completely different than what I had originally asked.
Worst part is that I ask it something, it does something different, and then when I say “hey Google stop” it just keeps going and going. Have to manually pull the plug for it to stop.
Used to love it, had too many weird promptless experiences, unplugged it and now it's gathering dust on a shelf.
Though it was nice to say "Hey google, tell me today's news" and get a few different news updates while making coffee.
Edit: Out of sheer curiosity, have you tried factory resetting it?
I’ve factory reset every Google home of mine multiple times over the years. Never had any effect.
Have you tried "arrete?"
I have the ring doorbell and a home blob which I only use to play the doorbell tune in the house. It is 50/50 luck if the tune plays when someone presses the doorbell button.
"Sony MDRXB55AP Wired Extra Bass Earbud Headphones/Headset with Mic for Phone Call, Black"
Biggest pieces of shit I have ever disgraced my ears with. I'm not even an audiophile or a gear snob or anything. These were just so ridiculously bad that it was offensive. I've owned earbuds from the dollar store that sounded better than these.
Probably won't help, but I find that headsets sound much worse when they're connected as a headset. My (completely different headphones/headset) sounds a lot better in headphone mode.
Yeah, there are different bluetooth audio profiles, one for high quality audio intended for media consumption, and one for bi-directional audio intended for telephony (and some others, but these are the relevant ones here). The "gotcha" is that in general, any attempt to consume the mic feed from a bluetooth headset will switch it to the telephony mode, so if you have them paired to a PC and an application is listening to the mic for any purpose you get stuck with much lower quality 64kbps PCM audio.
Or worse: it's in telephone mode now, so obviously you only want the sound from the "call" because there's no other reasons the microphone could be on.
Good to know, thanks!
Thank you for explaining that far better than I could!
Does anyone remember MSN WebTV?
It technically worked.
Imagine your grandmother ordering one of these from QVC and calling her grandchild to come over and show her how to work it...
I remember that thing... My grandpa had one. It was ... Interesting.
I had this one and the upgraded one since we were too poor to buy a real PC. It worked decent for web browsing at the time and I spent a lot of time in IRC chat rooms. I think (may have been later on a real PC) I even started doing Geocities/Tripod/Angelfire pages on this and learning basic HTML.
Oooh I had an Intel Atom Vaio Netbook as my first ever computer I actually owned, given to me as a gift by parents for school. I asked for a gaming laptop, so I was real bamboozled by it.
Somehow though I managed to grief my friends' Minecraft server with /set 0 and enderdragon spawn spam while talking to them on Skype, but it was painful, opening a web page took literal minutes sometimes and my internet wasn't the fastest back then but it wasn't too bad either like 5-10mbps easily. But it wasn't the worst.
That honor goes to an MSI gaming laptop. It was actually really powerful, quad core, 16GB RAM, 8GB VRAM, MSATA SSD and a 1TB HDD that is still alive and in a JBOD setup with mergerfs in my server today serving me shows to watch thru Jellyfin.
In 2014 it was nothing to scoff at, the 880m ran GTA V on almost the highest settings at 1080p and it had tons of storage.
But as a computer it was just fucking terrible, the screen is the dimmest, most TN LCD blue filter shit you've ever seen, it was all I had so I watched things on it, and it just always made me depressed that I was watching beautiful films and shows and playing games through this awful blue filter that had no warmth, everything looked like some movie dementia flashback.
USB port melted itself and made some random parts of the case have an electric surprise for you sometimes, keys popped off if you breathed on em but not like you would want those keycaps to stay on because they were disgusting, speakers sucked in dust and vibrated it inside, making all audio feel like earrape at any volume, headphones jack flew out, touchpad was off to the side because of the dumbass numpad, ethernet port fried entire cables, DVD drive wouldn't read disks, dumbass UEFI firmware locked down to shit, took forever to disable secureboot and the setting would get lost randomly.
About 3 years later, the AC port fried itself and would work like a pair of dodgy earbuds and I had to sit there rotating it like I was finding a radio signal in class, battery was long gone by then so it would shut off at random, which made android app dev I was doing at the time on it somehow even worse of an experience.
Still have many fond memories of my times with it but man did I not miss it at the time.
I replaced it with a 2010 ThinkPad X201 I got for 50 bucks and loved it, I proudly used and abused it and showed it to everyone like it was my first dress with pockets until I eventually blacked out on xanax and procedurally took the entire thing apart and flashed ??? onto the firmware chip and couldn't put it back together ever again.
Just writing to say that I admire your tenacity
I still have mine, what a great machine! I once accidentally stepped on it when hastily getting out of bed and nothing happened, it just continued to work.
I have a x220 that fell 1 meter lid first (and open) on the floor and... all I got was a crack on one of the posts inside the lid. Still fine to this day, in fact, still my number one laptop lol.
Those Vaios had a monumental amount of bloatware slowing them down too.
My wife has a dress with pockets and she didn't notice that for months because she didn't think to look for them and they weren't obvious. Same with a nightie. As someone who wears cargo pants, I was amused at her excitement.
I did this to my X201. Somehow i have like 7 screws that I couldn't find where they belonged (even though I tried to document each screw). I also broke part of the bezel. So I did put it back together again, but with poor structural integrity. The thing still works but I do not use it. Sadly that era of laptops just run too warm and the fans are too noisy.
Power Glove
It's so bad.
Having issues hacking time?
Ya but it looked cool as hell imo and I still want one.
So did I, until I tried to use it a few times.
HTC Vive. Not necessarily this specific tech itself, but VR gaming more broadly. My friend and I were ginning ourselves up for years before it came out. I dropped a lot of money on a gaming rig for it. And when I put the googles on... I fucking hated it. I didn't like standing and gaming. I didn't like being so isolated from everyone else in the house. And the games were glorified tech demos slapped together with unity assets. By the time Half Life Alex came out, I had no more fucks to give.
