What are your most regretted tech purchases?

Pixel 7a phone. Purchased for work, intended for infrequent use. I created a new Google account since I didn't want the phone associated with my personal account.

After a couple of months of inactivity, I needed access again. The finger print didn't work (not accepted after a time of inactivity), and I cannot remember the PIN or Google account. I'm essentially locked out.

I can easily prove I'm the rightful owner with an invoice or bank statement, however neither the retailer nor Pixel will do anything, despite multiple conversations.

It raises the question of who owns the device: The person who purchased it, or the person who initially set it up? The Pixel is designed for the latter. I would argue it should be the former since transactions can be verified through intermediaries, whereas anyone could have set up the device, however I understand the complexities of Google verifying retailer receipts.

So I'm left with an unusable device, and I've run out of possible PINs to try.

Hopes for the future:

- On initial setup, a big ugly warning about being permanently locked out, and that I should ideally add recovery options to the new account, and be careful in choosing the PIN

- Requirement for retailers that stock Pixels to accept refunds in these situations, either through the kindness of Google's non-evil heart, or consumer law ("fit for purpose"?).

Any suggestions for what to do with a "bricked" phone would be welcome!

Sonos speakers. I got a big system during COVID and it got me through isolation. But then they decided to redo the app and the new one is terrible (not that the old one was ever great; software is not their strength). It's still a buggy mess to this day. Some of the hardware died too, and they don't offer repairs. Their customer service sucks too. You can't email them anymore and you have to wait hours on the phone.

I went from loyal supporter to wanting to get rid of the whole system. Buyer beware. Company has really gone downhill. I wish they'd fire the CEO.

My highly customizable split mechanical keyboard. Not naming the product because it's my fault that I regret it. It's very high quality and does exactly what it claims to do, and I'm sure many users are happy with it. It cost nearly $400.

It's a ~60% keyboard, which means it's missing a lot of keys. Notably the F keys and the navigation keys (pgup, pgdn, ins, del, etc). There are ways to remap the blank keys to what you really need, and of course there are all the key sequences and chords you can use. But you have to memorize this stuff, because many of the keys are unlabeled by necessity.

I use it on my PC, Mac (work), and Linux (steamdeck). It's a lot of cognitive burden remembering shortcuts and which modifier keys do what on which OS, with the added headache of having to remember which unlabeled or remapped keys are which modifier keys. I love the feel of it and for normal typing it's great, but anytime I stray from the basic keys (A-Z, numbers, etc) it becomes difficult. I end up doing embarrassing things like using right click on my mouse to do things like copy/paste.

If I was on exactly one OS all day long, I think I could make it work. But juggling 3 is annoying.

If I could redo it all over again I'd realize I didn't need a split ergo keyboard, and would have gotten something more traditional.

A recent Motorola smartphone. Only advantage: it's cheap.

* it's a Tamagochi that keeps crying all day long. "Please set this thing up". "Notification about settings". "Help I shat!"

* Loses connections too often.

* Good old apps, like internet radio silently crash.

* If you happen to listen music over Bluetooth and there's incoming call, it

a) shows you modal windows -- "should setting ______ be set forever?"

b) to turn off Bluetooth speaker, you must notice and click a tiny drop-down menu, and select from "speaker" (which is phone's own loud speaker), "bluetooth" and something else -- basically you gotta guess where is "normal" call with phone at the ear. All this must be done in like 10 seconds of caller's patience.

* Unconfigurable at all. You set it to "don't disturb" and whatsapp/telegram still ring loudly!!! IDK, if this setting changes anything at all. Seems that every app has own overrides.

* tries to add junk stuff like "smart wallpapers" -- and after I found a way to turn it off, showed me "The notification will be shown in 24 hours again."

* wakes up if slightly shaken and shines with the screen -- must put it screen down to avoid bright light randomly shining at night.

Maybe it's the recent Android OS such a pile of accumulated crappy features, like CSS in the wild, that is impossible to sort out... Whoever approved to buy crappy noname smartphones and brand them as Motorola, had no brain.

