Tech Purchases You Feel Guilty About?

[dullard]

Canon S90 digital camera.
Soon after we got smart phones. Camera got passed around to the kids.

Bad move in my opinion. The S90 (if you spend a few hours to know how to use it) will blow away any smartphone camera*. The Canon S line is cheap (if you buy one version older than the newest it is usually in the sub-$200 range), pocketable, and great quality photos. I really liked my S90 until it ended up under a foot of water while kayaking around Halong Bay.

https://www.google.com/search?q=hal...ved=0ahUKEwiHruvlms_KAhVC32MKHT1LBsYQ_AUIBigB

I very quickly replaced it with two S110 cameras (one for me and one for the in-laws). Even though I have a SLR with good lenses, the S110 still is my go-to camera for the majority of things.


* For example, this summer I got a laugh out of family members who were bragging non-stop about the camera on their iPhone 6. So we did a head-to-head test at a family wedding. 6 months later and each and every one of the family members who's photos were taken in the test now have their Facebook profile photos from the S110, not their supposedly "unbeatable" smartphone camera.

 

[gorcorps]

Oh ya.

I bought a Nook and didn't even open it before buying a Kindle. Still have it new in box.

I at least got some use out of my Nooks before going to the Kindle. Amazon's store is just so much better, and I've been able to get a lot of cheaper books compared to the B&N store. I also used to sideload books to the Nook a lot because B&N rarely had the best price, but with Amazon I rarely have to look anywhere else. Some people don't like being tied to a certain ecosystem, but when that ecosystem is good I don't mind it.

 

[Anubis]

I have a ton of SSDs, I don't really need a ton of SSDs

 

[gorcorps]

I have a ton of SSDs, I don't really need a ton of SSDs

Selling?

 

[Charlie98]

Actually... my entire GAME rig. Even though I sourced some used parts, the whole PC itself was unnecessary, my desktop rig was handling it just fine. If there might be just one component... probably the 500GB SSD, completely unnecessary for game files, particularly when I have umpteen spinners setting around doing nothing. I caught a bit of flack from the wifey about the parts that were arriving... she was really hating on Newegg for a while, by default.

In hindsight, it was a good move... the GAME rig became my daughter's school PC, and getting Steam off my work PC kept my mind on work, not clearing out the favela or playing Bejeweled.

I have a ton of SSDs, I don't really need a ton of SSDs

I do have a weakness for storage... I see those big 500GB and 1TB SSD's on sale and think 'How can I justify this...?'

 

[Anubis]

Selling?

yea I got 2 or 3 sitting around, 128-256GB that I can get rid of, lemme check when I get home see what they exactly are

 

[Raduque]

I honestly feel more guilty about NOT buying tech things. Seeing a great device, but not buying one and then later it's killed.

I do have a weakness for storage... I see those big 500GB and 1TB SSD's on sale and think 'How can I justify this...?'

I'll NEVER feel guilty about buying storage. WalMart had a 3tb external HDD on sale for $89 yesterday. I bought it. What did I do with it? Plugged it into my server and added it to the Stablebit DrivePool. Now I have 12 or 13tb and about 9 free.

Asus Transformer tf700 since it ended up being a piece of shit

I don't feel guilty about my TF101 being a piece of crap (that I was very excited about to get. Tegra processor! 1gb ram! 1280x800 HD LCD! 32gb storage!), now I'm just upset about it turning out to be a piece of junk.

 

[poofyhairguy]

There are not many tech purchases I feel "guilty" about, but there are plenty I wish I did not make.

The most notable that comes to mind is the Synology Diskstation I bought a little over a year ago. The plan was to move my media collection onto it and use it to stream media to my TV over a local ethernet connection. After reading all the reviews it seemed like the way to go, especially since it supported on the fly transcoding.

Long story short - I have never gotten the thing to work properly. Oh yeah I got it set up right - but it has never ever worked correctly for its intended purpose. At best I could get 2-3 seconds of uninterrupted video before it would have to buffer again. Now it just sits unused under my desk. Shame - especially as it cost a fair bit to buy and populate with drives.

Hmm...that doesn't sound right. What model is it?

With NAS devices you can always just hook up some clients that don't require transcoding.

 

[AMDisTheBEST]

I brought a 900p monitor for 90 bucks. 3 days later, found a shell shocker 1080p monitor on newegg for 70 bucks. aaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh.....

Built a $750 dollar pc. one week later, found a similar spec prebuilt shell shocker on new egg for the same $$$. It comes with free and insane looking gaming keyboard and gaming mouse. The prebuilt one has twice the storage and best yet, built by a professional unlike mine which has been rough up by an inexperienced first time builder like me. I regretted building so much.....

