The appliance that elicits anger and frustrated at it’s mere sight. The treacherous device that never worked right.
My twin tub washing machine. Fucking POS doesn’t spin properly, so i just give up most of the time.
Printers
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 ice compartment of our fridge. It’s always a fucking compressed block that needs manually smashing up. I fucking hate it so much.
Both Costco and Sam’s club make these ice cream makers in the wooden buckets. The motors have flimsy PET plastic gears. I get it. Strip out a replaceable gear rather than burn out the wires in a motor, easy easier repair, right? Wrong, I have a nearly identical ice cream maker that’s 60 years old, the motor still works great. Metal gears, just gotta oil and maintain it regularly because it gets near salt water and gets splashed occasionally over the decades. The new ones strip out the damn gears after two batches of ice cream.
My solution ended up being to get an ice cream maker with built in refrigerant, but then I needed to get it recharged and that’ll cost a much as the machine itself. Thanks a ton, breville. I’m saving up for a professional machine now.
The Oatmeal is correct, the answer is printers
And by extension, scanners
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.
My favourite bad security thing about them is that it’s possible to hack them with a fake fax.
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.
Washing machines.
My washing machine 15 years ago would wash my clothes with…uhhhh…fucking water.
Now you can’t buy washing machines that actually wash your clothes in water. They all spritz your clothes with a little water then jiggle around your damp clothes for a bit.
I don’t live in a desert. I live in a place with access to plenty of water. I should be allowed to buy a washing machine that actually fills up with soapy water and washes my damn clothes.
I could buy a Speed Queen washer for $2,000 from a specialty store, but that’s ridiculous. Why can’t I just buy a washing machine that washes my clothes? They’re ALL terrible now. All the washers in all the big box stores are just…bad.
Get your washers used from thrift stores, the older the better
Don’t fall into the aesthetics trap, you don’t need to swap your appliances out every five years for new
That still make toploaders, you know. Even HE ones. Front loading washers only serve to break your back from all the bending over.
Even the toploaders do the same thing now. They don’t actually fill with water like they used to. I got frustrated with my modern toploader and that’s how I wound up with the highest rated frontloader I could find. Both garbage.
The washing machine I bought in 1996 for $250 cleaned clothes better than any machine I’ve had in decades.
I just want to wash my clothes. In water.
Mine does, and it’s only 2 years old. Make sure you’ve set the water level knob to either “auto”, or “fill tub/XXL” if you like wasting water.
That said, I can assure you that modern washers use enough water, even if you disagree. You’re probably just using too much soap. Ditch the softener too. It collects at the bottom of the washer and turns into a hard wax, which will eventually clog your drain pipe.
What brand/model # are you using?
I’m at work; if I don’t respond in about 3-4 hours, please remind me to follow up.
I really don’t get all the shit microwaves and printers get. smart devices especially samsung and xiakmxiaomi i phones are the worst, from privacy, ownership and control, and maintainability points
I’ve never had issues with microwaves
Sounds like you’ve never had to service a printer, their hate is justified
Same privacy, ownership, and control issues. Had HP remote shut down one of our office printers b/c it detected unauthorized ink. It wasn’t unauthorized ink. They didn’t care. And it is trivial to hack and duplicate any document that ever gets printed or put to glass
If my work computer counts as an appliance, then that (I have been using a mac for 2 years now for work and am hating nearly every moment of it).
Other than that, I’m not really sure I have one.
The fridge. If you close it too hard or too soft, it ends up not closed, but a fingers’ width open.
Elevate the front a bit and gravity will do.
IIRC a trick you can do is take a heat gun (or failing that a hair dryer) and warm up the magnet gasket border thing. Then close the door and leave it for a bit. Something about it better forming to the correct shape and making a better and more consistent seal.
Couldn’t hurt!
This works on certain models, I have had success with Samsung and Whirlpool fridges but that’s my only experience
Just bought a child lock for my freezer because of this
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.
even enterprise grade printers are shitty
And there is a very good reason: Good Mechanical engineers are epxensive, so instead they hire crappy mechanical engineers
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.
US parents only last for 20 years.
Jeez, I’m way past my warranty. Almost at 27 years.