The porn was fun though.
I liked it. Unfortunately aside from valve, no serious studio has put any resources into making a good vr game.
Sitting games could be big on vr. Flight/space sims could be awesome.
The only game I really liked in VR was Euro Truck Simulator 2 which wasn't even a VR game.
Can't you already fly with VR in MS flight sim?
Also I believe Asseto has VR support.
Yeah you can. Although it's hard on the computer, and depending on the type of plane, it might not be really playable in terms of controls (an airliner for instance)
Games like Elite Dangerous or Star Wars Squadron are really fun in VR though
I played a lot of Elite Dangerous until I realized there was not much to do besides "do the profitable thing over and over before it gets nerfed." And by the time Squadrons came out, I also ran out of fucks to give.
VR is too expensive and too rich white boy centric. Let me tell you something; if your business is gaming and the teenager children in China and India can't afford it, your market will NEVER be able to compete with mobile gaming and PC (M&K) gaming
Right now? I'd say first alert smoke alarms. The batch we bought all has failed in an "alarm always, and don't stop" kind of way. They are only two years old, and I'm frustrated.
First Alert, ask questions later
Failing to an alarm on state is preferred to an alarm off state. So at least no fire can sneak up on you. I think they sell ones now that are 10-year sealed battery with a 10-year warranty.
I agree. If it fails by alarming constantly you replace it. If it fails by not alarming at all you never know, because who actually tests their alarms?
My building has these and 2 of them failed in the first year. Can't replace the battery so had to replace the whole thing.
A self mowing lawnmower, it moved so randomly and was so specific for its operation parameters that I ended up just going back to manually mowing.
If your yard was just a perfectly level, medium sun, no rain, obstacle free, rectangle you wouldn't have any problems.
I don't know, we put in a lot of effort to make our living room clear for our robot vac. We lifted the sofa we got shelves with a space at the bottom but roomboi still just gets stuck on it's own in the middle of a hardwood floor
You need that RTK EPOS tech bruh
Every piece of hardware I've used past 2010 or so seems to have just gotten worse and worse, I honestly think I'm cursed.
2013 (? can't quite remember), Sager gaming laptop with sli gpu config, gpus drew too much power for the battery (I believe), leading to black screen and reboot. Company feigned ignorance, ran unrelated tests on RMA, Socially awkward at the time and was scared to ask for a refund. Convinced to this day it was a scam.
2015, desktop computer I built randomly powers off during usage, no errors, not the power supply, unsolved to this day.
2020-2022 5 cheap ebay thinkpads, all with one hardware problem or another. My beloved T60p was the last to go.
2022-present Framework laptop, ports suffer intermitent failure, webcam microphone stopped working. Replaced webcam/microphone, works for a day, breaks again. Unsolved.
2022-preset Steam deck, had to RMA 3 times for various hardware issues, works now, but the right trigger still rubs against something but I can live with it. Spilled coffee on the left trackpad so it's sticky; that's my fault though so I can't blame it on the curse.
Possible capacitor fault or a DOA chip -- try checking the components with a cap checker and a multimeter
You have a technology curse. Time to start gardening.
I had a laptop a while back with a fingerprint scanner that would work for one day, then stop working completely. I reinstalled the drivers, and it would work for a day and then stop again. I eventually gave up using the fingerprint scanner until I "upgraded" the laptop to Windows 11, and it worked again. No idea if it still works, since I rarely use that laptop now
You could either have the world's worst luck, or you are genuinely cursed
Alternatively, you keep spilling coffee on your devices and going into a blind fit of cleaning rage that blocks out the memory of the original coffee spill
I usually buy Asus for computers, and I go for a mid-range business model with dedicated graphics. They're cheaper than the gaming counterparts, still have good specs, and they are much more reliable and easy to work on.
Had a secondhand Alienware, circa 2017, and that thing looked nice, but it was heavy, bulky, and you had to remove the back cover, drives, battery, WiFi antenna, and a bezel just to swap the CMOS battery. But that's everything Dell IMHO.
Everything Dell is just garbage.
I remember subbing to r/dell and all you ever saw was people with problems with Dell/Alienware hardware.
I might be exaggerating a but I've never been a real fan of Bluetooth headphones or earphones. Sound quality never matched cabled ones (I also have the popular Sony one) and battery life sucks for the time I want to use it
I always wanted to be the cool hipster with cabled headphones and getting mad about phones without audio jack.
Truth is, my cables always got tangled up, especially at work. It was getting really annoying. I bought some open ear headphones from aftershokz because i often listen to music wherever and i don't want to be isolated. These things absolutely fuck. Battery life is fantastic. Even if they are empty, i can throw them into the pocket charger for 15 minutes and they go for hours again. The sound is good. It's not full blown headphone quality, obviously. But they are so comfortable and you don't have to stick anything into your ears. I saw that bose has a similar product and i kinda wanna try them.
I understand it's a very subjective experience. And tbh, one thing that bothers me about cabled ones is the cable noise when moving. Or accidentally pulling off the headphones from my head, although that's not a common issue,but for sitting experience they're perfect. Aside from that, my music preference is very eclectic, so e.g. the level of bass really needs to adapt properly to the genre I'm listening to atm, so the boosted bass Bluetooth headphones just don't work for me. I've never experienced a Bluetooth pair that doesn't have too much bass.
Ya, bass is always the downside of these things, but i'm not super into that. Also i don't really like to listen to music very loud. I really don't like when i feel the cable brushing my arms or something. And i rip them out every time i stand up. It's so bad. A huge plus for me is also that i can leave my phone somewhere and i can still listen to music.
