By Nick Gelling
Product Test Journalist | Kaipūrongo Whakamātautau Hautaonga
For a tech expert who lives and breathes consumer electronics, I’m weirdly downbeat about a lot of it. I think whole sections of the tech market are functionally obsolete, while new tech is overhyped and underbaked – plus it’s all too expensive.
Take a peek into my conflicted mind with this list of six tech gadgets I’ll always avoid. You might save yourself a pricey mistake – just don’t look too long, or you’ll become warped and cynical like me.
A WiFi range extender
Range extenders, also known as WiFi repeaters or boosters, rebroadcast the signal from your router to make it reach further.
If I was ever tempted to buy a range extender to boost WiFi coverage in my home, I would slap myself. Then, I would instead invest in a better router or a mesh network.
Range extenders tend to throttle your WiFi speeds and make network troubleshooting more difficult. It’s much better to futureproof your setup by upgrading to a mesh system that’s designed from the ground up to work with multiple units.
There are some exceptions, but I can count them on one hand – and they usually involve getting signal to an external building like a sleepout.
An inkjet printer with cartridges
I am, frankly, a bit of a home printer hater. I don’t own a printer and can’t really see myself buying one in the future. They’re wasteful, expensive to run and never seem to work on the first try.
However, I recognise I work in an office with a printer, and live close to a library with a printer. Others might not be so lucky.
So, I’m focusing my ire on the most wasteful category of printer: the cartridge-based inkjet.
Ink cartridges are notoriously expensive, and there are alternatives. Laser printers are great for printing black and white text, and the dry toner they use is far cheaper per page than liquid ink.
If you want colour printing, look for an inkjet model with refillable ink tanks. When they run dry, they can be topped up with well-priced bottled ink, rather than having to buy an expensive plastic cartridge every time.
You can filter our printers test results by the models that have refillable ink tanks.
An 8K TV
Barely anyone is recording any video in 8K, so there’s no point having a TV that can play it. It’s as simple as that.
It sure seems like 8K streaming will never take off, due to immense technical challenges in storing and sending that much data in real time. In some major markets, internet speeds are too low to even support 8K streaming, which will limit streaming providers’ appetites for tackling those challenges.
The makers of Blu-Ray have shown no interest in creating an 8K Blu-Ray format either.
Never is a long time, and maybe 8K will be feasible in 10 years’ time. But that’s more than enough time to get a good life out of any 4K TV you buy this year.
A Fitbit watch
Fitbit was once the brand synonymous with wrist-mounted fitness trackers – as ubiquitous as Sellotape or Google. You might still refer to a sports watch of any brand as a ‘Fitbit’.
But beyond the hype and the marketable name, Fitbit watches were never actually very good. They were quickly overtaken in both performance and price by competitors like Garmin and Xiaomi.
Plus, in our annual tech reliability survey, Fitbit consistently brings up the rear.
There are much better watch brands to spend your money on. Find the best Fitbit alternative with our smartwatch and fitness tracker reviews.
On-ear headphones
I just don’t quite understand these.
At risk of stating the obvious, on-ear headphones have pads that sit right against your ear, rather than fully enclosing them.
They’re not as portable as earbuds, and not as comfortable as over-ear headphones. And the sound leakage! No thanks. I don’t want a single commuter on the bus overhearing my goofy post-work decompression bangers.
Our lab technicians have tested one on-ear model that they loved, and it’s a cheap model too. It has the Consumer Recommended tick, but I still wouldn’t buy it myself when a nice big pair of over-ears perform even better.
You can see the best performing on-ears, over-ears and earbuds by browsing our comprehensive headphone reviews.
A USB charger from Temu or Shein
To be honest, I can’t think of any tech widget I’d buy from an opaque, unregulated marketplace like Temu or Shein. It just isn’t worth the risk of getting something poorly made that could shock me or catch fire.
And particularly for chargers, I have good evidence to support that position.
Our consumer advocate friends in Europe tested a whopping 54 USB chargers from these two sites and found 52 were unsafe. That’s 96% of them! Case closed.
Read our report for more detail on how the chargers were dangerous. You can also see how a selection of kids’ toys did in the same test (but you can probably guess).
