Forum game, Top 5 Friday, this week's category is worst tech purchase you ever made

[Panther21]

Old school forum list game. Post your top 5 for this week's category, worst tech purchase you personally ever made, and I'll post a new category next week for whoever wants to keep this tradition going

[Joel96]

5) a phone case that made the phone worse to hold 4) a smartwatch I wore twice 3) a gimmicky USB gadget from an infomercial 2) noise cancelling headphones that barely cancelled anything 1) an extended warranty on something that never once broke

[Craig71]

My number one has to be a wireless charger that somehow charged slower than just plugging the cable in directly

[Dark Elizabeth]

A drone that lasted exactly one flight before crashing into a tree and never being recovered, an expensive lesson

[ParallelSelf34]

Bought a gaming chair that fell apart within a year, still think about that money every single day

[Amber Tiger]

This game is such a fun format, half the fun is just remembering how confidently we all justified these purchases at the time

[Kane]

A smart fridge that constantly needed software updates just to keep the ice maker working properly, genuinely the worst

[FreeKickKing73]

That gaming chair one hurts because those are usually sold as an investment. The marketing makes it sound like you are buying comfort for years, then the padding disappears and the fake leather starts peeling.

Mine was a cheap office chair that looked great in photos but made my back feel like it was fighting a medieval torture device after an hour

Lesson learned: furniture with electronics branding is not automatically better.

[RomoneyWalters]

My worst purchase was probably a smart home gadget that I used twice. The idea sounded brilliant, but setting it up took longer than the time it saved.

By the third app update and password reset, it became an expensive paperweight.

Sometimes the simplest tech wins because it just works.

[SuperPosition52]

A gaming chair falling apart in a year is painful. Those things are not cheap either.

A friend bought one because the listing promised "premium materials" and the armrest snapped after a few months. The funniest part was the replacement part cost almost as much as the chair.

A lesson for everyone: never trust a product that spends more time talking about its racing design than its build quality

[Dialer75]

My entry is a fitness tracker that ended up tracking my frustration more than my fitness.

The battery became terrible, the strap broke, and half the features needed a subscription.

It was supposed to motivate me to exercise, but mostly it motivated me to read return policies.

[SpinState52]

Old forum games like this are dangerous because they remind you of all the money wasted over the years

Mine was a wireless keyboard that looked amazing but had terrible connection issues. Every few minutes it would stop responding, usually at the exact moment I was trying to type something important.

Went back to a basic wired keyboard and never looked back.

[Buffer]

A smart speaker has to be near the top of my list. Not because it was completely useless, but because I expected it to transform my home.

In reality I mostly used it for timers and checking the weather.

A very expensive way to avoid pressing a button.

[RonaldoNazario68]

Wireless earbuds are my regret. They were convenient for a while, but the battery degraded so quickly that they became useless.

With wired headphones, you plug them in and they work. Revolutionary technology apparently

Still prefer the convenience sometimes, but the lifespan is disappointing.

[Undertaker_EU]

My biggest mistake was buying a printer without researching the ink costs. The printer itself was cheap, but the cartridges felt like they were made from gold.

Eventually I realised the machine was basically the free razor and expensive blades business model.

A classic tech trap.

[Sinead]

Mine was an external hard drive that failed just after I transferred all my important files onto it.

Thankfully I had backups, but that experience changed how seriously I take storage quality.

Cheap storage is not really cheap when it contains things you cannot replace.

[Cheugy58]

Gaming accessories are a minefield. Some are useful, but there are so many products where you are paying for the branding rather than the quality.

Bought a gaming headset once that sounded worse than a pair of cheap earbuds. The glowing lights worked perfectly though, so clearly the important feature survived