Ask HN: What's a Purchase You Regret? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's a Purchase You Regret?

13 pointsznpy40 comments

Hello there!

I was thinking... In an era where we're constantly into buying this and that, why don't we have a thread where we just talk about stuff we bought but regret buying?

I'll start:

- I got a 34" ultrawide curved display. Philips, 34B2U5600C (3440x1440, 120Hz, USB-c and a lot of bells and whistles). It's just enormous, it takes half of my desk in depth and ~90% of my desk (130 cm) in width. Paid 400 Euros for that (new, off Amazon). It was cool at first but after a while it was feeling "heavy" on my desk. I kinda put it away and now I'm doing most of my work on "just" my 16-inches laptop display. It didn't really improve my life. Maybe I should have avoided the curved display. I'm torn between selling it and getting another one or selling it and keeping using just my laptop display.

- My ThinkPad X13G1. It just doesn't feel right. I bought it to replace my rusty X270. Supposedly it's much better (8c/16t+32GB ram vs 2c/8t+16gb ram on the X270) but it doesn't feel much snappier (same OS/Software) and battery life isn't that great either (the battery was in very good conditions when I received it). Also, when suspended the battery will drain incredibly quickly, sometimes overnight. Compared to my work macbook, it really feels like an inferior machine. Paid 400 Euros for that as well (used).

Any hardware from Google. Never again.

And any hardware from Samsung, for entirely different reasons.

Could you elaborate more on this?

I have a plan to replace my 5 year Samsung phone to the newer one. The reason is that no internal storage left.

Samsung is notorious for adding ads to products you have already purchased, and for many egregious privacy violations. Their appliances are also very unreliable.

In general, it's just not a trustworthy company.

They inject ads in other products? Almost everyone I know has a samsung phone and I've never heard about that

Fridges and televisions for sure. They also preload phones with third party bloatware.

The Surface Go 2.

I wanted to combine my MacBook, my notebook and my books to reduce my pack size, since I travel a lot.

It spent a full 24 hours doing software updates. Then I realised that nothing kills the joy of sketching like the file save dialog when you want to close the app. It was also a lousy laptop and a bad ebook reader. I returned it on day 2.

I got an iPad Mini instead. It's one of my favourite objects.

Apple Watch.

Got a cheap early model second hand to see if they were worth it, eventually the battery failed and popped the screen out. Got a brand new one to treat myself after the pandemic and… the only part of the UX that doesn't feel bad is the main screen.

It's, at best, a laggy remote control for apps running on my phone, and I haven't even charged it in over a year now, let alone worn it.

the trick is to leave your phone at home, apple watch can help with screen time addition, while still giving you notifications/texting. otherwise, yeah useless

I avoid all apps that overload me with notifications in the first place.

I'm also currently experimenting with no credit on my phone, so I can recieve calls and SMSes only, not send any message or browse unless I'm near WiFi.

The Daylight DC-1 tablet. I’m in the Apple ecosystem, so it’s on an island. I wasn’t a fan of the default launcher, so I replaced it, and now it just feels like a silly Android tablet with a black and white screen that I don’t really have a use for. One of the big things (gimmicky) things that sold me on the pre-order was the fabric case in almost all the marketing photos. I thought it would be nice to have tech that wasn’t all plastic, metal, or glass… then it showed up as a plastic and glass slab and that case didn’t actually exist for sale. I was upset and should have retuned it, but thought I’d give it a chance since it is a new company. That was a mistake. It was something like $700, and I feel like it should be around $249. It’s got a bunch of buttons that don’t even do anything. I do like that the stylus doesn’t need to be charged, but that’s about it. I really wish Apple went this route on the Apple Pencil.

On your X13G1:

My X1 Carbon gen 7 used to do that too. Go into your EFI setup and change the sleep mode to be Linux-compatible (or at least not Windows-specific), regardless of the OS on the machine.

I would like to give credit where due, but while I'm fairly certain that I read this solution here, I can't recall exactly who pointed it to me.

