I love Skoda. I love the Octavia. It was my fourth Octavia and I already ordered two more for my staff. PHEV would have been ideal for our use case.
Well,things didn’t go as planned.
The whole car was bugged with software and hardware problems from day one - controll units randomly crapping out, when my dealer wanted to replace them he often had to get 5 units because four would be DOA and the one that worked kicked the bucket before I left his premises. Highlights:
A steering wheel coming loose (only slightly,but still)
The main display that shows your speed,etc. randomly shutting down. (Especially nice as I live close to Switzerland with their exorbitant speeding tickets)
Randomly playing a screeching sound at full volume (especially nice at 3am or when on a highway)
Randomly shutting of AC, some motor controls , etc.
It took 12 months for VW to take that steaming pile back, and only we sued them (Shortly before the hearing).
Second place goes to LG which sold me a OLED TV for 2k that randomly showed faulty pixel lines exactly 3 years and 3 days after I bought it (so it’s out of the extended warranty programs as well). And when asked for a quote for the repair they had the audacity to ask for almost the new price for the TV back then, aka 150% of the current market value - without even looking at it first. Good way to make sure that I never buy LG anymore.
VW really dropped the ball on software, no wonder they’re buying now into other car manufacturers like Rivian, in hopes to use someone else’s more developed software.
Is there actually any car manufacturer that has decent hardware and software? I have never driven a really “modern” car but from all that I’ve seen so far the interfaces are typically horrible to interact with and laggy to the point where I prefer my car as dumb as possible
Why bother with software, then? Late-80s and 90s Type III Jettas can be absolutely bulletproof if you find them in not-bagged and well cared for condition.
The main display that shows your speed,etc. randomly shutting down
I know two people who had this exact issue with their new-gen Golf. First cause was the French language would crash the whole dash if you cycled the dashboard views (to my knowledge they never fixed the issue and the workaround is to set the car to English). Second cause was a malformed JPEG from a radio station would cause the dash to bootloop until you drove far enough from said radio station, which would allow the car to work long enough to disable that feature (IIRC).
So yeah, QA is down the fucking drain with VW on their latest gen. They had a new CEO, and now a new one again I think? But the reputational damage has been done. Too bad, I really liked my '18 Polo.
Fun fact. The guy that made this was the “forensic expert” that claimed he could detect bamboo fibers in ballots in Georgia and Arizona. The GOP tried to put him in charge of their investigation.
Maytag dishwasher and gas dryer. Maytag had always purported themselves to be a top brand. However, both of these products would not last more than 4 years. I should have bought the Bosch dishwasher like consumer reports told me.
Gotta have one from 30 years ago. My dad’s secondhand Maytag dryer survived 4 moves, and 35 years. We had it serviced twice in that time. First time was at 30 years. It stopped running because it filled up with pocket change. Some of the coins were polished almost completely flat. Second time, the heat quit working. Bought a new dryer after that. It’s going strong, but it’s got a long way to go just to be half as good.
Yeah, it’s a common fallacy in appliance brand discussions: “my grandma has a <brand> and it still works! You should buy one, too!”. First of all it’s survivorship bias and almost always the quality has degraded a lot in the past decades (greed and consumers that don’t want to pay the price for reliable appliances).
Also, it’s not even the same corporation or factories behind them. It’s just a brand name at this point, and the product has nothing in common with the old, good one. For example, Maytag bought Amana, and then Whirlpool bought Maytag. (It’s enlightening to read the list of Whirlpool-owned brands.)
It’s probably a bit of both here. We didn’t have the “disposable” lifestyle 50 years ago that we have now, and a stronger push for efficiency and features has had trade-offs in complexity and reliability.
Example: My current dryer (and my dad’s new dryer) both have a lot more plastic in them. The motors are smaller, and quieter, while making the same power (or more). They are loaded with temp, humidity, weight and wobble sensors, and my dryer has 4 dials, 5 different temperatures, and 2 different modes. The old one, had a dial to control the heat, and a timer.
As for disposable, I think older generations had an expectancy that you would buy an appliance once or twice in your life. I’ve got a 1000 dollar poket shit-posting device that I’m going to get rid of because it is pushing 4 years old. We just accept that these devices are uneconomical to repair, and we toss them out. I think the only things American’s bother to fix anymore are cars, and that’s going away because every year, they get harder and more expensive to repair.
If you want truly bulletproof clothing appliances and live in America, look up Speed Queen. They’re built to commercial standards and are trivially repairable. Many last for decades with only minor maintenance and upkeep.
Unfortunately, Speed Queen not available outside of America. 😭 Or, at least, absolutely not available in Western Canada.
I went with LG, as Bosch didn’t have the capacity I was looking for. Pretty happy with LG for both washer and dryer, four years and counting without a single issue. Would be nice if the front-loading washer came with an automatic dehumidifier, tho, as we have to leave the door open to avoid funky smells developing.
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.
