The appliance that elicits anger and frustrated at it’s mere sight. The treacherous device that never worked right.
“Smart” TVs.
I just want my TV to show pretty pictures with sound thrown at it by the digital receiver. If I want, I can attach a computer for streaming. How is that such a big ask?!
I think some commercial TVs might do what you want.
The cost of a TV is subsidized by advertisements and deals with different apps for prominent placement.
I mean, yeah. Somehow I’m aware of that. But also, we haven’t bought a TV for almost a decade now, and my biggest mistake is letting it update to the latest version. If there’s something these adverts have done is drive me into consuming even less than ever before. I actively don’t buy stuff now.
Disconnect it from the network and factory reset it.
That stopped mine showing me adverts. Won’t stand adverts from a device I’ve paid to bring into my home.
Only had to do that because I checked to see if the “download subtitles” feature would actually work.
Spoiler
It didn’t.
I couldn’t find a dumb TV, so I got a smart one didn’t give it wifi access. Every time I turn it on, it shows me a clock that’s wrong and I think “Not so smart now, are you?”. It’s a perfectly functional dumb TV.
Microwaves are allowed one proud “ding” or three “beep” before they are on my hate-list.
I want to open up my microwave and rip out whatever device makes the beep. Who has ever forgotten they have food in the microwave? I was hungry 3 minutes ago, I haven’t forgotten, and it’s not going to burn.
Is a printer an appliance? 🤔
I dont remember when but the printer was an evil demon sent from hell, then all of a sudden printers just got good.
I cant remember what the last serious issue I had with a printer was.
I cant remember what the last serious issue I had with a printer was.
I do, it was immediately before I switched to a Brother.
Not when I am done with it. From having to support them before I am so glad I don’t own one.
I have a Samsung printer that simply hates me. Whenever I need to print something urgently it will disappear from the wifi. It shows up for a few milliseconds when restarted and disappears again. However when you have the time and energy to investigate the problem it works flawlessly.
It’s not the printer, dude. It’s the radio.
The stove in the place I rent. Only been living here maybe 2 years… and that thing is the devil. I thought it was just me getting used to an electric stove again. Nope, that thing is just a piece of shit.
Nothing can simmer, nothing can be left unattended for more than a few minutes (at most), it can’t maintain anything close to a consistent temperature, and forget boiling water before you die of old age… I use an electric kettle just so I can boil noodles in less than 40 minutes
Maybe it’s my pots?.. nope, I’ve tried. Maybe I’ll get better at using it?.. no, and at this point I wouldn’t even want to. It’s just a piece of shit. My mother-in-law is a great cook, and she was pissed when she burned smothered chicken on it… because she hasn’t burned smothered chicken in probably 20+ years; she confirms the stove is garbage
Fuck that stove
Thanks for hearing my rant, I feel a little better now
Edit: I forgot to mention that the fucker is BRAND NEW too. We’re literally the first people to use it. Garbage-ass, giant piece of horse shit…
I trust your mom. She’s gonna be right.
You could get your thermostat checked. Depending on the stove, it’s something you could probably do yourself. It’s like a ten dollar part, maybe?
We’re just planning on moving now, cause we hate this place and there’s a multitude of problems: A/C can’t keep up with cooling the house, costs a fuck-ton in energy bills, the management company won’t fix shit and they’re a nightmare to work with. They tried to blame us for rats getting into the attic, when it was a known problem before. Took us 2 months to make them hire pest control, and then acted like we should be grateful for normal-upkeep, and not having rats get inside
The neighborhood is actually nice, but the big-name management company are basically slum lords with a smile. But we had 3 dogs at the time and rental options were few, that had a fenced yard and would accept 3 dogs. 2 of them sadly passed this past year, and as much as I miss them and it wrenched my heart… we realized we could probably find something better now and not need such a large yard (our last dog is old too, and doesn’t romp in the yard anymore. He just enjoys little walks now)
The stove is just one of the things I hate about this place and I don’t want to fix any of their shite, even for $10. We’re just making it work for now
I keep buying cheap toaster ovens. I keep paying the price for it. At least I know my smoke alarms work
Get yourself a nice Panasonic one. $150-ish I have one that’s over 10 years old
We must’ve lucked right out because we bought the literal cheapest toaster we found ($12 about 9 years ago). No special features, not even a cancel button, just a little knob for the doneness. It worked so well for the 7 or 8 years we had it, and the only reason we replaced it was cause we wanted a 4-slice toaster.
