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Declining quality of consumer-grade products – 2009 fridge compressor autopsy (automaticwasher.org)
659 points by userbinator on Aug 14, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 753 comments



From the notes: "These marginal design choices are not the only way to get an efficient unit, since the fridge compressors from the 1940's and 1950's era were very efficient, while having consistently longer lives. This failed unit is purely an example of doing just enough to get by until it is someone else's problem."

I've been seeing this as a common issue throughout most of the household appliances we've tried to buy in the last ten years. They just don't last.


Yep, some are so shitty that the whole product category becomes garbage. We went on an adventure with blenders:

1. We bought a Bosch hand blender (maxomixx) because it looked sturdy and was priced near the top at the mall -- thought that the brand and the price tag would guarantee that it would last. It broke after 8 months, turns out that the coupling between the mixer and the body is made of plastic that wore off. I called the Bosch service hotline, they told me that the whole body is one "part" that I can buy for ~80% of the original price.

2. Went back to the mall looking for one with metal coupling, turns out there is NONE. All of them are garbage with the same fault point. But luckily there is a wide selection of standing blenders, where some of them had much more massively looking, metal gears. Bought one from Electrolux. It broke after 3 months, this time the bearing on the bottom of the blender cup started leaking the grease into our food...

3. Gave up trying to get a blender from the mall, bought a Vitamix for 7x the price, which we're happy with for the last 3 years.

Yes, there is plenty of planned obsolence out there, and one of the greenest things you can do is buy premium stuff that will last you a lifetime (if you can afford it :/ )


I'd happily pay 5x the price of the cheapest product available, if I knew I was getting a higher quality product with a longer lifetime.

However, I can never tell if this 5x premium actually gets me a better core product, or just gets me better branding, advertising, aesthetics, and/or superfluous features.

So I usually just buy the cheapest and hope for the best.


In Germany there's an independent organisation, Stiftung Warentest [−4], that anonymously buys various products in stores and tests them quite rigorously. Some may say perhaps a bit too well (including things like the manual, how easy it is to set up a large appliance, or whether toxic chemicals are used in parts that are handled), but overall they seem to do a very good job. Testing and scoring methodology is published as well. I trust them a lot more than Amazon or YouTube reviews or some random blog that got the product sent by its manufacturer.

[−4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung_Warentest – the article also has a few pointers to international, similar organisations near the bottom.


There is a similar organization in the USA: Consumer Reports. It used to be a magazine, now I believe it's just a website. Entirely funded by subscription - and not advertisement or other sponsorship - they tackle entire categories of consumer goods in the USA, rigorously testing and ranking competing products across many metrics.


They are also incorruptible.

If they give your product good marks, you are not allowed to mention it in your marketing (Not sure how they enforce it; maybe they stop reviewing your stuff).

I worked at a company that regularly got top marks from them, and our Marketing folks would have fits, because they couldn't mention it.


Sounds great, but Consumer Reports definitely has a checkered past. Read about the Suzuki Samurai debacle, in which they methodically manipulated their tests (strictly for that vehicle, and not any of the others in its class that they were simultaneously evaluating), with the goal of destroying the vehicle's reputation.

https://www.aim.org/aim-report/aim-report-a-black-eye-for-co...


I'm not sure what the point is of linking to a reference that also features pieces titled:

'The media lied to you about COVID-19 – TAKE ACTION NOW'

'Critical Race Theory in schools, take action now!'

'Gender activists are politicizing the dictionary: TAKE ACTION NOW'

'Stand up for Rush – TAKE ACTION NOW'

'VOX buries the truth'

'CNN admits Hunter Biden ‘a real problem’ for Joe Biden, not ‘a right-wing media story’'

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Accuracy_in_Media

I am less confident about either your contention or about the position you are attacking than about the idea that this particular website is going to lie to me about it.


Why does anyone need to stand up for Rush? It was a great band and not really controversial, plus they disbanded years ago because the drummer died. They don't exist any more, just like Led Zeppelin no longer really exists (also because the drummer died, coincidentally).


Just four days ago they played at Red Rocks with Matt Stone on drums for South Park's 25th: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lel5JGJfwqQ

RIP Neil Peart


That's not really Rush, just like the surviving Led Zeppelin players playing a concert with Jason Bonham isn't really LZ. The guest drummer isn't an official band member in either case, just a guest musician. The band itself just doesn't exist; now it's "the surviving members of band X". Pink Floyd is the same way; they disbanded after their keyboardist died.


Spock: Captain we need to send down a landing party to investigate the radiation leak.

Kirk: Send some red shirts.

Spock: They're all in Agile training today.

Kirk: Do we have any rock drummers?


She's Buying the Stairway to Heaven TAKE ACTION NOW


Led Zeppelin should reunite with the deceased drummer’s son playing drums - TAKE ACTION NOW


> Led Zeppelin should reunite with the deceased drummer’s son playing drums

That's kind of how it worked when Zep was one of the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors a few years back, with Ann and Nancy Wilson + Jason Bonham, son of John, + others doing Stairway to Heaven.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFxOaDeJmXk


Jason Bonham made a couple of fun records in late 80s/early 90s with his group "Bonham". I'd be up for seeing a reunion.


It was ridiculous how long it took for them to be enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but that finally happened a few years back.


The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a complete joke, and has nothing to do with real Rock and Roll music. They regularly induct musicians and performers who have absolutely nothing to do with Rock. It's best to just ignore the whole institution.


That was a bizarre gardening accident.


Who cares, it's easy? I did my part: I just stood up and went to the bathroom.


I'm still not sure why I'm standing up for Rush, I don't even like the band, but I took action. Immediately!


Hey, I love Rush! "Hemispheres" is my favorite album by them!


All sound like accurate headlines in today’s political landscape.


So the website also publishes right wing propaganda. Does that invalidate the claims in the article he linked? Did you read the article before formulating your opinion?

This is basic critical thinking, you don't have to be as shallow as many readers of that website probably are, you're just choosing to be.


If somebody writes for you a long piece featuring many pages of text and references, quoting lawsuits and making numerous reasonable-seeming inferences throughout...

The opportunity they have to lie to somebody who is unfamiliar with the subject is immense. Falsehood could be hiding in any of a thousand places, and it could easily require you to hire a team of experts for weeks to find it and conclusively debunk it, line by line. It may well require decompiling what is functionally or literally the source code behind the piece to dismiss one's suspicions. "Basic critical thinking" is not trivial against a determined adversary.

Whether to take the claims within on face value depends on your purpose and on what you know of the writer. In this case, it is very easy to become quite familiar with this motivation and ethics of the writer in under a minute by clicking around the website, and come to the reasonable conclusion that this is a place that generally attempts to deceive their reader to secure material gain for their patrons & movement, and there are likely deliberate lies somewhere in the body of the piece. You don't even need to read the body.


In general, if someone cites a wacky propaganda website as evidence for something, I'm going to assume that they're doing this because there's no proper evidence. I suppose occasionally this isn't the case, and they've just made a bizarre choice on what to link, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

Indeed, the real story would appear to be rather more nuanced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzuki_Motor_Corp._v._Consumer....


Are you really wondering why someone is skeptical of an article on a website which is already clearly willing to publish falsehoods?


Sure it's stupidly sensationalized, but most of those statements listed are true.


All of those are objectively true.

Please list one of those that are false, so you can be educated.


> that gets little media attention

It did not get little media attention. Indeed, the lawsuit got rather a lot.

> AIM has submitted an amicus brief in the case, arguing that Suzuki should be allowed to present its evidence to a jury. It is hard to understand how any judge could honestly rule that the evidence in this case does not prove that the defendant knew that its claim that the Samurai “rolled over easily” was false.

The source definitely has a dog in this hunt.

Who are we to believe, a partisan in the lawsuit, or the trial judge? And why?

It's very likely that AIM's goal is to present the best facts in their argument, and ignore or minimize other factors. Or as CU put it (quoting https://www.theautochannel.com/news/press/date/19970422/pres... ): "First it was the cigarette makers, now it's an automobile manufacturer. Different industries, same desperate tactics. Throw up a smoke screen, hurl ludicrous charges, and falsely claim (despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary) that their product is safe -- all to avoid liability for defective and dangerous products." ...

> "We welcome and invite NHTSA to evaluate our honesty and integrity. Courts have done so and found unanimously that our methodology was beyond reproach. For example, the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York -- one of the nation's most highly respected courts -- has said that our work 'exemplifies the very highest order of responsible journalism.'"" ...

> "On the other hand, Dr. Pittle said, in a decision that the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review, a Federal Court of Appeals stated that Suzuki and its attorneys "engaged in an unrelenting campaign to obfuscate the truth."

> "The truth that was revealed despite Suzuki's cover-up is that Suzuki knew -- prior to first selling the car in the U.S. -- that the vehicle had a 'rollover problem' and that General Motors refused to sell the car because its evaluation demonstrated the danger of rollover," Dr. Pittle said.

Do you really expect HN readers to act like trial court judges and decide which of these two partisans are correct, and dig through decades old material to offer a point-by-point rebuttal?

If the evidence is so clear-cut, why did Suzuki and CU end up with a rather mundane settlement?


Basic critical thinking is "if the publication lies in every other article, the expected value of this one additional article is close to zero".

Critical thinking does not require you to carefully parse every bit of garbage on the planet.


I hadn't heard about this, thanks for the link. I did a little digging and it doesn't appear be quite as clean cut as that article says. For instance, check out https://www.theautochannel.com/news/press/date/19970422/pres... (a CR press release), where they mention internal Suzuki documents acknowledging the rollover issue.


I've read the text of the lawsuit. As you mention, this is a press release, so I'm highly skeptical of it. Video documentation of CR's manipulation of the tests is on YouTube. It's wild stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2Bv9WL3vpY


Best guess? CR fabricated their test results because they couldn't figure out how to replicate the real-life problems on their test course. Which is to say, both sides are in the wrong.


Every review site "fabricates their test reults" thats the whole point. You create a test that documents your assistent.

The ruling on an appeal makes the argument better than i could.

> [The] først theory is that CU know it was probably lying because its employees tries to make the samurai flip and we're happy when they suceeded. The second is that CU purposely avoided the truth by failing to address a potential source of experimental error. Neither of these theories withstands serious scrutiny

The opinion end up concluding that the entire reason for changing the test setup, along with a description of the changes, was present in the article.

What a non-story.


I think Consumer Reports has an opinionated editorial voice. But I think that’s inevitable in that line of work.

SUVs evolved to address the risks pointed out by CR and other entities. They mostly have wider wheelbases and lower centers of gravity.


Well, at least this wasn’t in the “pretend it’s better direction” so it’s a at least still reliable in helping pick good quality.


Not if you were trying to decide between the Samurai and the other vehicles CR was "evaluating" (a Wrangler and the Bronco II). Internally, CR's testers praised the Samurai as having the best handling of the bunch, but their editor made sure the public never heard this.


What are you talking about? The original review literally mentioned: "Under the touch of our drivers, all four utility vehicles got through the course at 52 mph or better. The Suzuki Samurai was actually more maneuverable than the others, since it's so much smaller and lighter"

Tell me again how it was some cover up. They literally published your argument along with the review.


They might be ethical, but they don't "live" with appliances to really figure out what they're dealing with, either. I used Consumer Reports' recommendation to buy a full set of appliances for a new house about 18 years ago. I bought "GE Gold" washer, dryer, fridge, stove, microwave, and dishwasher.

Within 2 years, every single one had failures. For instance, the oven's convection fan failed in a month. The washer AND dryer completely failed within 3 years. I bought refurbished units from a local guy, and when I told him what I had, he didn't even want them to flip again.

I, too, resigned myself to the fact that, unless you pay for commercial-grade appliances, it's all crap, and you may as well just buy the cheapest thing at Lowe's, and replace it when it fails. The industry deserves all the loss of trust they have earned.


I’ve had great success with them, my vacuum is going strong after 13+ years, washer and dryer great after 9 years. But I’m still harboring negative feelings about their car reviews. They marked the 2013 Ford Edge as a great vehicle with minimal flaws, but when they reviewed the 2014 Ford Edge they found an array of problems and lowered the score. While I was researching and shopping for my Ford Edge I found the 2013 and 2014 were exactly the same cars. I think they enhanced the weld points for ANCHOR points to support 60lbs instead of 45lbs, but that was the extent of changes.. small and incremental. Yet CR faulted them for excess road noise, stiff suspension, and reliability. I test drove both mode years and they both performed and sounded exactly the same. Major parts including suspension were interchangeable as well. We went with the 2013 to save money before the CR reviews for 2014 came out. It made me realize their reviews are not consistent, especially when Tesla Model S went from having top marks to all of a sudden being scored very low. These are not cars that drastically changed between the years, so just buyer beware YMMV

FWIW, I do love my Ford Edge and it is still the daily driver for our household


You do need to distinguish between their reviews (which are done by CR internal people and reflect their values and judgement) and the ratings which are done by surveying CR subscribers who are owners of the products.


I'm a member of CR, but they obviously have their biases and blind spots.

Sometimes they start with a premise they want to prove instead of just providing a straight review of the products. They may do this by selecting the criteria (key performance metrics), for example.

Sometimes, they just don't competently evaluate the products because they fail to take into account real world consumer needs.

The quality of reviews in CR these days doesn't hold a candle to what CR used to provide, but I remain a member because even a weak signal is better than the other random stuff out there like Amazon reviews.


They actually do allow you to mention it in marketing; I've worked with them for a consumer product. What you can't do is use it in "paid" marketing.

Emails, social media posts, website landing pages, collateral in-store/retail is all fully acceptable. You can also pay additional fees to them for additional materials to use in communications.


It is apparently allowed to put a link to the review, saying "Check out how CR reviewed us" e.g. https://www.lg.com/us/laundry


Another similar site is https://www.rtings.com/. They do very scientific, thorough quality tests. I've only used them to buy monitors so far, but it looks like they're starting to branch out from tech -- they have new categories for blenders and vacuums.


Hopefully they don't go the same path as the Wirecutter. Started out great and small and independent and slowly started watering down reviews as they branched into more and more areas. They are now owned by the NYTimes and the quality of the reviews is much more hit and miss.


rtings is trying to push a subscription now. I was looking up wireless mice latency, and after looking at 5 mice, I had used up all my free views of "advanced metrics" like click latency.

rtings does good work, I'd pay a flat fee for it. But a subscription for a website I check every 2-3 years when I'm upgrading some tech? I'll just clear my cookies.


> I was looking up wireless mice latency, and after looking at 5 mice, I had used up all my free views of "advanced metrics" like click latency.

If you're specifically looking at mice, you might want to check out RocketJumpNinja. The reviews are pretty biased towards suitability for FPS, but they are quite in depth, and the reviewer is pretty knowledgeable.


Wirecutter has always been hit or miss.


Their conclusions are somewhat suspect sometimes though… with weird qualifications for “best” that often barely effect actual functioning. Like, heavily weighting quietness over power.


Are you referring specifically to their car reviews? Those seem to regularly attract criticism for not being more like traditional car enthusiast-oriented reviews.

I think that's largely due to car enthusiasts having insufficient self-awareness about the degree to which their priorities differ from those of mainstream consumers. PC gamers and PC building enthusiasts are also frustratingly prone to this kind of thing. (I spent several years reviewing PC hardware for a living, which included constantly fielding comments from readers who seemed to be genuinely unable to understand how their could be a market for low-end components.)


I remember reading their computer reviews a few decades ago and being gobsmacked at how ignorant their process and conclusions were.

I assume that other articles have similar issues, and that I'm just unaware because they're not within my area of expertise.


CR's core failing is, on the surface, their greatest strength: they refuse to have any "special" contact with any manufacturers. Unfortunately, this also means that they don't ask, or listen, when their test procedures are nonsensical.


Last year, I was looking to upgrade my desktop. Found a review that was bemoaning a motherboard because it only had two M.2 slots. How many consumers use two, let alone would benefit from a third?


I have opposite bemoaning for recent motherboards: only one PCIe slot (x16) is directly connected to CPU (not via chipset). It's useless to have PCIe 5.0 x16 slot even for average consumer because 4.0 x8 is still enough for modern GPU for gaming and even if it become not enough, 5.0 x8 should be enough for foreseeable future. Lack of high bandwidth dedicated PCIe slots for other than GPU makes the PC less expandable, e.g. video capture, another GPU (not for SLI), 10GbE, HBA, etc...


I hate it too. The allocation of PCIe lanes is garbage unless you spend $500 on a motherboard. We should have had the lanes divided better once we hit 4.0 speeds. At 5.0 speeds, it's absurd that 16 full-speed lanes would go to a single slot except for very specialist scenarios.


Part of the problem is that it's quite difficult to get a PCIe 5.0 signal to travel further than the first slot while keeping the motherboard price reasonable by consumer standards.


I suspect that AMD & Intel push the motherboard manufactures in that direction. You can certainly get more high-speed PCIe slots if you get one of the higher-end product lines (Threadripper, Xeon, etc.)


Flexible I/O is one of those things Motherboard manufacturers reserve for the upper price ranges, unfortunately.


Yeah sadly now. PCIe x8/x8 or x8/x4/x4 (bifurcation) from CPU was common in standard priced board like Z170X-UD3, but now requires mid-high priced board. More flexible slots (dynamic switch by PLX chip) is always for highends.


Since the only thing consumers use full size PCIe slots for now is for a single GPU, extra M.2 slots isn't that big of an ask. One M.2 keyed for an interchangeable wifi card, one for NVMe storage, and then an extra one if you want to upgrade to more storage later. If you only have one keyed for storage, you're SoL when you buy a bigger one later and it's very inconvenient to move data over.


PC motherboard marketing and reviews usually don't count the WiFi card slot when tallying up the number of M.2 slots (since approximately zero motherboards are sold with an empty WiFi-type M.2 slot), so the complaint was most likely about not having more than two storage-type M.2 slots.


It's not a big ask, but it's also quite unimportant. Adapter cards to put one M.2 card into a PCIe slot are in the $5 range, and better adapters will do four.


At least they're open about how they weighed their values. And they give you enough information to draw your own conclusions from your own values. Some people want to be told what's "best", and they've found a way to make everyone (minus one) happy.


Consumers Report still has a magazine - I subscribe to it for a lower cost than the online access.


I had a problem with them where their rating methodology for carpet cleaners was not adequate. So the cleaner with strongest cleaning capability was like 10th in the list, instead of first


It's still a magazine. Source: I work at a library and put the September 2022 issue on the shelf last week.


My dad always used Consumer Reports to pick products, and... I dunno, they didn't seem to be super great.


I've seen some reviews for which I know a fair amount, and often the testing and rating rubric are ... Bewildering and unsophisticated. I love the idea of Consumer Reports a lot more than the actual thing itself.


> I love the idea of Consumer Reports a lot more than the actual thing itself

Yeah, exactly. I really love the idea, but not the results.


My issue with them is twofold: a) The "testing too much" part, specifically things like how well translated the manual is, for example. I don’t care. And b), it’s a blackbox. There are no real details for how they arrived at the rating of some subsection.

ETM [0] is subscription funded and their tests are far more detailed, and they even show the data (e. g. power usage curves for a toaster, measured air replacement curves for a fan, etc.).

[0]: https://etm-testmagazin.de/


Perhaps the magazine is good, but the website doesn’t leave a good impression: I search for dehumidifier, and all I get is the info about one particular model being released, an article that reads more like an ad, without any testing done.


They recently (about a year ago) redesigned their website, and it’s a disaster. I have absolutely NO idea what they were thinking. Links aren’t working properly, and as usual for an SPA, it’s slower now. It’s even hard to actually navigate anywhere now.

Anyway, in this case, they simply have not tested any dehumidifiers.


Do they do tear-downs and rate the engineering? That's pretty much the only way to determine how likey something is to last without using it for ten years.


I don't think they do tear-downs but they do stress test them extensively. Their reports also include their testing methods in detail. For washing machine testing, for example, they independently bought 3 of each model and ran each through 1840 cycles. That's equivalent to 3.5 cycles per week for 10 years. They checked how the machine held up in comparison to the beginning and if any repairs were needed.


