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.
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My old Wemo smart plugs. Constantly lost connection and the app was so useless for resolving issues.
When they announced they were stopping support this year, I was wondering what they considered support beforehand. Also, there’s a class action lawsuit because of that.
I’m in the same boat
You should try integrating them into home assistant. They still work very well.
You might be interested in pywemo. Bring new life to those things instead of just tossing them in a landfill. They also work with Home Assistant.
I had some connection issues when switching out my AP (had to factory reset), but otherwise they’ve been mostly solid.
They work with Home Assistant still and work pretty well.
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.
Pretty much anything that was “a really good deal”.
I read this as “a really good idea” and still kind of agreed.
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
A Kodak luma mini projector. Absolute dog shit ui and the worst speaker I’ve ever heard completely ruin the entire experience.
I snagged a 30USD Chinese mini projector. The speaker is trash but it has an aux/Composite audio out and the image quality is shockingly good. I expected complete trash for that cost but I was shocked.
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”).
I’m one of the few.people.that really liked tbe Ouya. At the time it was the best living room retro gaming system out there. I bought 3 of them. And I had no problem with the controllers.
Same, I thought it was awesome. The game library sucked though, and it just never took off. After awhile I used it for Kodi 99% of the time.
I played the duck tales remastered on it though and that was fantastic
Oh yeah I forgot I also had a Plex client for it
I supported them on kickstarter unfortunately
So did I. What a fucking waste. I played it twice and into the attic it went.
I bought a couple Ouya controllers for cheap on eBay a few years ago. Mine work fine. I’ll just connect my phone to the TV if I want to play Android games on a big screen, though.
Lenovo Daydream VR camera. Worked ok at first, but was soon after abandoned by Google and Android dropped support for it as well. These days an expensive brick. Oh and the battery became a spicy pillow as well 🤦
I had the daydream headset. It’s sad it was abandoned, it had potential and it would be cool if instead of selling expensive whole other systems for VR, we could just use our phone. I got mine on Super sale, not realizing Google was planning to abandon it. I thought they were just going to roll out a new one soon. Instead, all the apps were abandoned and it’s more or less useless now. Still works okish as a vehicle for porn I guess.
I bought an HD DVD player as a youth. I don’t think I need to explain further
Use it for ripping.
That thing is long gone
You have clearly not been to the library.
Is… The library bookstore full of HD DVDs people have donated? O.o
I don’t know about HD DVDs specifically but I do know they have plenty of movies usually in physical formats, depending on your specific location and whatnot.
Oh yeah! Totally! Big fan and advocate of the library. Mine’s even got Blurays and videogames now!
Haha yeah you probably won’t find HD-DVDs in the collection as it lost the format wars to Blurays , but maybe in the library book stores sold from donations. XD
Well, true, maybe not HD, haha, but I was just referring to how to continue breathing life into a DVD player. But yeah, I didn’t even know HD DVDs existed, given Blu-Ray…
Haha yeah, I think HD-DVDs were a bit more budget friendly compared to Blurays, but they were the extremely short-lived “team red” in the format war, and ultimately they weren’t a huge improvement to upgrade to, unlike Blu-rays when everybody was jumping to 1080p.
But yeah! Absolutely! Hit up the library and enjoy those DVDs (and Blu-rays)!
I was just having a discussion with a coworker who was wondering why one would keep a DVD player around, and I basically explained how not owning your media gets it ripped away from you sooner or later.
Libraries sometimes even get DVD versions of streamed TV shows and movies that don’t get a retail disc release.
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.
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This kills the Digg
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.
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.
If you haven’t already done this: wipe all the apps and run the cache-cleaning or whatever it is in the system menu. That should get it back down to where the memory and storage aren’t at 100% and fixes most of the problems. I’ve kept my 2017 Samsung usable that way. Also, if you have a pi-hole you can set it to use that as the DNS and block the advertising domains, retaining most of the smart functionality without all the crap.
That’s a software issue and user error. Don’t use the “smart” features is rule one for a consumer television.
I bought a Samsung for the display not the interface. I’m not sure if I’ve ever really even seen the built in interface, maybe when I initially set it up.
We have one of the Samsung frame TVs, it’s a nice TV, it fits a specific need for us in a bit of a weird spot in a bedroom where a regular TV would look out of place.
But man is the software trash. It’s laggy, a lot of the apps seem really poorly-optimized, and half the settings are just randomly unavailable for no apparent reason.
And since I had to install a box in the wall to hide the one connect box behind it, I kind of don’t want to use it with another streaming device, something about putting too much stuff in that box kind of rubs me the wrong way.
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.
This is standard Samsung TV behaviour.
I had one and never again. Friend only just got one a few months ago and already loathes it.
Not a shill, but I honestly love my Samsung TV. I took it out of the box, plugged in an HDMI cable to connect it to my PC, and use it as a monitor. I’ve never connected it to my wifi, so it has no internet access. I’ve never had to enter my Samsung account info to use it.
