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.
Newer cars. They come with cameras pointed at my face!
Several years ago, I bought a color laser printer/scanner. It cost about twice what an inkjet one costs. It has now lasted twice as long as the average inkjet, and no sign of that changing. And it doesn’t have any of the subscription bullshit. Money well spent.
almost everything.
They are sneaking creepnology into all kinds of things it has no business being.
I’d go back to a Bakelite phone on a fucking land line if I could. As it stands I mostly try to buy older shit, cause not only is it typically better made, its just simple and basic with no extra pointless points of failure.
windows. and any software related (github) to windows.
I’m now 100% all linux all the time.
Cars, phones
TVs. I haven’t gotten around to it yet, but I want to set up a Linux based streaming box and have my actual TV completely offline.
Printers, not only just from enshittification, but also due to the fact that traditionally they were constantly having issues to the point of being a meme. I need to print something twice a year, so yeah, I ain’t dealing with all that.
Good news, there’s an open source project working to develop a printer, and it has working prototypes: https://www.tomshardware.com/peripherals/printers/raspberry-pi-powered-open-source-printer-earns-design-award-nomination-but-still-has-no-price-nine-months-after-reveal
HP printers. For a long time, they had been my printer of choice because of quality and Linux support, but the quality has been replaced by enshittification. The last two printers had been fuckups (two, because I mistook the first ones’ shittyness for being a one-off bad one), and wasted overpriced ink on a massive scale.
Since then, I’ve added HP to my black list of printers. The other brand on that list is Canon. But that’s another story.
You should add HP to the list. They’re products are shit, and their support even worse!
Any hardware associated with Facebook.
False.
The Facebook Portal TV was, and still is, gorgeous. The voice control is dead, the streaming services removed, the Alexa link dead, but as a video conf device that uses your TV really well, it’s a life-changer.
We chat with people on the other Coast weekly, and we get to see people in their living room from ours. We can’t go visit, but we can stay in touch.
We paid like $100 each for 4 of these. I’d’ve paid 5 times that for one with upgradeable assistant access and vanilla open video chat so it’s fb free. They’re all still running but they tether us to Fb since the zoom was ass.
Maybe that’s the one tech we should try to bring back with FOSS next
What’s “false” here exactly?
Also at the end you’re like you’re like “but they force us to keep connected to fb” which sounds very disqualifying for many users here…
I stopped using a smart watch I used to use all the time because Samsung started requiring location services to be on to use it. Immediately made me drop it and I stopped buying anything Samsung after that. Not only would I never be okay with having that on all the time, it’s fucking insane to start making that a requirement for a device that never required that out of the box.
As a bonus one, I’ll never buy anything Playstation ever again for obvious reasons.
About 12 years ago I bought a Samsung tablet that had an IR blaster function so I could control my TV and audio equipment. It was a primary reason I chose that model. Less than a year after purchase Samsung discontinued their app and remotely disabled the tablet’s IR blaster.
It was less than $5 for a replacement app that could be configured to get it working again, but the fact Samsung thought it was just fine to remotely remove a feature that was one of the primary reasons for my purchase is not something I’ve forgiven.
Since then I’ve bought lots of consumer electronic products but have not (and probably never will) consider another Samsung product.
What the fuck! That’s egregious, that’s so anti consumer it’s basically malicious
This should be made illegal
What a disgusting practice… as if I needed more reasons to hate Shamsdung ugh I cant wait to ditch my phone
For some reason this user keeps telling people you can put graphene OS on Samsung devices, but that’s not accurate, graphene only runs on pixels
You replied to my comment with this. Are you referring to me? If so you’re mistaken.
Not a mistake, I am pointing out the other user to reply to your comment (saying you can put graphene on Samsung devices) is incorrect, in case you didn’t know.
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.
That sort of crap is why I specifically buy older Samsung hardware like that tablet. I love a Samsung Galaxy S10e for my phone, because I can flash Graphene onto it and not have to deal with their firmware. If that tablet had/has an IR blaster, it’s old enough to do the same thing and rip all that Samsung software off of it, flash it with a FOSS ROM, and enjoy your hardware.
Home speakers, the “smart” kind
Printers are a loss leader for selling ink cartridges. I have done my recent printing at Walgreens. It’s about 25 cents per page and I don’t need it very often.
Video games. I stopped buying games because they started requiring a monthly subscription to play.
Monthly subscription? You mean like PS+ or something?
Yes, also World of Warcraft, anything like that with a subscription. PS+/Xbox Game Pass was the death blow for console gaming for me. I want to buy the game, play the game. Not be paying each month.
Yeah, MMOs are a special case. Realistically WoW or XIV are a better deal than most games. I’m probably in the tens of thousands of hours in WoW since 2004. Pretty crazy value for money.
I agree paying for online in consoles is dumb but that’s always been their strategy - cheaper and easier to get into than computers and they’ll nickel and dime you since you don’t know any better.
I have an old Brother laser printer which absolutely rocks. But I also have an HP flatbed scanner that has never come out of the box because of their bullshit.
Yup, if I were still a buyer of printers, that’s what I’d get.
HP printer, cars, appliances.
Dryer drum seals broke and bushings worn. I just bought parts and spent the time fixing it, to avoid the IOT new ones. Probably coat me 30% of getting a new one
Car: we were due for a new one, but we found a 2004 car in mint shape so we downgraded purposely. I wanted to be able to have easy repairs and no phone-home garbage of a new car, and never any SaaS nonsense.
For the Printer: the drugstore guy alerted me to the HP ink nonsense, so I went with a Canon.
I’ve been slowly doing more and more car repair. I just hope they don’t stop producing replacement parts to force you into buying new cars.
Eventually we’ll all either be riding bicycles or constantly repairing homemade vehicles like they do in Cuba.
It seems like the way things are going. We are also gonna need those cooling shirts with ice packs in them to prevent heat exhaustion.
I was thinking of this this morning, so looked up electric motor kits to retro fit cars. https://ev-evolution.eu/solution/ev-kit/
New cars, Adobe suite, meta suite, and most restaurants.