AvE does this on his YT channel, though only for hand tools and adjacent stuff (he did a Juicero once and it was utterly hilarious).


Juicero teardown is one of the best youtube videos ever made.


The Australia Choice magazine does pretty hefty stress tests. No tear downs though.


> I trust them a lot more than Amazon or YouTube reviews or some random blog that got the product sent by its manufacturer.

Yeah same, those reviews are either bought, or made on a whim by people who aren't critical of what they buy - especially if the company or seller goad them into reviewing with giveaways or whatever. There will be good reviews, but they will be buried in the thousand+ mediocre ones.


We have the same in australia too, called choice magazine. https://www.choice.com.au/


And even better, OzBargain.com.au crowdsourced one liner reviews, surprisingly valid :)


Thanks for sharing, this is great information. I definitely think that independent testing organizations are important for quality so it’s always great to hear of more of them


In the US, the closest example is Consumer Reports ( https://www.consumerreports.org/ ); there actually are a lot of these orgs worldwide. It's pretty cool.

They often are somewhat marginal at the edges - e.g., for computers. But otherwise they are useful for consumer products.


It seems common all across Europe, maybe the whole western world.

Here for France: https://www.60millions-mag.com/tests-comparatifs

(I just laughed as I see they even review fries brands, and sex toys...)


Same stuff in France : 60 million de consommateurs.

They also provide help to launch class action. ( that exists differently than a US class action )


This is the core issue that prevents reliable consumer products from becoming more widespread. Even if demand exists for more reliable consumer goods, consumers don't have the ability to actually evaluate reliability at the time of purchase.

Manufacturers can't justify producing a more reliable product at a higher price point, because there isn't really a way to get consumers to trust that it really is a more reliable product worthy of the price.


There is a way, it’s the reputation that builds over time and is associated with your brand. It’s why many people buy Toyota by default. It’s why we paid 5x the price for a Miele vacuum (which are awesome, by the way). It’s just that most people either can’t or just won’t pay a significant premium for it, so those products tend to be niche.

Of course, many execs look at brand value as something to be harvested for short term gains to the value of their options, but that’s a different problem.


PE buying a brand to ‘harvest the brand value’ has become extremely common in tools, and has ruined a lot of things.


They have more techniques too, like having store- or region-specific models that probably are all essentially the same but have different model numbers and slightly different feature sets just to make searching for reviews and price comparisons more difficult.


Sometimes they aren't essentially the same, but instead different in invisible ways. DeWalt grinders at Canadian Tire used to use plastic parts where metal was typically used. Outside of the different SKU it was difficult to tell the difference.


Walmart is notorious for this - they push really hard on suppliers to reduce prices, and suppliers usually do so by cutting quality. However everyone still pretends it’s the same (including identical outside appearance).


This so much. At least over here it's completely impossible to find reviews of whiteware (refrigerators, washing machines etc.), at most a handful on the local reseller homepage.


even TVs suffer from this - tons of european models have different numbering/code, and unless you are die hard fan who understands various manufacturers product lines year by year, looking for products in Europe based on ie US reviews can get tricky.


That is more to allow big box stores to advertise "price match" when they know no one else as the "exact same model"

See this Drill is DW345, we sell DW350, it is 5 better


Absolutely, it's everywhere, not just in tools. Brand X known for quality decides to, well like you said, drop production cost and 'harvest the brand value'. Then after a while when the reputation is sullied, the same conglomerate / holding company launches another 'upscale' brand. Rinse and repeat.


I almost feel like it should be deemed fraud or false advertising, although I have no idea how we should draw the line and ultimately we probably shouldn't.


That was liking riding along in your mind as you constructed your thought! :)


The problem then is if the brand cashes in on the reputation while moving production to China and using cheaper parts whilst charging the premium price still.


In some sense, the longer the brand has been around, the less likely they are to pull an exit scam.


It’s the opposite in my experience - older brands have a hard time keeping up with newer trends and are more likely to be bought out by PE to ‘harvest value’, as they’re not as profitable right now.


In order for something to become old, it has to have resisted attempts on its life so far.


That didn’t work out well for Craftsman (or Sears in general), Milwaukee, and a bunch of other brands!


The tool market is an example of that not being the case

Craftsman, Portal Cable, Bosch, Stanley, the list goes on and on, of once independent brands that have been bought out by mass marketers to sell lower quality tools under those names


Another point - there is a difference between being 'old' (a 40 year old veteran solder is 'old', for instance, even if they're still in extremely good physical condition), and being 'old' as in 95 years old and can barely get out of bed.

From a PE/market perspective, the sweet spot seems to be the 95 year old with a good reputation that still carries weight.

I imagine it's because of the good spread between current price and expected returns, as the 'old' brands this is done with aren't usually very profitable, if at all.


Yeah, that's the exec short term gain thing. But it doesn't take too much research to check if that's happened before pulling the trigger, people are pretty vocal when that happens to their favorite brands.


Yeah just look at the recent reviews of Dyson vacuum cleaners. People buying the reputation but the quality has gone to shit.


I used to work with a mechanical engineer that was formerly at Dyson and he was rather scathing of their design policies, the tolerances being calculated badly and so on. The effect is everything feels "a bit loose".


Yep, I wouldn't buy Dyson again. If a manufacturer wants to preserve its reputation it shouldn't be making cordless vacuums with batteries that run out within 10-15 minutes.


Not being able to trust brand reputation is the same problem, not a different problem.


Many execs have short term personal incentives, so short term gains suit fine.


Re Miele - my sample size of one dates to 1987 and still is my main vac. So at some point in the past they were probably quite good (or I got really really lucky). FWIW


Ha awesome. Before I bought, I did some reading about vacuums that repair shops thought were good, Miele seemed to top the list at the time. It’s been great, despite suffering a decent amount of clumsiness-related abuse.


It's not easy, but it can be done.

We found Miele for dishwashers. Zwilling for our toaster, JennAir for microwave...

We explicitly avoided "smart" anything. I shouldn't need to connect my refrigerator to wi-fi.

But we've watched the crap curve take hold on a bunch of product categories, especially U.S. brands. Hannah Anderson used to make good quality, reliable children's clothes that didn't wear out when you looked at them funny. Not any more. Other brands that used to make clothing that lasted 20+ years now makes thin garbage that might last a season. Many of these transitions were to "Made in China" manufacturing.

We went to replace a ten-year old electric coffee grinder and couldn't find one for less than $1700 that wasn't garbage. We switched to a hand grinder as the only reasonable alternative.

It is very frustrating to try to find things that will last. My parents bought one refrigerator, and it lasted for more than 30 years. Most of their stuff they were able to get once. Not every two or three years.


I must disagree on the coffee grinder front. There's a great number of decent options well under your given price (I just took the plunge recently).

Brands like Ceado and Eureka make a bunch at various price ranges. 600 gets you a decent one, 1200 and you're well into very nice grinder territory (unless you wanna go all audiophile here).

There's not a ton to go wrong: good motor, bearings, a well designed adjustment mechanism and a good hopper design. Of those I'd really only expect the bearings and motor to die in any reasonable time frame.

If you're that concerned you could always get a commercial model. There's no way home use will kill one of those, but it'll just be big and impractical.


We landed on commercial coffee grinders for any with motors. The hand mill we ended up with does much better for pour-over coffee than any of the electrics at roughly a tenth of the price and counter space. Only requires elbow-grease and some good hand-torque.


Can I leverage your research for myself...Which hand grinder did you go with?


I'm not sure what the parent uses but I really enjoy using my Comandante Mark IV (which solves some issues with Mark III had, namely around body design). It's high quality, reliable, and consistent, and also easy to maintain since there's only a few parts that need cleaning. There are also a range of colors if you want something more eye popping. For me the only downside (besides price, it's around €275) is that I find the large logo on the side a little gaudy, but in practice it's not that bad.


The Commandante is one of the ones we would have purchased, though it wasn't available when the pandemic was in full swing. The one that I ended up with was the BPlus Apollo hand-grinder (made in Taiwan).

Very sturdy, easy to use, easy to clean, and surprisingly quiet.

Random review: https://www.home-barista.com/blog/bplus-apollo-hand-grinder-...


The Kinu m47 was unavailable (fire in the factory, pandemic...).

Went with the BPlus Apollo. See my response below to yaldiz.


I do like a good hand grinder, used one for years (Commandante) until I got lazy and wanted a machine to do the work.


The 20$ coffee grinder I got at target years ago still runs great...


I have one of those, newer than that, and the bearings are going out.


Has there been a change in Baratzza? The Virtuoso I bought a decade ago is built like a tank and has replacement parts available for consumables.

The one weakness it has is the plastic ring that holds the upper burr set. This appears to be intentionally designed to break as a sacrificial part if anything jams. Replacements are a few bucks.


I don't agree with that. There is a way to clearly signal that you're standing behind the quality of your products: offer an outstanding warranty.

If I was choosing between brand A and twice as expensive brand B, and brand B said "we trust that our stuff will last so we offer a 10-year, no questions asked warranty", I would go for B in a heartbeat. (As long as it was a brand with some history so I can trust they don't just go out of business.)


Some brands have gotten around this by offering a 10 years warranty*

* insert terms so onerous you’re very unlikely to claim, you have to ship the item on your own dime halfway across the world, if defect is deemed not covered (and you bet it won’t be) disposal at your expense or return as is at your expense, extended warranty void if you didn’t do $frivolousThing at time of purchase and not a day later, extended warranty doesn’t transfer to new owner, etc.


The problem is that the confident is just a confident by brand B, and possibly the warranty term is not decided from confident but from competitor's warranty term. Personally I don't want very long warranty term for some products (I came up with PC PSU 12yr warranty). Warranty increases product cost that I should pay finally, but some products never be used so long by me.


warranty has been replaced with AAS.


Don't know that acronym, is is "a-hat as a service?"

like help lines which charge 80 cents/minute to not help you?


as a service already has 2 'a's.


> because there isn't really a way to get consumers to trust that it really is a more reliable product worthy of the price

That is what warranties are for. You say it is reliable? Put it in writing how long you think it will keep working and what will you owe the customer if it ain’t so.


MTBF. The Engineer's secret way of measuring relative Quality.

MTBF is exec poison. Too high, and the customer doesn't come back, you see, or worse, it's too expensive to build! (According to finance).


Warranties? If you're gonna charge 3 times more for a product, then you should be able to offer a warranty that's much better than that for lower spec equivalents. Yet that rarely seems to happen.


I think there's a growing level of knowledge in some niches that's leading to higher quality items in some circumstances.

In power tools for instance, there's a number of YouTube channels that do high quality testing. In some cases some identified faults appear to have caught the eye of the manufacturer. Hopefully over time this feedback loop will result in higher quality products that still hit their price target.


I've had a blendtec blender for nearly a decade, and recently the gasket at the bottom started leaking. When I looked up pricing for replacing the container, I found it was nearly half the cost of the whole unit.

The motor doesn't sound as good these days, so I considered replacing the whole thing. Fortunately after I wiggled the gasket it seemed to stop leaking!


That gasket melted on mine after 1.5 years. I bought an Alterna-jar to replace it. It's a third-party jar with a significantly more robust bearing block.


Get a Vitamix. 5x the price and seems to last forever. In fact, there are even very old (decades old) used Vitamix’s on eBay that are still running and usually just need a new canister.


But that only says anything about the units that were sold decades ago. It's very common that quality brands with very good reputation are bought by some investors, and then they start selling the same crap as everyone else, but to the premium price that their brand and reputation allow them to. And it works surprisingly long before the new crap they sell destroys their reputation. (I know nothing about Vitamix, they may still be great.)


Vitamix is a private, family owned company.

Your statement would be correct for the majority of companies however, but Vitamix is actually distinct in that regard (currently)


It seems like private family owned companies are the way to go when you want something with decent quality that will last.


You are absolutely correct. This happens far too often, but I don’t think that is the case with Vitamix … yet.


Anecdotally, new units are about the same quality for a higher price than 10-15 years ago. Nothing objective, could be wrong; in my late-2000's case, it was from Costco, so maybe it was higher priced elsewhere.


Modern Vitamix benders (roughly within the last 8 years) have the same declining quality issues.

Newer models are typically much lighter. This means they now have far less internal material to reduce noise. I can't use mine without ear protection since it's about chainsaw level of noise. The reduced weight means I also need to hold onto it during use otherwise it will vibrate itself off the counter.

The company seems to be most interested in selling smoothie recipe subscriptions for their blender companion phone app. Aside from subscription selling the app is pretty much useless -- who wants a phone app to remotely control a blender?


Seems like common problem. Some retarded React App developer gets hired. And now business is no longer making some solid, long lasting blenders but "Connected Healthy Solutions"®

I am sure some next generation developers are already demanding to install VSCode on fridges so one can code on Samsung Smart refrigerators screens.

Wouldn't it be great that while fridge telling about running short on Kale green also download a gigabyte of NPM garbage to display image of Kale green in a bag?


> Some retarded

Do better.


Retarded is a fine word to describe a person that is acting like he/she has a mental handcap. Americans are sooo annoying with the language policing mania, tou guys really need to chill.


Baseball used to be America's favorite pastime, Now it seems taking offense is the most common pastime...


I believe the parent was imploring GP to use stronger words more accurately depicting the aforementioned React App developer, such as "braindead" or similar.


Nah, you sound like a school kid when you write like that.


People seem to use braindead nowadays. A clinical condition resulting from an accident, a stroke, ... such an improvement.


Some rodgerd


> who wants a phone app to remotely control a blender?

Here's an idea: if you find the blender to be too loud, go into a different room, close the door, and remotely trigger the blender with your smartphone app.

We put our blender in our pantry because we can close the door and blend without waking up the baby. Otherwise it (Blendtec) is too loud!

EDIT: to the downvoters, this was tongue in cheek. It would obviously be better for them to spend more money on soundproofing and less on a useless app!


This is the worst part about all this smart phone junk and cooking. It's normalising leaving the room and then cooking something remotely a bit too much.


It all depends. Getting notified for time consuming things is great.

Having my smoker self-manage its temperature and graph the amount of heat it's dumped in is nice. Checking on the temperature ramp of the sous vide is nice, too.


Is blending time-consuming? I guess peanut butter takes a couple minutes, most blending is < 40s IME.


I was just speaking about those specific cases. Running the smoker is a 8-20 hour endeavor. Sous vide is 2-6 usually. Smart devices are kinda nice for this.


For Christmas we replaced my moms vitamix. She had her last one for well over 20 years.

We’ve had ours for 8 years and it works like new and doesn’t smell like the motor is burning out like so many cheap blenders do.


I can second this motion. I've used a lot of blender-like products of various advertised levels of quality, and Vitamix is the only thing I've seen that can take massive levels of abuse for ages.


I can’t speak to the quality of the new ones, but mine is a decade old and still going strong.


Breville seemed to be the better one to go with, but that was a while ago, too.


Worse yet, even some of the traditional "expensive, but built like a tank" companies are starting to shift to being "better branding, advertising" from your list.


When investors put short-term profit ahead of long term brand viability...


Blendtec, KitchenAid


Is it more sturdy and long-lasting? Or does it just have wifi capabilities that put your computer network at risk for no increase in value whatsoever?


This is why I love the genre of teardown videos on YouTube. There is a while world of engineering minded folks tearing down basically everything on YouTube, and saying "what a piece of crap" or "such a brilliant engineered design"


For 5x price, you can probably get commercial grade.


> However, I can never tell if this 5x premium actually gets me a better core product, or just gets me better branding, advertising, aesthetics, and/or superfluous features.

For a wide range of consumables and gear that hackers of the physical world would probably like, check out Project Farm, protoolreviews, ToolGuyd, and of course AvE on YouTube.

For kitchen gear, check out America's Test Kitchen.

I hang out in r/bifl but it isn't as good as it used to be for my personal tastes, as there isn't as much of an emphasis on repairability as I'd prefer.

I wish there was a trend of someone like AvE doing a teardown of junk-quality consumer gear, then by replacing certain parts like bad capacitors, plastic gears, etc., turning it into much higher-quality equipment, and open-sourcing those small parts' design and manufacturing specs.

One hack I employ is I go straight to the servicing departments and find the service technicians, and lately I only go to commercial B2B offerings. They are usually more than happy to tell you which manufacturers and product lines are easiest to diagnose and service (and whether that conjunction of characteristics leads to reliability), have a reliable supply of parts, maintain that parts supply the longest, and have retained all those characteristics the most years. It is no more than a 10-15 minute conversation most service technicians are happy to have.

They will be especially happy to talk with you if you ask them how you can plan to accommodate their service visits more pleasant and efficient to work in. HVAC techs in particular will trade around site porn of customers who planned ahead, put in a proper-sized and sited pad easy to roll up to with all their equipment in their work van, with provisions for ample shade that doesn't obstruct the equipment airflow. They will <squee> over that more than tween girls over the heartthrob du jour.

Then I talk up staff at businesses who have to use the equipment every day to find out the most annoying aspects of using that equipment to determine whether I can put up with those idiosyncracies myself.

There are some manufacturers I will absolutely not even consider in the US for some equipment, for example. Samsung refrigerators; they are not designed to last past the warranty, not designed to be easily diagnosed and serviced, and their parts supply network reflects that. There are some categories of equipment I have absolute requirements no matter where I am in the world. Rigging gear where a failure puts life and safety at risk I will outright refuse to purchase and use from anywhere but Japan, Germany, and the US from long-standing manufacturers making it in those nations. I will pay the price to import it to where I am and wait for as long as it takes to get through customs. I'm beginning to stop using Amazon and switching to direct from manufacturer, distributors, or retailers listed on the manufacturer's web site; the SKU commingling issue has gotten out of hand, and Amazon's poor inventory control has robbed whatever unique value proposition their logistics arm painstakingly built up.


Interestingly, the Bosch food processor we have has a plastic coupling between the motor and the meat grinder attachment on purpose, so if anything gets stuck, it's a 5 € plastic part that's broken, instead of a more expensive and less accessible one. So a plastic coupling alone doesn't sound that alarming in general.


That is only true if the parts are available, often times companies will change the design annually and discontinue the parts making that "easy fix" a time bomb waiting to break and now you have to replace the entire thing

3D printing could resolve some of that, but brands have been known to issue take downs or other legal threats over people sharing models so....


The folks over at Lens Rentals have an excellent blog where they tear down lenses and cameras; they've discussed previously that plastics and metals have strengths and weaknesses, and encouraged people not to simply assume that plastic components in a lens tell you anything about quality or durability.


I think Kitchenaid's have that too, I remember repairing one years ago with my dad.


They do. I've replaced ours twice in 15 years of ownership (and have 3 more replacements in the junk drawer, since they came 5-for-$10: ASIN B07Y7S33RF).

It's a pretty elegant design. Unfortunately, a lot of people (including my wife, initially) would be prone to concluding that the whole unit was “worn out and needed replacing”.


Yes, they precisely have that. Have repaired three Kitchenaid mixers over the years, from different eras. Even in the higher end machines where it is almost all metal gears and parts, the helical gear box in those too is all plastic parts for easy and cheap replacement, and so that anything getting stuck doesn't burn out a more expensive elctrical motor.

I have an immersion blender that also has plastic gears, and even though the motor is sold as a single unit that is not an FRU, you can take it apart and service it with off-the-shelf gears you can source from eBay.

The two coffee grinders I have, high quality metal burrs, plastic gearing, for the same reason.

My higher quality power tools- track saw, drills, etc, all plastic gearing, metal everywhere else.

It just makes sense when it comes to repairs, though can be frustrating when they strip out.

That said, most consumer crap made today is complete shite.


> the helical gear box in those too is all plastic parts for easy and cheap replacement, and so that anything getting stuck doesn't burn out a more expensive elctrical motor.

I preferred metal "shear pins" for this function ... much easier to find replacements for at the local hardware store.


