Edit: I misread the question. I thought it was “lowest quality product that you still use” (I was distracted)
Original comment: Harbor freight calipers. Surprisingly still accurate and undamaged through years of abuse. Kind of amazing, and shockingly useful.
Microsoft Surface.
In no particular order:
The Al Cantera keyboard cover stated delaminating and the top layer started peeling off just from the friction of resting your hands on it. Started happening within months of getting it.
Battery failed after just a few years of daily use, I’m talking completely refused to charge, you unplug the charger even after leaving it in overnight and the screen goes black instantly. And while most laptops can run just fine with a dead battery as long as you keep it plugged in at all times, not the Surface. The little magnetic connector supplies so little power that the device is forced to down clock to below 1 GHz to keep from shutting down due to undercurrent. And sometimes it shuts down anyway because fuck you.
It’s also glued so tight, and the front glass is so thin, that you basically can’t open it without destroying the screen in the process.
Also, the magnetic charge connector started having contact issues around the same time the battery was starting to fail, so the moment you bump it, it disconnects and causes the device to turn off. It also just refuses to connect half the time when you plug it in. Gotta jiggle it, blow into it, shake and hit it a bunch of times, and pray. I’m pretty sure it’s the tablet’s side that’s the problem because changing chargers did nothing, and the charger that came with the problem tablet worked fine on another Surface. Gotta love when companies make the fragile part of the connector apart of the $2000 device that’s sealed shut with glue and put the more robust part on the cheap and easily replaceable charger.
It’s also really bad at going to sleep. Way too many times I’ve closed it, put it in my bag, and when I take it out it’s scalding hot and the battery is nearly drained. It’s your own device Microsoft, running 100% your own software. How the hell do you fuck it up?!
Worst. Tablet. EVER. And probably ruined any potential that laptop-replacement tablets once had, which is a shame because I still like the tablet form factor.
Recycled plastic bin liners. They literally split at the seams as I was peeling them off the roll.
Second place goes to a pair of cheap shoes. Literally walked the soles off them in two weeks.
Third place goes to a pair of nail clippers from a consignment store. The metal bent rather than cut through my fingernails. (Maybe it would have worked better under the red sun of my home planet?)
I’ve had a pair of nail clippers break similarly, but the edge split instead of cutting my nail. I think glass clippers would have been better.
A friend of mine made an online store and he started selling
e-wasteahem… various affordable electronics. He wanted me to test a Chinese tablet, and I said yes. This was back in the day when Android Honeycomb was a thing and iPad 2 was a reasonable option, so even the best tablets weren’t that great.I got the tablet, charged the battery, booted it up, and it was just barely ok. It worked, but it was really slow. I mean, like slower than my first Android phone. This was not even last gen hardware. It was clear that
someall corners were cut. The storage, CPU, RAM, bandwidth etc. Every component was the slowest one available.Anyway, the testing went slowly, as you would expect. It ran out of battery very quickly, because of course it did. Why put large cells or even mediocre quality cells in a cash grab like this. So, I charged it up and continued testing later until it ran out of battery again. Rinse and repeat.
After a few days of testing, It just didn’t boot up any more. Apparently some of those cheap components just couldn’t take the heat that comes with using a battery powered device. Rust in pieces! I hope this abomination gets ground to shreads and drowned in sulfuric acid.
I returned the tablet to my friend and I never heard from it again.
My wife once bought me a Siar Wars action figure from e bay. Yes that’s right Siar Wars. He fall apart immediately upon taking out of the box.
Was it Luke Skyvvalker or Ham Solo?
It was Bar Bar Jinks actually
I bought an ouya. I remember just about everything sucked. It’s the thing that came into mind.
It’s funny that Ouya’s brand recognition is so infamous that no additional explanation is needed.
I purchased sunglasses in the Philippines and they broke the same day. I purchased a different pair from a different stand and they broke the same day. Im convinced the defective bottom of the barrel get dumped onto the Philippines
So apparently this is 100% a thing with expensive camera lenses. Different markets will get different quality lenses despite the model being marked as the same.
