A knockoff iPhone charger from China. I plugged it into my computer and it literally caught fire.
probably not the lowest quality, but an allarm clock from walmart that sheared/tore off the prongs from its plug leaving them in the outlet. (to have some charity I was putting significant strain on it)
Alarm clocks have been the bane of my existence. Almost every one of them is a cheap POS that barely handles you hitting the snooze button
I can barely count the number of alarm clocks that I ended up destroying by hitting the snooze button on two hands.
A replacement PCV valve for my car.
Car was around 100,000 miles, figured it was a good time to do a big refresh & replace a bunch of stuff. Spark plugs, belts & hoses, fuel & air filters, fluids, etc etc… While I was at the parts store, guy suggested I also replace the PCV valve. But, it turned out the only one he had in stock was the store brand. $4, sure whatever. Got it home, took the factory one off the car, and sure enough it was gummed up kinda bad. But went to put the new one on, and it just about collapsed in my hands. It was so flimsy, kinda like a drinking straw. Ended up cleaning the factory one & putting it back on, threw the new one away.
Plastic clothes pins that degraded in the sunlight, turned into plastic powder.
My mom always bought those, granted they last close to a year but damn the cheap bamboo ones cost practically the same and last forever
A can opener from a convenience store. It was barely sharp enough to puncture the metal of the can and exploded the moment I turned the crank.
I bought a cheap scientific calculator for math class. When I tried to multiply .5 by .5 it gave a long irrational number instead of .25. then I had to try to explain to the store clerk why that was wrong before they would accept the return
First gen Pentium seems like it would be overkill for a scientific calculator but I guess they had to offload those chips somehow.
The ti-84 plus is based on the zilog z80. From 1976. The calculator is still being made, and still costs $100.
This reminds me of a story with an old high school maths teacher.
Someone said a number divided by zero was zero and he proceeded to explain why it was not. One of the class jokers went “oh yeah, well my calculator says it’s zero!”. The teachers smiles and says “surely not” and approaches the joker to see what kind of shenanigan he was pulling. And sure as hell he divides five by zero and zero is the result. The teacher, not believing his own eyes, looks at the calculator, then the joker, then the calculator again. The window was open. Figure out the rest yourself.
Ah floating point math. Works fine for 90% of use cases, until it doesn’t.
Better calculators just use floating point math with a few tricks on top to pretend it isn’t floating point math.
Weirdly though it wasn’t remotely close to the right answer so I don’t think it was floating point malarkey. I always assumed some defect but I guess we’ll never know.now I wish I had kept it so I could have sent it to Matt Parker for his calculator reviews
Hmm really? It’s always worked for 90.0001741894164% of use cases for me
You got an audible chuckle from me on that one
Technically, I didn’t buy this, but I feel like it fits the spirit of the thread.
When I was a kid, a friend of mine gifted me an off-brand Super Nintendo controller to me for my birthday. I used it for all of about 5 minutes before it shocked the shit out of my hand and then never worked again.
Considering that a Super Nintendo will not put anything close to being able to shock you out of its ports, I think what actually happened is you shocked shit out of it and that killed it. Cus static electricity n stuff
Could be. I was sitting on the carpet. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since, though.
Could face been a capacitor.
You know those apple slicer things that look like a wagon wheel pattern blade with a circle in the middle so you can core it and slice it in one swoop? We found one for watermelons. No shit. In hindsight, I’m guessing it was supposed to be more of a funny novelty than something actually used, but… we used it…
It made it about half an inch into the melon, then shattered like it was some kind of ACME explosion. Bits of plastic went EVERYWHERE, my melon was now wearing a crown of blades, and I was just standing there with a handle still in each hand trying to process wtf just happened, like Wile-E-Coyote still holding the steering wheel of the car that just blew up around him looking straight at the camera like “well that just fucking happened…”
0/10
haha love this, i had something similar but less explosive with a metal temu garlic press… it completely bent out of shape on the first garlic cloves i used it on hahaha
Bargain store potato knives with plastic hilts have only 2cm of blade inside.
“full tang” is the wording to look for on knives. I have gotten cheap ones before that had a little foil strip on the plastic handle to make it look like it was all metal.
I bought a size of pizza from a food truck in DC and it was so bad I threw it away. Which is saying a lot for pizza
I once bought cheap headphones from amazon without reading reviews. They literally fell apart in my hands as I took them out the packet.
Dr Dre Beats?
No they were really, really cheap ones.
Coors
We got gifted a plastic rack for garden utensils. My mother in law bought it for us from the local supermarket (which has various cheap crap every week). Anyway, we placed a few items in it and it broke in a day. Utterly useless.
Years ago I bought an angle grinder from Aldi, for about 20,-. After 30 min it started to smell and the enclosure started to melt. I brought ist back still warm and smelling burnt in order to recieve my refund. Although I knew it couldn’t be of good quality I expected it to last a little bit longer. If you buy cheap you buy twice.
Strawberrys…
On day of purchase they were fine, i put them in a fridge and next day all rotten and moldy…
Do yourself a favor and soak them in some vinegar water after you get them home. About a 1:4 mixture of white vinegar to water. The acidity will kill the mold spores that cause the berries to go bad, and it won’t be strong enough to affect the taste after you rinse them.
I usually just dump about a cup of vinegar into a mixing bowl and top it off with water when I’m getting groceries in. First thing I do is drop the berries in to soak. Then I put away all of my groceries, which gives the berries a few minutes to soak. Finally, I dump the bowl and give the berries a quick rinse with the sink sprayer.
I haven’t had strawberries go moldy since I started doing it. If I forget about them in the fridge for a week or two, they’ll simply dry out instead.
Same here, I bought Strawberries for 50% off at H-Mart, they didn’t even last the night lol.
I bought mine at NETTO
Every vegie or fruit i bought there is always quickly rotten. I even saw rotten lemons and paprika in their isle
A cheap USB 32GB pendrive. It would barely reach 1MB/s transfer speeds and started corrupting files almost instantly.
