OUYA
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouya ?
Wow. Okay, I misread it before, but still tell me more. What’s your story ?
Pretty much the worse “console” ever made. Any video on it will tell you all you need to know. I wouldn’t buy it for a penny today if someone offered.
It was nothing more than an off the shelf ARM SBC inside. Some third party designed and made the board. Nobody had the bootloader keys to unlock the units. It was easily bricked. No keys to recover it. They had sold it as a device for “hackers” but nobody could really hack it. The whole concept was dead on arrival.
Several years later people discovered weaknesses in Nvidias bootloader code. The Ouya is vulnerable. So they’re finally wide open hackable. But nobody cares anymore.
Maytag dishwasher and gas dryer. Maytag had always purported themselves to be a top brand. However, both of these products would not last more than 4 years. I should have bought the Bosch dishwasher like consumer reports told me.
If you want truly bulletproof clothing appliances and live in America, look up Speed Queen. They’re built to commercial standards and are trivially repairable. Many last for decades with only minor maintenance and upkeep.
Unfortunately, Speed Queen not available outside of America. 😭 Or, at least, absolutely not available in Western Canada.
I went with LG, as Bosch didn’t have the capacity I was looking for. Pretty happy with LG for both washer and dryer, four years and counting without a single issue. Would be nice if the front-loading washer came with an automatic dehumidifier, tho, as we have to leave the door open to avoid funky smells developing.
Gotta have one from 30 years ago. My dad’s secondhand Maytag dryer survived 4 moves, and 35 years. We had it serviced twice in that time. First time was at 30 years. It stopped running because it filled up with pocket change. Some of the coins were polished almost completely flat. Second time, the heat quit working. Bought a new dryer after that. It’s going strong, but it’s got a long way to go just to be half as good.
Yeah, it’s a common fallacy in appliance brand discussions: “my grandma has a <brand> and it still works! You should buy one, too!”. First of all it’s survivorship bias and almost always the quality has degraded a lot in the past decades (greed and consumers that don’t want to pay the price for reliable appliances).
It’s probably a bit of both here. We didn’t have the “disposable” lifestyle 50 years ago that we have now, and a stronger push for efficiency and features has had trade-offs in complexity and reliability.
Example: My current dryer (and my dad’s new dryer) both have a lot more plastic in them. The motors are smaller, and quieter, while making the same power (or more). They are loaded with temp, humidity, weight and wobble sensors, and my dryer has 4 dials, 5 different temperatures, and 2 different modes. The old one, had a dial to control the heat, and a timer.
As for disposable, I think older generations had an expectancy that you would buy an appliance once or twice in your life. I’ve got a 1000 dollar poket shit-posting device that I’m going to get rid of because it is pushing 4 years old. We just accept that these devices are uneconomical to repair, and we toss them out. I think the only things American’s bother to fix anymore are cars, and that’s going away because every year, they get harder and more expensive to repair.
Also, it’s not even the same corporation or factories behind them. It’s just a brand name at this point, and the product has nothing in common with the old, good one. For example, Maytag bought Amana, and then Whirlpool bought Maytag. (It’s enlightening to read the list of Whirlpool-owned brands.)
I have two Bosch dishwashers and have been very happy with them so far. Avoid Samsung appliances at all costs.
If you count cars: A Skoda Octavia PHEV.
I love Skoda. I love the Octavia. It was my fourth Octavia and I already ordered two more for my staff. PHEV would have been ideal for our use case.
Well,things didn’t go as planned.
The whole car was bugged with software and hardware problems from day one - controll units randomly crapping out, when my dealer wanted to replace them he often had to get 5 units because four would be DOA and the one that worked kicked the bucket before I left his premises. Highlights:
- A steering wheel coming loose (only slightly,but still)
- The main display that shows your speed,etc. randomly shutting down. (Especially nice as I live close to Switzerland with their exorbitant speeding tickets)
- Randomly playing a screeching sound at full volume (especially nice at 3am or when on a highway)
- Randomly shutting of AC, some motor controls , etc.
It took 12 months for VW to take that steaming pile back, and only we sued them (Shortly before the hearing).
Second place goes to LG which sold me a OLED TV for 2k that randomly showed faulty pixel lines exactly 3 years and 3 days after I bought it (so it’s out of the extended warranty programs as well). And when asked for a quote for the repair they had the audacity to ask for almost the new price for the TV back then, aka 150% of the current market value - without even looking at it first. Good way to make sure that I never buy LG anymore.