I'm triggered for I think I'm in this comment. But I'm less 'cool hipster' and more 'cantankerous nerd'. But allllll the rest is true.
My jabra 85 elite last me for a solid >12h of continuous play
I have $25 wired IEMS that sound better than my most expensive Bluetooth tws sets. I've taken to just listing to podcasts and YouTube videos with my Bluetooth sets at work.
All true. All good points.
I'm running out of places to buy a phone that offers a jack, though.
But my home rig is a USB sound dongle to wired earbuds usually. Occasionally a set of ANC buds for the bad days.
Printers i swear all of them hate me. I love it, but just cant deal with printers.
Brother, have I got a solution for you!
Either an hp ink jet printer.
Or my apple watch. The apple watch step counter is just plain broken. I can say hey siri a dozen times it may or may not respond.
Tablets. I've owned 2 so far, plus fucked around with a third, fancier one that was borrowed from someone else (in case you care: a very old Samsung one, a Xiaomi model from the late 2010s, and a new-ish Apple iPad for the borrowed one).
They suck as smartphone replacements because they are too big.
They lack button inputs, so they suck as gaming devices or as computer replacements.
You can browse the web... But if you decide to type anything, the large size plus the touchscreen keyboard make for an awkward experience (in ways that it's not on a smaller phone)
They have lit screens, so they suck as eReaders.
They're sorta okay as like, personal screens for watching movies or whatever, but like, at that point just use a television??
They can make sorta good drawing tablets, the ones that are pen-compatible I mean... Because I mean, yeah. But the lack of a keyboard is a bummer with how I learned to draw with my other hand on Ctrl+Z, though that's more a muscle memory issue than anything.
In general, every tablet I used felt like a less-good verion of a dozen other devices, yanno?
I use my tablet for 2 things"
Consuming media. Not sure what TV you have but mine would be a little unwieldy for taking it on travels.
Taking notes during conferences, meetings, presentations, etc. So much easier if all the notes are digital from the beginning
Wait, wait, wait. You're telling me people leave their homes?!
In my case it's more that I get car/airsick very easily -- So when I'm out and about, I won't be watching media on a portable screen. At most listening to music or an audio-book.
And if I'm in like. A hotel. Most of them (at least here in my country) have SmartTVs that will accept broadcasting from my phone. :P
As for note-taking, I can see the appeal but refer to my comment about typing in a Tablet being uniquely awful.
Absolutely. I use my tablet almost exclusively as a media device but I do feel it could be so much more. It is nice though to use it while my phone is charging overnight and not wasting battery on the phone while traveling.
I felt like this until I bought a legit tablet, not some sub $100 tablet. it's night and day. and it's not even super high end, just not cheap
Same. I used to make fun of them as they're 'too big' for mobile stuff but too small for computer stuff, but after getting a killer deal on a Tab S7+, it's super useful for casual games, watching youtube/plex, drawing, and web browsing. It's also great to use in the kitchen while cooking or doing other stuff
See, I thought it might have been my tablets being cheap things.
But messing around with that borrowed iPad (possibly a Pro, the person who lent me it was filthy rich and likes premium stuff) made me go "... This is like, a high quality laptop but worse in every way?"
The screen was drop-dead gorgeous, and it was clearly a powerful (if locked down, cuz Apple) device -- but it felt like everything I tried to do on the device was in some major way a compromise to accomodate for a less-than-ideal form factor.
One of the funniest memories from when I was travelling (around 2017) was many tourists holding up their giant tablet devices, fumbling with them to try take photos of things.
I've seen this at Disneyland. People walking around using a fucking tablet to record videos like people do with selfie sticks.
A Surface RT ... Slow, barely any software support. Totally lost whatever trust I had for Microsoft.
The wonderful result of Microsoft and Qualcomms exclusivity agreement.
That garbage tablet gave me lasting resentment for ARM processors.
Welcome to the Abandoned By Microsoft club. For me it was Windows Phone 7.
https://www.amazon.com/Scrubbing-Bubbles-Automatic-Cleaner-Starter/dp/B001QJAHIY/
Maybe not this exact model, but 20 years ago when I was a young gun in college for the first time, I got one of these because I hated cleaning the fucking shower and tub.
It worked about as badly as you'd expect. I don't know if modern versions are any better, but holy shit they're a lot more expensive than they used to be. I remember spending like $40 at the time.
I quickly learned to just wipe down the shower after use and clean it more often. Thing was fucking worthless.
Oh, yeah, those are crap. I went with scrub brush attachments for the battery-powered drill I already own. It cost like $20 for half a dozen heads of different sizes that chuck up like any normal drill bit. It's not as automated, but it's way easier and more thorough than scrubbing by hand.
That's dope, I've got one of those, I'll look into that. Thanks so much for the suggestion!
No problem. Pretty sure I got the idea from someone here on Lemmy. Look at that, it's already been more useful to me than reddit.
$176 for an automatic shower cleaner lmaooooooo
I went from a cheap mp3 player that I could just plug in to my computer and drag in music to an iPod which forced me to download the iTunes bloatware create an account and then took 100x longer to transfer music because of the pointless conversion each file had to undergo. This was my first and last experience with a personal Apple device. Ended up putting some old pop music onto it and giving it to my grandmother after 2 days. Uninstalled iTunes and went back to using my cheap mp3 player until I replaced it with a smartphone.
Coming in as a close second place, an all-in-one Sony Vaoi computer that cost a fortune and had shit performance. Took daily nags to Sony before they took it back and gave me a refund. I find that Sony's hit and miss though. My favourite smartphone (Xperia Play) was Sony, and I love my Sony Bluetooth earbuds. The Sony Smartwatch was shit.
