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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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.
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A pager called MiniLink when I was 16 right before mobiles became common
The ASUS transformer with keyboard. As did an update that made it super slow and clunky right before end of lifeimg it.
As a fellow Asus Transformer survivor, I feel your pain! I’ve never actively hated a piece of tech as much and as fast as that pos. Pretty sure I downloaded that same update that basically made it so slow it transformed it into a paperweight. I have never purchased another tablet after that because it turned me off to the whole idea permanently.
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.
The Outa console. It’s sitting in my shelf in my officefas a reminder of how dumb I can be.
the video version of the echo devices.
~$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.
There’s a LOT of snake oil in the audiophile world, and the matter of cost is almost universally a matter of diminishing returns. I say this as someone whose typical audio rig costs at least $250k: At home, I use basic Sennheiser monitor headphones.
You’ll notice a huge difference between $50 headphones and $100 headphones. But the difference between $100 headphones and $200 headphones will be much less noticeable, even though there is a much bigger price difference between the two.
Also, you probably got scammed on that balanced cable. I can guarantee that the recording studio used the cheapest $1/foot starquad cable, soldered by the intern using $3 Neutrik connectors.
Raycons. Got suckered by the YouTubers. They were garbage right out of the box. They could barely maintain a connection with each other, and the sound quality was awful.
Yeah, general rule of thumb is to avoid anything being peddled by YouTubers. It’s a good sign that the company is putting a ton of money into trendy marketing instead of R&D or product quality.
Razer Diamond back gaming mouse, shit at clicking, shit quality, over priced
Bohmann air-conditioner, broke after few hours of usage at most. Well within warranty, the reseller(Mediamarkt), and manufacturers took me for a long long ride until I eventually gave up on getting my money back…
Ringconn Gen2 smart ring. Battery issues. Eventually wouldn’t hold a charge for an entire day. This is after being sure to charge it from no lower than 40% and generally no higher than 90% Completely unusable after a year.
I’ve bought some different smart switches and bulbs that changed hardware but not model number thinking I could flash them to ESPHome.
Old crazy HP pisser of dad died a slow dead, needed a new one. I sent him a link to the Local online tech retailer, filters all set to bottle printers. One day dad wrote me, he was just in (i think Fust? Some local tech retailer), they only had HP printers, i should come set it up. Still crazy behavior in Cups but at least a laser this time. Half a year later, he bought new toners of 500$ for the 300$ printer “it’s the last one i need before retirement, i swear!”.
Old crazy HP pisser of dad died a slow dead, needed a new one.
I hate those HP pissers! It’s hard to get the stains off the floor.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Holy fuck, that would make me quickly turn around nope away.
I bought a router that had 5-10% package loss, it was basically trash, returned it of course.
Just keep the package?
A plex lifetime pass. Was okay until the company went crazy. Now I use Jellyfin and I’m happy.
On the flip side, it was one of my best purchases. The sync feature has historically been great and I’ve had over a decade of use out of it for that single payment. I hate every update they make, but Jellyfin clients still don’t have as good of a sync feature and that’s what I use a ton of for traveling.
Same. Jellyfin just isn’t there yet unfortunately. Maybe if a comparable plex4kodi existed. The jellyfin one isn’t aa good unfortunately.
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.
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.