My X13G3 does not have such a setting in EFI setup but the fancy power management setups that come with most (if not all DEs) does not seem to play well with it, it seems to wait for some processes to finish before sleeping even though those processes have already been suspended and will not finish, so it never goes fully to sleep even though the laptop's lid LED says it is suspended. I never investigated this issue since I was just seeing how KDE and XFCE had progressed since my last try of them. Have not had any issues with it using old fashioned suspend setups with just a WM and no DE.

Other things; it really did not play well with the 5.x LTS kernel of slackware 15, poor performance all around but switching to slackware current with its 6.x kernel solved that. KDE also used the GPU which decreased battery life but was still good, certainly better than the Windows that it came with which had abysmal battery life. I think the DEs also played with the CPU governor, at least with KDE, seem to recall that it reved up to full speed long before it needed to but don't quite remember.

Overall, love the X13, especially the 16:10 screen ratio, but I think the G1s had a 16:9?

Edit: With the DEs my X13 also goes into a half awake state when you plug it in when suspended. Generally not an issue but it will stay in that half suspended state until the lid is opened and then reclosed which means if you just unplug it and toss it into your bag, it is still in that half suspended state and will eat the battery. Another thing which I never investigated because I don't use DEs.

Hmm let me think back...

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Apple Homepod

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Bought it years ago since i was in the Apple ecosystem and I wanted an easy way to play music, set timers and add items to my grocery/reminder list.

I also knew state of the art in LLMs was picking up so I was willing to overlook how bad Siri is.

Flash forward to today:

- Siri is still a pile of garbage

- It only recognizes my voice despite my wife having an iPhone and being part of the household

- Sometimes doesnt save the timer

- Only recently did it get Spotify integration through my phone

- Still cant give it multiple items to add to a list at once

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Google Home

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Started strong then got progressively worse with each update until it could no longer do basic tasks like timers + reminders

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GoPro Hero

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Housing failed on my first use and they refused to honor the warranty.

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Quest 3

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Amazing device! But I wanted to use it for a virtual monitor and all the software was terribly buggy.

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Worth stating my favourite purchases in the last little while that make me happy every time I use them.

- XREAL One Pro (Amazing for a virtual display)

- Kindle

- Apple Watch (Perfect for waking me up but not my wife)

- iPad Air (Second display + drawing)

- Macbook Pro M4 14' (A portable beast)

- Moccamaster (Simple machine, great coffee)

- Toyota Tundra 2010 (Likely will run longer than I live and theres no touch screen in sight)

- Yeti mug (hot drinks all day)

- Hydroflask (cold water all day)

- Timbuk 2 Parker (Best daily use + light travel bag Ive had in awhile)

I regret buying an okay-ish car. I should have bought a cheap rubbish car, or paid the price for a good car. After 3 years of owning it, I'm stuck paying and repairing a car I want to dump.

What are your definitions of the 3 different levels of car?

Not him, obviously, but for me:

> cheap rubbish car

Something for $1,000-5,000. It's a gamble buying this type of car. It's either going to be a gem that was well-maintained by a senior, or an absolute nightmare of tow-trucks and repairs.

> okay-ish car

$6,000+. Car comes in decent shape, is clean, ready for the road, but is still in midlife. You can probably get at least 5 years out of it, most likely more, but things will start breaking.

> good car

Brand new car. Minimum $15,000+. Can last a lifetime, depending on how much you drive and how well you maintain it.

I felt exactly like this on my last car. That made me decide to never, ever get a car loan again. I'd rather drive absolute trash beater cars before ever getting stuck in a loan.

Best option is to save up ~$10,000 and get something decent outright.

This is what I recommend to all my friends. Go cheap ("bangernomics" is what we used to call it in the UK, from "an old banger" car), or go newer (<5 years & <60k miles & full history, or leased from new) because the middle ground is too risky.

It's incredibly hard to convince them though.

Google Pixel watch. I had a Garmin fitness tracker and a Pixel phone, and had difficulty transferring my fitness metrics to Sheets. So why not combine the two?

