Microsoft Surface.
In no particular order:
The Alcantara keyboard cover stated delaminating and the top layer started peeling off just from the friction of resting your hands on it. Started happening within months of getting it.
Battery failed after just a few years of daily use, I’m talking completely refused to charge, you unplug the charger even after leaving it in overnight and the screen goes black instantly. And while most laptops can run just fine with a dead battery as long as you keep it plugged in at all times, not the Surface. The little magnetic connector supplies so little power that the device is forced to down clock to below 1 GHz to keep from shutting down due to undercurrent. And sometimes it shuts down anyway because fuck you.
It’s also glued so tight, and the front glass is so thin, that you basically can’t open it without destroying the screen in the process.
Also, the magnetic charge connector started having contact issues around the same time the battery was starting to fail, so the moment you bump it, it disconnects and causes the device to turn off. It also just refuses to connect half the time when you plug it in. Gotta jiggle it, blow into it, shake and hit it a bunch of times, and pray. I’m pretty sure it’s the tablet’s side that’s the problem because changing chargers did nothing, and the charger that came with the problem tablet worked fine on another Surface. Gotta love when companies make the fragile part of the connector apart of the $2000 device that’s sealed shut with glue and put the more robust part on the cheap and easily replaceable charger.
It’s also really bad at going to sleep. Way too many times I’ve closed it, put it in my bag, and when I take it out it’s scalding hot and the battery is nearly drained. It’s your own device Microsoft, running 100% your own software. How the hell do you fuck it up?!
Worst. Tablet. EVER. And probably ruined any potential that laptop-replacement tablets once had, which is a shame because I still like the tablet form factor.
I bought a cheap scientific calculator for math class. When I tried to multiply .5 by .5 it gave a long irrational number instead of .25. then I had to try to explain to the store clerk why that was wrong before they would accept the return
This reminds me of a story with an old high school maths teacher.
Someone said a number divided by zero was zero and he proceeded to explain why it was not. One of the class jokers went “oh yeah, well my calculator says it’s zero!”. The teachers smiles and says “surely not” and approaches the joker to see what kind of shenanigan he was pulling. And sure as hell he divides five by zero and zero is the result. The teacher, not believing his own eyes, looks at the calculator, then the joker, then the calculator again. The window was open. Figure out the rest yourself.
Weirdly though it wasn’t remotely close to the right answer so I don’t think it was floating point malarkey. I always assumed some defect but I guess we’ll never know.now I wish I had kept it so I could have sent it to Matt Parker for his calculator reviews
Hmm really? It’s always worked for 90.0001741894164% of use cases for me
Better calculators just use floating point math with a few tricks on top to pretend it isn’t floating point math.
First gen Pentium seems like it would be overkill for a scientific calculator but I guess they had to offload those chips somehow.
The ti-84 plus is based on the zilog z80. From 1976. The calculator is still being made, and still costs $100.
I once bought cheap headphones from amazon without reading reviews. They literally fell apart in my hands as I took them out the packet.
Dr Dre Beats?
No they were really, really cheap ones.
Those Dollar Store umbrellas! They are so shit they will break if the slightest bit of wind hits them, or maybe the flimsy metal frame breaks from closing it.
Sure it’s from the Dollar Store, but I’ve bought lots of things from there that have last a decent around of time.
Measuring cup from Walmart. Packaging said dishwasher safe. It was not.
Better Homes Food chopper that couldn’t be disassembled to clean it. Potato chunks got pulled up into the housing by the blades and just rotted there with no way to access it. The exact same model is still sold in stores.
Packaging said dishwasher safe.
Maybe they meant the packaging was dishwasher safe 🤔
I’ve had measuring cups where all the markings come off.
A cheap USB 32GB pendrive. It would barely reach 1MB/s transfer speeds and started corrupting files almost instantly.
A bit off topic; a friend of mine purchased a play mat for his kid, one of those you put on the floor with a birdseye view of roads, buildings etc., from wish (yeah, expectations weren’t high to begin with). When it arrived he realized it was roughly 30 by 30 centimeters.
We went back and looked at the listing on wish, and while no dimensions were listed, the one image it had was of a kid sitting on the mat playing. That kid must’ve been less than 5 centimeters tall.
Wouldn’t be surprised if the kid playing on the mat would be part of the print as well.
My mom always bought those, granted they last close to a year but damn the cheap bamboo ones cost practically the same and last forever
The thing that immediately comes to mind is a cheap telescoping fly swatter. . Old radio antenna style shaft / handle. The part that’s supposed to swat the flies was a massive square that was way too heavy and had so much drag that it would flop and never hit flat and was too slow because of it. Never once was able to kill a fly and after about the fifth try the handle broke in half and the top flew off launching into the great Beyond. Pretty sure it’s still lodged behind a couch somewhere.
Coors
deleted by creator
We got gifted a plastic rack for garden utensils. My mother in law bought it for us from the local supermarket (which has various cheap crap every week). Anyway, we placed a few items in it and it broke in a day. Utterly useless.
Technically, I didn’t buy this, but I feel like it fits the spirit of the thread.
When I was a kid, a friend of mine gifted me an off-brand Super Nintendo controller to me for my birthday. I used it for all of about 5 minutes before it shocked the shit out of my hand and then never worked again.
Considering that a Super Nintendo will not put anything close to being able to shock you out of its ports, I think what actually happened is you shocked shit out of it and that killed it. Cus static electricity n stuff
Could be. I was sitting on the carpet. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since, though.
Could face been a capacitor.
Years ago I bought an angle grinder from Aldi, for about 20,-. After 30 min it started to smell and the enclosure started to melt. I brought ist back still warm and smelling burnt in order to recieve my refund. Although I knew it couldn’t be of good quality I expected it to last a little bit longer. If you buy cheap you buy twice.
You know those apple slicer things that look like a wagon wheel pattern blade with a circle in the middle so you can core it and slice it in one swoop? We found one for watermelons. No shit. In hindsight, I’m guessing it was supposed to be more of a funny novelty than something actually used, but… we used it…
It made it about half an inch into the melon, then shattered like it was some kind of ACME explosion. Bits of plastic went EVERYWHERE, my melon was now wearing a crown of blades, and I was just standing there with a handle still in each hand trying to process wtf just happened, like Wile-E-Coyote still holding the steering wheel of the car that just blew up around him looking straight at the camera like “well that just fucking happened…”
0/10
Bargain store potato knives with plastic hilts have only 2cm of blade inside.
“full tang” is the wording to look for on knives. I have gotten cheap ones before that had a little foil strip on the plastic handle to make it look like it was all metal.