Similar experience here. Good panel, solid colours, good angles and handles sunny rooms well. However, TV OS’s are one of the most asinine things to exist though. Never connect that thing to the internet if you can help it and it’ll work great.
Same, no account, no internet connects to my steamdeck and works perfectly
I love my Sony. Iirc, it wanted Internet for initial setup, but I unplugged the Ethernet cable soon after. It just works and displays what I want without issue.
My girlfriend brought a tcl roku special when she moved in. That blinked a very bright white LED unless it was connected to the internet. And now whenever I turn it on, it screams and displayed a fucked up picture from my media device until I go and use the “restart tv” option.
Fucking POS.
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 a Google TV box and disconnected my Samsung TV from the internet. A week later I got an email about how connecting them helps me because it sends the data and my preferences back to Samsung.
… It sends thousands of information pings each day.
I heard turning off Samsung live tv and removing the app helps the performance tremendously, I have yet to try it as my wife for some reason is willing to tolerate a menu that takes over a minute to navigate one click at a time so she can keep the live tv feature, it is unusable to me
Why oh why is your Samsung TV still connected to the WiFi? I kicked mine off WiFi within three months of getting the device and I’ve used it for four years now and it works like a charm!
Back in 2014, I bought a non-pro white MacBook for one Bitcoin.
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It’s not the MacBook that is the problem…
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They said ONE BITCOIN. That’s €68070
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I think I’d have to go with the HDMI switch I bought for work. There were some limitations, like it couldn’t do more than 1080p, but otherwise it worked quite well for what I needed it for. The reason it was my worst purchase is because when I was illegally fired from that job, I wasn’t allowed to collect my things from my desk. They assumed it was theirs and they never returned it. I got the better deal though, they didn’t keep track of KVMs so I never returned mine
Every smart phone. Without exception.
iPads. The first one was a hand-me-down only a few years old, but no longer getting iOS updates, so no apps would run anymore. Safari would crash on most web sites. Gmail worked, but holy hell was the keyboard beyond terrible. I used it to read textbooks in PDF. Couldn’t revive it with an alternate OS. The next one was a gift; I thought I’d use it for NOAA navigation charts on my boat. Nope, the PDF reader crashed out on ~1MB files. (I had to use my budget Android phone instead.) Now it’s no longer supported, and not even useful as a Home Assistant dashboard, because of the old OS. It’s a (fully-functional) piece of e-waste now.
Locked hardware? Just say no!
I bought my first iPad back in 2011, and, being a Mac and iPhone user at the time, it was great. I’ve had a few over the years, and always considered them indispensible.
Then I got a 6th gen mini. I didn’t actually buy it, it was a gift from my dad who has a tendency to buy Apple stuff tax free when he’s on holiday on New Hampshire. My one was £600 at the time. For its utility it’s worth maybe half of that.
The first thing that pissed me off was that Apple decided that it wasn’t worthy of Stage Manager. I understand not wanting it to be able to run a multiple app desktop on such a relatively small screen, but you can’t even hook it up to an external display. Or, you can, but it doesn’t scale. It’s just a bigger version of what’s on the iPad’s screen. The mini is a PERFECT candidate for Stage Manager. Small, portable, easy to carry about. But no, because Apple.
Then iOS 26 came along, and suddenly every iPad was getting Stage Manager. Finally, I can use my little iPad to its fullest potential.
No.
My one still doesn’t support scaling. So I can have multiple apps, but just bigger.
Then I replaced my iPhone with a Pixel running Graphene, and started using Linux a lot more, and suddenly, out of the Apple ecosystem, my little iPad made even less sense. It can technically run SyncThing, but it’s so restricted as to be functionally useless. So 95% of its use now is as a MIDI controller for Mixxx on my Mac when I’m doing my radio show.
£600 for a half-baked MIDI controller is pretty fucking steep.
Samsung washer and dryer. The bane of my existence. I just moved and left them behind, so happy!
I have heard similar stories from all other Samsung appliances.
My wife and I bought those stupid Surface tablets. Not really sure why. Too big to be comfortably portable, too small to be useful at home. At least the magnetic keyboard thing makes a good mousepad for my desktop PC.
I keep pondering grabbing one of those to put a Linux on. I want a tablet that isn’t an iPad, and isn’t Android, and those seem like the most cost-effective way to achieve that.
Same… I reckon they would be pretty good if they aren’t locked down
Most models are just PCs. The cameras in my Surface Go 2 don’t work out of the box on Linux, but everything else is fine.
I actually had the opposite experience.
It was the perfect device for going through university for me. I mostly used it for note taking and homework with OneNote. For something like proving my work with matrices I could just copy the last matrix, paste it, then replace the one column/row that I was working on and repeat. In that case, work that took other students an hour or more would only take me a few minutes.
Additionally, since it wasn’t just a tablet, I could run whatever software I needed on it for completing projects.
Of course a somewhat recent update from Windows bricked the device, and I haven’t gotten around to switching it over to Linux (like I have with my other devices). It does look like there’s a great group helping to support that transition though: https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface
I had the original Surface in college and it was excellent at the time.
