10 Worst Tech Products

[HTRegz]

It was intended to get Nintendo into the US market following the video game collapse of the early '80's. It worked because stores would stock a "robot toy" rather than a video game. As far as I am aware the actual device functioned as it was designed to, just like the Tamagotchi?

Not quite like tamagotchi... R.O.B. didn't exactly "work as designed"... Trust me I want a R.O.B. I've been scouring "retro toy stores" and video game shops for years now... I've found two in all that time... and neither store was willing to sell, they had them for "display purposes only". However R.O.B. doesn't work... The concept was cool but poorly designed. The response time was slow, so you essentially had to play the game and know how the game worked, so you could give R.O.B. commands before it needed to perform them.

Sorry, I don't understand what the technological issues are? Do the things actually work, or is it one of those "too late to market" things?

This is probably just a "too late to market" thing... The mini-disc worked... It's flaw was that compared to other media that existed it was a poorly concieved idea (at least in my mind).. It's sort of like Mini-DVD in my mind... When selecting my (cheap) video camera... I had a choice between Mini-DV tapes and Mini-DVD (whatever they care called.. but the sony cameras use them)... I chose Mini-DV... It's a reliable format and DV has stood the test of time...

That surprises me, as I have generally found Logitech stuff to be pretty functional and reliable. At the risk of sounding cynical, it would not be the first time that I have heard of companies giving or selling rubbish product that they can't retail to their staff

I can't help wondering if any of them perform 100%?

It could be that... However as far as I understood he brings them home new, in package... I've also experienced sales people in the store cursing out the display model. As for Logitech... I was a fan of them for quite some time... well over half of my peripherals are logitech (steering wheel, joy stick, game pad, web cam, speakers, etc)... However they are definitely going down hill... I think the problem is the same as it's always been... I just didn't know it before. Previously I purchased "low-end" electronics because I was a student and I needed something that was cheap and worked... logitech owns that market... However now that I have some money to spend I've got a step above logitech on most things, and the quality has improved 10x over.

[webwurm99]

Personally I thought the minidisk was a great concept and everyone I describe it to says so too, its just too bad it wasnt used.

How about windows ME, that one really sucked.

Mabey I should start a thread on "the best tech products that never went anywhere"

[nihil]

Interesting................. the R.O.B. was only around for a couple of seasons over here, and at that particular time I had no family or friends with kids in the right age group for one, so I never got any feedback.

It looks as if my suspicions of corporate BS to the stockholders might have some truth in it?

The mini-disk is another interesting one. Technologically it seems sound, but it doesn't appear to be particularly well suited to the general public market? Sure it replaces the traditional "walkman" in the area of portability, but severely loses out due to the incompatibility of the format with anything else.

Basically the players don't come as standard in home entertainment units or in automobiles. Another factor is that there is no pre-recorded material to speak of, so it requires additional effort on the part of the user compared to a regular CD/DVD. I also seem to recall that when it first came out it had some sort of DRM.............. an excellent idea given the lack of pre-recorded material

I think that it came out too late because the regular CD/DVD had already become accepted as the standard. I wonder what Sony were thinking about? I guess the future has to lie with solid state (flash) memory, as this addresses the size issue, and vibration/shock.

How about windows ME, that one really sucked.

Actually it didn't. The problems with that OS were mostly due to consumer ignorance and OEM greed. Basically it needed more resources than M$ originally suggested and a lot of OEMs supplied it with.

A lot of the initial criticism of XP was due to the same thing. Fundamentally, both OSes are resource hungry.............. mostly in the RAM department. My experiences with ME have been as follows:

PII/266 128Mb 72pin EDO RAM....................... unstable
PII/333 384Mb SDR RAM............................... stable
PII/450 384Mb SDR RAM............................... stable
AMD Duron/1.3GHz 512Mb SDR RAM................ stable
P4/1.7GHz 768Mb RAMBUS PC800 RDRAM......... unstable (sometimes)

I would guess that the comfort zone is 256~512Mb of RAM. The CPU didn't seem to have much if any influence on stability.

At the time I fixed a lot of machines by sticking in more RAM and a video card (shared memory wasn't............it was stolen.)

I have never built an XP box with less than 1Gb, and from ones that I have fixed, I wouldn't go for less than 512Mb, although it will handle "light computing" with less.

