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.
And they’re making things worse as we use less and less paper at the same time… Geniuses
Gotta protect those profit margins!
I bought an old business monochrome laser printer ten years ago. Still hasn’t needed a new toner cartridge.
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 got my parents a laser as well and evidently I picked a shitty one because they are planning to go back to the other side 😞
Considering the volume businesses need weekly vs a private household I wonder why the very same cartridge lasts for >5 years
If you’ve owned more than 2, those are on you! 🤣
But yea, consumer printers suck.
Hey, my Brother laser printer can see my screen, you know! Apologise now!
My Lexmark laser, from 1996, just quit last summer.
Though I think I can fix it - seems a paper jam sensor is stuck.
Laser printers are way way better than the other types
Everything is better with lasers. Prove me wrong…
Sharks with laser beams on their heads?
Fricken, better.
I got one of those Epson ink tank printers for $250au. I think it’s the first time inkjet printers have become legit affordable and high capacity.
Laser still wins on reliability though, and being an Epson means it’s a Tamagochi so needs to be used monthly at least so it doesn’t die.
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.
Anything with fucking Bluetooth. Even in 2024 getting it to connect consistently requires some kind of arcane magic
HP Printer
A smart egg tray. It was in fact quite stupid. Mainly purchased it because of how absurd it was.
Main issues:
- it was constantly wrong about how many eggs were in the tray
- it was wrong about the eggs age.
- it took 6AA batteries that only lasted a month at best.
The egg that stays fresh for a few hundred years is kinda lame for an SCP
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?
That really sounds absurd. Both the idea itself and the fact that they somehow screwed up the execution of such a simple thing that much.
That sounds eggceptionally stupid, eggregious even.
Wow. Nicely done.
eggcellent
Hahahahaha omg that is horrible
Wow I thought I was the only idiot that bought it. Once they started charging for the smart features, it got unbatteried and became just a fancy box.
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.
HP anything, absolute trash
Tablets. I’ve owned 2 so far, plus fucked around with a third, fancier one that was borrowed from someone else (in case you care: a very old Samsung one, a Xiaomi model from the late 2010s, and a new-ish Apple iPad for the borrowed one).
They suck as smartphone replacements because they are too big.
They lack button inputs, so they suck as gaming devices or as computer replacements.
You can browse the web… But if you decide to type anything, the large size plus the touchscreen keyboard make for an awkward experience (in ways that it’s not on a smaller phone)
They have lit screens, so they suck as eReaders.
They’re sorta okay as like, personal screens for watching movies or whatever, but like, at that point just use a television??
They can make sorta good drawing tablets, the ones that are pen-compatible I mean… Because I mean, yeah. But the lack of a keyboard is a bummer with how I learned to draw with my other hand on Ctrl+Z, though that’s more a muscle memory issue than anything.
In general, every tablet I used felt like a less-good verion of a dozen other devices, yanno?
I felt like this until I bought a legit tablet, not some sub $100 tablet. it’s night and day. and it’s not even super high end, just not cheap
I use my tablet for 2 things"
Consuming media. Not sure what TV you have but mine would be a little unwieldy for taking it on travels.
Taking notes during conferences, meetings, presentations, etc. So much easier if all the notes are digital from the beginning
Wait, wait, wait. You’re telling me people leave their homes?!
In my case it’s more that I get car/airsick very easily – So when I’m out and about, I won’t be watching media on a portable screen. At most listening to music or an audio-book.
And if I’m in like. A hotel. Most of them (at least here in my country) have SmartTVs that will accept broadcasting from my phone. :P
As for note-taking, I can see the appeal but refer to my comment about typing in a Tablet being uniquely awful.
One of the funniest memories from when I was travelling (around 2017) was many tourists holding up their giant tablet devices, fumbling with them to try take photos of things.
Absolutely. I use my tablet almost exclusively as a media device but I do feel it could be so much more. It is nice though to use it while my phone is charging overnight and not wasting battery on the phone while traveling.
The worst piece of tech I currently own is a small server that must have hard drive issues cause it forgets everything when it restarts and I have to set it up again.
The worst piece of tech that I have ever owned in my life is a CD Cleaner I bought from GameStop back in the day. That shit was straight up a sacrificial altar. It never cleaned. Only consumed.
The worst piece of tech that I have ever owned in my life is a CD Cleaner I bought from GameStop back in the day. That shit was straight up a sacrificial altar. It never cleaned. Only consumed.
Oh shit, I remember those. They “cleaned” by using an abrasive spray to “polish” the CDs. Those things were straight-up evil.
Yes! RIP Dinocrisis. My Gauntlet: Dark Legacy survived the process though. Thing still runs today with a fucking trench etched across the bottom, it doesn’t make sense really.
GameStop
That explains it.
Funny thing is, out of all the disc “cleaners” we sold while I was at Gamestop, we got very few complaints about it. Make the discs look like they went through hell but the product worked.
– forgets everything
Many mother boards have a battery on them that is used in retaining state. May need to be replaced.
I checked the CMOS and ended up replacing it. I thought that was it too. Same issue.
I paid 100 bucks for this server 5 years ago, came with 4TBs. Only thing I ever did with it was run private game servers on it for my friends. Maybe I’ll try replacing it again just for laughs and poop.
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.
Have you tried “arrete?”
Used to love it, had too many weird promptless experiences, unplugged it and now it’s gathering dust on a shelf.
