You probably know that I buy a lot of tech. Most of it’s good because I do my research, but I have also made some major mistakes in my time.
7 gadgets I Wish I Never Bought
So these are the 7 Gadgets that I regret buying, from the least expensive to the most expensive.
BlendJet
There’s a decent chance that you’ve come across this on an Instagram ad somewhere. That’s what got me. This is the Blend Shed. It’s a portable blender that’s extremely well marketed gadget. It’s apparently always half price. It comes with a free 20-ounce jar, and it’s got 51,000 5-star reviews, somehow. And you know they really sell you on this whole vision of it: this all-in-one tool that helps you live your healthiest life, filled with matcha and kale smoothies. But then you get it and you realize: why do I need to blend on the go? You’ve still got to fill it up with your ingredients before you leave home. And it’s not like if you make your smoothie earlier on in the day, it’s gonna stop it going mushy; it’s a drink.
The only difference between using this and then using a proper blender that you probably already have at home is that you get less capacity, you have to worry about the battery running out (which it does), and it’s really hard to clean because the cup is so long and narrow. And because the blades are actually fixed inside the bottom of it, there’s just so many places for food to get stuck. And yeah, it says you can stick some soap in and blend to clean it, but that doesn’t work as well as you’d think. And then how do you get the soap out?
Corsair Mechanical Keyboard
Now moving all the way up to 200, I regret buying a mechanical keyboard. Ever since I got my first MacBook in 2013, my primary keyboard to type on has all been Apple keyboards, whether that’s the built-in ones on the MacBook or the Apple Magic Keyboard or the desktop. They’re all kind of the same, which is to say really easy to type fast on because the keys have a total travel distance of like this, but they’re just not the most satisfying. And I’ve always been tempted by the allure of a mechanical keyboard.
I mean, you ask any Tech person; they’ll tell you that mechanical is the Holy Grail because instead of all your keys pressing down on this one big squishy plastic sheet, every single key here has its own mechanism that makes each press that extra bit more purposeful and tactile. So one day I caved; I went out and I bought myself the Corsair K95 Platinum, which is one of the better mechanical keyboards at close to 200.
I just couldn’t get on with it. I mean, for starters, these clicky keys, they’re really fun, but I completely overlooked just how annoying they were going to be. Not for me; I was having the time of my life. But for everyone in a 10-meter vicinity. Since I work at my parents’ house, I just remember sitting down for a scripting session, now my sister who was also trying to work next to me, slowly giving me more and more obvious side-eye until I eventually got the hint and stopped bombastic. Now, I’d already kind of factored this in. I didn’t go for the most clicky type of switch that you can get, but even then it didn’t work for me. I definitely also lost some typing speed, which I initially thought would be just teething pains, but it never picked up. Turns out I am quite an aggressive typer.
When I hit keys, my fingers really want to bottom out those keys, but if you bottom out your keys on this, it’s going to be slow because each key has so much travel distance. And also, I started to feel the impact on my fingers more so than on any normal membrane keyboard because these keys have more cushioning. But then the worst part of it was that over a longer period of time, having to constantly lift my wrists up like this because the sheer height of the keys started compressing the nerves in my hands, leading to carpal tunnel syndrome. I was already on the edge with this, anyways. Instead of investing in a really good wrist rest to try and fix the problem, I just had down and instead bought myself a specifically ergonomic keyboard which I much prefer.
Xbox Series X
If you’re curious, this one’s kind of sad for me, but the Xbox Series X also deserves a place on this list. I was so excited about both this and the PlayStation 5. I mean, let’s be honest, very few things beat that next-gen console feeling. And yeah, while Sony has more exclusive games that I love like Horizon and Ratchet and Clank, the Series X still had my attention from the very beginning being technically the more powerful console of the two.
Plus, Xbox has Halo. Sleepovers at my friend’s houses playing old school Halo was a massive part of my childhood. And so when I saw this teaser of a true next-gen Halo that was coming to this console, with the promise of full Split-Screen Co-op, which is a massive deal to me because my favorite thing to do is to play video games with someone sitting in the same room as me, I’m pretty sure I wet myself. I mean, I ordered the best console to play the game on, the Series X, and I patiently waited. For starters, the moment Xbox revealed the first real gameplay of this next-gen Halo, the internet let out a collective groan, realizing that it didn’t really look very next-gen at all. So the game got delayed by a whole year, and then that split-screen co-op feature that I was so excited about? Canceled.
So Halo was kind of a dud for me. And then almost nothing came out after that. There were some Xbox exclusives, but very, very thin on the ground. And in any game that released on both Xbox and PS5, I got for PS5 because it actually, in my experience, seems to run a lot better, which is kind of ironic considering the whole Xbox “most powerful console in the world” thing. The key redeeming factor for Xbox now is definitely Game Pass, which is pay monthly, play as many games as you want. But since I’m someone who tends to pick one game and play that for like three-quarters of a year, that model doesn’t really work for me. So this Series X that I was once so, so excited about now sits in my basement as a glorified media player, which is quite sad.
But even more so than console gaming, I’ve always been a handheld guy. Whether it’s being able to play on the plane or under the covers at night, or let’s be honest, on the toilet, there’s always, for me, been something really freeing about owning a handheld game. It’s this feeling that once you own the game, you can play it whatever the situation you end up in. And that feeling has always stuck with me. If you compare my Play Time on the PSP or the DS or the Nintendo Switch to any home console, it’s literally 10 times.
But then equally, as somebody who used to build his own computers and has had a real taste of PC gaming, I also have a very high appreciation for graphics. So as soon as this concept of handheld consoles that can play full-quality PC titles appeared with products like the Steam Deck and the Asus ROG Ally, I was getting ready to sell everything I own, live in a box, and spend the rest of my days playing out Monster Hunter World but portably.
