Ask HN: What tech purchase did you regret even though reviews were great?
Curious what products looked amazing on paper and in reviews, but disappointed in real daily use.
Vacuuming is actually the easiest bit of cleaning a house IMO - getting the floor clear (if you have kids, or out of control hobbies, or are just lazy or a bit of a horder) is hard.
People aren't stupid, they kind of know this. But just like buying expensive gym equipment they think that a new toy will incentivise them do the hard bits.
"If I buy a new gizmo I'll finally start cooking healthy delicious food" is a great pitch.
It was “easy” to vacuum before but we never did a thorough job. All too often we just vacuum what we can see, never under the couches, etc.
Now that we have to move everything so it can complete the full map we have a much cleaner house. It encourages us to move all of the chairs, toys, etc.
I worked on an IoT project at one of the big German car makers and it was a mess. More money than sense. They didn't really have any idea why they were putting software into stuff. Just some vague notion that some software systems needed to exist to then present its existence to the next boss up; presumably all the way up and out to investors. Discussing the actual functionality or how the product(s) would actually be experienced in the real world was essentially taboo.
There was a podcast called garbage.fm [1] with one of the hosts working for General Electric at the time it was recorded. It sounded like GE were yet another one of those incumbent companies doing "smart" Internet of Things products just because they were worried about being left behind.
I made sure to buy zigbee ones so that I'm just tied to home assistant which even if it goes out of business will still work with whatever binaries I've downloaded already (as well as it works locally so I can control them during internet outages). I'm sure somebody else can explain why you should get Thread or Matter nowendays but I never bothered to learn the differences.
But yeah, the average life of a company is what 1 year? Don't get any product you want for more than 5 years from a company younger than 5 years if you need that company to exist for it to work.
The connectivity doesn't matter when it's the actual filaments/LEDs that burn out after only a year or two.
Even buying a big name like Sylvania doesn't help. I had eight Sylvania smart bulbs burn out or go into endless flicker fits in under a year. They're all in a landfill now.
Of course, that's better than when Feit Electric sent out a firmware update that deliberately bricked all of its smart bulb controller boxes with nothing more than an e-mail telling people it was done. (This was before Apple Home or Google Home existed.)
Mind you, one would expect them to work for a long time considering they’re (probably) the most expensive on the market.
I can set individual colors and intensity on the lights as well as with a dumb switch I can also have the lights just come on so if I were to sell the house or whatever the next person wouldn't need to have home assistant to work anything in the house.
You can't control color easily, but you can get dimmable smart switches. I find for most lights, I don't change the colors pretty much ever. YMMV.
To change for another scene, have a button or voice command?
I’m with you here - make control „as usual as possible“, also saves a ton of money and annoyances - and most important: home automation is about automation, not controlling manually via phone…
The only complaints that I have are:
1) I have mine set to notify me when it's done cleaning. Sometimes it will do it immediately after it's done, while other times the notification might come two or three hours after the fact. Still other times, not at all.
2) I have to clean the vacuum more frequently than I would like. That means: cutting out hairs from the "side brush" on the front of it, cutting hairs out of the "main brush" that sucks up most of the debris, and wiping the sensors clean. In fairness, I'd probably have to do the same sorts of thing with the rollers on a normal vacuum cleaner after a while too, though.
3) There's been a handful of times over a 2-ish year period where it'll go to the other room to start cleaning, and while a normal trip might take 15-20 minutes, it'll claim to be done in about 5 minutes. I suspect that blankets may have fallen on the ground or something, so it became too "blocked" to be able to clean properly, but it could be some kind of software error.
Check your mobile's app settings/battery optimisation? Sounds like the app doesn't keep running properly in the background
Exactly. We changed from some fancy one that my boss gave me to a cheap one that you operate with an old-school (can't believe I'm saying that) infrared remote. It doesn't "think". It just works like our other reliable dumb machines - diswasher and washing machine. We don't own a regular vacuum cleaner as I just do a regular sweep with a broom when we want a thorough job done.
All other home tech gadgets friends and family have acquired live in limbo land stored in the back of the draw or on top of the cupboard, never opened or tried once but got stuck downloading some stupid app. But we can't just throw it away yet, as there's guilt around acquiring that smart tech thing in the first place even though we know there's already so much e-waste.
I set all this up over the course of several years, as needed, and haven’t thought much about it since. It’s nice.
Slighly laggy remote control for my phone, with widgets a little too small for my finger to reliably hit.
When I do proper long walks, the battery reliably dies on me during the walk.
My guess is that the sensors use a lot of energy (even when the display is normally off) and that the longer one uses it for workouts within a day (with the sensors continuously on [1]) and the older the watch is, the lower the battery life.