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.
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!
Yeah, there is no true rage like trying to get a Xante to work properly. “YOU HAD NO PROBLEMS 2 HOURS AGO WHEN I FED YOU 2,000 #10 ENVELOPES! WHY WON’T YOU PRINT THIS LETTERHEAD!”
Or my Canon 8000 that has decided it doesn’t want to print double sided on satin paper anymore. Or that is will staple a booklet, but only if i have the paper size down as 12x9 portrait instead of 9x12 landscape.
“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.
TV’s are actually cheaper not because the tech necessarily being more available (even though it should) but instead it’s because companies are harvesting your data on smart tv’s and selling it making more profit than they would make with just selling you a TV. On a separate but somewhat related note, has anyone else noticed smart phones becoming more expensive as they become more protective of the users privacy?
as they become more protective of the users privacy?
that was a good joke
as they become more protective of the users privacy?
that was a good joke
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.
Yep. Best way to get a TV that will never sell your data or show ads is to literally blacklist its MAC address at the router level, and then assign the “smart” functionality to a device environment you control, like a Shield Pro with a custom launcher or an Intel NUC media PC or NAS or something similar.
The Samsung man will still sneak in your house at night and check your watch history. There is no escape.
The dumb ones are typically “display” monitors, like what fast-food restaurants use for their menus. Likely more expensive, but built better too
Not built better, just under-driven on brightness so they can run 16-24 hours a day. Contrast suffers, frame rates are limited, you’re paying for support you will never use, and enterprise software features you will also never use.
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’m so happy my old 1080p dumb TV is still chugging along. Acts as a third screen to my computer, has a minor spot with pressure damage making the colors darker there. Ultimately still far superior to all the smart junk and cost me only 270€ when it was new in 2014
Do printers count? I fucking HATE printers.
After some half a century of existing they are somehow still annoying to use.
I got a Brother printer. I hate it less than my HP and Cannon ones I used to use but it’s still a printer. A sin which cannot be redeemed
I’d enjoy my Epson Eco tank printer more if it wasn’t trying to constantly update firmware, apps, drivers, etc.
I’m not setting up faxing. Stop asking.
Printers are a given, I figure.
I have a black and white samsung printer that is like a decade old with the only maintenance being adding the powdered ink and replacing the roller thingy a couple of times. Always works, never had an issue, printed thousands of pages over time in spurts of hundreds at a time and even not printing for like two years.
On the opposite end inkjet printers are the fucking worst computer accessory I’ve ever dealt with. They have always been a shitshow even before they started the ink pricing shenanigans because they are finicky and unreliable to start with.
mine has said that all the ink is critically low and I’ve just ignored it for the past few months and it just keeps going.
Nearly same here, but mine is from 2010 and all I’ve ever done is replace the original starter cartridge of toner with a generic one once, and that was 12ish years ago and 2 cross-country moves. I’ve maybe printed a thousand pages ever.
Came here to say this. F all printers ever made.
Inkjet printers clogging and requiring ink refills aside, I don’t think I’ve ever been unhappy with (2D) printers. I’ve used…continuous-feed dot-matrix printers, a thermal wax printer, laser printers, a text-only line printer, and a continuous-feed plotter. They all worked pretty well.
And honestly, I’m still kind of impressed at what inkjet printers can turn out on photo paper, even if I wouldn’t buy one for my own uses.
I had one very elderly Apple laser printer that I picked up once that someone was throwing out. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, laser printers were wonder printers that business users might have, but home users mostly didn’t have in their price range — fast output, sharp text, but expensive; always wanted one, but I wasn’t going to buy one. It didn’t have much memory, so there were some limitations on the complexity of what it could print. I rigged up the
lpdon my computer to do all the rendering of vector Postscript images and convert it into a fax-compressed raster image and hand it off to the printer, so aside from taking a while to transfer the resulting image to the printer, it could pretty much handle anything. It served for something like ten years, with the remainder of the original toner cartridge lasting something like five of that, and I only tossed it because I wanted a higher-resolution printer, not because it had any problems functioning. I could probably still be using that thing. Kinda have some warm fuzzies remembering that ancient thing still soldiering on.Stop buying shitty ink jet printers and get a laser printer. Pretty sure the Brother MFC my dad purchased a decade ago will outlive him.