ROG Ally
I pre-ordered a Steam Deck and I bought myself an Asus ROG Ally, as well as being sent another one for the purposes of review. But that vision that I had in my mind, it was just too good to be true. When everything works, yes, these products do feel like magic. It genuinely feels like everything I ever dreamed of in a console. But the day-to-day reality of it is just you are constantly reminded that Windows as an operating system is not made for gaming (Checkout: 8 Best OLED Gaming Monitor) handhelds like this. But this will never have close to the level of polish that something like the Nintendo Switch does.
That pretty much every single PC game is designed for one person to play on their own compared to the very social Switch that I’d gotten used to, where you just zip off one of your joy-cons and hand it to your friend. But the single biggest thing is the battery. If you actually want to use this thing in the way that it’s intended, the ROG Ally will literally get you one to two hours of gameplay before needing a charge, which, given that my journeys are either three hours into London or ten hours into the United States, it just doesn’t give me that same feeling of freedom that makes handhelds so special to me.
Foodini 3D Printer
Right, you ready to see how I wasted six thousand dollars last year? This bad boy. This Houdini. And let me just tell you, on the picture that I had in my mind, a 3D printer so advanced that it can print food, like real edible foods, would not just laser-like precision, but also using any 3D model that you can find on the internet. I can’t stress to you how much I just really, really wanted this to work. I had this whole idea that I was going to challenge a famous chef to a cook-off, right?
Okay, and then use this machine to literally 3D print the perfect steak and blow them off their feet. I made mixture, a mixture. I tried savory with an avocado base, like it recommended. I tried sweet with cookie dough, to the exact recipe that the product told me to. And I just could not get it to work. I had mixtures that dribbled, I had explosions where literally food particles reached the wall behind me.
I was just sat there scrubbing slash licking it because it still tasted good, yeah boy. So why didn’t it? Well, I came to the sad realization that food is not 3D printing filament. It’s not sticky in the same way. So more often than not, it doesn’t stay in the exact spot it’s been printed in. Most food doesn’t have the structural strength to be able to support a multi-layered 3D model, which is why I ended up resorting to 2D shapes but couldn’t even do that properly because fundamentally, food is uneven.
You can calibrate a 3D printer all you want, but you can’t factor in that little chunk of tomato still left in your otherwise perfectly smooth guacamole. Yes, this links to how the explosion happened.
2019 Mac Pro
We’re getting to the big boys now. I regret buying the 2019 Apple Mac Pro. This was around the time where the channel was really picking up for the very first time. My editing workload was getting a little too heavy for my Intel Core i7 MacBook, so I thought, if I just make one big investment now, I can save myself hours every single video from now on, just waiting for things to happen. So I sucked it up, I pulled together 25,000 and bought one of the highest configurations of the Mac Pro you could get.
A server-grade Intel Xeon W processor, eight terabytes of solid-state storage, and 192 gigabytes of RAM. And I remember at the time that I got it, I felt like, okay, this is faster than my MacBook for sure, about 25% faster, which is something, but not the 500% faster that the price would indicate. I stuck with it for a couple of years because it was better than the alternatives, but I started to fall out of love. I was still used to being a laptop guy, just flitting between rooms, that me stuck up in the attic of this house on this. It just started to feel quite isolating. And then something else happened.
Apple launched their own Apple Silicon MacBooks. And I kid you not, the minute I opened up Final Cut Pro on this new MacBook with an M1 chip, I knew that my use for this machine was over. The MacBook had the level of fluidity that I’d never seen before in a video editing program. It wasn’t just that it was powering through the workload, but it felt like it was doing it so easily that it wasn’t even trying. And this was both really impressive considering that this is a laptop and it was priced at $4,000 instead of what’s meant to be a $25,000 supercomputer.
But also really sad because it immediately invalidated the biggest purchase I’d ever made. This wasn’t worth $25,000 anymore. It was worth like three. And over the last couple of years, exclusively using this laptop, it feels like the Intel Mac Pro has just gotten slower and slower, to the point where now I still use it, but I use it almost exclusively to display the backgrounds for our videos, which I could do on a $300 machine.
Mercedes EQS
But it gets more expensive, much, much more expensive. You might have seen that video where I bought my mom her dream car, the Mercedes EQS.
Yeah, I mean, I still don’t think she’s over it. She tells me every day how much she appreciates it. And nothing changes the fact that this is still a spaceship of a car. But we severely underestimated the hassle of electric cars, at least here in the UK. Like, for example, the range. When we bought the car, we were quoted a range of around 450 miles. I mean, the car model is called the EQS 450 plus, which would actually imply more than 450. And while I’m not upset that we didn’t hit those numbers, you know, I was expecting 350, 400, maybe. The reality? 250. Once you factor in the heating and the occasional bit of traffic, which means that this car is not even enough to do the one regular trip that we do to and from London without needing a charge.
Then the charging is what makes this entire situation so much worse. For our main charger that we keep at home, Mercedes recommended someone to install it for us. They installed the wrong one. We were told that we had the first year of charging for free, which is great, but then it turns out that the selected charging points that that was applicable for are so far away from us that it would never be worth actually driving past them. Okay, so we’ll pay for charging when we’re on the go.
If you can actually find a charging spot, because there are fast chargers here in the UK, ones that can fully charge this EQS from zero to 100 in like 30 minutes, but every single electric car user on the road wants them. And so assuming that you don’t get one of those, because the vast majority of the time you don’t, you could well end up with a charger that could take three full hours of you just sitting there, reading a magazine, to get back 30% of your battery life.
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