“If Buying Isn’t Owning, Piracy Isn’t Stealing”: 23 Tech Products That Are Huge Scams

Look around you and ask yourself: is this the type of futuristic life that you thought you’d have? For some of us, that answer is a definite ‘no’ because it strays too far from the idealized things we’ve seen in our favorite sci-fi movies and shows. In real life, there’s too much friction, bad design, and annoyance compared to technological awesomeness. In short, some tech corporations are less than friendly toward their valued customers in their pursuit of profit and never-ending growth.

User u/cutypatotie sparked an interesting discussion on r/AskReddit after asking everyone to share their opinions about the biggest tech scams that have been widely accepted. We’ve collected the most interesting insights to share with you, from how God-awful subscriptions can be to the scourge that is planned obsolescence. 

We wanted to learn more about user-(un)friendly companies and product longevity, so we reached out to marketing psychology speaker Matt Johnson, Ph.D., for comment. Johnson is the host of the branding and human nature blogs. You'll find the expert insights he shared with Bored Panda as you read on.

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IamShellingFord:

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munificent:

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#23

Subscription models in general. We're not getting new content or functionality every month, so why the hell am I paying a monthly fee? Just let me buy it, own it, and pay for an upgrade if I want it.

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#25

selling games that cannot be played offline then turning off the server. i recently tried to play some older games and none that i put a lot of time into now play. what is the point of my 80 quid disc now? i paid for the game so i should be able to play it.

#26

games that cannot be played offline then turning off the server. why give me a £80 disc if i cant play it from the disc?

#27

games that cant be played offline. why give a disc if it does nothing

#28

Hewlett Packard printers which don't work unless you subscribe. And use their ink.

#29

Longevity of TVs.
My mom gave me her old TV from the 80s and it worked until it stopped turning on in the mid 2000s. So, that was a couple decades we got out of it. Our next big TV came from my, then, bf's parents. They bought it, I think, early 2000s. That TV lasted until 2019. Like, it still worked but the picture was going very orange due to the colour tubes wearing out.
My next big TV I bought in 2018 to replace the one above, the picture wasn't great with the old fashioned plug ins. When I put in the HDMI cable, it was a tad sharper but there was weird green speckling in all the black, dark areas in what was in the picture. Any shadows in the images, green speckles. Tried to correct it by adjusting the picture settings. The speckling fluctuated but became accentuated in other areas of the images. There was also this weird, wavy light border whenever we watched a movie or show. Didn't matter if it was a DVD or VHS. It didn't show up on the TVs intro screen, though. I just replaced my TV, again, this year. I'm hoping nothing goes awry with this one for a while.

#30

Longevity of TVs. TVs used to last decades. Now, they barely last half a decade, and sometimes there's something so unusually wrong with them no one can give you a clear, good answer.
Green speckling in the shadows and dark areas of the images in a movie that won't go away no matter how much you try to fiddle around with the picture settings.
Weird, light wavy boarder around the screen that only shows up when playing a movie.

Unsubscribe button not being honored. Tactics include: 1. It takes 15 days to unsubscribe but 1 min to subscribe. 2. Sometimes link does not exists at all. 3. Sometimes it takes you to a non existent page. 4. Sometimes it asks you to login but you never had an account. 5. Sometimes they will randomly send emails even after unsubscribing , especially around holiday season. Like out of the blue they will email, I think they got a new incompetent marketing guy. 6. Them not realizing that they product they sell is not something I buy or need on a regular basis. Eg: indochino , how frequently do you think I buy a new suit. 7. The whole marketing email is an image and not an html. Clicking on it just opens the image or takes you to home page (mostly sites from India ) 8. Somehow referencing the canspam act and sending it to their privacy email stops all the emails suddenly. But the. Point 5 happens. Accepting cookies.Just to continue on a site they’ll say accept or reject cookies. It’s easier for everyone to just accept. However, we’re selling our data to a host of companies who package it sell it to advertisers “We have changed our terms of service.  Click here to accept and continue using our services.”Forced arbitration and changing the terms of service after the product has been boughtwhen i bought my device, i had an understanding of what i was buying. it makes my skin crawl knowing that companies can change that after i paid for something and i can't hold them accountable for that.it's like i bought a pizza with some toppings.after i buy it with the terms being i can eat the toppings as well, they take away the toppings from the rest of the pizza as soon as I've had a couple of slices.feels absolutely disgusting to me. Non-replaceable batteries.  You don't actually own anything, you just own a license to view/listen/play it... and it can be revoked/edited at any time without consequence. Subscription Traps: Makes signing up easy but canceling difficult, often hiding the cancellation process. Intentionally downgrading older models of just about anything so you’re forced to upgrade. Printer cartridges. Crypto. Magic internet money with a community of people all just trying to get other people stuck holding the bag. Ads after subscription. Here’s a new product! (Uber! DoorDash! Amazon!) It’s so cheap and easy! One year later: Sorry! We had to raise prices! Sorry, you have to pay for a membership now! Sorry, we had to make the app really confusing so you’re not really sure what you’re buying! Sorry, you have to wade through 1 million ads to find what you’re looking for! Sorry, not sorry! AI = Certainly artificial but lacking a great deal of intelligence.Training generative AI on copyrighted material laboriously produced by artists and then using the result to put those same artists out of work. "I accept your 1000 page privacy policy and terms of service" I can't believe I don't see this in here, but the fact that most tech companies use their end users as testers is wild. Tons of the time you get something released that like, half works, and the end users or customers are used to find and fix bugs. It's everywhere man. Data caps, literally not a technical reason for it. Throttling may make sense if they get overloaded but caps are literally just money grabs. Planned obsolescence. Companies need that profit margin, and they will use very underhanded methods to make sure your appliances/electronics will get replaced by their new models when they come out. Hippity hoppity your data is now my property… or something along those lines. McAfee - who in the hell actually needs it? Trapping customers with subscriptions. Cable TV packages that include hundreds of channels most people never watch but have to pay for. It forces consumers to overspend on content they don't want just to get access to a few channels they do. A new iPhone being released every year and Apple convincing people it has a ton of improvements. Paying for storage on iPhones. Extended warranties for electronics, which are rarely worth the cost given the low chance of a malfunction that would fall under the warranty terms, and often overlap with the manufacturer’s warranty.