My Roomba.

It's ok-ish but too noisy, takes too long to do its job and as vacuum it kinda sucks I guess.

It also needs an app that doesn't really work at all. I was forced to install it to solve a random problem with the unit, but now it's useless. It doesn't trigger the Roomba sometimes.

I replaced it with a Bosch vacuum that has the bonus of using the same batteries as my cordless drill and other Bosch devices. Yay. The Bosch is also WAY quieter than the Roomba (also quieter than a Dyson, that was surprising), which is great since I have a cat. Also it doesn't have IoT capabilities so it's amazing.

Every device that requires IoT or an App needs to die die die.

I bought a 2-unit Dell R730 server to crunch through a specific big data problem. I needed dozens of TBs of disk and hundreds of GB of memory. The cost of running it in the cloud one time was $2000+. I figured why not spend that on hardware and use it forever?

Well I got everything set up, turned it on, and it sounded like a jet airplane taking off in my basement. I knew it was going to be loud but this was ridiculous. It was an obnoxious high-pitch whine and I could hear it through the walls and in all rooms of the house. Plus it idled at 100+ watts so it was an energy hog.

Needless to say, I crunched the data that needed crunching then turned it off. I rarely spin it back up. I had some vague ideas about water cooling to avoid the fan noise but that's on the back burner. For now it's just taking up space.

Remarkable. It was great for doing math, annotating texts, and taking notes for a couple of months. The device became less and less sensitive to the pen over time, which eventually became intolerable. I had kept it around to turn into an eink ssh terminal at some point except I found the iPad that replaced it superior in every way.

HP Spectre X360. The wifi card started failing less than 1 year in and there was no way of getting it fixed. It was touted as Linux compatible, but the stylus barely worked with the latest kernel. Sound NEVER worked from the integrated speakers (in Linux, Windows was OK). I digged through so many alsa and pulse-audio posts that it was probably 10% of that year's time wasted. It wouldn't go to sleep when closed (randomly, 8 times out of 10 it would) , so it kept overheating in my backpack.

HP + Linux, never again.

"Streaming tape backups." Several different hardware formats, various software interfaces, native OS and commercial.

Backups are important, but only restores count. Thousands of dollars and years down the tape rabbit hole, I eventually realized (major denial factor there) that the number of successful restores was 'zero'.

By that time I could buy an external hard drive and enclosure for about the same price, and it would work perfectly. Particularly if I simply did a recursive copy of the files instead of using some backup software's weird-Harold file format.

Level smart lock. I have a handful of issues with it, but the big one is that it falls in the category of "tech product never tested outside of California" because the thing just does not work outside of the Goldilocks days where it's not too hot, cold, humid, or dry (for me, it works maybe half the time during the summer, and never during the winter). To hardware product designers: capacitive touch sensing is not reliable in the cold.

LED light bulbs. They are better than they used to be, but they are still awful compared to incandescent bulbs.

They are also inescapable, which means we are cursed with ugly, unpleasant lighting basically everywhere.

LG microwave that cost $2300 and died just out of warranty. I swear it’s as if the companies program them to die just out of warranty. Now, we probably have to spend another $500 to get it fixed. The LG service charges $150 just to come home and diagnose an issue.

Then there’s the entire Amazon Echo ecosystem. Amazon’s Eero routers - cost $600 or something from what I remember, but they add on a stupid subscription on top for that for features that should be free and are free on other routers.

I had to buy an Ecoflow river 2 max because of outages, it was quite good for some time. But as it turned out you have to fully discharge and charge it back every 6 months (if you don't do it, you lose the warranty). I didn't do it, and apparently something happened either with one of the batteries inside or with the sensor that gauges the charge level. I cannot charge it, because it thinks it's 99%, and I cannot discharge it because it's actually 0 and it dies immediately. Previously, I was able to discharge it slowly (it would die but after a while I'd get it to 98, 97 etc) but not anymore. I can't say I wouldn't do it again because I didn't have much choice at the time.

