What are the worst tech purchases you or your family have ever made?
I watched a video recently and wanted to know what other have bought over the years.
I’m not sure if they count is a “tech purchase”, but I bought all new Samsung appliances in my previous home (washer, dryer, refrigerator, and dishwasher). The washer and dryer failed catastrophically within 6 months, the dryer drum cracked and shredded a whole load of clothing into confetti and the washing flooded my kitchen and ruined my cabinets (it was a weird house layout). The refrigerator just had random parts dying over and over (water dispenser, lights, sensors, ice maker) until it finally died at the year mark. The dishwasher made it nearly to year two before the control panel died and the replacement part was more expensive than an entire new unit. Never again Samsung!
If you’ve ever made a cell phone or a TV I will NEVER buy your appliance.
Got “burned” by a Samsung induction stove. Never again.
I came in here expecting Samsung hate, and I am not disappointed. They’re like 13% of South Korea’s GDP, they should make shit that lasts longer than a year!!
You don’t get rich by selling something people only buy once…
That being said I have a Samsung oven that’s about 12 years old now and still works perfect aside from one element doesn’t trigger the “burner on” light, but the “hot surface” light still works, so I’m not overly concerned.
Samsung used to be awesome up until, say, 10-15 years ago? Then they just got so big and quality just went off a cliff
I have a Samsung flat screen from 15 years ago, the thing is a tank and won’t die. A new Samsung flat screen is lucky to make it 5 years tops
I bought an after-market touchscreen entertainment/navigation unit for my 2008 car from some online place selling cheap Chinese gear.
It was so slow it was nigh on useless. I’d be halfway home before the maps would finally start, and Spotify would just crash. I pulled it out after a few weeks and went back to the stock unit.
Hey I did the same! Thought hey I know tech, I know car audio, this will be great. It wasn’t. Some bottom of the barrel android tablet that barely run a music player let alone navigation. Ended up putting back the stock and getting a 15 dollar phone mount instead. Worked way better.
Easily 1000% my Samsung TV.
Each update somehow makes it slower, it always loads up whatever the Samsung TV app thing is before it will do anything with a menu so you can get out of it, I believe it requires a Samsung account before it will allows you to do anything, and every now and then it locks up so hard that I have to factory reset it to get it to work again.
I refuse to buy anything from Samsung ever again.
Ah, there’s the problem — you connected it to the internet. I’ve had decent experiences with Samsung TVs, but I just plug them into an apple tv and let the box do the work. I’ve had to see their UI on a couple occasions though and yeah it’s trash.
same with my LG. I never connected it to the internet directly. I chose instead to plug in an rpi
Last TV I had (besides my current CRT for retro games) I used an RPi 4 (later upgraded to the 5) for a media center and a steam link (purchased for $1 during a bundle sale) so I could game off of it from my desktop. I did also have a Chromecast but honestly with a wireless keyboard I would have been fine with just the steam link.
Every consumer TV is subsidized by the advertisements they (plan to) put on it and your data they’ll sell. I bought a mid-range Samsung TV last year, used it for TV, movies, gaming, and I love it. But I haven’t connected it to the internet, I use a separate device I can easily discard if need be. Not blaming you because it’s counter-intuitive, but you can’t update consumer TVs. They know it will live in your… living… room for several years and want to make money off displaying ads. Do you really think they’ll update it to be less intrusive and show fewer ads so they make less money!?? Obviously, I just guessed right; I’m not a genius, nor do I have precognition. I’ve even heard stories about TVs connecting themselves to open networks, but I’m not sure sure I believe them…
I got an ouya.
The controllers keys stuck.
You had to give them your credit card in order to get an account.
The games were ok if you could get over the 1/2 second of lag between button press and game.
One of my gaming buddies is in Thailand, but plays on the American server with us. His ping is regularly 2000-3000ms. When he hits a button, he doesn’t actually “do the thing” for 2-3 seconds. But dude is a fucking genius, and he’s mastered the timing. He regularly outperforms folks with a 28ms ping (It’s me, I’m “folks”).
Let’s see… One that comes to mind that I guess is “tech” would be Substance Painter and Designer, back when it was independently owned and had an indie license.
