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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
The iPhone
Samsung M540 "Slyde" phone - The software was incredibly buggy including things like just randomly typing the wrong letter. Randomly bad tech is so much more irritating than tech you know is bad.
Google Nexus 7 (2012) - The tablet had defective chips that slowed down over time. Turned into a horrible slow piece of shit over time.
When I was a child in the 90s I somehow scored a voice role in a hotdog commercial for the radio. I was paid a king's ransom for this, half of which my parents made me put in savings (wise), and half of which I spent on a brand new Sega CD (not wise).
The magic of postage stamp-sized full motion video took about three days to wear off, at which point all that was left was basically pure shit. They jacked me. At least I learned that lesson early.
I purchased a razor branded Smartwatch, way back when. Thing could barely connect to my phone, it's battery life was atrocious when it did, and all it did was show the time and track steps. It didn't have any built-in notifications so you had to use a separate app. This was fairly early in smart watches though, it was pretty fad-esque.
My current Amazfit smartwatch. The only good thing about it is the long battery life.
It's a piece of crap otherwise. Requires the data harvesting app to always be running in the background or it loses connection to my phone. It's slow, has ugly watch faces and the custom ones are awkward to install. I can't get it to work with Gadgetbridge. The always on display is so dim that it's useless. Pinging my phone doesn't work.
I don't know why I let the Internet convince me that spending £120 on this thing was a good idea. I'm going Casio or something next time around.
Reeder tablet that came as a promotion with something. Could barely keep a single app open, sometimes. At some point low spec just means e waste
Metal detectors, just in general. My BF has one and the metal detectors just don't like me for some reason, I could never achieve success with it, like everything was a needle in a haystack. He was always "the detector" and me "the photographer" and I guess stuff just doesn't transfer over well.
I was willing to put up with a lot of sacrifices for a $100 smartwatch but I was not expecting the level of trash I received. Unappealing and cheap looking silver colored case, typos in menus, and navigating the painfully underperformant UI made me immediately regret my purchase. There were many other issues I’ve since pushed out of my memory. I packed it up for a return within 24 hours.
The ONLY positive was supposedly the battery lasted weeks but I didn’t want to use the damn thing for more than 5 minutes.
Nintendo Wii: as a loyal Nintendo purchaser here from the Game & Watch, to the Super Nintendo, N64 and GameCube, but the Nintendo Wii never let me back up my purchased downloaded games in a way I could transfer to another Wii without online access. I get that that's now standard but it was the first time I was burnt by it.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybiko
The Cybiko. Got it for Christmas and my father threw out the box before I could get the rebate for the mp3 player attachment. Didn't know any other kid with one, so the wireless communication was useless. The games all sucked anyway. Gaming on rubber buttons was always a terrible idea
Amazon Fire Tablet 7in. I bought it literally just to read PDFs, and it was so slow that it was basically unusable. I tried switching out the launcher to something more minimal (Niagara launcher I think), and I figured out how to disable the ads that were all over the place. It helped a bit, but not enough to overcome the hardware and Fire OS. (I think I needed ADB for both of those fixes; I had to put in some real work to unfuck that tablet.) Plus the screen was too small for my pathetic human eyeballs.
Was it worth $30? At the time, yeah, because I literally couldn't afford anything else, but I now have an $80 10in generic Android tablet that's wildly faster.
Any Bluetooth headsets on Windows 11. On Windows there are two modes for Bluetooth headsets: One with high quality audio and no microphone, one with lower quality and mic support. On Windows 10 was able to change the mode, but on Windows 11 you can't actively change it anymore, because "the software decides" this mode. So ever few weeks my headset switch to the output only mode, get stuck, and I cannot make a call with my team mates. The workaround is time consuming and frustating.
Too bad I have to use Windows for work. Most companies do not have Linux option, even for devs.
Any and all dishwashers and refrigerators I've ever owned. Fuck planned obscelence.
My Seat Leon car. VW really shat the bed with their latest gen cars.
Not sure if it is was the worst but I had a Ngage Q. You know the taco shaped gaming phone? Only that it was the less taco shaped version. And it was in 2009, several years after those things failed. It was a decent phone actually and it had tony hawk pro skater, very playable.
But yeah ugly as fuck and hard to hold as a phone plus lack of colours on the screen unless it was a game.
Manual lawnmower.
The surface RT and windows ME e-machine computer were both a close second.
The WD TV Media Player was pure garbage.
Also hated the Macbook Pro with the Butterfly Keyboard.
And probably a lot of smaller tech that I forgot about.
Handheld sewing machine. Not sure if all are like this or just the cheapo one i bought, it can't sew anything thick else it will get stuck often and can't make the loop. End up shelving it and never use it since then.
Microsoft surfacebook (or whatever the fuck that thing was called) that died after like 13 months. Motherboard went to shit and MS offered me a $100 discount on a new one. Yeah fuck that, I bought a MacBook Pro.
A Sony mobile phone that couldn't remember the time when it was switched off.
True it's going back a while. But not so far that battery backed clock chips were uncommon.
My son picked up a refurbished Ipad mini that we were going to use as a screen for our quadcopters. Well, you can't load any software on it so it's just a worthless piece of shit. Way to go apple.
