What are the worst tech purchases you or your family have ever made?

I watched a video recently and wanted to know what other have bought over the years.

  • Watermark710@piefed.social
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    1 day ago

    My wife and I bought those stupid Surface tablets. Not really sure why. Too big to be comfortably portable, too small to be useful at home. At least the magnetic keyboard thing makes a good mousepad for my desktop PC.

    • QuadratureSurfer@piefed.social
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      13 hours ago

      I actually had the opposite experience.

      It was the perfect device for going through university for me. I mostly used it for note taking and homework with OneNote. For something like proving my work with matrices I could just copy the last matrix, paste it, then replace the one column/row that I was working on and repeat. In that case, work that took other students an hour or more would only take me a few minutes.

      Additionally, since it wasn’t just a tablet, I could run whatever software I needed on it for completing projects.

      Of course a somewhat recent update from Windows bricked the device, and I haven’t gotten around to switching it over to Linux (like I have with my other devices). It does look like there’s a great group helping to support that transition though: https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface

    • djdarren@piefed.social
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      1 day ago

      I keep pondering grabbing one of those to put a Linux on. I want a tablet that isn’t an iPad, and isn’t Android, and those seem like the most cost-effective way to achieve that.

        • Zak@lemmy.world
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          21 hours ago

          Most models are just PCs. The cameras in my Surface Go 2 don’t work out of the box on Linux, but everything else is fine.