Are there any common household items or products that you think are designed incredibly poorly?
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Alec from Technology Connections is known for his extensive rants about household appliances: https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections
As for me, I'm just trying to avoid things in general, and things I don't enjoy in particular. Perhaps the only things that I find annoying at my home are:
- An awful flow-through gas water heater, which requires me to wait for like a minute before water gets up to temperature every time I need hot water (I'd go with an electric one myself, but unfortunately I'm a renter for now). It's also a poor design because it's going to fuck over humanity in a couple decades via climate change.
- Packaging on almost all processed food. I don't need everything I buy to be in a plastic bag. It's an incredibly poor design because it is almost always non-recyleable, either because it has a thin foil layer or it's a mix of plastics or both, filling the landfills forever and contaminating everything with microplastics.
- Poor window frame design, combined with inevitable building settling, has resulted in a cracked window twice within the last year.
I have many more gripes about things, some of the most prominent:
- Most modern smartphones just suck. Gimme back the headphone jack, an SD card slot, and a back that I can open with my fingernails! (thankfully my current phone has all of those despite being only a couple years old and very cheap)
- Generally everything that has a battery which I can't replace
- Bluetooth headphones without a headphone jack or at least audio-over-USB are an awful design, it would cost the manufacturer like a dollar do add that functionality that can come in really handy and yet they don't
- Fuck clothes without pockets!
- Cheap plastic crap from wish.com or similar that's designed to fail after one use, it just shouldn't exist. I hope CPC bans this shit soon. (although I find it fun to pull out broken christmas lights from recycling, fix them and then get free christmas lights for every New Year's)
- "Teflon" or similar frying pans. Just get a cast iron one. Lasts forever, doesn't poison you, also allegedly enriches your food with iron
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Then why bring it up and say someone will correct you if you're wrong?
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Can I ask where everyone is from? I'm in the UK, which uses 230v, and even cheap-ass LED bulbs last forever. But a lot of the bulbs are rated for both 230v and 115v so I'm wondering if those same bulbs are being sold in the US. If that's the case, they'll need to pull double the current to manage the same output which is far more stressful on the electronics than higher voltage with lower current.
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Old mate didn't provide any fascinating insights into the manufacturing practices of soviet era communism, they just trotted out some meme-level anti-capitalist vibe-based hyperbole.
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A bridge rectifier circuit for each battery slot would solve the issue and, at the low currents of things like remote controls, would be pretty tiny and introduce inconsequential power overhead bbbuuuuuuuuu-uuuuuu-uuuuutttt it would cost money, precious pennies per device. And it would be tricky to market it, educate users, and so on. Such things are too good for this world.
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My laptop doesn't have dust filters, but the fan almost never runs anyway. Like the heatsink is way overbuilt for the CPU it's attached to. It's actually quite nice. I've never seen it hit 70 degrees. I've cleaned it maybe three times since 2016. It really only spins the fan up when I'm watching 60 fps YouTube videos or playing games. And even then, it kicks hard for a very short time and shuts off again.
And again, I bought this thing nine years ago. It's just a little Acer. And it's not even a nice one. I paid like 500 bucks for this thing.
Now, my wife's MacBook that she games on....yeah, I need to figure out how to get the back off so it can get a proper dusting. Fuck you, Apple. Let me work on my stuff, dammit.
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I switched to using a microplane (or similar super fine grater) for garlic a few years back, it's far easier to clean and I like it for ginger, nutmeg, hard cheeses etc.
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That’s why you should just drink it straight from the
bottlebox.FTFY
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There are many, but my current bugbear is the wireless Apple mouse. It has a built in rechargeable battery and and a tiny little port for you to plug the recharging cable in. The port is mounted on the bottom of the mouse rendering it useless while it's being charged. I guess it's to make it look nicer but it's so stupid.
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It's like that to push you to buy two of them.
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I just fold it up and use a clothes peg ha ha
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Buy jarlick. Join us in convenient garlic-in-a-jar nirvana.
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We did.
Boxed wine.
However, bottle design is pretty refined, and they are quite reusuable.
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A twelve year old computer in 2013 would have been utterly useless. Doesn't matter how good is was in 2001 it would die under even a modest 2013 workload. But a decent computer from 2013 is still useful today. Not for triple-A gaming, VR, or 8K video editing, but still a decent productivity and media machine. I just bought my first handheld gaming PC and I made sure it had eGPU support since that's the likely bottleneck in the future (i7 and 32GB RAM, so that should be good for a long while) and I fully intend to get a decade out of it. There's no real appetite to upgrade your machine regularly any more, and the manufacturers hate that.
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Y'know, I bought a bag of bag clips from Ikea years ago and I'm only now realising that they're less suited to the job than a clothes peg. Smart.
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US can openers. In other countries, they cut the sides of the can not the top, so the lid has no chance of falling in while dulling the edges. It also allows them to be much smaller and easier to use.
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That was a design decision by Steve Jobs to keep people from using them as wired mice.
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I imagine that can be true, as the sheets are one-size-fits-all rather than measuring based on the size. Usually I run laundry before it's too full to reduce noise in the closet near my office. If I ever notice it's not getting clean when full I'll just throw 2 sheets in given how cheap they are
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Came here to say can opener too. Not for the same reason as you mentioned just that more often than not a can opener is just plain shoddy. Slips, doesn’t fully cut, hard to grip, etc….