It’s also why I won’t buy clothing from US based outlets, as the brands have been known to explicitly manufacture lower quality product to sell at outlets. That said, the only time this actually comes up for me (being an Australian), is that I won’t buy big brand clothing at Costco.
I bought a desoldering iron for a project I was working on. Seemed to work fine although the thing had no power switch and was very uncomfortable to hold. I just needed it for one project so it made sense and I think it had a fair amount of compromises given the savings. Sometimes cheap does make sense
A bit off topic; a friend of mine purchased a play mat for his kid, one of those you put on the floor with a birdseye view of roads, buildings etc., from wish (yeah, expectations weren’t high to begin with). When it arrived he realized it was roughly 30 by 30 centimeters.
We went back and looked at the listing on wish, and while no dimensions were listed, the one image it had was of a kid sitting on the mat playing. That kid must’ve been less than 5 centimeters tall.
Wouldn’t be surprised if the kid playing on the mat would be part of the print as well.
You know those apple slicer things that look like a wagon wheel pattern blade with a circle in the middle so you can core it and slice it in one swoop? We found one for watermelons. No shit. In hindsight, I’m guessing it was supposed to be more of a funny novelty than something actually used, but… we used it…
It made it about half an inch into the melon, then shattered like it was some kind of ACME explosion. Bits of plastic went EVERYWHERE, my melon was now wearing a crown of blades, and I was just standing there with a handle still in each hand trying to process wtf just happened, like Wile-E-Coyote still holding the steering wheel of the car that just blew up around him looking straight at the camera like “well that just fucking happened…”
0/10
Bargain store potato knives with plastic hilts have only 2cm of blade inside.
“full tang” is the wording to look for on knives. I have gotten cheap ones before that had a little foil strip on the plastic handle to make it look like it was all metal.
haha love this, i had something similar but less explosive with a metal temu garlic press… it completely bent out of shape on the first garlic cloves i used it on hahaha
Plastic clothes pins that degraded in the sunlight, turned into plastic powder.
My mom always bought those, granted they last close to a year but damn the cheap bamboo ones cost practically the same and last forever
I bought a cheap scientific calculator for math class. When I tried to multiply .5 by .5 it gave a long irrational number instead of .25. then I had to try to explain to the store clerk why that was wrong before they would accept the return
Ah floating point math. Works fine for 90% of use cases, until it doesn’t.
Hmm really? It’s always worked for 90.0001741894164% of use cases for me
You got an audible chuckle from me on that one
Better calculators just use floating point math with a few tricks on top to pretend it isn’t floating point math.
Weirdly though it wasn’t remotely close to the right answer so I don’t think it was floating point malarkey. I always assumed some defect but I guess we’ll never know.now I wish I had kept it so I could have sent it to Matt Parker for his calculator reviews
First gen Pentium seems like it would be overkill for a scientific calculator but I guess they had to offload those chips somehow.
The ti-84 plus is based on the zilog z80. From 1976. The calculator is still being made, and still costs $100.
This reminds me of a story with an old high school maths teacher.
Someone said a number divided by zero was zero and he proceeded to explain why it was not. One of the class jokers went “oh yeah, well my calculator says it’s zero!”. The teachers smiles and says “surely not” and approaches the joker to see what kind of shenanigan he was pulling. And sure as hell he divides five by zero and zero is the result. The teacher, not believing his own eyes, looks at the calculator, then the joker, then the calculator again. The window was open. Figure out the rest yourself.
A five dollar automatic open umbrella that shot right off the shaft as soon as I hit the button.
Damn, you got a $5 umbrella projectile. Was it reloadable?
Sadly, no. But it was quite disposable.
Pew
Fly swatter that burst in to a million bits the first time I hit a fly.
ha, been there with this one. why even waste plastic, energy and man hours making it. i bet margins are horrible too.
The other fly swatters will know not to mess with that fly.
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A can opener from a convenience store. It was barely sharp enough to puncture the metal of the can and exploded the moment I turned the crank.