[thehorse13]

And the worst product ever...the Timex Sinclair 1000 circa 1980. Trust me on this. I had one.

lol

[nihil]

OMG!

And the worst product ever...the Timex Sinclair 1000 circa 1980. Trust me on this. I had one.

A Sinclair ZX81 you poor thing! Mind you it was relatively inexpensive in its day, and got a lot of people started. I went for a BBC Micro, but that was in a totally different price bracket........... I must dig it out some day

[ArPaNET]

LOL... great find nihil! I was in my java programming class, bored, waiting for someone to debug this simple little program. I almost had to leave the class I was laughing so hard!

I just went through the pictures and knew what and why they were considered "bad technology"; but when I got to the last one, and saw the picture of vista... I just lost it.

[thumbnail]

that was a great list! i agree that the worst product is the Sinclair ZX81! can't believe i even had one too.

[romanticcowboy]

I'll probably be the only one who disagrees with a decent amount of this list.

The Barcode Battler just came up for discussion the other day around the office and a couple of us were talking about what a cool concept it was. I had one for years... I loved it... I think the problem with the comments (and the video review) is that they are wrong... The Barcode Battler wasn't meant to compete with Gameboy and Game Gear. If I remember correctly my Gameboy was well over $100 and my Barcode Battler was like $30.

It was cool for the same reason that people like RISK or D&D. It was a turn based dice game in electronic form. Something that interested a lot of people... especially people with a geek background... (since generally those are the people that turn based dice games appeal to). There was no need for fancy graphics, or anything else... you just had fun with it.

The example in the video was pretty pathetic and my bet is that he removed the instructions simple to attempt to make a humorous video. As for most barcodes not working... I saved them off everything... I would say that 95% of my collected barcodes worked in one way, shape or form... The first barcode that he had an issue with may not have been a hero barcode, it could have been a bad guy or even a special item.


Other issues:

Vista is not a terrible tech product... and it is only the uninformed and generally those lacking knowledge that feel it is. It took 6 years because there was a lot of rewriting and in that time a new initiative was introduced so a lot of code had to be revisited. As for UAC... as someone with a Vista PC, a Mac Mini and a Ubuntu Laptop... I don't get how people whine about UAC in Vista... I'm guessing most people that complain have never used Ubuntu or OS X. Does it have it's problems... sure... every new product does... It's still a massive improvement over most of what Microsoft has released in the past. Is there a campaign around saving XP.. yep... but I remember people fighting to keep Windows 98... and Windows 2000 and I remember massive hysteria about how bad XP was when it was released... The net is much more common now, everyone is using it and online media is huge... that's the only reason the Save XP compaign exists. The goal of the campaign is to have XP sales continued past (june|july)(whichever it is)... I doubt anyone on that petition plans on buying a copy of Windows XP at this point.

The sony rootkit... as marketing disaster?? Yep... a technological mistake... yep... One of the top 10 terrible "tech products" of all time??? Not even close...

This is a prime example of the media picking things that people will immediately latch onto and feel familiarity with (which previous posts in this thread have demonstrated)... They aren't items that belong on the list.. Other examples are the Atari Jaguar (it was poorly marketed... but not necessarily a bad tech product) and tamagotchi... as they mentioned it made mad money and was extremely popular... adding it to the list on the basis of being annoying... purely adding a product that they figure readers will be familiar with.

Even an MP3 player doesn't belong up there, regardless of quality... it's an appeal to the mass market... and it's a shame every time it occurs in "journalism"


If they wanted true tech flops... There were plenty to chose from:
-- TV Tuner for the Game Gear (most people don't even realize they existed)
-- "Ghetto Blasters"/Boomboxes with built in 3" BW TVs
-- R.O.B. for NES
-- The Mini Disc Walkman
-- Teddy Ruxpin (there was good and bad here... but the 2nd version Teddy was awful)
-- Logitech Harmony Remote (Any remote that costs over $100 is bad enough, but when you can get over $400 theres' a real problem)

i have to disagree about r.o.b i had one that came with my n.e.s and had allot of fun with it and it worked well into the 90s
teddy ruxpin was bad but had alot of fun playing my misfits and samhain tapes till the mouth broke