Ask HN: What tech purchase did you regret even though reviews were great?

I have several smart power strips that stopped responding; I have had better luck with individual smart outlets.

Digital audio players with Wi-Fi radios that support AirPlay. I've purchased three, two from Hiby and one from FiiO. The idea was to stream AirPlay to the DAP from one of my PCs, getting quality audio over wired headphones, while I walked around the house. The Hiby models would drop the stream occasionally and both had batteries that died in a year or less. The FiiO would accept streams from Apple devices, but not third-party AirPlay streams. I ended up listening to my phone.

I found bone conduction headphones don't come anywhere close to audiophile quality.

Wi-Fi in general, living in a row home in a neighborhood crowded with 2.4 GHz transceivers.

I bought and stored away a large drawer full of microphones, headphones, mice, and keyboards before I settled on the models I like.

I've never used a Windows trackpad that was worth spit. I can't use a Mac without a trackpad next to my keyboard and mouse. The difference on Windows is maddening.

I was getting frustrated with the battery in my old Apple watch as it got older, but now that I have two watches and can switch between them, I wear one or the other 24 hours a day.

Never be an early adopter of hardware.

In fairness, it was not as bad as a desktop computer running Windows Me.

Microsoft was evil then, and Google has been evil since then.

For instance I never liked the default band, but the Milanese loop is great. My wife never wore her series 5 but I got her a series 11 which is a few grams lighter and thinner and she wears it all the time now.

I was on the fence about getting an ultra but for some reason never liked the size and shape (big rectangle with a huge crown bulge) since I have small wrists. I ended up getting a garmin epix pro at a big discount which is slightly smaller and round.

At the end of the day they are great if you want to collect data on yourself. Even though my wife didn’t like her series 5 the hypertension features were worth trying a newer one.