Brought a r9 380 4gb for $220, only to found two weeks later that AMD was waging a price war with Nvidia. Both r9 380 and gtx 960 dropped to 170 dollars with free tripple A games upon purchase. Also, later version of the $170 sapphire had a backplate AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Last regret, i shouldve brought a powerful but cheap spec phone from china. Instead i purchase BLU phones which are pretty much copycats of Chinese phones tailor for the American market. 3g speed was fast enough, i shouldve just stick to importing the redmi note 3

 

[Herr Kutz]

My XBox One. I'm not a big fan of console games, but it does a great job streaming Netflix

My Xbox nothing. I gave it to someone at work a few months ago because it's worthless these days and I was tired of storing it.

 

[Muse]

The ipad air 2. Saw a guy using it for a presentation once and was enamored by it. I'm not an Apple fan and this is the only Apple product I own. What do I use it for? - Fallout shelter. -_-

I have never ever bought a single Apple product, not even an iTunes download. I do have some Fuji apples in my refrigerator's right bottom crisper drawer, but they don't count!

Now I did buy a big NEC CRT monitor, NEC 2141SB, cost me $665, shipped from Dell in January 2003. It had a reputation as a virtual professional graphics quality monitor. I sold it a year and a half later for $150 to a couple of guys who in person gave me a take it or leave it offer. I figure I didn't begin to get my money's worth of out that, my last CRT monitor. I don't know that I felt guilty, but I felt that I didn't get anywhere near my money's worth out of that tech purchase.

You guys are actually making me feel pretty smart. I'm actually pretty behind the curve on a ton of technology, tons. I know where to go online for confirmation of that, and do so all the time. When I figure I need something I dig into the info online before making a decision. Sometimes I make a decision in a matter of a few minutes, for instance I bought my first external optical drive a couple days ago on recommendation from a guy in General Hardware. There's always the Law of Diminishing Returns when researching a purchase. I spent as much time finding the best price as determining that it was reasonably appropriate for my purposes on that external DVD burner.

 

[Golgatha]

Western Digital's WD TV Media Player. Slow as cold molasses UI, didn't stream worth a damn, and was a pain to setup. $100 for a completely worthless POS I ended up selling later for about half that price a few months later after it had collected some dust. Built a full HTPC for my upstairs TV and haven't looked back.

 

[core2slow]

USB flash drives. They're the equivalent of pens. I keep on losing them.

 

[BurnItDwn]

The couple of raptor hard drives I had picked up over the years. I could never justify the cost of going with proper 15K SCSI, then, SSDs came out and were way too much $$$.

Anyhow, once 1TB SSDs are under $200, I'll be replacing the raptor in my eyefinity box. The projector computer already has a SSD.

 

[jlee]

I'm pretty happy with my tech purchases in general.

 

[NutBucket]

In college I bought a Dell D830 laptop. It was a nice machine with a great screen (for the era) but had heat issues. It met its untimely demise due to what seemed to be a graphics controller failure. But before that it had already roasted it's battery.

In contrast, the XPS M1330 I bought my gf (now wife) around the same time still works well and the battery still holds a decent charge too. Clearly that was the better machine.

Wow, I paid $1800 for that XPS in Feb 2008. I guess it was worth the money!

EDIT: And the D830 ran me $1100....

 

[Sho'Nuff]

Hmm...that doesn't sound right. What model is it?

With NAS devices you can always just hook up some clients that don't require transcoding.

Its a DS214 play - populated with two 3TB NAS drives in raid 1 - its never worked right and I absolutely HATE the interface. Whoever programmed their software needs to take a bunch of courses in usability.

I can't help but think that there is a huge market out there for idiot proof, stupid easy to manage media server devices. 10-15 years ago I could understand why things like that were difficult. There really is no excuse now.

FWIW - I have been running plex on my main PC for ages now with no issues, and I'm smarter than the average bear when it comes to this stuff. Not an IT expert, but certainly more knowledgeable than your average run of the mill person when it comes to computing and networking. So its frustrating when I can't get something to work properly when it should be stupid easy.

 

[potzocalli]

Tech purchases will inevitably make you feel guilty.

Plextor CDRW units that cost $280
My first SSD
My first 1MB (not GB) of RAM for my 486SX was more than $100
My Iwill motherboard that had 5.1 sound (when 2 speakers was the norm) and a ton of features I never used but paid for.
Changing PCI modem cards, video cards and sound cards out every couple of months. Remember Cirrus logic and Motorola modems, Trident video cards and the Echo Wave 128and SoundBlaster sound cards? A new product came out every 2 months or so.
And last of all several 4TB HDDs collecting dust because I have not filled my 2TB drives and am to lazy to copy all of my data.