Though it was nice to say “Hey google, tell me today’s news” and get a few different news updates while making coffee.
Edit: Out of sheer curiosity, have you tried factory resetting it?
I’ve factory reset every Google home of mine multiple times over the years. Never had any effect.
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.
Manual lawnmower.
The surface RT and windows ME e-machine computer were both a close second.
I went from a cheap mp3 player that I could just plug in to my computer and drag in music to an iPod which forced me to download the iTunes bloatware create an account and then took 100x longer to transfer music because of the pointless conversion each file had to undergo. This was my first and last experience with a personal Apple device. Ended up putting some old pop music onto it and giving it to my grandmother after 2 days. Uninstalled iTunes and went back to using my cheap mp3 player until I replaced it with a smartphone.
Coming in as a close second place, an all-in-one Sony Vaoi computer that cost a fortune and had shit performance. Took daily nags to Sony before they took it back and gave me a refund. I find that Sony’s hit and miss though. My favourite smartphone (Xperia Play) was Sony, and I love my Sony Bluetooth earbuds. The Sony Smartwatch was shit.
A Canon printer. Not just a simple one, but a big (wide) one with real ink tanks, about 20 years ago.
Under Linux, I could only access basic printing services with that, and this only by using a default driver not made by Canon that happened to work. So I contacted Canon to get a proper user manual to create a proper device driver for this (something I could have done without problems), and basically got the answer that they would not support this, as “open source is theft of intellectual property”. They also had some very choice words about Linux in general.
I assumed I just got an asshole on the phone, so when I attended Cebit a short time later (back then the biggest trade fair in Europe for things like that), I went to the Canon booth, explained my issue, and basically got the same reply. So I sold the Canon printer and bought an HP one. At least HP supported Linux and supplied working drivers. Sadly, they have really gone down the drain since that, so the next printer will be a different brand again…
Try brother. They’re usually quite good, though I’ve only had their laser printers.
I have a brother color laser + scanner. Love it.
I’ve had it for 8 years now, and so far it’s only on its second set of toners etc.
The only warning I give to brother printer owners is don’t leave them on. The capacitors in them aren’t the best and your printer will either not turn on without a long power off, or like mine it will turn on and off randomly all day and night.
So now I only turn it on at the wall when I need it, and unplug it after
It will probably be either a Brother Inkbenefit or an Epson Ecotank model.
My last Epson is a model from 2009 and still somehow works perfectly. Every Canon I’ve owned was garbage.
Well, the question for me back then was printing wide, so the selection was quite limited from the start. And laser was completely out of the equation, as anything printing wider than 21cm was industrial (size of a bus and price of a house) back then.
Buy an industrial laserprinter. Anything consumer will fail you intentionally
I grabbed an HP 3055 that my work was throwing out almost 10 years ago, along with two spare laser cartridges.
We don’t print much, but I’m still on the initial cartridge it came with.
It also has been set up in an often dusty, sometimes smokey garage, and hasn’t had an issue yet.
I got an HP printer and it’s prints reliably when connected via USB but that’s about it.
Samsung appliances. Fridges. Washing machines.
Got them as part of the rental unit. They’re very new looking. But every month is some new mess up.
God I would replace them if I owned this place.
I used to be a big fan of Samsung, but over the past couple years it has become a do not buy brand for me. They keep doing anticompetitive stuff with their phones so my next phone won’t be one.
Start of 2024 my Samsung TV that wasn’t that old up and died. And my less than a year old Samsung monitor is flickering.
My watch 6 classic is my favorite smart watch I’ve ever had, but in order to get it working well on a non Samsung phone you need to go through a bunch of bullshit hassle.
I used to be a Samsung galaxy note diehard, but I stopped at the 10+. The quality just gets worse every time.
Got a Xiaomi Redmi Note and it’s basically everything I used to love about Samsung phones.
The friggin ice maker on the fridge. Plus the drawers are falling apart and it’s only been 7 years.
I don’t understand fridges with ice makers. You can just make ice in the freezer without any further complex machinery.
Yeah it being broken is definitely a first world problem, hence why it has stayed broken for 5 years.
I bought a dehumidifier off amazon that was “rated” for 800 sq ft.
Not only did it not live up to that promise, but it also served as the worlds shittiest ice maker. Ice formed on the radiator inside and stoped it from dehumidifying the air.
Thats right, you too can have a ice maker that makes ice in the shape of a radiator while ineffectively dehumidifying your home!
Best part was they reached out after I left a one star review and what they could do to change my rating.
I said “Nothing. Make a better product”
I wonder if we had the same dehumidifier. Same 800 sq ft claim, except it didn’t produce ice because it couldn’t pull enough moisture out of the air to do so despite it being ~80% humidity in my apartment.
After a night of running at full blast, I woke up and poured out a whopping 10 mL of water from the basin
From my understanding, a lot of the products on amazon are resellers that buy stuff from alibaba and then resell it at a markup so it would not surprise me if that was the case.
They all looked the same when i was last on there searching for one.
100%.
I’m constantly seeing the same items with different branding all at a similar price point - it’s all AliExpress garbage. And if the AliExpress version suits your needs you’re better off ordering from AE directly as it’s significantly cheaper. AE shipping speeds have improved over the years too, I’ve gotten items within 1 week several times now
Anything that relies on mini/micro USB for charging. With enough repeated use, they eventually cause an early failure of the device.