Thing was a champ, I was trying to see if I could find it online but can’t see it anymore. I think it was Master Chef brand.
We have an Oster one now with a fancy touch screen that I can see is about $70. It works about as well as the previous one we had.
Dishwashers
Modern ones have too many features that can break and brick the whole thing and the cheap ones never get good powerful pumps so they spray like shit. Just make a basic mechanical timed dishwasher with a super powerful pump and I will be all in.
This is what I want for the vast majority of appliances. It just needs to do the basic functions reliably and have a few adjustments that I can fiddle with.
That’s the thing–the actual purpose of the appliances hasn’t changed at all. Every “advancement” is typically proprietary tech made to help comply with energy and water/gas usage standards–or to add perceived value through some half-baked gimmicks. For instance, dishwashers use smaller pumps run for longer periods of time to perform the same amount of work a larger more powerful pump could handle (in many cases a single pump sufficed for a dishwasher–one rotational direction for wash, opposite direction for drain)… I’m totally on board with energy efficiency but the laughably cheap/shitty tech they use to those ends kinda blunt the effectiveness of the energy saving measures (since replacing parts–or more likely entire dishwashers when those pumps fail–is a less energy-saving process than having a stronger, more durable pump that draws an extra amp or 2)
Yeah, saving $40 a year but spending $500 every three years instead of ten isn’t saving money.
I got an inkling that it just isn’t profitable to make quality appliances anymore. Why make something that can last for decades when you can sell people a new appliance every 5-10 years with cheaper parts?
It could be profitable, but it isn’t as profitable as making an unreliable and overly complex piece of crap that increases sales totals which jack up stocks.
Hell, being profitable isn’t even important for lot of businesses anymore, they just want growth.
I think this is recently apparent with Instant Pot. Their first model was phenomenal, and if you have one, you probably still do. The newer ones are still pretty good, but they come with small issues, don’t work as well and need more maintenance. Plus, Instant Pot now offers a host of bullshit add-ons to round out the sales line-up.
I had heard they were considering bankruptcy at some point prior to their recent line of products.
Think it was something about being bought out by private equity, and being run into the ground. I’ve loved all of the instant pots I’ve owned, only have had more than one because I needed a bigger one.
Being bought out by private equity is a massive red flag for quality, they always go cheap and ride the brand recognition as long as possible.
What features do dishwashers have?
Literally every one I’ve used has had racks, two to three spiny water sprayers, a water intake, and a detergent basket.
I’m not disagreeing with the overall sentiment, the “modes” of a dishwasher are dumb as shit. No I don’t want reduced water flow, reduced temperatures, and a worse outcome requiring manual intervention.
But what is there to break? Suck water in, pump it out, spray it at dishes.
maybe there’s the occasional weird model, like Samsungs wall sprayer. But you can’t buy them any more.
Nothing makes me particularly angry, but I’d really like if my washing machine had an accurate sense of time. It’s so far off sometimes I might as well just pretend there’s no timer. 1 hr 10? Come back in 1 hr to find it’s got 58 minutes to go. Which is sometimes 10 minutes but might actually be 58. Or 30. Or 70.
Dumb fucking thing. Doesn’t even do multiple cycles in a row so it’s not like the timer resets for the next bit.
Yeah this drives me insane too.
Dont have a timer if its guessing
Printers. There is no excuse for (consumer) printers to be as shitty as they are.
There are reasons, but none of them are excuses: If patent hell wasn’t a main obstacle put in place by the large printer manufacturers, I am sure open source hardware alternative would’ve forced industry improvements ages ago.
Don’t worry, commercial printers are equally bad but in a different way.
Every vendor feels the need to inject their own special secret sauce into the drivers instead of making a tool that Just Works.
OS people need to make the drivers. Once.
The driver is only “I bake you a PDF, and you will eat it and you will like it”
I’m not sure about PDF specifically as a printer language but yeah basically.
Brother printers to the rescue. I think they are still untainted by crap bloatware and just do the thing.
Their mobile app is crap but the printer rocks!
For me, it’s specifically the HP printer my wife has. It has one of those subscription models where you pay per page (or per some unit, I forget) and you can’t use it without an account and an internet connection.
