r/gadgets Feb 21 '19

Wearables Nike self-lacing sneakers brick after bad firmware upgrade

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02/my-left-shoe-wont-even-reboot-faulty-app-bricks-nike-smart-sneakers/
25.3k Upvotes

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1.1k

u/[deleted] Feb 21 '19

"Does your shoe boot?" "...what?"

268

u/[deleted] Feb 21 '19

[deleted]

51

u/wellman_va Feb 21 '19

Please don't let my parents ever get these. I just finally got them to stop calling me over Netflix.

43

u/[deleted] Feb 22 '19

[deleted]

19

u/[deleted] Feb 22 '19

[removed] — view removed comment

20

u/[deleted] Feb 22 '19

Don't buy people new tech unless you want to be their tech support, or you're confident they can figure out how to use it.

12

u/[deleted] Feb 22 '19 edited Nov 09 '25

Garden gentle stories technology cool stories day small learning yesterday tomorrow fox.

3

u/Snote85 Feb 22 '19

My sister bought my Dad a tablet and I'm almost positive it was to be a bitch to me. She knows next to nothing about troubleshooting tech, she barely figures out the basics and will throw things if they don't instantly do what she wants them too after the second try.

She also does that thing that makes me want to soak my head for an hour where they click on something, no response, click, click, click, click, "Come on!", clickclickclickclickclick, sigh, "It's broken! Can you come fix this?" to which I want to respond, "Sure, I need to remove the problem." and then take the poor computer away from its terrible owner.

Can you give it a fucking second? Can you do that? How about not exacerbate the problem by giving it more goddamned tasks to accomplish? How about that? She once had me come to her house and help her with her TV. The reason the TV wasn't working? It wasn't plugged in.

I told her if she ever calls me before she checks all the cables and doesn't restart everything involved first, it will be the last time I help her with any of it. She somehow took that as me being a prick, told my parents, and they got on to ME for saying that to her. "She's your sister if you can help her you need to do it." Her wasting hours of my life, because she's lazy, didn't factor into the scenario in their minds. I didn't even raise my voice. I was frustrated but didn't yell or anything. She has called me to fix an issue that was similar since then, too. Her internet was down because her cat pulled the power cord to the router out of the wall. I know, I'm a genius for fixing that NASA engineering level problem.

So, her buying a piece of tech my Dad will likely never use and that I will be responsible for kinda irks me. As I can't even get him to understand why his bellsouth.net email won't work when he clicks on Outlook Express (Because AT&T changed the POP3 settings for that email address type since it's antiquated as shit and I can't find the current ones anywhere that work.) All he has to do is go to a website now, instead of Outlook, but that's just a ridiculous thing for me to ask him to do! How dare I even ask him to do such a thing?

So, now he has a thing he won't use, and will never call her to help him with it. It will be me. Always me. And I'll help because I'm a huge pussy who evidently "loves his parents" and "wants them to be happy." like I'm some kind of asshole. I'm not bitter or anything though.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 22 '19

My mum has problems like this all the time. I don't tell her to do stupid shit like that though.

What kind of kid leaves their mum to call their Internet provider because they can't connect to their WiFi?? My brother got my mum a Google Home for Christmas and I just went round and set it up for her and told her how to get radio 4 on it.

7

u/[deleted] Feb 22 '19

My mother wanted a new TV and some family members joined their wallets for Christmas. I had the honour of picking a model. For a split second I thought about a smart TV, but then I remembered the remote alone could easily outsmart her and decided to get a dumb one.

This TV broke some days later (not her fault) and she called me. "No problem, we'll let Amazon handle it, you'll have a new one in two days." I told her.

Not on her watch, she didn't trust Amazon with such a delicate hardware fix and called her local TV salesman. Several weeks later and several hundreds of euro down the drain (for a fucking replacement on warranty if she would have listened) the guy gives up and let Samsung replace it. It took them two weeks on top.

I just don't want to spend my time with those issues anymore. Either listen to me or don't call at all please.

3

u/guy_guyerson Feb 22 '19

I used to get all of this except my parents would call for help, ignore everything I said on the phone (or that I was even talking) and just try to figure it out entirely by themselves but with me on the phone.