What are your worst tech purchases?

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.

I bought an HD DVD player as a youth. I don’t think I need to explain further

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.

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

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.

A plex lifetime pass. Was okay until the company went crazy. Now I use Jellyfin and I'm happy.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

fuck samsung!

Any Razer product ever. Shit company, laptop battery fucked itself, keyboard doesn't work, mouse falling apart

Switch. My Nintendo acc got hacked which turned the thing into a brick basically, but Nintendo didn’t give a flying fuck

A Sony Minidisc recorder / player in the early 2000s. So much DRM. So many bugs. I'll never buy Sony again.

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!

Raycons. Got suckered by the YouTubers. They were garbage right out of the box. They could barely maintain a connection with each other, and the sound quality was awful.

Back in 2014, I bought a non-pro white MacBook for one Bitcoin.

Samsung washer and dryer. The bane of my existence. I just moved and left them behind, so happy!

The Bosch SmartHome outdoor camera.

The only way to view the stream is through their app and over the cloud, and the recordings are kept in the cloud exclusively. There is no way to use it without the cloud account. Everything is slow, choppy, unreliable and buggy as hell. Replaced it with Frigate running on our homeserver and a proper Hikvision IP camera. Much better quality, viewable from everywhere, much faster, ultra reliable, perfect.

Movies for my PSP. A lot of them.

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 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

Pretty much anything that was "a really good deal".

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.

~$800 headphone setup. My then-employer paid for more than half of it, so I splurged a bit. Got refurbished planar magnetic headphones for ~$500 and an amp for ~$300. I later bought a balanced audio cable (I don't remember the price, maybe $20—50).

It sounds good, but I've also been down the Chi-Fi IEM rabbit hole before. I think I could get similar results from $150—250 Chinese IEMs.

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).

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.

A Samsung smartwatch, it's almost useless.

I bought a router that had 5-10% package loss, it was basically trash, returned it of course.

Might sound weird but it was the PSP I imported at launch. 

Great device but that was when I realized I don't like handheld gaming. 

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.

Audio set up, microphone, DAC and headset, a friend recommended for me during covid. My, now, husband was in disbelief on how crappy it actually is and well now i have studio quality for almost the same (just 100€ extra) what i paid back in covid times

Barnes and Noble Nook HD+

I was all in on a 1080p tablet with micro sd card in 2012. And then it just shut off and never turned on again a few months out of warranty.

Then there was a Lenovo yoga tablet in 2014 with windows 8. The Intel atom processor was such a dog it just ended up being a solitaire screen and about nothing else.

Recently bought another cheap tablet for a different specific use case. We'll see if this one is a POS.

Trying to solve wifi dead spots across my then house. It didn't have wired conduits, so no ethernet between floors. Went through a series of range-extenders, multiple routers, everything from cheapo no-names, to TP-Links, Netgears, and Apple Airports. All sucked. Terrible reception in all the places that people hung out.

Then mesh routers showed up. Got a 3-pack and never looked back.

Edit: runner-up was an HP Inkjet printer. Every time someone needed a color print, one color ink was either out or dried out.

Thinkpad L390 Yoga. They crammed a 4.6 GHz CPU into a cooling system that was not designed for it, so the machine ran hot and throttled all of the time. The keyboard keys rubbed off after a few months of use. The Thinkpad logo was just a sticker that one day decided to stick to my hand because Lenovo used really cheap glue. It had a MicroEthernet port with a passive adapter that did nothing but break it out to a regular ethernet jack. The adapter cost 30€ and its cable turned into oil after a year.

I was able to undervolt the CPU and make it barely passable, then Microsoft released a Windows update that prevented undervolting. Gave it to a friend afterwards and got myself a GPD Win Max 2.

An Eink smartphone from a Chinese company: Bigme Hibreak pro. It never worked, I sent I back for repair and they shipped it back to me in the same buggy conditions... Now it lies in a drawer completely frozen and unresponsive...

Asus video cards.

I've owned 3 of them.

one caught fire, one failed in a spectacular flash of light, and one just quietly died.

Every single one of them managed to take rest of the system with them.

No I did not overclock/overvolt them, and yes I had good airflow/cooling.

That BlackBerry tablet. It honestly wasn’t a bad device on some levels. It had features that weren’t as easy on other devices for some time. Like the fact it automatically got internet from my phone seamlessly.

But support for apps was garbage and the hardware the dumb. If you let the battery fully discharge you had to spend like 15 minutes plugging and unplugging the power to force it to trickle charge to get enough battery for it to start the system that ran the battery management.

Every smart phone. Without exception.