I had to buy a Clicker for college in a day when any number of phone apps, or even the Smart board, would have done exactly the same thing. I think it cost about $150 and the only thing it did -- THE ONLY THING IT DID -- was serve as an expensive and drastically crippled version of Kahoot. Abject waste of money for all parties involved.
Amazon kindle. It didnt let me plug it into my computer and upload books to use it without internet access. Everything needed sending through amazon. I should have expected this but it was so locked down and filled with ads to the point it was unusable. I attempted to jailbreak it and it bricked so i threw it away and went back to using calibre on my computer. I would really like an offline open source ebook reader.
Get a boox, runs android.
You can even install the Kindle app. But seriously, there are bunch of good ereader apps.
I love that you've set that boundary there and stick with it. Admirable.
I found a paper weight at Goodwill about 2 years ago, and haven't seen one ad, and I have an email address for it that I can mail any file format. I have not had any issues.. maybe because I was a late adopter?
I'm a huge book reader, and I love it,
If you can get one of the early Kobo ereaders, you can flash this Libre OS on it, that would be better.
Also, those early Kobo ereaders (glo, nia, mini and some other models) can support up to 32gb sdcard, that's a lot of books and out goes the need for cloud storage
i've been desperately trying to get my hands on one of those, but I live in a third country and import duties are a pain
Anything with fucking Bluetooth. Even in 2024 getting it to connect consistently requires some kind of arcane magic
All of my Bluetooth devices work flawlessly these days. What are you using?
Windows OS
Silly goose, you don’t own Windows — you license it.
Ya, when my windows 10 stops working I'm just going to hook up my steam deck to my monitors and kb+m and use that for everything.
OUYA
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouya ?
Wow. Okay, I misread it before, but still tell me more. What's your story ?
It was nothing more than an off the shelf ARM SBC inside. Some third party designed and made the board. Nobody had the bootloader keys to unlock the units. It was easily bricked. No keys to recover it. They had sold it as a device for "hackers" but nobody could really hack it. The whole concept was dead on arrival.
Several years later people discovered weaknesses in Nvidias bootloader code. The Ouya is vulnerable. So they're finally wide open hackable. But nobody cares anymore.
I had an ouya.
That was pretty terrible.
The games were actually really fun....but the console was basically a really slow phone. And the controllers had sticky buttons. But worst of all, all games lagged badly. Like half a second or more on some games.
You're not the only one. If anything it created what is one of my all-time favorite videos. https://youtu.be/QY5yG2KyQfM?si=IvJWVTm__Tc7RTqM
Ive never seen this, thanks! This made my day.
I tried making it work for a month! I even tried to hack it to put retro stuff on it. My tiny gaming pc at the time had better capabilities and was easier to work with...so I gave up on that too. Tried to use the controllers (they were Bluetooth, they could technically work with other machines) but they lagged and felt terrible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat
These things were trash and the concept was even worse.
Fun fact. The guy that made this was the "forensic expert" that claimed he could detect bamboo fibers in ballots in Georgia and Arizona. The GOP tried to put him in charge of their investigation.
If you count cars: A Skoda Octavia PHEV.
I love Skoda. I love the Octavia. It was my fourth Octavia and I already ordered two more for my staff. PHEV would have been ideal for our use case.
Well,things didn't go as planned.
The whole car was bugged with software and hardware problems from day one - controll units randomly crapping out, when my dealer wanted to replace them he often had to get 5 units because four would be DOA and the one that worked kicked the bucket before I left his premises. Highlights:
It took 12 months for VW to take that steaming pile back, and only we sued them (Shortly before the hearing).
Second place goes to LG which sold me a OLED TV for 2k that randomly showed faulty pixel lines exactly 3 years and 3 days after I bought it (so it's out of the extended warranty programs as well). And when asked for a quote for the repair they had the audacity to ask for almost the new price for the TV back then, aka 150% of the current market value - without even looking at it first. Good way to make sure that I never buy LG anymore.
VW really dropped the ball on software, no wonder they're buying now into other car manufacturers like Rivian, in hopes to use someone else's more developed software.
Yeah. Both hardware and software, sadly. Their QA is going down the drain.
Happy Hyundai customer now.
Is there actually any car manufacturer that has decent hardware and software? I have never driven a really "modern" car but from all that I've seen so far the interfaces are typically horrible to interact with and laggy to the point where I prefer my car as dumb as possible
Really can't complain about Hyundai/Kia and Volvo (Android) so far.
Why bother with software, then? Late-80s and 90s Type III Jettas can be absolutely bulletproof if you find them in not-bagged and well cared for condition.
The iPhone
Anything that relies on mini/micro USB for charging. With enough repeated use, they eventually cause an early failure of the device.
Mini's are fairly durable, but the spring in built into the device. With Micro, the spring is part of the cable and is cheaper to replace.
HP Printer
Their home/home office stuff is absolutely trash. That much is true.
Much of their small business stuff is on the verge of being ok. Just, expensive for what it is.
Meanwhile at work we have hp enterprise printers that are twelve years old and still working flawlessly.
I have a laserjet 1020 and its absolutely flawless
Košs KPH30i headphones. Those fuckers are an actual health hazard. They will make your ears suffer for the crime of putting them on.
Really sad cause Porta Pros are incredible. And I usually see people suggest getting the KPH30i instead. Don't do that.
Anything KOSS or PYLE is straight dog shit. Been that way for at least 25 years. I bought many of their products as a broke teenager.
Maytag dishwasher and gas dryer. Maytag had always purported themselves to be a top brand. However, both of these products would not last more than 4 years. I should have bought the Bosch dishwasher like consumer reports told me.
