Hardware Insights Forum

We all have our low points, from time to time. But these are the companies that have managed to fuck things up in ways that just about no-one else could do if they tried. Don't buy anything from the companies on this list — you will regret it much more likely than not. So brace yourselves for…

• Apple takes the top "prize", for having become a complete monster in every way. Not only that, but they're the only company I know of to fail to enforce correct safety earthing of their notebook chargers (as was discussed before).
• Brilliant Lighting of Australia has been anything but; aside from that rather worthless LED floodlight I mentioned in the backronym thread, a fluorescent lamp that was used mainly by my sister discoloured its plastic from purple to blue , and the ballast got so hot that the insulation on its lead-in wires (which was irradiated PVC with a temperature limit of not the usual 75°C for flexible cords nor the now-common 90°C for fixed mains cables, but 105°C) broke down in short order. I doubt if they even have any actual engineers to be honest…
• Creative Labs of former SoundBlaster fame lost the plot when they transitioned from ISA to PCI sound cards, and they have since screwed up pretty much everything that could conceivably be screwed up.
• The Australian electrical company HPM has, to be honest, sold Hopelessly Poorly Made garbage for quite a while now: The cord grip on their model 7P extension-cord socket doesn't even work with the cable type it was allegedly designed for, the plastics they use are about as tolerant of UV exposure as IBM's Deathstar 75GXP was of thermal cycling (I have two 6-way HPM power boards/strips that have severely discoloured in less than 5 years of household usage; clearly, they can't even dream of having the centuries of lifespan that I would predict from high-quality electrical accessories), they have yet to adopt the logical surround system of Clipsal's ever-popular 2000 Series, and they seem to think 32A is safe for the highest-current variant of the Australian 3-pin plug (there are two problems with that — reliable operation at that current would IMHO require nickel-plated contacts, which they don't use, by mandate; more on that later — and circuit breakers above 20A, the most powerful variant of the plug made by Clipsal, will not adequately protect the smaller cables from short-circuit events). Overall, they're pretty much the Australian electrical industry's exaggerated version of STMicroelectronics (or Infineon); by now, you would have to pay me to take one of their products, and even then, I probably wouldn't use it (I still have a few HPM products remaining in use but intend on replacing them as soon as I get the opportunity).
• Seagate also deserves mention for losing the plot starting around 2005. Back in their glory days (Barracuda ATA III/IV/V/7200.7), their drives were reliable, consistent with HDA configurations, and had at least competitive performance, but ever since then, they've gone downhill. The 7200.11 deserves special mention for being not only unreliable, but also for the name spanning two whole generations of drive (codenamed Moose [250GB/platter] and Brinks [375GB/platter in the 1.5TB model and 333GB/platter in the smaller models]), both of which had 1TB models (ST31000340AS and ST31000333AS respectively), with their unreliability as the only commonality ; by all reason, Brinks should have been called the 7200.12 and its successor (codenamed Pharaoh) the 7200.13.
• Sony has many haters, in no small part due to their draconian attempt at copy protection of music CDs — even at the cost of ruining PC users' Windows installations. Not that the company is that good at what else they do, either.
• Telstra Bigpond is, considering their nightmarish support, ridiculous prices, and unreliable hardware, undoubtedly the worst ISP in Australia — do I really need to say more?
• VIA's stuff has, in my experience, proven unreliable in the long term, and it was evidently a big mistake, in hindsight, for AMD to have left VIA to make the chipsets for the Athlon/XP/64 families.

In the end, the bare-faced truth is that every legitimate Asian (Japanese or Taiwanese, it doesn't seem to make a difference either way for power cords) maker of electrical items that I could care to name makes far higher-quality products than what HPM peddles. I think I know why: HPM has a brand presence among the general population here in Oz, so can ride on brand complacency for a long, long time, while the Asian makers work "behind the scenes", selling to OEMs with very stringent demands. For that matter, Clipsal don't want their products sold to the general public either. Coincidence? I think not.

What's also interesting is that the electrical companies of the Western world seem to have become generally complacent in their own quality standards to a greater or lesser extent (Clipsal included). I have noticed that almost every Asian-made mains cord (and every external PSU) in my stash has nickel-plated plug pins, while their Western counterparts still consider non-plated brass "good enough". The difference the nickel plating makes is easy to underestimate: The oxide layer that forms on bare brass from early on can add as much as 0.1Ω to the circuit for each pin (as measured by my DMM), while nickel-plated contacts add negligible extra resistance (even after decades of use). Presently, nickel plating is still unusual for the socket contacts — mainly because the plug pins can be touched by the user when unplugged and the socket contacts can't. (Have you ever noticed how mains connectors near their rated load always seem to get much warmer than the cables between them? This is the reason, and if nickel plating was mandated for both the plug and socket contacts, it would probably do away completely with this phenomenon. But without such a rule, I think that the 32A and maybe 25A plugs and sockets that HPM makes are, quite frankly, fire hazards in the long term.) But at least Clipsal try to make good products, unlike HPM who are all show and no go nowadays.

HPM did appear to make high-quality products in the distant past, so I suppose they're not unlike Seagate in the direction they've turned in. This page of a museum of electrical items, at least, shows (in photo #8) a 1950s-era HPM single outlet apparently still in good condition (setting aside the comical backwards N). But after all they've done in modern times, I absolutely cannot forgive them.

