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.
And they’re making things worse as we use less and less paper at the same time… Geniuses
Gotta protect those profit margins!
If you’ve owned more than 2, those are on you! 🤣
But yea, consumer printers suck.
Hey, my Brother laser printer can see my screen, you know! Apologise now!
I bought an old business monochrome laser printer ten years ago. Still hasn’t needed a new toner cartridge.
I bought my parents a laser printer after years of them being incredibly frustrated by inkjets. I got them the same model as me, as well as a spare toner cartridge.
I’m still on my original toner cartridge, and I’ve had it for probably six years or so.
My parents are in their late 40’s and early 50’s. I think I might have accidentally gotten them a lifetime supply of printing.
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.
I should really get a laser printer but my need for 11x17 capacity kind of limits options. To be fair though, my brother small business type inkjet printer does pretty well! Ink costs suck but I don’t want to commit seppuku after using it.
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.
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.
Oh shit, I remember those. They “cleaned” by using an abrasive spray to “polish” the CDs. Those things were straight-up evil.
Yes! RIP Dinocrisis. My Gauntlet: Dark Legacy survived the process though. Thing still runs today with a fucking trench etched across the bottom, it doesn’t make sense really.
GameStop
That explains it.
Was it a cleaner or one of those “Resurfacing” things with the crank that just scratched the hell out of your discs in a circular pattern?
You needed to use the lubricant that came with it. I used mine hundreds of times with incredible results.
Oh I followed all the instructions, used the fluid & all that. Still had to track down a new copy of Street Fighter EX…
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 wonder if we had the same dehumidifier. Same 800 sq ft claim, except it didn’t produce ice because it couldn’t pull enough moisture out of the air to do so despite it being ~80% humidity in my apartment.
After a night of running at full blast, I woke up and poured out a whopping 10 mL of water from the basin
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.
The man who holds the patent legally changed his name after it failed so he wouldn’t be associated with it.
You can cut one leg off an IC on the board and it becomes a regular barcode reader.
It also looks vaguely like a dildo, which is cool.
Ha, I had one and it’s what first came to mind too. Pretty useless.
I completely forgot these existed until you just mentioned it!
I think I still have one somewhere in a box of “I might need this” along with a parallel port ZIP drive and a bunch of FireWire cables.
“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.
Probably won’t help, but I find that headsets sound much worse when they’re connected as a headset. My (completely different headphones/headset) sounds a lot better in headphone mode.
Yeah, there are different bluetooth audio profiles, one for high quality audio intended for media consumption, and one for bi-directional audio intended for telephony (and some others, but these are the relevant ones here). The “gotcha” is that in general, any attempt to consume the mic feed from a bluetooth headset will switch it to the telephony mode, so if you have them paired to a PC and an application is listening to the mic for any purpose you get stuck with much lower quality 64kbps PCM audio.
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.
My ring used to do that shit. I stopped using it for like a year. Then I was bitching about it and someone said they just got one and it worked great. So I tried it again out of spite to show what a piece of shit it was and now it works within a couple of seconds. shrug
I can’t speak for ring but I know as long as my Google nest is connected to WiFi it will update software automatically.
At first I thought your doorbell was a eufy. The failure sounds similar.
i tried the eufy afterwards and it wasn’t better. when the eufy crashed daily, it doesn’t restart itself. but when it worked it was super fast.
Power Glove
It’s so bad.
Imagine your grandmother ordering one of these from QVC and calling her grandchild to come over and show her how to work it…
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.
First Alert, ask questions later
Failing to an alarm on state is preferred to an alarm off state. So at least no fire can sneak up on you. I think they sell ones now that are 10-year sealed battery with a 10-year warranty.
I agree. If it fails by alarming constantly you replace it. If it fails by not alarming at all you never know, because who actually tests their alarms?
My building has these and 2 of them failed in the first year. Can’t replace the battery so had to replace the whole thing.
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.
You need that RTK EPOS tech bruh
If your yard was just a perfectly level, medium sun, no rain, obstacle free, rectangle you wouldn’t have any problems.
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.
Just writing to say that I admire your tenacity
ThinkPad X201
I still have mine, what a great machine! I once accidentally stepped on it when hastily getting out of bed and nothing happened, it just continued to work.
Those Vaios had a monumental amount of bloatware slowing them down too.
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.
Oh, yeah, those are crap. I went with scrub brush attachments for the battery-powered drill I already own. It cost like $20 for half a dozen heads of different sizes that chuck up like any normal drill bit. It’s not as automated, but it’s way easier and more thorough than scrubbing by hand.
That’s dope, I’ve got one of those, I’ll look into that. Thanks so much for the suggestion!
No problem. Pretty sure I got the idea from someone here on Lemmy. Look at that, it’s already been more useful to me than reddit.
Windows OS
Silly goose, you don’t own Windows — you license it.
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
I’d have you say the Pixel 6 Pro that I handled like a baby, but the screen died in the second month.
Reminds me of the two Nexus 4’s I got. First one dead in the box, second overheated after two weeks and mysteriously lost its IMEI and never had cell signal again. Worked fine otherwise, but stupid.
Oh man, my buddy’s P6P has a weird issue where it feels like the DAC is coming loose too (if the audio goes out he can press on a part of his to make it come back). Guess I got lucky as I’m still on mine.
