What are the worst tech purchases you or your family have ever made?
I watched a video recently and wanted to know what other have bought over the years.
Thinkpad L390 Yoga. They crammed a 4.6 GHz CPU into a cooling system that was not designed for it, so the machine ran hot and throttled all of the time. The keyboard keys rubbed off after a few months of use. The Thinkpad logo was just a sticker that one day decided to stick to my hand because Lenovo used really cheap glue. It had a MicroEthernet port with a passive adapter that did nothing but break it out to a regular ethernet jack. The adapter cost 30€ and its cable turned into oil after a year.
I was able to undervolt the CPU and make it barely passable, then Microsoft released a Windows update that prevented undervolting. Gave it to a friend afterwards and got myself a GPD Win Max 2.
The Outa console. It’s sitting in my shelf in my officefas a reminder of how dumb I can be.
the video version of the echo devices.
~$800 headphone setup. My then-employer paid for more than half of it, so I splurged a bit. Got refurbished planar magnetic headphones for ~$500 and an amp for ~$300. I later bought a balanced audio cable (I don’t remember the price, maybe $20—50).
It sounds good, but I’ve also been down the Chi-Fi IEM rabbit hole before. I think I could get similar results from $150—250 Chinese IEMs.
Raycons. Got suckered by the YouTubers. They were garbage right out of the box. They could barely maintain a connection with each other, and the sound quality was awful.
Razer Diamond back gaming mouse, shit at clicking, shit quality, over priced
Bohmann air-conditioner, broke after few hours of usage at most. Well within warranty, the reseller(Mediamarkt), and manufacturers took me for a long long ride until I eventually gave up on getting my money back…
Ringconn Gen2 smart ring. Battery issues. Eventually wouldn’t hold a charge for an entire day. This is after being sure to charge it from no lower than 40% and generally no higher than 90% Completely unusable after a year.
I’ve bought some different smart switches and bulbs that changed hardware but not model number thinking I could flash them to ESPHome.
Old crazy HP pisser of dad died a slow dead, needed a new one. I sent him a link to the Local online tech retailer, filters all set to bottle printers. One day dad wrote me, he was just in (i think Fust? Some local tech retailer), they only had HP printers, i should come set it up. Still crazy behavior in Cups but at least a laser this time. Half a year later, he bought new toners of 500$ for the 300$ printer “it’s the last one i need before retirement, i swear!”.
Old crazy HP pisser of dad died a slow dead, needed a new one.
I hate those HP pissers! It’s hard to get the stains off the floor.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Holy fuck, that would make me quickly turn around nope away.
The Bosch SmartHome outdoor camera.
The only way to view the stream is through their app and over the cloud, and the recordings are kept in the cloud exclusively. There is no way to use it without the cloud account. Everything is slow, choppy, unreliable and buggy as hell. Replaced it with Frigate running on our homeserver and a proper Hikvision IP camera. Much better quality, viewable from everywhere, much faster, ultra reliable, perfect.
I bought a router that had 5-10% package loss, it was basically trash, returned it of course.
Just keep the package?
A plex lifetime pass. Was okay until the company went crazy. Now I use Jellyfin and I’m happy.
I remember when I started using Plex it was great. And then each update made it harder and harder to use, until I was struggling to find my own media. I still don’t understand what was wrong with them. Jellyfin just works. It’s infinitely better.
On the flip side, it was one of my best purchases. The sync feature has historically been great and I’ve had over a decade of use out of it for that single payment. I hate every update they make, but Jellyfin clients still don’t have as good of a sync feature and that’s what I use a ton of for traveling.
Audio set up, microphone, DAC and headset, a friend recommended for me during covid. My, now, husband was in disbelief on how crappy it actually is and well now i have studio quality for almost the same (just 100€ extra) what i paid back in covid times
Convinced my mum to splash out on an Amstrad Emailer. It looked really cool and could store your phonation, and had emails.
3 months later, my Dad is checking the landline phone bill which is expensive for some reason. Turns out the Amstrad phones a premium rate phone lime every night. Managed to switch it off but then the whole thing stopped working saying it needs to do that to work.
Nowhere did they mention this, or at least it was not clear to both of us. Absolutely dodgy fuckers.
My brother and I saved up money for a few months and bought the Nintendo Virtual Boy… We were not too happy with it so we thought we just needed to buy better games. That was not a viable solution for that POS.
Let’s see… One that comes to mind that I guess is “tech” would be Substance Painter and Designer, back when it was independently owned and had an indie license.
“This will really take my Blender work to the next level. I’m going to LEARN this. Let’s freaking go.” I said, and “invested” like $150 into it.
I’m NORMALLY a FOSS nut, but this software was changing the game! Paint directly on 3d models with smart materials and layers and dynamics‽ AWESOME! Maybe it’s worth paying a chunk of my meager part time income for quality software…
Then comes the email:
Subject: “Substance is joining the Adobe family!”
Then the follow-up to all the pissed off customers:
“Don’t worry, it won’t be subscription only.”
Maybe a month later it’s part of the “cloud” and made subscription only.
I don’t care what’s “iNdUsTry sTaNdArD.” I refuse to engage with Adobe for any reason, and I’d rather put my hard earned money into supporting open source community tools than to ever get rug pulled by some shameless sellout ever again.
