What's your worst tech purchase?

[root]

Thought this might be a fun topic to discuss here.

What’s the worst piece of tech you ever bought?

For me probably an Acer Aspire laptop in the mid-2000s. It was my first laptop as they had finally got towards affordable territory for me.

An absolute lemon. 4 repairs in about 6 months before I insisted the retailer gave me a refund. It was literally falling apart, keys coming of the keyboard and a power button that came off in my hand…

It put me off Acer for a long time, though a Chromebook from them I bought 8 years ago is still going strong so I think they have upped their game somewhat. They also make some pretty nice monitors these days.

 

[Philtrum]

Now this is a topic! Where to start?

IBM PCJr: good on paper but a terrible replacement for my Speccy. Still feel this one to this day as it was a LOT of money back then.

Lexmark inkjet printer, unknown vintage: Couldn’t tell you the model or when exactly I had it but it was just terrible. Lasted about 2 months. You don’t see them much outside of office machines these days.

ZIP Drives: In my first IT job we went fully on board with em, at the time it was mindblowing how much storage they offered compared to a floppy but the format died as quickly as it came. Had a couple of them fail on us but not as remarkably unreliable as I remember them being reported as being at the time.

More recently a HP Stream netbook: Wanted to get a cheap Windows machine for my son, but it was almost uselessly slow.

 

[strollin]

Hands down an Apple Mac Mini! What an expensive piece of nonsense that was. I bought it after listening to all the Mac users claim that using a Mac was Nirvana. It was expensive, cost about $1000 to get it home and worked every bit as well as a $400 Windows machine. I used it for a few months but then grew tired of it so gave it to my daughter. After a month or so she begged me to get her a Windows machine.

Mac users always claim how high the resale value of Macs are. When I tried to sell my less than 1 year old Mac, all I could get was low ball offers like $200. I ended up trading it for a Windows laptop and felt I got the better end of the deal.