Now that I agree with. Unfortunately their usage in lower end products, and also the move to lighter weight products with higher torque due to brushless motors, seems to have reduced their usage. Maybe because they are an all-or-nothing failure point. Unless you really abuse the gear box, plastic gears don't tend to strip out all at once, they just get "worn" or "sloppy." That said, I think a lot of products are a race to the bottom in some regards.


Your drills have plastic gears simply as a cost saving measure. Spend a bit more and you get powdered metal gears.


Okay, I'll bite, tell me which drills I should be spending a bit more on?


Not sure. I don't think drill manufacturers advertise these details often because they don't want to confuse consumers.

You can try to watch teardowns, like this DeWalt by Ave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHCS7JXfuv0

Gears at 16:40


Yeah, okay, you got nothing.


What are you talking about? You claimed the plastic gears were used as a failsafe. That's not true, higher quality equipment uses metal gears. Drills already have fuses and overload detectors built in.

Go watch some teardowns of cheap stuff vs expensive stuff and stop being a jerk.

I'm not your mom. I'm not gonna explain everything AND shop for you.


[flagged]


Too long to read. Some gears are nylon, yes, which is strong. I didn't get juvenile. I told you to watch teardowns. I don't keep a back catalog of every device with metal gearboxes, sorry.


Also! Way to completely flip the responsibility to on me. Very un-juvenile of you! I wasn't addressing "what tool should I buy", I was addressing "plastic gears are there to protect my drill/impact".

The shopping aspect was uninteresting to me to begin with and was not what I was joining the discussion for. :)


Most garage door openers too.

Unfortunately, it's an open system, so the grease usually dries out after 5-10 years. Undo the 6 screws and put some marine grease on them every couple years everybody.


Garage door maintenance, every two years, regular as clockwork. In Southern California, with all the dust and the dry desert heat, you have to clean them down and regrease regularly. If you don't, they get real noisy, and then they fail. I've looked at closed system units, but they aren't worth the cost vs the 20 or so minutes of biennial maintenance. I'd rather have $3 of plastic gears strip out that I can reorder through a dozen different supplies than actual damage to my door or the infrastructure that holds the door. Though that has become less of an issue on newer units with excessive force sensors.


I bought and installed a Sommer Evo+ (German made), after Chamberlain, Craftsman products crapped out prematurely. So far, so good (7 years), extremely quiet; slow, but well put together.


It depends a lot on where the breakable part is, and whether it can be replaced reasonably. I just did some repairs on our Cuisinart food processor, that highlighted poor design.

The motor is in the base of course, driving a shaft that comes up through the center of the housing. So far, so good. The problem is that this beefy-looking motor is screwed onto three plastic pillars that are just part of the otherwise thin outer housing. Each pillar is essentially an "asterisk" cross-section, probably to minimize material, and it had just snapped off the outer shell. You can buy things like the blades or the plastic bowl, but not random parts from the inside (or, outside).

I managed to get it together with a screw through the housing and a large glob of epoxy putty, but the experience really emphasized that it was pretty much designed to fail.


Its common practice for larger devices as well. E.G. construction equipment will often have an inexpensive rubber coupling between the very expensive 250 HP diesel motor and the hydraulic pump or air compressor that provide useful working fluids to the tools.

Sometimes they can be a right bastard to replace, but its still cheaper and much quicker than replacing a blown hydraulic pump and flushing the system to ensure no filings escaped the filters.


Yes, this is the moral of the story behind the “one boss shay.”

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45280/45280-h/45280-h.htm

A deacon designed a horse cart where all the parts were designed to last a hundred years. Most cart had a weak spot which meant the cart wore out but never broke down. This thing was built with no weak spots.

So on the hundredth and one year to the day, all of a sudden everything failed at the same time and it collapsed into a cloud of dust.


There are 2 issues:

1. They don't sell this coupler as a part. I could get one from abroad for like $7+postage and wait weeks for it.

2. This plastic crap is glued to the motor shaft. I might deform the shaft while trying to fix it.


> it's a 5 € plastic part that's broken

FWIW you can buy used one for that price


planned obsolence out there

I don't think it is planned obsolescence, it is just a race to the bottom on price. At $30, an immersion blender can't have metal gears. Most people value cheapness more than quality, so we get cheap junky products. Nylon gears are a travesty, but most people prefer replacing crap to paying 7x for the Vitamix.


Plenty of planned obsolescence. I won’t go into my rant but my brother is an engineer who is paid very handsomely to make sure that products outlast their warranty period but then fail predictably. He engineers special plastics that degrade rapidly after 5 or 6 years, gears that fail after 10th no later than 12 years, bearing assemblies that will leak but not fail between 4000 to 5500 hours, etc.

Often the components he designs cost more to manufacture that components that would last much, much longer. . To build a pump that will 99 percent make it to 3000 hours, that means half will make it to 9000 hours or more. Unless you really, really make sure that 90 percent will also fail by 4000 hours. It’s not easy to do.

Some products actually incorporate extra parts such as batteries that serve no other purpose than to cause the unit to degrade after a certain time (honeywell thermostats I’m looking at you … their round thermostat includes a lithium cell. When the lithium cell degrades, the at328p processor switches to a limping mode that regulates +/- 10 degrees, but never less than a little over freezing. The (soldered) battery just goes through a resistor to a GPIO pin. It’s just a chemical timer. It serves no other purpose than to make the unit need to be replaced.)

I could go on and on and on, but stuff is definitely designed to fail in predictable ways in a predermined timeframe. Considerable expense is invested in this behavior.


special plastics that degrade rapidly after 5 or 6 years

...so the company making parts with them can then extoll the virtues of "biodegradable" in their marketing...?

Also, for those who doubt the claim about the Honeywell thermostat having a battery, I did some further research, and it does appear to be true:

https://forum.heatinghelp.com/discussion/128526/honeywell-th...

https://www.amazon.com/review/R3V5R0MJGEFNXH

But then this video shows that it is relatively easy to replace, it's not soldered in place, although the comments there do mention that the presence of the battery isn't documented anywhere in the original instructions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VKowLXfERo


The first two links you've provided about the battery don't prove or even suggest that the battery is essentially intended as a chemical timer to disable the thermostat when it runs out, which is the gist of the claim.


We had a over a hundred deployed so I did pretty exhaustive analysis. There is no rtc or anything that needs power. The at328p chip used has nonvolatile storage, the battery does not supply power when the power to the thermostat is removed, and the battery keeps a gpio pin on the mcu high. It’s pretty plain.


Your brother should write a book.


It would be amazing to have a ranking of companies whose products actually work and don't break down after some years. Might be controversial, but I'd place Apple pretty high up there since (excluding the battery thing they did), they built really sturdy hardware that lasts and offer long software support.


when he retires?


I knew planned obsolescence was a thing, but this is just insane to me! At best, it's really disingenuous (which is bad enough). No wonder we have so many conspiracy theorists. They've somehow socially engineered this situation to be acceptable (and relatively unknown).


The subscription model is older than most people realize


But how can we be sure you are telling the truth about who your brother is?

Many people add ficituous evidence of their views because they are so sure they are right.


Have a look at the little plastic bars that connect heater vent louvers on 1994 Toyota 4 runners. You will find that the plastic of the louvers is fine, but the bar that makes them move as a unit if extremely fragile (now). It also is an individually part numbered part with date codes lol. This is how they tell you your car needs replaced without making it unreliable, so you go buy a new Toyota.

Also, the gears inside of refrigerator defrost timers in the 160 refrigerators we bought for an apartment complex. Shockingly, still mechanical. And one of the gears is date coded and has teeth made of a rubbery, disintegrating plastic around a regular nylon wheel. The vast majority of the timers failed in a two years window. At 7-8 years. The cheap replacement timers have no such nonsense and I’ve never seen one fail. Most people just would have replaced the cheap apartment fridge.

This is just some of what I’ve personally seen.

But you are right, I’m just some guy on the internet, I could be just making this up.

And corporations would never make things with life limitations to make more money. Surely. I mean, that would be like a subscription model! Ridiculous!


What kind of battery goes into the Honeywell thermostat you are talking about? Is it one you have to buy from Honeywell, or an off-the-shelf part?

If the latter, how does it help Honeywell that you have to replace it?


It is an off the shelf part. It is (at least in the models I have worked with) possible, but not easy to replace, as the holder is blocked buy other components and the thermostat is not designed to be disassembled. The existence of the battery is undocumented.

Since we had over a hundred of these deployed in an apartment complex, when they started failing I carefully characterized their behavior. It just makes them go wonky when it is removed or dies. The at328p functions fine without it, there is no RTC or anything that needs a battery., and the chip is not powered by the battery when power is removed. In fact, there is no discharge from the battery when power is off. The at328p has nonvolatile eeprom and flash storage.

Interestingly, the wonky behavior it exhibits is the same (but doesn’t go below 40 degrees (f) ) as an old electromechanical one failing lol.


I'm curious too, but even if something is fairly easy to replace or repair a significant amount of people may still just buy new and not bother. (My own landlord is making this choice over a $100 logic board replacement for the garage door opener.)


I think the point is that you (or most people) will replace the entire unit because it's beyond warranty, stops functioning correctly, and a soldered (probably special) battery would be difficult to replace.


There's no such thing as a special battery. No manufacturer is going to have some kind of custom battery manufactured just for one part; they always come in standard sizes and voltages. At the very worst, you could hack in a similar-sized battery with the right voltage.


My bicycle light begs to differ. It’s a standard 18650 cell with a protection PCB slapped on top, and both poles on the same end of the battery.

This is exotic enough that replacements are very hard to find. I can either get the 2 cells needed from the manufacturer at about 70% the cost of a new light, or get a new light. It’s technically repairable/user serviceable, it’s just not practical to do. Apple is playing a similar trick with their 80lbs iPhone repair kit to change the battery yourself: technically user repairable, practically not.


>My bicycle light begs to differ. It’s a standard 18650 cell with a protection PCB slapped on top, and both poles on the same end of the battery.

Huh? You seem to be contradicting yourself: you say it's a standard 18650 cell. That's not something custom, that's something you can buy from an electronics supplier quite easily. And no, having both poles on the same end isn't something custom either, that's just a variant you can buy. You should be able to find this exact part on digikey.com.

>This is exotic enough that replacements are very hard to find.

If you can buy something on digikey.com, it's not "exotic". They even ship small orders by USPS for cheap. It might be "exotic" to a typical consumer, but those people don't know how to use a soldering iron.


This entire thread is people talking about planned obsolescence for _consumer_ devices and you keep making the same rebuttals. Typical home owners who buy a thermostat at Home Depot or cyclists who buy a tail light at a bike shop are unlikely to even know what digikey is, let alone order a replacement (especially if you have to buy in bulk) and do their own soldering to replace it if it's soldered in.

We all know the typical HN reader thinks a fun weekend would be spending 6 hours researching part numbers and getting out the soldering iron, but we are atypical. Most people will assume their product is at the end of its life because the warranty has lapsed and it doesn't work anymore. Companies are apparently betting on that and it's an environmental travesty.


>Typical home owners who buy a thermostat at Home Depot or cyclists who buy a tail light at a bike shop are unlikely to even know what digikey is, let alone order a replacement

Yes, I know. I said this exact thing above.

The parent said these devices used "custom batteries", implying that Honeywell et al were custom-designing and manufacturing their own special nonstandard batteries just for these applications. This is incorrect, and needed to be corrected.


It’s standard in the sense that a 18650 with a protection PCB on top and both poles on the same end isn’t exclusive to this manufacturer and others use it. There is nothing proprietary about it. But it’s not run of the mill 18650 either.

But it’s rare enough that it’s hard to find. So much so that it actually doesn’t make economical sense to find this (rare, at a premium) variant because it would cost about as much or more than a new light (which includes new batteries, ironically)


There are batteries special enough that I can't pick one up at Walmart, and for the general public that may render the device kaput. I didn't say it's an unhackable design.


>There are batteries special enough that I can't pick one up at Walmart

You can't pick up a standard 18650 battery at Walmart either, but that doesn't make it some kind of special battery. It's bog-standard. Availability at Walmart has nothing to do with something is standard or even common. Brake pads for some random mass-market 2015 model year car (GM, Toyota, etc.) are nothing special or difficult to find either, but you're not going to find them at Walmart.


But perhaps BMS expect specific battery product. I don't want to take risk by replacing to random Li-ion that not matching original BMS.


The question is how much hacking would be required.


Probably not much, but that's still far more than the average consumer is willing or able to do.


Yes, a soldered or special battery would be (weak) evidence of the tactic of planned obsolescence. A standard battery that you can just pop in and out, would not be.


When I was in engineering school 35 years ago, the "joke" was that our job was to design a car that ran perfectly until its warranty expired, and then, poof!, turned into a pile of dust. I didn't realize this actually became a science. Good grief. Of COURSE it did. Someone should make an expose about this stuff, and sell it to a news program.


Metal is not a panacea, and it can often lead to misleading marketing. Different metals wear at different rates and poor design can still lead to premature failure. Heck the viscosity of the lubricant was the cited reason for the failure of the compressor. Lubricated devices also need maintenance, otherwise the surfaces the lubricant is intended to protect will wear. The properties of lubricants can also change and cause moving parts to cease.

Engineering is both easy and incredibly difficult. It is relatively easy to design something that does a particular task (at least for many of the applications being discussed here). It is incredibly difficult to design something that does its job well or last for a long time.


Engineering is both easy and incredibly difficult. It is relatively easy to design something that does a particular task (at least for many of the applications being discussed here). It is incredibly difficult to design something that does its job well or last for a long time.

No, that's relatively easy as well. What's incredibly difficult is doing so while keeping the BOM cost under control in a competitive market.

Recall the classic saying, "Any idiot can design a bridge that will stand up. It takes an engineer to design a bridge that will barely stand up."


Indeed. His engineer brother is essentially designing a component that can barely function, just like a bridge, because resources are finite.

I have never seen any example of 'planned obsolescence' which was anything more than giving the consumer what the consumer wants. Modern economy is essentially the peak optimization of cost vs utility, i.e. value maximization.


According to the poster the components their brother designs are often more expensive then the standard ones. Precisely because it takes a higher tolerance to fail between a tight time window. So it is in fact the opposite of resources are finite. They are spending more to squeeze the consumer.


But!… we don’t have any evidence yet. Just a claim. I’d love to see some evidence.


If someone is telling you something, which you have no way to verify, it's obscene to cherry pick a piece of information to believe, use that to make your point and then call out the other piece as an unverified claim because it would completely destroy the point.


The notion of a battery tied to a GPIO pin in an HVAC thermostat amounts to an extraordinary claim. Unless we're talking about a smoke detector or other safety-critical item that actually has an expiration date (in which case I'd think they would use a real chemical timer), there are no obvious explanations for the battery other than planned obsolescence.

So, yeah, I'd like to see a model number as well.


I owned an AEG washing machine.

The plastic tub that contained the rotating drum was hung up on springs just like in any other washing machine.

The holes in the tub where the ends of the springs went through were just that, holes without any reinforcements.

The inevitable happened (because the strain in the plastic where it met the unforgiving steel of the springs was too much) and over the years, the holes wore through the plastic, resembling an oblong shape more and more.

I simply pressed a metal bushing into the enlarged hole on one side and on the other, I used two small strips of steel (with holes in it for the spring) clamped to the tub with bolt and nut.

And voilà the machine easily did another two years (electronics now messed up).

This case is either a pitiable engineering failure or 100 % planned obsolescence.

Merely equipping the holes in the plastic tub with metal bushings would have easily made this part outlive every other failure.


For a less cynical take, efficient use of resources is important as well. Theoretically every bridge should just be a solid wall going straight down to the nearest bedrock beneath it, but you can build a lot more bridges with the same resources if you use various other techniques. :)


>Most people value cheapness more than quality, so we get cheap junky products.

Well, it would help tremendously if costs per month/year/lifetime were more obvious. A lot of people just don't know how long certain appliances are supposed to last at what price points comparatively. 7x is only a hefty price tag upfront when you know it will pay for itself over time, but even that is no longer certain.


How many years would you divide by as a “lifetime”? That’s your new failure year that lots of people would prefer for it to last longer than.


Right, judging long-term product value is like trying to win against the casino on their own slot machines.


This isn't true of me.

I value quality and price. Unfortunately, while price is clearly stated, poor quality is often hidden.


Well, you want more people to buy your product so you get growth year over year. You can't do that with a basic widget that will last 10++ years. Otherwise your growth would plateau to the natural population growth rate and there would be a thriving 2nd hand market because your stuff rarely breaks. Adding complex electronic features is an obvious choice now. You can just stop providing updates or the electronics will fail.

Cheaper things aren't necessarily bad either. You don't want things like fridges and blenders to be items only the rich can afford and less robust things are probably fine if it was clear under what conditions you can use the item to make it last and if the item was easily repairable.

Lastly, I don't think you can blame the manufacturers alone either. I know people who don't like used things even if they are still good and will always buy new.


I suspect lots of people value cheapness when there is no way to tell whether the premium actually reflects quality.

This is for example why flying commercial is such a miserable experience: people will look for the cheapest ticket that gets them to their destination because the whole thing is like being treated like cattle. Why then should you pay a single cent more for the same shitty experience? Airlines that used to offer a slightly better experience have figured this out and also treat you like cattle now so they can also offer the route for a low or lower price.

This is not unique to airlines, and this is my default mode of purchasing things because I’ve been burnt too many times. Unless I know for sure that X brand is much more durable and repairable than another, I’ll always go for the cheapest I can find that meets my needs.


Disclaimer: I have a KitchenAid blender. I only paid 5x for it, so I didn't have to pay the Vitamix guerrilla marketing part of the deal. But yes, expect something several multiples over the nickel-and-dimed stuff.

The high-end blender lines of both brands are made domestically, and rate at the top in Consumer Reports. I can vouch that both are pretty quiet in operation, for what are essentially food-violence machines.

Just because it's a German brand like Bosch doesn't mean it's made in Germany, from quality parts, so, buyer beware.


thats fine, but then why do I get the same problems when i pay $200?


We have a blender that we got from my wife's parents. It probably dates back to the 1950s, and I love it. It's only got two speeds and heavy as anything, but it's probably the most solidly-built appliance I own. I also have one I bought in the early 90s that's fine as well. I don't expect to ever need to buy another one.

But you're absolutely right. Buying cheap stuff is bad in so many ways. Since they wear out faster, you end up replacing them much more often, which is environmentally bad, and in the long run, costs more. The problem is that being expensive does not necessarily correlate with lasting long.

When our TV died a few years ago, my kids pooled together and bought me a 50" Samsung 4k TV. It's a great device in so many ways, but after 3 years, the backlights started failing. Right now half the screen is dark, and it would cost almost as much as a new TV to get them replaced, with a part that probably costs all of $5 to manufacture. So it's been hanging on the wall for the last year, because I've been too cheap to replace the whole TV, and too scared too attempt the repair on my own, since it involves stripping the thing down to the frame (and removing that enormous panel). I still might try some day. It's worth a $50 gamble to get the TV back. Either that or I'll just replace the darn thing. This TV (like all modern TVs) is a miracle of engineering, and the thing that stopped it from being usable is probably the simplest and one of the cheapest components.

My first TV was a hand-me-down from my parents that eventually died in late '88 or '89. It was an RCA from 1968. Then I bought a 26" RCA TV in 1989 and used it until we replaced it with an HD TV in 2012. It still worked fine when we got rid of it, and I was sad to see it go, even though we had no use for it.


Another issue I've experienced with these smart TVs is, that the software becomes extremly slow and almost unusable after a couple of years.


Seconded. Don’t forget updating with ads and spyware. I’ve resolved never to update the software on my TVs going forward unless there’s a major bug.


> environmentally bad

How about replacing appliances with new ones? Washers can now do both - wash and dry AND it has heat pump. Induction cooktop are way more efficient. Instant hot water taps translates to smaller hot water cylinders. Japanese style fridges spoil less food.


By Japanese style fridge, do you mean a fridge with the freezer on the bottom? How does a Japanese style fridge reduce spoilage?


