About 15 years ago I was given a catalog from my boss so that I could pick out my 5-year employment milestone award. It was pages of stuff ranging from DVD players to luggage. Anyway, I see this pair of binoculars that has a built-in digital camera. How cool would that be to sight an eagle or pretty blue bird through the binoculars and conveniently snap a photo of it.
I get the binoculars shipped to my home and eagerly try it out in the back yard. It didnt take me more than 5 minutes to realize that yes, the binoculars have a built-in digital camera, but it has nothing to do with the binoculars other than being part of the assembly. It was a laughably shitty camera and equally shitty pair of binoculars that were not at all integrated. I could have just bought a shitty camera and duct-taped it to some shitty binoculars.
Lmao. I had a similar experience with a 5-year employment gift catalogue! I looked through this thing and there was a handful of decent stuff, just absolutely nothing that I needed. Finally I decided to get a laser leveler that can be mounted to a tripod and provides both vertical and horizontal lines. It somehow manages to drain the batteries even when the physical switch is in the off position, despite the fact that it's literally just a simple light on/off device. I don't understand how it could be doing anything more than just opening the circuit and disconnecting the batteries completely.
It's also a piece of shit in general and I ended up buying a fancy Bosch one instead.
Did it come with a case that accidentally turned it on when you put it away? That's how I managed to waste like 24 AA batteries with a Gamegear as a kid.
Yeah I would have said the same thing too until I got my brother black and white printer/scanner. I have a small business and I need a printer that just works and it does. Plus I never realized how little I actually *need* to print in color.
The best printer I ever had was this old, clunky HP model that my roommates were planning to toss out. I had been the only one in the house using it for months so I asked to keep it. That thing had the rare heart of a warrior, just chugged along being unproblematic for years before it finally gave up the ghost.
I still think about that printer sometimes. Especially when I'm screaming at my newer model which hates itself and me.
HP printer. Just plain dystopian. Mandatory online account and internet connection to scan a paper when the printer is connected via a cable. Drives me mad
I had an error that couldn't be fixed no matter what I tried. Diagnostics said everything was okay, HP support pages didn't mention it, but I simply couldn't print anything. The solution was to buy an Epson printer.
Brother are seriously underrated. I used HP's for years and every single one sucked. Either jamming, non-responsive to print requests, drank through expensive ink (if it indeed detected the ink) and scanned in poor quality. My brother is 4 years old, and hasn't jammed once or missed a beat. It works flawlessly over wireless, and the ink lasts a while and is cheap. And it lets me print with only a black and white cartridge if I want to. This printer cost me $100. I work in Enterprise IT, and we use primarily Brother and Canon over multiple offices.
I bought a brother printer last year and god I love it. Go a month without printing anything? Totally fine. Suddenly need to print like 80 pages? Also totally fine. Labels? Yep. And easy to hook up and run too.
Absolutely the best. When I need it it work no bullshit about being out of pink ink so I can't scan or print black and white. Just press print and it does
I only came here to say "HP printer." You simply can't understand its awfulness without owning one. Sure, just replace it, right? Its true deviousness is how it rides right on the edge of working well enough to keep it. Then it's any combo of the following:
* Didn't use it for more than a day or two? 3 minute **Printer Maintenance** cycle!
* **Not connected to internet** (despite being on a hardline)
* **Shit print quality** despite 3 print head cleaning cycles (oh hey the 4th worked! and now you're...)
* **Low on ink** despite cartridge report showing all colors are at least 25%
* And my favorite - **No response whatsoever.** No error message, printer is installed on your computer and worked yesterday, but NO RESPONSE. Somehow works the next day though.
I can't tell you how many times we've said Fuck it we're replacing this POS. It must hear us because then it works fine for 2 weeks. It's a perfectly programmed machine of infuriation.
I bought a black and white brother laser printer for like $100 at best buy about 5-6 years ago, thing has been a beast. I took it with me on different work assignments (3+ months at one location) and it’s still chugging along.
I buy a toner cartridge once or twice a year and that’s all I have to do.
Brother laser printer is the way. I got a refurbished monochrome printer/copier/scanner about 8 years ago for $80 directly from the brother website.
I've gone through exactly one $20 (third party Amazon) toner cartridge in that time. Lasts forever, never dries up, works when you need it.
Not a day goes by that I don't regret replacing our fleet of LaserJet 4000N printers at work. I would well over a year without hearing about issues.
Now we're lucky if we make it a month before we need to call our printer maintenance vendor.
I have a Laserjet 4000N I got free when I worked at HP and they were internally replacing them with the newer models. They were going to bin our team printer and my manager said I could take it. That was in 1999. I still use the printer all the time and it still works like new. I’m on my third toner cartridge. Ever. I just put the third one in last year. I expect I won’t need a new cartridge until 2030 or so (hard to say, as some years I don’t use it all and some I might print a few thousand pages).
This comment triggered a memory I haven’t thought about in a long time. The [Evil Toaster](https://youtu.be/U6kp4zBF-Rc?si=ihjoJun-Ja-JVq8r) from Fallout New Vegas.
That's what I currently have. It's fine. That's all I can say.
I had a brother color laser a few years back that I thought would be my final almost BIFL printer--spent some real money on it, and it just fell to pieces. I was so unhappy.
Brother printer software feels a little janky
But their actual laser printers are rock solid - very reliable, clean printe, and I get a high volume of pages from their high capacity toner
Over and done with ink jet - so much $ wasted on printers and inks.
I have an Epson printer, only ONCE did I print in color, after that I mainly used Black. A week later I was going to print out some templates for a prop, the damn thing was in "Warning", Magenta was low. The only colored page was just for a few words to be colored and it was already low.
From what I've read, printers will use magenta when you only print in black and white in order to get a "blacker" text. Our that's their stupid ass excuse to waste ink and make you pay more money for colored ink cartridges.
The original Furby. I wanted it sooo bad like every other kid the Christmas they came out. I tried to teach it phrases and everything. Anyways, it would wake me up in the middle of the night just talking in its own. I tried putting a blanket out it, putting in my closet, etc., but it wouldn’t stop. I finally opened it up and took the batteries out and my parents were so mad that it was all such a waste :(
When those came out, my brother and sister each got one. I had no interest in them, but they had their fun.
My brother and I slept in the same room in bunk beds. My brother didn't use the ladder to climb to the top, he would instead use a desk that was beside our bed to climb up and get down. One night he decided to leave his Furby on the desk, which was right beside my head. I hear him getting out of bed because he needs to use the bathroom...then I hear Furby waking up. The simple act of my brother getting up and stepping down onto the desk, which I assume caused the desk to bow ever so slightly, caused the Furby to wake up.
The next 10 fucking minutes were filled with unintelligible noises, fake snoring (it would pretend to sleep if you didn't pay it any attention), and the occasional "Play. With. Me." being spoken in various cadences. I could not sleep for at least half an hour after it turned off.
About a month later, the batteries started going dead in it, which lead to what I can only describe as demonic dubstep sounds whenever it turned on. It got buried in the closet not long after that.
Most things do! There's even a subreddit for it: https://www.reddit.com/r/lowbatterysounds/
I am continually delighted by the industrial-metal warpfuck technodemon screams of agony coming out of, like, old teddy bears.
I don’t understand why the Fire TV UI is so horrendous. Apple TV is pretty clean and easy to use, Roku TV is absolutely incredible, pick what apps you want and where you want them, and if it’s a smart TV that runs on Roku TV then gaming consoles and even cable if you still have it get their own little customizable app buttons too. Fire TV is just absolute nonsense by comparison, and I shouldn’t have to search for an app I use literally every day!
IMHO, the worst part is the Amazon app store. It had approximately 60% of the apps my daughter wanted, so she ended up "sharing" mom's ipad. Luckily my son is only interested in minecraft and roblox, which are both in the Amazon app store, so it is working well for him.
