Products will few or no reviews
A phone plan with a phone. You pay more over time and you get stuck with a contract.
Buy a phone and get a plan from a MVNO. Your monthly plan will be better and cheaper. Also since you own the phone when a better plan appears you can just switch.
Any Google smartwatch. I bought 2 at one point. A sport and a dress watch. Both only lasted about a year before the software rendered them useless. I’m now back on analogue watches.
I have a pixel watch I bought around its launch (IIRC) and it’s still going fine today. The only issue I’ve had is, since starting farming, the little dial can gum up a bit, but it can be cleaned.
It’s almost aggressive how quickly smart devices get shuttered, being an oldschool techhead I’ve always dreamed of being a walking compute center, but just like smart house gear, you can’t expect a thing you buy today to work next week and we are just conditioned to accept it.
I absolutely loved my LG Android watch from a couple years ago. Used it constantly
But then a major update for Android Wear was released, and it completely changed the UX and UI. It was absolutely annoying to use suddenly
Stopped using it a week after the release. Never had an android wear watch since
Your experience is so common that I don’t understand why manufacturers keep doing it. Sure I get people want updates, but major UI changes should be optional.
Same. I use an MX Master all day every day and they last for years. No Linux support though. I might try a Corsair mouse next time
Kids
Any computer mouse, frankly.
The sad thing is when I bought my first gaming mouse in the mid 2000s it was a Razer and that thing ran great for almost 10 years. I only replaced it because after handling it for that many years it was worn and kinda gross.
I replaced it with a Razer that went sure enough went faulty after a year. I then tried other brands (name and no-name). I’ve never had a mouse last me 18 months before it started to go faulty. It really feels like they all colluded a planned obsolescence. Even my current mouse, a Zowie FK3-C, has begun to drop the mouse input when i click and hold the left button. I bought this in June 2023!!
I still like the Zowie a lot, it has great features like a button to toggle the refresh rate without the need for installing dumb software to set it. But it’s been 10 years of this shit, for me, so I will never recommend a computer mouse to anyone. Just use the one that you get from your office job, I guess.
“Any computer mouse” guess I’m not using my computer anymore, thanks for the advice.
It’s about never recommending, not never buying. You can buy something unrecommended ;)
Middle mouse click is indispensable but it seems to be first to fail on my mice
I got a Kensington trackball. I’ll never use a mouse again.
The only ones that seem to last for me have been Logitech, and even then its not even close to the 10 years. Maybe around 3 years, a couple more replacing the switches
For me it was the Microsoft intellimouse, the led one. It had 5 buttons, one on each side so it was also ambidextrous. Now I have a mouse graveyard box.
I see plenty of Logitech fans here…but the cheap budget version of the wireless keyboard and mouse had the mouse zonk out on me just a couple of years later.
I went for a more expensive professional for work version. Will need to see how that works out.
Always been happy with Logitech. But I switched the software to SteerMouse since Logitech jumped on the AI train.
Man, Logitech all the way. I’ve only had to replace one or maybe two with 8-hr/day, 5 days a week constant usage
I’ve been using logitech for years and they’ve all been holding up well for me. The only issue I had was an older trackball mouse design. I owned two and one had some issues but the other lasted almost a decade.
Been using a cheapass dell mouse we got free with our servers for about a decade now and it’s great.
I’ve had Razrs, expensive assed MS nostalgia grabs, Kensingtons of every configuration, Logitech of both gaming and office models and nothing has been as accurate and problem free as this cheap assed dell server mouse.
Well that’s cause one is made to look fancy and make money, the other is meant to do its job
I’d argue that it’s more of a ‘If we don’t send them something to get bootstrapped, the customers will complain, so throw in a cheap kbd and mouse and stick our logo on it’, but they JUST happened to be SLIGHTLY less cheap than everyone who makes ‘gaming’ mice.
I’m under no illusions, it’s a really cheap mouse, just its one that has a good sensor.
Mainly I have it because it was free and we had a closet filled with a few hundred of them.
I used to have an old MS Pro mouse that was literally my favorite pointing device EVER made but it was SD resolution so useless in modern machines, and the cash grab piece of crap that MS just re-released a few years ago to get a piece of that sweet nostalgia pie was worse than any razr I’ve ever used.
I just want to click on heads and it’s crazy that gaming mice are so poorly made nowadays that free server mice are objectively better.
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Roku anything
I have a tv from them and one day the PBS kids app just stopped working. I contacted customer support and they just told me it was the app developer’s fault, nothing to be done. Waited months thinking it would eventually resolve but never did.