I'll tell you why; the Pixel watch manages to combine all the disadvantages of a fitness tracker and a smartphone. Now I have to log in to my watch, the display is too small to read anything on, and I can't increase the font size. The Android fitness app is a walled garden inside a walled garden, and I still can't transfer my metrics to Sheets.

100 euros claude subscription not nearly useful enough

Chromecast: only streams chrome within same wifi connection (no vpn) snd only streams some video formats. I should have researched more.

Somebody wrote a tool for pushing Apple airplay to chromecast [1]. There might be a way to push arbitrary streams?

[1] https://github.com/philippe44/AirConnect

A refurbished Dell XPS 9315. Had it a bit over a year, just out of warranty and the screen hinge sensor broke. Can’t open the laptop more than like, 20 degrees or so before screen shuts off. So it can really only be used as a “desktop”. New screen to replace would not be cost effective, plus I don’t have much faith in Dell products anymore.

A mechanical keyboard with too many fancy switches and lights. I thought it would make coding feel better, but it just ended up being noisy and distracting. I went back to a simple, quiet one and realized comfort matters way more than looks.

the first laptop I bought with my own money after college back in 2010-2011. Needed one for work, so I "splurged" on a $600 ASUS laptop. The battery tanked around the time the 1-year limited warranty expired, so I had to keep it plugged in for nearly the entire time I had it. It was slow as hell (no SSD) and weighed a ton. That POS met its fate to an e-waste recycler around 2014.

Another regret is my first Apple computer. A 2014 Mac Mini that replaced that Asus laptop. 8GB of ram and the slowest "hybrid" HDD drive. I hated using it so much until I figured out how to boot it off of an external SSD. Then I started to understand why people like MacOS.

I bought an XP-pen drawing tablet. I had it on my Amazon wishlist for years and had never pulled the trigger because I feared I wouldn’t use it. Well, I was right…

Also, pretty much any board game expansion. They usually add complexity without improving the fun of a board game.

iPad Pro M1. I use it rarely. Anything I can’t do on my phone I use my MacBook or pc. Consuming media is better on my laptop display, and easier to type/navigate. It just doesn’t really serve a purpose.

GoPro Hero 5. The main reason I bought it was for taking wide photos and for capturing stuff when it rains. But the device was terrible for photos from a photography point of view.

Lenovo Legion 5i. It fails at its primary purpose of being a gaming laptop by having memory/graphics issues while playing games.

I liked my X1 carbon gen 7, but the motherboard died after 2 years and was not repairable, so it's my biggest regret recently.

iPhone 16 Pro. Good hardware but mediocre software. Coming from a cheap $180 Android phone there is a lot of culture shock.

Also a thinkpad, macbook is way better.

Two guitars, never got to learn them.

iPads and surface, pads don't seem to be that useful to me.

The iPad Mini is wonderful with Notability and Procreate for writing, and Instapaper and some ebook app for readings. Mine is a completely silent and disconnected device that packs lighter than books and art supplies.

All computer devices on Amazon. My hot take is this is where all the high failure rate electronics are sold that could never be sold in a brick and mortar computer store given the customers would return irate and the store would eventually go out of business whereas Amazon is too big to fail. A partial exception are some mini PC's. Many are pre-loaded with old malware but I throw away the 1TB NVME they come with and I add supplemental cooling which they all benefit from.

What mini PCs do you like, and which cooling system have you found nice to have?

For daily driver for me anything with good ventilation and for gaming the acemagic but one absolutely must format the provided NVME or replace it as there is old malware and the windows image has been customized to mute and cripple windows defender. On windows the CPU mitigations must be disabled or the integrated GPU runs hot. Usage before: 83%, after 13%. I still use win11 for some games for the anti-cheat crap.

The mini-PCs are vulnerable to graphics errors in some video games that can perma-brick them. Many people ran into this issue with Starfield and one specific multi-beam gun turning their mini-PC into a paper-weight.

For cooling I get a desktop sized HEPA filter unit and remove the panel on the mini-pc that permits access to memory/nvme. Enough air will get past the memory/storage sockets to cool the CPU.

Meta Quest 3s

Anything by Microsoft

a house in altadena

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