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.

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.

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.

Trying to solve wifi dead spots across my then house. It didn’t have wired conduits, so no ethernet between floors. Went through a series of range-extenders, multiple routers, everything from cheapo no-names, to TP-Links, Netgears, and Apple Airports. All sucked. Terrible reception in all the places that people hung out.

Then mesh routers showed up. Got a 3-pack and never looked back.

Edit: runner-up was an HP Inkjet printer. Every time someone needed a color print, one color ink was either out or dried out.

An early Purism laptop. That was the most lemony lemon that ever lemoned. Components failing, keyboard was shit, the case just fell apart. I think I had to replace it after 6 months because I was tired of its shit.

An Eink smartphone from a Chinese company: Bigme Hibreak pro. It never worked, I sent I back for repair and they shipped it back to me in the same buggy conditions… Now it lies in a drawer completely frozen and unresponsive…

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.

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

I bought a 2nd hand MacBook Air with an Intel chip to put Linux on it. Forgot about the T2 chip being a bitch.

Jide Remix Ultratablet.

Kinda glitchy from the start. Got one minor software update before the company decided to focus first only on their mini-desktops and soon after, B2B; dropping the consumer support entirely.

Which wouldn’t have been so bad is the released the proprietary blobs for others to use to keep up support. The hardware was nice, and the concept was one of the first to try an “Android version of a Surface”. But to my knowledge, no ROMs have ever been made for it.

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.

Micro usb to hdmi that I didn’t know wasn’t compatible with my phone

My partner bought a Skylight screen a month ago. I put it up, but it’s basically been unused since.

For me, there was this very early health tracking watch I got, which was so fragile that it would reset and lose all data if I did anything more active than walking.

Some Google TV that was well reviewed, but at some point shortly after I got it had a software update that made the UI unusablly slow. Like, 5-10 seconds to respond to every button click.

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

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