Asklemmy

It's hard to top the inkjet printers I've owned. I still can't believe 30 years later home printer tech is not only unimproved but worse between lower quality production and squeezing people on ink costs.

The worst piece of tech I currently own is a small server that must have hard drive issues cause it forgets everything when it restarts and I have to set it up again.

The worst piece of tech that I have ever owned in my life is a CD Cleaner I bought from GameStop back in the day. That shit was straight up a sacrificial altar. It never cleaned. Only consumed.

I bought a dehumidifier off amazon that was "rated" for 800 sq ft.

Not only did it not live up to that promise, but it also served as the worlds shittiest ice maker. Ice formed on the radiator inside and stoped it from dehumidifying the air.

Thats right, you too can have a ice maker that makes ice in the shape of a radiator while ineffectively dehumidifying your home!

Best part was they reached out after I left a one star review and what they could do to change my rating.

I said "Nothing. Make a better product"

A smart egg tray. It was in fact quite stupid. Mainly purchased it because of how absurd it was.

Main issues:

• it was constantly wrong about how many eggs were in the tray
• it was wrong about the eggs age.
• it took 6AA batteries that only lasted a month at best.

The Cuecat: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat

Came at a time when there weren't barcodes everywhere and QR codes didn't exist yet. Companies had to publish Cuecat specific barcodes, it was much easier to just type in the URL by the time you figured out you could use it at all.

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...

smart doorbell that takes 25+ seconds to fire up a video feed, and errors out most of the time. (Original Ring doorbell, received when they bought out my kickstarter Doorbot and bricked it)

or the Lockitron smart door lock from Kickstarter which took like 6 AA batteries and couldn't muster the strength to unlock the door more than like 3 times.

but least they worked together in failure.

Samsung appliances. Fridges. Washing machines.

Got them as part of the rental unit. They're very new looking. But every month is some new mess up.

God I would replace them if I owned this place.

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.

"Sony MDRXB55AP Wired Extra Bass Earbud Headphones/Headset with Mic for Phone Call, Black"

Biggest pieces of shit I have ever disgraced my ears with. I'm not even an audiophile or a gear snob or anything. These were just so ridiculously bad that it was offensive. I've owned earbuds from the dollar store that sounded better than these.

Does anyone remember MSN WebTV?

It technically worked.

Oooh I had an Intel Atom Vaio Netbook as my first ever computer I actually owned, given to me as a gift by parents for school. I asked for a gaming laptop, so I was real bamboozled by it.

Somehow though I managed to grief my friends' Minecraft server with /set 0 and enderdragon spawn spam while talking to them on Skype, but it was painful, opening a web page took literal minutes sometimes and my internet wasn't the fastest back then but it wasn't too bad either like 5-10mbps easily. But it wasn't the worst.

That honor goes to an MSI gaming laptop. It was actually really powerful, quad core, 16GB RAM, 8GB VRAM, MSATA SSD and a 1TB HDD that is still alive and in a JBOD setup with mergerfs in my server today serving me shows to watch thru Jellyfin.

In 2014 it was nothing to scoff at, the 880m ran GTA V on almost the highest settings at 1080p and it had tons of storage.

But as a computer it was just fucking terrible, the screen is the dimmest, most TN LCD blue filter shit you've ever seen, it was all I had so I watched things on it, and it just always made me depressed that I was watching beautiful films and shows and playing games through this awful blue filter that had no warmth, everything looked like some movie dementia flashback.

USB port melted itself and made some random parts of the case have an electric surprise for you sometimes, keys popped off if you breathed on em but not like you would want those keycaps to stay on because they were disgusting, speakers sucked in dust and vibrated it inside, making all audio feel like earrape at any volume, headphones jack flew out, touchpad was off to the side because of the dumbass numpad, ethernet port fried entire cables, DVD drive wouldn't read disks, dumbass UEFI firmware locked down to shit, took forever to disable secureboot and the setting would get lost randomly.

About 3 years later, the AC port fried itself and would work like a pair of dodgy earbuds and I had to sit there rotating it like I was finding a radio signal in class, battery was long gone by then so it would shut off at random, which made android app dev I was doing at the time on it somehow even worse of an experience.

Still have many fond memories of my times with it but man did I not miss it at the time.

I replaced it with a 2010 ThinkPad X201 I got for 50 bucks and loved it, I proudly used and abused it and showed it to everyone like it was my first dress with pockets until I eventually blacked out on xanax and procedurally took the entire thing apart and flashed ??? onto the firmware chip and couldn't put it back together ever again.

Power Glove

HTC Vive. Not necessarily this specific tech itself, but VR gaming more broadly. My friend and I were ginning ourselves up for years before it came out. I dropped a lot of money on a gaming rig for it. And when I put the googles on... I fucking hated it. I didn't like standing and gaming. I didn't like being so isolated from everyone else in the house. And the games were glorified tech demos slapped together with unity assets. By the time Half Life Alex came out, I had no more fucks to give.

The porn was fun though.

Right now? I'd say first alert smoke alarms. The batch we bought all has failed in an "alarm always, and don't stop" kind of way. They are only two years old, and I'm frustrated.

