Favorite Sony Gaffe?

Not on the list but here's why I'll never buy anything Sony ever again. Three years ago I purchased a Vaio notebook and within six months the letters had started to wear off of the keyboard, the battery had failed and the DVD writer could only read disks. Sony refused to honor the warranty because I had wiped the hard drive and installed a Linux distro, they regarded it as an 'unauthorized modification'.

Friends don't let friends buy Sony.

Ganty

That's horsecrap, you should have sent them a copy of the Magnuson-Mass warranty act. If you change something to a product that has nothing to do with it's failing, they must honor the warranty. For example, if I put a new radio in my car and a month later the transmission falls out, the car company can't claim that they won't honor the warranty because I modified the car.

I really loved Planetside, stopped playing it for a couple years then came back to it - only to find myself with a suspended account for a month (immediately I tried to cancel the subscription and they charged me again - refused to cancel until the suspension was lifted) due to "cheating" because I had a graphics card that apparently counted as a cheat due to it's ability to process faster than cards did nearly a decade prior when the game had come out. When I filed a bug report they added another 2 weeks to the suspension for "spamming their forums" with a single post about the glitch they had apparently just left in to exploit customers that would otherwise choose to cancel their accounts - getting me charged for another unplayable month. Planetside is by far my worst Sony experience and those fuckers should be shut down for how they treat users.

In Sony's defense, we all know that Linux will cause the letters to wear off the keyboard. I'm still waiting for a patch so I can stop buying replacement keyboards every other week.

Our company has had problems with many of the Apple computers we have purchased. From keyboards and trackpads sporadically not working on the original MacBook, video scrambling and freezing on MacBook Pros, which were given logic boards as a temporary fix, to blacking out video and video flicker on newer MacBook Pros (Late 2008 Model and newer). Some of these Late 2008 and newer MacBook Pro models, when under their first year warranty, were given new logic boards as a temporary "fix". And after enough failures under warranty some were even replaced by Apple. Others which failed or failed again outside of warranty, are now very expensive Apple-branded hunks of beautifully water-jetted aluminum. Apple's discussion forums are full of people having the same issues we have here with their laptops. I, for one, am no longer disillusioned by Apple products; I can't imagine laptops from other manufacturers could have much worse track records. At least their users probably didn't pay as much for their computers.

They remained quite popular in a certain niche - recording enthusiasts. Nowadays I'm sure you can get a flash-based digital recording device that's much better, but up until just a few years ago minidisc was the best reasonably priced option for recording things (like concerts/demo tapes, nature, or anything else you may wish to record the sound from without spending tons of money).

With Hi-MD you could record in lossless WAV format for however much the 1GB discs could manage (90 minutes or so), or in compressed format for quite a while longer (though in classic Sony fashion it was their proprietary ATRAC format). It's true the regular minidiscs had a laughably small capacity once mp3s were in common use, but the Hi-MD discs at 1 GB (for about $7-8 per disc) were pretty good for the time (soon to be made obsolete by iPods and similar devices with large capacities of course).

I bought one in around 2005 or 2006 because I wanted a music player, but I didn't want an iPod and I didn't like the other mp3 players that were available (basically I chose it to be different) and I was interested in making bootleg concert recordings (I only ended up doing that once, but it was cool and the recording is great quality). It played mp3s and everything, you didn't have to use ATRAC. It turned heads when I swapped out discs to play different stuff. Practically speaking, it was kind of ridiculous, and an iPod at that point would have been the smart choice for a mp3 player, but I liked it a lot (I still have it but don't use it).

I bought a Cowon X5L a couple years later, and kept using that until last year when I got a smartphone (Nexus One). Both the Cowon and the N1 are much better media players :) But, the minidisc still holds a special place in my heart, and I suspect it's the same story for most people who used them (especially in their heyday, which was a few years before I got mine). There are very few technologies that you can really say that about, I think.