Sure, but they don’t stop on the side of the road if you drive through a puddle. Jesus, try driving some old 70s cars. 

Agreed, but that was 50 years ago. I’m thinking back to maybe 20 years ago, lots of cars from then are still around now and running as well as the day they were bought. By then they were well past the kind of issues you describe.

We bought an Echo Show. Terrible bit of kit. Will only respond if we say “echo” in a northern accent and has yet to show anything of remote relevance to any question.

Better.

The leisure centre chain, Better.

Specifically their website. It’s just hard to use. It should be simple, but *somehow* it’s just baffling. Easy things like ‘when can I swim’ take thousands of clicks and dead ends and irrelevant asides. It should be easy, I’m a web-literate human. But it’s awful

Couldn’t it just be, erm… ‘better’

Meh….my WD mycloud works great still after 4+ years. Granted the mobile app is pretty shocking though.

GoPro software. Absolute shite.

The new sky guide. It used to work well. Now it doesn’t.

Wireless printers. Ours works for a few months then needs setting up again.

WiFi bulbs that aren’t from the major brands. Instructions were to switch on/off repeatedly until the bulb started flashing.
Stood ther for 15 minutes turning lights on and off and still didn’t connect.

Nextbase dash cam. Must be on the 6th one in 12 months. Every so often, it just locks up making an annoying pinging noise and none of the button respond. Response from nextbase? You need to format the SD card.

1. I can’t, the **** thing is unresponsive.
2. Why does it need formatting every two weeks? Can’t it just overwrite? Or failing that, give me a warning message that it needs attention rather than just locking out.

I’d also like to give an honorary mention to every single IT system at work. Everything needs a password, but each set of password criteria are different so you can’t use the same one and none of the systems talk to each other.

but each set of password criteria are different so you can’t use the same one

Sounds idiot proof 🙂

GU10 light fittings. Hateful.

Sounds idiot proof 🙂

Just means everyone has a post-it note on the side of their screen with all the passwords on it – which all need changing after differing amounts of time.

One of our managers had his car broken into recently and his laptop back was stolen. It was recovered about 3 cars down once they’d looked inside and saw the pos laptop that was in their.

The interior of any Saab, especially those made in the 2000s. All the buttons and controls in the wrong place and behaving in the wrong way makes for a hideously counter-intuitive experience.

I had one of those wd my cloud things. It went in the bin.
It utterly refused to ‘actually’ work.
It would say it had achieved its job, but when you checked, it hadn’t.

Please, can I join the ‘WD MyCloud are shit’ group? It seemed to be ok, but then I noticed it hadn’t been backing up via Time Machine. Had it and my Mac Mini checked over, nothing apparently wrong, and then my Mac’s HDD failed. Turned out the MyCloud hadn’t been backing up, and I lost 100Gb of music I’d ripped. 🤬
Fortunately, I’m one of those odd creatures who keeps CD’s, instead of flogging them all for a fiver, so I’ve been gradually re-ripping all the old stuff, and bought two small toughened 2Tb portable drives that I can daisy-chain and set up a software RAID. I’m going to get another portable drive, backup everything onto that first, I have to reformat the other drives to run in RAID.
I wish I had an air rifle, so I could shoot the WD drive full of holes. What a hopeless piece of shit.
Amazon smart speaker jobbie – friends have got one, let’s just say it’s not an encouraging advert for their efficiency…

Touch screens in cars, what **** idiot thought that was good idea?.

Mac user here.
Printers. Just work
GoPro. Just works
Garmin. Just works
Android phone. Just doesn’t work easily enough.

PC user here
Printers just work. Never understand why people struggle with them.
win 10 just works. Has worked perfectly since I started using it at work and home.
iPhone. Just works, has done for 10 years (or ever since I started using my iPhone 3).

Sony OLED TV, brilliant picture, crap everything else, so flaky it makes the old Samsung look good.

