Gorple
Any Google smartwatch. I bought 2 at one point. A sport and a dress watch. Both only lasted about a year before the software rendered them useless. I’m now back on analogue watches.
I absolutely loved my LG Android watch from a couple years ago. Used it constantly
But then a major update for Android Wear was released, and it completely changed the UX and UI. It was absolutely annoying to use suddenly
Stopped using it a week after the release. Never had an android wear watch since
Your experience is so common that I don’t understand why manufacturers keep doing it. Sure I get people want updates, but major UI changes should be optional.
I have a pixel watch I bought around its launch (IIRC) and it’s still going fine today. The only issue I’ve had is, since starting farming, the little dial can gum up a bit, but it can be cleaned.
It’s almost aggressive how quickly smart devices get shuttered, being an oldschool techhead I’ve always dreamed of being a walking compute center, but just like smart house gear, you can’t expect a thing you buy today to work next week and we are just conditioned to accept it.
Paper drinking straws
Silly, but I like those because I can eat bits of it after using them :3
My guy, pasta drinking straws are for you!
Same. I use an MX Master all day every day and they last for years. No Linux support though. I might try a Corsair mouse next time
Adobe Creative Cloud. It’s really expensive, and once you stop paying, you lose everything.
No wonder why it’s some of the most pirated software in the world.
Losing access to a work I put hours and days, sometimes months of my life was the main reason I now absolutely refuse any non-open source products. My advisor/colleagues sometimes say “university gives it for free”, or “we pay all that money for this softwares”, but I am not going to use them even if they are slightly better than open source.
You’re making great progress.
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S24:
UI not confusing at all imo, just your typical Samsung Android. And obviously not slow since it’s a flagship phone
No ads
Not really bloated (comes with Samsung’s own apps + Google’s apps but you can uninstall most of them)
Decently fast updates
7 years software support (not only security updates but also 7 years of new Android updates)
Wouldn’t say 4000 mAh 50 MP sounds that fancy, but it works very well (lots of optimisation for the battery and good software for the camera)
Downside: expensive (~600€ new currently)
I can’t wait for LineageOS to be available for my Samsung phone.
Idk if it’ll ever be for mine (Samsung Galaxy A51). Hopefully one day, if such a phone exists, i’ll have a phone that is more open and also supported by something like LineageOS.
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I’m still waiting for a viable competitor to the Galaxy Tab S line. Literally no one makes a flagship tablet that can compete with Samsung’s build quality on those, they’re pretty much the only ~11in OLED game in town too.
Mi pad-s exist, which are near flagship, but of course mi unlock and no oled.
also Huawei laptops. Jfc what a trashy counterfeit of a MacBook and if you get an AMD one, better also get a good cooling stand. The keyboard is terrible and costs a fuckton to replace and generally the repairability is like with macs, the USB ports are built in a way that just begs for either them or your peripherals to be broken, they might overheat while charging, they ship bloatware and the speakers are ridiculously quiet. My friend’s mom bought her one contrary to my advice to get a second-hand thinkpad or just any other business-line laptop and it she had to return the first shipment because the screen got bent during shipment.
MIUI… don’t even get me fucking started on this garbage. It literally removes numerous features from vanilla android, presumably to relocate some performance budget to the bloat they add.
Yep I’ve seen Huawei and Xiaomi MacBook copies and you only need to take one look at the keyboard to know they’re trashy.
I got a second hand ThinkPad and it’s fast and robust. Designed to last like a proper MacBook.
Well, I have lineageos on my XM phones (rmx4x and mi11lite5g) and they’re great except for the reliability of the 11 lite. And before you ask about it, yes the mi unlock is terrible, but after you sell your soul to Xiaomi, you can unlock it and have a good enough phone.
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Anything made by Razer, any Google hardware
I got a bundle of a Razer keyboard, mouse, headset, and mousepad for all of $50 one time cause it was on sale and we just happened to come across the last one they had. This was about a year ago, because I was needing new ones anyway, and they’ve been perfectly fine ever since.
