What gets me about sub-standard equipment is not so much that they can't do basically the same thing as more pricier stuff (though sometimes that is true), it's the little annoyances that, over time, make me want to chuck shit into the garbage.<p>For example, an MP3 player has only a few core behaviors.  But it gets tiresome if boot time is slow, or it freezes at boo every 20th time, or the screen is hard to read, or there's a pop or click in between every track, or you can't resume playing where you left off, and so on.<p>Often what makes take a long time in picking what brand of device to buy isn't so much the core qualities but what feature set versus known flaws will make me happiest over some period of time.