Stupidest product design you’ve experienced

In My Humble Opinion
1821

It helps to understand that modern packaging is about 99% about anti-theft and about 1% product protection from damage.

Their goal is to make it difficult for a thief to quickly and deftly remove the small product from the deliberately bulky & balky packaging. If it’s slow and arduous, that’s good from the manufacturer’s POV.

So slow down, accept that you’re wrassling not with a product, but with the inevitable detritus of shoplifters enshittifying the world, then use big strong tools deliberately to make short easy work of the task at hand.

1822

We traved on United last March. In coach, my regular headphone jacks worked for the in-flight entertainment.

We upgraded on the way back - and there was a different kind of jack on those seats - an older style, I think, that won’t fit regular headphones.

1823

Delta Airlines had something similar. Generic headphone jacks in coach seats and dual jack over the head headphones in Delta One seats.

1824

Because I was stupid enough to not do it in the light, and also did it with scissors that were not made to cut plastic, apparently.

1825

My 2013 Mazda 3 will do 3 beeps at certain locations. They are not predictable in a new town, but I could do a “magic trick” by predicting them when driving down streets I knew. This has stumped the Mazda Reddit and the service manager of a Mazda dealership.

1826

According to this, it’s a notification from the navigation system that the speed limit has changed, and you can stop it by muting the navigation audio.

1827

My wife does a lot of sewing and buys fancy irons. Her latest iron has a feature that it turns itself off after several minutes of non-use. It beeps when it’s going into shutdown mode. Not one beep, or two or three, nope, it beeps six times. Why six? One would be enough (or none).

1828

Not exactly a bad product design, but I have to vent.

I just bought a Dell monitor. It came packaged with two cables. I choose the one that my computer had a port for. The monitor wouldn’t recognize it.

After a long call to tech support, I found out that the cable was “obsolete” and therefore not included in the list of image sources.

Then why include it in the box? The poor guy I talked to obviously had instructions not to answer that question.

Next step: a strongly worded letter!

1829

That’s crazy. Even the danger signal between ships (say to avoid a collision) is only five blasts of the ship’s horn.

1830

Well, that’s the answer, then. Five beeps for avoiding a collision, so they need six to signal a shutdown.

1831

Sure, if the device that is shutting down is something like a ventilator or a pacemaker. But an iron?

1832

I’ll look into it, but in my little town I can go all over, in and out of the city, onto the highway, and nothing happens. Also, the places it beeps are in the middle of long commercial developments, almost always. Thanks.

1833

We have a commercial Keurig machine at the office - the kind that is hooked up to the water supply. If it has not been used for a while, when you touch the touchscreen it will display a “Heating” progress bar while it heats the water, then prompt you to insert a pod. When you insert your pod and close the lid then you get the brew menu (cup size, brew strength, etc.)

However, if you put the pod in first and close the lid, it goes through the warm-up but still prompts you to insert your pod when it’s done, instead of going straight to the brew menu. So you have to lift the lid and close it again just to get the brew menu to display.

1834

I’ve looked askance at Keurig machines because whether you select 6, 8, or 10 oz. the pod has the same amount of coffee which means if the amount is okay with one size cup it’s going to be either over or under extracting for the others.

I use a French press for brewing coffee because it gives me complete control over the process from water temperature to amount of coffee to how long its extracted. Through experimentation I’ve found what works for me The disadvantages are,

  • It does turn making coffee into something of a ceremony rather than load and go like Keurig or an auto-drip are.
  • You need coarse ground coffee so all the types of percolator or espresso grind on the shelf are useless to you.*
  • You will wind up with sediment in the bottom of the cup.

*I had been buying coffee at Trader Joes a pound at a time but decided to try some at Fry’s to get a wider selection. It turned out ‘coarse’ on Fry’s in-store grinder isn’t really.

1835

Do you prefer your beer shaken, not stirred?.. Rake with a beer holder.

1836

Thanks for the attempt, but as usual all help files found, searching through google, looking on youtube, and paging through all settings on the actual car, have produced no sense of any navigation settings at all in any manner. It’s very frustrating. It makes me ask questions like, do people get paid more if they are unhelpful? How can everyone’s answer be wrong all the time? This happens over and over and over with almost every device.

1837

Sorry, I have found no navigation notification sounds settings.

1838

A combination of people guessing at the answer and everyone having slightly different devices and/or slightly different software/firmware versions?

1839

Yup. Nobody is thorough enough in their answer. Because people are sloppy, lazy, forgetful thinkers. And worse writers.

A good answer is not “My Subaru does X”.

It’s “My early 2022 Subaru Buzzmobile running software version 3.14.159 with the XYZ trim package with the 4WD option does this … after I had set all these settings in the configuration menus.”

Look how hard it is to get Dopers, the smartest hippest people on the planet, to even include whether they’re talking about an iPhone or an Android when asking tech questions about their phone. It’s like pulling teeth to get the truth, the whole truth, out of them.

1840

It strikes me this product is designed to let lonely old men stand on their lawns, to try engage passers-by, while enjoying a warm beer.

(Almost made a typo, “lonely old me”… maybe I should get one)