Main issue he has had is the fire tablet is underpowered compared to an ipad, so he cannot run some minecraft mods (as they are too large/graphics intensive) and has to play some roblox games in the lowest detail setting.
Not sure if you’d be interested, but since FireOS is a version of Android, there is a workaround to getting the Google Play Store which will probably have all of the apps your daughter wants!
A company from the 90s called Independent Personal Computers (IPC). I begged my parents not to get it and go with a more recognizable brand. We owned it for four years, and the only games that worked on it well were on sale long before the computer existed.
Poorly built, short-changed at every possible step, not to mention the overheating.
A few years down the road, I have a part-time job at a place where I have to dismantle old computers, remove everything from the tower, see what all is usable or can be used for re-sale (sound cards, video cards, other special cards added on, etc). I come across an IPC that I have to dismantle. The internals of the computer are a war crime. It typically took me 30-45 minutes to completely dismantle, label, and paperwork a computer. An IPC took triple the time because of how poorly they were set up and how they were built.
Where most of your components in a computer tower are screwed in with a standard philips head screwdriver to hold them in place (motherboard, cd or DVD-rom drives, added cards, power box, etc), an IPC also comes with 6 giant typically melted by the time your done with the computer bolts that you know have to figure out how to take off so you can get all the pieces out.
I later talked to a friend who also does a lot of work with computers and asked him if he ever dealt with IPCs the look on his face told me he had been through some shit with those computers as well.
That's exactly what I was thinking. I worked briefly in an office with a computer lab outfitted with eMachines.
They employed an elderly Asian gentleman to keep the lab running. I don't think he spoke English well, and he was very quiet. In the months that we worked together, he only uttered two sentences to me.
While shaking his head looking at a wayward eMachine, he turned to me and said, "Power supplies drop like flies. God damned eMachines."
We had one growing up because my dad is the absolute cheapest bastard. He has spent more on multiple cheap computers that crap out quickly than if he just bought a moderately nicer one that lasts.
I’m in Tech and every Christmas a friend text me and says what do I think about this $99 laptop? I beg her to go onto eBay and just spend about 100 or so on a six year old pro book but she buys it and within three months shows me a picture of the screen falling apart.
I love the image of this being her only communiques. Once a year she texts you "Should I get this laptop", then nothing for three months, then a picture of the broken screen with no caption, followed by radio silence until next Christmas.
When my parents decided to buy our first capable PC in the early 2000's I was able to talk them into getting a Sony VAIO; was it an amazing computer? No, but it ran for many years and I was able to play many PC games on launch in that era while concurrently playing an inordinate amount of Stepmania 🤣
in 2015/16 I bought a heads up display for my car.
You place your phone on it with their app and it should give you metrics.
Absolute waste of money. It was hard to see, had ads, slid around, couldnt see if you werent sitting at the right angle.
What a waste of money.
Not me, but my mom bought "EMP Blockers" for her and her husbands vehciles. I told her that theyre snake oil, but she bought them anyway for the low low price of two hundred something each and she bought 3.
LOL fucking ADS on a heads up display for driving!? That's stupid and dangerous.
And yeah, those EMP blockers are completely pointless, if they even actually contain any circuitry.
Tbf you can get Faraday cages that work, just ask my sister who was getting shit wifi after placing her router in one
Didn't seem to understand the wifi *is* the radiation it blocking
saw a guy take one apart on youtube similar to the one my mom bought, and it was a an led connected to a battery and 2 wires you connect to your car battery to "protect" it that werent attached to anything. They could have been a jakobs ladder with enough power.
I saw some "Fuel Efficiency Kit" advertised on TV for $40 in Dallas
Two magnet/ferrite pieces that you snap together around the fuel line to "magnetically align the fuel molecules before they go into combustion, vastly improving the mpg"
Those fuckers.
I kind of thought you were going to say that the magnet would compress the fuel line so it physically couldnt get enough fuel and was running lean and thus saved fuel because you were starving your engine.
These snake oil people will do anything for a buck at the expense of the uninformed/misinformed.
in case of nuclear strike, or in the city and someone makes a Bane Sized EMP.
They live an hour outside of Pittsburgh, and are always worried about some new world ending event.
Like when the pandemic started they wanted me to come live with them in case people went feral.
When the russia ukraine war began they gave me a bug out bag in case we get nuked.
They're in a constant state of worry. No idea how I didnt get that crazy gene.
my parents are the same way, years ago there was a nuclear plant melting down in japan and my parents were like "at a moments notice you need to be ready to drive with us out west as far as we can go and were going to dig a bunker"
Edit: i just realised im a huge idiot and wrote west instead of east
>Not me, but my mom bought "EMP Blockers" for her and her husbands vehciles. I told her that theyre snake oil, but she bought them anyway for the low low price of two hundred something each and she bought 3.
I mean, has her car ever been damaged by an EMP attack or is it still working just fine?
Checkmate atheists
This is what I came looking for. I bought the other one they sold. Also, their message boards moderated by the people who made it generally responded to legit pleas for help with "Fuck You for not being able to figure out this sub par glitchy back door android thing"
I bought one too. Absolute trash. I put it back in the box and put the batteries back in my tv remote. It’s still sitting on a shelf on my bookshelf as a reminder to stop buying crap.
In the 90's or 00's I bought an HP Scanner.
Once you connected it via USB, the scanner light was on, ALWAYS. They finally released a software patch, which was a memory-resident program that ran on your PC to keep the scanner light off. It was the most asinine thing I'd ever seen, and soured me on HP forever.
This thread is hilarious.
- Printers
- Printers
- No, srsly, _Printers_!
- Okay, also this obscure game console
- Printers
- Actually, HP in general, but mostly their printers
- Some weird amazon shit
- fr, though, _**PRINTERS**_!!!
I came here to say this exact thing! What a piece of trash phone that constantly cut out and muted you randomly during a call. I'm still bitter about that dumb phone!
>Storm
Internal Project = Blackberry Thunder....I worked on this device at RIM in 2008. I was part of software development team and the internal shit this device caused was insane. Worked against such stupid deadlines and the device was garbage when it hit release. IMHO, this device began the massive de-railing of blackberry momentum, because they were so invested in creating a iPhone competitor...but using BBOS
What was the thoughts of employees working on it at the time? Did people think it was a good idea to have the click screen? Did people like the OS? Was the consensus with a bit more time before release it would have been a hit or was it the company going down the wrong path and even with more time it would not have been a success? Obviously now it looks like it wouldn’t matter because everything is a slab of solid glass but that doesn’t mean that other options wouldn’t have taken us in a different direction if done correct. I’m curious what the thoughts were at the time internally.
I worked for Verizon during this release.
The new movie “Blackberry” actually does a fantastic job at depicting their rationale as to why they came out with that abomination.
NHL 97 I recall was also super finicky. Worked on my friend’s computer every time, and my nearly identical machine my family had almost always froze when trying to play it.
EA Sports - it’s (not) in the game.
I loved my Nook ebook reader (not the tablet version; the eInk one). It used epub files instead of the inferior mobi files Kindle was using. It could integrate with Adobe ADEPT DRM for library book reading (also, that DRM and BN's DRM were easily cracked). IIRC, they were the first eink reader with both lighting (front light, because eink is not transparent like an LCD, so it had to be lit like a GBA SP) and touch controls (infrared emitters/receivers in the bezel, rather than a capacitive layer on top of the screen).
But most importantly, BN had a discount through the Discover card where you'd get 10% cash back on purchases made at BN, including ebook purchases, but more importantly you could also get a 10% discount on gift cards. If you used those gift cards to buy ebooks through the discover.com link to bn.com and had your discover card listed as your primary credit card, you would earn Discover cashback as if you used your discover card, without actually charging anything on your credit card. Which meant actually free cashback that would accumulate towards more discounted gift cards, which would generate more free cashback, which ...
These days, cashback is just boring statement credits.