“This will really take my Blender work to the next level. I’m going to LEARN this. Let’s freaking go.” I said, and “invested” like $150 into it.
I’m NORMALLY a FOSS nut, but this software was changing the game! Paint directly on 3d models with smart materials and layers and dynamics‽ AWESOME! Maybe it’s worth paying a chunk of my meager part time income for quality software…
Then comes the email:
Subject: “Substance is joining the Adobe family!”
Then the follow-up to all the pissed off customers:
“Don’t worry, it won’t be subscription only.”
Maybe a month later it’s part of the “cloud” and made subscription only.
I don’t care what’s “iNdUsTry sTaNdArD.” I refuse to engage with Adobe for any reason, and I’d rather put my hard earned money into supporting open source community tools than to ever get rug pulled by some shameless sellout ever again.
I agree with your frustration and dislike of Adobe but you can still get a permanent license through Steam. It is unfortunately an industry standard, only toolbag comes close afaik but it’s still a long way off
EDIT: Yeah, they did finally release a Steam version with a perpetual license. That’s a step in the right direction but I’ve already gotten burnt so bad lol.
You’re right, when it comes to the industry’s “cutting edge” unfortunately the likes of Autodesk and Adobe and their copycats seem to hold the hill.
But know what? I’ve actually quite made peace with the idea that I’m probably never gonna work in the AAA(A?) space where that top of the line cutting edge stuff is absolutely required.
In this case, Material Maker and Blender with some add-ons are providing some wonderfully intuitive materials workflows!
Despite my ambitions, my life just didn’t shake out that way and now people that are at least a decade my junior are far exceeding what I can do, with a lot better training and a back that can handle the long hours. :p (Honestly from some of the stories we’ve heard out of the industry, I feel I dodged a bullet sometimes.)
But yeah…
It’s kinda like when I say I work in Godot and people wanna say “WeLL uNrEaL’s GrApHiCs ThO…”.
They might be right but, ha! Am I, a little indie dev that might work alongside some other indie devs, REALLY gonna be making a project SO incredibly strenuous that it’s gonna break anything less than the full might of Unreal?! Probably not. :p
(Power to whatever tools people like using of course! The tools don’t make the artist. :) )
I’ve decided to dedicate my study and efforts towards empowering the Rest Of Us ™. The FOSS tool users, the industry’s rejected applicants, the amateurs, the little guys and gals; Especially the ones who are sick of being exploited by tools, employers, and corporations.
And I hope something good comes of it one day. <3
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.
I got a cheap dash cam off Temu a few years ago. I’m sure I don’t have to explain beyond that.
Yes. I’m an idiot. I know. I’ve always known.
So just out of curiosity, did the dash cam not work for dash cam purposes?
As in, did you end up getting into an accident and have no usable footage?
Or was it just a piece of shit that didn’t work?
My guess is the quality is so bad they can’t see shit or it overheats from the sun very easily and shuts down
I bought an HD DVD player as a youth. I don’t think I need to explain further
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Wow I never knew about the AACS encryption key stuff.
I’ve always wondered how much piracy really hurts companies or individuals. I mean, it seems to me even with piracy happening these corpos are making bank.
Same. Young and stupid, and I already had the Xbox…
This is incredibly funny to me because I remember coming home for a holiday and seeing a new Blu-ray player under my brother’s PS3. My dad was so excited about it.
Convinced my mum to splash out on an Amstrad Emailer. It looked really cool and could store your phonation, and had emails.
3 months later, my Dad is checking the landline phone bill which is expensive for some reason. Turns out the Amstrad phones a premium rate phone lime every night. Managed to switch it off but then the whole thing stopped working saying it needs to do that to work.
Nowhere did they mention this, or at least it was not clear to both of us. Absolutely dodgy fuckers.
I bought a MacBook Pro for iOS development. It was alright until Apple decided to exclude it from future OS updates, preventing me from using it for it’s sole purpose, and forcing me to either buy a new one or stop developing iOS apps. Guess which one I chose. There is nothing wrong with the hardware, it’s still got a 2TB SSD, 16GB of RAM and 16-core CPU but apparently Apple thought they could make more money off of me by intentionally barring it from updates to force me to buy a new one, rather than simply allowing me to install MacOS updates. They were wrong.