Razer Diamond back gaming mouse, shit at clicking, shit quality, over priced

Bohmann air-conditioner, broke after few hours of usage at most. Well within warranty, the reseller(Mediamarkt), and manufacturers took me for a long long ride until I eventually gave up on getting my money back...

surface pro 4 maybe.. had swollen battery, yellowish screen, touch/stylus malfunction, charger connection issues, keyboard connection issue, heat/fan grinding noise, etc all right after the warranty just expired (3 years iirc?)

it still does boot and i've learnt a lot of computer stuff thanks to it though

I bought an HMD skyline phone based on the fact that it was a user serviceable device. I'd like to support that kind of thing so I took a gamble on a "goofy" phone. Best buy's website had a sale on them and I went for it. When it showed up it came out of the box with a dead USB port. It may be user serviceable but I don't want to user service it right out of the damn box so I took it back to a best buy store to try and get it replaced. They had never heard of it and wouldn't touch it. Turns out just because it came from best buy's website doesn't mean it came from best buy? I guess? Best they could do for me was to tell me to contact HMD, and the best HMD could do was have me ship it to somebody to get it repaired. This took weeks and when it came back the cameras weren't aligned properly anymore. I kinda gave up on it after that and bought a used Pixel from eBay. I jammed GrapheneOS onto it and never looked back. I'll never buy from best buy or HMD again.

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.

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.

My partner bought a Skylight screen a month ago. I put it up, but it’s basically been unused since.

For me, there was this very early health tracking watch I got, which was so fragile that it would reset and lose all data if I did anything more active than walking.

Some Google TV that was well reviewed, but at some point shortly after I got it had a software update that made the UI unusablly slow. Like, 5-10 seconds to respond to every button click.

Zip drive

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.

I bought an Xbox One to play D3. Nobody else did and then the rest of the episodes got cancelled.

I bought a System76 laptop once. Poop_OS! was fucking awful and when I owned it their updating application especially was and had been left buggy and broken for years. So I put Fedora on it instead which then stopped working shortly after. The kernel just wouldn't load past a certain version and I gave up waiting for a fix and just e-wasted that miserable piece of shit with tinny speakers and bruise inflicting pointy metal casing. I have no faith these guys can make Cosmic not blow ass when they struggled to make a basic update GUI function for YEARS.

An out of date, yet new, drawing tablet. Obsolete at the touch of a finger...

A pager called MiniLink when I was 16 right before mobiles became common

The ASUS transformer with keyboard. As they did an update that made it super slow and clunky right before end of lifeing it.

Our shitty MSI laptop

A Kodak luma mini projector. Absolute dog shit ui and the worst speaker I've ever heard completely ruin the entire experience.

Old crazy HP pisser of dad died a slow dead, needed a new one. I sent him a link to the Local online tech retailer, filters all set to bottle printers. One day dad wrote me, he was just in (i think Fust? Some local tech retailer), they only had HP printers, i should come set it up. Still crazy behavior in Cups but at least a laser this time. Half a year later, he bought new toners of 500$ for the 300$ printer "it's the last one i need before retirement, i swear!".

I once bought one of these weird gaming 'keyboards' where you only have the keys around WASD on it. Used it once, thought it sucked and never looked at it again

Micro usb to hdmi that I didn't know wasn't compatible with my phone

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.

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.

• 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)

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 🤦

This worst purchase but entirely my fault. I bought a thrust master t3000 kit off of a website I had found because it was like 200 bucks cheaper than anywhere else. I get the thing in the mail and it’s the EU plug so I had to order another servo motor that was for US outlets

Vr Headset.

Worth it to play Half Life Alyx and 3D Skyrim.

But was it worth $400?

All three different aux to usb-c adaptors I have bought..
The "best" one was the cheapest aliexpress one.

I owned a MindDrive. It did not help me get better at CS like I had expected. 😔

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.

The Outa console. It's sitting in my shelf in my officefas a reminder of how dumb I can be.

BQ Aquaris E5 Ubuntu Editon

Big flop

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

Those HD fans they had didn't cool anything but the vibration wrecked the HD.

the video version of the echo devices.

Jide Remix Ultratablet.

Kinda glitchy from the start. Got one minor software update before the company decided to focus first only on their mini-desktops and soon after, B2B; dropping the consumer support entirely.

Which wouldn't have been so bad is the released the proprietary blobs for others to use to keep up support. The hardware was nice, and the concept was one of the first to try an "Android version of a Surface". But to my knowledge, no ROMs have ever been made for it.

I bought a 2nd hand MacBook Air with an Intel chip to put Linux on it. Forgot about the T2 chip being a bitch.

I saw this video show up as well, and it got me thinking what are mine?

I tend to do tonnes of research before buying any tech. But potentially it would be my TP-Link BE6500 WiFi 7 router. Like it works amazingly well, and it solved all of the routing and bandwidth issues with streaming and gaming on WiFi, however I don't think it was worth the price or headache getting it working.

Otherwise, not sure if we're regarding this as tech, but I purchased the Illumi Classic IPL device a few months ago. I made the wrong decision here, I should have spent the extra and picked up the Illumi Pro instead.

Ringconn Gen2 smart ring. Battery issues. Eventually wouldn't hold a charge for an entire day. This is after being sure to charge it from no lower than 40% and generally no higher than 90% Completely unusable after a year.

I've bought some different smart switches and bulbs that changed hardware but not model number thinking I could flash them to ESPHome.

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.

Intellivoice Voice Synthesis Module for Intellivision

Had a Tapwave Zodiac as a teenager. Was so excited waiting for it, quite a disappointment.