Another thing I bought which I regret is a used system76 laptop. I originally planned to use it during said outages, but battery life is very far from what I expected (I guess it being old and me using linux doesn't help too).

A Surface Go 2. After a whole day of Windows Updates, I tried to use it to draw, as it was meant to replace my laptop and my notebook. I made a doodle and passed the tablet to my friend. When I was going through the file save dialog to save my drawing before closing the software, I decided to return it. I couldn’t imagine myself fiddling with that dialog again, nor using Windows Explorer to flip through my drawings. This device was everything I hate about computing made small enough to experience it everywhere. It gave me Windows Mobile flashbacks.

Now I have a MacBook Air and an iPad Mini. Two of my best hardware purchases. Procreate and Notability are genuine notebook replacements.

I had to buy a laptop on 24 hour notice for a consulting gig I had. I really regret getting an Acer. Cheap construction, no discernible thermal management, and the screen would regularly go completely blank with the IBM MDM/corporate spyware the customer required, I had to do a paperclip reboot several times each time I used it. Also terrible IRQ latenecy for audio.

Besides that, any wireless speakers using Bluetooth - it's a garbage consumer technology that I can't believe became a standard. Curious if there was a superior "Betamax" to its "VHS".

Those throwback re-releases of Sega or Atari consoles with a bunch of games built into them. They're fun for the first few hours and they work well, but they end up collecting dust. Turns out those games aren't as fun as they were when I was a kid and didn't have many options for gaming.

2016 Macbook Pro - was a total lemon with 3 keyboards, 2 screens and a logic board needing replacement. All handled under Apple Care but I was without the machine for a total of about 2 months across all those repairs. Even after repair, the keyboard was an abomination to type on.

It shouldn’t be a tech purchase but our Bosch refrigerator. Our options were limited during the pandemic so we got the smart one and the setup process was so bad that it should’ve been a warning: they cheaped out and didn’t put Bluetooth on it so you have to let it be a hotspot, connect with their mobile app, give it the password for your device network, etc., all with lowest-bidder unreliable software at every stage.

After all that, it turns out that they didn’t do anything useful: no way to even see the current temperature and after a high temperature alert, there’s no way to see how high it got for how long. They advertise remote support but the one time it came up, it turned out that was completely fictitious and they insist on sending a technician.

They're all Samsung. The Gear S3 was utterly useless due to the bespoke OS they immediately abandoned, the Note 10 was bloated as hell, un-rootable, and would forcibly restart to apply 30-minute updates while I was using it to show something to a client. One of said forced updates also bricked the damn thing. Never buying anything from Samsung again.

Other than that, I regret buying a Nintendo switch. I played the big Zelda game when it launched and that's about it. Nothing else in Nintendo's library interested me, not for a $70 download-only two years after release.

Sony xm4's, they are great headphones! but i never use the noise cancelling feature, because the absence of noise for some reason gives a sensation of pressure and is very discomforting. Don't use the transparency mode either, but its really useful imo.

It's hot most of the year where i live, and it turns into a sauna around your ears, didn't think of that when i dropped a couple hundred bucks on it.

Also my unit sometimes just momentarily doesn't have sound. For like a split fraction of a second there's no sound, and then it continues like nothing. Seems other people have this issue, i've been able to solve it for short periods of time by toggling the connection quality switch in the sony app.

I would recommend the sony WI-C100's, not very expensive, bluetooth, and battery life of 24 hours, plus since its just wireless buds connect together, no sauna during the warm months.

Still like using the XM4's the sound quality is amazing.

A touchscreen laptop, I thought it would be incredibly useful and fun back when they were getting popular, but when I got one, I completely stopped using the touchscreen after a few months. I just didn't find it useful.

"gaming" chair. Should have gotten a normal office chair

Apple MacBook Air 2020, intel edition. Such a piece of junk and shame on Apple for releasing it knowing that they’d have launched the M1 in just a few months. Maximum corporate greed.

