If you count cars: A Skoda Octavia PHEV.
I love Skoda. I love the Octavia. It was my fourth Octavia and I already ordered two more for my staff. PHEV would have been ideal for our use case.
Well,things didn’t go as planned.
The whole car was bugged with software and hardware problems from day one - controll units randomly crapping out, when my dealer wanted to replace them he often had to get 5 units because four would be DOA and the one that worked kicked the bucket before I left his premises. Highlights:
- A steering wheel coming loose (only slightly,but still)
- The main display that shows your speed,etc. randomly shutting down. (Especially nice as I live close to Switzerland with their exorbitant speeding tickets)
- Randomly playing a screeching sound at full volume (especially nice at 3am or when on a highway)
- Randomly shutting of AC, some motor controls , etc.
It took 12 months for VW to take that steaming pile back, and only we sued them (Shortly before the hearing).
Second place goes to LG which sold me a OLED TV for 2k that randomly showed faulty pixel lines exactly 3 years and 3 days after I bought it (so it’s out of the extended warranty programs as well). And when asked for a quote for the repair they had the audacity to ask for almost the new price for the TV back then, aka 150% of the current market value - without even looking at it first. Good way to make sure that I never buy LG anymore.
VW really dropped the ball on software, no wonder they’re buying now into other car manufacturers like Rivian, in hopes to use someone else’s more developed software.
Yeah. Both hardware and software, sadly. Their QA is going down the drain.
Happy Hyundai customer now.
Is there actually any car manufacturer that has decent hardware and software? I have never driven a really “modern” car but from all that I’ve seen so far the interfaces are typically horrible to interact with and laggy to the point where I prefer my car as dumb as possible
Really can’t complain about Hyundai/Kia and Volvo (Android) so far.
If you buy new and sell before 100k miles, Hyundai/Kia are great. Otherwise, you better be okay with oil consumption and potential engine work, the new engines are kinda prone to failure.
Tbh, with a BEV I am not that concerned with oil consumption and engine work.
A Dell Inspiron laptop.
It just kept dying. Typing a Word document one moment, black screen the next. I bought this thing in August because I was going back to school and I needed a new laptop. By December I finally convinced them to replace the machine outright. I got a different model that lacked a lot of the features I had ordered.
I’m no longer a Dell customer.
Unfortunate. My wife has an inspiron 7000 gaming laptop that I bought for school in 2016… it has survived a repair to the screen due to being ran hard and dropped often, but it is still a powerhouse and keeps up with any task thrown at it with Fedora Kinoite. The keyboard stopped lighting up a few years back but other than that it shows no sign of stopping.
To be fair, the machine they replaced my original Inspiron with (also a 7000 series from 2014) is still working after a bit of a post-warranty glow-up including replacing the battery, CPU fan and HDD with an SSD. It’s in “still works fine running Mint” territory. When it finally snaps I’m going Framework.
Samsung M540 “Slyde” phone - The software was incredibly buggy including things like just randomly typing the wrong letter. Randomly bad tech is so much more irritating than tech you know is bad.
Google Nexus 7 (2012) - The tablet had defective chips that slowed down over time. Turned into a horrible slow piece of shit over time.
Was that the first version Nexus 7? I had the refreshed version and it was my favourite bit of tech ever. I ran it for about 5 years until the screen and battery both died. I loved that thing.
I still have the refreshed second gen version running, got an android 12 rom flashed and now it is being used with an amcrest camera as a privacy friendly nanny cam monitor!
They were brilliant. I ran a Nexus 10 for about 5 years, and about the same from a Nexus 9 my BIL asked me to look at. I forget the ROM but he couldn’t believe it kept getting OTA updates for that long.
Those were the days, enjoy your 7!
