Sooo many websites, especially when you need to fill in forms or register. And too many still seem to assume that you’re using a great big desktop monitor when most people will probably use a phone or laptop!
What specifically gives me the rage is whenever you have to fill in a box and it turns into that annoying smug bloke with no friends who seems to live in the pub and implores you to “Enjoy your trip!!!!!!” if you stumble on a step - like Billy Bleach from The Fast Show.
Whether it’s a postcode, a phone number, a password or whatever, it cannot grasp that standard keyboards do not have a single button for every possible phone number or password combination in the world. If they did, keyboards would have to be the size of Anglesey. Which idiot programmed websites to keep saying ‘error: answer has to be X number of characters’ with every single digit I enter until I’ve finished entering the whole number?
HSBC have recently downgraded the security of their mobile banking app. Whereas before, you could have a password made of any length of any combination of numbers and letters, now you're only allowed to use six numbers - no more or fewer. You have to enter them when logging on, wait for it to freeze, back-space out of the screen and then go back in and try again (to be fair, it does usually work on the second attempt). Isn't progress marvellous?!
Laptops. I'm seeing ones being sold for £800 that say "fine if all you do is check emails"...why have they become so much less powerful
I know they’re not the only brand of laptops that may be ‘lacking’, shall we say, but there’s one particular brand – let’s call them ‘LeonardEgg’ – that are just utterly useless. I’ve had three through work and, within a few months of receiving them brand new, they just keep crashing and freezing, keys stop working, the trackpad seizes up, the cursor disappears, the speakers randomly cut out, multiple issues in nearly-new laptops. Even by design, they re-assign standard commonly used and understood useful F-key shortcuts to something that nobody normally cares about – and mostly only ever catch by accident, before worrying about how to undo/get rid of it again. It’s like having an etch-a-sketch with a web browser.
I gather that they use very low-grade components as their policy – usually soldered into place in one unit rather than clipped or screwed, so you can’t even easily replace a faulty part yourself.
To be honest (even though this particular company sell a lot of expensive laptops too, not necessarily much better), I think laptops are one of those things where people have an unrealistic idea of what they should cost, and so manufacturers cut all manner of corners and ‘build down’ to achieve those prices. We accept that a decent mid-range smartphone will be about £400-£600, yet we expect £250-£400 to buy a perfectly good reliable laptop – with so many more components and materials and far more processing power.
Re the foil, I’ve noticed more places offering ‘strong foil’ as an option now - obviously considerably more expensive than the basic ones. I wonder if that’s the industry-wide euphemistic code for ‘foil that actually does the job of foil’? Who on earth is using foil just for wrapping sandwiches or whatever these days, when a tupperware box does the job much better and is so much less wasteful? Even cling film – environmental horror that it may be – will keep the food airtight; but foil as a first choice for wrapping food in???!