Spill the beans... on products that don't live up to the hype

VfM4meplse

delain wrote: »

JML Halogen oven. OH saw and fell in love with one a friend had, so he bought one. It got used once, and was fiddly to use and clean. Been sat in the cupboard ever since!

This is interesting! My Dad has one and uses it 5 days out of 7 at lunchtime, and keeps it spotless. Because it's just him at l/t, it's quicker and cheaper than a conventional oven for roasting a piece of chicken, fish, veggies etc. My ex also had one, which he would use to cook marinated cuts of fish and meat every evening. It was filthy! - he claimed to clean it once a month whether "it needed it or not" :eek:. Believe me, it needed it!!

moonpixiewitch

switched to eon a few years back because they claimed they had the cheapest online tarriff, discovered i had been overcharged by £400 , when i tried to get my money back , i had a 3month battle and ended up switching suppliers to get the money back.
I have been with Ecotricity ever since and my bill went down by £120 this year , their customer service is fab .
eon still keep trying to get us back , their latest trick is try and speak to my husband by saying he has entered an online competition .

limereason

Skeenfleent wrote: »

Anything by Apple has to be number one in the list... followed by Virgin Media's vastly over-hyped, postcode-lottery, oversubscribed, under-honest 'fibre-optic' broadband (ALL broadband is fibre-optic at some point, incidentally).
Microsoft - telling you that your PC will suddenly do stuff that it's been capable of doing for decades - if only you shell out another £150-£300 for their latest version of Windows, which then won't be 'mature' enough to rely on for a good two years after that!

Basically, anything that needs a marketing budget rather than a simple advertising one - and the rest sold by deserved good reviews, word-of-mouth and good design, not hype.
Too much hype these days, very little talent in design and Chinese factory workers don't really have that much pride in whether we get a good product, do they?

I have a 7 year old Apple laptop that's still going strong, unlike cheaper Acer one my partner had that lasted barely 3 years. Which Apple products have you used to come to this opinion?

Lum

Acer are makers of cheap plasticky crap so this is hardly surprising.

A decent business laptop such as a Lenovo Thinkpad or the Dell Lattitude range (not the Inspirons as they're more cheap plasticky crap) will easily last 7 years so long as you don't throw it out of your car and/or pour coffee into it.

That said, Apple laptops don't bother me so much as they are nicely designed and built. It's their desktops that bother me. They are the same hardware as PCs but they charge ridiculous prices for upgrades you can do yourself such as memory or hard drives.

For example, if you want a 512GB solid state drive adding to your Mac Pro you will pay an extra £1174. That same drive can be had for £300.

Going to 24GB of memory costs you an extra £1020. You can buy 24GB yourself for £274.79

Sure OSX is lovely but you pay a very steep price to run it. Unless you want to go down the Hackintosh route of getting it to run on "normal" PC hardware.

MoaningMyrtle

The freeze off wart/verruca treaments you can buy over the counter.

Jarvissa

That 'instant veneer' varnish stuff from Pearl Drops that you paint on your teeth... supposedly to make them instantly white.

Great! I thought... and handed over £9 for my tiny bottle.
S**t! I thought... when I opened it and it looked like glittery nail varnish.
S**t! x 2 when I ran my tongue over my front teeth and they felt as grainy as if I had just painted them with glitter nail varnish.
S**t! x 3 when I looked in the mirror. Yep... still yellow. But now glittering yellow.

And then the wretched stuff wouldn't even come off despite brushing so long and so hard my gums were almost raw.

Eurgh!!!

emmadragon

I got some Head and Shoulders shampoo from a 99p store thinking I'd got a bargin but it actually doesn't work. This is the second time I've bought a "premium" brand from a 99p store to find that it wasn't as good quality as when you pay full price. Shall continue waiting for the BOGOF offers from now on

princess_aloha

Jarvissa re: Pearl Drops - hehehe!!!!!!! Funniest thing I've read today!

Northern Ireland (ok, so not a product, as such!). The adverts make it look like there are carnivals every night, and my favourite slogan - "Culture around every corner". Hmm.

CannockFrodo

I bought 2 pairs of these from a Cruise show at the NEC in 2010 with a long guarantee.
To date 1 pair went solid, 2 pairs sprung leaks.
The company (Gel Doctor) have replaced 2 pairs but have not responded to my recent problem.
Disappointing to say the least.
This are simply not worth the money.

immie

emmadragon wrote: »

I got some Head and Shoulders shampoo from a 99p store thinking I'd got a bargin but it actually doesn't work. This is the second time I've bought a "premium" brand from a 99p store to find that it wasn't as good quality as when you pay full price. Shall continue waiting for the BOGOF offers from now on

I had some really good bargains on branded stuff from the 99p store,:T john frieda, charles worthington, etc and veet wax strips. Sometimes the packaging isn't in english, so if in doubt I go home and check what it is, perhaps the shampoo was by Head and Shoulders but from a different range?

I saw a bottle of Aveeno positively luminous moisturiser in tkMaxx yesterday, it was £4 for a huge bottle, the packaging was the same as my small one at home, and it said 'pour visage et yeux' so i thought perfect, it's definitely moisturiser for the face then! So took it to the till and paid, got home and found out it's actually cream face wash :eek: