Asklemmy

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

HP Printer

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.

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.

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.

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?

Manual lawnmower.

The surface RT and windows ME e-machine computer were both a close second.

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.

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.

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.

HP anything, absolute trash

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...

Anything that relies on mini/micro USB for charging. With enough repeated use, they eventually cause an early failure of the device.

Not sure if it counts as technology but it was a Ford Focus.

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.

An iBook. I had the GPU replaced twice under warranty. I sold it after the second time. Never again.

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"

I think the Thinkpad X130e with the AMD E-240 CPU. That processor, really, was the bad part. Every little single thing you wanted to do was absolutely CPU-bound, even when it was contemporary and new (c. 2011-2012). The amount of time I wasted waiting for the fully hammered CPU to do literally anything was too much.

I bought the laptop used because I figured a tiny Linux laptop would be great. And other aspects of it were fine, such as the display, keyboard, trackpad, build quality, etc. But that stupid CPU totally killed the device. Such a regret.

A Huawei MediaPad M5 Lite.

Their own lower-end APUs are sooo slow (even worse than Samsung) and the bloated stock ROM doesn't help. The tablet was borderline unusable without limiting background applications (which for some reason reset every time you reebooted the thing), and it's not like it ever got any updates.

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

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.

Any and all dishwashers and refrigerators I've ever owned. Fuck planned obscelence.

Anything that accesses Expedia.com

A Xiaomi smartwatch. I never found any good use for its "smart" features and I had to charge the fucking thing all the time. So I ended up dropping it after a year in favor of a regular digital watch.

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