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Buyer's remorse: Phones, tablets and more tech purchases we regret

Regrets, we've had a few. Exploding phones. Just plain useless phones. Unstable devices and not-very-smart devices. Hardware that was obsolete before we got it setup. Stuff we wish we'd never heard of.
By ZDNET Editors, Contributor
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Drobo S

My biggest (read: most expensive) tech purchase regret is the Drobo S, for which I paid a small fortune ($800 or so) in 2011.

The idea of a single box filled with hard drives seemed excellent at the time, especially as Windows Home Server was shuffling off its mortal coil. But the actual implementation of the hardware was less than ideal.

For starters, it took forever to boot, and after it did, it was unacceptably noisy. And it arrived right at the dawn of the cloud era, when online storage turned out to be a much better deal than a bunch of drives stuffed into a big black box in the corner of the office.

-- Ed Bott

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MoviePass

I was an early subscriber to MoviePass, or at least early after the $9.99 unlimited plan debuted a year ago. Ironically, all the troubles it's facing now weren't present then. But I still regret subscribing, because I simply couldn't make enough use of it.

During the months of September, October and November, I couldn't find a single movie I really wanted to see in a theater. Plus, I never go on my own, so paying full price for my wife's ticket kind of killed the thrill. After four months, I cancelled the subscription -- just in the nick of time, because by now I'd *really* be regretting it.

-- Rick Broida

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Early Chromebook laptops

I liked them from an ease-of-management point of view, but I bought them for my family members, each of whom refused to use them or even try them out. They didn't like that they were limited to just Chrome, and they found the pure Chromebook interface confusing. I bought four of these devices and none of them ever got used more than a few times -- and then only under duress.

-- David Gewirtz

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iKettle Wi-Fi electric kettle

All I wanted was a cup of tea ready for me in the morning.

At first the iKettle was great, but after a few months, the lid began to take flight and refused to stay shut, and the Wi-Fi kept dropping, even when I placed my router close to the kitchen. The power would randomly cut out, and I eventually found it so unreliable and infuriating I threw it in the bin in a fit of rage. Some things just need to be reliable, not smart.

-- Charlie Osborne

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Adapter cords for music

Over the years, I've bought many adapter cords. (Examples: CD to cassette for my car, switching our external satellite radio to a new car, Apple's annoying new headphone jack.)

I either never use the adapters or only use them for a short time and then stick them in my overflowing "miscellaneous electronics" drawer. If you need an adapter, the technology you're trying to "adapt" is already becoming obsolete.

-- Kelly Simon McSweeney

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Amazon Fire HD 8 (2017)

The Amazon Fire HD 8 (2017)'s battery was awful in that it lasted only a half a day and then took practically a full day to charge back up to 100 percent. The apps were more limited than the experience you could get on an Apple iPad, too. You were stuck with the Silk browser, for instance, and there were no native apps for many popular services.

It was so frustrating that I dumped it after a week of use.

-- Élyse Betters-Picaro

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Apple MacBook Pro with Touch Bar

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