I do think that most people would be happier with lasers, especially on the “clogged nozzle and requires regular use” front (though now there are also lasers that also do the “razor and blades” sales model, with a cheap printer and more-expensive toner).
However, there are legitimately some people who do need inkjets for one reason or another.
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Lasers, and especially inexpensive lasers where the manufacturer wants to shave down power supply costs, have a brief period of very high electrical draw when they are powered on. This is why you’ll typically see UPSes with warnings saying “don’t plug laser printers into this device”. This probably isn’t more than a minor irritation for most people, but I bet that it can overwhelm small inverters; there are probably people living full-time in RVs or something for whom this a problem.
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Even relatively-inexpensive inkjet printers today can produce what I’d call pretty impressive photograph prints if paired with fancy photo paper. Color lasers — and I’ve never bothered to even get a color laser — do not print photos that look remotely as nice as inkjets do. I don’t print photos — I have screens that can display photos perfectly well — and if I really wanted to do so, I’d go to one of the many stores around that do have the ability to do really fancy photo prints. But if someone were into that, they can’t really substitute a laser printer or most other types of printers for that. Maybe dye-sublimation printers, if those are still a thing. kagis Appears so.
Yeah some laser printers can for sure pop a circuit breaker in older houses
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Microwaves are allowed one proud “ding” or three “beep” before they are on my hate-list.
And any remaining time on the cooking timer should automatically clear after say 10 minutes. Too many people that love leaving a few seconds remaining when retrieving their food. Then the remaining time stays there forever until someone comes along and clears it.
i muted my microwave, almost every microwave i’ve used has been mutable
I have a similar short fuse for microwaves but for the +30 seconds button. If the microwave doesn’t have this it should get tossed in the nearest dumpster. The +30 seconds button is the pinnacle of human achievement.
My partner took our microwave (an obnoxious thing I bought at a charity shop for $15) apart and wrapped the dinger-thing in a thick rubber band to muffle it, then put it all back together. It sounds so much more polite now, and he didn’t have to cut any wires or otherwise fuss with the basic function.
I have to try that, thanks for the idea!
My microwave has an un-interuptable 6 shrill beeps, that then repeat if the door is not opened in 10 seconds. There is no mute option, and it can be heard everywhere in the house. I have seriously considered just ripping the speaker out of it. It is, without a doubt, the appliance I hate most in my house.
I moved from the US to Europe and I keep joking that the largest QoL upgrade has been my unbelievably dumb microwave. It has a power knob, a timer knob that is spring wound, and when it hits 0 it physically hits a bell like an older toaster.
I fucking love it. It was like 20€
Wait what do US microwaves do? Play the national anthem?
Newer ones have way too many digital buttons and a loud repeating beep when finished. Even newer ones, probably Bluetooth or something
https://homemicrowave.com/microwave-with-alexa/
Want to set up your microwave with Alexa for plenty of cool tricks, but didn’t know how to pick the best microwave that works with Alexa?
Having an Alexa compatible microwave in your kitchen, you can control the microwave and adjust the cooking setting simply via Alexa’s voice control feature.
Speaking for myself, I don’t really want Internet dependency, much less a microphone sending data to the Internet on my appliances.
Yeah, you still have to put the food into the microwave, might as well just press the button there too.
Perfect this is the type answer I was looking for!
Open the door to your microwave and see if it has instructions for written on its body. Mine has a secondary menu where you can turn it off.
Checked there and searched online for any demo modes/ testing codes that would allow me to mute it. Evidently, a lot of folks online absolutely hate my microwave as well, because no one can mute it. That said, the community of microwave haters has provided me with instructions to rip out the speaker if I choose to silence the wailing banshee for good.
One thing you can do if you’re not fully prepared to remove the speaker is to cover it with several layers of tape. It will muffle the sound and is somewhat reversible
Mine is not nearly as bad as yours, but it is loud and doesn’t stop beeping when you open the door, just continues until its preprogrammed three loud beeps are over. I muted it when my kids were babies and have never looked back. I think a lot of people worry about muting their microwave because they think they won’t hear when it’s done or something. I’m here to tell you that you won’t miss it. Go forth and rip that speaker out with no regrets.
