Easily 1000% my Samsung TV.

Each update somehow makes it slower, it always loads up whatever the Samsung TV app thing is before it will do anything with a menu so you can get out of it, I believe it requires a Samsung account before it will allows you to do anything, and every now and then it locks up so hard that I have to factory reset it to get it to work again.

I refuse to buy anything from Samsung ever again.

I bought an HD DVD player as a youth. I don’t think I need to explain further

I bought a MacBook Pro for iOS development. It was alright until Apple decided to exclude it from future OS updates, preventing me from using it for it's sole purpose, and forcing me to either buy a new one or stop developing iOS apps. Guess which one I chose. There is nothing wrong with the hardware, it's still got a 2TB SSD, 16GB of RAM and 16-core CPU but apparently Apple thought they could make more money off of me by intentionally barring it from updates to force me to buy a new one, rather than simply allowing me to install MacOS updates. They were wrong.

Edit: 8 physical cores, 16 logical

I bought an after-market touchscreen entertainment/navigation unit for my 2008 car from some online place selling cheap Chinese gear.

It was so slow it was nigh on useless. I'd be halfway home before the maps would finally start, and Spotify would just crash. I pulled it out after a few weeks and went back to the stock unit.

Let's see... One that comes to mind that I guess is "tech" would be Substance Painter and Designer, back when it was independently owned and had an indie license.

"This will really take my Blender work to the next level. I'm going to LEARN this. Let's freaking go." I said, and "invested" like $150 into it.

I'm NORMALLY a FOSS nut, but this software was changing the game! Paint directly on 3d models with smart materials and layers and dynamics‽ AWESOME! Maybe it's worth paying a chunk of my meager part time income for quality software...

Then comes the email:

Subject: "Substance is joining the Adobe family!"

Then the follow-up to all the pissed off customers:

"Don't worry, it won't be subscription only."

Maybe a month later it's part of the "cloud" and made subscription only.

I don't care what's "iNdUsTry sTaNdArD." I refuse to engage with Adobe for any reason, and I'd rather put my hard earned money into supporting open source community tools than to ever get rug pulled by some shameless sellout ever again.

A plex lifetime pass. Was okay until the company went crazy. Now I use Jellyfin and I'm happy.

I got a cheap dash cam off Temu a few years ago. I’m sure I don’t have to explain beyond that.

Yes. I’m an idiot. I know. I’ve always known.

I'm not sure if they count is a "tech purchase", but I bought all new Samsung appliances in my previous home (washer, dryer, refrigerator, and dishwasher). The washer and dryer failed catastrophically within 6 months, the dryer drum cracked and shredded a whole load of clothing into confetti and the washing flooded my kitchen and ruined my cabinets (it was a weird house layout). The refrigerator just had random parts dying over and over (water dispenser, lights, sensors, ice maker) until it finally died at the year mark. The dishwasher made it nearly to year two before the control panel died and the replacement part was more expensive than an entire new unit. Never again Samsung!

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.

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.

I got an ouya.

The controllers keys stuck.

You had to give them your credit card in order to get an account.

The games were ok if you could get over the 1/2 second of lag between button press and game.

I bought a fucking Xioami Poco F4 GT near the launch date because I wanted a gaming phone and back in the time I was naive to think mobile games were a thing. It came with a top of the line chipset from the time I bought it (Snapdragon 8 Gen 1), and this shit overheats as fuck and eats your battery even on average use.

I was able to unlock the bootloader around 2023 and so far used only LineageOS, but this year I had to relock the bootloader for a specific usage, and guess what Xiaomi is making nearly impossible to unlock the bootloader again, I didn't know about that and now I'm stuck on Xiaomi stock ROM with 24/7 spyware (I know because I can see the requests log with an app, the fucking package installer app is reaching the facebook domain every few hours).

Such regret OMG. Suck unfortunate series of events. I'm not even using my phone, just basic stuff.

Good thing: I just bought a second hand Redmi Note 10 Pro in a pretty reasonable state and cheap, there are dozens of ROMs to this phone and easy to unlock the bootloader (actually I already started the process just need to wait more 160h). Not just that but the phone supports jack connector and micro SD. A truly piece of technology.

Learned a lesson don't buy any phone launched after 2022. Unless it's Linux phone or pro-consumer brands like Murena and Fairphone.

Any Razer product ever. Shit company, laptop battery fucked itself, keyboard doesn't work, mouse falling apart

fuck samsung!

A Sony Minidisc recorder / player in the early 2000s. So much DRM. So many bugs. I'll never buy Sony again.

Switch. My Nintendo acc got hacked which turned the thing into a brick basically, but Nintendo didn’t give a flying fuck

iPads. The first one was a hand-me-down only a few years old, but no longer getting iOS updates, so no apps would run anymore. Safari would crash on most web sites. Gmail worked, but holy hell was the keyboard beyond terrible. I used it to read textbooks in PDF. Couldn't revive it with an alternate OS. The next one was a gift; I thought I'd use it for NOAA navigation charts on my boat. Nope, the PDF reader crashed out on ~1MB files. (I had to use my budget Android phone instead.) Now it's no longer supported, and not even useful as a Home Assistant dashboard, because of the old OS. It's a (fully-functional) piece of e-waste now.

Locked hardware? Just say no!

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.

Back in 2014, I bought a non-pro white MacBook for one Bitcoin.

The Bosch SmartHome outdoor camera.

The only way to view the stream is through their app and over the cloud, and the recordings are kept in the cloud exclusively. There is no way to use it without the cloud account. Everything is slow, choppy, unreliable and buggy as hell. Replaced it with Frigate running on our homeserver and a proper Hikvision IP camera. Much better quality, viewable from everywhere, much faster, ultra reliable, perfect.

Samsung washer and dryer. The bane of my existence. I just moved and left them behind, so happy!

Movies for my PSP. A lot of them.

I think I'd have to go with the HDMI switch I bought for work. There were some limitations, like it couldn't do more than 1080p, but otherwise it worked quite well for what I needed it for. The reason it was my worst purchase is because when I was illegally fired from that job, I wasn't allowed to collect my things from my desk. They assumed it was theirs and they never returned it. I got the better deal though, they didn't keep track of KVMs so I never returned mine

My old Wemo smart plugs. Constantly lost connection and the app was so useless for resolving issues.

When they announced they were stopping support this year, I was wondering what they considered support beforehand. Also, there's a class action lawsuit because of that.

Pretty much anything that was "a really good deal".

Windows Surface Pro 3

Worst purchase of my entire life. Every update broke some function of the tablet. At one point no stylus would pair with it so i had to use have gestures, then another time the detachable keyboard wouldn't work so i had to use a USB keyboard. The final straw was that the tablet updated, rebooted, and powered off and wouldn't turn back on for like 3 months... Until randomly in the middle of The night it finally woke up.

~$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.

Anything Samsung. The appliances fail fast (TV & washing machine in my case), and the smartphones are constantly getting more and more enshittified (speaking as a long-time customer since the 1st Galaxy S all the way to S23).

My wife and I bought those stupid Surface tablets. Not really sure why. Too big to be comfortably portable, too small to be useful at home. At least the magnetic keyboard thing makes a good mousepad for my desktop PC.