[1]: there is a setting to in the workout app to reduce the frequency of GPS and heart rate readings during walking, running and hiking workouts when low power mode is also turned on
It now feels almost unusual for it to get the heart rate correct. And I'm not talking about off by a few or feeling off. I'm talking about full on max heart rate when I'm doing a easy run or 1/2 and 1/3 off which is impossible to miss.
It’s a hit or miss product category. My wife and I like ours and most of my friends like theirs, but I have a couple friends who got a smartwatch and then never liked it. Would be a shame to buy an expensive one for someone who doesn’t even like it.
For instance I never liked the default band, but the Milanese loop is great. My wife never wore her series 5 but I got her a series 11 which is a few grams lighter and thinner and she wears it all the time now.
I was on the fence about getting an ultra but for some reason never liked the size and shape (big rectangle with a huge crown bulge) since I have small wrists. I ended up getting a garmin epix pro at a big discount which is slightly smaller and round.
At the end of the day they are great if you want to collect data on yourself. Even though my wife didn’t like her series 5 the hypertension features were worth trying a newer one.
The pulse, EKG, and blood oxygen are first rate.
Get a Titanium band (why doesn't Apple sell this?) and use a square design screen and it's a dress watch:
It keeps me on track every day. I have recurring alarms for my daily and weekly meetings/calls, and for life things like when it is time to pack up and get the kids out time to close things down and go to bed. Each morning I also set alarms for critical events that day. Basically I outsource the “scheduling” part of my brain to the watch and just focus on whatever I’m doing.
I also use it for a stop watch, cooking times, etc. I use it for GPS while hiking and biking. My phone running AllTrails can’t track a 25-mile bike ride through the mountains without dying, but the watch doesn’t even break a sweat.
Beyond that, it’s a great backup phone for when I leave my phone on the table or in the other room, etc. I also bind the button on the side to the flashlight feature, which I use almost every day. It’s not as strong as a phone flashlight but it’s instantly available and more hands-free. It’s so helpful for dealing with crying kids in the middle of the night. It’s nice when I don’t have a hand to hold a phone flashlight, like when I take the trash cans to the curb at night, etc.
Overall I get tons of use out of my Apple Watch every day.
I wouldn’t be exaggerating when I say that it’s changed my life for the better. At the same time, I personally know people who have it but aren’t used to it or don’t use it for what it does best.
Although it was a decent effort, their overall build quality is pretty cheap, and it's not good enough to recommend. I took a chance on their 2nd revision and it was at least good enough to keep for periodic use, but it really isn't worth buying atm. Half of the spacebar stops working nearly every day and I need to reset it
I concur. I thought I'd save a few bucks by buying the Matias keyboard that looks like the Apple Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad. After all, there are thousands of people on the internet who swear that Apple's prices are disconnected from build quality. It turns out the chattering masses online are wrong.
The Matias keyboard lasted all of a year. I ended up replacing it with the real deal from Apple, which is still going strong six years later.
More often than online "experts" would have you believe, you really do get what you pay for.
They've also been trying for 10 years to make a 60% keyboard (see the infamous thread on geekhack). Granted they do seem to refund anyone who wants it, but it's hard to understand why on earth a keyboard would take 10 years to develop.
They're really good at identifying niche products and designing things to fit the target market, but not so good on actually manufacturing them.
That indeed does seem to be the sentiment, and seems true, but to be fair, Apple also botched their laptop keyboards to the point of class action for years. But the current Macbook Pro keyboard seems fine so far.
Problem with the original, is that it's a perfect shape, but it wears down too quickly and becomes a paperweight if the dongle is lost. The price is insultingly high for the almost exactly original
The palm rest is a more comfortable softer pad than the the o.g sculpt, but I find for me it does get a little sweaty. I take Adhd meds during the day and drink a shit ton of coffee, so tend have very sweaty hands. I can't yet speak to durability, but the sculpt palm rest starts looking tattered around the ~2 year mark, while the Matias palm rest is a replaceable piece of rubber with a fantastic velvety feel (I use it when I'm at the office).
Connectivity is way better than the sculpt, but it's a little finicky when switching between devices on Bluetooth, which I feel I might just be doing wrong and haven't tried to learn about yet.
I find that the keycaps have low quality printed characters on the mac version, and when the backlight is on, some keys are hard to read or don't shine through properly.
My biggest problem with this keyboard is that it has a small right shift key, a normal size left shift key, and arrow keys that I find less preferable to the sculpt. The small right shift key means it's harder to position my shoulders in an ideal way compared to the sculpt for my ridiculously large hands, and I have to contort my wrist a bit more than I'd like. I also just can't feel my way around the board as easily, since I used the shift keys and arrows as anchor points.
As I've gotten used to it a little more, this is becoming less of an issue.