It's probably a stretch on big picture but some have vacuum compartment for fresh meat and fish and humid compartment for vegetables.


For food-service you can often find commercial-grade stuff which still has some durability to it - but it will NOT have things like "be quiet" or "small portion size" or "cheap" usually.


> Yes, there is plenty of planned obsolence out there, and one of the greenest things you can do is buy premium stuff that will last you a lifetime

The annoying part is that you can end up missing on new features.

I look at the Zojirushi rice cooker that I bought in college - a hefty purchase at the time - the Jaguar of rice cookers at a time when I should have been buying the $10 Black and Decker rice cooker. It's still with me, over a decade later, through countless moves, a handful of girlfriend (who all had opinions on it, interestingly), and at least 1,000 bowls of rice cooked.

The battery that keeps the time died (I could replace it, but I'd have to take it apart and it's technically non-replaceable), but other than that it's working perfectly. The rice is as good as it ever has been.

My oh most first world of problems? A while ago Zojirushi released rice cookers also function as pressure cookers in the same device. I'd love to upgrade so I can quickly make stews in it, but I cannot possibly retire my old one just because it's old.

Most likely I'm going to end up having two Zojirushis because well, rice goes pretty well with stew and you can't exactly make both simultaneously. And then in 10 years when they make one that's both a rice cooker, a pressure cooker, and an air fryer; I'll be having this monologue again.


> I cannot possibly retire my old one just because it's old.

Why not sell it second hand? Someone (even a student like you once were?) will happily extract a decade or more of value from it and you’ll get some of your money back towards the upgrade.


I have a similar story of buying a zojirushi rice cooker when spending 1/10th as much would have seemed wiser. That was 13 years ago! It turned out to be a great decision because it’s also still going strong. The clock is still good, but now you’ve got me worried that it’s on its way out.

I can also relate to your envy of the new models we don’t need.


I got my first Zojirushi rice cooker over 20 years ago. The only reason I'm on my second is that my ex-wife claimed it in the divorce, she's still using it. I'm still using my "new" 12 year old model.


Same with my Zojirushi rice cooker, as well as my Zojirushi water heater and thermos. Their stuff has lasted a long time and performed great for me.


> I called the Bosch service hotline, they told me that the whole body is one "part" that I can buy for ~80% of the original price.

It's eight months old. They *have* to replace it under warranty.


I had the exact same experience with hand blenders! I went for WMF the first time, a brand known at least in Germany for its quality. The connection was plastic too, but even worse: it didn't have a simple snap in mechanism, but you had to rotate it by about 20 degrees after connecting until you heard a click. When my mom visited she didn't know and didn't do it properly, and you could hear an awful sound. Within seconds the plastic connector got completely destroyed. Was also just a couple months old, so I went to the store (yes they have stores in almost every city that's maybe 200k people or more), and they were like "sorry bud, but you can get 10€ off for a new one". WMF is now on my blacklist of "crap companies that use their reputation to sell cheap China crap for a premium". I was so mad I glued together the connector with JB weld and used it for almost another year. Cleaning sucked that way though. Now I always get the cheapest one on Amazon so I don't have any expectations. When I wanted a standing one a couple years later I did that right from the start.


This is why I'm glad for EU laws; nowadays their objectives is to reduce e-waste. Electronic products now have a mandatory warranty of three years; I believe smartphones and such electronic devices need to have a lifetime of six.

But one-year warranties have been a thing everywhere for a long time I believe, so I hope you got your money back for both devices.

A good channel on youtube for these kinds of things is AvE, especially his older videos are good breakdowns and explanations of mostly electric tools where the creator points out things like molding, plastics, but also gears and probable failure modes - often a switch or as you mentioned, plastic gears or bad / missing bearings. The best device he had a teardown of was actually the Juicero, a massively over-engineered piece of hardware that was basically an inefficient press - as in, you get more juice just by hand-squeezing/rolling the overpriced Juicero bags.

Is that company still in business? If it does I'm sure some SF companies with too much money on their hands are still paying their subscriptions / deliveries.

Edit: it is not, they went out of business in 2017.


I try to buy kitchen stuff from kitchen supply stores, not the mall. If you've ever been to a quality restaurant where the kitchen is visible from the seating area, you can see that they don't use fancy-ass pots and pans, because they are very hard on cookware (heavy vollrath aluminum with no coating, no stainless steel!). Same goes with their appliances: if a kitchen is using an appliance, you know it has been abused.

I would have tried these first:

Light duty:

https://www.restaurantsupply.com/waring-wsb33x-quik-stik-7-i...

Turn it up:

https://www.restaurantsupply.com/waring-wsb40-quik-stik-plus...

Bring the noise!...

https://www.restaurantsupply.com/robot-coupe-mp600-turbo-23-...


On the other hand, some components get so abused in a commercial/industrial setting, that they're considered consumable parts of the machine, making "long life if lightly used" into a complete non-consideration in the design process.

You probably don't want a commercial-kitchen dishwasher; IIRC you're expected to have someone in to replace the hoses in them every year or two, because they make those hoses out of plastics that are tolerant to higher temperatures, but at the expense of plasticizer degradation (becoming stiff + brittle) after just sitting around at ambient temperature-and-pressure for a few years. A residential dishwasher, while not able to clean as well, will be able to start up just fine after years of disuse; which is more what you want in a house or apartment that might go years sitting empty.


Commercial dishwashers work completely differently from home ones. They are designed to use the same water across multiple loads. Home ones clean way better but take 1.5 hours per load rather than the 3 minutes commercial ones use. Have you ever actually used a commercial dishwasher? They are about as similar to a residential dishwasher as a Porsche is to a dump truck.


I didn't know that. At least it is understood up front!

I really would like one of the bar water jets they use for cleaning the mixers/shakers, tho!


Was the blender part one of these:

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4415363

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3969534

https://www.printables.com/model/172705-bosch-blender-coupli...

You could try printing it yourself, or using a 3D printing service to get a replacement. It would be interesting to see how different material options hold up.


Yep, its one of these, but 3D printing will not work here. The original part is some kind of injection molded, ABS or PC with 5-30% glass fiber content. In other words a very strong type of plastic, which was not strong enough for the job.

FDM printed parts are inherently much weaker than injection molded ones, simply it breaks very easily between the layers. Even if you print it in the right direction it will be much weaker. Maybe parts printed with continuous glass fibers could hold up with the original part, which was crap in itself.

Until there are affordable printers that can print metal this will be crap by design. Or I could buy a CNC that can work with steel :)


We had a similar experience tooling up our kitchen. I ended up buying used, high quality appliances from an earlier era.

Best move ever! Our Kitchen Aid mixer, for example, is metal construction, has servicable motor parts, and just works. Well, it did get glitchy a month or two back. I took it apart, saw flour everywhere. Hit it with compressed air, greased up some things, cleaned the motor brushes and mating parts, put it back together and it's like new!

Toaster, blender, can opener, all the same deal. When I get them, I do a quick test and refurb on them. Doesn't take long, and often I can get parts, depending on what it is. Once I know the device, I feel like I can depend on it. And going used = ultra cheap. It's kind of crazy how cheap.

And these things are simple. They have the features they need to and that's kind of it. Attachments are not hard to find either.

Worst case it's a bad call. Oh well, try again.


I bought a Ankarsrum assistent for the sole reason it was designed in the 40s and comes with 10y warranty for the motor.

I am so tired of "cheap" stuff breaking.


It's the indifference and apathy that is annoying. Just yesterday I was told "did you check online" from a local business that was complaining that nobody buys local.

Or my new hated phrase "ready to ship" on store websites, in other words they don't have it. Why would I get it shipped to them and then have to call when I can just order it direct.

Between crap quality, apathetic store staff, and no inventory it's become a pain to buy anything locally or online even just a regular toaster.


Same issue with a Dremel. Stopped spinning so opened it up and found it had a plastic coupler. Junk. Luckily I was able to find a 3d file and print a new coupler with my printer.


I had a higher end Dremel that would intermittently die because the brushes got stuck in their channels once the motor warmed up. I was so happy when the speed controller died and I replaced that garbage with a $20 Menard's unit that's been bulletproof.


Fantastic you could 3D print the part. That's beautiful. That's how you fuck their business, and good that you did, they should sell quality.


I love my 3d printer. Last Christmas opened up a brand new hot wheels track and told the kids not to touch it so we didn’t lose any parts. They waited patiently as I built it. Get toward the end and realize a clip for the tracks was missing no fault of the kids. Damn. Quick search and find a 3d file for new clip. Printed within 30 minutes and kids had their track. So much easier then calling the company and dealing with waiting for a part and not having the receipt anymore. Was really nice


I knew of a kid in elementary, this was in Chile, ordering missing Lego parts from the catalog. Was unthinkable. Pre-internet, I think mail or international phone call, something crazy. Unthinkable.

Plus the company introduces a wait. No blame on hot wheels, they (I think, not sure but want to believe) try to live up to being a cool toy. Good gift. They want to be a good gift, like get a kid saying "Ohhhhh, damnit I mean gosh-darn-it, sorry, hot wheels cars, real cars, wow oh wow oh wow oh wow!" Jumping up and down. But it's still a wait. So the problem is, reminiscing upon childhood, children make promises to themselves about holding out until birthdays and Christmas. So if they break that promise with themselves because a "company" (what's that?) "makes an error" (like on a test?) then it's like...nah, "I'm not a happy kid."


Sometimes it's easiest to do without some appliances. Blenders are convenient, but also one more thing to maintain, if only just to clean it. Often there's an alternative to get something premade. Like, I could make milkshakes...or I could take fresh milk and stir it into ice cream.

If it's your hobby to cook more elaborately, of course, you still end up in the position of having no quality options. But if you're dealing with something sufficiently disposable, maybe it makes sense to lean into it. Everyone who writes or draws regularly has extra stationary supplies, for example - but not everyone goes down the route of getting a converter fountain pen and filling it with bottled ink. The extra packaging of a disposable pen body is waste, but the all-in-one nature of it makes it portable, fungible.

I actually made an attempt to calculate what it would take to replace everything I seriously use in my home recently - all the cookware, electronics, toiletries, furniture, office supplies, clothes, cleaning tools. I estimate that it would be under $15k. Whatever I have on top of that is essentially just purchases that turned into waste - extra clothes, extra furniture, etc.

So most of my outgoing costs are strictly recurring service charges: rent, energy, food, transport, insurance, etc. We often get appliances in hopes of beating those service charges, but then it turns into junk.

On balance, most things can be done more easily than they used to be with an appropriate mix of product and service. But we also all got on the hedonic treadmill and the promise of living better by buying better. Maybe that's not how to live better.


Your country needs consumer laws. If something craps out like that within a reasonable timeframe for the thing to last you get a refund or replacement. Generally people expect a blender to last for more than a year or two, you'd get your money back after 8 months here easy.

Same goes for whiteware that's expected to last more than 5 generally.

Shops still somehow sell extended warranties though. Crooks.


The problem isn't just with poor quality, but with integration or lack of modularity/standardization.

I've had exactly the same problem with blenders, several times, where for example a small plastic tab that secures the blender bowl to the motor base snaps off, making the whole thing useless.

It would not be such an issue if these couplings were standardized in some way, so that you could buy a replacement, other than the manufacturer's hugely price inflated spare part.

Contrast the situation with when your PC graphics card or memory stick fails, you can just buy a commodity replacement, rather than junking the whole PC, screen, keyboard.

The more philosophical problem of course is that market capitalism's one incentive is to make profit. Making good products is only incidental to that imperative, and clearly not always a requirement.


If I understand the issue correctly, I have a Bamix model with 'metal coupling'. Swiss company, bought on Amazon UK, presumably available on Amazon US, no idea about 'malls'.

As an aside, AIUI there are two Boschs, and 'consumer Bosch' is merely a marketing/branding department.


Undervalued option for a hand blender: A power drill with a blender attachment, it'll easily beat any store bought immersion blender when it comes to reliability.

Of course you might end up wishing for crappy plastic gears over something with enough torque to shear a finger off...


In this case, the power drill actually has a torque limit feature (normally used for putting in screws, without stripping them). If the blender attachment gets stuck, the drill "cams out" and does not get damaged at all, unlike plastic gears.


There's a law of economics [1] that describes how bad products drive out good ones if they look the same:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law


Gresham's law is about (physical) currencies though - while it could arguably be somewhat extended to consumer products, the latter can typically be distinguished readily on more than just their superficial appearance. The fact that it's hard to accurately do so at point of purchase for most consumers is definitely part of the problem though.


Believe the Market for Lemons may apply:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons


I bought a refurbished Blendtec blender a while back. The jar failed after a year and a half; some plastic involved in the blade shaft bearing melted from the blender's own rotation. It's not designed to be replaceable and so I consider it a design flaw. It turns out someone already created a better jar with a significantly more robust, replaceable bearing assembly. It's called the Alterna-jar or something.

In total I'm in for about $450 and have a powerful blender that should last for at least the next decade.


>> “it broke after 8 months”

Why are you being asked to pay for a replacement? Isn’t this covered under warranty?


Most warranties in the US are only "free from manufacturing defects" so if the gear was manufactured to spec, but just wore out, then it's not covered

Also a 90 day warranty is not uncommon


There’s a problem.

In Australia a 12 month warranty is required. And for “expensive goods” it’s 24 months.

I’m not sure where the line is, but an iPhone certainly falls into the expensive category.

When those battery woes occurred, Apple was required to replace batteries, and they did.


It varies from state-to-state, but "Caveat Emptor" is the general rule of the land in the US.

[edit]

It's not quite "Caveat Emptor" but rather "perfect-tender" which still requires the buyer to inspect the items with "reasonable promptness"


I take it you don't live in the EU? Because regardless of what warranties the seller provides, all consumer electronics generally have a 2 year legal minimum guarantee and the first two blenders you describe definitely would have been covered by it. Bosch would have had to replace that plastic part, not "sell" it to you.

I'm not saying this to dunk on Americans. I'm just saying this is a problem that can be addressed with proper consumer protection regulations. Mind you, products will still fail and need to be replaced but this incentivizes manufacturers to aim for 2 years of use rather than 2 months.

Of course the real problem is that the broken device becomes your problem once the legal guarantee runs out and electronics waste is just handled in bulk, disregarding the environmental impact and resource waste. All the long-term damage becomes an externality so companies will optimize for limiting the lifetime of components to the least they can get away with because longer lasting products mean fewer sales.


We have a Vitamix at home, in use every morning. After nearly 7 years, the blade block started to leak. They sent a new one. It was very interesting to see how they improved the design of the block in between.

As I said somewhere else, first buy cheap, if it fails you know better what you really need and can buy the right expensive stuff. If it does not fail, enjoy your luck.


Its a nightmare anything that will last is now “premium” and top of the line. You spend easily 4x what even a good one costs and then you get something that lasts as long as appliances did 30 years ago. Washers and dryer’s drive me mad not to mention most kitchen appliances.


In the world of 3D printing where the tagline is "the limit is only your imagination" you'd expect to get those plastic replacement parts for a dime but nooo the devices are not even designed to be replaceable...


Commercial range of devices often are better as they need to endure much more uses.


Commercial grade devices are often not suitable for home use - for example commercial dishwashers are a totally different beast, their cycles are like 10 minutes and they are meant for disinfection nore than cleaning. They need frequent maintenance, dont come with a pump, dont tolerate long periods of non use, etc.


I noticed this when looking into coffee grinders.

A commercial one is a problem at home unless you make 20 coffees a day because it is going to retain a lot of grinds (not a problem if you have a lot of throughput, it won't go stale). It will also be noisy and big.

A prosumer one should be quite and good for not retaining grinds, but would be bad for commercial as it wont be fast enough (ten times slower), and you you don't want to wait grind for every shot. Also a prosumer one would look nicer probably.


FWIW I've had a Baratza grinder going strong with daily use for 5+ years


For kitchen appliances you should try to get restaurant grade if you can afford it. Won't solve all the problems but Restaurant appliances are made for heavy use so are more durable compared to home kitchen appliances. Last 1-2 years would have been a good year to get 2nd hand restaurant appliances with the many restaurants going out of business.


>Yes, there is plenty of planned obsolence out there, and one of the greenest things you can do is buy premium stuff that will last you a lifetime (if you can afford it :/ )

Economically this is almost always the case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory


If you can identify the good boots. That's the problem--quality is hard to identify these days.



On Blenders, I got mine from the free/donation pile at the dump. It’s glass, all metal and proudly declares itself “solid state”. It has 14 speeds with a high and low and smells vaguely of ozone when you turn it on. It’s bulletproof.


About the ozone, you might want to replace the brushes and/or polish the commutator. Blenders of that design use brushed motors, and the brushes are a wear part (although they can last a long time).


And they’re dirt cheap and usually easily accessible.


Same. Exact. Experience. Mother-in-law has a very old one with a metal coupling. Why can’t I buy one like that?!


What blenders do professional kitchens buy?


my vitamix is turning six. i would love to buy the equivalent of a vitamix for anything whenever possible


I bought a blender off amazon, it literally vaporized in first use. All gears turned to powder


had exactly the same point fail on a hand blender. the plastic teeth of the gear connecting the motor to the blades. every other part was still perfectly fine, but it's just garbage now.


[flagged]


GE sold their appliance division in 2016[1].

[1]https://www.ge.com/news/reports/done-deal-ge-sells-its-appli...


That was long after they sold the Cussen household their toasters.

They're responsible for what they sold when they sold it. The didn't sell responsibility for stealing my food.


You know that foreign countries don't have to take the loans you offer at the interest rates you offer?

In principle especially a wanna-be socialist country like the Soviet Union wouldn't need to participate in capitalist rituals like this.


Capital is global. Seeks the highest returns wherever they are.


This doesn't work in all categories, but when the product breaks before a reasonable lifetime you buy a new one, and return the old one.

The store ships it back to the manufacturer, and if they are smart they tear it down and improve whatever caused it to break.

If enough people did this quality would improve.


Yeah, except that you're not getting your money back because almost nothing has a warranty that extends nearly to it's reasonable lifetime, so the manufacturer has no particular interest in stopping you from buying another one.


You get your money back when your return the defective item for a refund.


not when the return is a year after purchase (even shorter for most products these days)


You don't claim the warranty. You buy the new one, put the old broken one in the new one's box, and return that.


I believe this is called fraud, but you do you.


Well, on some ethical level so is what manufacturers are doing. Race to the bottom!


No, a bad deal isn't fraud.


My plan if I magically become a billionaire is to start a consumer goods (and maybe tools) brand that makes devices that are "just good". They won't be bristling with pointless and fragile features (like WiFi in everything), they won't have overwrought styling and decorative frills, but they will do things like not skimp on 0.1g of plastic in critical places, MOSFETs, UV stabilization, etc. Captive cables avoided. Metal preferred over plastic, and spares provided at cost. Wearable parts should be off-the-shelf components where possible. Parts lists and schematics provided. Any API should be open and documented. They won't be priced or marketed as premium, they're "just good" and you shouldn't have to pay extra on top just for the logo of all you wanted was a working, long-lived device.

Then, importantly, stick to it and not ride laurels all the way down to the bottom of the barrel. And refuse to sell out to larger competitors who will then gut quality.

The reason it's on my Magic Billionaire list is because I cannot imagine I'd get the investment to set up a brand that isn't designed to squeeze every last penny out of the products, but rather simply provide "just good" products.


At first your competing with manufacturers who save the pennies and invest in marketing/branding over reliability. And those will do anything to outcompete you (including metagaming like legal actions and smear campaigns). Because if your claims hold, you might reduced the market cap by a few percent, maybe even more. This means losing out on a lot of sales now and the "recurring" sales (because crap breaks after 2 or 3 years) for another decade.

Later, when you mostly saturated your target market, you're mostly earning on the sales of spare parts (which you produce in bulk every few years and sell from your inventory). Also, you now have to enter the next market or let go of most of your people. That cycle then repeats, and maybe you re-enter a market to make the next version of a product.

