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.
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.
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 should really get a laser printer but my need for 11x17 capacity kind of limits options. To be fair though, my brother small business type inkjet printer does pretty well! Ink costs suck but I don’t want to commit seppuku after using it.
I’ve never owned a better inkjet than the one I’ve had in the late 90s on all measures; build-quality, print quality, speed, operating noise, ink consumption, ink price, overall price, usability. Everything has got worse.
I back a running trainer on Kickstarter called Vi. When I got it is was insanely uncomfortable, drained my phone battery on an hour via the companion app and did not work for runs longer than 10 minutes. It was absolutely dog shit.
Not that guy. But: what people were promised was smartphone guts in a set-top box, for all the novel PSP-grade mobile titles that were limited by touchscreen controls and battery life. What was delivered was Not That. They turned the Kickstarter into a custom microconsole, which is a vulgar word in any context, because it means there’s no goddamn software. The central fucking point was to take advantage of everything on Google Play… or whatever the hell it was called that month. Instead you got a tiny selection of games which were forced to provide free demos. And you could play them with an abysmal controller, which was the one thing these geniuses were supposed to get right for free.
It was nothing more than an off the shelf ARM SBC inside. Some third party designed and made the board. Nobody had the bootloader keys to unlock the units. It was easily bricked. No keys to recover it. They had sold it as a device for “hackers” but nobody could really hack it. The whole concept was dead on arrival.
Several years later people discovered weaknesses in Nvidias bootloader code. The Ouya is vulnerable. So they’re finally wide open hackable. But nobody cares anymore.
The joycons that came with the Nintendo Switch, both failed within 3 months of owning it, and might as well include the entire console cause all the cheap plastic bits are falling apart.
I’d replace it with a Steam Deck, but the Switch’s biggest strength is being such a piece of junk I wouldn’t care if it gets stolen or destroyed
I’ve had my joycons for 5 years and they still work fine. Tbh I mostly use it as a handheld and probably only play about 100 hours per year, but I think the switch is pretty neat
Google Home. Bought them for $40 CAD and back then they were great. Responsive, did quick google searches, played my music all over the house.
Over the years they’ve lost functionality. Mine no longer accurately respond to voice queries and no longer complete google searches. I can still play music on them manually from my phone but when I ask it something, it responds back in French or does something completely different than what I had originally asked.
Worst part is that I ask it something, it does something different, and then when I say “hey Google stop” it just keeps going and going. Have to manually pull the plug for it to stop.
I have the ring doorbell and a home blob which I only use to play the doorbell tune in the house. It is 50/50 luck if the tune plays when someone presses the doorbell button.
An early Samsung phone my spouse bullied me into taking over from him. I don’t know how anyone likes those. I went to Google phones and they’re the only good thing about Google.
iPhone 4, nexus5, samsung7, samsung10, and all I can say is the Samsungs aren’t like the nexus5 but at least they’re not apple, whose keyboard and features I just hate. Good earbuds though.
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.
I might be exaggerating a but I’ve never been a real fan of Bluetooth headphones or earphones. Sound quality never matched cabled ones (I also have the popular Sony one) and battery life sucks for the time I want to use it
I always wanted to be the cool hipster with cabled headphones and getting mad about phones without audio jack.
Truth is, my cables always got tangled up, especially at work. It was getting really annoying. I bought some open ear headphones from aftershokz because i often listen to music wherever and i don’t want to be isolated. These things absolutely fuck. Battery life is fantastic. Even if they are empty, i can throw them into the pocket charger for 15 minutes and they go for hours again. The sound is good. It’s not full blown headphone quality, obviously. But they are so comfortable and you don’t have to stick anything into your ears. I saw that bose has a similar product and i kinda wanna try them.
I understand it’s a very subjective experience. And tbh, one thing that bothers me about cabled ones is the cable noise when moving. Or accidentally pulling off the headphones from my head, although that’s not a common issue,but for sitting experience they’re perfect. Aside from that, my music preference is very eclectic, so e.g. the level of bass really needs to adapt properly to the genre I’m listening to atm, so the boosted bass Bluetooth headphones just don’t work for me. I’ve never experienced a Bluetooth pair that doesn’t have too much bass.
Ya, bass is always the downside of these things, but i’m not super into that. Also i don’t really like to listen to music very loud. I really don’t like when i feel the cable brushing my arms or something. And i rip them out every time i stand up. It’s so bad. A huge plus for me is also that i can leave my phone somewhere and i can still listen to music.
I have $25 wired IEMS that sound better than my most expensive Bluetooth tws sets. I’ve taken to just listing to podcasts and YouTube videos with my Bluetooth sets at work.
“Sony MDRXB55AP Wired Extra Bass Earbud Headphones/Headset with Mic for Phone Call, Black”
Biggest pieces of shit I have ever disgraced my ears with. I’m not even an audiophile or a gear snob or anything. These were just so ridiculously bad that it was offensive. I’ve owned earbuds from the dollar store that sounded better than these.
Probably won’t help, but I find that headsets sound much worse when they’re connected as a headset. My (completely different headphones/headset) sounds a lot better in headphone mode.
Yeah, there are different bluetooth audio profiles, one for high quality audio intended for media consumption, and one for bi-directional audio intended for telephony (and some others, but these are the relevant ones here). The “gotcha” is that in general, any attempt to consume the mic feed from a bluetooth headset will switch it to the telephony mode, so if you have them paired to a PC and an application is listening to the mic for any purpose you get stuck with much lower quality 64kbps PCM audio.
Or worse: it’s in telephone mode now, so obviously you only want the sound from the “call” because there’s no other reasons the microphone could be on.
My first two smartphones were keyboard phones that I had a love-hate relationship with. The rest were all a hate-hate relationship, except my current phone which is back to love-hate. How many smartphones has the average person owned now? I am up to 12…oh god.
They do many many useful things and the utility is valuable enough to begrudgingly have to accept the frustrating experience of using them. We generally really do have to accept it as well because as with all useful technologies, they become ubiquitous and then useful technologies are built off the fact of their reliable ubiquity and then those technologies replace existing ones and you find yourself needing smartphones to get by in society. They’re close to a necessity if not in reality, a necessity where I live, but places like China for example it is simply impossible to go about life without one. I honestly don’t what people do there when their phone is broken, just getting out the door to pick up a new one would be a challenge.