For portability, the overall build feels more solid than the sculpt, which would sometimes get stuck keys if I'd throw it in my backpack and get a piece of dirt in there or something. The better connectivity is a huge relief, since I don't need to worry about a dongle for wireless, and/or can use a usbc cable if the batteries are dead. It seems a bit shorter but chonkier, and maybe weighs less.
So that's my review. 8.5/10, since some of these lean toward preferences rather than quality. I'm not as confident touch typing with it yet, maybe 70% as confident, but I think I'll keep it and refine that skill.
Additionally, although the printed/etched characters on the keycaps are low quality, I'm glad there's mac variant. I did use the sculpt overwhelmingly on my mac, and had to remap keys, which I'll now do if necessary on my windows PC for the minority of time I'm using it there.
I have several smart power strips that stopped responding; I have had better luck with individual smart outlets.
Digital audio players with Wi-Fi radios that support AirPlay. I've purchased three, two from Hiby and one from FiiO. The idea was to stream AirPlay to the DAP from one of my PCs, getting quality audio over wired headphones, while I walked around the house. The Hiby models would drop the stream occasionally and both had batteries that died in a year or less. The FiiO would accept streams from Apple devices, but not third-party AirPlay streams. I ended up listening to my phone.
I found bone conduction headphones don't come anywhere close to audiophile quality.
Wi-Fi in general, living in a row home in a neighborhood crowded with 2.4 GHz transceivers.
I bought and stored away a large drawer full of microphones, headphones, mice, and keyboards before I settled on the models I like.
I've never used a Windows trackpad that was worth spit. I can't use a Mac without a trackpad next to my keyboard and mouse. The difference on Windows is maddening.
I was getting frustrated with the battery in my old Apple watch as it got older, but now that I have two watches and can switch between them, I wear one or the other 24 hours a day.
supports running dockers, running adguard DNS filtering, youtube-dl container and adblocker is such a time saver self hosted image hosting etc
so much potential lost... if you just use it as a "HDD on the network"
From my experience it does work, although I never experienced it, say, using a Time Capsule or similar?
'Time Machine detected that your backups on “xyz Time Machine Folder” can not be reliably restored. Time Machine must erase your existing backup history and start a new backup to correct this.'
Never be an early adopter of hardware.
In fairness, it was not as bad as a desktop computer running Windows Me.
Microsoft was evil then, and Google has been evil since then.
Every Samsung phone I've ever owned - great hardware, but the software is a mess, especially with all of the Samsung apps that duplicate the Google apps.
Sony smart TV - was excited about running Android TV apps, but the onboard hardware is so bad that everything lags, and I actually ran out of space after installing 10-20 apps (it only has 4GB of flash storage). Also, its Ethernet adapter has a hardware bug that occasionally freezes up my entire network by spamming it with flow control frames.
I broke out and ended up getting a DAC/AMP, some good cans and a mounted microphone and I’ve never looked back. I miss the wireless part a little, but taking the headphones off to get up is a cheap price compared to $200+ garbage.
They dropped access to the API for new developers.
Their air quality sensor is horribly inaccurate.
Their UI is actually very confusing.
The app is merely a way to shove ads in your face.
I wish I just got a new Honeywell.
GHome consistently gets worse voice recognition or usability.
Nest has many notifications to enable eco modes making me uncomfortable in own home.
Alexa terrible voice recognition.
Roomba kept getting stuck, errors.
Apple Watch useless versus oura ring even if steps aren’t as accurate.
iPad usage not worth the cost. Either get a laptop full featured or a small tv and android shield box.
The recent iterations are just frustrating. The apps are laggy. It’s always prompting me to join an energy savings program no matter how many times I say no. We had to disable the home/away detection because it went from working well to thinking we were away 5 times per day.
Nest stands as my example of a product that went from great to terrible through complete mismanagement and customer neglect.
It will still go energy saving but now I don’t care
Although it makes sense not to pull more from the grid during high usage times
I loved the form factor but was disappointed at the level of hostility toward user control, which only increased over time
Now, to their credit: The keyboard itself is of a reasonable build quality, aside from the fact that it will just occasionally completely die on me until I unplug it for a few minutes and try again.
On the other hand, their customer service was not only unhelpful but actively antagonistic and rude towards me. I gave basic feedback once or twice, and asked for an updated technical manual on the keyboard I purchased and I was treated like I shit on their cat.
---
"Hello, I can only find (this) and (that) manual regarding the 360 SmartSet. One document appears to be an outdated version of the other, and the more up-to-date version is no longer accurate. Do you have an up-to-date manual I can work off of? I was able to parse out some other functions like XYZ by looking at manuals for (devices that are no longer for sale) but I think I'm still missing some crucial information."
"It's on the site, but since you can't find it yourself, here you go." (It's the more outdated manual that I already referenced by name and included already.)