Did you think about a kickstarter to bootstrap with a mechanically relatively simple product, and on which you could compete with a relatively small mark up? E.g. a coffee grinder over a fully automatic coffee maker; or probably something even more simple.


> Did you think about a kickstarter

Honestly, I could not think of anything that would make me miserable more than battling up from ground level in this kind of market, using my few personal savings as collateral. Kind of the same reason I don't intend to get into politics.

Yes, I'm giving up on a chance to make something better, but I won't make anything better from an early grave.

I'm content to work for a company that I think is making good products. I have never worked for a company making cheap crap, and I hope I never will.


I feel very much the same :)

Maybe we both "just" need to find a niche (or simple enough) product that can be started as an extended hobby. But I fear these are often not very interesting or won't even make us millionaires. How about electric tooth brushes, have these any relevant flaws these days?

Another small thing: We have a cat toy that moves via vibration (they love it), but the 3 tiny 312-type cells only survive for at most 30m. We even tried those specced for hearing aids (180mAh instead of 30mAh), but they seem to have trouble with the current and don't live much longer; so using it is not only moderately expansive, but produces a lot of unnecessary waste. A small LiPo with USB-C charger could fit, but of course then the margin would drop sharply.


you could always become a patent troll, with a portfolio of assorted product improvements you license out


If I had no morals, I'd already be selling crap like "nuclear power filters" and useless resonator circuits for "charging water" ;)

But I prefer useful contributions to society.


Don't forget the anti-5G USB field generators.


This sounds more like a critique of capitalism than anything.

What I find absurd is the re-badging of appliances. A clothes dryer or a gas furnace is a very simple device. So simple, in fact, that you will find the same control board inside a wide variety of seemingly "different" products.


Well, these terrible products are a result of capitalism-as-implemented, so, pretty much, yes.

Though I'd say it's more a critique of the belief that "the market" must be "right": on the manufacturer/investor side that "immediately profitable" is the main goal and that "cheap right now" is the goal on the customer side. In fact this is now so normalised that customer and consumer are almost synonymous, even for things that should, by rights, outlive the customer without being consumed.

Both these views can be rational (if you, the company, go bust this year, you can't make a good product ever, and you, the customer, may well want a blender now, not in 10 years when you can afford one that will last another 20). But they result in a Hotelling's Law joint race to the bottom (with a froth of shatteringly expensive artisanal Veblen-esque goods more for fashion then utility at the opposite end).

Perhaps "the market's" view of value is not actually a good description of long term utility.

And probably the most galling part of this is that with same amazing manufacturing methods and process control used now to shave a product to just barely good enough not to be warranty returns, you could produce wonderful products on the other side of the line[1]. Probably for only a few percent off the bottom line. But then you'd get pounded into the economic sand by corner-cutters and double-dippers who sell multiple bad products to the same customers in sequence.

[1]: The difference between a MOSFET driver circuit that fails after a year and one that basically never fails could be pennies, say.


I did not have critique in mind when I wrote that comment. I merely stated what I expected to happen without voicing my judgment.

But assuming the 1. outcome is both morally "bad", 2. and a realistic prediction, 3. which happens to be a necessary consequence of capitalism; and also 4. it's safe to assume that moral judgement of the consequences also apply to the cause: Well then yes, if all 4 of these hold, then my post carries hidden criticism of capitalism ;)


I have some more anti-feature requests for you:

1. I don't need a digital clock or timer on my appliances

2. No loud beeps whenever a touch button is pressed or a dial is turned or when the microwave is done

3. No blue LEDs that somehow light up the whole room at night

4. Physical dials where it makes sense (temperature, time etc) instead of clunky touch crap


And I promise not to skimp on controls and displays. Sure you can set up any device using only 4 seven segment displays and 2 buttons, with each button overloaded with about 12 functions. But that just means that although I advertised my cooker has a timer-start function, functionally, it doesn't have such features as they're impractical to learn and use.


Ah, but how would I turn off the kid safety lock if it doesn't involve tapping Imperial March on two separate buttons in canon?

After my kid randomly pressed a bunch of buttons on our stove the alarm kept randomly turning on, sometimes in the middle of the night and I could not for the life of me figure out how to turn it off. But one day it stopped.


I had to find a manual for my washing machine to disable the child lock which accidentally got turned on. There's no symbol (maybe kids are onto that these days), you just have to intuit which buttons you have to hold at the same time.

Plus points: you can turn the beep volume down.

Minus points: without a manual you would never in a million years figure out the magic sequence to get into the menu and when you did what the numeric menu codes mean.


There was a microwave at a job that would, of course, beep when you pressed a button or the timer was done. But also when you opened or closed the door.

Had a electric kettle that also beeped. I removed the piezo buzzer.


I had a microwave that beeped loudly at every interval of the duration dial. Just imagine it for a second.


>4. Physical dials where it makes sense (temperature, time etc) instead of clunky touch crap

Physical dials will break eventually. The touch crap doesn't feel as good to use, but actually lasts longer if it's well made.


The printer market is probably one of the worst when it comes to this. Everything just keeps breaking down and not working and I don't know a single company that makes printers that actually last.


This is easily solved, just subscribe to the HP Cloudcare Print Feed Spool Renewal program for a lifetime of print happiness. Terms and conditions apply.


Brother laser printers are pretty good.

If you're asking about inkjets, they're all a scam. Don't buy one.


As this category used to exist (and partly still does in my country with Miele, but is considered niche), I doubt you‘ll get much product market fit there.

Total Adressable Market is the nerds who care, i.e. barely anybody.


I have a 2015 or so era Miele and have taken apart the dish washer and some design decisions are a bit dubious too.. cost down of physical relay from traditional bulky electromechanical relay to solid state (without heatsink might I add) and situated on top of the dish washer where it's warm. you can tell they don't really care enough about it, as the location which worked for older style relay but would be hostile for newer relay which on paper have better reliability.


Miele gouge like hell on spares, a new door for my fridge-freezer costs about as much as the entire unit, including 2 doors, did. The door cover is maybe one of the top things to want replacing on a fridge. Also the plastic door trays are clearly suffering from "material use optimisation" because the hinges break off due to insufficient material support.

On the other side, the thing is still working, but it's only been 8 years.

But I do agree about the TAM, which is why it's contingent on being an idle billionaire.


FWIW Miele refrigeration products are made by Liebherr and many are rebadged for Miele. You might be able to find an equivalent Liebherr product and save money by buying the Liebherr part instead.


Right, but these are the kind of games that I, as a consumer, do not expect to have to play with an ethical producer that truly just cares about making good products.


You just need to realize your market is small.

Speed Queen washers come to mind. They are commercial washers that laundromats would install.

A home washer might cost $500. That’s what I spent and got 10 years out of an LG (and still going).

A Speed Queen might cost 2 to 2.5X that.

Most people don’t really care to buy it for life. $1200 now or $600 now isn’t a hard decision.

People will just take their chances.


They are designed to die just slightly past the warranty, so they can sell you another. Of course, the statistics means that quite a few units won't even last until then.

Before manufacturing tolerances were as tight, they'd error on the side of caution and overbuild, resulting in a wider MTBF curve. There were both many early failures as well as ones which far exceeded their expected life. Now, the standard deviation is much smaller so the end-of-life has become more well-defined both at the cost of nothing much lasting longer nor shorter than expected.


> They are designed to die just slightly past the warranty, so they can sell you another.

Not quite. They're designed to last at least as long as the warranty so that they don't lose money on returns. At least based on my experience in Dyson.

They don't deliberate sabotage anything like some people seem to think. Like there's no 5 year clock that is programmed to break so you have to buy another. If some part is cheap and lasts 20 years they aren't going to deliberately weaken it just so it breaks after 5 years.

What actually happens is they reduce the cost of expensive parts as much as possible (to save money) subject to the constraint that it can't fail within the warranty.

Part of the reason why early versions of products are often more reliable than later ones - they haven't sold very many so there's no financial incentive yet to do extensive cost-down optimisation (and they haven't had time).

It's still not great IMO but it's not outright evil. Your average Redditor thinks there are lightbulb conspiracies around every corner and that's just untrue.


> Like there's no 5 year clock that is programmed to break so you have to buy another.

Sounds a lot like printers and their ink cartridges.


the greatest trick dyson did was to turn vacuum an almost whiteware category item lasting 10-20yrs into 5yrs cycle product... so in that regard even if it lasted 10yrs by accident they're still well within tolerable profit margin over customer's life time projection

also it sucks well which does help

apple watch is of similar trajectory kudos to these two products


So I guess the best strategy is to use them as much as possible and make sure they break in the first year...


I remember someone who bought a low-mileage used car under warranty. The transmission started acting funny and making strange noises, but the dealer wouldn't do any repairs because it worked. I think he was about 8 months into a 12 month warranty.

He drove in such a way as to make sure it didn't work before the warranty was up, and then they fixed it.


Surely driving the vehicle in a manner that was certain to break the transmission within 4 months caused no other excessive wear in the vehicle, right? Sounds like a terrible idea, really.


trolling manufacturer stats is quite a fun idea.


> They are designed to die just slightly past the warranty,

Or more likely, they set the warranty period to be just below the MTBF


Thankfully in Europe it is minimum 24 months by law.

This I assume is also why amazon.de won't let you access invoices a while after purchase without talking to a CSR.


People keep mentioning this, and it's just not true - or people misunderstand what the law actually is.

The EU directive on this says that all products sold here should be free of manufacturing defects within the first 24 months(it's 6 years for most products actually). But the key word here is manufacturing defect. Furthermore, the law clearly states that any fault found within the first 6 months is presumed to have been a manufacturing defect, anything found afterwards it's up to the consumer to prove that it was a manufacturing defect and not a fault that developed later.

As you can see, that's not the same as unconditional 24-month warranty - if your laptop dies 23 months in, good luck proving that it died because of a manufacting defect without hiring an expert to do so. Yes some places will repair it anyway to avoid the hassle, but it's not codified in the law.

On the bright side, EU(and UK) make the seller responsible for the products sold, so if your item breaks and the seller goes "oh well you need to go to the manufacturer to get it fixed" you can politely decline and demand that they repair/replace/refund it for you - that's the law.


Well, significantly before - if you were warrantying 50% of your stuff you wouldn't be making much money..


To save everyone a lot of time: he finds that a sintered bronze bearing has worn and allowed metal-on-metal contact elsewhere in the unit. He theorizes it's the oil, which he demonstrates is very thin at room temperature. Which is meaningless - film strength doesn't have to be high if there isn't high pressure between sliding surfaces.

The claim that fridges from the 40s and 50s were very efficient is nonsense. Even a 10-20 year old fridge is very inefficient compared to a modern fridge. It's as easy as looking at energy star ratings.

> When it becomes a problem, it goes to the dump where all the foamed-together plastic parts will not be feasible to separate nor recycle.

It's never been economical / feasible to manually take apart an appliance for recycling. They're shredded and the plastic/metal chunks separated mechanically for the raw materials.


> They're shredded and the plastic/metal chunks separated mechanically for the raw materials.

The plastics recycling industry is over 90% fraud, just like the carbon credits market.

There are thousands of cases of Australian garbage turning up in indonesia with trash bags marked with the name of the local authority responsible for managing it. Plastic from UK is either burned in Poland to power cement production, or is sorted in Turkey and send to the third world to kill children and sea turtles.

I throw plastic in the trash to make sure it never leaves the country, but stays here and goes into landfill and doesn't hurt anyone. And to make sure the true cost of disposing of it is paid.


>The plastics recycling industry is over 90% fraud [...]

>Plastic from UK is [...] sorted in Turkey and send to the third world to kill children and sea turtles.

So in other words, they're sending recycling to third world countries to be sorted because the cost of labor is cheaper, and those countries have bad waste management practices so the unrecyclable materials end up in rivers or whatever. I guess this counts as fraud if you think that putting something in recycling means that it'll definitely be reused somehow. Many people might even legitimately hold this belief. However, if you do a little bit of thinking you know this is an impossible goal/strawman. For one, people frequently miscategorize their recycling, which means things that can't be recycled end up in recycling. Obviously those won't be reused. Also, no recycling technology is perfect, and there's bound to be something that gets up too degraded/contaminated to be properly recycled. Meanwhile, I'm not aware of any active efforts to portray recycling as some sort of 100% perfect waste remediation, so I'm not sure where the fraud angle is from. It's a case of mismatched consumer expectations at best.


> because the cost of labor is cheaper, and those countries have bad waste management practices...

If you are running any kind of business, say house insulation, you take money to fully insulate a house, don't insulate 90% of the house, and then attempt to mislead the customer into thinking the job is done, you have commited fraud or embezzlement.

If these companies are paid to recycle but recycling is not happening, then someone has commited fraud. Also the contract does not say 'you can dump unresycleable stuff into the ocean' - they are suppose to dispose of it properly.

It is their job to audit their supply chains and to make sure the job is done. If I know from public sources that majority of plastic that goes to their contractors in Turkey are commiting fraud, then a company with an army of lawyers knows it too.

If they continue using contractors in knowledge that their contractors are fradulent, but are telling me that plastic is being recycled, they are defrauding me. When major western media publishes a video of masked armed men chasing their reporters in Indonesia for investigating 'recycling', it should be clear to anyone that this is massive organised crime.

You don't get to blame this on 'those countries' because our countries are not doing shit either. We created the problem and we outsourced it by contracting literal mafia in Indonesia. Your taxpayer dollars are used to pay mafia bosses and to bribe Indonesian officials, sponsoring corruption in 'those countries'.

This is not just my opinion, there have been multiple investigations and convictions for recycling fraud.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/brothers-sentenced-for-14...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/18/uk-recyc...


>If you are running any kind of business, say house insulation, you take money to fully insulate a house, don't insulate 90% of the house, and then attempt to mislead the customer into thinking the job is done, you have commited fraud or embezzlement.

Okay, but even in your example of insulating a house, there are areas that can't be insulated. For instance, it'll be insanely expensive to insulate the studs themselves, because they're load-bearing. A reasonable consumer would understand that you can't replace the entire surface of a house with insulation, just like a reasonable consumer would understand that not everything they put in recycling is going to be recycled.

>If these companies are paid to recycle but recycling is not happening, then someone has commited fraud. Also the contract does not say 'you can dump unresycleable stuff into the ocean' - they are suppose to dispose of it properly.

Without specifics it's hard to argue either way. I'm not aware of recycling contracts that stipulate x% must be recycled. Can you provide some references here? Here in the US counties/cities only does recycling as a money-making measure. If they market rate for recycled outputs drops too much, some jurisdictions end up landfilling the recycling.

>https://www.gov.uk/government/news/brothers-sentenced-for-14...

Looking at the story it seems like it's less "taking e-waste and dumping it in a river somewhere" and more "submitting fraudulent invoices".

>https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/18/uk-recyc...

>The exporters make millions by charging retailers and manufacturers a fluctuating tonnage rate for plastic waste recovery notes – currently £60 a tonne. Retailers buy these plastic export recovery notes – Perns – to satisfy the government they are contributing something to recycling plastic packaging waste.

This seems like an issue with a government program intended to curb plastic waste, rather than consumers being misled. Prior to your comment I wasn't even aware of the existence of such a program. That's not to say the fraudulent behavior is acceptable, but it's slightly different than what we were originally discussing which is consumers being somehow deceived that what they put in recycling actually ended up in a river somewhere.


> Okay, but even in your example of insulating a house, there are areas that can't be insulated.

Then thats what you have to tell that to the client, and the client is free to look for a different proffeshional if he is not happy.

However if you lie, and client thinks thay you have insulated things that are impossible to insulate, thats fraud. And that's happening.

> I'm not aware of recycling contracts that stipulate x% must be recycled

Think about, whats the point of a recycling contract that says 'you could recycle only 0.1% if you feel like it'?

> we were originally discussing ... consumers being somehow deceived

that happens too. I have taken my old electronic goods to a commercial recycler. You have to pay to dispose of large appliances.

Now I realise there is about 60% chance that they took out and sold the valuable copper, and the rest is sitting in a river somewhere, leaching heavy metals and poisonong children


>However if you lie, and client thinks thay you have insulated things that are impossible to insulate, thats fraud. And that's happening.

I agree fraud is happening in the UK, because the government specifically set up a market for recycling credits. However, I doubt consumers are thinking of that when they're chucking their appliances in the garbage bin. I myself were not aware of such a program, and unless such a program is widespread that example has limited applicability.

>Think about, whats the point of a recycling contract that says 'you could recycle only 0.1% if you feel like it'?

That's... basically how I treat most public recycling bins. They're some hopelessly contaminated with non-recyclables that I assume they're collected as trash. It's entirely unreasonable to expect that just because someone put something in the recycle bin, that the city would bend over backwards to ensure it's recycled. Again, I'm also not saying that there aren't people who actually believe that ("wishcycling" is a thing), but what I'm saying is that anyone who has given the topic a bit of thought would realize that:

1. not everything can be recycled

2. even something that could theoretically be recycled, can be contaminated so that it can't be recycled

3. recyclers are subject to economic constraints

4. therefore, it's entirely unreasonable to expect that everything that you throw in recycling ends up recycled

Applied to the original topic of appliances/electronics, this means that I expect they recycle the bits that are economically feasible to recycle, and toss the rest.

>that happens too. I have taken my old electronic goods to a commercial recycler. You have to pay to dispose of large appliances.

Right, but is the service you're paying for "getting rid of the electronics in a way that complies with local laws" or "getting rid of the electronics in a way that complies with local laws, and ensure that it gets properly recycled"?


> I expect they recycle the bits that are economically feasible to recycle, and toss the rest.

So last year I had a lot of old electronics, I spesifically looked for a recycler, not a landfill.

I spesifically asked if they can recycle the old motherboard before handing it over. If they said no, I would go to someone else. I was prepared to pay a reasonable fee.

Maybe there is someone in Uk that does actually recycle 95% of the motherboard and charges £2 for their service, but they can't get any business because of all the fraudsters that pretend to recycle for free and actually don't

There is no way to distinguish between the 0.001% recycler and 100% recycler.


> Okay, but even in your example of insulating a house, there are areas that can't be insulated. For instance, it'll be insanely expensive to insulate the studs themselves, because they're load-bearing

ignoring for a second that modern insulation is just blown onto whatever surface you want, and obviously doesn't affect load bearing properties,

the analogy is about doing 90% of your job and acting like you did 100% of it

even if you personally think that extra 10% is hard

even if you personally think that extra 10% shouldn't be your responsibility

you still have to do it for it to not be fraudulent


> Plastic from UK is either burned in Poland to power cement production'

It's basically burning fossil fuel. Too bad about the dioxins though.


Depends on which type of plastic. Burning anything halogenated is really bad, but e.g. polypropylene or polyethylene is comparable to natural gas in terms of emissions (CO2+H2O) because they contain only C and H.


Yeah but if you ask people no one thinks "burning it" would count as recycling, but it does.


And also, if anyone actually reads the page linked - just below his post you can see a reply from an appliance repair shop, stating that they repair about 1500 refrigerators a year, and they see maybe one compressor failure a year - further stating that modern compressors, even with their shitty design, are still the most reliable part that will outlast the rest of the applience by a mile.

And yeah, I agree with them actually - there's no way 1950s compressors had such low failure rates.

I do recall seeing an american ad for some oven brand from the 50s, where the leaflet advertised that an average consumer shouldn't expect to repair it more than 2-3 times in a 5 year period - and that was advertised as a selling point!


Old refrigerators may not be as efficient, but they were built better internally and last longer. The savings from an efficient refrigerator that only lasts a few years is meaningless.


He is not arguing old fridges were as efficient as modern ones, but the compressors. From what I know, most modern fridge efficiency usually boils down to better isolation.


Is compressor not evolved from 50s? Looks hard to believe. Isn't modern refrigerators use inverter compressor? I suspect that some other improvements exists.


compressors have only two simple characteristics, compression ratio and volume. A fridge doesn't require anything special and is essentially the same piece of metal since the 50's exept theres probaly alot less metal in modern ones.


Not true, if you can compress a real refrigerant slower you get better performance; modern control systems that can ramp up and down are significantly more efficient than older on-off styles.