Galaxy tab s6 lite. It's a decent tablet, nice screen, fast enough. It's the first tablet I've ever owned, and I just can't figure out what to use for it. I planned to use it for taking notes, but writing on it is very uncomfortable because I can't rest my hand anywhere while writing without activating the screen. But even if I could write comfortably, I think I still prefer paper.

And I just can't figure out what else a tablet is useful for: it seems to be an uncomfortable compromise between a real computer and a phone but doesn't do either very well. The OS isn't good enough to handle complex apps, and it's just a bit to big to hold comfortably like a phone.

ThinkPad X1 Extreme gen 2. Bought it years ago. Very powerful laptop. Too powerful, it turns out. Burns through its battery so quickly it's basically impossible to use unplugged. At times, it has gotten so hot I burned my fingers on the keyboard. And sometimes it throttles to a truly glacial speed. The 4k OLED screen is gorgeous but eats too much power, and 4k is simply wasted on a 15" screen.

On the other hand, it did survive spilling an entire mug of tea over its keyboard without any problems.

3 ceiling fans by "Carro USA." Supposed to be compatible with smart assistants, turns out there are Siri Shortcuts and that's it. The backend is Tuya, but "Smart Life" which isn't compatible with any of the Homebridge plugins that I have. So aside from using the absolutely horrible Tuya app, or the Carro app (which is simply the Tuya app rebranded) there's no way to digitally control these fans. The smart ceiling fan market is a mess, and so many of the manufacturers rely on what is essentially bargain basement garbage from China. It's sorely disappointing.

Also, the Boxee Box. Worked great with Boxee for a little bit, and then it all fell apart and Boxee ceased to exist.

Samsung monitor. I decided to upgrade my WFH situation, and bought their 49" G9 Neo (5120 x 1440, 240 hz). I've always gone with Alienware/Dell in the past, but I assumed there were always better products out there. The Samsung display died on month 13 (one month out of warranty). The repair would've cost almost what I paid for the monitor outright. $1500 down the drain.

iPhone 3g. Bought it new yet within a month of purchasing it Apple released iOS 4 which slowed it down so much it might as well have been bricked.

That, plus the lack of OTA updates, needing to plug into a PC/Mac with iTunes (horrible app) to load music, backup photos or update lead me to never purchase an Apple product again.

Going from that to an HTC Android phone was like going 10 years into the future.

A consumer-grade HP printer for my home office.

Had a regular end-of-the-month printing need of about ~500pages. To my great frustration it still kinda works - needs monitoring for jams, bad prints, paper replenishment, wifi connection loss, you name it.

Should've kept(and very likely will go back to) using the services of a local professional print shop.

Secret Lab gaming chair. Just terrible.

And they don’t have returns, customer service also fails to admit that they suck by design and blame it all on me (even though i know other people who has exactly same complaints).

A naked king situation.

Dell XPS 9440. Worst keyboard I've ever seen on a Dell laptop. I'm not a fan of the MacBook keyboard either, and this is worse. The touch-activated F row makes accidental activations of Delete / Insert too easy. The flat keys are harder to distinguish, making accidental activation of caps lock a common occurrence. It was a work laptop and so fortunately I didn't have to pay for it.

Personally I'd say my most regretted purchase was the Brand New Model F Keyboards "ortholinear" - It's modeled after an ErgoDox but critically both halves are not connected, so in reality it's two separate keyboards. I don't know how anyone could release something so useless for ~$700. I'm sure all of their other offerings are great, however.

Shokz OpenFit ear phones. I bought them to be able to go running or cycling while listening to music and hear my surroundings. However it doesn't really work, because as soon as there is a little bit of noise around I can't hear the music anymore. A passing car, or a little bit of wind(which happens quite often on a bike) is enough to not hear anything that comes out of them.

The M2 iPad Pro with Apple Pencil and Magic Keyboard.