A self mowing lawnmower, it moved so randomly and was so specific for its operation parameters that I ended up just going back to manually mowing.

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

Either an hp ink jet printer.

Or my apple watch. The apple watch step counter is just plain broken. I can say hey siri a dozen times it may or may not respond.

Printers i swear all of them hate me. I love it, but just cant deal with printers.

Every piece of hardware I've used past 2010 or so seems to have just gotten worse and worse, I honestly think I'm cursed.

2013 (? can't quite remember), Sager gaming laptop with sli gpu config, gpus drew too much power for the battery (I believe), leading to black screen and reboot. Company feigned ignorance, ran unrelated tests on RMA, Socially awkward at the time and was scared to ask for a refund. Convinced to this day it was a scam.

2015, desktop computer I built randomly powers off during usage, no errors, not the power supply, unsolved to this day.

2020-2022 5 cheap ebay thinkpads, all with one hardware problem or another. My beloved T60p was the last to go.

2022-present Framework laptop, ports suffer intermitent failure, webcam microphone stopped working. Replaced webcam/microphone, works for a day, breaks again. Unsolved.

2022-preset Steam deck, had to RMA 3 times for various hardware issues, works now, but the right trigger still rubs against something but I can live with it. Spilled coffee on the left trackpad so it's sticky; that's my fault though so I can't blame it on the curse.

Tablets. I've owned 2 so far, plus fucked around with a third, fancier one that was borrowed from someone else (in case you care: a very old Samsung one, a Xiaomi model from the late 2010s, and a new-ish Apple iPad for the borrowed one).

They suck as smartphone replacements because they are too big.

They lack button inputs, so they suck as gaming devices or as computer replacements.

You can browse the web... But if you decide to type anything, the large size plus the touchscreen keyboard make for an awkward experience (in ways that it's not on a smaller phone)

They have lit screens, so they suck as eReaders.

They're sorta okay as like, personal screens for watching movies or whatever, but like, at that point just use a television??

They can make sorta good drawing tablets, the ones that are pen-compatible I mean... Because I mean, yeah. But the lack of a keyboard is a bummer with how I learned to draw with my other hand on Ctrl+Z, though that's more a muscle memory issue than anything.

In general, every tablet I used felt like a less-good verion of a dozen other devices, yanno?

A Surface RT ... Slow, barely any software support. Totally lost whatever trust I had for Microsoft.

I had to buy a Clicker for college in a day when any number of phone apps, or even the Smart board, would have done exactly the same thing. I think it cost about $150 and the only thing it did -- THE ONLY THING IT DID -- was serve as an expensive and drastically crippled version of Kahoot. Abject waste of money for all parties involved.

https://www.amazon.com/Scrubbing-Bubbles-Automatic-Cleaner-Starter/dp/B001QJAHIY/

Maybe not this exact model, but 20 years ago when I was a young gun in college for the first time, I got one of these because I hated cleaning the fucking shower and tub.

It worked about as badly as you'd expect. I don't know if modern versions are any better, but holy shit they're a lot more expensive than they used to be. I remember spending like $40 at the time.

I quickly learned to just wipe down the shower after use and clean it more often. Thing was fucking worthless.

Anything with fucking Bluetooth. Even in 2024 getting it to connect consistently requires some kind of arcane magic

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.

Amazon kindle. It didnt let me plug it into my computer and upload books to use it without internet access. Everything needed sending through amazon. I should have expected this but it was so locked down and filled with ads to the point it was unusable. I attempted to jailbreak it and it bricked so i threw it away and went back to using calibre on my computer. I would really like an offline open source ebook reader.

OUYA

Windows OS

I had an ouya.

That was pretty terrible.

The games were actually really fun....but the console was basically a really slow phone. And the controllers had sticky buttons. But worst of all, all games lagged badly. Like half a second or more on some games.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat

These things were trash and the concept was even worse.

If you count cars: A Skoda Octavia PHEV.

I love Skoda. I love the Octavia. It was my fourth Octavia and I already ordered two more for my staff. PHEV would have been ideal for our use case.

Well,things didn't go as planned.

The whole car was bugged with software and hardware problems from day one - controll units randomly crapping out, when my dealer wanted to replace them he often had to get 5 units because four would be DOA and the one that worked kicked the bucket before I left his premises. Highlights:

• A steering wheel coming loose (only slightly,but still)
• The main display that shows your speed,etc. randomly shutting down. (Especially nice as I live close to Switzerland with their exorbitant speeding tickets)
• Randomly playing a screeching sound at full volume (especially nice at 3am or when on a highway)
• Randomly shutting of AC, some motor controls , etc.

It took 12 months for VW to take that steaming pile back, and only we sued them (Shortly before the hearing).

Second place goes to LG which sold me a OLED TV for 2k that randomly showed faulty pixel lines exactly 3 years and 3 days after I bought it (so it's out of the extended warranty programs as well). And when asked for a quote for the repair they had the audacity to ask for almost the new price for the TV back then, aka 150% of the current market value - without even looking at it first. Good way to make sure that I never buy LG anymore.