Slighly laggy remote control for my phone, with widgets a little too small for my finger to reliably hit.
When I do proper long walks, the battery reliably dies on me during the walk.
It now feels almost unusual for it to get the heart rate correct. And I'm not talking about off by a few or feeling off. I'm talking about full on max heart rate when I'm doing a easy run or 1/2 and 1/3 off which is impossible to miss.
It’s a hit or miss product category. My wife and I like ours and most of my friends like theirs, but I have a couple friends who got a smartwatch and then never liked it. Would be a shame to buy an expensive one for someone who doesn’t even like it.
I broke out and ended up getting a DAC/AMP, some good cans and a mounted microphone and I’ve never looked back. I miss the wireless part a little, but taking the headphones off to get up is a cheap price compared to $200+ garbage.
Disc games are cheaper on sales + has actual resale value.
I don't think you would get the same mileage with an Ikea office chair.
I have one I got from a coworker for $100 when he was moving. 13 years later it’s as good as it’s always been, and I don’t even know how old it was when I got it.
Comfiest office chair I’ve ever sat in.
Microphone/audio input sucks over BT. So many glazing reviews. I don't get it.
Vacuuming is actually the easiest bit of cleaning a house IMO - getting the floor clear (if you have kids, or out of control hobbies, or are just lazy or a bit of a horder) is hard.
People aren't stupid, they kind of know this. But just like buying expensive gym equipment they think that a new toy will incentivise them do the hard bits.
"If I buy a new gizmo I'll finally start cooking healthy delicious food" is a great pitch.
I made sure to buy zigbee ones so that I'm just tied to home assistant which even if it goes out of business will still work with whatever binaries I've downloaded already (as well as it works locally so I can control them during internet outages). I'm sure somebody else can explain why you should get Thread or Matter nowendays but I never bothered to learn the differences.
But yeah, the average life of a company is what 1 year? Don't get any product you want for more than 5 years from a company younger than 5 years if you need that company to exist for it to work.
The only complaints that I have are:
1) I have mine set to notify me when it's done cleaning. Sometimes it will do it immediately after it's done, while other times the notification might come two or three hours after the fact. Still other times, not at all.
2) I have to clean the vacuum more frequently than I would like. That means: cutting out hairs from the "side brush" on the front of it, cutting hairs out of the "main brush" that sucks up most of the debris, and wiping the sensors clean. In fairness, I'd probably have to do the same sorts of thing with the rollers on a normal vacuum cleaner after a while too, though.
3) There's been a handful of times over a 2-ish year period where it'll go to the other room to start cleaning, and while a normal trip might take 15-20 minutes, it'll claim to be done in about 5 minutes. I suspect that blankets may have fallen on the ground or something, so it became too "blocked" to be able to clean properly, but it could be some kind of software error.
Exactly. We changed from some fancy one that my boss gave me to a cheap one that you operate with an old-school (can't believe I'm saying that) infrared remote. It doesn't "think". It just works like our other reliable dumb machines - diswasher and washing machine. We don't own a regular vacuum cleaner as I just do a regular sweep with a broom when we want a thorough job done.
All other home tech gadgets friends and family have acquired live in limbo land stored in the back of the draw or on top of the cupboard, never opened or tried once but got stuck downloading some stupid app. But we can't just throw it away yet, as there's guilt around acquiring that smart tech thing in the first place even though we know there's already so much e-waste.
They dropped access to the API for new developers.
Their air quality sensor is horribly inaccurate.
Their UI is actually very confusing.
The app is merely a way to shove ads in your face.
I wish I just got a new Honeywell.
It was a cheap piece of shit though and all the plastic pieces rapidly came apart. The rubber coating on the handle disintegrated too.
In contrast my iPod survived 10+ years in a glove box and was still immaculate.
The recent iterations are just frustrating. The apps are laggy. It’s always prompting me to join an energy savings program no matter how many times I say no. We had to disable the home/away detection because it went from working well to thinking we were away 5 times per day.
Nest stands as my example of a product that went from great to terrible through complete mismanagement and customer neglect.
But then we filled it with stuff and got a doggo. Those hairs fast-track the process of jamming the wheels and sweeper. Why do we need a robot vacuum when we still have to vacuum by hand?
If I could click print from my phone I’d be running it constantly.
I seriously thought it would be another fad hobby that I drop immediately. But now I’ve gone as far as learning 3D modeling which I never really expected to do. I actually have more projects going on than I have printing capacity for sometimes.
I wish I had perfect advice for getting the most out of it.