I got it so that I could do some writing and note-taking away from my main work computer. Forum posters and tech reviewers assured me the device was up to the task. But the reality is that while iPadOS can do about 60-70% of what macOS can do, the remaining 30% is entirely impossible to accomplish unless you have access to a computer.

I learned this the hard way when I was traveling with just my iPad and somebody sent me a ZIP file that had a hidden file in it (in the UNIX sense, i.e, with a name starting with a period). At the time, there was no way to view or open this file using the iPad Files app. I could pay for a third-party file manager, or I could use iSH to edit it in Vim. Why make it impossible to see dotfiles at all?! Why not give me a checkbox I can enable to temporarily view those files? I understand that it's rare to receive a dotfile over email, but it's not an impossible event.

At some point I discovered you can't install custom fonts on an iPad. Apps can bundle their own fonts, but installing a font globally requires a nasty workaround: use a third-party app to embed your font files inside a security profile, then install that security profile via the Settings app. For a device that targets designers, video editors, and musicians, not being able to install your own fonts is such a bizarre choice.

There were other weird papercuts too. When exporting tracks from Logic, I couldn't put the app in the background. I had to sit there and wait for it to finish. Many apps had iPhone and Mac versions, but no iPad versions. For a while the Magic Keyboard's trackpad cursor didn't send hover events to web pages in Safari, which meant some webapps were unusable. The Apple Pencil could send hover events, though, which meant I had a fun week navigating the WordPress admin interface using the Pencil instead of the trackpad. They eventually fixed this issue.

You can't play more than one sound source at a time. A one second looping sound on a webpage can permanently stop playback in Spotify or Apple Music. This behavior might be fine for a phone, but for a tablet that claims to be a computer replacement? Weird choice.

I could go on and on about this. After all these years, the iPad is still pretty much a consumption device unless you're a digital artist who relies on the Apple Pencil for work. Besides digital drawing and handwriting, there is very little you can accomplish on an iPad that you can't accomplish far more easily on a Mac.

My iPad Pro is basically a Kindle now. Sometimes I use it to watch YouTube, but only sometimes. The YouTube app on iPad is far worse than the website, and it's easier to just reach for my Mac.

Xbox with Kinect. I was impressed by the original Wii and thought, hey, kinect can do it with bare hands. It didn't work all that well and I am not much of a gamer, so the whole thing was a waste. To top it off I even bought a spare controller because it was available for sale on Prime day and didn't even open the box!

My experiences with Asus have been terrible.

First Asus purchase ever. USB Bluetooth dongle. Stopped working in 2 weeks.

Second. An Asus GTX 770. It broke in 3 months.

Third. Asus Xonar PCIE Sound Card. Optical did not work, started hissing/having static in less than a year.

Fourth. Asus motherboard for 1st gen Ryzen. Tried to update bios on arrival, it bricked.

I am never NEVER buying anything Asus related ever again.

Actofit body composition smart scale. They insist on tying measurements to phone numbers/profiles. I have to go to my phone, hit record and stand on it to sync. The login broke, so I left a play store comment and they denied the problem exists. Its very low in ratings thanks to too many angry fellow users.

Later I got one from Omron, an actual medical company. It stores my vitals without phone and displays almost all the data on device and autodetects user. There is syncing for my data which I can do once in a while. The app's headscratching/feature ratio is moderate but since it has no bullshit features its enjoyable.

Smart Pen and analog writing tablet.

It's actually amazing how much you can get done without a phone distracting you, but it's expensive and rarely used, and paper is fine for occasional initial brainstorming.

Mechanical Keyboard. I tried one with no page up/page down/home/end keys and hated it. I also wasn't a fan of how separate keyboards keep your hands farther from your eyes on the screen compared to a laptop, but that probably just takes a few months to adjust.

Pickit3. I learned a lot... But why didn't I start with Arduino?

