Anything with fucking Bluetooth. Even in 2024 getting it to connect consistently requires some kind of arcane magic
All of my Bluetooth devices work flawlessly these days. What are you using?
It’s fine as long as you never connect different controllers to the same device. Then it becomes a nightmare
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.
I was coming to post the same. Those fucking clickers were so stupid and overpriced, all so my biochem professor could poll the class AND grade everyone on their results. Results to questions about material that was JUST taught in the same lesson. Good thing everyone benefits equally from lecture, right? Fuck that guy.
HP Printer
Their home/home office stuff is absolutely trash. That much is true.
Much of their small business stuff is on the verge of being ok. Just, expensive for what it is.
Meanwhile at work we have hp enterprise printers that are twelve years old and still working flawlessly.
I have a laserjet 1020 and its absolutely flawless
Depends on when it was produced.
My 1998 HP 4050DTN is still going strong, an absolutely bulletproof beast of a machine. My HP 5000DTN wide-format printer is much the same.
Of course, this was years before the DRM enshittification path that HP started down, so there is that.
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 egg that stays fresh for a few hundred years is kinda lame for an SCP
I dunno, does it warp probability around it so that no matter what, the egg is always fresh? How far does the effect extend? Does it affect people or just physical interactions? If people ask these questions are they under the effect and contributing to the egg’s defense and therefore continued freshness?
That really sounds absurd. Both the idea itself and the fact that they somehow screwed up the execution of such a simple thing that much.
That sounds eggceptionally stupid, eggregious even.
Wow. Nicely done.
eggcellent
Wow I thought I was the only idiot that bought it. Once they started charging for the smart features, it got unbatteried and became just a fancy box.
Hahahahaha omg that is horrible
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
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 my parents a laser as well and evidently I picked a shitty one because they are planning to go back to the other side 😞
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!
My Lexmark laser, from 1996, just quit last summer.
Though I think I can fix it - seems a paper jam sensor is stuck.
Laser printers are way way better than the other types
Everything is better with lasers. Prove me wrong…
Sharks with laser beams on their heads?
Fricken, better.
Anything that relies on mini/micro USB for charging. With enough repeated use, they eventually cause an early failure of the device.
Mini’s are fairly durable, but the spring in built into the device. With Micro, the spring is part of the cable and is cheaper to replace.
Any and all dishwashers and refrigerators I’ve ever owned. Fuck planned obscelence.
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.
HP anything, absolute trash
Depends on when it was produced.
My 1998 HP 4050DTN is still going strong, an absolutely bulletproof beast of a machine. Plus, I can get extra-stuffed cartridges for it that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage. Even after two degrees and a quarter century I am only on my third cartridge.
My HP 5000DTN wide-format printer is much the same.
Of course, this was years before the DRM enshittification path that HP started down, so there is that.
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.
Funny thing is, out of all the disc “cleaners” we sold while I was at Gamestop, we got very few complaints about it. Make the discs look like they went through hell but the product worked.
– forgets everything
Many mother boards have a battery on them that is used in retaining state. May need to be replaced.
I checked the CMOS and ended up replacing it. I thought that was it too. Same issue.
I paid 100 bucks for this server 5 years ago, came with 4TBs. Only thing I ever did with it was run private game servers on it for my friends. Maybe I’ll try replacing it again just for laughs and poop.
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?
Manual lawnmower.
The surface RT and windows ME e-machine computer were both a close second.
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.
Went down the rabbit hole on this guy a bit. He went on to participate in the CyberNinjas audit of Arizona’s ballots after the 2020 election. He claimed to have technology that could detect whether ballots had been folded in the mail, and claimed to detect bamboo in “fraudulent Chinese ballots”.
He was such a kook, the other kooks rejected him.
You can cut one leg off an IC on the board and it becomes a regular barcode reader.
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.
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?
I use my tablet for 2 things"
Consuming media. Not sure what TV you have but mine would be a little unwieldy for taking it on travels.
Taking notes during conferences, meetings, presentations, etc. So much easier if all the notes are digital from the beginning
Wait, wait, wait. You’re telling me people leave their homes?!
In my case it’s more that I get car/airsick very easily – So when I’m out and about, I won’t be watching media on a portable screen. At most listening to music or an audio-book.
And if I’m in like. A hotel. Most of them (at least here in my country) have SmartTVs that will accept broadcasting from my phone. :P
As for note-taking, I can see the appeal but refer to my comment about typing in a Tablet being uniquely awful.
I felt like this until I bought a legit tablet, not some sub $100 tablet. it’s night and day. and it’s not even super high end, just not cheap
See, I thought it might have been my tablets being cheap things.
But messing around with that borrowed iPad (possibly a Pro, the person who lent me it was filthy rich and likes premium stuff) made me go “… This is like, a high quality laptop but worse in every way?”
The screen was drop-dead gorgeous, and it was clearly a powerful (if locked down, cuz Apple) device – but it felt like everything I tried to do on the device was in some major way a compromise to accomodate for a less-than-ideal form factor.
Same. I used to make fun of them as they’re ‘too big’ for mobile stuff but too small for computer stuff, but after getting a killer deal on a Tab S7+, it’s super useful for casual games, watching youtube/plex, drawing, and web browsing. It’s also great to use in the kitchen while cooking or doing other stuff
One of the funniest memories from when I was travelling (around 2017) was many tourists holding up their giant tablet devices, fumbling with them to try take photos of things.
I’ve seen this at Disneyland. People walking around using a fucking tablet to record videos like people do with selfie sticks.
Absolutely. I use my tablet almost exclusively as a media device but I do feel it could be so much more. It is nice though to use it while my phone is charging overnight and not wasting battery on the phone while traveling.
Anything that accesses Expedia.com
I had this one and the upgraded one since we were too poor to buy a real PC. It worked decent for web browsing at the time and I spent a lot of time in IRC chat rooms. I think (may have been later on a real PC) I even started doing Geocities/Tripod/Angelfire pages on this and learning basic HTML.
