Ask Lemmy

I think I'd have to go with the HDMI switch I bought for work. There were some limitations, like it couldn't do more than 1080p, but otherwise it worked quite well for what I needed it for. The reason it was my worst purchase is because when I was illegally fired from that job, I wasn't allowed to collect my things from my desk. They assumed it was theirs and they never returned it. I got the better deal though, they didn't keep track of KVMs so I never returned mine

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.

Pretty much anything that was "a really good deal".

An early Purism laptop. That was the most lemony lemon that ever lemoned. Components failing, keyboard was shit, the case just fell apart. I think I had to replace it after 6 months because I was tired of its shit.

Intellivoice Voice Synthesis Module for Intellivision

My wife and I bought those stupid Surface tablets. Not really sure why. Too big to be comfortably portable, too small to be useful at home. At least the magnetic keyboard thing makes a good mousepad for my desktop PC.

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.

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

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...

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.

I owned a MindDrive. It did not help me get better at CS like I had expected. 😔

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.

Those HD fans they had didn't cool anything but the vibration wrecked the HD.

Every smart phone. Without exception.

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.