Another particularly dangerous (non-counterfeit) electrical product would have to be the decorative light strings that run directly off the mains. Setting aside that Christmas has effectively become the opposite of a holiday, it seems that the "safety" authorities see fit to allow single-insulated (i.e. Class 0) construction of those sets (despite it having long been prohibited for all other mains cables and devices) for no better reason than because they're only used "intermittently". The only apparent reason why direct-connected decorative lights are still allowed anywhere seems to be because the thicker (although still inadequate) insulation costs less than using a small step-down transformer (e.g. to 24V), even though the shock danger of each is high and minuscule, respectively. In fact, I consider the "off-the-line" decorative lights to be the most dangerous electrical item to use in the vicinity of small children, with the only more dangerous appliances to them being due to non-electrical hazards (high temperatures, most often). At a wild guess, I would estimate that the electrical fires here in Oz are about 20% from HPM's products, 20% from counterfeits, 20% from non-isolated decorative lights, 20% from overloading circuits (by using the unprotected 2-way adapters — which IMHO should not be sold to the general public — in, most often, extension cords), 15% from ordinarily poor-quality products, and the other 5% is the sum of the products from reputable makers, recalls and all.

Frankly, I'm getting rather tired of the overdoses of FLA (Frivolous Lawsuit Avoidance — otherwise known as "ass-covering"), as I know that the standard Australian-type extension cords (with a single socket of the same rating as the plug) are extremely reliable provided they were properly made in the first place and aren't overheated (be that due to exceeding the maximum load — whether with outright illegal contraptions or the common OCP-less 2-way adapters mentioned — and/or operating the cord in its coiled-up state).

A-Power, Fuhjyyu, GSC/Sacon. I imagine they probably belong on the list.

Microsoft is kind of up there, too. They've just about ruined windows and office.

c_hegge wrote:A-Power, Fuhjyyu, GSC/Sacon. I imagine they probably belong on the list.

Yes, indeed.

Microsoft is kind of up there, too. They've just about ruined windows and office.

Let's not forget the incident involving weak mounting of the power inlets in the PSUs of some of the original Xboxes — which therefore moved around when connecting/disconnecting the cord, eventually resulting in broken solder joints and arcing. So did Microsoft take the consoles back for repair? No — too expensive Instead, they recalled the power cords that came with the affected consoles, replacing them with cords with built-in Arc-Fault Circuit Interrupters (are those devices even used outside of North America?). That may have succeeded in preventing subsequent house fires, but didn't actually fix anything.

LongRunner wrote:

c_hegge wrote:A-Power, Fuhjyyu, GSC/Sacon. I imagine they probably belong on the list.

GSC/Sacon is the worst....

Microsoft is kind of up there, too. They've just about ruined windows and office.

Let's not forget the incident involving weak mounting of the power inlets in the PSUs of some of the original Xboxes — which therefore moved around when connecting/disconnecting the cord, eventually resulting in broken solder joints and arcing. So did Microsoft take the consoles back for repair? No — too expensive Instead, they recalled the power cords that came with the affected consoles, replacing them with cords with built-in Arc-Fault Circuit Interrupters (are those devices even used outside of North America?). That may have succeeded in preventing subsequent house fires, but didn't actually fix anything.

Fixing that problem would have been very easy. They wouldn't have even needed to have resoldered it more effectively, all they needed to do is mount it such that the inlet could have been screwed to the chassis like with regular ATX PSUs and it never would have been a problem unless someone unscrewed and screwed the inlet too many times....

Haven't been too happy with AVC lately. I've pulled countless seized hydraulic bearing fans and a brand new C7015T12MY fan was working fine but was making unusual noises every 2 seconds, a noise that could easily be mistaken for the read/write heads of a HDD seeking (and a noise that made it difficult to hear the HDD seeking). I took the fan apart (it had an adequate amount of lubricant) and found no signs of damage, rusting, or charring, but would guess that either the ball bearing is somehow damaged or the impeller is imbalanced in that unit. It's the first C7015T12MY I've come across to sound like that, though....

Wester547 wrote:Haven't been too happy with AVC lately. I've pulled countless seized hydraulic bearing fans and a brand new C7015T12MY fan was working fine but was making unusual noises every 2 seconds, a noise that could easily be mistaken for the read/write heads of a HDD seeking (and a noise that made it difficult to hear the HDD seeking). I took the fan apart (it had an adequate amount of lubricant) and found no signs of damage, rusting, or charring, but would guess that either the ball bearing is somehow damaged or the impeller is imbalanced in that unit. It's the first C7015T12MY I've come across to sound like that, though....

Are JMC/Datech still worse?

I suppose PC Chips also deserves a mention, for producing the infamous mainboards with fake cache.

LongRunner wrote:Are JMC/Datech still worse?

Yes, because even their dual ball bearing fans have a very finite life (though they don't have any plug but neither do those same NMB fans with far more lubricant and I seldom see them fail).

Whoever made this thing also qualifies for sure.

See for yourself:


There are also a few Clipsal outlets near windows. Those haven't discoloured — only the red "on" marks have faded (that happens to most red dye, in my experience). But I have seen discolouration of very old Clipsal stuff (in other buildings) so it seems to me that as Clipsal improved, HPM got worse…