It's too simplified while talking efficiency. Let's see how much A/C become efficient over decades.


Even a 10-20 year old fridge is very inefficient compared to a modern fridge. It's as easy as looking at energy star ratings.

Do you think the manufacturers aren't gaming those ratings either?

The energy efficiency of fridges over time has definitely not been monotonic either. The ones that use the most were the late 60s-80s models that sacrificed insulation thickness for more interior volume.


>Do you think the manufacturers aren't gaming those ratings either?

Oh cmon, you can't categorically dismiss an entire government program with an offhand comment like that. You need to at least provide some sort of evidence supporting your claim.


But I saw on your YouTube channel that.. do your research man...

/s


The problem with many energy efficiency ratings, including Energy Star and that controversial California "ban gaming PCs" one, are that they are designed around "power consumed for a particular use case", where use case is defined as "watch TV for the household average number of hours per day", not normalized for whether the picture quality was great or poor. In the gaming PC case, there was a bureaucratic formula based on how many ports the computer had, and having lots of ports allowed you to use more energy because it was considered a "high expandability" computer, regardless of whether it was reasonable for the computer with empty extra ports and no different parts to use more power. And it focused almost exclusively on "turned off or standby" power, not power in use.

In the case of TVs, manufacturers game the numbers by rating efficiency "as shipped to the consumer at factory default settings." The manufacturer just sets the brightness to 20%, and throws a warning on the screen if the customer tries to change it, saying "the TV may use more energy". Of course, in the store, the TV is set to Store Mode, which means the brightness is often even higher than 100%, and the TV has a sticker about how efficient it is. Nobody would buy a TV that was dimmed permanently to the Eco Mode, but technically, you can "watch the very dim TV", so it counts.

This means that the composite "energy efficiency score" is not calculated with "output" or "work done" or "function realized" held constant. The text of the standards often does not define exactly the outcomes to be achieved.

Thus, it is entirely possible for a manufacturer to produce products with a degraded functionality in exchange for "better energy efficiency", regardless of whether worse functionality may cause the consumer to use the item for twice as long. (i.e. some government restricting the wattage of vacuum cleaners, which may cause vacuum cleaners to become less effective instead of more efficient, causing increased run time)

In the case of fridges, you might imagine how a manufacturer might skimp on "lasts long", "how much space the fridge takes compared to how much space is inside", and other things like this.


I thought early fridges did surprisingly well because they tended to be smaller and the frost-free mechanisms are wasteful on multiple levels (they're running a heater, and then probably have to run the cooler more to compensate)


You'd have to stick an ammeter on it, but I bet a 50s fridge is pretty efficient because they are manual defrost only. Most modern full-size fridges are auto defrost – essentially they suck down electricity to heat up the cooling system. The efficiency gains over a couple decades ago are due to moving from fixed, mechanical timers to computer controlled adaptive defrosters.


>I bet a 50s fridge is pretty efficient because they are manual defrost only

That doesn't seem like a fair comparison. It's like saying a bike is "pretty efficient" compared to an e-bike because it doesn't consume any energy (infinite efficiency!)


There's a small subset that avoid it - but the only one I know of is the Speed Queen machines that are identical to their commercial offerings - and have remained basically the same for decades.

One way to gauge it is see how available repair parts are (all systems eventually wear out) and what the costs look like.


The quality and warranty are the primary reasons I bought a Speed Queen washer and dryer a few years ago. Most reviews say the washer isn't the best at actually cleaning clothes but 99% of the time I don't need to remove stains or dirt, I just need to wash clothes from daily use. In addition to the reliability I really like the controls. Nothing fancy, very easy and obvious with a 7-segment LED display that will likely last forever.


Speed Queen warranty is 5 years and price was 3x LG washer from Costco. Costco gives 4 year warranty with Costco credit card.

So I just buy appliances from Costco and assume I will have to replace sometime after 4 years.

As one data point, all of my LG Costco appliances from almost 4 years ago are still working fine, through very heavy use. We probably use washers/dryers 10+ cycles per week due to babies/toddlers. The LG inverter linear compressor fridge is still as silent as the day we got it.


Old American made washers are running 40 years later. Speed Queen isn’t really about the warranty, it’s about the implications.


I prefer the implication of having it in writing.

If Speed Queen’s data showed them their machines lasted 40 years, then they would advertise them with a 40 year warranty to maximize sales.

Since they do not, it is safe to say that Speed Queen does not want to bet their machines will last 40 years. So why should I bet they will last longer than their stated warranty period?

It is possible that Speed Queens are worth more because they are more repairable, but I have no interest in spending my time repairing my washer/dryer. And calling a technician would be $100/hour plus parts, at which point I might as well buy a new machine.


You realize most so-called warranties are issued with the expectation that the overwhelming majority will never make a claim let alone collect on it right? To put it plainly I don’t care a whit about warranties, I just don’t want the hassle of an unnecessary repair job.


That is true, but I figure for higher value products, the warranty period gets closer to the product’s mean time before failure.

If the Speed Queen cost 50% more, I would be inclined to buy it. But at 3x the price, I feel like it’s just easier for me to replace, and since it is Costco, I trust that the process will be easy.


> You realize most so-called warranties are issued with the expectation that the overwhelming majority will never make a claim let alone collect on it right?

Wouldn't that mean they should have longer stated warranty than estimated lifetime?


the lack of a longer warranty does not decrease the likelihood of unnecessary repair jobs

in other words, if BrandX had products they believed would last 40 years, they would have a warranty that says so, and it would not decrease the reliability 1 iota


A product can last X years without being something you want to warranty for that time - because "last" can mean "keeps working with maintenance and repairs" vs "works without a hitch for the whole time.

Also, longer warranties can be a selling point (speed queen does this with the same exact internals being sold with a higher warranty on the 'fancier' ones which just add some more features to the board).

And, a company has to hold monies on the books for warranty service, so a defined warranty period that is not unreasonable can help with that.

But the "best" company in a given market only needs to warranty beyond the nearest competitor.

Speed Queen also is implicitly dealing with people who would buy the "lifetime" warranty residential unit and run it in a commercial setting, where the wear parts would wear out.


Loan me a million dollars and I’ll pay you back in 40 years. No? Does that sound meaningless? Thought so.


It sounds like you have a point to make regarding the time value of money? But I'm sorry, I'm not following the connection. Would you mind rephrasing?


Have you ever tried to use your "warranty"? It's a "lifetime warranty", the lifetime being the core components of the washing machine. When it dies, that's it's lifetime.

There is little enforcement of warranties from the FTC. They cannot afford to do investigations, because they are civil litigation.


I have not used Costco warranty before, but I have not seen a reason to doubt Costco’s services.

https://www.costco.com/appliance-warranty-calculator.html


Note it's Costco's warranty - they take the product back and ship it to the manufacturer, and just deduct the amount from the next payment to them.

If the manufacturer doesn't like it, they get dropped by Costco like a hot potato.


My LG linear inverter fridge from costco has been loud from day 0.


If it is still under your Costco warranty, I would claim the warranty. LG advertises it as being less noisy (I hear zero noise from my fridge).


LG linear compressor failure rates triggered a class action suit that LG lost


Yes, that is why I mentioned it. I was expecting mine to fail by now too, but so far, no problem. I think the design or quality may have improved after the initial batches.


Thoughts on Maytag?


Maytag is owned by Whirlpool Corporation, which makes ~all of the various appliance brands I've seen here in Canada except for the newer LG/Samsung etc. Any "FSP" branded parts are made by Whirlpool.

For what it's worth, the Speed Queen washer/dryers people seem to like, appear to also share parts with Maytag [1], which means Whirlpool made, or uses, or shares at least designs for parts, even though Speed Queen is owned by Alliance Laundry Systems, who also make the Huebsch machines in apartments, which, are commercial grade, but still not free of problems (i.e., >half of front loading machines in one place I've been in have the marbles-in-bearings sound when spinning, which a newly replaced machine didn't)

Some models of Speed Queen washers I've seen people open on YouTube look suspiciously like a Whirlpool "direct drive" 90s washer.

[1] https://ibb.co/PzQxxP6 - I searched for "speed queen transmission" on DuckDuckGo Images and found this listing that mentions compatibility between that and Maytag. I also recognize that transmission as a Whirlpoolish thing.

Given that most appliances around me are made by Whirlpool, I don't personally have anything to compare them to. I haven't personally seen many extreme design flaws, but the parts are built down to a cost. For example, all of their dryer motors are epoxied together instead of bolted, like every other motor, probably to save cost at assembly, and conveniently prevents oiling and servicing of the bushing/bearing. The washer pumps for the aforementioned "direct drive" washers are sealed, and if something gets jammed, you can't take them apart to unjam them (though I've unjammed one before, and they don't cost much, and there is a ~good reason to seal it shut).

However, whatever evils, if any, Whirlpool puts into their machines, at least you can get the parts, and compatibles exist, and junkyards are probably full of compatible parts, simply because the parts are all shared between most Whirlpool appliances in existence.

I've had one example of a bad experience with the electronic controls on a Maytag front load washing machine. I don't consider a single sample to be representative, but the software on the control was poor and refused to spin-dry a blanket after washing it. It wasn't because the machine was unbalanced. It would rotate the blanket very slowly (zero shaking), and just decide not to do anything else. It eventually did it after a bout of unplugging, pushing buttons, and cursing.


Thanks for the in-depth reply. I recently opened up my screeching (Maytag?) dryer and replaced the roller wheel and pulley and it’s running like it’s brand new and I inherited it, most likely 20 years old. It was shocking the carpet of lint I pulled out. I’m surprised it didn’t burn the unit and house down.


Speed Queen is worth the money. Happy customer here.


> which sacrificed its life span in the name of some modicum of energy savings. These marginal design choices are not the only way to get an efficient unit, since the fridge compressors from the 1940's and 1950's era were very efficient.

This one surprised me. I need to do some digging. Did they get worse after the 50s? I know that an old fridge I had in the basement, probably from the 80s/90s, was horrible in that regard. It pulled 300W when the compressor was running, and about 20W when idle (why!?). I threw it out a long time ago, so I don't have the exact figures anymore, but over a day it consumed at least 3 to 5 times as much as the bigger one in my kitchen that was new at that time. And it was notably cooler in the basement too, so that should've worked in favor of the old one.


Old ones did a few things really well; they typically have the hot radiator coils on top, or better separated from the internals (at the cost of space) better insulation (at the cost of internal space), and didnt have built in defrosters (or air circulation). They also used a somewhat more effective (but worse for the environment) refrigerant, freon.

After the 50s, we demanded a larger volume, not just being larger but also sacrificing insulation and ideal hot-side placement. And we had to change the refrigerant used (and get rid of latching doors). Several features that were poor from an energy standpoint became standard (auto-defrost, air circulation).


i'm quite interested in Vacuum Insulation Panel (VIP) used in some fridges nowadays, it seems the edges and punctures would be their down fall, but it does make for some strikingly thin fridge walls...


It is worth mentioning that there is a survivorship bias inherent to this problem. The older designs that were well made tended to be the one that lasted, and so become the ones we see today, whereas the poor quality old designs already failed.


Another possible cause: Do people even know how to make high-quality products any more? Who are the top 1% of refrigerator engineers, and do they still even go into refrigerator design, or did they become wall street quants instead? This is the same thing I wonder when I eat at crappy restaurants. It's not like the staff knows how to make good food and they choose not to do it. They don't know how!


Top refrigerator engineers are probably making lab freezers. I imagine a lot consumer hardware is JDM these days. Parent company mostly doing industrial design (if that) and the rest is farmed out to China where they have a standard design they're working from.


That reminds me of something I always wondered: during that window (I'd say, roughly 1975-2000) where Japan had strong brand equity for "quality, reliable, innovative", why did they seem to make no footprint in the US appliance sector? I've never seen a Panasonic washer or Sony fridge.

It wasn't a "we can't make/ship big things with relatively low value density" factor (they made cars, after all) and I'm assuming they were making something for domestic consumption (or were they buying Whirlpool fridges for Tokyo apartments?). Was there some tarriff situation keeping them out of this sector?


>during that window (I'd say, roughly 1975-2000) where Japan had strong brand equity for "quality, reliable, innovative", why did they seem to make no footprint in the US appliance sector? I've never seen a Panasonic washer or Sony fridge.

I have a Panasonic washer and fridge. They're great.

>I'm assuming they were making something for domestic consumption (or were they buying Whirlpool fridges for Tokyo apartments?)

Whirlpool and other western brands have no presence in Japan for appliances. It's all Panasonic, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, plus Haier, and for the cheap brand, Iris Ohyama. Virtually all appliances are made in Japan, or some (usually cheap ones) in China by Japanese companies.

They probably don't bother with the US because American consumers don't want to pay for quality, and they'd have to re-engineer everything for American sizes and preferences. American appliances look nothing like Japanese ones.


Engineering doesn’t change. If it was learned by one it can and will be learned by another. Manufacturers know how to make quality parts, they are just not able to, or choose not to, for whatever reason. Aftermarket parts business is a large portion of an appliance or vehicle manufacturer’s bottom line, so they make decisions to augment the profit of that business, including sacrificing quality on the appliance or vehicle.


> Do people even know how to make high-quality products any more?

Is it even possible to lose this knowledge? Surely they know how to make good reliable products, they simply choose not to...


We should collect more data on product longevity and repairability. I'm trying to build a community for this: On https://exitreviews.com, consumers can learn how long products last, where they break, and how to fix them.


I like the idea, would be helpful to include (if not already) where the product is sold. Toyota famously added a small metal block in the US to pass IIHS's small overlap crash test but that small block doesn't exist in other Asian countries.

The modern production line is so efficient they can do that level of customisation for every market individually...


That's a cool idea ; feel free to use https://www.haaartland.com/ for this.

best/Niklas


People value low prices more than they value longevity.


Maybe some do, but I don't think that is the root of the problem. A lot of people would be happy to buy a more expensive product if they knew they would get a better product. But we don't know that. A lot of more expensive brands are just design and marketing. And models often aren't sold long enough so I still can buy something that some reviewer (which I should try to make sure isn't paid by the manufacturer) praise after actually using for a couple of years.

So, as usual, it's an information problem. We don't pay for quality, because it's almost impossible to know that we actually get what we pay for. So it's more rational to buy some cheap stuff and hope for the best instead of paying 5 times as much and be disappointed again when the stuff breaks.


> And models often aren't sold long enough

This is so annoying. There are pointless model churn for everything. You can't keep up and get a understanding of what is quality or not becouse when a device has been on the market for a while and you can know if it last it is out of production.



This is the root of the problem for me as well.


This is the root of the problem. Quality machinery costs more and most people think they are getting a good deal when they buy junk at cheap prices.

However, sometimes you get lucky buying cheap stuff that lasts and that is the experience we like to remember and try to repeat.


It's the root of the general problem, but as noted elsewhere by another commenter, paying a lot more doesn't actually provide much signal that the product isn't junk.


For beancounters, a brand's reputation for expensive but long-lasting products is an amazing opportunity to "create shareholder value" and boost (short-term) profits by cutting corners on quality. Obviously the reputation will eventually adjust and this strategy will stop working, but besides the disgruntled customers, bonuses have been paid, people have been promoted and shareholder value was created. By the time the brand dies the people involved would've moved on to their next victim.

Paying more indeed isn't a reliable signal because even if a brand truly has a reputation for reliable stuff there is no guarantee someone isn't pulling the aforementioned strategy in the background.


Also, if you make machines that last a long time and are easily repairable, pretty soon you will saturate the market and won't have any new customers. If you can only sell to each person once, you won't have a sustainable business.

All the companies that made things that last forever went out of business.


If companies can't produce the high quality goods that we want and need, then what are they good for? They were supposed to compete with each other to see who can make the best products, not the cheapest junk.

This pathological capitalism has to go away forever. It's bad for consumers and bad for the environment. Companies exist because society allows them to exist, and they're allowed to exist because people believe they will fulfill their wants and needs. If they keep failing us in such spectacular ways, there's no reason for them to keep existing.


But a lot of people actually want companies to produce as cheap as possible - be it because they are poor or because they dislike regulatory interventions for ideological reasons.

Not saying this is great and I try to buy higher-quality goods if possible, but the reality is that needs and wants of high-income persons might be different to those of the poor.


It feels like a middle ground would be to make shit that lasts and decent amount of time AND sell the parts at a decent cost to keep them working for ever.

Parts provide a regular revenue stream, consumers don’t have to buy a new appliance every three years, and swapping a gear doesn’t cost 75% of a new appliance.


If you buy something expensive it won't last any longer than the cheap shit. Most of the core components are the same, you just get more features.


The key is usually to buy commercial grade, but that can be up to 10X as expensive.

Consumer grade stuff has been a race to the bottom on price and quality for years with glitzy bullshit features like WiFi support making up in marketing.


That’s not true.

But Amazon, Walmart, Whirlpool, GE, etc, have no useful indications for longevity.

There’s no way to know how long your fridge will last before you buy it. So why spend more when you literally have no idea if it’s actually better quality?


this is just your opinion.

People have no way to know longevity of the product they are buying


Not between a $100 product and a $120 product on a store shelf. Because the difference is slim to none. They are all similar quality.

Pretty much anything within about an order of magnitude in price will be value engineered like everything else.

Go to a specialty store with 10x the budget and they’ll hook you up with something where price was not a primary engineering factor.


Will they? Or will they hook you up with feeling superior while selling you the same crap branded differently?


You can be ripped off at any price level, but you won't get a premium product for budget prices. Reputation and quantification is, of course, key.

For example, the $1200 chair I'm sitting on is unquestionably better quality than the $120 chair it replaced. The $120 chair had no warranty, only the retailer's return policy. The manufacturer of the $1200 chair will gladly send someone to my house for free to replace a squeaky wheel more than a decade from now.


And more than consumer protection. At least here in Australia we have the ACCC, even though it feels somewhat weaker than usual in recent years, it can still help. It probably contributes to the so-called 'Australia Tax' we have on products here in addition to our small market and large distance. But at least a TV or car manufacturer offering a 4 year warranty here is still obliged to replace it later if it's reasonable to expect such an expensive product to last longer than 4 years.


Planned obsolescence went so far that often appliances has a higher TCO than 10 years ago.

The cheap ones by lasting very little. The reliable ones by being very expensive.


Except with any decent brand being sold down the river for a quick buck and all sources of review being paid shills the choice for most people that don't know the specific niche extremely well isn't cheap and crap vs. expensive and quality, it's cheap and crap vs. expensive and crap but with more failure modes.


Probably true, but it's also almost entirely impossible to know for sure whether a product has longevity. Yes, this is why branding is important (see Tumi or Briggs & Riley for examples), but it's very difficult to actually know whether the product will last outside of a contractual guarantee.


People nowadays also don't seem to mind to replace their items more frequently to get newer ones for possibly better features. Being too sturdy is almost a disadvantage.

(I'm not saying it sacrificially; I think both sides have a point.)


I believe this is on old merits from the time where stuff actually got better. Wont the "new model" is implied to be better wear off by now?


What does this say about the longevity of items priced higher in their category?


It's very similar phenomenon to shrinkflation. Instead of getting more expensive, items are just getting lower quality


> since the fridge compressors from the 1940's and 1950's era were very efficient

Is this only true for fridges? Because this video on a 1984 washing machine versus one from today[0, timestamp relevant] shows a big difference in efficiency from then to now.

0: https://youtu.be/NHrPcx0xkGU?t=776


He shows the instantaneous/peak power in watts, not total energy used, and didn't even use the same meter for both.

I think the actual difference is not quite so much.


Often it’s someone comparing a cheap modern version with some super high-end appliance from the 50s (because cheap low margin options didn’t exist back then).

If you were buying a $7k fridge today to compare - that’d be interesting.


A theory I've been developing explains this.

When there wasn't enough to go around, capitalism was amazing. It created tremendous wealth, such that for the first time in history, in large parts of the world, there's enough for everyone.

