Ask HN: What's a Purchase You Regret?

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.

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.

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.

Any hardware from Google. Never again.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Meta Quest 3s

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 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.

a house in altadena

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.

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.

Anything by Microsoft

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

100 euros claude subscription not nearly useful enough

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

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.