Gotta have one from 30 years ago. My dad's secondhand Maytag dryer survived 4 moves, and 35 years. We had it serviced twice in that time. First time was at 30 years. It stopped running because it filled up with pocket change. Some of the coins were polished almost completely flat. Second time, the heat quit working. Bought a new dryer after that. It's going strong, but it's got a long way to go just to be half as good.
Yeah, it's a common fallacy in appliance brand discussions: "my grandma has a and it still works! You should buy one, too!". First of all it's survivorship bias and almost always the quality has degraded a lot in the past decades (greed and consumers that don't want to pay the price for reliable appliances).
It's probably a bit of both here. We didn't have the "disposable" lifestyle 50 years ago that we have now, and a stronger push for efficiency and features has had trade-offs in complexity and reliability.
Example: My current dryer (and my dad's new dryer) both have a lot more plastic in them. The motors are smaller, and quieter, while making the same power (or more). They are loaded with temp, humidity, weight and wobble sensors, and my dryer has 4 dials, 5 different temperatures, and 2 different modes. The old one, had a dial to control the heat, and a timer.
As for disposable, I think older generations had an expectancy that you would buy an appliance once or twice in your life. I've got a 1000 dollar poket shit-posting device that I'm going to get rid of because it is pushing 4 years old. We just accept that these devices are uneconomical to repair, and we toss them out. I think the only things American's bother to fix anymore are cars, and that's going away because every year, they get harder and more expensive to repair.
Also, it's not even the same corporation or factories behind them. It's just a brand name at this point, and the product has nothing in common with the old, good one. For example, Maytag bought Amana, and then Whirlpool bought Maytag. (It's enlightening to read the list of Whirlpool-owned brands.)
I have two Bosch dishwashers and have been very happy with them so far. Avoid Samsung appliances at all costs.
When I was a child in the 90s I somehow scored a voice role in a hotdog commercial for the radio. I was paid a king's ransom for this, half of which my parents made me put in savings (wise), and half of which I spent on a brand new Sega CD (not wise).
The magic of postage stamp-sized full motion video took about three days to wear off, at which point all that was left was basically pure shit. They jacked me. At least I learned that lesson early.
You know what's funny? Nintendo put expansion slots on the bottom of all of their consoles prior to the Wii. In Japan, they were used for the Famicom Disk System, the Satellaview, the N64DD and the Gameboy Player. The latter was the only one that made it to the West. They never released an expansion for a console outside of Asia. They even had to retool several games that were released on Famicom diskettes for cartridges in the West, including inventing on-cartridge save files via battery-backed RAM for The Legend of Zelda in order to release them in the West.
Given Sega's track record with console expansions, Nintendo might have been just as well off. Well, except for how the SNES optical drive add-on played out.
More directly. The playstation was developed as an expansion for supernes. Then nintendo changed their mind and sony decided to keep developing it as their own device
Created their successor in following generations
iPad can't open anything, keeps crashing. (relatively new)
You mean files? Or apps? Or mails? …
all of it, well mail works. I know I mainly used it for VLC which atleast 2/3 times I tried opening a file, my ipad would just restart, same with some apps.
Your iPad sounds pretty broken, that's not normal.
That or the files he has are badly corrupted…
they're not, work fine on any non-apple device, (iPhone had a similar problem, although not as bad.) those devils devices have been collecting dust for a while now.
I purchased a razor branded Smartwatch, way back when. Thing could barely connect to my phone, it's battery life was atrocious when it did, and all it did was show the time and track steps. It didn't have any built-in notifications so you had to use a separate app. This was fairly early in smart watches though, it was pretty fad-esque.
Smart watches are still pretty useless for most
None of them do what I want, which is to check my blood sugar via UV light. They've been talking about it for at least 15 years. I know why too. They want to be able to sell all our info, and medical stuff is protected by HIPPA.
Samsung M540 "Slyde" phone - The software was incredibly buggy including things like just randomly typing the wrong letter. Randomly bad tech is so much more irritating than tech you know is bad.
Google Nexus 7 (2012) - The tablet had defective chips that slowed down over time. Turned into a horrible slow piece of shit over time.
Metal detectors, just in general. My BF has one and the metal detectors just don't like me for some reason, I could never achieve success with it, like everything was a needle in a haystack. He was always "the detector" and me "the photographer" and I guess stuff just doesn't transfer over well.
Reeder tablet that came as a promotion with something. Could barely keep a single app open, sometimes. At some point low spec just means e waste
Fuck the surface pro 3, you'll never get another cent from me Microsoft you fucking cunts! ( Except for halo mcc and infinite BUT NO MORE (unless the next halo is actually good but even the ONLY ON SALE))
Nintendo Wii: as a loyal Nintendo purchaser here from the Game & Watch, to the Super Nintendo, N64 and GameCube, but the Nintendo Wii never let me back up my purchased downloaded games in a way I could transfer to another Wii without online access. I get that that's now standard but it was the first time I was burnt by it.
Worse than that. You bought software licenses specific to that Wii, not to an online account. If it died, you lost all your purchases.
Yes that's right, and I realised I could no longer be a historic game hardware collector with that generation of consoles which killed my main hobby at the time. Years of Nintendo loyalty and, dare I say it, fandom, were betrayed and the Wii itself was just awful.
My current Amazfit smartwatch. The only good thing about it is the long battery life.
It's a piece of crap otherwise. Requires the data harvesting app to always be running in the background or it loses connection to my phone. It's slow, has ugly watch faces and the custom ones are awkward to install. I can't get it to work with Gadgetbridge. The always on display is so dim that it's useless. Pinging my phone doesn't work.
I don't know why I let the Internet convince me that spending £120 on this thing was a good idea. I'm going Casio or something next time around.
I bought something on eBay for 10 dollars that was supposed to be able to copy key fobs. Didn't work.
