Amazon Fire Tablet 7in. I bought it literally just to read PDFs, and it was so slow that it was basically unusable. I tried switching out the launcher to something more minimal (Niagara launcher I think), and I figured out how to disable the ads that were all over the place. It helped a bit, but not enough to overcome the hardware and Fire OS. (I think I needed ADB for both of those fixes; I had to put in some real work to unfuck that tablet.) Plus the screen was too small for my pathetic human eyeballs.
Was it worth $30? At the time, yeah, because I literally couldn’t afford anything else, but I now have an $80 10in generic Android tablet that’s wildly faster.
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.
Imagine your grandmother ordering one of these from QVC and calling her grandchild to come over and show her how to work it…
I remember that thing… My grandpa had one. It was … Interesting.
Power Glove
Ya but it looked cool as hell imo and I still want one.
So did I, until I tried to use it a few times.
Having issues hacking time?
It’s so bad.
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.
Those Vaios had a monumental amount of bloatware slowing them down too.
Just writing to say that I admire your tenacity
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.
and couldn’t put it back together ever again.
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.
ThinkPad X201
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.
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.
Not sure if it counts as technology but it was a Ford Focus.
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 bought something on eBay for 10 dollars that was supposed to be able to copy key fobs. Didn’t work.
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.
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.
Oh, remember the good old Nexus 7. Had only a fraction of its performance 1-2 years down the line…
Hahaha. Shit, I didn’t even get that far before the touch digitalizer broke. Maybe 8 months in and dead.
I got mad because my mom bought it in the US. Didn’t sell in my country. What a piece of shit.
Edit: It was made by ASUS!
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I still have the refreshed second gen version running, got an android 12 rom flashed and now it is being used with an amcrest camera as a privacy friendly nanny cam monitor!
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Ipod touch 5.
I keep my electronics for long, so seeing my iPod turn slow and not being able to do anything about it really pushed me away from apple.
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.
FM radio receivers for the car.
Never could find a radio station that would work. When you did, it only worked for about 1/4 mile down the road and then had to find another station.
If your car is old enough to have a tape deck, they have cassettes that connect via Bluetooth. Just about perfect sound quality since there is no interference.
I changed cars in January and the car I previously drove, an 05, Jetta had a tape deck. I bought this to connect my phone. Surprised that it handled calls as well.
I remember when those things first came out and used a headphone jack so you could plug in your CD player. (those were the days…)
I was actually kinda pissed when I had to switch to a car with a CD player and couldn’t use it anymore.
Yeah those worked way better than the fm transmitters. Only problem was my car introduced a humming sound into the signal that got worse with speed lol.
You were supposed to have an antenna.
Where do you live? I don’t listen to the radio anymore but when I did, I could get my favorite station 50 miles away no problem.
It’s not the radio that didn’t work. These were fm transmitter/receivers you used to play mp3 players/cd players back in the day when vehicles didn’t use aux cables. It sent the signal over short range fm signal to your radio.
The alternative was the cassette adapter, but some vehicles had swapped to cd
Handheld sewing machine. Not sure if all are like this or just the cheapo one i bought, it can’t sew anything thick else it will get stuck often and can’t make the loop. End up shelving it and never use it since then.
iPad can’t open anything, keeps crashing. (relatively new)
You mean files? Or apps? Or mails? …
all of it, well mail works. I know I mainly used it for VLC which atleast 2/3 times I tried opening a file, my ipad would just restart, same with some apps.
Your iPad sounds pretty broken, that’s not normal.
That or the files he has are badly corrupted…
they’re not, work fine on any non-apple device, (iPhone had a similar problem, although not as bad.) those devils devices have been collecting dust for a while now.
An iBook. I had the GPU replaced twice under warranty. I sold it after the second time. Never again.
