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.

  • EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com
    7·
    22 hours ago

    Tablet - it was a middle ground that I never found a use for

    If I’m out and about, I’m not dragging the tablet with me and will just use my phone.

    If I’m home, I’ll use the computer.

    I’m not saying that tablets are bad or useless, they just aren’t for me.

  • tristynalxander@mander.xyzEnglish
    6·
    21 hours ago

    During Covid I ordered a little screen replacement kit from a cheap Chinese company, and they said it was delayed due to Covid, so I was trying to be patient, but then the company disappeared. Unfortunately, I was too patient and the six months went by so I couldn’t reverse the charge. Only time I’ve ever gotten scammed, and I was pissed because I had even looked them up before I ordered and they seemed to have decent reviews until after and everyone was calling them out. I don’t know if they were legit then collapsed during covid or they put a lot of effort into looking legit with fake reviews. Lesson learned I guess.

  • bobbysixkiller@lemmy.worldEnglish
    61·
    21 hours ago
    • First generation Samsung Android Watch (Just plain useless)
    • Asus Transformer TF101 Tablet (Bloated UI)
    • Acer C720 Chromebook (a bit better after installing Xfce over ChromeOS)
    • Fiio M11 DAP (it’s chunky and I just never use it)
  • Doctor MoodMood@lemmy.ml
    9·
    1 day ago

    Mother bought a pair of “light therapy” glasses many years ago from a Russian quack site. It was basically a pair of blacked-out safety glasses with ~8 LEDs for each eye and a button cell to power it all. All circuitry and wires fully exposed and visible. You’d set your program and it would cycle through different colors for a predetermined time. Also came with a knock-off Chinese iPod and some gas-station headphones, preloaded with “relaxing sounds from nature.” You were expected to lay there for 30 minutes with your eyes closed as it did its thing. This cost around 600€ in 2019. What an absolute scam.

  • Professorozone@lemmy.world
    5·
    23 hours ago

    Not sure if it qualifies as tech, but a hybrid water heater. Was twice as expensive, sometimes provided only luke warm water and finally the compressor gave out prematurely. Should have just bought a normal one.

        • zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          2·
          16 hours ago

          Actually, this is not the case at least with regards to the one I owned. The “hybrid” part was that it had a heatpump attached that was more efficient that standard electric heating in some circumstances. Mine worked OK, so I wouldn’t put in my worst buys, but the electricity savings were definitely exaggerated by the sales rep.

  • ikidd@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    5·
    24 hours ago

    Cheap chinese Android tablet that was supposedly 8-core 16Gb ram. It’s an absolute piece of shit, I think my S4 has more juice. It’s a paperweight now after the Ali seller disappeared.

  • Sv443@sh.itjust.works
    151·
    21 hours ago

    Anything Samsung. The appliances fail fast (TV & washing machine in my case), and the smartphones are constantly getting more and more enshittified (speaking as a long-time customer since the 1st Galaxy S all the way to S23).

    • tristynalxander@mander.xyzEnglish
      1·
      21 hours ago

      Replaced my samsung phone with a unihertz Atom – Definitely not for everyone, but I love it. With samsung I’d gone from my phones never breaking to two phones that seemed to jump out of my hands and crack if you looked at them funny, so I gave up on the brand and looked for something small and rugged. I swear I could chuck the Atom off a building into concrete and it’d be fine. I do wish there was a newer version to update the software, but you get used to the older interface pretty quick.

      Hopefully Unihertz will go back to the atom series and make one with linux software, but I was thinking of just buying another and seeing if I can install linux.

    • tristynalxander@mander.xyzEnglish
      2·
      21 hours ago

      Skyrim is terrible in 3D. I can barely hack and slash normally, and I’m supposed to do it while disoriented and facing the wrong direction. Even with my coward play style of sneaky mage with uncapped runes, it’s too much of a pain to do anything other than stare up at the sky.

  • sleet01@lemmy.ca
    1·
    18 hours ago

    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.

  • reksas@sopuli.xyz
    3·
    1 day ago

    gaming motherboard that is too new for my system and has this stupid bug on some driver that my internet cuts off randomly

  • kokoto@lemmy.zip
    9·
    1 day ago

    I bought a Wii U. It had some good games at the time, but Nintendo’s strategy over the last 10 years has just been to rerelease those games with better performance and new content. I wish I’d just waited.