Maybe this one will help: remember that even cheap plastic products are often more expensive than printing your own. That $10-20 doodad from the store is still more expensive than a LOT of filament. I’ll list out some stuff I’ve printed:
- Planter pots
- Knock box (for espresso)
- portfilter stand for tamping (espresso)
- espresso machine mod kit enclosure
- A loom for a friend who weaves
- “neon” LED signs with custom words (designed by me based on YouTube tutorial)
- Same concept but used to make might up address numbers for the house
- A triangle-shaped piece to guide the extending kitchen sink sprayer hose so it stops getting caught on stuff under the cabinets
- A replacement clip for a Packit reusable container
- Designing your own wall or under-desk mount for any custom size object is trivial
- Tea bag organizer
- Bag clips
- Toothpick dispenser
- Toothpaste squeezer dispenser thing to keep the tube neat
- storage organizers, including a whole pegboard system hanging up all my tools and junk
- Contact lens storage boxes
- Replacement latches for plastic bins
I haven’t printed them yet but I’m very interested in some of the cool mini-racks, mini NAS systems, and small form factor PC cases you can print from scratch rather than buying them. For example there’s a design on makerworld where you grab a cheap mini PC, an nvme to SATA adapter, and an AliExpress SATA 3.5” backplane, and boom, you’ve built a consumer NAS alternative for a fraction of the price.
It has that early 2000s PHP website programming vibe to it, and way too many things don't work but you only notice at the end. And then you need to redo the setup with mqtt, some plugins and arcane "programming" across multiple yaml files that is way more effort than just writing some code would be.
On the other hand, people who aren't software engineers might not have these issues and are enabled to do things they otherwise never could, so it's a wash.
Every Samsung phone I've ever owned - great hardware, but the software is a mess, especially with all of the Samsung apps that duplicate the Google apps.
Sony smart TV - was excited about running Android TV apps, but the onboard hardware is so bad that everything lags, and I actually ran out of space after installing 10-20 apps (it only has 4GB of flash storage). Also, its Ethernet adapter has a hardware bug that occasionally freezes up my entire network by spamming it with flow control frames.
Every item meant to "solve a problem" rather than "do something" never solved my problems and rarely worked well. Be it fitness or personal productivity or learning etc.
I've had to learn the hard way that reviews are mostly marketing, and very few (if any) reviewers will actually say something isn't great. And grassroots reviews are too often shills or some hivemind and not worth much either (even on HN).
Tech specs aren't worth much either, it's how it's actually in use that counts.
Examples from tech:
Sony WF 1000 (1st gen): good on paper (before Airpods with NC) but then lost charge every day in the charging case, making them useless.
remarkable 1: went back to real paper.
Fitbit, Garmin watches: Playing Spotify offline during a run never worked reliably with any of these and every one dies in 1h. The Apple watch can sort of do it but only on cellular, offline doesn't work either. And of course dies after 30mins.
Mighty player: likewise, also never worked reliably
Early Samsung note tablet for note taking at uni - even though technically superior to an iPad, the software support was lacking.
That said, some things mentioned in this thread have been genuinely great and useful for me, so not everything is universal.
Now, to their credit: The keyboard itself is of a reasonable build quality, aside from the fact that it will just occasionally completely die on me until I unplug it for a few minutes and try again.
On the other hand, their customer service was not only unhelpful but actively antagonistic and rude towards me. I gave basic feedback once or twice, and asked for an updated technical manual on the keyboard I purchased and I was treated like I shit on their cat.
---
"Hello, I can only find (this) and (that) manual regarding the 360 SmartSet. One document appears to be an outdated version of the other, and the more up-to-date version is no longer accurate. Do you have an up-to-date manual I can work off of? I was able to parse out some other functions like XYZ by looking at manuals for (devices that are no longer for sale) but I think I'm still missing some crucial information."
"It's on the site, but since you can't find it yourself, here you go." (It's the more outdated manual that I already referenced by name and included already.)
---
"Hello, I noticed it occasionally has issues when I use it with my KVM. Is this a known problem, or should I perform an RMA?"
"Well, that's why we say don't use a KVM!" (Take a wild guess at what information was not listed on any page of their website in regards to the 360 SmartSet.)
---
"Hi, some of the marketing material on your site on (this page) is inaccurate. It would be good to update it to reflect how this thing work now. I've provided a few points to consider updating. (Two or so changes)"
"Too many people have complained about this! This issue is closed now!!" (The entire page is subsequently deleted, making it even less clear how things are intended to work, what future customers will be paying for, giving even less information about their products.)
---
To be clear, I know that some times people will overstate things and make it sound much worse than it actually are, but I really am just trying to tell things as they were. If anything, I've probably understated how rude some of their responses have been. I have never had a positive experience interacting with any person at that company.
Moral of the story is: Never buy from Kinesis, even if it causes you physical pain.
Really not getting much value out of it, despite being all-in on Apple otherwise (iPhone, Mac, AppleTV, Homepods).
I really feel like it absolutely should be more integrated into the other devices. Set a timer on the phone? Can’t see on watch. Stuff like this bugs me like hell. And I think there’s too much of it.
bix6•1h ago
Not necessarily regret but the Apple Watches have such crap battery.
xthe•1h ago