I dunno, does it warp probability around it so that no matter what, the egg is always fresh? How far does the effect extend? Does it affect people or just physical interactions? If people ask these questions are they under the effect and contributing to the egg’s defense and therefore continued freshness?
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.
The Cybiko. Got it for Christmas and my father threw out the box before I could get the rebate for the mp3 player attachment. Didn’t know any other kid with one, so the wireless communication was useless. The games all sucked anyway. Gaming on rubber buttons was always a terrible idea
Yoo a lot of nostalgia for the Cybiko! My mom wouldn’t let me get a gameboy but my sister managed to find one of these somewhere. That was my only way to do handheld gaming for years! The games sucked but it was better than homework =)
Amazon kindle. It didnt let me plug it into my computer and upload books to use it without internet access. Everything needed sending through amazon. I should have expected this but it was so locked down and filled with ads to the point it was unusable. I attempted to jailbreak it and it bricked so i threw it away and went back to using calibre on my computer. I would really like an offline open source ebook reader.
I found a paper weight at Goodwill about 2 years ago, and haven’t seen one ad, and I have an email address for it that I can mail any file format. I have not had any issues… maybe because I was a late adopter?
Nah, I had the kindle keyboard and it was great. Still is, if I don’t want to read with a backlight. My first one stopped working after at least a decade, and a couple months later I came across one in a thrift store for like 10 bucks and it still works great.
If you can get one of the early Kobo ereaders, you can flash this Libre OS on it, that would be better.
Also, those early Kobo ereaders (glo, nia, mini and some other models) can support up to 32gb sdcard, that’s a lot of books and out goes the need for cloud storage
i’ve been desperately trying to get my hands on one of those, but I live in a third country and import duties are a pain
My HP laserjet 1320n is over 20 years old. Every 6-8 months I have something to print and it does it like a champ. I can even print to it from my phone. Idk the last time I put toner on it.
With as cheap as pen plotters have gotten, I’m surprised no one has come up with a reasonably small printer looking one for normal sized paper that functions like an actual printer. the ones you can get need special plugins and vector graphics to plot. There used to be many models several decades ago, and they can still be found and modified to use normal pens, but that’s kind of a driver nightmare. I feel like we’re past the point where people need to be able to print many pages relatively quickly, and I’d rather have a printer that took a while to print but I knew that it would work every single time.
Brother laser printers, higher upfront cost but I don’t think I’ll ever need another. I don’t print frequently so inkjet carts dry up, toner doesn’t have that issue, toner also lasts longer, whenever I have to replace it I’m pretty sure they have 3rd party carts, and they don’t do any subscription bullshit or planned obsolescence so far that I’ve seen. Easy to set up on linux through CUPS and the official brother .rpm or .deb drivers. Cannot recommend them enough as someone who also hates all other printers.
My wife got the air pods pro 2 I think. Can’t tell one from the other. She preferred the Samsungs so she got those and gave these to me because I liked them
And I do. It’s the only piece of apple tech I have.
For me they fit REALLY well. And I want people to be happy like me so I’m thinking all of the usual things you’ve been asked or recommended before. Because I want you to like yours like I like mine.
You know: try different tips, go watch a YouTube to confirm it’s fitted right, etc. All ye things you’ve done or thought of doing, try it again with an open mind. And then sell them off, but yeah.
I hope, since this is probably a ways ago, that your current earbuds are working well. Phones seem to be incapable of a headphone jack, despite my startac-7800 fitting one in, so it’s got to be fucking radio earbuds all the way, so you gotta find some that fit and make you happy.
That means they’re not for your ears. Not that they’re designed to inflict pain. I’ve had those AirPods, they were fine for me - and my ears don’t like most earbuds that get shoved in there, and sometimes even start hurting from over-ear headphones. I now have the Airpod Pros and they’re even better, all that goes into your ear is the silicone bud, no rigid plastic in the mix.
I purchased a razor branded Smartwatch, way back when. Thing could barely connect to my phone, it’s battery life was atrocious when it did, and all it did was show the time and track steps. It didn’t have any built-in notifications so you had to use a separate app. This was fairly early in smart watches though, it was pretty fad-esque.
None of them do what I want, which is to check my blood sugar via UV light. They’ve been talking about it for at least 15 years. I know why too. They want to be able to sell all our info, and medical stuff is protected by HIPPA.
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.
Nintendo Wii: as a loyal Nintendo purchaser here from the Game & Watch, to the Super Nintendo, N64 and GameCube, but the Nintendo Wii never let me back up my purchased downloaded games in a way I could transfer to another Wii without online access. I get that that’s now standard but it was the first time I was burnt by it.
Yes that’s right, and I realised I could no longer be a historic game hardware collector with that generation of consoles which killed my main hobby at the time. Years of Nintendo loyalty and, dare I say it, fandom, were betrayed and the Wii itself was just awful.
Except that it’s great to homebrew and experience literally everything it has to offer. It’s the same with the 3ds. Turns out to be about the best handheld emulator out there, because of the extremely high quality buttons.