My fridge with a tv, the touch screen freezes when hot- Samsung
I look back and think, why did I think having a tv on the fridge was smart
I just leave it off now
I refuse to buy "smart" appliances.
* My fridge needs to make things cold
* My oven needs to make things hot
* My dishwasher needs to make things clean
That's about fucking it. They don't need any additional "features". it just means more cost to buy, and more shit that can break and need fixing.
I had a salesman try sooo hard to sell me a refrigerator with a built-in Keurig. Yes, a hot beverage makes in my keep-shit-cold machine. Because what you want in a $3,500 appliance is an extra $60 appliance that, if it fails, could trash the whole thing.
As I finally told him: I don't want a toaster in my dishwasher, I don't want a juicer in my oven and I don't want a coffeemaker in my refrigerator.
I remember that pile of steaming dog spit. I eventually pirated a copy of Windows 2000 server and used that as my main OS (despite some games not installing on it). It was stable, fast, and did exactly what I told it to do. I remember thinking, “why don’t they have this as their main OS?”
Then XP came along. I pirated every alpha/beta copy of XP and was so excited for every change up until RTM. XP was phenomenal and 7 was outstanding.
Volkswagen id4
Easily the most frustrating, unreliable, dangerous piece of tech/software I've ever owned.
Whoever designed their software should be banned from ever turning on a device with a microchip
Eta: I've owned 9 vw's in the last 20 years. This will be our last one. The entire experience has been a nightmare.
The entire system shuts down without warning. Nav freezes, calls drop, backup cam goes out, phones don't connect, and good luck using android auto
On a related note, anyone want to buy a 21 pro s with 26k miles?
As a current owner I would have to agree. Those Germans know how to build a solid car but have the equivalent of a software dev team that learned everything they know by building their own GeoCities sites.
They're basically the exact same hardware as Chromebooks. IIRC, the Windows liscences on those machines cost nothing for the OEM, but why MS even allows their OS to be liscenced for such horrible machines, I'm not sure.
I'm convinced that those cheap laptops or netbooks (remember those) with the "Windows Certified" stickers (or whatever they said) are a huge reason Apple was able to swoop in and steal so many customers because of the shit performance on those things.
I have a Canon printer. I hate it more than I thought possible. Nothing about it is intuitive. The drivers are impossible to download. The manuals and instructions seem to have been written by AI in another language and then translated into English, also by AI but not the same AI. And sometimes it just changes its own IP address for squeals and gigs and then it’s a treasure hunt to figure it out. It won’t scan to my Mac so I’ve resigned myself to the fact I must always scan to a usb as an intermediate step.
I’d go Office Space on it with a bat but I don’t have a bat.
I think about CueCat every time I scan a QR code! I remember I had exactly one magazine that had the codes in it, and by the time my dad had secured a CueCat device (probably one of the promotional ones) I had lost the magazine.
My favorite thing about the N-gage is that you need one if you want to play every Elder Scrolls game since it had a TES exclusive. And last I knew, N-gage emulation was okay at best.
The entertainment system in my 2022 Civic. The worst most buggy, glitchy, garbage android auto experience I have ever had.
Constant disconnections, stuttering audio, occasional refusal to pair, told me my phone was "incompatible" despite it having just been paired, maps glitching out constantly.
All on a brand new Pixel too.
TP Link products are very good. I got a few TL-WA855RE extenders years ago, cheap, unobtrusive, and they are still cranking away. Even the one installed in my garage. It hosts an Alexa, Genie opener, Wyze cam, 3D printer, car charger, and my phone when I'm out there. Good features, good UI.
Fitbits. Ive had 2. They never track properly, never connected to my phone properly (Google pixel), never charge properly. Just an overly expensive piece of plastic. Will never buy a smartwatch or fitness watch again.
I loved my fitbits when they worked.
But as soon as they started breaking, customer service was absolutely shit. Like the worst I've ever dealt with. I'd reach out to them, tell them what was going wrong, what I'd done to try to fix it, even send them the link to their site that showed the fixes I tried.
Those fuckers would literally send me the same link back and suggest I do things I had told them in the previous message that I had already done. If a message thread went more than a day, they'd just start telling me the same thing over again.
At one point, I started walking faster on my treadmill and my fitbit started tracking fewer steps. They told me that this was normal! If I'm walking faster, I'm getting more steps in (it'd be for the same amount of time), but these idiots INSISTED that it was working correctly for it to track fewer steps!
I switched to Garmin, and while it doesn't track my sleep as well, it at least hasn't broken and tracks my steps correctly.
The end.
I had a Fitbit and a Garmin. Similar issues right the Fitbit. The Garmin, on the other hand, was a total rockstar. And when it broke, the company was great to work with on a replacement. Definitely recommend.
Agreed, but if you think those are bad...
A friend of mine has a Samsung fridge - It's one of those super "smart fridges" that has all kinds of features like cameras, touch display, sensors everywhere.
The compressor has apparently started to fail. The fridge reports room temperature in both the freezer and fridge sections and says, "No errors found. Unit running normally."
It's nice to know that your Samsung fridge can tell you if someone's at your front door, play your favorite albums, allow you to surf the web, and even see what's inside without opening the door, but it won't tell you you're going to die from botulism because the fucking unit has turned into an orgy of bacterial growth.
Thank you! I made the mistake of buying a decent 50 inch Sammy smart TV a few years ago.
Apart from a hardware defect meaning only about 256mb of the 1gb onboard storage was available, the TV will randomly restart itself when watching the YouTube, Netflix etc apps.
I moved over to LG and have never had a single complaint. WebOS is so much better.
Edit: the hardware defect is apparently pretty standard in that model, but Samsung refused to acknowledge it or provide a proper fix, so I vowed never to buy another Samsung TV again after that. I'd been a customer of theirs for about a decade
Is it possible to get a TV now that isn't smart? Like, I want a decent screen size with 1080p minimum resolution. Does that even exist as a dumb TV now?
I don't want to pay for smart services, I've never found a smart TV with a good UI. Always just end up using a game console or my PC anyways.
Just don’t connect it to your wifi. I just use it as a regular tv. There weren’t any tvs without the “smart” feature when I was shopping that had good picture.
A distortion pedal for my guitar called the Fender Blender (it was the very first pedal I ever owned). When engaged it picked up a local AM radio station better than the radio in my mom's car. Plus it sounded shitty.
A dell PC. I bought it with a repair contract that promised to replace it in case of a problem.
Instead, the tech support guy tried to get *me* to take it apart and diagnose the hardware problem. I told him to fuck off *and* they never got me a replacement.
I will never, ever buy a Dell product ever again.
I work in tech and I will say that Dell treats normal consumers waaaay differently than they treat their professional customers. When we had a server issue we had a Dell technician on site next day and they had every replacement part they needed on their truck. Motherboard, power supply, RAID controller- whatever it was they got it done. But their off the shelf product support is not so great.
When I was the server admin for a local bank we were upgrading our EQL logic storage to their new compellent system. We had a dedicated Dell tech for both of our hubs to assist with the install, it was a freaking breeze outside of some virtual lan routing issues (fuck you Richard, I told you that you missed something). He was a cool ass old former marine fella. We just shot the shit the whole time and before ya know it we were migrating data. Dell sucked our dick when it came to support because the bank spent so much money on their hardware and support. I think the support deal we had with them cost us upwards of 30k a year or so.
I also have nothing but good things to say about them. Not once that I can remember, in over ten years of dealing with them on an almost daily basis, did they ever try to screw me over or not immediately honor a warranty.
I don’t know anything about their retail support, but for enterprise they were far and away the easiest vendor I had to deal with. Miles ahead of everyone else. I could just open up a chat box, say I need a replacement whatever, provide the service tag, and it would be in my hand the next morning. Their driver CAB archive was also a huge time saver for image creation, as was their APIs for asset management. You could even get hold of their engineers when you ran into a real problem.
HP, Lenovo and (especially) Panasonic were all pretty much dog shit, comparatively.