My theory is: Back then, the market for most goods was under-served, so the way the rich got richer was by creating more goods, since you could sell everything you could make (almost always at a profit).

However, in a saturated market, the incentives change; because you can produce far more than you can sell, the rich almost exclusively get richer by taking market share from other players. Making something last 50 years instead of 10 at a 1% cost premium becomes a bad idea, because people care about the headline figure.


Paradoxically, back when the market was LESS efficient, the extra slack afforded higher standards because they could overengineer something and still sell it easily.

It always comes down to supply and demand. Supply of generic products like compressors and blenders skyrocketed. Increase the supply enough and you get a race to the bottom. All market inefficiency has been squeezed out of the market. The market has arrived at an equilibrium of making some things just high enough quality that they last longer than a few months while being as cheap as possible. Anyone trying to make something higher quality gets squeezed out. Unless there's also much higher demand to compensate for it.


There is enormous survivorship bias with this 'stuff was way better back in the day' argument - there have always been awful products produced, but those get replaced quickly. An awful fridge from the 1950s was replaced by the 1960s. Engineers weren't deliberately overengineering things back then out of some sense of pride, they were just worse at engineering (and material science) - some things were over-engineered, because we didn't know better ways to solve that problem, and some things were under-engineered for the same reason. I think the increased cost of labor relative to manufactured goods is a big driver of this perceived change, as nobody wants to pay a repair guy $500 to come out and fix their $500 fridge. If the fridge cost $20k we would probably still fix them and they would have a long lifetime (and the repair guy would still charge $500, like an HVAC guy), but there is almost no market for a $20k fridge when a $500 fridge is available.


The market only trends to maximum efficiency if information is sufficiently cheap for enough participants.

Most people have no cost-effective way to find out how long an appliance will last, so the market cannot find the most efficient lifetime for appliances.


> I've been seeing this as a common issue throughout most of the household appliances we've tried to buy in the last ten years. They just don't last.

I've had the same experience. E.g. I bought a kettle 2 years ago and it lasted for 6 months. Previous kettles have lasted many years (as they should).


I accidentally just reasoned about kettle for another comment, but removed that part again.

First, TIL: Since in the US the mains voltage is 120V, kettle there have less power (or would trip the circuit protection/burn out old sockets) than our 240V kettles (Amazon offers plenty 2200W units, might be a legal limit). It's obvious, but I totally forgot to consider this.

Anyway, the main failures to expect from a kettle is a failing heating element or leaky sealing. Both can be avoided by using induction. But with induction stoves becoming the norm for new kitchens (at least around here), all you need is a suitable, passive kettle instead of the kettle+base. Plus a 3.7kW induction field will be faster to boil water than something that plugs into a 240V/16A socket.

Only reason to go with a standalone kettle appliance are "smart" kettles with more precise temperature control (some teas should be prepared at specific temperatures).

TL;Dr: Upgrade to an inductive stove, get a passive kettle for it, be happy :)


>But with induction stoves becoming the norm for new kitchens (at least around here), all you need is a suitable, passive kettle instead of the kettle+base.

One of the nice features of any modern kettle is that it automatically and audibly shuts off after the water starts boiling, so you know your water is ready and you don't forget and get a burnt kettle from leaving it boiling for an hour. You won't get that with a passive induction kettle.


Induction is great, but an electric kettle costs like 10 bucks while changing your stove is a huge investment that includes replacing all your pots and pans, plus if you were using gas before now your household electricity consumption grows very noticeably. Not really a comparable option in my opinion.


Depends on where you live. Around here (SW Germany) non-induction electric stoves with resistive heating elements under a special glass ("Ceranfeld") are much more common for home-use than gas. So when these fail, swapping to induction is relatively easy; picking gas over electric means a lot of extra effort for many people.

Personally, when buying new pots and pans in the last decade, I picked only those that work with induction (payed something like 20 Euro extra, in total); so when we finally swap the stove, we only have to replace one pan. Several friends make the same complaint, and I never understood why they didn't plan ahead (induction is not that new, especially when some of them only moved out from their parents in the last 5 to 10 years).

The induction kettle of friends definitely is much faster than both their old kettle (1.[2,5] kW) and ours (2.2kW); and I am not sure if they even have a 3.7kW field.

Edit: If course assuming that you eventually get a new stove anyway, at least at some point in the future. If you're settled in your house/flat for live and have a gas stove you're happy with & that will survive you, then the point is of course mood.


Something to note is that resistive and (much more commonly) gas heating is prone to warping cookware, which isn't an issue with those types of heat. However, once warped they heat unevenly over induction. So, you may find yourself having to change some of your cookware anyway (I'm in the same boat btw)


Induction hobs are a daft idea because -- as you point out -- they are incompatible with most saucepans.


Very true of hot-water heaters, too. We had the misfortune of recently needing to replace the "original" one that came with our house when we bought in in 1997. The installer told us that all current models, including some quite expensive ones, are warranted to last seven years and might give us a few more. "But you won't get 25 years out of anything today."

Thinner vessels seem to be the main culprit. That does save a few dollars on materials costs.


> since the fridge compressors from the 1940's and 1950's era were very efficient

This statement is very suspect without a citation, because since the 1970s, new refrigerator energy consumption has dropped 3x while volume has doubled [1]. As far as I can tell, fridge efficiency data from before then isn't available, but it's highly unlikely that compressors were more efficient even further back in time.

Some of the improvement in efficiency is undoubtedly much better insulation and seals, but the compressors have definitely become more efficient, which is also why refrigerators are so much more quiet today than they used to be.

1. https://www.energy.gov/articles/proof-pudding-how-refrigerat...


It's not just household appliances.

I happen to like 'On' sport shoes, for the comfort and the design. And like clockwork, after 6 months of use (walking mind you) holes develop in the fabric where the shoe bends as you walk. First pair, I assumed it was a fluke. Second pair, it became clear it is inherent in the product. Send pictures to On sports and was told it is not covered by warranty. "Normal wear and tear". I guess it is Swiss Cheese Technology (tm)!

(p.s. these are not cheap shoes. And the company must be aware of this issue since my 2 pairs developed holes in the same precise place and clearly because the material they use can't repeatedly flex.)


It seems to be almost completely unique to some but not all types appliances.

There are almost no functional household products on earth I'd choose an older version of, in fact I don't think I own anything that I wouldn't prefer over the older version.

But for some reason stuff other than cars and power tools that experience significant forces seem to at times get worse.

I guess everything is probably built with the same tech over craftsmanship mindset and there's a few things where that results in things not lasting.


"This failed unit is purely an example of doing just enough to get by until it is someone else's problem" this is the trademark of humans.


Absolutely awful experience with air conditioners. They keep malfunctioning every two years.

Meanwhile my parents have a 25 year old aircon with heavy duty copper wiring that’s still going strong.

I’ll pay a premium for appliances that are simply built to last, but there’s nothing on the market built to that spec anymore.


Really? What type? Here in Europe they’re invariably Japanese heatpumps (Daikin, Hitachi etc) - crazy reliable


Europe is generally better for reliability from personal experience. You guys are blessed with better regulations that force manufacturers to build better.


There's nothing stopping you from buying Japanese heatpumps in the US. They sell them there regularly.


I think a public policy solution to this could be to require a minimum warranty period for certain kinds of appliances, to force the manufacturers to increase the product quality.


Sounds similar to a solid number of software engineering departments too.


> They just don't last.

Two words: planned obsolescence.


so when do we get to ask where they come from now compared to then?


Could it be because the information age causes companies to compete on price much more aggressively? You can’t easily prove that your fridge really will last longer, but easy to price the price is low.


I have the internet at my fingertips. I know a thermostatically controlled toaster is feasible to make into a cheap product because it existed in the 1960s and we now have transistors. Every single toaster is exactly the same with cosmetic differences. They're priced from $10 to $500 with no distinguishing features in the first $200.

The market is not working, we just have the tools to realize how badly it's broken.


FWIW I love this Panasonic toaster, which is some substantially different toaster tech: https://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-NB-G110P-FlashXpress-Infrar...

No thermostatic control, but the defaults are fine for my uses.

Currently on year 10. The power button got a little finicky so I have to wedge it with a piece of cardboard to make contact, but otherwise as good as the day I bought it.


> The market is not working, we just have the tools to realize how badly it's broken.

"The market" is not a single thing. It's an idea(ology) from economics, and a cultural mythology, that vaguely intersect at some point.

We all think we know what "The Market" is, supply, demand, competition and so on. It's existence and operation underwrites many a political argument.

Then there is the reality:

Walk in to a supermarket and "choose" from 20 different brands of tinned vegetable, grown in the same region, processed in a handful of factories ultimately owned by the same parent company.

"Own" a movie, on a device that you don't actually control in any way, that you were effectively forced to purchase, with money you don't have.

And so on....

So, in respectful mockery of Thatcher I say "There's no such thing as The Market" - not because I don't believe in the values of property, choice, competition, innovation.... but because we don't have these, and haven't for some time. The myth of "The Market" lives on the place of early (real) capitalism as we head toward "consumer communism".


But there are choices, sometimes you're not conscious of the effect of your choice but it was made nonetheless.

For your supermarket example, instead of going there you could go to a local farmer's market for those vegetables. It might cost more, but most expect higher quality there than at the supermarket. So there is another "market" option, you shouldn't just expect all your "market" options to be placed in convenient aisles at the grocery store.

If you live in the city and have to drive over an hour to get to a farmer's market, well that was also a choice you made. Perhaps you didn't make that choice because you wanted to be away from locally grown produce, but the supermarket being your only option is a consequence of that choice.

I'm not trying to be a jerk, just trying to point out that much of the choices we make will reduce the other choices we have and we should be conscious of the ones that drive us to become mindless consumers and remove other options from us in the market.


> be conscious of the ones that drive us to become mindless consumers and remove other options from us in the market.

Nicely put. I see that sort of "choice affecting choices" you describe leveraged/manipulated a lot in tech, to "funnel" people into worlds with ever smaller horizons. Every product has an inbuilt con or trick that seems out to get you. It's essence is anti-choice masquerading as forms of economic freedom.

How to remain conscious of that? It's tiring. Like being in a jungle surrounded by predators.


> > The market is not working, we just have the tools to realize how badly it's broken.

>"The market" is not a single thing.

Who seriously think it is? I think most people here knows that "the market" doesn't refer to an actual thing or place, just like "the internet" doesn't refer to an actual actual thing or place.


> Who seriously think it is?

Nobody. I'm not implying anyone is that stupid. It's obviously a figure of speech. Which you get, right?


> respectful mockery of Thatcher

There is no need to do anything "respectfully" of Thatcher. She should have been hanged.

I wouldn't piss on her grave for fear the warmth would comfort her.


> I know a thermostatically controlled toaster is feasible to make into a cheap product because it existed in the 1960s

Having bought a toaster and electric kettle recently, I completely agree with your main point: buy the cheapest one you can bear to look at, because they're all the same in the essentials.

But this anecdote about your aside might be diverting. One of my earliest extended memories (in the 1960s) is watching my dad repair our toaster. winding new resistance wire around the mica central divider. (The toaster was a manual model with flip-open sides, toasting one side of the bread at a time.)

I don't think automatic toasters were all that cheap in the 1960s. Not everywhere, anyway, if repair of a manual toaster was worthwhile to do.


Manual repair of just about everything was worthwhile to do back then. Partly it was because labor was cheap and physical stuff was expensive (which has inverted) and partly because the overall <pick the appliance> was well built enough otherwise where one could expect to get years more service out of it post-repair. This approach doesn't payoff nearly as well when everything in the device is engineered to be within an inch of it's life once the warranty period ends. (if you're lucky)


This video makes this point very well: https://youtu.be/1OfxlSG6q5Y


The market works fine. For any category of good you can think of there will be producers that make a high quality version of it. Consumers who care about that quality (according to however you’re measuring it) will make their decisions accordingly. Consumers who reveal a preference for caring less about that quality will make decisions based on other criteria.

If your complaint is that this requires effort from the consumer, then that’s not something any market could fix. The consumer will always have to consider what their preferences are and how the offerings in the market align with them, if the want to end up purchasing goods/services that align with their preferences.


No it's doesn't work "fine". One of the failings is the artificial information asymmetry imposed by the companies' constant churn of products. By the time we get some non-seo actual reviews of the model A1000, it's out of stock and you can only buy A1000b and A2000, both made from different components. The market can't work as intended under these circumstances, because there's no way for the consumer to make an informed decision.

Consumers signal their preference for quality all the time. By buying the pricier stuff. But sometimes, somehow, there's no option anymore to buy X stuff - try buying a desktop CPU without Intel ME or AMD PSP for example. They just put it in every one of the CPUs at one point and that was that. People are not going to not buy newer CPUs.


It works in some areas and not in others. I buy iPhones because I get 10 years out of them. Same for MacBooks.

We just need a kitchenware company that takes the quality mantle and seriously maintains it over the course of 40 years. I bet it’s a niche that would actually work if someone tried it. You just have to keep the MBAs out of the company somehow.


The newest iPhone you could have bought in 2012 was an iPhone 5, which was 32-bit and doesn't support anything newer than iOS 10. You'd basically not be able to run any apps from the last three or four years. (And apps from before then may stop working if they depend on servers that have been shut down, under the assumption that everyone who cares has updated.)

I totally support your mission. I'm writing this on an 8-year-old Mac that I hope to eke out a full decade from. I just don't think iPhones (or Macs, really -- mine already can't run the newest OS, and its Safari can't display WebP images that are popping up increasingly across the Web) are a good example.


> For any category of good you can think of there will be producers that make a high quality version of it. Consumers who care about that quality (according to however you’re measuring it) will make their decisions accordingly.

I've been a consumer my whole life, and I still struggle to "make my decisions accordingly" because it's so difficult to find trustworthy information about quality, especially the qualities that matter to me. It can take an exhaustingly long time to gather this information, there are no shortcuts, and price and quality are often only loosely correlated.

Worse, after putting in the effort, I frequently find that those high-quality products and their makers disappear from the market, being outcompeted by junk.


Yeah, no.

Nobody makes high quality cassette tape mechanisms. It doesn't make sense to make ten of a custom cassette tape mechanism, only at least tens of thousands, so, they don't. But the market for thousands of these mechanisms is for the cheapest possible not good quality. So you simply can't buy good quality.

It was possible in the 1980s, at great expense, for the humble cassette tape to sound pretty good, the Nakamichi Dragon is the most famous high end tape deck.

But you can't do that today. There are a handful of Chinese manufacturers, spitting out variations on the same basic cheapest possible "eh, it's good enough" mechanism and that's the entire market.


A more modern example would be dashcams. The vast majority of products on the market are using the same sensors and the same SoCs, and the image quality difference is practically negligible between <$100 units and $400 ones. A dashcam with the image quality of even a GoPro doesn't exist, no matter how much money you are willing to spend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AnyhHl3_tE


Why does nobody mass produce a high quality version of this outdated technology that only myself and a small collection of enthusiasts care about? Has the free market failed yet again?


I will produce one in my garrage for a price. I know good preamps can be bought off the shelf. I'm not sure about the heads, so I'll have to do some research, if I have to make the head cost goes up because I need to buy tools I don't have. Some for the other parts, some I can make already with tools I have, some I can buy quality, others I'll need to charge enough to pay for tools.


I saw an interesting schematic to use a cut off casette-tape head to read the magnetic stripes on credit cards.

I wonder if the reverse could be done-- using the heads that are still (likely) in production for use in card readers, then using some DSP magic to reconstruct a decent audio product?


Well, the cassette tape is obsolete, unlike toasters or refrigerators.


The original comment offered no such exclusions. If we want to say only that the free market will provide whatever it wants and we can like it or lump it suddenly that's not very attractive is it?


The complaint is that one could manufacture those more expensive high quality products at a larger quantity and, through scaling effects, one would achieve a lower price, which would make them accessible to larger segments of the market. I suppose that would be the market "working". Instead you have manufacturers churning out tons of cheap shit that breaks quickly. I guess most customers don't know how quickly different household appliances break, so they also can't compare that together with price. They have to assume that the more expensive appliances are also higher quality, but how can you judge that as a non-expert?

Household appliances are textbook examples of adoption s-curves, and in different phases, different rules apply for the market. Especially in the last phase of the s-curve, those manufacturers are hurt the most which build lasting products, because their own past customers, usually the best source for new purchases from their brand, don't buy from them any more because the need is still met by the still working product. So they either go bankrupt or get bought by one of the manufacturers that put in planned obsolescence and got tons of money from that, or they change their strategy before that happens.


because their own past customers, usually the best source for new purchases from their brand, don't buy from them any more because the need is still met by the still working product

Doesn't this neglect word of mouth? If you ask someone on HN, they will tell you to buy your vacuum cleaners and dishwashers from Miele and your washers and dryers from Speed Queen, budget permitting.

To the extent that scales to the world at large, the quality manufacturers will take business away from their competitors who don't get recommended as often.


> The complaint is that one could manufacture those more expensive high quality products at a larger quantity and, through scaling effects, one would achieve a lower price, which would make them accessible to larger segments of the market.

That complaint is immature and entirely self-interested. It’s almost always beneficial (except when there’s production shortages) to have a preference that is shared by large segments of the market. It’s not the systems fault if few people share your preferences.


> That complaint is immature

That's a bit rich for you to write -> this thread is addressing a practical problem with consumer goods, and your post is a theoretical, spherical car in a vacuum description of how ideal market should work, and falls apart in the real world.

If the model worked perfectly, we would never have problems with slave labour in supply chains because ~0% of consumers are willing to buy them. The fact that we do, indicated that consumers are not able to enforce their preferences, for example because companies lie with no consequences. And if they can lie about slave labour, then they can lie about anything else.


> this thread is addressing a practical problem with consumer goods

The problem of selecting for quality is exactly what I am talking about, and it is very simple to accomplish. I do it myself routinely, so I know that it takes a bit more than 0 effort, but it is a very simple problem to manage, and anybody can do it. The actual immature complaint is that not enough people have the same preferences as you do. Which you just have to get over, and accept that you live on a planet with 7 billion other people, and a lot of them (no matter what they say), actually don’t care about a little bit of slave labor in the supply chain of their new TV.


> lot of them (no matter what they say), actually don’t care about a little bit of slave labor in the supply chain of their new TV

So we can't trust what consumers say they want, but we can trust what you say they wan't?

What is the basis for this extraordinary claim?

So far your argument reads a lot like 'market is infalliable, if it doeant serve your needs, its your fault. And even if you find it ever fails, it's your, the consumers fault too. No flaw in the system is possible'


> So we can't trust what consumers say they want, but we can trust what you say they wan't?

I’m not saying they want anything. I’m saying that what they want is revealed by their choices and not how they might answer any particular question when prompted. In economics this is called a revealed preference.


> I’m saying that what they want is revealed by their choices

You still have not addressed how does this square with lying.

What should happen when I ask primark staff and they say 'there is no slave labour'?

Is it also my responsibility to fly to Taiwan, break into the factory and defeat their security in a shootout, to find out that thwy use slave labour?

At least I hope the state won't protect primarc in case I want to make sure they are not lying before I buy a t-shirt?


> You still have not addressed how does this square with lying.

That’s just regular fraud. It’s already illegal.


>it is very simple to accomplish.

Given you don't have details on the quality of the item you are buying how do you accomplish that?


You don’t have information unless you seek to find it. The information is available and if you choose not to seek it then you have nobody but yourself to blame.


How do I get details on the design changes that make it less reliable as a consumer?


> You can’t easily prove that your fridge really will last longer, but easy to price the price is low.

I'm not so sure about that. In my experience people tend to be less price sensitive with household appliances (big one time purchases that are supposed to last long) than they are with other more expensive items. Most people I know tend to be lifelong customers if they have good experiences with a specific brand and are very willing to share that brand as a recommendation.

The problem is, those good experiences don't seem to hold true anymore. Price hasn't been a good indicator for product quality and life expectancy for a while. I've seen this first hand with my family. My parents were very willing to spend significant amounts on stuff like dishwashers, fridges, or washing machines. Despite sticking to the brands they had good experiences with, the product lifetime decreased with every new product purchase. It has come to the point that they don't care for the brand they used to trust, they are just buying the stuff thats cheap and checks all the boxes.

