> "I asked both companies for more details, and got a polite no comment in record time". Found this line really funny, I guess I'm sailing a lonely ship on this.
Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M
111–120 of 135 posts
Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M
#112i honestly would think that Belkin would be worth something in the billions. they are the qtip of computer cables.
Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M
#113The only good Belkin product I have ever seen is their 12 outlet power strip. As a network engineer everything they make with an Ethernet/wifi interface is complete shit. But this is not really news, D-Link, Netgear, many of their competitors are also junk.
Well, the only Thunderbolt 2 to HDMI adapter I've used that actually worked well (and I tried 2 others .. they're expensive too, I must have spent ~$150 in the process) was the Belkin ones. The others didn't, for whatever reason, work when both Thunderbolt 2 ports were in use and the internal display was also turned on (on my '14 MBP). Other dongles for example randomly lost one of the color channels, had noisy outpu…
Surely you're talking about MiniDP->HDMI adapters? Thunderbolt2 is also MiniDP, I'm not sure why a TB2>HDMI adapter would even exist.
Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M
#114The only good Belkin product I have ever seen is their 12 outlet power strip. As a network engineer everything they make with an Ethernet/wifi interface is complete shit. But this is not really news, D-Link, Netgear, many of their competitors are also junk.
The worst router I’ve ever seen was a D-Link. I was in a position where I had to provide support for it, and in the end I gave up and bought them an ASUS with my own money. It ended up being worth it, just in terms of time and aggravation saved. The software and firmware on the D-Link were garbage, and so was the actual build.
I stopped using D-Link equipment after I had to work with an IP camera that would choke on the cron'ed FTP upload if the server welcome message had more than three lines. Fewer than three lines and everything was great. But when it tired to upload to a server that responded with more than three lines and the camera ate itself.
Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup, they took their corporate video conferencing products and tried to make a consumer version (Umi I think it was) that while cheaper than the cooperate product were still absurdly expensive. This was all while Skype pretty well established .... it was pure insanity.
And now we have WebEx and they're trying to make a Slack competitor.
Oh man WebEx is crazy clunky software. I used it regularly for years and never got comfortable with it ... let alone that it ran in fits and starts for everyone.
Not using webEx was one of the things I actually looked forward to when I lost my last job. It's crazy that would occur to me.
Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M
#116The only good Belkin product I have ever seen is their 12 outlet power strip. As a network engineer everything they make with an Ethernet/wifi interface is complete shit. But this is not really news, D-Link, Netgear, many of their competitors are also junk.
Every Belkin product I owned was garbage... but just like you I ran across a couple power strips that are surprisingly good. I don't know if they bought someone who knew what they were doing with power strips or what, but .... i'm still using them.
I think it's something of a natural progression with accessory companies.
Their core competency is something innocuous like mousepads and power strips. Then they advance into more delicate and complicated electronics and the wheels fall off the wagon.
It reminds me of the early and mid-1980's when office supply companies decided that they should branch out from selling paper to making floppy disks. They were cheap, especially in bulk, but over time they had a much higher failure rate.
Eventually the only brands you could count on to work properly were BASF, 3M, Elephant Memory Systems, and IBM. (And probably a couple of others)
Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ubiquiti ftw After a brief romance with VyOS and RPi based APs, Ubiquiti came along and swept me off my feet Currently using their gear throughout a 300-ish person office. Easy to setup, no issues that weren’t our fault in the first place. Great kit for startup and growing type situations
What was your experience with Raspberry Pi APs? I set one up for Americans traveling abroad on the original Pi B model and couldn’t get any reliability for the life of me. The VPN constantly broke down because of WiFi sleep issues. Wondering if things are better with newer hardware.
That was years ago at this point, we were using RPi 2s.
It became rather untenable once that office hit ~30 people.
There were external factors that had us accepting defeat. Picked up some used Ruckus gear on the cheap, which helped but wasn’t that nice to use
Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ubiquiti ftw After a brief romance with VyOS and RPi based APs, Ubiquiti came along and swept me off my feet Currently using their gear throughout a 300-ish person office. Easy to setup, no issues that weren’t our fault in the first place. Great kit for startup and growing type situations
Haven’t had a single issue with my Ubiquiti AP in 2 years. None of the other consumer-grade APs even came close, I had issues with all of them (Netgear, Linksys/Cisco, AVM, Zyxel, TP-Link, MicroTik, even Apple Airport), and I wasn’t buying the lowend models either. Most needed reboots as they’d stop working from time to time, many had flaxy Wifi or sudden long network lags for no reason, and the MicroTik even bricked…
Yup, every piece of “home user” gear I’ve tried has needed regular reboots, or failed in ~24 months.
I mean I was purposefully stress testing and can be a heavy user. Maybe it works fine for grandma doing some email and Facebook on an iPad
After great feels using it at work, setup Ubiquiti kit at home two years ago and only rebooted it when I decided to move the APs to improve signal coverage on the far end of our house.
For $100-ish an AP these days (my home units are the UniFi AP-AC Long Range on Amazon), I don’t see any reason to buy anything else
Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M
#119Re: Foxconn buys Belkin for $866M
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cisco had money burning a hole in their pocket and bought a some consumer stuff and then had no idea what to do with it ... so they sold most of it off, or simply discontinued it (like flip video).
they discontinued flip video because after the acquisition they didn’t really understand the consumer and then GoPro came and they got wreckt
I think the bigger problem was cellphones, especially the iPhone, gaining the ability to record decent video.
Flip filled a convenient niche for a few years until the 3GS came along with video support, after which it was useless for many consumers. This was the only reason I bought a Flip, and the only reason anyone else I know with one did.
Similarly, I think the first mainstream smartphones to record HD video wasn't until 2010. Again flip had a small window with their HD models before cellphones killed them again.
At least GoPro have (had?) a good story around their mounts and waterproofing, there was nothing in my opinion a Flip did that cellphones didn't very quickly do better.