Samsung M540 “Slyde” phone - The software was incredibly buggy including things like just randomly typing the wrong letter. Randomly bad tech is so much more irritating than tech you know is bad.
Google Nexus 7 (2012) - The tablet had defective chips that slowed down over time. Turned into a horrible slow piece of shit over time.
Oh, remember the good old Nexus 7. Had only a fraction of its performance 1-2 years down the line…
Meanwhile, my Samsung Galaxy Tab A 10.1 2016 still soldiers on with good performance, even if it hasn’t gotten updates in half a decade, and its internal 16GB space is beyond ridiculously small for today’s standards and has to be cleaned up revery few months.
Was that the first version Nexus 7? I had the refreshed version and it was my favourite bit of tech ever. I ran it for about 5 years until the screen and battery both died. I loved that thing.
A lot of those are very dependent on which tech is in the key fob. They can easily copy old hid prox which just broadcast the UUID of the fob, but struggle with newer tech that does a challenge and response.
Microsoft surfacebook (or whatever the fuck that thing was called) that died after like 13 months. Motherboard went to shit and MS offered me a $100 discount on a new one. Yeah fuck that, I bought a MacBook Pro.
Oooh I had an Intel Atom Vaio Netbook as my first ever computer I actually owned, given to me as a gift by parents for school. I asked for a gaming laptop, so I was real bamboozled by it.
Somehow though I managed to grief my friends’ Minecraft server with /set 0 and enderdragon spawn spam while talking to them on Skype, but it was painful, opening a web page took literal minutes sometimes and my internet wasn’t the fastest back then but it wasn’t too bad either like 5-10mbps easily. But it wasn’t the worst.
That honor goes to an MSI gaming laptop. It was actually really powerful, quad core, 16GB RAM, 8GB VRAM, MSATA SSD and a 1TB HDD that is still alive and in a JBOD setup with mergerfs in my server today serving me shows to watch thru Jellyfin.
In 2014 it was nothing to scoff at, the 880m ran GTA V on almost the highest settings at 1080p and it had tons of storage.
But as a computer it was just fucking terrible, the screen is the dimmest, most TN LCD blue filter shit you’ve ever seen, it was all I had so I watched things on it, and it just always made me depressed that I was watching beautiful films and shows and playing games through this awful blue filter that had no warmth, everything looked like some movie dementia flashback.
USB port melted itself and made some random parts of the case have an electric surprise for you sometimes, keys popped off if you breathed on em but not like you would want those keycaps to stay on because they were disgusting, speakers sucked in dust and vibrated it inside, making all audio feel like earrape at any volume, headphones jack flew out, touchpad was off to the side because of the dumbass numpad, ethernet port fried entire cables, DVD drive wouldn’t read disks, dumbass UEFI firmware locked down to shit, took forever to disable secureboot and the setting would get lost randomly.
About 3 years later, the AC port fried itself and would work like a pair of dodgy earbuds and I had to sit there rotating it like I was finding a radio signal in class, battery was long gone by then so it would shut off at random, which made android app dev I was doing at the time on it somehow even worse of an experience.
Still have many fond memories of my times with it but man did I not miss it at the time.
I replaced it with a 2010 ThinkPad X201 I got for 50 bucks and loved it, I proudly used and abused it and showed it to everyone like it was my first dress with pockets until I eventually blacked out on xanax and procedurally took the entire thing apart and flashed ??? onto the firmware chip and couldn’t put it back together ever again.
I still have mine, what a great machine! I once accidentally stepped on it when hastily getting out of bed and nothing happened, it just continued to work.
I have a x220 that fell 1 meter lid first (and open) on the floor and… all I got was a crack on one of the posts inside the lid. Still fine to this day, in fact, still my number one laptop lol.
My wife has a dress with pockets and she didn’t notice that for months because she didn’t think to look for them and they weren’t obvious. Same with a nightie. As someone who wears cargo pants, I was amused at her excitement.
