I’ll start: printers.
I bought an HP in March 2020 when my job went remote and HP bricked it remotely after only 100 pages because I wouldn’t sign up for their subscription program. Ended up trashing a perfectly good printer.
Luckily my library’s close by and I can print there remotely.
I never understood why they got rid of that. I always thought it was a cool feature that they could have really leaned into. I had a tablet with it and I never used it much because I don’t watch TV, but it felt like something that could have been super useful to someone who did watch TV a lot (and I also had fun setting it up for my family TV and then casually sitting in the background adjusting the volume, changing the channel, and tweaking other settings and watching the chaos that ensued while I oh so innocently appeared to be oblivious and busy playing games on my tablet)
If I remember right it’s because they outsourced that feature to a third party called peel
It started as a dumb remote (which was everyone wanted) but they had some monetization ideas like full TV schedules and “suggested” (aka: sponsored) content.
The same for Xiaomi. A simple ir remote app in the mi 5, but no, in the next updates they had to bloat it until it imploded and nobody used it anymore so they could say “see? Nobody uses it, we can save the $0.05 ir LED”
The Samsung IR app also was used for their streaming service. They could have easily updated the app to allow it to run without connecting to their servers once they killed the service, but it was easier to tell their customers to pound sand.