Hardware / Software

Annoying Things Tech Companies Do To Consumers And Get Away With

  • How many times have you been disappointed with a new product from a company you love?
  • How many times did you say “Why are you doing this? Enough, this is the last time I’ll buy from this company.”?
  • And finally, how many times did you scratch your head trying to understand the reasoning behind why a company did something weird or unexpected?

Look, companies have one purpose and one purpose only: to make money. That’s written right there, in their definition. Nobody expects companies to do things for free, other than as a strategy to make up the losses later, tenfold. Companies don’t owe us anything and we’re not entitled to their products or services.

Most people understand these things, anyway. But as you can imagine, boundaries can and will be broken all the time. As easy it is to fall in love with a brand or company, just as easy you can fall out of love when your favorite company neglects you, does something against your principles, lies to you, pretends to care about something you care about, or does other things you consider awful.

In the past few years, I’ve observed the trend where a lot of tech products have been designed with intentional limitations, “features” and other unusual characteristics as a way to trap consumers into a closed ecosystem, to check boxes for the sake of checking boxes, or to make it harder for the owner to actually own the product he paid for with his hard-earned cash.

I know this sounds a bit too vague, so here’s my list of top things tech companies do that I don’t like, I literally hate, or just don’t understand. Why tech and not companies in general? Because this is my niche, this is what I know and understand best.

Lack of Audio Jack on Any Product

This is probably the original annoying tech thing that happened, which caused this article in the first place. I really don’t think there’s an excuse for excluding the 3.5 mm audio jack. I use wired over-the-ear headphones, I actually have quite a few pairs I like.

Now they’re good as trash. That’s not friendly to the environment. At all.

Plus audio quality over Bluetooth is not that good, no matter what people say. It’s just not there.

But that’s not the annoying thing. No, the annoying thing is when your previously paired devices don’t want to connect again when you turn them on. I think you know what I mean. Must have happened to you too.

phone with audio jack wired headphones
This belongs in a museum now

Then numerous problems appear all of a sudden when you want to unpair a device and pair it again with another device, then switch back again when you’re done. Not as easy as plugging and unplugging an audio cable.

My solution? For each Bluetooth audio device, I have a dedicated pair of wireless headphones. They stay paired and I don’t ever pair them with another device. Not what you would call an intelligent solution, but it’s the only one that works for me without causing annoyances.

Lack of Charger in The (Phone) Box

And because we’re talking about my archenemy, Apple, here comes another annoyance: the lack of a phone charger in the box. It wouldn’t be an issue if Apple, the company that puts the environment at the forefront (yeah, right), wouldn’t use the dreaded Lightning port nobody else uses, not even Apple on anything else than the all-mighty iPhone.

And by the looks of it, we’ll never see a USB-C iPhone from Apple, even if legislators are pushing hard for a unique port. This is beyond stubbornness.

Everything USB-C won’t solve the problem, since most manufacturers are using their own charging tech, so you could use a third-party charger, but most likely it won’t take advantage of your phone’s amazing charge speed if it uses a different standard. Most likely it does.

phone charger
This is optional now

Maybe the new USB charging standard will fix this, then I could erase this issue from this list.

MicroSD slot on Laptops

This is the kind of “feature” that will literally make me buy another laptop. If you want to check the SD card box on your product page don’t add a microSD port, especially on a creator laptop, the new hype word manufacturers use today.

Those of us who need an SD card use them in digital cameras, and these products use a full-size SD card slot. No photographer, videographer, or Youtuber would use micro-SD cards.

If in phones you can agree that the audio jack freezes some much-needed space (I don’t), what’s the excuse in laptops for not including a full-size SD slot. The difference between full-size and micro-SD is negligible. Better not include a slot at all, if you ask me.

Micro SD cards are really slow, not very reliable, and only useful in phones if you want to expand storage, on phones that still support SD cards, that is.

I was tempted to put the lack of expansion slots on phones in this article, but it doesn’t bug me that much, since micro-SD cards, even the premium ones, are slower than the UFS 3.1 internal memory in use today.

Laptop Screen Bezels so Thin That There’s No Room for a Webcam

Form over function is something that Apple does very well. It works for its followers, for sure. When a PC company does the same it makes me cringe a little. I don’t do a lot of video conferences, but from time to time I talk with someone “face to face” on my laptop.

I can’t really imagine buying a laptop without a webcam. It doesn’t have to be good. Webcams usually are trash, but they’re good enough for what they do.

It seems some manufacturers think webcams are not justified if you can make the screen bezels incredibly thin. I “appreciate” those who put the webcam at the bottom of the screen. Nice try, but seeing up my nose is not something others appreciate, I’m sure.

So can we add the webcam back, please?

Ads In The Software of Tech Products I Bought

This is a worrying trend but has not yet reached full annoyance status. After products that come with unwanted bloatware that sometimes you can’t even uninstall, now some phones come with ads that display in the operating system, throughout the interface.

Yes, you buy a phone, for a lot of cash I may add, then you will get the privilege to watch ads from time to time. On your phone! Owning things is not what it used to be.

phone ads

Not all companies that practice this are doing it in an annoying way. For example, Amazon acknowledges the presence of ads in the Kindle product name and offers a version without ads at all, for a bit more cash, as expected.

This should be the correct practice for companies that want to lower the selling price of a product using third-party preinstalled apps or software.