Edit: 8 physical cores, 16 logical
should just install Linux and be done with it.
I thought Mac development had to come signed from one of their OSs though? Maybe I’m wrong. Have never owned one.
AS others have said you are correct. We had to buy a mac mini just to develop at one job.
If you dont make programs for mac then its much easier.
You are correct.
Can’t publish to App Store from Linux, can you?
correct, but why develop for a platform that literally told you to fuck off and buy different hardware because they just wanted to.
What even model and year is it? They support the things for a very long time. I’ve got a 2011 that still works great but it’s getting Linux on it cuz they’ll run better in it than any version of Windows or OXS. 500GB SSD, 16GB RAM, i7 of some sort. Love it.
I’ve got a 2011 MBP running Debian that is about to be put into service as a backup for my Nextcloud server, which is being hosted on 2014 mini that’s also running Debian. That one is my general purpose home server, running things like Navidrome, Mealie, Grimmory, Jellyfin, etc…
Then I’ve also got a 2011 mini running Mint, which I took to work to use solely for giving presentations for teaching competencies.
Those old Macs are resilient computers.
Which model is that supposed to be? My intel model is still getting the latest updates and any MBP with 16 cores must be newer than that …
The 2019 MacBook Pro that I paid $3,000+ for after taxes and shipping, but looking at the hardware specs I was mistaken on the core count. It has a i9 Intel CPU with 8 physical cores, and 16 logical. More than enough power for software development if Apple wasn’t such a greedy entity.
I know 2019 seems like just a little bit ago, but it was 7 years ago. I mean, the machine has been supported for at least 7 years. From what you say, it appears you have the 2019 15-inch model only offered from May to November of that year; incredibly bad luck, as the 16 inch was introduced in November of that year and that model is still receiving updates.
While I understand the frustration of not being able to write apps, it’s still a solid computer and I personally would love an Intel Mac to run Linux on.
Edit: I took a look at which OS would’ve come with the computer you have. It’s 10.14 Mojave. Oldest MacBook Pro that ran on was the mid-2012, making the length of support you should have expected to be 7 years.
It’s simultaneously the shortest lifespan of any electronics I’ve ever purchased while also being the most expensive, by a considerable margin. Not a great combo no matter how you attempt to spin it.
On what evidence were you basing your assumption it’d last longer than 7 years specifically for development? Seems like 7 years is what would’ve been expected when you bought it and what can be expected now.
WTF. Do you work for Apple? What EVIDENCE do I have that I expected my hardware that I bought for over $3,000 to continue functioning until it died? My evidence is my experience with every piece of electronics I have ever owned from every other manufacturer up until that point.
I can still connect to Xbox Live on my Xbox 360, giving it a lifespan, so far, of 21 years.
Knowing what can be expected from Apple is exactly why I won’t ever buy an Apple product again, and warn anyone who mentions them that they’re buying a ticking time bomb and Apple holds the donator, which they will use for the explicit purpose of extracting more money from people, even while the hardware is still working.
Apple is also the ONLY company that charges an annual fee on TOP of their exorbitant hardware costs for the ability to develop apps for their hardware. They’re also the ONLY company that demands you own their brand of hardware to publish apps. Google doesn’t force developers to use a Chromebook to publish Android apps, and Microsoft doesn’t force developers to use a Windows machine to publish Windows apps. Samsung doesn’t demand you develop apps for the Samsung marketplace on a Samsung device.
This is literally only an issue with Apple, and it’s entirely of their own creation. Apple is unrestricted and blatant in their greed, and I’ve learned they’re not shy about it at all. I no longer participate in any of their ecosystems and never will again.
You’re defining “useful lifespan” of the Apple very differently than the Xbox. You’re defining the Apple by how long development tools are supported, and while that is a valid criticism, it is the same duration today as it was when you bought the laptop. By the metric you’re judging the Xbox, the MacBook Pro can connect to the internet, can run programs, and can connect to Apple’s consumer services the same as it ever could. Its life as a consumer device is far from over. I’m typing this on my pre-retina 2012 MacBook Pro (running Linux).
You’ve said the machines “sole purpose” was development, yet you chose upgrades not essential to that process; the absolute fastest chip at the time and a larger SSD are arguably not necessary for the machine’s “sole purpose.” And the expected lifespan of the machine by that metric is no different today than when you bought it. Hate to put too fine a point on it, but you choose to overspend on a tool and are upset that the tool didn’t ROI your inflated expectation.
Apple’s decision to require a Mac for development and “only” supporting for seven years is absolutely worthy of critique. But it’s also been consistent, and I’m sorry you didn’t factor that in when you bought the machine. Sounds like you’re done developing for iOS; I don’t blame you. But if you decided otherwise, you can get into a development machine for probably not too much more than what you can sell your 2019 MacBook Pro for. Mac mini (if you can find one) and even the Neo will run absolutely hog wild over the performance of your MBP.
idk. I just graduated college with the laptop I bought in 8th grade. that thing is 9 years old at this point. I paid 550$ after convincing my parents to cover the extra 50$ I didn’t have cause I wanted the 1050ti version. I’m a computer science student and took a few mobile app dev classes. it never gave an issue and is still kicking.
I think for nearly 6 times what I paid in 2017, one should be entitled to use a device for as long as the hardware is able to keep going, regardless of brand. that macbook was hobbled by a companies arbitrary decisions. 7 years is apples typical support length, yes (it’s the same for iOS on iPhones) but the fact is that these devices are still perfectly capable of remaining useful, but apple gladly turns them all into ewaste to get people to buy new ones.
your point of it still being solid if it had Linux is kinda moot. the average user doesn’t know how to install Linux and that’s not what they paid 3000$ for.
My brother and I saved up money for a few months and bought the Nintendo Virtual Boy… We were not too happy with it so we thought we just needed to buy better games. That was not a viable solution for that POS.
The virtual boy is a good contender here. My friend got one at launch and it was laughably bad. I myself couldn’t use it for more than ten minutes without getting a headache.
Mine was the Powerglove. I begged for it for my birthday and the price was high enough that was the only present that year.
A Logitech MX Ergo trackball mouse.
I’ve used thumb ball mice since the 20th century. I replaced a Microsoft branded one with a Logitech M570, that started to get a little old in the tooth so I saw this “premium” mouse they were offering.
Worst HID I can think of. it really wasn’t that ergonomic, the ball was at such an angle that you don’t get much vertical throw, the Forward button is hard to reach, the customization software is insipid, the hole to push the ball out is too small, and then the coating started to perish. It has this rubberized coating that just…started failing. It’s disgusting to touch now. Only reason I don’t throw it out is there’s a lithium battery in it.
Oh, even techier: I bought a pair of ESP32CAM devices. Little ESP32 dev boards with a camera on them. That’s a surprisingly powerful yet low power microcontroller, with onboard Wi-Fi, attached to a microSD card slot and a 1080p camera. On paper that’s a cool idea. I think they both overheated and died.
Microvision ShowWX+ pico projector. They’d been advertising their laser-based VR tech for almost a decade but still had zero products on the market, so when they advertised a portable, battery-powered 640x480 laser projector with adapters for cell phones (this was 2010 so fairly unusual) I ordered one. I hoped I’d get something fun for travel/work use, and maybe help kickstart Microvision finally selling what was supposed to be a revolutionary VR display. Supposedly it required no focusing and would produce a bright image from 1’ to 6’ wide.
It was $400, arrived months late, didn’t work out of the box, and even when I finally had everything updated, it was so dim you could only see it in a pitch-black room or when the projector was inches from a reflective surface. To top it all off, the “low power, highly efficient” laser module constantly overheated.
Just a complete disaster. I think in the following 16 years they’ve sold maybe a dozen monochrome HMDs to the Air Force… for analyzing skin cracks in grounded planes.
Movies for my PSP. A lot of them.
Windows Surface Pro 3
Worst purchase of my entire life. Every update broke some function of the tablet. At one point no stylus would pair with it so i had to use have gestures, then another time the detachable keyboard wouldn’t work so i had to use a USB keyboard. The final straw was that the tablet updated, rebooted, and powered off and wouldn’t turn back on for like 3 months… Until randomly in the middle of The night it finally woke up.