I had a Razer keyboard, mouse, mousepad, laptop. They all broke down in 1-2 years. The Razer keyboard battery bloated until it broke the chassis, so I bought another battery, but that bloated, now I use a thinkpad t14; the mouse’s rubber pads fell off and the paint started peeling off, now I’m using a better mouse, glorious model o-; the mousepad started deteriorating and splitting apart; and the keyboard paint also fell off and the stabilizers were not stabilizing.
I try to avoid razer because their products seem so gimmicky and are quite expensive. But i have an mmo mouse for a long time now (longer than any other mouse) and the tartarus, because they were the only ones at the time wgo had something like that. It still works perfectly fine. The s button is almost gone because of usage, but other than that, 10/10
Chromebooks suck ass but Pixel phones are pretty solid
To be fair, they are just expensive mid-range phones (except the hardware security and build quality), but the tradeoff is worth it for GrapheneOS.
they have nice cameras. but the battery life is attrocious and sometimes will run into radio issues (iirc fixed only one or 2 generations ago)… lack of otg support is also one minor issue
Chromebooks are amazing for a certain type of low technical skill person. Older parents and grandparents in particular are exactly the kind of people that Chromebooks are for. There’s zero technical support burden and if anything goes wrong a power wash solves it.
That sounds pretty good, why wouldn’t you recommend it then, are there better alternatives?
Oh I totally recommend Chromebooks, they almost entirely eliminate the tech support burden from having a parent/grandparent who doesn’t get computers. It was the dude above me who crapped on them.
You’re the one who replied “any google hardware” though.
So buy Chromebooks from other oems?
Chromium is about 99.5% open source, there’s no real problem with the OS itself. If you’re afraid of Google tracking just use the machine with the guest account.
Frank’s cancer pills. They gave you cancer.
I don’t get how he’s made them for so long.
That guy is such a wiener; the wurst kind of shit sack.
A real jerk.
Cloud and “serverless” solutions
I gotta disagree on this one. I cut my workload in half by shifting our infrastructure to the cloud, and now I can spend my time focusing on more worthwhile endeavors.
Care to elaborate? Every cloud “solution” I’ve been pitched is just a super expensive way to bottleck everything at the router.
HP printers.
Really HP anything on principle, but their printers take the cake for anti-user bullshit.
I think the M477 and M479 were good, but those are business class laser printers. So far I’m less impressed with the 4301 that replaces them.
I picked up an old HP LaserJet (with the Ethernet option) for free during grad school. It was a great printer — good CUPS/Linux support, reliable, cheap 3rd party toner.
It’s sad how the mighty have fallen. Would never recommend one for someone today.
I still use a LaserJet 4N, but not a chance I’d buy a new HP anything.
Their laptops are good. But the company is shitty.
That being said, they’re still thriving for a reason. I was trying to convince my cousin to get rid of his HP subscription printer and he won’t. He says it is cheap and easy to pay the subscription and his school aged kids can print the colour pictures they want when they remember they had an assignment at midnight. He just gets ink replacement posted to his house before he runs out and he says it works out great for him.
My mother got an HP 255 G8 laptop on which the webcam just will not work no matter what I do.
It’s enabled in the bios and the correct driver is installed but the built-in webcam is not detected. Also the keyboard got damaged with the space button only responsing to center presses after roughly a year of usage.
I know it’s a relatively cheap machine but the driver issue pissed me off
What a sign of the times. Being subscribed to a fucking printer
I’m told it is not just for ink convenience. Apparently the printer needs to be connected to the internet and stops working if you stop paying the subscription, which you are locked into.
It’s cheaper to buy a new printer then…
That said, if you pay more up-front for something like a Brother laser printer, it should last you a lot longer and be on the order of 10x cheaper per page. People see Instant Ink as “cheap” because they’ve probably never tried the much cheaper alternative, and they see it as “convenient” because they’ve never had a printer that lasts several thousand prints without a cartridge change. It’s really sad seeing so many people who can afford the upfront cost of a laser printer falling for this scam so often.