Curved Screens on Mobile Phones

This is yet another thing nobody asked for. Really: nobody said, “I need a phone with a screen that’s curved on the sides”. The only benefit is looks, and that’s very subjective, as you know.

Having a curved screen makes it harder to read text close to edges, makes the device impossible to repair, plus needs very good software to help with palm rejection, when you accidentally touch the sides while gripping the phone.

Not to mention the fact a good protective case will try and enclose these curved margins, thus making them harder to interact with during normal operation.

Remind me again about the benefits of curved screens. Maybe I’m missing something here.

Make Products Harder To Repair On Purpose

This is so bad that it started the Right to Repair movement. One little guy can still make a difference apparently, as Rossmann’s movement caught traction on the Capitol and sparked a similar response in Europe.

A lot of the tech products I don’t use work perfectly fine and can be used by someone else. I resell them all the time, but when something breaks repairing is not an option, at least not an option that makes sense when you look at the resale value left after subtracting repair costs.

Standard components are not the norm anymore. Also, by design, some of the new products are meant to never be repaired by unauthorized shops, or even by the company that made them. And no, replacing a complete motherboard assembly is not the same as doing a repair when the tiniest component breaks.

Companies like Apple make it harder to almost impossible to repair their products. It’s not just Apple, but they’re by far the worse in this regard.

Macro Or Black And White Phone Camera Sensors

This is not as annoying as it is pointless. Phone manufacturers boast about having a five of six camera array on even the cheapest models, but forget to mention that a lot of these sensors and lenses are of no actual use.

2-megapixel macro cameras and Black and White sensors come to mind. Instead of adding these cheap useless components, just to make their product sheet look favorable, they could have spent this money on something really useful, like a faster processor or a better display.

phone with many cameras
Coming soon…

Using Consumers As Beta Testers For Released Hardware

The rapid cycle of product development means that most of the new products are not completely finished when they launch. I mean, they’re mostly done, but a few finishing touches here and there could make a big difference. Emphasis on could.

But because companies compete with each other launch deadlines are more important than ever for them and their investors. Don’t be silly, they’re not launching unbaked products for our pleasure, to get them faster.

Recent mishaps I remember? Red Dead Redemption 2 not working on my system three days after launch. Rockstar is lucky because they did a tremendous job with the game, but it’s still annoying and I’m probably going to think twice before preordering anything from them.

Windows 11 is another example, as you may have read about recent Ryzen issues, which “feature” a slower Level 3 cache latency than under Windows 10. And by slower I mean three times slower. Ouch! By the way, I’ve checked on my Ryzen system and the tests don’t lie.

Unfortunately, most tech companies are plagued with the issue of releasing software that’s basically in the beta stage marked as a final release. Software companies and Tesla. But what can go wrong in a car controlled by beta software?

Touchscreen Only Controls in Cars

I have to add this to the list, even if it pertains mostly to the automotive industry. It’s a bit tied with tech trends too, that’s why it’s here. I’m not saying I don’t like touchscreens. I do, but not in cars, not as a driver.

It’s dangerous from a road safety perspective. I really don’t understand how legislators allow for this kind of driver interface.

car infotainment touch interface
Let’s see how we open the glovebox…

OK, put a large touchscreen in the infotainment area, but leave all the important car controls as physical buttons (including climate controls, stereo on/off, and volume controls, since these are all things a driver adjusts all the time).

And don’t tell me about voice controls: they’re not that good and are slower than a physical button you can reach immediately when needed.

Tech Companies That Follow Other Tech Companies, Thus Setting New Annoying Trends

One company doing something annoying is bad, but what’s worse is when other brands soon follow. Remember the jokes that flooded Twitter when Apple ditched the audio jack, or when they skipped the charger in the iPhone box?

Not long after these jokes, the tweets were deleted, and these companies launched new products that lacked the same features they made fun of in the first place. Often this happened in just a matter of months.

Copying trends is more annoying that trends themselves

I think this is more annoying, that’s why when I say “I don’t like Apple and Facebook” it shouldn’t be translated to “I like Samsung and Google”. I don’t like a lot of companies equally.

A lot of the bold moves in the tech industry have a financial scope at the base, that’s why you see other companies follow suit, once they realize why it helps the bottom end to remove the jack or the charger from the box.

Who would have thought the motive is money?

What Can We Do As Consumers?

A lot and not much at the same time. I’m soon going to upgrade my 4-year-old phone and I think I can still get a flagship killer (not a true flagship) with an audio jack.

This is my way of refusing to buy into this trend and this is how we, the consumers can protest these practices: by not buying products that annoy us, no matter the other reasons or incentives to do so.

But in the long run, I don’t think I can protest for the lack of audio jacks. I’m pretty sure in a few years most phones won’t come with this option. That’s when I’ll throw the towel and together with it my beloved wired headsets.

These silent protests affect profits, and companies have to reconsider. But only if it’s a protest at the right scale. Me not buying a phone without a jack won’t hurt anyone’s feelings, less so quarterly profits.


I’ll stop for now, but I’ll update the list once I find other things that disturb me. I’m curious if I’m the only one annoyed by these practices. I can’t be, right?

Do you have anything else to add to this list? Join the conversation.

Avatar for Ionuț-Alexandru Popa
I'm a writer and Editor-in-Chief at BinaryFork. I am passionate about technology, science, space exploration, and movies. I started writing about tech more than 20 years ago, after graduating in Computer Science.
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