Asklemmy @lemmy.ml

1y ago

What’s the worst piece of technology you’ve ever owned?

344 comments

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.
- 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!
- 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.
- I've never owned a better inkjet than the one I've had in the late 90s on all measures; build-quality, print quality, speed, operating noise, ink consumption, ink price, overall price, usability. Everything has got worse.

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.
- -- 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.

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.
- Hahahahaha omg that is horrible
- Wow I thought I was the only idiot that bought it. Once they started charging for the smart features, it got unbatteried and became just a fancy box.

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.
  
  It also looks vaguely like a dildo, which is cool.
- 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 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.
  
  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.
- 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 watch 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.
  
  I don't understand fridges with ice makers. You can just make ice in the freezer without any further complex machinery.

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 removed 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.

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.
- 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.

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.

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.
  
  I always wanted to be the cool hipster with cabled headphones and getting mad about phones without audio jack.
  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.
  
  There's a method to put headphones into your pocket without them tangling. Fold them in half always instead of coiling them up.
- My jabra 85 elite last me for a solid >12h of continuous play
- I have $20 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.

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.
- You have a technology curse. Time to start gardening.
- 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 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

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!
  
  Happy cake day.
- Brother laser printers, higher upfront cost but I don't think I'll ever need another. I don't print frequently so inkjet carts dry up, toner doesn't have that issue, toner also lasts longer, whenever I have to replace it I'm pretty sure they have 3rd party carts, and they don't do any subscription bullshit or planned obsolescence so far that I've seen. Easy to set up on linux through CUPS and the official brother .rpm or .deb drivers. Cannot recommend them enough as someone who also hates all other printers.
- My HP laserjet 1320n is over 20 years old. Every 6-8 months I have something to print and it does it like a champ. I can even print to it from my phone. Idk the last time I put toner on it.
- With as cheap as pen plotters have gotten, I'm surprised no one has come up with a reasonably small printer looking one for normal sized paper that functions like an actual printer. the ones you can get need special plugins and vector graphics to plot. There used to be many models several decades ago, and they can still be found and modified to use normal pens, but that's kind of a driver nightmare. I feel like we're past the point where people need to be able to print many pages relatively quickly, and I'd rather have a printer that took a while to print but I knew that it would work every single time.

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.

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.
- I was coming to post the same. Those fucking clickers were so stupid and overpriced, all so my biochem professor could poll the class AND grade everyone on their results. Results to questions about material that was JUST taught in the same lesson. Good thing everyone benefits equally from lecture, right? Fuck that guy.

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.
- 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
  
  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.
  
  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
- 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.
- 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.
- I used mine for GBA emulation for a while, and it ran flash for some reason.

Anything with fucking Bluetooth. Even in 2024 getting it to connect consistently requires some kind of arcane magic
- It's fine as long as you never connect different controllers to the same device. Then it becomes a nightmare

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.
- $176 for an automatic shower cleaner lmaooooooo

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.
  
  They unfortunately come with some proprietary Chinese apps by default
- 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,
  
  Nah, I had the kindle keyboard and it was great. Still is, if I don't want to read with a backlight. My first one stopped working after at least a decade, and a couple months later I came across one in a thrift store for like 10 bucks and it still works great.
- 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, that's really awesome. Which Kobo devices are supported?

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.

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.
  
  Pretty much the worse "console" ever made. Any video on it will tell you all you need to know. I wouldn't buy it for a penny today if someone offered.
  
  Not that guy. But: what people were promised was smartphone guts in a set-top box, for all the novel PSP-grade mobile titles that were limited by touchscreen controls and battery life. What was delivered was Not That. They turned the Kickstarter into a custom microconsole, which is a vulgar word in any context, because it means there's no goddamn software. The central fucking point was to take advantage of everything on Google Play... or whatever the hell it was called that month. Instead you got a tiny selection of games which were forced to provide free demos. And you could play them with an abysmal controller, which was the one thing these geniuses were supposed to get right for free.

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.

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.

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.

HP Printer

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.
  
  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.
- The main display that shows your speed,etc. randomly shutting down
  I know two people who had this exact issue with their new-gen Golf. First cause was the French language would crash the whole dash if you cycled the dashboard views (to my knowledge they never fixed the issue and the workaround is to set the car to English). Second cause was a malformed JPEG from a radio station would cause the dash to bootloop until you drove far enough from said radio station, which would allow the car to work long enough to disable that feature (IIRC).
  So yeah, QA is down the fucking drain with VW on their latest gen. They had a new CEO, and now a new one again I think? But the reputational damage has been done. Too bad, I really liked my '18 Polo.

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.

The iPhone

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
  <brand>
  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).
- I have two Bosch dishwashers and have been very happy with them so far. Avoid Samsung appliances at all costs.
- If you want truly bulletproof clothing appliances and live in America, look up Speed Queen. They’re built to commercial standards and are trivially repairable. Many last for decades with only minor maintenance and upkeep.
  Unfortunately, Speed Queen not available outside of America. 😭 Or, at least, absolutely not available in Western Canada.
  I went with LG, as Bosch didn’t have the capacity I was looking for. Pretty happy with LG for both washer and dryer, four years and counting without a single issue. Would be nice if the front-loading washer came with an automatic dehumidifier, tho, as we have to leave the door open to avoid funky smells developing.

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.

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.

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.

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.
- Was that the first version Nexus 7? I had the refreshed version and it was my favourite bit of tech ever. I ran it for about 5 years until the screen and battery both died. I loved that thing.
  
  I still have the refreshed second gen version running, got an android 12 rom flashed and now it is being used with an amcrest camera as a privacy friendly nanny cam monitor!
- Oh, remember the good old Nexus 7. Had only a fraction of its performance 1-2 years down the line...
  Meanwhile, my Samsung Galaxy Tab A 10.1 2016 still soldiers on with good performance, even if it hasn't gotten updates in half a decade, and its internal 16GB space is beyond ridiculously small for today's standards and has to be cleaned up revery few months.
  
  Oh, remember the good old Nexus 7. Had only a fraction of its performance 1-2 years down the line...
  Hahaha. Shit, I didn't even get that far before the touch digitalizer broke. Maybe 8 months in and dead.
  I got mad because my mom bought it in the US. Didn't sell in my country. What a piece of shit.
  Edit: It was made by ASUS!

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.
  
  They do many many useful things and the utility is valuable enough to begrudgingly have to accept the frustrating experience of using them. We generally really do have to accept it as well because as with all useful technologies, they become ubiquitous and then useful technologies are built off the fact of their reliable ubiquity and then those technologies replace existing ones and you find yourself needing smartphones to get by in society. They're close to a necessity if not in reality, a necessity where I live, but places like China for example it is simply impossible to go about life without one. I honestly don't what people do there when their phone is broken, just getting out the door to pick up a new one would be a challenge.

HP anything, absolute trash

Any and all dishwashers and refrigerators I've ever owned. Fuck planned obscelence.

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