What brands do you avoid at all cost? I don’t keep up with the news all that much, and many of the reasons to avoid something don’t make it there anyway. So I’m asking here to make a big list of things to avoid. It could be anything from bad security practices to really frustrating packaging. Working as a cashier myself, I definitely know there are plenty of brands I avoid purely on the basis that their product is a pain to stock.
On the flip side, what’s the alternative? If you avoid Pepsi, for example, what do you turn to instead?
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Honestly… Google Play… someone re-gifted my son a $20 Google Play card a few years ago, and I tried to buy something for him and realised the card was about 2weeks out of date, and after about 10 back and forwards with support, they wouldn’t honour it… a trillion dollar company. I get it, but their cold indifference just seemed mean
I thought it was illegal basically everywhere to have gift cards go out of date? Scumbags.
They didn’t become a trillion dollar company by being nice. No mega Corp earns their billions by being an honorable company
Ugh god… Tech brands, off the top of my head:
- Asus (Scammers)
- Lenovo (Fuck lenovobios, bad hardware quality past 2010 or so)
- Sager (Scammed me by selling a laptop with too high power draw that resulted in crashes)
- Microsoft (Mega spyware corp, bad software, worst OS on the planet)
- Apple (Likely spyware corp, Bad locked down devices, anti right to repair, overpriced)
- Google (Biggest Baddest spyware company, monopoly on many platforms)
- Nvidia (Extremely hostile to open source, will likely never work on OpenBSD unless Nvidia seriously changes their stance; even then there’s so much bad faith at this point I wouldn’t trust them)
- Meta/Facebook (Mega spyware corp, zuck is a lizard)
- Tesla (Loudest most-punchable most-hatable fascist at the helm, employees caught spying on users through interior cams)
- All major phone manufacturers (Android sucks, iOS sucks harder)
- Pine64 (Charging circuit is software controlled for some insane reason, supports Manjaro)
- All major smart TVs (spyware, always-on microphones, locked down OS with ad-ridden clients)
Okay companies:
- Valve (Still hosts a shitty DRM platform, but it’s the best one; only listing because the Steam Deck is awesome)
- Framework (Pro user repair, good hardware, no complaints; look forward to RISC-V board)
Tesla (Loudest most-punchable most-hatable fascist at the helm, employees caught spying on users through interior cams)
Cars less reliable than ICE, despite having a fraction of the parts. Absolutely proprietary and probably going to start enshittifying over the air at some point. Still some degree of expense-adding hype.
Pine64 is not one I expected to see dissed on Lemmy. I can’t say I’m impressed with the one I bought, though, and it has some kind of electrical issue that would be a pain to fix. It’s too bad, I love the concept of OS phone hardware.
Pine64 is definitely tenuously on the list, I simply can’t recommend a device thats status as a bomb depends on what kernel you put on it (and theo forbid an attacker manages to get access to the circuit).
A colleague of mine bought a framework and is always complaining about it. Says he wish he’d got a thinkpad again.
must miss the clit
We call it the nipple, but I know what you mean.
Let me give you a complaint for Framework: apparently they were having a hard time releasing bios updates in a timely manner (as in, they were over a year late iirc) which pissed a lot of people off.a
Framework sounds great in theory, but it’s hard to justify nearly double the cost compared to a Lenovo T-series.
So, uh, how do you live in modern society?
Framework laptop with OpenBSD for prod, Steam Deck for gaming, Pinephone with pmOS for phone stuff (even though I put Pine64 on the bad list, if I could buy again I would have tried the Fairphone or other pmOS compatible device instead); self host everything possible (mail, git (got), gitweb (gotweb), http, ipsec vpn) on a cheap VPS running OpenBSD. It’s comfy.
Why openBSD though?
Good documentation, good in-house servers, correctness, secure defaults.
Fair enough, what’s software/hardware support like in general?
https://www.openbsd.org/plat.html
All the x86 hardware I’ve tried at least boots. Suspend/other acpi stuff can be a problem, as well as wireless card support. Intel devices are the best supported at the moment by iw*(4) drivers.
Cemusa, they buy all the fucking cement in my country which is corrupt and has no ability to tarrif it or anything then sell it back to us at extremely high prices so my country, which is the Saudi Arabia of cement, is filled with half built buildings because no one can afford fucking cement. Fuck American corporations
For sure: fuck them, but this sounds more like a government corruption issue, laws should be in place to prevent businesses doing scummy monopolistic shit like this.
We are right next to the United States and they operate their military on the border and own all the politicians and businesses in Mexico. This is like telling an abusive wife it is her fault for not standing up for herself.
Isn’t it owned by Cemex which is a Mexican company?
All of the Cemex board members are American institutional investors. Cemex operates as a mafia here for the profit of American oligarchs. Cemusa was the old name of a parent company which was folded into Cemex, I’m old.
Most fashion clothing brands.
The additional expenditure rarely maps to better quality.
And if they make watches too, don’t buy those. They are always the cheapest watches with a name stamped on.
Same here regarding fashion brands, except for Duluth Trading for clothing and Ariat and Hoka for shoes. When working out in the elements and walking on concrete all day, I find the extra expense for those brands are worth it for me.
Yeah, pretty much anything luxury. I make a point to buy knockoffs if I need the same class of product, because I know I’m paying a premium for intangible marketing bullshit otherwise.
Less than half of them are legit. You want to buy $15 pants 10 times or buy $70 pants once. Budget says $70 is a luxury. So we keep at it. It’s expensive to be poor.
No, I meant “luxury brands”. Buying something slightly better quality but not flashy doesn’t count. Nobody is impressed I’m wearing GAP instead of Walmart.
TikTok and Kaspersky.
Why Kaspersky?
Oh you really haven’t heard??
Security software from a Russian company. It was recently banned in the US due to its national security concerns.
Tesla
Nestle.
Adidas. McDonald’s. Starbucks.
Not really answering the question but I’ve completely stopped buying anything that requires USB micro B. I can’t fucking stand that connector. USB C costs a negligible amount more and I’ve yet to have a single port or cable fail irreparably after using it for the best part of a decade.
An actual answer to the question? I’m done with Microsoft and Nvidia. I’d love to add Google to the list but I’m still largely entrenched in their ecosystem.
Friggin’ Spirit Airlines!
Why? Because of quality, service or?
Well, I guess spirit is technically the cheapest. So that might be worth it to people all on its own. But I find the seating to be very cramped, I don’t like the feeling of being “nickel and dimed” with their “charge for everything” scheme, and when I rode spirit they would have extremely generous take off and landing estimates so that even with many delays, they are still “on time”.
None of this is really malicious, I think they are clear about the fact that they offer cheap tickets for a cheap experience. But man, as a customer, it feels bad. I will just pay the extra money and go with something else.
Nestle
Chic fil a, Tesla, Apple
But it tastes so good!!!1!! /s
There’s a bunch I know when I see them, but not many I can think of right on the spot. Apple, Liquid Death, and Celestial Seasonings are a few I can think of though. Apple for a million reasons; LD because I just find their whole campaign insanely obnoxious and everywhere I look and I hate that people are paying ridiculous prices for plane ass water in a can; Celestial Seasonings because it’s straight up an actual cult.
Sony