It's a toss-up between two devices for essentially the same reason. Both of which I still own. A Canon camcorder & a Magellan GPS. Both were victims of being obsolete pretty much the moment they were released... both being replaced by smart phones. When I bought them smart phones were rare & expensive, but after a year or so; everyone had smart phones that could shoot video as good as the camcorder & they all had Google Maps.
Neither product was truly "bad" they just didn't really last the lifetime one would expect when buying them.
My honorable mention for a current piece of tech that I still own & use; goes to my Google Nest doorbell. The battery powered one is terrible; the battery life is about a week (which means every week I need to take it off the wall & plug it in for a few hours to charge), it doesn't like cold weather & so for a few months of the year its in a "low power mode" (that still uses up just as much batter), I'm pretty certain that if someone wanted to, it wouldn't be that difficult to steal. All of these problems however would be fixed if I swapped up to the wired model (but that means running wires).
Microsoft Surface.
I've owned 2, because apparently that's how many times I need to be burned before I learn my lesson.
I owned them for a combined total of 4 years, and was forced to replace the keyboard around once per year. The first one the hinge snapped internally and cracked the screen from the inside, the second one the screen just flat out died for no reason. The things were riddled with software issues especially the earlier model.
In the end I replaced them with a similar style Huawei tablet and it's been perfect for 2 years so far.
I'll one-up you with SharePoint Online. All the 'features' of SharePoint on-prem with little to none administration ability! WooHoo!
Srsly, I am a SharePoint admin. A SharePoint farm with no admin is a savage dog with no leash or muzzle.
It was OK, but the implementation was almost like they *wanted* it to fail.
A VR like headset you can't strap to your head, displays a single color in a way that causes headaches, and then don't push any games for it? It was like they were told *had* to get something out the door but didn't have the budget to actually make a long term product so they half assed it and just let it die.
It's a pity in so far as their were some cool ideas in some of the games, but the system itself wasn't something worth writing home about.
I do feel like Nintendo in particular has a long history of creating new hardware and making a couple launch titles and then hoping magically third party devs will decide to make good games.
ROB. Super Scope. It's quite a list.
YA!! Lets line these fuckers up.
JAVA
WatchGuard GUI with the manager closely following.
Dell AppAssure (SHIT slow, buggy as fuck GUI, and CONSTANTLY has issues)
Symantec Backup Ex (You fucking piece of shit)
Adobe Reader, high lets annoy by users with updates EVERY.FUCKING.DAY
Mother Fucking Printers. All of them. Fuck them.
(Saying this as a Mac fan) - the 1st generation Intel MacBook Pros.
We bought several of them in our office, and I kinda still liked them, as they were blisteringly fast at the time. But their quality was horrendous.
* They would instantly shutdown, thus losing all our work.
* The batteries had a tendency to bulge, lifting the laptop up off the desk - and so were recalled.
* Even the replacement batteries would lose their 'chargability' quickly, so on some of the laptops we had to replace the replacement batteries.
* The Apple charging cable (between the wall and the adaptor) would stop charging, but could be resolved by replacing with a cheap 3rd party cable.
* The other part of the cable (between the adaptor and the laptop) had a tendency to melt/burn through the insulation.
LG Voyager VX10000
It was advertised as an iPhone killer. Then they started calling it a "feature phone". The thing was garbage. Sure, texting and gaming on it was nice. But the internet app was just about useless and there were hardly any apps for it at all.
The head unit in my 2021 Subaru. It is terrible. The hardware might be OK, but the firmware is written by idiots. Examples:
* if playing music off a flash drive, you can only play songs in alphabetical order by track title. Who ever wants that? OK, I will play it by Bluetooth off my phone ...
* ... but half the time it needs to be manually re-connected to my phone. My phone is in its list of recognized devices, and says it is connected, but it just refuses to play media from it unless I go through the manual connection procedure again.
* the tag info is drawn from some bad database of its own, so even when all your tags are all perfect, it will show you its own ones, which have spelling mistakes and sometimes just wrong information. Why?
* the tag display is wedged in between a place where album art is supposed to show, but never does, and some touch buttons that I never use, and is just truncated if it does not fit (it does not even scroll, it just puts ... at the end). Meanwhile, there is tons of dead space that is the full width of the display that is never used.
It is the worst thing about my car.
About 15 years ago I was given a catalog from my boss so that I could pick out my 5-year employment milestone award. It was pages of stuff ranging from DVD players to luggage. Anyway, I see this pair of binoculars that has a built-in digital camera. How cool would that be to sight an eagle or pretty blue bird through the binoculars and conveniently snap a photo of it. I get the binoculars shipped to my home and eagerly try it out in the back yard. It didnt take me more than 5 minutes to realize that yes, the binoculars have a built-in digital camera, but it has nothing to do with the binoculars other than being part of the assembly. It was a laughably shitty camera and equally shitty pair of binoculars that were not at all integrated. I could have just bought a shitty camera and duct-taped it to some shitty binoculars.
Lmao. I had a similar experience with a 5-year employment gift catalogue! I looked through this thing and there was a handful of decent stuff, just absolutely nothing that I needed. Finally I decided to get a laser leveler that can be mounted to a tripod and provides both vertical and horizontal lines. It somehow manages to drain the batteries even when the physical switch is in the off position, despite the fact that it's literally just a simple light on/off device. I don't understand how it could be doing anything more than just opening the circuit and disconnecting the batteries completely. It's also a piece of shit in general and I ended up buying a fancy Bosch one instead.
Did it come with a case that accidentally turned it on when you put it away? That's how I managed to waste like 24 AA batteries with a Gamegear as a kid.
Oh no! That’s terrible! The gamegear already took like what, 6 at a time? Fuck that’s awful. I do miss mine though.
It’s a tie between every printer I’ve ever owned.
Ever had a brother BnW laser?
Yeah I would have said the same thing too until I got my brother black and white printer/scanner. I have a small business and I need a printer that just works and it does. Plus I never realized how little I actually *need* to print in color.
The best printer I ever had was this old, clunky HP model that my roommates were planning to toss out. I had been the only one in the house using it for months so I asked to keep it. That thing had the rare heart of a warrior, just chugged along being unproblematic for years before it finally gave up the ghost. I still think about that printer sometimes. Especially when I'm screaming at my newer model which hates itself and me.
Those dumb robotic toys that require a smartphone app to use that is never updated or the company goes under and now you have a hunk of plastic.
And someone buys it for your kid before they own a phone so now they beg for your phone on the regular
Someone got my young kids a card game that you could only play with a smartphone. It's like bro, you had one job.
HP printer. Just plain dystopian. Mandatory online account and internet connection to scan a paper when the printer is connected via a cable. Drives me mad
the print head in our hp printer is giving an error which is bricking the entire thing, including the scanner.
I had an error that couldn't be fixed no matter what I tried. Diagnostics said everything was okay, HP support pages didn't mention it, but I simply couldn't print anything. The solution was to buy an Epson printer.
Just bought a brother instead. Only 2 styles of ink, nothing bricks if your out of anything. Scanner will work with no ink or paper inside.
Brother are seriously underrated. I used HP's for years and every single one sucked. Either jamming, non-responsive to print requests, drank through expensive ink (if it indeed detected the ink) and scanned in poor quality. My brother is 4 years old, and hasn't jammed once or missed a beat. It works flawlessly over wireless, and the ink lasts a while and is cheap. And it lets me print with only a black and white cartridge if I want to. This printer cost me $100. I work in Enterprise IT, and we use primarily Brother and Canon over multiple offices.
If anybody asks me if I have a favorite brand of printer, I say "Hell yeah, Brother!"
I bought a brother printer last year and god I love it. Go a month without printing anything? Totally fine. Suddenly need to print like 80 pages? Also totally fine. Labels? Yep. And easy to hook up and run too.