A lot of those are very dependent on which tech is in the key fob. They can easily copy old hid prox which just broadcast the UUID of the fob, but struggle with newer tech that does a challenge and response.
Any Bluetooth headsets on Windows 11. On Windows there are two modes for Bluetooth headsets: One with high quality audio and no microphone, one with lower quality and mic support. On Windows 10 was able to change the mode, but on Windows 11 you can't actively change it anymore, because "the software decides" this mode. So ever few weeks my headset switch to the output only mode, get stuck, and I cannot make a call with my team mates. The workaround is time consuming and frustating.
Too bad I have to use Windows for work. Most companies do not have Linux option, even for devs.
You can still switch, if I'm thinking of what you are, in the legacy "sounds" menu. Just turn off all their universal app shit and 11 is ok :)
HP anything, absolute trash
Amazon Fire Tablet 7in. I bought it literally just to read PDFs, and it was so slow that it was basically unusable. I tried switching out the launcher to something more minimal (Niagara launcher I think), and I figured out how to disable the ads that were all over the place. It helped a bit, but not enough to overcome the hardware and Fire OS. (I think I needed ADB for both of those fixes; I had to put in some real work to unfuck that tablet.) Plus the screen was too small for my pathetic human eyeballs.
Was it worth $30? At the time, yeah, because I literally couldn't afford anything else, but I now have an $80 10in generic Android tablet that's wildly faster.
Have to add, I came across mine the other day in a drawer and the soft touch finish is sticky now, and the thing was so bad to begin with I feel like it's that way on purpose just to be a dick.
They are pieces of shit but for the price it's actually pretty decent. $30 is the price of a couple McDonalds meals. We used to buy them for the kid to use since it didn't really matter if it got destroyed. I also bought a new one to use as a smart home touch interface but I haven't quite finished that due to ADHD and too many projects.
An early Samsung phone my spouse bullied me into taking over from him. I don't know how anyone likes those. I went to Google phones and they're the only good thing about Google.
iPhone 4, nexus5, samsung7, samsung10, and all I can say is the Samsungs aren't like the nexus5 but at least they're not apple, whose keyboard and features I just hate. Good earbuds though.
Nexus 6 was a hell of a phone. I still miss it even three phones later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybiko
The Cybiko. Got it for Christmas and my father threw out the box before I could get the rebate for the mp3 player attachment. Didn't know any other kid with one, so the wireless communication was useless. The games all sucked anyway. Gaming on rubber buttons was always a terrible idea
Yoo a lot of nostalgia for the Cybiko! My mom wouldn't let me get a gameboy but my sister managed to find one of these somewhere. That was my only way to do handheld gaming for years! The games sucked but it was better than homework =)
A smartphone
Good call, never come across one that isn't a dreadful user experience and I'm confused as hell as to why they've become so popular.
My first two smartphones were keyboard phones that I had a love-hate relationship with. The rest were all a hate-hate relationship, except my current phone which is back to love-hate. How many smartphones has the average person owned now? I am up to 12...oh god.
Holy shit. I was around before the Internet and I've owned four smartphones.
A Sony mobile phone that couldn't remember the time when it was switched off.
True it's going back a while. But not so far that battery backed clock chips were uncommon.
Microsoft surfacebook (or whatever the fuck that thing was called) that died after like 13 months. Motherboard went to shit and MS offered me a $100 discount on a new one. Yeah fuck that, I bought a MacBook Pro.
In ear earbuds. I blimmin' hate them but my Audio Technica over ears are too bulky for the gym.
Bit off topic, though if anyone could recommend cheap but decent wireless headphones, for the gym, that are not in ear I would appreciate it a lot (I'm in the UK).
Not cheap and i already said it in another comment. I absolutely love my aftershokz open fit. My ear hurt like hell when i use in ears and they never seem to fit. These i wear sometimes 10 hours a day. I went to the shower multiple times because i forgot i was wearing them. They sound really good imo, battery life especially with the charging case is fantastic. It's perfect to cycle or in areas where you still need basic awareness. Like i can talk to people at work while i have some music in my ears.
Do they hurt the backs of your ears? I've had some cheap in-ear headphones that also had curved plastic to fit around the shell of your ear for stability. I'd have to take them off after an hour or two in pain, but not because of the in-ear component.
I know you're looking for on or over ear, but for the gym, it might make more sense to get the non TWS earbuds like the LG Tone or similar. They're light in your ear as all the battery weight stays on your neck.
My son picked up a refurbished Ipad mini that we were going to use as a screen for our quadcopters. Well, you can't load any software on it so it's just a worthless piece of shit. Way to go apple.
I back a running trainer on Kickstarter called Vi. When I got it is was insanely uncomfortable, drained my phone battery on an hour via the companion app and did not work for runs longer than 10 minutes. It was absolutely dog shit.
Should have used Vim
Watch out, you might upset the emacs crowd.
Handheld sewing machine. Not sure if all are like this or just the cheapo one i bought, it can't sew anything thick else it will get stuck often and can't make the loop. End up shelving it and never use it since then.
Moto Watch 100
I was willing to put up with a lot of sacrifices for a $100 smartwatch but I was not expecting the level of trash I received. Unappealing and cheap looking silver colored case, typos in menus, and navigating the painfully underperformant UI made me immediately regret my purchase. There were many other issues I’ve since pushed out of my memory. I packed it up for a return within 24 hours.
The ONLY positive was supposedly the battery lasted weeks but I didn’t want to use the damn thing for more than 5 minutes.
FM radio receivers for the car.
Never could find a radio station that would work. When you did, it only worked for about 1/4 mile down the road and then had to find another station.
If your car is old enough to have a tape deck, they have cassettes that connect via Bluetooth. Just about perfect sound quality since there is no interference.
I remember when those things first came out and used a headphone jack so you could plug in your CD player. (those were the days...)