I did this to my X201. Somehow i have like 7 screws that I couldn’t find where they belonged (even though I tried to document each screw). I also broke part of the bezel. So I did put it back together again, but with poor structural integrity. The thing still works but I do not use it. Sadly that era of laptops just run too warm and the fans are too noisy.
Metal detectors, just in general. My BF has one and the metal detectors just don’t like me for some reason, I could never achieve success with it, like everything was a needle in a haystack. He was always “the detector” and me “the photographer” and I guess stuff just doesn’t transfer over well.
I had this one and the upgraded one since we were too poor to buy a real PC. It worked decent for web browsing at the time and I spent a lot of time in IRC chat rooms. I think (may have been later on a real PC) I even started doing Geocities/Tripod/Angelfire pages on this and learning basic HTML.
I was willing to put up with a lot of sacrifices for a $100 smartwatch but I was not expecting the level of trash I received. Unappealing and cheap looking silver colored case, typos in menus, and navigating the painfully underperformant UI made me immediately regret my purchase. There were many other issues I’ve since pushed out of my memory. I packed it up for a return within 24 hours.
The ONLY positive was supposedly the battery lasted weeks but I didn’t want to use the damn thing for more than 5 minutes.
My son picked up a refurbished Ipad mini that we were going to use as a screen for our quadcopters. Well, you can’t load any software on it so it’s just a worthless piece of shit. Way to go apple.
Came at a time when there weren’t barcodes everywhere and QR codes didn’t exist yet. Companies had to publish Cuecat specific barcodes, it was much easier to just type in the URL by the time you figured out you could use it at all.
Went down the rabbit hole on this guy a bit. He went on to participate in the CyberNinjas audit of Arizona’s ballots after the 2020 election. He claimed to have technology that could detect whether ballots had been folded in the mail, and claimed to detect bamboo in “fraudulent Chinese ballots”.
smart doorbell that takes 25+ seconds to fire up a video feed, and errors out most of the time. (Original Ring doorbell, received when they bought out my kickstarter Doorbot and bricked it)
or the Lockitron smart door lock from Kickstarter which took like 6 AA batteries and couldn’t muster the strength to unlock the door more than like 3 times.
My ring used to do that shit. I stopped using it for like a year. Then I was bitching about it and someone said they just got one and it worked great. So I tried it again out of spite to show what a piece of shit it was and now it works within a couple of seconds. shrug
Reminds me of the two Nexus 4’s I got. First one dead in the box, second overheated after two weeks and mysteriously lost its IMEI and never had cell signal again. Worked fine otherwise, but stupid.
Oh man, my buddy’s P6P has a weird issue where it feels like the DAC is coming loose too (if the audio goes out he can press on a part of his to make it come back). Guess I got lucky as I’m still on mine.
I’m still using the 3a, but I’ve broken the screen at least 4 times. I’m clumsy, but I don’t think it’s just my fault? That screen is ridiculously delicate.
However, once cracked, the hauntings begin. There are touch controls attached to the display that go haywire, and it would cycle through clicking buttons like Russian Roulette: it called the emergency line twice while cracked, and would just power itself back on when I turned it off. I finally bought a screen protector and haven’t had an issue since.
Maybe not this exact model, but 20 years ago when I was a young gun in college for the first time, I got one of these because I hated cleaning the fucking shower and tub.
It worked about as badly as you’d expect. I don’t know if modern versions are any better, but holy shit they’re a lot more expensive than they used to be. I remember spending like $40 at the time.
I quickly learned to just wipe down the shower after use and clean it more often. Thing was fucking worthless.
Oh, yeah, those are crap. I went with scrub brush attachments for the battery-powered drill I already own. It cost like $20 for half a dozen heads of different sizes that chuck up like any normal drill bit. It’s not as automated, but it’s way easier and more thorough than scrubbing by hand.