Software not hardware but…Zwift.

I’m relatively tech savvy. Got smart tech thoughout my house, worked as IT project manager for years. Can work my way around Android, iOS and Windows quite happily. Used to ride Sufferfest on a dumb trainer and it was, obviously, straight forward. I got a smart trainer a couple of years and the tech just sapped my will to live. The softward, apps, profiles, accounts and interdependencies just broke me. I know it is user error but I never actually was able to work out how to train on it in any sort of session or race. I even asked on here. I now use my smart trainer in dumb mode and ride Sufferfest sessions again. I could have easily saved myself a few £££ by keeping my old dumb trainer

Oh and agree about the WD My cloud as well

Just means everyone has a post-it note on the side of their screen with all the passwords on it –

That works absolutely fine. Hackers can’t see the post it note.

iPads.

I’d like to connect to computer please. Now let me drag and drop files. No? iTunes? Yes, **** you very much.

Don’t get me started on WD crap. I bought a 1TB external hard drive a few years ago

Just dismantle it, the drive will just be a standard SATA unit that you can plug into any computer.

PC user here
Printers just work. Never understand why people struggle with them.

Single user or networked? My HP works fine for one computer. Refuses to work for the app or any other computers (luckily this can be worked around by emailing docs to it). By the look of it I’m not alone either. Older networked printers were fine, it’s the bells and whistles that bugger everything up.

That works absolutely fine.

I’d say that is dependant on the data those passwords are supposed to be protecting.

Touch screens in cars, what **** idiot thought that was good idea?.

Actually…. pretty much all car stereos – but particularly aftermarket ones. I’ve never understood why they invest so much space on the facia for a screen- which you can’t really look at when you’re driving – and so little space to the buttons – which you typically operate without looking at them. Lets not have any space between the buttons and lets make them the same colour as the facia.

The printer I have works fine most of the time, when connected to a PC. It doesn’t like my daughters’ Macs, though.

Cheap WiFi plugs probably get my vote: getting them to pair to your phone is an exercise in frustration.

Usb a is simply always the logo on top, no?

Wd cloud is really easy once you enable Windows file sharing, and just map a network drive to your laptop or whatever. I cant remember how I did this, but I suspect its enabled by default

Sony OLED TV

This. I have low expectations of anything running Android but the Sony TV implementation takes things to a whole new level of incomprehensibility. For example, if you want to watch Freeview you have a choice of two guides, each of which has a different set of features, neither of which is complete, so you have to choose the least worst option. The Home Screen has more random unremovable crap than things you actually want and new things appearing randomly whereas stuff you actually might want (like Nowtv, AppleTV+) is carefully obscured. Bluetooth headphone connection is a lottery. Do people not try these things before they sell them? All that and the uncomfortable knowledge that Google is spying on your TV watching habits.

iPhone.
Wife has had one for 3 years. She said she still hadn’t worked out how to copy a mp3 from our win7 computer onto her iPhone and play it.

The heating controls in my car. How about a knob for fan speed and a knob for temp? Nope, you have to select the control and then turn the knob. TBH there’s a lot wrong with the audio/Satnav/phone stuff too. I’m not sure my brain works in the same ways as Germans when it comes to ergonomics. See Vailant boiler controls and anything SAP for confirmation.

iTunes. Apple’s insistence on not just killing it with fire is akin to being forced to run your Porsche on Ling Long tyres. Just awful. The iOS Podcasts app gets an honourable mention too.

Having read through this thread it seems obvious to me that we are in the Windows 95 era equivalent of ‘smart’ home appliances and software.

Having read through this thread it seems obvious to me that we are in the Windows 95 era equivalent of ‘smart’ home appliances and software.

When I was trying to set up my WD NAS I compared it to the very early home networking systems where you needed to set up routing tables on everything in order for it to work. Just not something you’d expect “normal” non-tech users to be able to do.