 

[Linux23]

There are not many tech purchases I feel "guilty" about, but there are plenty I wish I did not make.

The most notable that comes to mind is the Synology Diskstation I bought a little over a year ago. The plan was to move my media collection onto it and use it to stream media to my TV over a local ethernet connection. After reading all the reviews it seemed like the way to go, especially since it supported on the fly transcoding.

Long story short - I have never gotten the thing to work properly. Oh yeah I got it set up right - but it has never ever worked correctly for its intended purpose. At best I could get 2-3 seconds of uninterrupted video before it would have to buffer again. Now it just sits unused under my desk. Shame - especially as it cost a fair bit to buy and populate with drives.

I have the QNAP TS453 Pro NAS with 4x4tb drives in raid 5 with my entire movie collection as well. It allows me to not run my pc 24/7 these days. This thing has a quad core CPU and it handles 720p transcoding well but not some 1080p content.

I guess my point is that these NAS boxes don't have the CPU power to transcode on the fly. However what you can do is create a Plex Version of that same movie and play the pre-transcoded version instead of the original in order to prevent on the fly encoding in Plex.

 

[Nashemon]

I don't know if anyone is answering the OP's question correctly.

I was an ATI user since I started working with computers 20 years ago. The first Nvidia card I ever bought was just last year. GeForce 970. Best card I could afford. Shortly after that, all the info on it about the whole 3.5 GB RAM debacle came out. I feel I betrayed ATI (now AMD) by going with a product that was falsely advertised. And of course the price has plummeted since that news came out, so I regret it as well.

 

[fleshconsumed]

Tech Purchases You Feel Guilty About?

Pretty much every single one. Every. Single. One. They either get a price drop as soon as I buy them, or they get largely unused, or they're too much for what I use them for, or they end up being a total crap. There are very few tech purchases that leave me satisfied.

Latest tech purchase is HP Envy 8 Note tablet that is supposed to be coming in today. I wanted a smaller windows tablet that is light and portable, yet can run full windows so that I can use it to read PDFs or casually browse web before going to sleep. I'm sure I'll be happy as a clam for the next few days playing with a new toy, but if past history is any indication, either the screen is going to be too small, or it's going to be too under powered with an atom cpu/2gb/32gb configuration, basically there will be something about it that will make me regret the purchase... Sigh.

 

[Sonikku]

Sega Saturn.

No Sonic Xtreme. Had to settle for Sonic 3D bast. :\

 

[jlee]

I don't know if anyone is answering the OP's question correctly.

I was an ATI user since I started working with computers 20 years ago. The first Nvidia card I ever bought was just last year. GeForce 970. Best card I could afford. Shortly after that, all the info on it about the whole 3.5 GB RAM debacle came out. I feel I betrayed ATI (now AMD) by going with a product that was falsely advertised. And of course the price has plummeted since that news came out, so I regret it as well.

I paid $298 for my GTX970 in late 2014...absolutely no regrets.

 

[AMDisTheBEST]

I don't know if anyone is answering the OP's question correctly.

I was an ATI user since I started working with computers 20 years ago. The first Nvidia card I ever bought was just last year. GeForce 970. Best card I could afford. Shortly after that, all the info on it about the whole 3.5 GB RAM debacle came out. I feel I betrayed ATI (now AMD) by going with a product that was falsely advertised. And of course the price has plummeted since that news came out, so I regret it as well.

This is what you get for jumping ship lol

 

[Sonikku]

I know that as nerds we are all supposed to only purchase the best product possible in the category without caring about hype or marketing, but lets be honest we are people too.

Are there technology purchases/brands you feel guilty about buying? And if so why?

Like for me, I feel guilty every time I buy an Intel CPU or a Nvidia GPU. I know AMD is hurting. I know that if AMD goes away it will be bad for us. But I just can't find a way to work AMD CPUs or GPUs into my life, they always suck at something I care about.

Also I feel guilty about all my Polk speakers. I know there are better speakers, probably at the same price. I know some audiophile could take my speaker budget and get way more out of it, but then I would need their help making it all work together. Polk just makes it easy to work together if you only buy their stuff.

Oh and I am sucker for Antec stuff. I know other companies are better in most cases but I keep going back to the well, and will pay extra for their brand for some reason (even though I actually like Fractal more).

What about you? What have you bought that gives you nerd guilt? A pair of Beats headphones you love, or Bose speakers? Maybe that "new" Macbook that everyone knows is an overpriced netbook?

This is a safe place, share with us your guilt.

I can understand having a beef with AMD CPUs but GPUs too? Most of the AMD cards I see these days seem to beat their comparable priced Nvidia alternative in all but the $1000+ ultra high end.