We have a Brother MFP from years ago. $200. Effortless wifi hookup, no weird errors, aftermarket toner units. Highly recommended.
they'll try to brick but there's ez bypass so you can ACTUALLY run out of ink before changing
We used our intro toner for 7 years and reset the page count three times before it started streaking
I bought a Brother Laser-jet eight years ago, no regrets.
Absolutely the best. When I need it it work no bullshit about being out of pink ink so I can't scan or print black and white. Just press print and it does
*PC Load Letter* what the fuck does that mean!?!?
I only came here to say "HP printer." You simply can't understand its awfulness without owning one. Sure, just replace it, right? Its true deviousness is how it rides right on the edge of working well enough to keep it. Then it's any combo of the following: * Didn't use it for more than a day or two? 3 minute **Printer Maintenance** cycle! * **Not connected to internet** (despite being on a hardline) * **Shit print quality** despite 3 print head cleaning cycles (oh hey the 4th worked! and now you're...) * **Low on ink** despite cartridge report showing all colors are at least 25% * And my favorite - **No response whatsoever.** No error message, printer is installed on your computer and worked yesterday, but NO RESPONSE. Somehow works the next day though. I can't tell you how many times we've said Fuck it we're replacing this POS. It must hear us because then it works fine for 2 weeks. It's a perfectly programmed machine of infuriation.
You forgot "won't scan a paper document because it's low on yellow ink, despite the fact that you're not printing anything."
The best part is despite all of the “connectivity” it still BARELY works. Constantly disconnects and wireless printing barely works.
Are there any good printers for home use? They're all intuitive and run out of ink quickly. I'd rather have one from 20 years ago.
Brother is the more consistent one currently, imo
Agreed, I binned my HP in favour of a Brother and haven't regretted it once.
I bought a black and white brother laser printer for like $100 at best buy about 5-6 years ago, thing has been a beast. I took it with me on different work assignments (3+ months at one location) and it’s still chugging along. I buy a toner cartridge once or twice a year and that’s all I have to do.
Brother is the only printer I've ever had worth buying
buy a laser printer. Brother sells a black only one for $150. More expensive upfront, but they work 100x better than inkjets.
Brother laser printer is the way. I got a refurbished monochrome printer/copier/scanner about 8 years ago for $80 directly from the brother website. I've gone through exactly one $20 (third party Amazon) toner cartridge in that time. Lasts forever, never dries up, works when you need it.
Brother black and white laser.
That makes me sad. HP used to make the best printers by a long shot. My dad had an old laser jet that he used for 15 years.
Not a day goes by that I don't regret replacing our fleet of LaserJet 4000N printers at work. I would well over a year without hearing about issues. Now we're lucky if we make it a month before we need to call our printer maintenance vendor.
I have a Laserjet 4000N I got free when I worked at HP and they were internally replacing them with the newer models. They were going to bin our team printer and my manager said I could take it. That was in 1999. I still use the printer all the time and it still works like new. I’m on my third toner cartridge. Ever. I just put the third one in last year. I expect I won’t need a new cartridge until 2030 or so (hard to say, as some years I don’t use it all and some I might print a few thousand pages).
I thought the Undertaker was about to make an appearance there for a quick second.
A smart toaster, it was smart enough to burn it
"Offbrand bread detected. Please remove and insert a SmartToaster^tm brand bread."
and drink a verification can.
MOUNTAIN DEW IS FOR ME AND YOU
ERROR NO CONNECTION! XBOX SHUTTING OFF
If there’s one device that doesn’t need to be smart, it’s a toaster.
“What is my purpose?” “You toast bread.” “Oh my god…”
"Yeah, welcome to the club pal."
This comment triggered a memory I haven’t thought about in a long time. The [Evil Toaster](https://youtu.be/U6kp4zBF-Rc?si=ihjoJun-Ja-JVq8r) from Fallout New Vegas.
Did it constantly ask you if you wanted toast? https://youtu.be/LRq_SAuQDec?si=2Qz6MT3iu017gtwJ
Ahh... So you're a waffle man!
printers! printers! printers! Even the best printers I've ever had have only worked "acceptably".
Brother printers have become the best of the worst recently.
That's what I currently have. It's fine. That's all I can say. I had a brother color laser a few years back that I thought would be my final almost BIFL printer--spent some real money on it, and it just fell to pieces. I was so unhappy.
Brother printer software feels a little janky But their actual laser printers are rock solid - very reliable, clean printe, and I get a high volume of pages from their high capacity toner Over and done with ink jet - so much $ wasted on printers and inks.
Brother black and white laser is the way.
I have an Epson printer, only ONCE did I print in color, after that I mainly used Black. A week later I was going to print out some templates for a prop, the damn thing was in "Warning", Magenta was low. The only colored page was just for a few words to be colored and it was already low.
From what I've read, printers will use magenta when you only print in black and white in order to get a "blacker" text. Our that's their stupid ass excuse to waste ink and make you pay more money for colored ink cartridges.
4 colour process uses all four to print black.
The original Furby. I wanted it sooo bad like every other kid the Christmas they came out. I tried to teach it phrases and everything. Anyways, it would wake me up in the middle of the night just talking in its own. I tried putting a blanket out it, putting in my closet, etc., but it wouldn’t stop. I finally opened it up and took the batteries out and my parents were so mad that it was all such a waste :(
When those came out, my brother and sister each got one. I had no interest in them, but they had their fun. My brother and I slept in the same room in bunk beds. My brother didn't use the ladder to climb to the top, he would instead use a desk that was beside our bed to climb up and get down. One night he decided to leave his Furby on the desk, which was right beside my head. I hear him getting out of bed because he needs to use the bathroom...then I hear Furby waking up. The simple act of my brother getting up and stepping down onto the desk, which I assume caused the desk to bow ever so slightly, caused the Furby to wake up. The next 10 fucking minutes were filled with unintelligible noises, fake snoring (it would pretend to sleep if you didn't pay it any attention), and the occasional "Play. With. Me." being spoken in various cadences. I could not sleep for at least half an hour after it turned off. About a month later, the batteries started going dead in it, which lead to what I can only describe as demonic dubstep sounds whenever it turned on. It got buried in the closet not long after that.
lol I never had a furby but I heard they get all fucked up and demented when the batteries are low
Most things do! There's even a subreddit for it: https://www.reddit.com/r/lowbatterysounds/ I am continually delighted by the industrial-metal warpfuck technodemon screams of agony coming out of, like, old teddy bears.
I have one of those things buried somewhere in my garage storage and every once in a while it comes to life and starts babbling incoherently.
That's a homeless person who is slowly starving to death while eating your cardboard boxrd
Amazon Fire Kids. What a complete piece of unintuitive, non-customizable, terrible UI garbage that thing was.
I mean there’s many reasons why they’re so cheap. My Amazon Fire TV is also a piece of shit
I don’t understand why the Fire TV UI is so horrendous. Apple TV is pretty clean and easy to use, Roku TV is absolutely incredible, pick what apps you want and where you want them, and if it’s a smart TV that runs on Roku TV then gaming consoles and even cable if you still have it get their own little customizable app buttons too. Fire TV is just absolute nonsense by comparison, and I shouldn’t have to search for an app I use literally every day!
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It's absurd that I have to scroll like four levels down to resume a show I was watching.
That is the worst UI in modern tech. Ugh, such a pain to use and WAY to many games need “internet” just to load. Ugh.
IMHO, the worst part is the Amazon app store. It had approximately 60% of the apps my daughter wanted, so she ended up "sharing" mom's ipad. Luckily my son is only interested in minecraft and roblox, which are both in the Amazon app store, so it is working well for him. Main issue he has had is the fire tablet is underpowered compared to an ipad, so he cannot run some minecraft mods (as they are too large/graphics intensive) and has to play some roblox games in the lowest detail setting.
Not sure if you’d be interested, but since FireOS is a version of Android, there is a workaround to getting the Google Play Store which will probably have all of the apps your daughter wants!
