Happy to see Sony hate. Sony was Apple before Apple.

The vita was amazing, but destroyed by the stupid proprietary memory cards that were obscenely expensive

Then again, the Xperias are pretty damn good and use stock Android without all the bloat that other manufacturers add.

If anyone reading this is considering cheaper Sony bluetooth headphones versus the comparable Anker product, go with Anker! The speaker and a few models of headphones I've used were much better and cheaper than the comparable Sony product.

Their professional CD audio recorders only take CDRs with special "generation bits" in some desperate stupid attempt to reduce copying even though everybody else's CD recorders don't care about the bit.

They invented their stupid proprietary memory sticks even though SD cards were cheaper and more readily available.

The power plugs for their devices of course are not barrel plugs so you can't replace them with a cheap and easily available replacement.

They're complete assholes to their customers.

I'd say the HP is at least on par with them. They're software locking which RAM or WiFi modules you can use in their laptops and theyuse as much proprietary components as possible in their desktops and servers, just because they can. And that's not even talking about printers...

4th place I think would go to LG, but thankfully they're not big enough to be noticeable

All Japanese tech and adjacent companies are so extremely corporatised. Panasonic, Toshiba, Fuji, Mitsubishi etc. They protect their profits through proprietary connectors and firmware, and the overworked Japanese populace puts up with it over there. Where it's for an international market, that's made clear by the fact that there's almost never a Japanese language option (see: games and other media that protects the corporations' IP for Japanese voice actors). Living there I was always disturbed by how the government let this happen and there was no social movement to do anything about it. The zaibatsu are still in control of the country, of course.

To be honest, the real problem with betamax was that Sony never thought about longer tape lengths. They just designed a cartridge and then got in trouble when they had to catch up with VHS when VHS offered longer play time. People wanted to record a football game when they were away and you just couldn't do that with early Betamax. And even later on, VHS stayed supreme in playback length. Even though video quality was never as good as Betamax. I guess this also goes to show is that most people don't care about the quality of a device but the usability of a device. Which brings us right back and why people would want to use bluetooth audio even if it is a sub optimal experience.