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.
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.
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.
Yeah the moving around thing is also a benefit to me too
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.
I learned ‘cable macrame’ from my networking mentor. I can wrap a cable so fast, and it’s not gonna tangle.
My jabra 85 elite last me for a solid >12h of continuous play
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you buy new and sell before 100k miles, Hyundai/Kia are great. Otherwise, you better be okay with oil consumption and potential engine work, the new engines are kinda prone to failure.
Tbh, with a BEV I am not that concerned with oil consumption and engine work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Any and all dishwashers and refrigerators I’ve ever owned. Fuck planned obscelence.
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.
Not sure if it counts as technology but it was a Ford Focus.
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
Printers i swear all of them hate me. I love it, but just cant deal with printers.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I got an HP printer and it’s prints reliably when connected via USB but that’s about it.