I was actually kinda pissed when I had to switch to a car with a CD player and couldn't use it anymore.
I changed cars in January and the car I previously drove, an 05, Jetta had a tape deck. I bought this to connect my phone. Surprised that it handled calls as well.
Yeah those worked way better than the fm transmitters. Only problem was my car introduced a humming sound into the signal that got worse with speed lol.
Where do you live? I don’t listen to the radio anymore but when I did, I could get my favorite station 50 miles away no problem.
It's not the radio that didn't work. These were fm transmitter/receivers you used to play mp3 players/cd players back in the day when vehicles didn't use aux cables. It sent the signal over short range fm signal to your radio.
The alternative was the cassette adapter, but some vehicles had swapped to cd
The WD TV Media Player was pure garbage.
Also hated the Macbook Pro with the Butterfly Keyboard.
And probably a lot of smaller tech that I forgot about.
Not sure if it is was the worst but I had a Ngage Q. You know the taco shaped gaming phone? Only that it was the less taco shaped version. And it was in 2009, several years after those things failed. It was a decent phone actually and it had tony hawk pro skater, very playable.
But yeah ugly as fuck and hard to hold as a phone plus lack of colours on the screen unless it was a game.
My Seat Leon car. VW really shat the bed with their latest gen cars.
Airpods 3, i got these as a gift. basically, you put them in, and they hurt like hell, they are meant to inflict damage BY DESIGN.
My wife got the air pods pro 2 I think. Can't tell one from the other. She preferred the Samsungs so she got those and gave these to me because I liked them
And I do. It's the only piece of apple tech I have.
For me they fit REALLY well. And I want people to be happy like me so I'm thinking all of the usual things you've been asked or recommended before. Because I want you to like yours like I like mine.
You know: try different tips, go watch a YouTube to confirm it's fitted right, etc. All ye things you've done or thought of doing, try it again with an open mind. And then sell them off, but yeah.
I hope, since this is probably a ways ago, that your current earbuds are working well. Phones seem to be incapable of a headphone jack, despite my startac-7800 fitting one in, so it's got to be fucking radio earbuds all the way, so you gotta find some that fit and make you happy.
That means they're not for your ears. Not that they're designed to inflict pain. I've had those AirPods, they were fine for me - and my ears don't like most earbuds that get shoved in there, and sometimes even start hurting from over-ear headphones. I now have the Airpod Pros and they're even better, all that goes into your ear is the silicone bud, no rigid plastic in the mix.
A Xiaomi smartwatch. I never found any good use for its "smart" features and I had to charge the fucking thing all the time. So I ended up dropping it after a year in favor of a regular digital watch.
A Dell Inspiron laptop.
It just kept dying. Typing a Word document one moment, black screen the next. I bought this thing in August because I was going back to school and I needed a new laptop. By December I finally convinced them to replace the machine outright. I got a different model that lacked a lot of the features I had ordered.
I'm no longer a Dell customer.
My last ever Nokia phone, a half way house between old Nokias and smartphones circa 2008.
No touch screen, but could play music, videos, had a calendar etc.
Absolute piece of garbage. Got super hot at times doing who-knows what, and had a software bug where the audio would completely stop working until you rebooted it… which meant that multiple times my morning alarm went off completely silently and I was late for work.
Bought an iPhone 3GS as soon as my 1 year contract was up, Nokia were never relevant again after that era.
N95?
No, I was still being cheaper with phones at that stage.
I remember my friend getting an N95 and how that was a big deal back then haha.
After looking through an extremely long list of Nokia phones on Wikipedia, it might have been a 6120 classic.
Rechargeable beard trimmer. They last six months , then the charge is less than 5 minutes.
Im on year 5 with my cheap ass braun
Any and all dishwashers and refrigerators I've ever owned. Fuck planned obscelence.
Manual lawnmower.
The surface RT and windows ME e-machine computer were both a close second.
The joycons that came with the Nintendo Switch, both failed within 3 months of owning it, and might as well include the entire console cause all the cheap plastic bits are falling apart.
I’d replace it with a Steam Deck, but the Switch’s biggest strength is being such a piece of junk I wouldn’t care if it gets stolen or destroyed
I've had my joycons for 5 years and they still work fine. Tbh I mostly use it as a handheld and probably only play about 100 hours per year, but I think the switch is pretty neat
The Asus Transformer Prime.
It was an Android tablet circa 2011, right at that time they were actually making 10" Android tablets. I bought one as soon as Android Honeycomb launched which had an improved UI and lot of new tablet focused features. I bought the optional keyboard/battery attachment and planned for it to be my tiny laptop replacement that could also play emulators and be used for reading comics. I wanted to like it so bad.
It never really panned out though, a large majority of which was because of the faulty Nvidia Tegra 3 chip. Awful performance issues, terrible wireless connectivity, overheating, battery drain and nonexistant software updates from Asus. I ran custom ROMs trying to squeeze it as much as I could but that meant I was constantly tinkering with it and having yet more problems. Eventually I even broke the screen (my fault) and painstakingly went through a whole botched screen replacement before finally deciding that it had been a huge waste of time and money and sent it to it's grave.
Ipod touch 5.
I keep my electronics for long, so seeing my iPod turn slow and not being able to do anything about it really pushed me away from apple.
LG Optimus 2x, the first dual core smartphone.
What a piece of shit, never bought LG again. It kept randomly crashing and rebooting, along with a host of other problems.
Anything that accesses Expedia.com
August wifi smart lock. Originally wanted the zigbee version for my home but apparently they stopped making those in favor of wifi, however wifi needs more energy to communicate and would go through they special batteries in a week's time. Even replacing the unit with another one didn't solve the issue, so I just returned it and deleted my account.