And recently where they:
- Blocked people from using their tvs until they accepted a new agreement and
- Filed for a patent that defines how they can start overlaying ads on top of other connected devices over hdmi
Glad I shut off wifi to my tv years ago and plugged in a separate smart tv hdmi dongle. And not getting anywhere near anything that says Roku on the packaging again.
I’ve never had a Roku TV, but I’ve been using two of their HDMI connected devices for years.
I’ve never had an issue, but one is too old and needs replacing. What alternatives would you suggest I have a look at?
We’ve used the Amazon firestick before and it worked well. Currently we use the google chromecast/tv dongle for both ours tvs.
Nice thing about the google one is that it makes any Google movie/tv show purchases available, and Amazon movie purchases are still available through the Amazon video app.
But they’re pretty comparable. Depends mostly on what ecosystem you’re in or would prefer to be in.
Cloud and “serverless” solutions
I gotta disagree on this one. I cut my workload in half by shifting our infrastructure to the cloud, and now I can spend my time focusing on more worthwhile endeavors.
Care to elaborate? Every cloud “solution” I’ve been pitched is just a super expensive way to bottleck everything at the router.
Any guitar under $700 with any feature you’d expect to be standard in medium to high end guitars. If a brand new guitar has a floyd rose but is $300, it won’t hold tuning, and the screws will strip easily.
Not saying expensive guitars are good by default, but there’s very little room for innovation in the guitar world, and corner cutting will happen in cheaper guitars.
This guy guitars
Harley Benton Fusion 3 owner here… €450. Nothing at all wrong with this thing.
What you’re saying was true 10 years ago but musical instruments have been improving in quality a lot recently.
Hm, yeah that might be the case. Last guitar with a FR I bought was well over 10y ago.
I have had two Harley Benton bass guitars, a 5 string fretless, and a 5 string PJ combo, and they both shit the bed and ceased to work in under a year of light usage, both times it was cheap electronics (the pickups).
That being said I have many friends with Harley Benton instruments and amps and they all work fine still, I just got unlucky. Of course, cheap parts are cheap parts and will be more liable to fail than better ones. It is still a lot better than it used to be.
Not really a specific product but those horrible soaking sharpening stones especially if you’re a beginner at sharpening. It’s just too much hassle compared to diamond. That and printer lubricant papers, just make them with printer paper and mineral oil
Anything made by Razer, any Google hardware
Chromebooks suck ass but Pixel phones are pretty solid
To be fair, they are just expensive mid-range phones (except the hardware security and build quality), but the tradeoff is worth it for GrapheneOS.
they have nice cameras. but the battery life is attrocious and sometimes will run into radio issues (iirc fixed only one or 2 generations ago)… lack of otg support is also one minor issue
Chromebooks are amazing for a certain type of low technical skill person. Older parents and grandparents in particular are exactly the kind of people that Chromebooks are for. There’s zero technical support burden and if anything goes wrong a power wash solves it.
That sounds pretty good, why wouldn’t you recommend it then, are there better alternatives?
Oh I totally recommend Chromebooks, they almost entirely eliminate the tech support burden from having a parent/grandparent who doesn’t get computers. It was the dude above me who crapped on them.
You’re the one who replied “any google hardware” though.
So buy Chromebooks from other oems?
Chromium is about 99.5% open source, there’s no real problem with the OS itself. If you’re afraid of Google tracking just use the machine with the guest account.
I got a bundle of a Razer keyboard, mouse, headset, and mousepad for all of $50 one time cause it was on sale and we just happened to come across the last one they had. This was about a year ago, because I was needing new ones anyway, and they’ve been perfectly fine ever since.
I try to avoid razer because their products seem so gimmicky and are quite expensive. But i have an mmo mouse for a long time now (longer than any other mouse) and the tartarus, because they were the only ones at the time wgo had something like that. It still works perfectly fine. The s button is almost gone because of usage, but other than that, 10/10
I had a Razer keyboard, mouse, mousepad, laptop. They all broke down in 1-2 years. The Razer keyboard battery bloated until it broke the chassis, so I bought another battery, but that bloated, now I use a thinkpad t14; the mouse’s rubber pads fell off and the paint started peeling off, now I’m using a better mouse, glorious model o-; the mousepad started deteriorating and splitting apart; and the keyboard paint also fell off and the stabilizers were not stabilizing.
Paper drinking straws
Silly, but I like those because I can eat bits of it after using them :3
My guy, pasta drinking straws are for you!
Any purism product, overpriced, outdated and their hardware basically breaks when connecting it to external devices.
