Ask Lemmy

I bought a router that had 5-10% package loss, it was basically trash, returned it of course.

Might sound weird but it was the PSP I imported at launch. 

Great device but that was when I realized I don't like handheld gaming. 

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

Barnes and Noble Nook HD+

I was all in on a 1080p tablet with micro sd card in 2012. And then it just shut off and never turned on again a few months out of warranty.

Then there was a Lenovo yoga tablet in 2014 with windows 8. The Intel atom processor was such a dog it just ended up being a solitaire screen and about nothing else.

Recently bought another cheap tablet for a different specific use case. We'll see if this one is a POS.

Trying to solve wifi dead spots across my then house. It didn't have wired conduits, so no ethernet between floors. Went through a series of range-extenders, multiple routers, everything from cheapo no-names, to TP-Links, Netgears, and Apple Airports. All sucked. Terrible reception in all the places that people hung out.

Then mesh routers showed up. Got a 3-pack and never looked back.

Edit: runner-up was an HP Inkjet printer. Every time someone needed a color print, one color ink was either out or dried out.

That BlackBerry tablet. It honestly wasn’t a bad device on some levels. It had features that weren’t as easy on other devices for some time. Like the fact it automatically got internet from my phone seamlessly.

But support for apps was garbage and the hardware the dumb. If you let the battery fully discharge you had to spend like 15 minutes plugging and unplugging the power to force it to trickle charge to get enough battery for it to start the system that ran the battery management.

Every smart phone. Without exception.

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.

An Eink smartphone from a Chinese company: Bigme Hibreak pro. It never worked, I sent I back for repair and they shipped it back to me in the same buggy conditions... Now it lies in a drawer completely frozen and unresponsive...

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...

Asus video cards.

I've owned 3 of them.

one caught fire, one failed in a spectacular flash of light, and one just quietly died.

Every single one of them managed to take rest of the system with them.

No I did not overclock/overvolt them, and yes I had good airflow/cooling.

I bought an HMD skyline phone based on the fact that it was a user serviceable device. I'd like to support that kind of thing so I took a gamble on a "goofy" phone. Best buy's website had a sale on them and I went for it. When it showed up it came out of the box with a dead USB port. It may be user serviceable but I don't want to user service it right out of the damn box so I took it back to a best buy store to try and get it replaced. They had never heard of it and wouldn't touch it. Turns out just because it came from best buy's website doesn't mean it came from best buy? I guess? Best they could do for me was to tell me to contact HMD, and the best HMD could do was have me ship it to somebody to get it repaired. This took weeks and when it came back the cameras weren't aligned properly anymore. I kinda gave up on it after that and bought a used Pixel from eBay. I jammed GrapheneOS onto it and never looked back. I'll never buy from best buy or HMD again.

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.

surface pro 4 maybe.. had swollen battery, yellowish screen, touch/stylus malfunction, charger connection issues, keyboard connection issue, heat/fan grinding noise, etc all right after the warranty just expired (3 years iirc?)

it still does boot and i've learnt a lot of computer stuff thanks to it though

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.

My partner bought a Skylight screen a month ago. I put it up, but it’s basically been unused since.

For me, there was this very early health tracking watch I got, which was so fragile that it would reset and lose all data if I did anything more active than walking.

Some Google TV that was well reviewed, but at some point shortly after I got it had a software update that made the UI unusablly slow. Like, 5-10 seconds to respond to every button click.

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.

A pager called MiniLink when I was 16 right before mobiles became common

The ASUS transformer with keyboard. As they did an update that made it super slow and clunky right before end of lifeing it.

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.

Zip drive

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

Our shitty MSI laptop