RFM non-LoRa Arduinos. Nobody uses these, it's like $5 of cost savings. My custom protocol I built to do error correction with them was incredibly time consuming and not that much fun.

A loft bed and mattress. I could have probably just found a more durable cot really. The extra storage space didn't help that much, I would have been better off just.. buying less stuff.

Any brushed motor tool when brushless is available used for the same price as the brushed one new and on sale.

Earbuds. I lost the charging case on one, and an earbud on another. Not doing that again, I'll just use normal Bluetooth headphones or else not do headphones at all.

12v gear. Everyone who starts with electronics will at some point think about having a single 12v transformer and running their whole workbench on it. They will pick a connector and start building around their new standard.

I chose XT60 which requires a bunch of handmade cables. Such a hassle. Just use USB-C and you can run on 12v easily if you ever need to.

Tons of random parts and pieces, to the point where I'm trying to put together an Awesome List in celebration of all the super common parts and materials which are all you need for 99% of stuff.

Any product containing lead. I'm sure the amount of exposure was trivial but really there was just no reason to be messing with it when there are alternatives.

A catalytic butane heat gun. The one I have is just kind of OK.

A Hakko soldering iron. Those FX-888 type ones are so expensive especially for the older tip format.

Remarkable 2. For me, it's worse than pen and notebook, since I can search effectively in neither and the writing experience in the latter is much better. Tags aren't a replacement for search in notes, the screen is quite imprecise at times, the cloud sync is paid, and a lot of the features that would make it more than a paper notebook are missing imo (better overview over my notes and annotations, lack of infinite canvas for PDF annotation means I have less space in the PDF than with a printed one, etc.).

Here's an oldie: A Zip drive and Zip disks. At the time it was revolutionary, it also broke with click of death. I was in college and buying new drives was too expensive especially since they were basically guaranteed to fail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death

I tried buying a monitor direct from a Chinese company (Innocn). It broke within 8 months. They never listed a warranty, but I (stupidly) assumed it was at least a year; but no, it was 6 months. After having such a bad experience, I went looking and apparently was not the only one. Many others had their monitors die and the company would purposefully drag out the RMA process past the warranty period.

Long story short, warranties still matter, and it should be a big part of any expensive purchase decision.

An Oculus Go and Oculus Quest.

I don't have the floorspace to walk around, there's only one app I even use (Wander) and it gives me a headache after a few minutes. And now both of them are obsolete. Even the default environments are disappointing.

I have spent thousands on the cool noise cancelling bluetooth headsets. Each of them is garbage. (I just kept buying them, hoping that at least one of them is not only hyped, but have some substance also)

Also, just broke a cheap Hama mouse into pieces, literally today. It was only like ~$5, but the worst piece of trash I have had: it turns off after 2 minutes of inactivity, and on top of that it can't wake up always... (well, couldn't wake up. It's in the mouse-heaven now)

Wetek Play2 Android based TV box.

My first and last experience with an Android based TV device.

Since 2018 or so, I've been using a small Windows PC with a Hauppauge WinTV Dual USB tuner (ATSC, watch as you record a different channel in the backgroud) and DVBViewer software. Use a web browser for streaming.

https://www.dvbviewer.com/en/index.php

The Sega CD addon for Genesis. $300! when that was a lot of money and I was a lot poorer. Was happy with my Genesis and wanted to try CD+G and CD+games so it seemed like a decent buy at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_CD

It was kinda cool but they didn't support it long. Video was one of its selling points supposedly, but didn't have good replay-ability. I should have known that because I'd played "video" games like Dragon's Lair in the arcade. But the Sega CD was even worse, limited to (I think) 64 colors! Which looked like shit. At least I did not buy the 32X as well.

I did however learn a very expensive lesson about product support and being on the bleeding edge—let others live there.

Easy! The Vision Pro. It seams like Apple has already given up on that product.

Flipper Zero. I got it when it was new and never really used it.

A “gaming headset” with a built-in microphone. The sound quality was fine but the build quality was terrible. It broke apart while I was wearing it, after owning it for less than a year.

