What is a product you would never recommend?

HP printers.

Really HP anything on principle, but their printers take the cake for anti-user bullshit.

Huawei, Xiaomi and Samsung phones

• main reason: anti user freedom, and locking you in to their system, it's extremely hard to wipe out your phone in order to sell it if you have a Samsung account linked to your phone, and they make it hard to flash a custom ROM, imagine buying a phone with your own money and you still need the manufacturer consent to do what you want with it..
• confusing and slow UI
• Ads everywhere on the UI
• bloated with games and useless apps
• they don't take security seriously at all ( slow updates )
• short update period
• they lie in their marketing by giving big numbers ( battery capacity and camera quality for example )

And last but not least, they kill your apps

Any Apple product, mostly the iPhones. If you live in Latin America, those things are more a burden than something useful. They are too expensive, too fragile, and too Eye-catching for burglars.

They eats up your phone plan in hours just by existing, you can't borrow a charger because everyone around you has Android. The simplest things to do on Android are an ordeal on Iphone.

The only way it can be worth it is if you have all Apple products (iMac, AppleTV, iPad, etc). But for that, you better be prepared to pawn your soul.

Any Google smartwatch. I bought 2 at one point. A sport and a dress watch. Both only lasted about a year before the software rendered them useless. I’m now back on analogue watches.

Cloud and "serverless" solutions

Adobe Creative Cloud. It's really expensive, and once you stop paying, you lose everything.

No wonder why it's some of the most pirated software in the world.

A phone plan with a phone. You pay more over time and you get stuck with a contract.

Buy a phone and get a plan from a MVNO. Your monthly plan will be better and cheaper. Also since you own the phone when a better plan appears you can just switch.

I have never had a good time with Asus anything and their customer service is abysmal.

Anything from Anker after they cancelled an order with PayPal approved payment because 'they couldn't verify payment'. Then they insist that the cancelled order could be reviewed if I put personally identifiable information into a random Google sheets doc.

All complaint handling appeared to be a bot. They refused to explain what was the concern with the payment and always responded with very similar 'apology' emails even when I indicated for every email they send i'd inform another person to avoid them.

Anything made by Razer, any Google hardware

Kids

Frank's cancer pills. They gave you cancer.

I don't get how he's made them for so long.

Tile countertops. Our house came with them and they are terrible. Who the fuck thought of these?

Paper drinking straws

Any Skullcandy headphones. Shit quality. They just break

Any AmazFit smartwatches. They look okay and have good battery life (for smartwatches). They're shit in every other way.

Roku anything

I have a tv from them and one day the PBS kids app just stopped working. I contacted customer support and they just told me it was the app developer’s fault, nothing to be done. Waited months thinking it would eventually resolve but never did.

And recently where they:

1. Blocked people from using their tvs until they accepted a new agreement and
2. Filed for a patent that defines how they can start overlaying ads on top of other connected devices over hdmi

Glad I shut off wifi to my tv years ago and plugged in a separate smart tv hdmi dongle. And not getting anywhere near anything that says Roku on the packaging again.

Any guitar under $700 with any feature you'd expect to be standard in medium to high end guitars. If a brand new guitar has a floyd rose but is $300, it won't hold tuning, and the screws will strip easily.

Not saying expensive guitars are good by default, but there's very little room for innovation in the guitar world, and corner cutting will happen in cheaper guitars.

Boox Palma. Got one for myself as a treat and upgrade to my aging Kobo and the screen broke within 24 hours. I have never broken a screen. Support immediately told me it was “pressure” and that it wasn’t covered. I was very careful with it so no…I really don’t believe them. If the screen is THAT fragile…no interest. Planning on selling the ewaste at a yard sale. No way am I giving them money to fix an already flawed product.

"Old Spice" flavored candy

Any computer mouse, frankly.

The sad thing is when I bought my first gaming mouse in the mid 2000s it was a Razer and that thing ran great for almost 10 years. I only replaced it because after handling it for that many years it was worn and kinda gross.

I replaced it with a Razer that went sure enough went faulty after a year. I then tried other brands (name and no-name). I've never had a mouse last me 18 months before it started to go faulty. It really feels like they all colluded a planned obsolescence. Even my current mouse, a Zowie FK3-C, has begun to drop the mouse input when i click and hold the left button. I bought this in June 2023!!

I still like the Zowie a lot, it has great features like a button to toggle the refresh rate without the need for installing dumb software to set it. But it's been 10 years of this shit, for me, so I will never recommend a computer mouse to anyone. Just use the one that you get from your office job, I guess.

Any "Gaming" headphones they are all such trash. Buy a nice pair of headphones with a quality metal headband and get an audio cable with a built in mic.

Don't ever buy Sony wireless buds. They stop working right around the one year mark. Customer service is horrible.

Anything from any company large enough that the obvious business decision is the screw over the end user to generate additional profit. That excludes basically everything, so instead it's easier to give recommendations for what I would buy/use instead:

• Open hardware products
  • Framework laptop with RISC-V hardware
    • not released yet
  • Purism
    • Maybe not fully open, but at least they have schematics
  • Pine64
    • Caveat emptor, software controlled charging circuits, be wary of bomb
  • RaptorCS
  • Wikipedia has an okay list
• Open source software
  • Operating systems
    • *BSD
    • Some Linux distributions
    • Plan9, Haiku, Illumos, etc
  • Web browsers
    • qtwebkit based
      • qutebrowser
    • gtkwebkit based
      • luakit
    • Textmode/Terminal browsers
      • w3m
      • lynx
      • links
    • Other graphical browsers
      • netsurf
      • links graphical mode
      • ladybird
        • Apparently the developer is an asshole
  • Other userspace software
    • Video
      • ffmpeg
    • Graphics
      • Krita
      • Blender
      • GraphicsMagick/ImageMagick
      • ffmpeg
    • Audio
      • LMMS
      • ffmpeg
    • PDF
      • xpdf
      • mupdf
    • IRC
      • Hexchat
        • Feature Complete ( dead :'( )
      • EPIC5
    • This list could go on forever, consult your repository instead of me

Everything sucks, avoid car brands that sell your driving data (AKA buy an old car or figure out how to permanently disconnect your car from the internet), and avoid smart home and llm garbage.

Products will few or no reviews

Same. I use an MX Master all day every day and they last for years. No Linux support though. I might try a Corsair mouse next time

Any purism product, overpriced, outdated and their hardware basically breaks when connecting it to external devices.