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.
Any and all dishwashers and refrigerators I’ve ever owned. Fuck planned obscelence.
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.
An iBook. I had the GPU replaced twice under warranty. I sold it after the second time. Never again.
A Huawei MediaPad M5 Lite.
Their own lower-end APUs are sooo slow (even worse than Samsung) and the bloated stock ROM doesn’t help. The tablet was borderline unusable without limiting background applications (which for some reason reset every time you reebooted the thing), and it’s not like it ever got any updates.
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.
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.
My last Epson is a model from 2009 and still somehow works perfectly. Every Canon I’ve owned was garbage.
Well, the question for me back then was printing wide, so the selection was quite limited from the start. And laser was completely out of the equation, as anything printing wider than 21cm was industrial (size of a bus and price of a house) back then.
Ink stinks, but I’ll condone the toner. Inkjets are so unreliable compared to lasers. Good luck, but I worry you’re stacking the deck against yourself a bit with the ink and would hate to see you lose here.
Don’t worry, I consider lasers, too.
I have a brother color laser + scanner. Love it.
I’ve had it for 8 years now, and so far it’s only on its second set of toners etc.
The only warning I give to brother printer owners is don’t leave them on. The capacitors in them aren’t the best and your printer will either not turn on without a long power off, or like mine it will turn on and off randomly all day and night.
So now I only turn it on at the wall when I need it, and unplug it after
I got an HP printer and it’s prints reliably when connected via USB but that’s about it.
I went from a cheap mp3 player that I could just plug in to my computer and drag in music to an iPod which forced me to download the iTunes bloatware create an account and then took 100x longer to transfer music because of the pointless conversion each file had to undergo. This was my first and last experience with a personal Apple device. Ended up putting some old pop music onto it and giving it to my grandmother after 2 days. Uninstalled iTunes and went back to using my cheap mp3 player until I replaced it with a smartphone.
Coming in as a close second place, an all-in-one Sony Vaoi computer that cost a fortune and had shit performance. Took daily nags to Sony before they took it back and gave me a refund. I find that Sony’s hit and miss though. My favourite smartphone (Xperia Play) was Sony, and I love my Sony Bluetooth earbuds. The Sony Smartwatch was shit.
Anything that relies on mini/micro USB for charging. With enough repeated use, they eventually cause an early failure of the device.
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
My jabra 85 elite last me for a solid >12h of continuous play
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
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.
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.
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.
Google Home. Bought them for $40 CAD and back then they were great. Responsive, did quick google searches, played my music all over the house.
Over the years they’ve lost functionality. Mine no longer accurately respond to voice queries and no longer complete google searches. I can still play music on them manually from my phone but when I ask it something, it responds back in French or does something completely different than what I had originally asked.
Worst part is that I ask it something, it does something different, and then when I say “hey Google stop” it just keeps going and going. Have to manually pull the plug for it to stop.
I have the ring doorbell and a home blob which I only use to play the doorbell tune in the house. It is 50/50 luck if the tune plays when someone presses the doorbell button.
Have you tried “arrete?”
Used to love it, had too many weird promptless experiences, unplugged it and now it’s gathering dust on a shelf.
Though it was nice to say “Hey google, tell me today’s news” and get a few different news updates while making coffee.
Edit: Out of sheer curiosity, have you tried factory resetting it?
I’ve factory reset every Google home of mine multiple times over the years. Never had any effect.
HTC Droid Incredible.
It kept telling me its storage was full when it was nowhere close, and then because it only allowed over the air factory resets, it couldn’t even erase and reformat itself. It was the top rated Android phone at the time and it’s why I’ve never gone back.
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.
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.