Now I just use a pair of Sennheiser studio headphones and a usb desktop microphone, and they’ve lasted for years with no issues.

Bought a cheap power drill, like "I can't believe how cheap this thing is". It broke after 15 minute of usage.

Secretlab gaming chair. Horrible to sit in. Sold it after a while but should have sent it back.

MacBook Air 13", 2018 edition

Used to have an MBA 2013. Great device, which ran well despite its age.

The MBA 2018 is awful. The keyboard is awful (have the double-keystroke issue), the performance is awful and the device would get hot and throttle with even the least demanding of tasks. And no magsafe! At least the USB-C connectors were a welcome addition. And an additional regret (totally my fault) is that I got the ISO-keyboard version.

I now also have an MBA M3 for work, which is a great device. The keyboard feels better, it runs smooth as butter and hey, the magsafe's back!

The Rabbit M1. This thing is so ridiculously unnecessary. Poor battery life, little to no usable features.

Lytro camera. My wife bought it for me because she hear me say "oh, how cool!" It wasn't that cool, and she never bought me another toy again.

Airpods. Bought them for instances when I have to sit on hold. Used for about 30 hours total, Batteries no longer charge and it's just a throw away item now.

A Samsung clothes washer.

After I had owned it several months, they sent out a repair crew to reinforce the lid for the purposes of (I am not making this up) preventing it from exploding and spraying the laundry room with shrapnel. OK, fine, mistakes were made. But the reinforcement came with a new wash setting for use with heavy loads (bedsheets, etc.). Using that setting, or loading the washer past about 50 percent on any other setting, or sometimes just because, it seizes up and dumps its entire water load onto the laundry room floor. This happens just rarely enough that I've only now decided to go through the annoyance of replacing it.

HTC Vive Pro 2.

Unlike some of the other people listing VR headsets, I actually use VR regularly. But the Vive in particular was an expensive piece of junk: it lasted not even a year before one of the displays started to die, then experienced the same failure again 6-7 months after warranty repairs. Apparently this failure mode is common.

In general I think it's best to stay away from the high-end headsets: HTC, Varjo, Pimax, Bigscreen, everyone I know with them has experienced problems of some sort or other. Many of the midrange headsets are worse on paper, but seem to have fewer issues in practice.

Cheap 2-port KVM switches. I have, in the past, needed a 2-port KVM so I have bought a cheap one (typically via Amazon). Every time, it is bad and it does not work reliably.

IBM PCjr. Not exactly a regret. It was a family computer when I was a tween. They made the best decision they could based on the information available at the time. But it was not a great product.

Android phone circa 2010

Every computer ever, I could have been a lumberjack and had a peaceful life

My first LCD monitor.

A couple months later I was at the local surplus goods shop and they had gorgeous Sun 21" CRTs for $75 each. I broke down and passed the virtually new $350 LCD to other family members.

It ended up Capacitor Plaguing itself to death after like 3 years. I tried replacing the bulgetacular caps, but no dice.

The Siacoin miner that I purchased for 3 bitcoins.

Surface Book 2. It’s kind of a bad tablet and also a bad laptop. Both batteries completely dead and not repairable. E-waste.

Copenhagen Wheel. Still working but no longer supported. Approaching 5000 miles. Some day they might brick my bicycle, which is kind of crazy.

A Gaming chair (Greensoul). Should have brought a office chair.

Most of the headphones I've bought have broken within a few years. It's not a "huge" regret though.

Oculus 2 or something. Had it as a birthday gift to play VR games with friends. Turns out it isn't as fun for me: I'm getting really hot wearing the helmet, the games are a bit dull, of course there's nausea that I can't force myself to push through because the games are silly and I'm bad at them. Probably I need to try half life Alexa or whatever it was called but overall VR is a useless gimmick to me

An iPhone. An employer purchased it for me but it truly is unusable in a lot of ways.