Apple TV touch remote. The old one was fine, the one with the little touch pad must have been signed off without any user testing.

Wahoo RFLKT. Properly awful, half baked piece of crap.

My daughter’s iPhone and iPad. Never realised a device could actually be smug.

Agree about zwift. I’ve been using other apps with a wide variety of sensors/trainers for years but I have never managed to get through a month of ‘I’ll give zwift another go’ before giving up. All the setting up stuff takes ages, it’s cold in my garage and I’m not emotionally equipped to deal with it when the wee man on my screen stops pedalling at random for the 90th time.

Usb a is simply always the logo on top, no?

unless the slot is on its side – then what? Or you can’t see the logo.

Wd cloud is really easy

Seems you’re outnumbered in this opinion.

Look at the logo on the usb cable before putting it somewhere you cant dee? Sure if its in its side its tricker (there might be a standard?) And dual sided is obviously better, but its not bad for a design thats 24 years old. Remember how bad ps2 was?

Or it’s one of the annoying cables where the manufacturer has ignored recommendations and put their logo on the top instead of the usb logo. PITA.

I have my cloud too but I don’t use the software and it works fine. Use Pcloud instead. Marvelous.
iPad keyboard on the other hand is dismal.

iTunes. Apple’s insistence on not just killing it with fire…..

Itunes was replaced in 2019 🙂

Modern cars I’d say.

Nah. You just need the tool to deal with it, then they’re great. Something goes wrong, a light comes on, you plug in and it tells you what’s wrong. Half the time you just replace the bit then you’re off. It doesn’t require arcane ancient lore of rules passed down from father to son for decades.

I’m thinking back to maybe 20 years ago, lots of cars from then are still around now and running as well as the day they were bought.

Disagree there. My Passat is now 14 years old and they were incredibly common when I got it in 2009, but surprisingly few now. Because I notice these things. Look out for cars with pre-2000 old style number plates on. There are hardly any.

My old VW Polo was a 93, the one that looked like a little estate car. Simple mechanical engine and reliable. I almost never see those on the road now. This has been the case for many years, and they were a popular car at the time. Thinking back to the cars of my youth 20-25 years ago, they are all rare as hell now despite being ubiquitous at the time.

The program I just wrote as a sub contractor.

I told the BA it was a terrible design. He/they didn’t care. Write it verbatim they told me. So I did.

Full of useless needless complicated features controlled by a zillion inputs.

Management think ‘more features, close tight integration’ = ‘adding value’. Grrrr…..

Disagree there. My Passat is now 14 years old and they were incredibly common when I got it in 2009, but surprisingly few now. Because I notice these things. Look out for cars with pre-2000 old style number plates on. There are hardly any.

That’s mostly down to depreciation and the low perceived value of old cars in the UK.

I’ve known people scrap old cars at a big bill. By big bill I mean tyres, brakes and other consumables.
Car is worth £not a lot, new tyres and brakes etc will cost more.
Completey ignoring the fact that the replacement will cost more and still need, probably even more expensive tyres and brakes etc.

The trick with WD NAS drives is to forget the app and just map the drive as a network drive. It then always just like any other hard drive. Forget Twonky or anything else like that.

As for my vote – macOS. Just hateful. iOS I actually like but the Apple’s desktop OS just doesn’t make any sense to me. For something that is supposed to ‘Just Work’ it’s shit.

And for a niche entry, any astrophotography set up. Requires hours of fiddling, usually in the freezing cold and dark 🙂

Or you can’t see the logo.

Put a dob of tippex on the logo for easy identification

Not consumer but…

Autodesk products.

New features everyear. Recurring problems you find first mentioned in 2008 forum posts remain unfixed with helpful “workarounds” suggested by staff on the forum like its not worth fixing.

Crashy and buggy. “Oh and by the way this year we’ve changed the file type and its no longer backwards compatible. Also while we’re at it no more shared licenses for anyone its standalone only”