I bought a Brother that offers but does not mandate a subscription and tried to get her to use it, but she is convinced the awful disgusting subscription model is easier.
Every time I see it it makes me a little sad and a little mad, but I had her put it on my network that has guest isolation, so it can’t touch or spy on any of my other devices and only impacts her.
(My feelings about it aren’t quite that strong in reality, but this is a thread about appliance beef. If her printer weren’t isolated, I might actually feel pretty strongly about it.)
US patents only last for 20 years. Technically, nothing is stopping you from making a part-for-part copy of a good laser printer from 2005 and selling it the same way some companies do replacement toner.
It’s just that making a cheap and reliable appliance is HARD if there are dozens of distinct parts that all have to move together. Heck, id expect a near-clone of a Cuisinart stand mixer before I’d expect a printer.
(And, even then, i doubt it’d be much cheaper than just buying one used.)
Edit: patents, not parents.
Brother
I really cannot believe we fucked printers in so many unique ways.
- No universal drivers and software support, requiring entire settings pages to be about printers
- DRM everywhere, rendering third party cartridges useless
- Routinely bad security, making Wi-Fi enabled printers one of the common attack vectors
Etc. etc.
HpLJ4 was a wonderful beast.
Having said that, “print drivers” need to be “I’m gonna blow a PDF onto your port 9100 and you better make the things go on the goddamned paper or you fail and it’s the wood chipper for you”. I’m tired of everything else.
In grad school I picked up a an old free HP LaserJet, with an Ethernet NIC card (it was an upgradable printer, maybe from the mid 2000s?).
It was great! Only complaint was no duplexer, but the thing printed great from Linux and the generic toner was cheap.
Today though…the experience is a bit different.
Yeah I got an HP laser MFC with like 3 new carts 10 years ago. NIC and Duplex. Going to have it for at least 10 more years or brother when it dies.
Samsung Fridge (don’t judge me, it came with the house).
I knew it was a “when” and not and “if” it would start having issues, and it finally showed its colors last month.
Front panel buttons either refused to work at all or would cycle through every option continuously and randomly.
Want water? Sorry, only crushed ice today. Want ice? Sorry, just water today. Oh, I actually did want water (starts dispensing). PSYCH! Now I’m going to shoot ice at you and splash water everywhere.
Was about to just toss the thing and get something dumber and more reliable, but decided to roll the dice with a replacement control board from ebay. Thankfully, that worked and I’m only out $80.
I used to really want an icemaker for convenience, because invariably I’d run into a mostly-empty ice cubes tray when I wanted ice cubes. Or I’d fill the ice cubes tray before it was empty, but then I’d partially-melt the ice cubes there and make them unusable until they refroze.
I didn’t care that much about chilled water, because I can throw ice in it. But the ice cubes were a pain.
I even got a dedicated icemaker at one point, when I wanted softer ice to run a small shaved ice machine.
But…finally I figured out what I needed to do differently. Instead of freezing water in ice cube trays and taking the ice cubes directly out of the tray, just go stick a container in your freezer. Whenever you get ice cubes, if the ice cube tray is full and there’s space, just dump it into the container and refill it. Now you have a big container of ice cubes that’s always full. Just replicates what freezer-integrated ice cube makers do. Haven’t had any issues since. Maybe this is obvious to some people, but it wasn’t to me.
You can get little containers that will fit into the door shelves if you want to stick them there:
Are you sure someone wasn’t pranking you? Cuz that’s hilarious.
Lol, if only. It’s not a “smart” fridge, but it does have a lot of, frankly, unnecessary electronics for what it does. Electronic components that, as any internet search for Samsung appliances will confirm, can and do go bad and are a pain to repair.
Everything with a built in lithium battery that isn’t easy to swap. Phones, headphones, vapes, the weird gameboy thing I got offa aliexpress.
The microwave, because my roommates insist on having a model that beeps every 30 seconds after it finishes cooking so you don’t forget you had food in there. They still forget, though. It just gets on my nerves while I try to wash some dishes while waiting for the microwave to finish, or if I’m using it as part of prepping while cooking.
any fucking thing with touchscreens or touch buttons. those stupid things barely ever work and imagine not being able to use your appliance once that shit breaks.
Printers