I have the same lock. I didn't want it but it was the only lock I could find that would work on my sliding door. The key is to buy rechargeable batteries. Mine last maybe a month before they need to be replaced.
That is fucking dumb that you have to replace the battery every month.
We have low power mcu that can go down to a few uA and make battery last for years, but this company decided that it was beneath them.
Bad engineering overall.
I think it is more about the power required to run the lock motor.
I have several z-wave door locks as well. They all need battery replacement within a few months. Unless I don't open/close them very often. They can go much longer.
But it really isn't to big of a deal. Home Assistant tells me when they are getting low and I just swap the batteries in a few minutes.
Honestly the most any smart door lock las lasted us before the low battery has been 1-2 months. I ended up just going to a old fashion lock and key
No wonder. The hassle of changing the batteries so often is not worth it.
To this day I don't know what problem smart locks are supposed to solve that hasn't already been solved by the good old lock and key combo. Requires no electricity, no internet, just works.
Letting people in without giving them a key (or if they forgot their key) is the use case. Also if you have smart home stuff like home assistant, you can program it to lock on its own based on conditions (like night time or your phone leaves the house).
Re the first part: nobody enters my house if they don't have a key and I'm not present. Re the second part, I don't trust any software-based technology near enough to rely on that kind of stuff without double-checking. . Turn the key, done.
Qi chargers. These mofos are so god damn slow.
It's better to spend 2 sec plugging a charging cable than wait freaking hours for your phone to charge with Qi.
Soft disagree. I use the Qi charger to charge my phone overnight or while it’s sitting on my desk. The USB cable is when I need it charged quickly.
This way, my phone’s charging port is protected with a plug when I’m not using it and it is immaculate and unlikely to fail while I have it.
(My previous phone’s charging port almost failed and would stop working if I used it for all charging. Using Qi for the bulk of the charging kept the port working for when I needed it, like in the car or to the computer.)
I do the same, including plugging the usb-c port. I specifically got a 5-watt qi charger over the 10 or 15 watt ones so that my phone would slow charge overnight. The phone doesn't get warm when charging that way, unlike when I use the usb-c port.
Second this. When I sit at my desk, the phone's on the Qi pad. I don't need it all the time, and it's fine to stay there 30 min. When I sleep, same thing. I actually use a smaller charger brick so it charges more slowly overnight. I don't know what it's a better charge for the battery if it stays lower temp but it feels right.
I bought a phone mount one, it charges quite fast and it is so much easier to place my phone in the dock and have it charge. It does get quite warm but that's easily remedied by pointing an AC vent to the back of the phone.
Honestly it sounds like you got a low wattage one and yes those do charge much slower.
portable swamp cooler. it leaked and makes your carpet a swamp and maybe cooler. also luggable.
roller-type kitchen knife sharpener. the finer edge sharpener actually dulls the knife more.
tile tracker. it was so big, I didn't lose it. I also hate the concept because it works like insurance does.
I think the Thinkpad X130e with the AMD E-240 CPU. That processor, really, was the bad part. Every little single thing you wanted to do was absolutely CPU-bound, even when it was contemporary and new (c. 2011-2012). The amount of time I wasted waiting for the fully hammered CPU to do literally anything was too much.
I bought the laptop used because I figured a tiny Linux laptop would be great. And other aspects of it were fine, such as the display, keyboard, trackpad, build quality, etc. But that stupid CPU totally killed the device. Such a regret.
Nokia Lumia 620 (Windows Phone)
As someone who runs a Windows phone launcher to this day, I think you're wrong 😂 had they actually pursued them, and supported them better. I think we'd still have Windows phones today, The app store was truly the killer.
iPod shuffle, sometime around 2003 or 2004. Died in three weeks. Ordered a replacement. Died in two weeks
Pioneer ddj400
Where do I start first off it comes with record box, for better effects or features you have to buy a subscription . The knobs come off in your hand and are made out of plastic crossfader sucks made out of plastic buttons stick, pads stick. It's just horrible
Years ago I owned a pioneer dgm 1000 the thing was built like a tank and held its value well. I sold it for something else about 3 years 4 years later and got the same price I paid for it..
I expected the pioneer 400 to at least be manufactured somewhat sturdy, and not feel like a Fisher Price toy..
Ended up finding a numark ns7Ii for a decent price.
Made out of metal, more buttons than you can shake a stick at very high quality. It's almost 10 years old and nothing's wrong with it..
The cheap pioneer mixerswill be E-Waste within a few years
An iBook. I had the GPU replaced twice under warranty. I sold it after the second time. Never again.
Nintendo virtual boy.
Really? Despite how much of a flop it was, if I owned one I feel like I'd find it fun?
Though now that I think about it...did it even have many games?
I was fun for a moment and then the headaches and nausea would kick in. And yeah, very few games. At the time it was pretty innovative as Nintendo always is. Still a terrible experience however.
It wasn't really fun, and I could never see properly in it.
Hmm, good point. I have an astigmatism and slightly different vision in both eyes so now I'm questioning if it would even work for me.
Yeah I have the world's smallest astigmatism in my left eye and even that was annoying for me as a kid using it.
HTC Droid Incredible.
It kept telling me its storage was full when it was nowhere close, and then because it only allowed over the air factory resets, it couldn't even erase and reformat itself. It was the top rated Android phone at the time and it's why I've never gone back.
This stogie sized covert camera. The photos looked like a screenshot of the game snake.
For society? A smartphone
A Huawei MediaPad M5 Lite.
Their own lower-end APUs are sooo slow (even worse than Samsung) and the bloated stock ROM doesn't help. The tablet was borderline unusable without limiting background applications (which for some reason reset every time you reebooted the thing), and it's not like it ever got any updates.
PackageKit