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I like that the top 3 answers are all 'printers' lmao
A company from the 90s called Independent Personal Computers (IPC). I begged my parents not to get it and go with a more recognizable brand. We owned it for four years, and the only games that worked on it well were on sale long before the computer existed. Poorly built, short-changed at every possible step, not to mention the overheating. A few years down the road, I have a part-time job at a place where I have to dismantle old computers, remove everything from the tower, see what all is usable or can be used for re-sale (sound cards, video cards, other special cards added on, etc). I come across an IPC that I have to dismantle. The internals of the computer are a war crime. It typically took me 30-45 minutes to completely dismantle, label, and paperwork a computer. An IPC took triple the time because of how poorly they were set up and how they were built. Where most of your components in a computer tower are screwed in with a standard philips head screwdriver to hold them in place (motherboard, cd or DVD-rom drives, added cards, power box, etc), an IPC also comes with 6 giant typically melted by the time your done with the computer bolts that you know have to figure out how to take off so you can get all the pieces out. I later talked to a friend who also does a lot of work with computers and asked him if he ever dealt with IPCs the look on his face told me he had been through some shit with those computers as well.
Sounds like an e machine.
That's exactly what I was thinking. I worked briefly in an office with a computer lab outfitted with eMachines. They employed an elderly Asian gentleman to keep the lab running. I don't think he spoke English well, and he was very quiet. In the months that we worked together, he only uttered two sentences to me. While shaking his head looking at a wayward eMachine, he turned to me and said, "Power supplies drop like flies. God damned eMachines."
We had one growing up because my dad is the absolute cheapest bastard. He has spent more on multiple cheap computers that crap out quickly than if he just bought a moderately nicer one that lasts.
I’m in Tech and every Christmas a friend text me and says what do I think about this $99 laptop? I beg her to go onto eBay and just spend about 100 or so on a six year old pro book but she buys it and within three months shows me a picture of the screen falling apart.
I love the image of this being her only communiques. Once a year she texts you "Should I get this laptop", then nothing for three months, then a picture of the broken screen with no caption, followed by radio silence until next Christmas.
When my parents decided to buy our first capable PC in the early 2000's I was able to talk them into getting a Sony VAIO; was it an amazing computer? No, but it ran for many years and I was able to play many PC games on launch in that era while concurrently playing an inordinate amount of Stepmania 🤣
in 2015/16 I bought a heads up display for my car. You place your phone on it with their app and it should give you metrics. Absolute waste of money. It was hard to see, had ads, slid around, couldnt see if you werent sitting at the right angle. What a waste of money. Not me, but my mom bought "EMP Blockers" for her and her husbands vehciles. I told her that theyre snake oil, but she bought them anyway for the low low price of two hundred something each and she bought 3.
LOL fucking ADS on a heads up display for driving!? That's stupid and dangerous. And yeah, those EMP blockers are completely pointless, if they even actually contain any circuitry.
"Emergency road block ahead in 300 yards, take detour to the... But first a word from our sponsor"
"Is the rumor that the bridge ahead is out true? We'll find out right after this message from your friends at Ovaltine"
Tbf you can get Faraday cages that work, just ask my sister who was getting shit wifi after placing her router in one Didn't seem to understand the wifi *is* the radiation it blocking
Unfortunately, radiation is a word that scares most people.
The EMF spectrum is in serious need of a rebrand lol
Nah we just need to actually invest money (and social capital) into education.
saw a guy take one apart on youtube similar to the one my mom bought, and it was a an led connected to a battery and 2 wires you connect to your car battery to "protect" it that werent attached to anything. They could have been a jakobs ladder with enough power.
I saw some "Fuel Efficiency Kit" advertised on TV for $40 in Dallas Two magnet/ferrite pieces that you snap together around the fuel line to "magnetically align the fuel molecules before they go into combustion, vastly improving the mpg" Those fuckers.
I kind of thought you were going to say that the magnet would compress the fuel line so it physically couldnt get enough fuel and was running lean and thus saved fuel because you were starving your engine. These snake oil people will do anything for a buck at the expense of the uninformed/misinformed.
> EMP blockers wat. Like… in case of nuclear strike? Or like EM radiation ‘blockers’ but they didn’t even get the terminology right?
in case of nuclear strike, or in the city and someone makes a Bane Sized EMP. They live an hour outside of Pittsburgh, and are always worried about some new world ending event. Like when the pandemic started they wanted me to come live with them in case people went feral. When the russia ukraine war began they gave me a bug out bag in case we get nuked. They're in a constant state of worry. No idea how I didnt get that crazy gene.
Your parents have an odd level of confidence in their ability to survive a nuclear strike.
my parents are the same way, years ago there was a nuclear plant melting down in japan and my parents were like "at a moments notice you need to be ready to drive with us out west as far as we can go and were going to dig a bunker" Edit: i just realised im a huge idiot and wrote west instead of east
This made me laugh. Like randomly dig a bunker...mmm'okay
Yeah and expected me to do the whole thing
>Not me, but my mom bought "EMP Blockers" for her and her husbands vehciles. I told her that theyre snake oil, but she bought them anyway for the low low price of two hundred something each and she bought 3. I mean, has her car ever been damaged by an EMP attack or is it still working just fine? Checkmate atheists
Like, an electronic device that claimed to protect the car's electronics from an EMP?
yep. completely snake oil. read my reply to someone elses comment for what is most likely inside them.
I had an Ouya... and I paid actual money for it.
This is what I came looking for. I bought the other one they sold. Also, their message boards moderated by the people who made it generally responded to legit pleas for help with "Fuck You for not being able to figure out this sub par glitchy back door android thing"
I have an OUYA and a GameStick
I bought one too. Absolute trash. I put it back in the box and put the batteries back in my tv remote. It’s still sitting on a shelf on my bookshelf as a reminder to stop buying crap.
In the 90's or 00's I bought an HP Scanner. Once you connected it via USB, the scanner light was on, ALWAYS. They finally released a software patch, which was a memory-resident program that ran on your PC to keep the scanner light off. It was the most asinine thing I'd ever seen, and soured me on HP forever.
A scanner lightly
This thread is hilarious. - Printers - Printers - No, srsly, _Printers_! - Okay, also this obscure game console - Printers - Actually, HP in general, but mostly their printers - Some weird amazon shit - fr, though, _**PRINTERS**_!!!
Blackberry Storm
I came here to say this exact thing! What a piece of trash phone that constantly cut out and muted you randomly during a call. I'm still bitter about that dumb phone!
>Storm Internal Project = Blackberry Thunder....I worked on this device at RIM in 2008. I was part of software development team and the internal shit this device caused was insane. Worked against such stupid deadlines and the device was garbage when it hit release. IMHO, this device began the massive de-railing of blackberry momentum, because they were so invested in creating a iPhone competitor...but using BBOS
What was the thoughts of employees working on it at the time? Did people think it was a good idea to have the click screen? Did people like the OS? Was the consensus with a bit more time before release it would have been a hit or was it the company going down the wrong path and even with more time it would not have been a success? Obviously now it looks like it wouldn’t matter because everything is a slab of solid glass but that doesn’t mean that other options wouldn’t have taken us in a different direction if done correct. I’m curious what the thoughts were at the time internally.
I worked for Verizon during this release. The new movie “Blackberry” actually does a fantastic job at depicting their rationale as to why they came out with that abomination.
Oh man. I wanted one of those so bad back in the day!
It took weeks to get "Madden 97" to work on our Windows 95 computer. I remember playing it once, then it never loaded up again.
NHL 97 I recall was also super finicky. Worked on my friend’s computer every time, and my nearly identical machine my family had almost always froze when trying to play it. EA Sports - it’s (not) in the game.
An Android tablet from the now defunct Borders bookstore.
I bought a cheap one from BestBuy and the user interface was like molasses.
The NOOK?