Brother seems to be the last printer brand to be good. At least on the consumer grade. And they seem to last forever
HP laptops are bottom-of-the-barrel trash and have been for at least 15 years at this point. HP will purposely hide screws underneath rubber skid pads and stickers, requiring you, the owner of said laptop, to damage your own laptop in order to open it up. And you will have to open it up, because it is a piece of shit and it will break. But good luck fixing it, because they won’t even be able to sell you the parts you need, presumably because they’re sourced from whatever Chinese factory is the cheapest at any given time. Fuck HP and fuck HP laptops especially.
I’ve had a decent run with their 4K monitors. They haven’t worked out a way to monetise them yet.
Anything from Anker after they cancelled an order with PayPal approved payment because ‘they couldn’t verify payment’. Then they insist that the cancelled order could be reviewed if I put personally identifiable information into a random Google sheets doc.
All complaint handling appeared to be a bot. They refused to explain what was the concern with the payment and always responded with very similar ‘apology’ emails even when I indicated for every email they send i’d inform another person to avoid them.
This was the same company that refused to ship to Rhode Island, suggesting you had their product shipped to a friend on “the mainland” who could then forward it
I had an Anker headphone break within a year or so. I asked for a replacement and sent a picture of a broken hinge. Despite heavy insinuations from them that it was probably because of my rough use (lkely true), they sent me a replacement and asked for my feedback with the whole process. Nicest customer service experience Ive had.
Also, Eufy is owned by Anker. They claimed they weren’t transmitting images until hackers proved they could access your “smart” cameras…
The problem is, in order to view the cameras in their app, the video has to relay through their cloud servers, and they had little to no security. Since then they have added encryption which hopefully helps.
Best practice is to avoid placing any cameras, especially big box store cloud cameras, anywhere sensitive. The two cameras I have online right now are outside where hackers won’t see anything my neighbors can’t see.
On Christmas 2023 I was given an Anker charger. By March 2024 it stopped working…
I really wonder if their product quality fell off and why. I have chargers/cables/batteries from Anker that I bought in 2016 and not a single one has failed.
Ive only used their headphones and chargers, which I bought recently, theyre still working fine. Mostly. Except for my bluetooth earphones. Theres occassional lag and stuttering problems with it on my laptop.
Hard disagree. That sucks about what happened to you but in my experience, Anker products (especially their USB cables, chargers, and batteries) are the best.
Edit: Just learned about this shitty news regarding Anker’s cameras (didn’t even know they had cameras) thanks to /u/Empiricorn. Personally, I don’t trust any security cameras that are cloud-based.
Anker is off my list because of the cameras. They used to be my go-to for cables and chargers. Completely unacceptable.
Any suggestions for a different company to buy cables etc from? I’ve bought their chargers and cables and been happy with them but I’m fine with trying something different next time.
The suggestion I took was Ugreen for chargers and cables. Cables seem to work, and don’t instantly fray, that’s all I want. I got a compact GaN wall plug and it is reasonably fast for the size. No fires and no fried electronics so far.
I appreciate the recommendation! Thanks!
Where should I get my phone cables and battery banks from?
The phone cables are shit but I haven’t found any other good alternatives. The battery banks are alright.
Roku anything
I have a tv from them and one day the PBS kids app just stopped working. I contacted customer support and they just told me it was the app developer’s fault, nothing to be done. Waited months thinking it would eventually resolve but never did.
And recently where they:
- Blocked people from using their tvs until they accepted a new agreement and
- Filed for a patent that defines how they can start overlaying ads on top of other connected devices over hdmi
Glad I shut off wifi to my tv years ago and plugged in a separate smart tv hdmi dongle. And not getting anywhere near anything that says Roku on the packaging again.
I’ve never had a Roku TV, but I’ve been using two of their HDMI connected devices for years.
I’ve never had an issue, but one is too old and needs replacing. What alternatives would you suggest I have a look at?
We’ve used the Amazon firestick before and it worked well. Currently we use the google chromecast/tv dongle for both ours tvs.
Nice thing about the google one is that it makes any Google movie/tv show purchases available, and Amazon movie purchases are still available through the Amazon video app.
But they’re pretty comparable. Depends mostly on what ecosystem you’re in or would prefer to be in.