---
"Hello, I noticed it occasionally has issues when I use it with my KVM. Is this a known problem, or should I perform an RMA?"
"Well, that's why we say don't use a KVM!" (Take a wild guess at what information was not listed on any page of their website in regards to the 360 SmartSet.)
---
"Hi, some of the marketing material on your site on (this page) is inaccurate. It would be good to update it to reflect how this thing work now. I've provided a few points to consider updating. (Two or so changes)"
"Too many people have complained about this! This issue is closed now!!" (The entire page is subsequently deleted, making it even less clear how things are intended to work, what future customers will be paying for, giving even less information about their products.)
---
To be clear, I know that some times people will overstate things and make it sound much worse than it actually are, but I really am just trying to tell things as they were. If anything, I've probably understated how rude some of their responses have been. I have never had a positive experience interacting with any person at that company.
Moral of the story is: Never buy from Kinesis, even if it causes you physical pain.
Really not getting much value out of it, despite being all-in on Apple otherwise (iPhone, Mac, AppleTV, Homepods).
I really feel like it absolutely should be more integrated into the other devices. Set a timer on the phone? Can’t see on watch. Stuff like this bugs me like hell. And I think there’s too much of it.
It was a cheap piece of shit though and all the plastic pieces rapidly came apart. The rubber coating on the handle disintegrated too.
In contrast my iPod survived 10+ years in a glove box and was still immaculate.
I remember that there was a technique where you could smack it at a certain angle and it would "fix" some of the hard drive issues for people.
If I could click print from my phone I’d be running it constantly.
I seriously thought it would be another fad hobby that I drop immediately. But now I’ve gone as far as learning 3D modeling which I never really expected to do. I actually have more projects going on than I have printing capacity for sometimes.
I wish I had perfect advice for getting the most out of it.
Maybe this one will help: remember that even cheap plastic products are often more expensive than printing your own. That $10-20 doodad from the store is still more expensive than a LOT of filament. I’ll list out some stuff I’ve printed:
- Planter pots
- Knock box (for espresso)
- portfilter stand for tamping (espresso)
- espresso machine mod kit enclosure
- A loom for a friend who weaves
- “neon” LED signs with custom words (designed by me based on YouTube tutorial)
- Same concept but used to make might up address numbers for the house
- A triangle-shaped piece to guide the extending kitchen sink sprayer hose so it stops getting caught on stuff under the cabinets
- A replacement clip for a Packit reusable container
- Designing your own wall or under-desk mount for any custom size object is trivial
- Tea bag organizer
- Bookmarks
- Name tags/3D labels (you can pause prints and change filament colors at a specific layer even without an automated material system)
- Bag clips
- Toothpick dispenser
- Toothpaste squeezer dispenser thing to keep the tube neat
- storage organizers, including a whole pegboard system hanging up all my tools and junk
- Contact lens storage boxes
- Replacement latches for plastic bins
I haven’t printed them yet but I’m very interested in some of the cool mini-racks, mini NAS systems, and small form factor PC cases you can print from scratch rather than buying them. For example there’s a design on makerworld where you grab a cheap mini PC, an nvme to SATA adapter, and an AliExpress SATA 3.5” backplane, and boom, you’ve built a consumer NAS alternative for a fraction of the price.
Hopefully some of these ideas inspire you to get more use out of your machine!
Holy hell that's genius. I know what I'm printing tomorrow! :D
The weight would get caught on some cabinetry piece. Now that piece is made to intersect more gradually with the triangle.
I gave them a quality evaluation and have had occasion to sit in them for long periods at client sites.
I am all for spending for quality and generally am a BIFL type consumer, but these chairs just don’t carry the value for me.
Google tells me Aerons have 8-ways of adjustability. The missing adjustability I don’t have are arm height and tilt. I don’t miss it. And if I did, it’s not worth the extra grand it would take to get it.
I don't think you would get the same mileage with an Ikea office chair.
I have one I got from a coworker for $100 when he was moving. 13 years later it’s as good as it’s always been, and I don’t even know how old it was when I got it.
Comfiest office chair I’ve ever sat in.
I used the Steam deck extensively,I thought she would do the same,but she prefers to read when waiting for stuff.
Maybe as he gets older. Until then, I'm just periodically charging it up.
Disc games are cheaper on sales + has actual resale value.
Not necessarily regret but the Apple Watches have such crap battery.
Microphone/audio input sucks over BT. So many glazing reviews. I don't get it.
But if you don't need that it's probably a useless overcomplexification.
And while it took some tinkering to setup (back in the "edit all the yaml" days), I barely touch it anymore, I have it set how I like it and that's that.
But then we filled it with stuff and got a doggo. Those hairs fast-track the process of jamming the wheels and sweeper. Why do we need a robot vacuum when we still have to vacuum by hand?
Oh wait, reviews were not great, never mind.