The joycons that came with the Nintendo Switch, both failed within 3 months of owning it, and might as well include the entire console cause all the cheap plastic bits are falling apart.
I’d replace it with a Steam Deck, but the Switch’s biggest strength is being such a piece of junk I wouldn’t care if it gets stolen or destroyed
Anything that accesses Expedia.com
A Dell Inspiron laptop.
It just kept dying. Typing a Word document one moment, black screen the next. I bought this thing in August because I was going back to school and I needed a new laptop. By December I finally convinced them to replace the machine outright. I got a different model that lacked a lot of the features I had ordered.
I'm no longer a Dell customer.
My last ever Nokia phone, a half way house between old Nokias and smartphones circa 2008.
No touch screen, but could play music, videos, had a calendar etc.
Absolute piece of garbage. Got super hot at times doing who-knows what, and had a software bug where the audio would completely stop working until you rebooted it… which meant that multiple times my morning alarm went off completely silently and I was late for work.
Bought an iPhone 3GS as soon as my 1 year contract was up, Nokia were never relevant again after that era.
August wifi smart lock. Originally wanted the zigbee version for my home but apparently they stopped making those in favor of wifi, however wifi needs more energy to communicate and would go through they special batteries in a week's time. Even replacing the unit with another one didn't solve the issue, so I just returned it and deleted my account.
Ipod touch 5.
I keep my electronics for long, so seeing my iPod turn slow and not being able to do anything about it really pushed me away from apple.
LG Optimus 2x, the first dual core smartphone.
What a piece of shit, never bought LG again. It kept randomly crashing and rebooting, along with a host of other problems.
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.
The Asus Transformer Prime.
It was an Android tablet circa 2011, right at that time they were actually making 10" Android tablets. I bought one as soon as Android Honeycomb launched which had an improved UI and lot of new tablet focused features. I bought the optional keyboard/battery attachment and planned for it to be my tiny laptop replacement that could also play emulators and be used for reading comics. I wanted to like it so bad.
It never really panned out though, a large majority of which was because of the faulty Nvidia Tegra 3 chip. Awful performance issues, terrible wireless connectivity, overheating, battery drain and nonexistant software updates from Asus. I ran custom ROMs trying to squeeze it as much as I could but that meant I was constantly tinkering with it and having yet more problems. Eventually I even broke the screen (my fault) and painstakingly went through a whole botched screen replacement before finally deciding that it had been a huge waste of time and money and sent it to it's grave.
HTC Droid Incredible.
It kept telling me its storage was full when it was nowhere close, and then because it only allowed over the air factory resets, it couldn't even erase and reformat itself. It was the top rated Android phone at the time and it's why I've never gone back.
portable swamp cooler. it leaked and makes your carpet a swamp and maybe cooler. also luggable.
roller-type kitchen knife sharpener. the finer edge sharpener actually dulls the knife more.
tile tracker. it was so big, I didn't lose it. I also hate the concept because it works like insurance does.
Pioneer ddj400
Where do I start first off it comes with record box, for better effects or features you have to buy a subscription . The knobs come off in your hand and are made out of plastic crossfader sucks made out of plastic buttons stick, pads stick. It's just horrible
Years ago I owned a pioneer dgm 1000 the thing was built like a tank and held its value well. I sold it for something else about 3 years 4 years later and got the same price I paid for it..
I expected the pioneer 400 to at least be manufactured somewhat sturdy, and not feel like a Fisher Price toy..
Ended up finding a numark ns7Ii for a decent price.
Made out of metal, more buttons than you can shake a stick at very high quality. It's almost 10 years old and nothing's wrong with it..
The cheap pioneer mixerswill be E-Waste within a few years
An iBook. I had the GPU replaced twice under warranty. I sold it after the second time. Never again.
I got one of those Epson ink tank printers for $250au. I think it's the first time inkjet printers have become legit affordable and high capacity.
Laser still wins on reliability though, and being an Epson means it's a Tamagochi so needs to be used monthly at least so it doesn't die.
iPod shuffle, sometime around 2003 or 2004. Died in three weeks. Ordered a replacement. Died in two weeks
This stogie sized covert camera. The photos looked like a screenshot of the game snake.
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.
Not sure if it counts as technology but it was a Ford Focus.
Any device produced by the Transsion company, a company which exists only to scam ppl out of their hard earned money and create e-waste. They're the owners of the Infinix, Tecno and Itel mobile lineups
if you want a 2gb ram device produced this year that can get so hot and burn the flesh off your palm, get one of these devices, they're so prevalent in Africa, India and other developing countries
the marketing budget for each lineup outweighs the RnD budget for the three collectively
Pixel 3A. Constant bugs, camera would stop working or had a long delay starting up, system would randomly stop responding, constant crashes, lock screen would bug out preventing you from unlocking the phone. Dialer would bug out preventing you from answering the phone. Random reboots. Screen scratched really easily.
Phone crapped out about a month before warranty expired, wouldn't boot any more. Luckily, it was still in warranty and they returned the full price.
The worst most unreliable phone I ever owned.
PackageKit
hp wireless bw laser printer
gigabyte motherboards
For society? A smartphone
A CD-Rom with Windows ME. only took me 2 hours after buying to break it in pieces. It hung in the computer store for years as a trofee 😂