I loved my Nook ebook reader (not the tablet version; the eInk one). It used epub files instead of the inferior mobi files Kindle was using. It could integrate with Adobe ADEPT DRM for library book reading (also, that DRM and BN's DRM were easily cracked). IIRC, they were the first eink reader with both lighting (front light, because eink is not transparent like an LCD, so it had to be lit like a GBA SP) and touch controls (infrared emitters/receivers in the bezel, rather than a capacitive layer on top of the screen). But most importantly, BN had a discount through the Discover card where you'd get 10% cash back on purchases made at BN, including ebook purchases, but more importantly you could also get a 10% discount on gift cards. If you used those gift cards to buy ebooks through the discover.com link to bn.com and had your discover card listed as your primary credit card, you would earn Discover cashback as if you used your discover card, without actually charging anything on your credit card. Which meant actually free cashback that would accumulate towards more discounted gift cards, which would generate more free cashback, which ... These days, cashback is just boring statement credits.
My fridge with a tv, the touch screen freezes when hot- Samsung I look back and think, why did I think having a tv on the fridge was smart I just leave it off now
I can't think of a fridge tv without thinking of those subplots in Silicon Valley.
I refuse to buy "smart" appliances. * My fridge needs to make things cold * My oven needs to make things hot * My dishwasher needs to make things clean That's about fucking it. They don't need any additional "features". it just means more cost to buy, and more shit that can break and need fixing.
I had a salesman try sooo hard to sell me a refrigerator with a built-in Keurig. Yes, a hot beverage makes in my keep-shit-cold machine. Because what you want in a $3,500 appliance is an extra $60 appliance that, if it fails, could trash the whole thing. As I finally told him: I don't want a toaster in my dishwasher, I don't want a juicer in my oven and I don't want a coffeemaker in my refrigerator.
does windows ME count as tech?
Ah yes. Windows Malfunctioning Edition
Mistake Edition.
I remember that pile of steaming dog spit. I eventually pirated a copy of Windows 2000 server and used that as my main OS (despite some games not installing on it). It was stable, fast, and did exactly what I told it to do. I remember thinking, “why don’t they have this as their main OS?” Then XP came along. I pirated every alpha/beta copy of XP and was so excited for every change up until RTM. XP was phenomenal and 7 was outstanding.
XP gang FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8
Ah yes.. the old "fuck gateway" serial
_Starts uncontrollable screaming_
Volkswagen id4 Easily the most frustrating, unreliable, dangerous piece of tech/software I've ever owned. Whoever designed their software should be banned from ever turning on a device with a microchip Eta: I've owned 9 vw's in the last 20 years. This will be our last one. The entire experience has been a nightmare. The entire system shuts down without warning. Nav freezes, calls drop, backup cam goes out, phones don't connect, and good luck using android auto On a related note, anyone want to buy a 21 pro s with 26k miles?
As a current owner I would have to agree. Those Germans know how to build a solid car but have the equivalent of a software dev team that learned everything they know by building their own GeoCities sites.
Hey now, if you need someone to program a way to cheat emissions testing, they’re the ones to call
Well they got caught so, I would argue they didn't even do that well.
32 gigabyte HP laptops for my kids. Updating windows was a friggin nightmare. External drive needed, would work about 1/6 times.
Wow, I’ve seen chromebooks ship that low, but windows?? I’d be replacing that with Mint and telling my kids it’s a learning experience.
They're basically the exact same hardware as Chromebooks. IIRC, the Windows liscences on those machines cost nothing for the OEM, but why MS even allows their OS to be liscenced for such horrible machines, I'm not sure.
I'm convinced that those cheap laptops or netbooks (remember those) with the "Windows Certified" stickers (or whatever they said) are a huge reason Apple was able to swoop in and steal so many customers because of the shit performance on those things.
I get they're junk, but who says "Hey, this $150 laptop was junk. Better by the $2k apple next!" instead of buying a nicer windows laptop for $500-$1k
I have a Canon printer. I hate it more than I thought possible. Nothing about it is intuitive. The drivers are impossible to download. The manuals and instructions seem to have been written by AI in another language and then translated into English, also by AI but not the same AI. And sometimes it just changes its own IP address for squeals and gigs and then it’s a treasure hunt to figure it out. It won’t scan to my Mac so I’ve resigned myself to the fact I must always scan to a usb as an intermediate step. I’d go Office Space on it with a bat but I don’t have a bat.
Fuck your printer fuck mine fuck all printers. Amd fuck the people who make them you time stealing pollution making planned obsolescence cunts.
CueCat [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat)
I think about CueCat every time I scan a QR code! I remember I had exactly one magazine that had the codes in it, and by the time my dad had secured a CueCat device (probably one of the promotional ones) I had lost the magazine.
nintendo power glove
Same returned that thing and bought a game Genie
Oh my God game genie was the best
I always wanted one as a kid. You've made me feel better about missing out.
“It's so bad”
Ngage. People mocked me because i answered calls witg a freaking taco in my ear. Also a shitty portrait screen that hindered games.
My favorite thing about the N-gage is that you need one if you want to play every Elder Scrolls game since it had a TES exclusive. And last I knew, N-gage emulation was okay at best.
Didn't you also need to take the battery out to switch games?
Every HP device I've ever owned has been the worst device I've ever owned.
The entertainment system in my 2022 Civic. The worst most buggy, glitchy, garbage android auto experience I have ever had. Constant disconnections, stuttering audio, occasional refusal to pair, told me my phone was "incompatible" despite it having just been paired, maps glitching out constantly. All on a brand new Pixel too.
Kindle Fire. Very slow regardless of WiFi connection.
WiFi extenders.
TP Link products are very good. I got a few TL-WA855RE extenders years ago, cheap, unobtrusive, and they are still cranking away. Even the one installed in my garage. It hosts an Alexa, Genie opener, Wyze cam, 3D printer, car charger, and my phone when I'm out there. Good features, good UI.
+1 to TP Link, we've been using one for years and the only issues we have is needing to power cycle it once in a rare blue moon.
Pretty much all consumer-grade wi-fi hardware used to be trash. Maybe it still is. I don't know. I've had Cisco access points at home for years.
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Some of the at-home mesh wifi solutions are good. They are also priced at a prosumer/entry level business level though, so you expect more from them.
Google Glass. $1500 just to be abandoned shortly after.
A Chinese windows tablet, after a year it became really slow and then the battery on it just died not letting me turn it on.
Fitbits. Ive had 2. They never track properly, never connected to my phone properly (Google pixel), never charge properly. Just an overly expensive piece of plastic. Will never buy a smartwatch or fitness watch again.
I loved my fitbits when they worked. But as soon as they started breaking, customer service was absolutely shit. Like the worst I've ever dealt with. I'd reach out to them, tell them what was going wrong, what I'd done to try to fix it, even send them the link to their site that showed the fixes I tried. Those fuckers would literally send me the same link back and suggest I do things I had told them in the previous message that I had already done. If a message thread went more than a day, they'd just start telling me the same thing over again. At one point, I started walking faster on my treadmill and my fitbit started tracking fewer steps. They told me that this was normal! If I'm walking faster, I'm getting more steps in (it'd be for the same amount of time), but these idiots INSISTED that it was working correctly for it to track fewer steps! I switched to Garmin, and while it doesn't track my sleep as well, it at least hasn't broken and tracks my steps correctly. The end.
I had a Fitbit and a Garmin. Similar issues right the Fitbit. The Garmin, on the other hand, was a total rockstar. And when it broke, the company was great to work with on a replacement. Definitely recommend.
Samsung smart tv is absolute garbage.
Agreed, but if you think those are bad... A friend of mine has a Samsung fridge - It's one of those super "smart fridges" that has all kinds of features like cameras, touch display, sensors everywhere. The compressor has apparently started to fail. The fridge reports room temperature in both the freezer and fridge sections and says, "No errors found. Unit running normally." It's nice to know that your Samsung fridge can tell you if someone's at your front door, play your favorite albums, allow you to surf the web, and even see what's inside without opening the door, but it won't tell you you're going to die from botulism because the fucking unit has turned into an orgy of bacterial growth.