The main display that shows your speed,etc. randomly shutting down
I know two people who had this exact issue with their new-gen Golf. First cause was the French language would crash the whole dash if you cycled the dashboard views (to my knowledge they never fixed the issue and the workaround is to set the car to English). Second cause was a malformed JPEG from a radio station would cause the dash to bootloop until you drove far enough from said radio station, which would allow the car to work long enough to disable that feature (IIRC).
So yeah, QA is down the fucking drain with VW on their latest gen. They had a new CEO, and now a new one again I think? But the reputational damage has been done. Too bad, I really liked my '18 Polo.
VW really dropped the ball on software, no wonder they’re buying now into other car manufacturers like Rivian, in hopes to use someone else’s more developed software.
Yeah. Both hardware and software, sadly. Their QA is going down the drain.
Happy Hyundai customer now.
Is there actually any car manufacturer that has decent hardware and software? I have never driven a really “modern” car but from all that I’ve seen so far the interfaces are typically horrible to interact with and laggy to the point where I prefer my car as dumb as possible
Really can’t complain about Hyundai/Kia and Volvo (Android) so far.
If you buy new and sell before 100k miles, Hyundai/Kia are great. Otherwise, you better be okay with oil consumption and potential engine work, the new engines are kinda prone to failure.
Tbh, with a BEV I am not that concerned with oil consumption and engine work.
VW really dropped the ball on software
Why bother with software, then? Late-80s and 90s Type III Jettas can be absolutely bulletproof if you find them in not-bagged and well cared for condition.
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Silly goose, you don’t own Windows — you license it.
Ya, when my windows 10 stops working I’m just going to hook up my steam deck to my monitors and kb+m and use that for everything.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Nintendo virtual boy.
Really? Despite how much of a flop it was, if I owned one I feel like I’d find it fun?
Though now that I think about it…did it even have many games?
It wasn’t really fun, and I could never see properly in it.
Hmm, good point. I have an astigmatism and slightly different vision in both eyes so now I’m questioning if it would even work for me.
Yeah I have the world’s smallest astigmatism in my left eye and even that was annoying for me as a kid using it.
I was fun for a moment and then the headaches and nausea would kick in. And yeah, very few games. At the time it was pretty innovative as Nintendo always is. Still a terrible experience however.
A Huawei MediaPad M5 Lite.
Their own lower-end APUs are sooo slow (even worse than Samsung) and the bloated stock ROM doesn’t help. The tablet was borderline unusable without limiting background applications (which for some reason reset every time you reebooted the thing), and it’s not like it ever got any updates.
Not sure if it counts as technology but it was a Ford Focus.
An iBook. I had the GPU replaced twice under warranty. I sold it after the second time. Never again.
For society? A smartphone
I had an ouya.
That was pretty terrible.
The games were actually really fun…but the console was basically a really slow phone. And the controllers had sticky buttons. But worst of all, all games lagged badly. Like half a second or more on some games.
You’re not the only one. If anything it created what is one of my all-time favorite videos. https://youtu.be/QY5yG2KyQfM?si=IvJWVTm__Tc7RTqM
Ive never seen this, thanks! This made my day.
I tried making it work for a month! I even tried to hack it to put retro stuff on it. My tiny gaming pc at the time had better capabilities and was easier to work with…so I gave up on that too. Tried to use the controllers (they were Bluetooth, they could technically work with other machines) but they lagged and felt terrible.
The joycons that came with the Nintendo Switch, both failed within 3 months of owning it, and might as well include the entire console cause all the cheap plastic bits are falling apart.
I’d replace it with a Steam Deck, but the Switch’s biggest strength is being such a piece of junk I wouldn’t care if it gets stolen or destroyed
Any Bluetooth headsets on Windows 11. On Windows there are two modes for Bluetooth headsets: One with high quality audio and no microphone, one with lower quality and mic support. On Windows 10 was able to change the mode, but on Windows 11 you can’t actively change it anymore, because “the software decides” this mode. So ever few weeks my headset switch to the output only mode, get stuck, and I cannot make a call with my team mates. The workaround is time consuming and frustating.
Too bad I have to use Windows for work. Most companies do not have Linux option, even for devs.
I had to buy a Clicker for college in a day when any number of phone apps, or even the Smart board, would have done exactly the same thing. I think it cost about $150 and the only thing it did – THE ONLY THING IT DID – was an expensive version of Kahoot. Abject waste of money for all parties involved.
Anything that relies on mini/micro USB for charging. With enough repeated use, they eventually cause an early failure of the device.