What microwave and model is it?
Frigidaire FFMV164LSA MFG in 2012
Microwaves are the penultimate Norman Object (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things). They could have a standardized UI (cue up obligatory XKCD “Standards”). Instead, every manufacturer does it differently and usually in obscure, unintuitive fashion, often differently from the same manufacturer. Do you enter the time or power setting first? Oh wait, pressing a number launches it straight into running. That part that looks like a door handle is not how one actually opens the door; press the door button first. So. Much. Hate.
Yeah, I can see what you mean. Generally, they’re similar-enough, at least in basic functionality, that I don’t have an issue using someone else’s microwave though. The advanced functionality can vary a lot.
What does kind of annoy me is that they’re basically the one device — VCRs used to be the stereotypical holders of this position — that has a clock, but also is a device price-sensitive enough to both:
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Lack an internal battery to keep the clock powered when power is lost.
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Not have a network link, cell link — not that I really want those — or radio time signal receiver to automatically set the clock.
The result is that every microwave I see seems to wind up showing an unset clock.
I get irrationally upset over microwaves that don’t let you use the timer and cook functions simultaneously
looks puzzled
Hmm. What are you doing with that? Like, you want to be cooking for a certain amount of time, then after the cooking completes, have a timer trigger to start a second cooking period?
More like, I need to heat this frozen thing for 4 minutes. Also while that’s going on, I want to set a timer for my pasta which is cooking on the stove for 6 minutes to remind me to check it.
Exactly. I have a batch of cupcakes in the oven so the timer is set for 12 mins, but I also want to melt some chocolate for the ganache while that’s going.
Luckily, my microwave supports doing both, but I’ve cooked at other people’s houses and their microwaves are essentially bricked while the timer counts down which is so crazy to me it’s like they’ve made this appliance worse on purpose.
Oh, so this is like, a timer for an alarm rather than to control the microwave’s operation. Gotcha.
Didn’t they somehow send time info down the power line in some places? Or maybe I’m just misremembering this?
I can’t think of anything that quite fits that off-the-cuff, at least not in the US. A quick search doesn’t turn anything up. I can think of some related things:
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The AC signal is used as a clock in a number of devices. This isn’t a “clock” in the common-language sense of the word, but in the electrical engineering sense – it provides a reliable frequency over the long run. Some (common-language) clocks and timers have used this to keep them running at a steady pace, but it’s not really a time signal, wouldn’t help restore an on-device clock setting after power loss.
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X10 is a low-speed networking protocol that runs over local power circuits for home automation. I’m sure that at some point, someone has made some product that permits setting a clock with it. The limitation is that your signal doesn’t span across household circuits, which I suspect one would want for a “whole house time signal”.
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There have been powerline-based ISPs, where the power company shovels data over the line using high-frequency modulation. In theory, you could use one of various Internet time protocols over that. I think that that was kind of a dead end, technology-wise — there’s just not that much data that you can push over an unshielded, non-twisted-pair, metal power line.
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I would not be surprised if there’s some data protocol that power companies use to talk to smart meters that includes pushing a time signal out specifically for them – they do push and pull data over that – though I don’t think that that’s accessible to other devices.
That being said, could be some company out there that did that locally. Not technically impossible.
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You know, the worst part is, they intentionally make the interface shittier on the cheap ones. I’m very convinced of this.
My microwave thinks it’s a regular oven and keeps beeping if you don’t open the door. It doesn’t seem to understand it has stopped on its own and can shut the fuck up now.
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.
My parents used to have an old Amana Radarange. Built like a tank, wood paneling and chrome, warm incandescent lighting…I miss it. It didn’t have a beep or a bell or anything. Once it was done it would just…turn off.
My microwave’s beeper only work in 10s increments. Meaning if I enter a cook time of 91 seconds, I get 91s at high power, 9s at low power, and a beep. If I listen for the power change, I have a 9 second window to open the door. It’s perfect; no annoying beeping, and the timer reads 0:00 so it doesn’t need to be cleared before reuse.