Redmi phone after long iphone use, as an experiment. I used it for six+ months, made sure I get used to it before criticizing, then sold it to a colleague. The upside is, I got a new iphone instead and it felt like changing from new shoes to old comfy ones.

VR headset with Valve Index controllers (~$1200 total) It was cool initially and Half Life Alyx was a great game, but overall it wasn’t worth the money with how little I use it and how many issues there are with VR and VR games.

PlayStation VR (v1) Great demo games no other games leverage the hardware in a meaningful way and the camera requirements and cords made it a hassle to use so it collected dust.

Any Logitech mouse. I tried a bunch of models, from most expensive to cheaper ones. They all died exactly after one year. It's very odd.

iMac 2010, I think all-in-one computer is a bad idea in general, because the cpu/mem/gpu age quicker than the monitor.

lenovo thinkpad, used as a linux notebook, but the trackpad is difficult to use under linux.

PSVR2. Gran Turismo 7 is the only game I found was worth playing with it, and the progression loop sucks, so I've no use for it.

Weird one: a ring doorbell. Started going off randomly between 3-5 in the morning, stuck on until unplugged. Replaced with an analog one, don’t miss it at all.

I bought a Moonlander keyboard, but the dang thing has Opinions about how things should work and I just wanted a regular keyboard that was two sided and has thumb keys but it's too different. the right side doesn't even have enough keys to have [ ] ' keys so I can't use it for programming

Right now I’m thinking of my Razer PC laptop. Computer technology is always getting so much faster that yesterday’s expensive cutting-edge future-proof elite hardware is tomorrow’s slowpoke bottom-shelf e-waste. Now, I will say it overall has been a good computer. But I could have saved a lot of money getting something 10-20% slower and replacing it sooner.

Eurorack.

But it is a regret with benefits. E.g. this comment.

Used apple 2015 apple imac. I bought it to use as a second monitor because the retina displays is the only monitor I’d used for extended periods without my eyes aching. I did very little research, bought a used one to find out, nope you can’t hook it up as a second monitor and the hardware is awful

Probably my Raspberry Pi Pico. I bought it when it got released because it was super super cheap and I had some good ideas to use it for. Unfortunately it’s been sitting on my desk unused ever since. Would love to try some stuff out with embedded Rust at a certain point though!

Windows gaming laptop from MSI. It's not bad at all, but the battery life is horrible and gaming performance is OK. I finally built a gaming PC which I like a lot more. As for a portable machine, I should have just got a Macbook.

Anything with touch interfaces.

So far aside from cell phones and tablets nothing has worked right.

My Lenovo Legion 5i. It freezes while playing CS2 and takes up 15 minutes to wake from sleep. It's literally a regret.

My Macbook Air M2 is the exact opposite of that. Best purchase of the past few years, without a doubt.

A TCL TV. It broke exactly after the warranty expired (led issues). I was planning to replace the leds, then discovered that the screen is glued to the frame. I gave up in disgust.

Big USB hubs. I have like a few ports and swap things when I need to charge them.

My Logitech g915 keyboard, every day there is some key that randomly stops working and then restarts few minutes later

Dell XPS 13 - died just out of warranty with probably 10 hours of usage. Giant waste of money.

Kobo eReader, think it was called a Sage? absolute garbage, worst eReader I have ever bought. Spent 10 months battling with support after constant issues, got a replacement and sold it immediately.

BlackBerry Storm, hands down.

MS Surface PRO, good notebook TERRIBLE keyboard, the worst i ever had

Samsung Galaxy Watch 4. The battery life is absolutely atrocious and the health readings are unreliable.

I still want to give smartwatchs a chance but this definitely didn't convince me. Who wants another thing to charge every single day? I have enough with my phone already...

The Meta Quest.

I gotta find an excuse to use this thing.

GoPro Hero 5

So. Much. Kickstarter. Garbage!

Right now: Lily58 split keyboard. No way I'll be able to adapt to this.

All Apple products.

iPad