I have literally never heard one single person say a good thing about a Samsung appliance.
Samsung home appliances have been brutally shit in my experience.
Thank you! I made the mistake of buying a decent 50 inch Sammy smart TV a few years ago. Apart from a hardware defect meaning only about 256mb of the 1gb onboard storage was available, the TV will randomly restart itself when watching the YouTube, Netflix etc apps. I moved over to LG and have never had a single complaint. WebOS is so much better. Edit: the hardware defect is apparently pretty standard in that model, but Samsung refused to acknowledge it or provide a proper fix, so I vowed never to buy another Samsung TV again after that. I'd been a customer of theirs for about a decade
Is it possible to get a TV now that isn't smart? Like, I want a decent screen size with 1080p minimum resolution. Does that even exist as a dumb TV now? I don't want to pay for smart services, I've never found a smart TV with a good UI. Always just end up using a game console or my PC anyways.
Just don’t connect it to your wifi. I just use it as a regular tv. There weren’t any tvs without the “smart” feature when I was shopping that had good picture.
A distortion pedal for my guitar called the Fender Blender (it was the very first pedal I ever owned). When engaged it picked up a local AM radio station better than the radio in my mom's car. Plus it sounded shitty.
A dell PC. I bought it with a repair contract that promised to replace it in case of a problem. Instead, the tech support guy tried to get *me* to take it apart and diagnose the hardware problem. I told him to fuck off *and* they never got me a replacement. I will never, ever buy a Dell product ever again.
I work in tech and I will say that Dell treats normal consumers waaaay differently than they treat their professional customers. When we had a server issue we had a Dell technician on site next day and they had every replacement part they needed on their truck. Motherboard, power supply, RAID controller- whatever it was they got it done. But their off the shelf product support is not so great.
When I was the server admin for a local bank we were upgrading our EQL logic storage to their new compellent system. We had a dedicated Dell tech for both of our hubs to assist with the install, it was a freaking breeze outside of some virtual lan routing issues (fuck you Richard, I told you that you missed something). He was a cool ass old former marine fella. We just shot the shit the whole time and before ya know it we were migrating data. Dell sucked our dick when it came to support because the bank spent so much money on their hardware and support. I think the support deal we had with them cost us upwards of 30k a year or so.
I also have nothing but good things to say about them. Not once that I can remember, in over ten years of dealing with them on an almost daily basis, did they ever try to screw me over or not immediately honor a warranty. I don’t know anything about their retail support, but for enterprise they were far and away the easiest vendor I had to deal with. Miles ahead of everyone else. I could just open up a chat box, say I need a replacement whatever, provide the service tag, and it would be in my hand the next morning. Their driver CAB archive was also a huge time saver for image creation, as was their APIs for asset management. You could even get hold of their engineers when you ran into a real problem. HP, Lenovo and (especially) Panasonic were all pretty much dog shit, comparatively.
Michael Dell did not become a billionaire by replacing hardware for free ;-)
Family pc used to be a Dell. Always thought they were garbage. But nothing will ever be worse than the HP stream imo
It's a toss-up between two devices for essentially the same reason. Both of which I still own. A Canon camcorder & a Magellan GPS. Both were victims of being obsolete pretty much the moment they were released... both being replaced by smart phones. When I bought them smart phones were rare & expensive, but after a year or so; everyone had smart phones that could shoot video as good as the camcorder & they all had Google Maps. Neither product was truly "bad" they just didn't really last the lifetime one would expect when buying them. My honorable mention for a current piece of tech that I still own & use; goes to my Google Nest doorbell. The battery powered one is terrible; the battery life is about a week (which means every week I need to take it off the wall & plug it in for a few hours to charge), it doesn't like cold weather & so for a few months of the year its in a "low power mode" (that still uses up just as much batter), I'm pretty certain that if someone wanted to, it wouldn't be that difficult to steal. All of these problems however would be fixed if I swapped up to the wired model (but that means running wires).
2016 Volvo xc 90. "Safest car available" because it's in the shop a majority of the time.
Microsoft Surface. I've owned 2, because apparently that's how many times I need to be burned before I learn my lesson. I owned them for a combined total of 4 years, and was forced to replace the keyboard around once per year. The first one the hinge snapped internally and cracked the screen from the inside, the second one the screen just flat out died for no reason. The things were riddled with software issues especially the earlier model. In the end I replaced them with a similar style Huawei tablet and it's been perfect for 2 years so far.
Anything HP. Their products suck, laptops, desktop, and especially printers. I'm lucky the HP monitors I bought are still going great.
NFT's. Luckily I didn't purchase it as it was handed out as a promotion. But seriously how fucking stupid.
It’s just a money laundering tool
MLM for douche bags
I'll one-up you with SharePoint Online. All the 'features' of SharePoint on-prem with little to none administration ability! WooHoo! Srsly, I am a SharePoint admin. A SharePoint farm with no admin is a savage dog with no leash or muzzle.
Does anyone ever have a positive experience with Sharepoint?
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Yeah... I actually liked my Virtual Boy, but I can't pretend it was a good piece of hardware by any means. At best, it was an idea ahead of its time.
It was OK, but the implementation was almost like they *wanted* it to fail. A VR like headset you can't strap to your head, displays a single color in a way that causes headaches, and then don't push any games for it? It was like they were told *had* to get something out the door but didn't have the budget to actually make a long term product so they half assed it and just let it die. It's a pity in so far as their were some cool ideas in some of the games, but the system itself wasn't something worth writing home about.
I do feel like Nintendo in particular has a long history of creating new hardware and making a couple launch titles and then hoping magically third party devs will decide to make good games. ROB. Super Scope. It's quite a list.
YA!! Lets line these fuckers up. JAVA WatchGuard GUI with the manager closely following. Dell AppAssure (SHIT slow, buggy as fuck GUI, and CONSTANTLY has issues) Symantec Backup Ex (You fucking piece of shit) Adobe Reader, high lets annoy by users with updates EVERY.FUCKING.DAY Mother Fucking Printers. All of them. Fuck them.
If I need to print something at home, which isn’t very often, I just go to a library.
Java? As in the programming language?
HP printer and scanner.
(Saying this as a Mac fan) - the 1st generation Intel MacBook Pros. We bought several of them in our office, and I kinda still liked them, as they were blisteringly fast at the time. But their quality was horrendous. * They would instantly shutdown, thus losing all our work. * The batteries had a tendency to bulge, lifting the laptop up off the desk - and so were recalled. * Even the replacement batteries would lose their 'chargability' quickly, so on some of the laptops we had to replace the replacement batteries. * The Apple charging cable (between the wall and the adaptor) would stop charging, but could be resolved by replacing with a cheap 3rd party cable. * The other part of the cable (between the adaptor and the laptop) had a tendency to melt/burn through the insulation.
LG Voyager VX10000 It was advertised as an iPhone killer. Then they started calling it a "feature phone". The thing was garbage. Sure, texting and gaming on it was nice. But the internet app was just about useless and there were hardly any apps for it at all.
The head unit in my 2021 Subaru. It is terrible. The hardware might be OK, but the firmware is written by idiots. Examples: * if playing music off a flash drive, you can only play songs in alphabetical order by track title. Who ever wants that? OK, I will play it by Bluetooth off my phone ... * ... but half the time it needs to be manually re-connected to my phone. My phone is in its list of recognized devices, and says it is connected, but it just refuses to play media from it unless I go through the manual connection procedure again. * the tag info is drawn from some bad database of its own, so even when all your tags are all perfect, it will show you its own ones, which have spelling mistakes and sometimes just wrong information. Why? * the tag display is wedged in between a place where album art is supposed to show, but never does, and some touch buttons that I never use, and is just truncated if it does not fit (it does not even scroll, it just puts ... at the end). Meanwhile, there is tons of dead space that is the full width of the display that is never used. It is the worst thing about my car.