Ask Lemmy

Easily 1000% my Samsung TV.

Each update somehow makes it slower, it always loads up whatever the Samsung TV app thing is before it will do anything with a menu so you can get out of it, I believe it requires a Samsung account before it will allows you to do anything, and every now and then it locks up so hard that I have to factory reset it to get it to work again.

I refuse to buy anything from Samsung ever again.

Anything Samsung. The appliances fail fast (TV & washing machine in my case), and the smartphones are constantly getting more and more enshittified (speaking as a long-time customer since the 1st Galaxy S all the way to S23).

An out of date, yet new, drawing tablet. Obsolete at the touch of a finger...

I'm not sure if they count is a "tech purchase", but I bought all new Samsung appliances in my previous home (washer, dryer, refrigerator, and dishwasher). The washer and dryer failed catastrophically within 6 months, the dryer drum cracked and shredded a whole load of clothing into confetti and the washing flooded my kitchen and ruined my cabinets (it was a weird house layout). The refrigerator just had random parts dying over and over (water dispenser, lights, sensors, ice maker) until it finally died at the year mark. The dishwasher made it nearly to year two before the control panel died and the replacement part was more expensive than an entire new unit. Never again Samsung!

Tablet - it was a middle ground that I never found a use for

If I'm out and about, I'm not dragging the tablet with me and will just use my phone.

If I'm home, I'll use the computer.

I'm not saying that tablets are bad or useless, they just aren't for me.

Mother bought a pair of "light therapy" glasses many years ago from a Russian quack site. It was basically a pair of blacked-out safety glasses with ~8 LEDs for each eye and a button cell to power it all. All circuitry and wires fully exposed and visible. You'd set your program and it would cycle through different colors for a predetermined time. Also came with a knock-off Chinese iPod and some gas-station headphones, preloaded with "relaxing sounds from nature." You were expected to lay there for 30 minutes with your eyes closed as it did its thing. This cost around 600€ in 2019. What an absolute scam.

During Covid I ordered a little screen replacement kit from a cheap Chinese company, and they said it was delayed due to Covid, so I was trying to be patient, but then the company disappeared. Unfortunately, I was too patient and the six months went by so I couldn't reverse the charge. Only time I've ever gotten scammed, and I was pissed because I had even looked them up before I ordered and they seemed to have decent reviews until after and everyone was calling them out. I don't know if they were legit then collapsed during covid or they put a lot of effort into looking legit with fake reviews. Lesson learned I guess.

fuck samsung!

I bought an HD DVD player as a youth. I don’t think I need to explain further

Any Razer product ever. Shit company, laptop battery fucked itself, keyboard doesn't work, mouse falling apart

A plex lifetime pass. Was okay until the company went crazy. Now I use Jellyfin and I'm happy.

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.

Movies for my PSP. A lot of them.

I bought a MacBook Pro for iOS development. It was alright until Apple decided to exclude it from future OS updates, preventing me from using it for it's sole purpose, and forcing me to either buy a new one or stop developing iOS apps. Guess which one I chose. There is nothing wrong with the hardware, it's still got a 2TB SSD, 16GB of RAM and 16-core CPU but apparently Apple thought they could make more money off of me by intentionally barring it from updates to force me to buy a new one, rather than simply allowing me to install MacOS updates. They were wrong.

Edit: 8 physical cores, 16 logical

Zip drive

• First generation Samsung Android Watch (Just plain useless)
• Asus Transformer TF101 Tablet (Bloated UI)
• Acer C720 Chromebook (a bit better after installing Xfce over ChromeOS)
• Fiio M11 DAP (it's chunky and I just never use it)

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.

I bought an after-market touchscreen entertainment/navigation unit for my 2008 car from some online place selling cheap Chinese gear.

It was so slow it was nigh on useless. I'd be halfway home before the maps would finally start, and Spotify would just crash. I pulled it out after a few weeks and went back to the stock unit.

I bought a Wii U. It had some good games at the time, but Nintendo's strategy over the last 10 years has just been to rerelease those games with better performance and new content. I wish I'd just waited.

Windows Surface Pro 3

Worst purchase of my entire life. Every update broke some function of the tablet. At one point no stylus would pair with it so i had to use have gestures, then another time the detachable keyboard wouldn't work so i had to use a USB keyboard. The final straw was that the tablet updated, rebooted, and powered off and wouldn't turn back on for like 3 months... Until randomly in the middle of The night it finally woke up.

Not sure if it qualifies as tech, but a hybrid water heater. Was twice as expensive, sometimes provided only luke warm water and finally the compressor gave out prematurely. Should have just bought a normal one.

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.

All three different aux to usb-c adaptors I have bought..
The "best" one was the cheapest aliexpress one.

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.

I got a cheap dash cam off Temu a few years ago. I’m sure I don’t have to explain beyond that.

Yes. I’m an idiot. I know. I’ve always known.

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 got an ouya.

The controllers keys stuck.

You had to give them your credit card in order to get an account.

The games were ok if you could get over the 1/2 second of lag between button press and game.

Cheap chinese Android tablet that was supposedly 8-core 16Gb ram. It's an absolute piece of shit, I think my S4 has more juice. It's a paperweight now after the Ali seller disappeared.

I bought an Xbox One to play D3. Nobody else did and then the rest of the episodes got cancelled.

I bought a System76 laptop once. Poop_OS! was fucking awful and when I owned it their updating application especially was and had been left buggy and broken for years. So I put Fedora on it instead which then stopped working shortly after. The kernel just wouldn't load past a certain version and I gave up waiting for a fix and just e-wasted that miserable piece of shit with tinny speakers and bruise inflicting pointy metal casing. I have no faith these guys can make Cosmic not blow ass when they struggled to make a basic update GUI function for YEARS.