These companies seem to have traded high customer loyalty (and possibly a very efficient organic marketing channel) for more frequent sales but higher price competition. I have no insights into those companies, but I'm not sure if that was an intelligent long term play.


It's worse now - the cheaper product often lasts longer (as it's simpler) - I have a fridge/freezer thing that has basically no controls and no computers, and it chugs along.

Newer refridgerators with fancy water faucets and computers and locks have failed in the time I've had it.

Had a washer blow out on a computer control board; $750 for the board.

A similar washer blew out on the dial, $35 for the dial.


Similar story with old Honda’s. Simple cars that just worked with few problems, but they were simple cars with few electrical motors and digital features. Automatic, heated, air conditioned seats? No. Automatic climate control? No. Speed adjusted suspension? No. Speed adjusted stereo volume? No. Etc.

However, some manufacturers like Saab actually delivered all this with excellent reliability only to be rejected by the US market and driven into the ground by General Motors. What is a quality manufacturer to do?


Where to start…

  Similar story with old Honda’s. Simple cars that just worked with few problems, but they were simple cars with few electrical motors and digital features. 
No they weren't. Japanese manufacturers brought all sorts of whiz-bang doohickeys over by the boatload. That was one of the ways the Japanese luxury cars were able to compete with the Germans. Even if you go back further you'll find stuff like the 2nd gen Accord which was the world's first car to offer automated navigation. Even if not electronic, Honda brought over a bunch of really complex mechanical things like four wheel steering. Even the old carburetors of 70s and 80s Hondas were among the most complex you're ever likely to encounter.

  However, some manufacturers like Saab actually delivered all this with excellent reliability
lol. no. I say this as a Saab fan: Saabs have never been reliable. Ever. The (pre-GM) 9000 made the news for being fire prone. The Trionic stuff while fascinating was not reliable in the slightest, or as Saabnet puts it: 100% of engines equipped with direct ignition have had a direct ignition cassette failure. Transmissions were delicate. Climate control…

If you mean older Saabs, well the two stroke stuff has its own set of problems. They're neat cars but were just different enough to make it difficult to find a competent mechanic. Saab already had one foot in the grave by the time GM bought them.

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Feds-investigate-Saab-90...


The joke I heard was Saab stands for Swedish Automobile, Always Borken.


How many Saabs have you owned?


The manufacturers are all gaming the system by releasing new models so quickly (and in so many varieties) that any design flaw of a model cannot be used to make a purchasing decision because the comparable old devices are no longer available.


Or there is one or two manufacturers for all the various brands.

"Whirlpool brands include Whirlpool, Maytag, KitchenAid, Jenn-Air, Amana, Magic Chef, Admiral, Norge, Roper, and others. See all items in Dishwasher Dishrack. Whirlpool also makes various appliance models for Sears / Kenmore."

And once you start looking up part numbers you realize it goes even further.


100%. Information asymmetry, and also the glut of options make informed consumer decisions much harder than they need to be.


Could be.

E.g. the majority of consumer grade ice machines on Amazon (at least in the UK) uses a mechanism that is near identical. This extends to mostly copying a design flaw: Most of them a compartment used to immerse cooled metal rods in water, which then rotates out of the way to let the ice cubes fall into the ice compartment when done. Most of these are made out of plastic, with a motor rotating only one side. Problem is when it's stopped mechanically by simply hitting the end of the range of motion, which means the motor effectively ends up trying to twist the compartment. This works fine for casual use - the plastics holds for a while. But use it enough, and you get cracks developing. It's trivial to fix - some of the designs have an optical diode to stop rotation in one direction, but weirdly not in the other, and doing that in both directions would solve it

But I'm thinking that apart from not just coming up in testing (it takes a lot of cycles before it breaks), a lot of these problems spread because of cost cutting in the product development phase. It's a pretty obvious flaw if you observe the above mechanisms, and while you can cut a few cents of the bill of materials, without extensive testing you won't know for sure that it won't fail within the warranty window (they do if you use them as heavily as I use mine) and it doesn't take a very high failure rate to make an extra optical diode and wiring worth it. If people did product dev from scratch you'd expect at least some of them to decide it'd be worth it, but almost all of these are clearly just blindly copied designs (I'm sure multiple models must also be manufactured on spec by the same manufacturer).

As a result there's little real competition, and few customers will be aware there are better alternatives, especially because it takes quite a bit of wear and tear and so most people don't shop for these types of products often enough to realistically compare, and as you point out it's hard to prove (and takes a long time to develop a reputation).


Sounds right to me. When you look at markets where reliability is important, you see appliances that are the same. You can get good quality commercial washing machines.


> You can’t easily prove that your fridge really will last longer

Yeah you can, it's called warranty


These studies never account for survivorship bias. There were plenty of crappy appliances decades ago, but they’ve all long since broken, so we only have the very best old appliances to compare against today.

Also, the inflation adjusted cost of a fridge in the 50s was something like $10k. A $10k fridge today (e.g. Sub Zero) will easily last for many decades. A $1k Wal-Mart special will not.


I just watched an amusing video that compares Mr. Coffee's original machine to modern drip coffeemakers. Mr. Coffee would cost $300 today (adjusted for inflation). There's been great simplification of the design over the years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp9H0MO-qS8

Given a more than order of magnitude reduction in price, a shorter lifespan can be tolerated, and could even be a rational consumer choice.


In this specific case, I think you're too quick to accept that trade-off. I don't remember the video drawing any such conclusion, and from memory, it seemed to slightly indicate that the older-and-more-expensive model was likely the less reliable of the pair in one or two ways (the flimsy and dangerous wire, and less importantly the dual heating elements). The new model is probably only less reliable in one way -- the outer shell is probably easier to break if you really smash it.

In general, I think it's almost always the case that compared to historical offerings, you can get an order or so drop in price, without sacrificing core lifespan. Sacrificing lifespan can be done, but for such devices, such sacrifices lead to saving an additional $10-$20 rather than $100-$200 -- those come from access to cheaper materials.

It's like buying shoes for $20 that you'll have to replace every year, instead of an $80 pair that last 10 years. It's a trap, and the goal should be to lift people out of it, rather than make an even worse $15 shoe, and so on.


The new one, using 2 heating elements, burns your coffee if you leave it because the heater needs to be warm enough to actually make the coffee two and it takes literally twice as long to make the exact same coffee.

Maybe people wouldn't use Kurig if they could still make their cup of coffee in 5 minutes instead of 10.


The old one is the one with 2 elements — the new one has only 1. The bad taste from the hot plate is mostly a function of using the hot plate, rather than a specific temperature difference from old to new — he recommends not using the hot plate at all in either version, and just letting it get cold, and microwaving your next cup on demand. I think you’re mixing up his discussion of water temperature leaving the bubble pump.


The newer model is more subject to failure due to scale buildup inside the heating tube, causing the thermostat to trip.


As Alec recounts you can run vinegar through it to descale it.


But that doesn't always work. I've wondered if coffee residues in the carafe contaminate the water (when the carafe is used to fill the water reservoir) and could get baked on to the surface of the heating tube.


> These studies never account for survivorship bias.

Then I'm sure you were relieved to discover that the author didn't!

From the link:

"The very early (30's and 40's) ones were less consistent in their life spans. I've seen a document on this somewhere and will share it if I run across it again. They didn't have the automated and consistent manufacturing processes like we have today. Some of them did go out early. The ones we still have today from the early days are the ones which were especially good, and are still in the long flat bottom of the failure bathtub curve.

"What I foresee killing off many of the 2000's compressors are the lower engineering margins in the design. It takes less of an incident to go beyond that margin into the region of damage and failure; as compared to earlier compressors with a larger engineering margin.


That does not account for survivorship bias. It makes no mention of compressors from the 30s and 40s that were universally terrible, so none existed for long enough to evaluate their MTBF.

It also does not evaluate reliability of units from the 50s through the 2000s, which is apparently when everything became unreliable junk.

In order to properly control for survivorship bias, you need to tabulate reliability figures for each year (and for each price point). The handwaving assertion about manufacturing consistency does not do that in the slightest.


You're making an unnecessary distinction between intra-brand survivorship bias and inter-brand survivorship bias.

Both effects are at play in the real world, obviously.

Reply to edits:

>It also does not evaluate reliability of units from the 50s through the 2000s

"This isn't a massive cross-brand longitudinal study" is a pretty low-hanging critique.

Who could afford such a study?

>In order to properly control for survivorship bias, you need to tabulate reliability figures for each year (and for each price point).

Does any party have access to these data, realistically?


>You're making an unnecessary distinction between intra-brand survivorship bias and inter-brand survivorship bias.

No, I am not. A $10k fridge from a premium manufacturer that makes no budget models will last decades. A $1k fridge from a budget manufacturer that produces no premium fridges will last a few years.

There are very few manufacturers that make models spanning the entire reliability (and thus price) gamut.

>Does any party have access to these data, realistically?

Probably not. Which is why we cannot assert with any solid evidence that appliance reliability has declined over the years—we have no way of conclusively ruling out survivorship bias.


>There are very few manufacturers that make models spanning the... gamut.

How does that relate to survivorship bias?

>Probably not. Which is why we cannot assert with any solid evidence...

...anything.

If you crank the standards for "solid" high enough, you can make literally anything become unknowable.

You can always ask for better evidence, in any situation! Historically this has been exploited in denial campaigns (tobacco, climate change, etc), so there should be some wariness surrounding this rhetoric.

That said, N=1 here. Let's not make more (or less) of it than there is.

>we have no way of conclusively ruling out survivorship bias.

Is the corollary that we have no way of detecting planned obsolescence?

I hope I'm misunderstanding. If not, it's the fox guarding the henhouse.


>How does that relate to survivorship bias?

You said that inter vs. intra brand survivorship bias didn’t matter. I think it does, since the former likely has a much bigger effect (models from premium brands generally last longer overall due to higher reliability, whereas random units from cheaper brands last longer due to pure chance).

>...anything.

>If you crank the standards for "solid" high enough, you can make literally anything become unknowable.

This is arguing in bad faith. There is a high level of evidence required to support the extraordinary claim that modern appliances are generally less reliable than old appliances, after controlling for price point. I believe a reasonable amount of evidence to support this claim would require unbiased sampling of a statistically significant number of appliance service records over the years. Otherwise, we’re just idly conjecturing.

That said, I take back my claim that the requisite evidence is unobtainable. We unequivocally know that cars have gotten much more reliable over the years, based on purchase frequency and service records (remember, cars’ odometers used to top out at 99999 miles because they weren’t expected to last longer). There is no reason we couldn’t do similar surveys with appliances.

>Is the corollary that we have no way of detecting planned obsolescence?

No, the corollary is that it would be equally difficult to infer if planned obsolescence has gotten more frequent over the years. That’s very different from being unable to detect planned obsolescence at all. It’s easy to inspect a particular appliance (or line of appliances) and find evidence of premature failure points, as the linked article nicely did.


Yeah, the adjusted prices are a major factor. Today, that could get you a Miele that would be inherited by your children, nephews, or grandchildren.

The other thing people forget is that older appliances and electronics were built to be easily serviced, and therefore the ones today that survive have been repaired at some point (most likely). Today, most of those dedicated repair shops are long gone and products are no longer designed to be serviceable.


Usually repairing costs are incredibly high. So you usually end up buying new one and creating more waste.


I had an inexpensive fridge in my apartment break and the cost of having the tech just come out to look at it was around 1/2 of a new unit and then who knows how much the parts and labor would have been to fix it. Sadly, it just went to the scrap yard and we got a new one.


The nice thing about Sub Zero is that the whole thing can be disassembled so when something does go wrong it can be repaired.

I inherited a 12+ year old one one with my apartment and have been able to strip it down to its circuit boards to clean, maintain, and repair it when needed which I love.

The bad thing is the company treats itself like a luxury car brand so OEM parts are a fortune ($400 for a shelf!) and if you aren't interested in doing the work yourself the certified repair guy is going to rake you over the coals like a luxury German auto dealer's service department for simple repairs.

Luckily, like with luxury car brands, the resale value of all the parts is basically $0 so you can get used parts (or even entire used appliances) super cheap and there are lots of compatible parts out there on amazon for reasonable prices (I recently had to replace the compressor switch which took about 10 minutes and a $10 part but would have been $200+ to have a tech show up).

Net-net it's the best fridge I've ever owned but even so I'm not sure I would have chosen to shell out the $12k for it if I had been the original buyer.


The point is that the curve of MTBF has a much narrower standard deviation than it used to --- there aren't as many early failures on newer models, but there also won't be as many old-age survivors.

A 70 year old fridge that cost the equivalent of $10k today when new, and is likely to last over a century, is still a better value than replacing a $1k model a dozen times in the same timespan.


Not necessarily, if you accommodate for inflation.


Sub Zero fridges are terrible. The people I’ve known that had them rued the day they bought them.

They are a status symbols, that’s why they cost so much, not because they are top quality.


I've worked on one from ~2008. The fridge has a decent build quality, and two (!) compressors inside of it. It uses more metal components, more structural supports, etc, compared to most other fridges I've seen. So it's "better".

It also is designed such that you absolutely cannot clean the inner layers of the fan-cooled condenser coil without major disassembly of the fridge. The service panel on the front can be removed, but there is a metal fan shroud that is difficult to remove and turns what ought to be routine maintenance into an ordeal involving taking things apart and taking the built in fridge out of the wall. Whether this was deliberate or just an oversight, I don't know. There would have been many other simple and cost-neutral ways to implement this cover.


That is not what I’ve heard from speaking to appliance repair techs, or builders/architects, or the Sub Zero owners I know with 15+ year old refrigerators that have never had any issues (except the ice maker, which is an inherently unreliable piece of technology).

My guess is your friends aren’t maintaining them properly (they know they have to clean the condenser coils every couple months, right?) Either that, or they have those “integrated” models with no visible vent for the condenser, which of course will overheat the compressors and electronics.


Ah, the fridge equivalent of "you're holding it wrong"



but electronics are literally shit. perhaps they always were, but there are things that are new since the early 2000s that automatically make them shit, like those buttons on a microwave, digital controls, and having javascript inside the product. i cant think of a single piece of hardware i bought after 2005 that i was happy about. i buy a scale (the most expensive one in the store this time) and it automatically shuts off after a minute and i have to re-tare it. i buy a thermostat and it has a vuln that lets people remotely control it. i buy a keyboard and it has LEDs and when you turn them off (lucky it has the feature), you cant see the key labels because they are just holes for the LED. i buy another "gaming" keyboard and it has 2KRO (i.e, worse than $5 generic keyboard). the last decent product i can remember was a CRT in 2005. LCDs starting with HDMI or so take longer to turn on that a CRT, they are THAT bad. (LCDs did not compete with CRT until 2015 or so, btw).

i cant even imagine why you would downvote this. are you the one agreeing with OP's "no evidence" claim, or are you just some frothing idiot consumer who is upset that your little purchases arent being extolled as they usually are?


Every time this quality decline pops up there always someone to argue that this is all caused by survivorship bias, but this argument just doesn't hold water: if it was survivorship bias, you would see isolated old appliances scattered between homes, but nobody with many appliances from the 80s and earlier still working, yet it's the opposite that occurs. I'm extraordinarily happy to still have 3 of my grand parents (95/93 and 86) and most of their stuff is almost 40 years old :

- fridge

- oven

- dishwasher

- freezer

- hairdryer

- vacuum cleaner

- mixer

- coffee machine

- and even a microwave oven that's been in use daily since 1984!

The notable exception being the toaster (thrown away when we learned it had asbestos in it very close to the bread) and the washing machines.

> A $10k fridge today (e.g. Sub Zero) will easily last for many decades.

I wouldn't take a bet on it. Especially because luxury stuff are targeting a wealthy audience who often change their still fully functional appliance after a few year to buy “better” ones (bigger, additional feature, or even just a design that isn't out of fashion), they have very limited incentive in making things that last several decades, it just needs not to die during the typical ownership duration. Related trivia: the most expensive Hermès handbags are really fragile because the crocodile skin is untreated, and if you carry them outside when it rains, every drop will leave a stain. That doesn't seem to negatively affect their business in any way.

That being said, it is true that household appliance used to cost much more back then, and people where willing to pay that much money. That's the tragedy of competitive markets for commodities: it's a race to the bottom.


Weird that we've been making a lot of the same appliances for so long but haven't really gotten any better at making them reliable. I mean, if I'd been making fridges for the last 60 years I'd probably know how to make one last, right?


They've gotten really good at making them break down on time to ensure more business for the fridge-making company. Planned obsolescence isn't a conspiracy theory.


Without numbers it's really hard to say how good or bad these engineering choices were in regards to the consumer to come out on top or not.

In my experience appliances are a lot more efficient and cheaper than they used to be. My new stainless steel fridge has much more capacity while using the same amount of power than the 20yo one it replaced (Which didn't actually fail, but the white coating was rusting all over the place).

My HE washer doesn't fill the entire tub compared to the old upright ones, so my water heater is used less, and spins at ~1,200rpm, greatly reducing dry times for my electric dryer. The recessed lighting in my house went from 90 watts per bulb to 12 watts for LED, and saves me $$ on cooling when needed. My tankless water heater heats up only the water being used, no more, no less.

I'm paying roughly 32¢/KW all-in (after taxes, fees etc.) for electricity in the Bay Area, so efficiency gains build up quickly over time.

Anecdotally, the only issues I've had so far have been with poorly engineered Samsung refrigerators, where the fans would seize due to ice buildup, not mechanical wear.


> In my experience appliances are a lot more efficient and cheaper than they used to be.

turbokinetic agrees modern refrigerators are more energy efficient but at the expense of longevity and not worth it

> I am saying that this compressor, and its application, show clear engineering choices made, which sacrificed its life span in the name of some modicum of energy savings.


>turbokinetic agrees modern refrigerators are more energy efficient but at the expense of longevity and not worth it

Without numbers to back up that claim, that's just their opinion, as is mine. I my experience the energy savings have been significant enough for that to not be a big concern.

There may be an environmental argument here of course, but that's a separate argument than what consumers feel in their pocketbook.


If our goal is to minimize cost (ignoring the environmental side of things), longevity must be taken into account. If energy savings at the expense of longevity truly makes refrigerators cheaper in the longterm then that's awesome, but I worry planned obsolescence is ruining the appliance market and increasing consumer expense.


>energy savings at the expense of longevity

I think we're in agreement, however, I don't think an analysis has been made either way to be able to make this claim. The old appliances you see could just be due to survivor bias, while the broken ones were unceremoniously disposed of. Perhaps the old appliances were simpler and cheaper to repair, but perhaps new appliances need less repairs in the first place. Without an actual analysis this is just speculation.

A related example would be laptops and cell phones, which have become more complicated, less upgradable, and harder to repair over time (soldered parts, glue etc.). However, cell phones are now commonly waterproof, which has eliminated a major reason for replacement. Laptops basically have no moving parts other than the keyboard and screen hinge now, and stay useful much longer due to chips being really fast in the last decade.


How much more energy efficient are they really? How much are you actually saving?


Well, in the case of my refrigerator, I didn't do a 1:1 replacement. I got a much larger capacity one, about 30% more space, while not using any more energy (It actually uses less, but not really noticeable in my energy bill.)

My energy company gave be a multi-hundred dollar rebate to upgrade to an HE washer, so it was objectively better for my wallet to upgrade. Now I'm using less water, gas, and electricity when doing laundry. About a few hundred a year less on top of the rebate I got upfront.

The tankless water heater has no pilot light, so there's some savings there, but the real benefit was having unlimited hot water. Tankless water heaters are rated to last longer than tanks, allegedly, but I haven't had one long enough to know either way.

Incandescent to LED was a no-brainer, each pair of LED lights was about $30 at costco and use 14% of the energy. They have already more than paid for themselves, not including the money saved by needing to run the AC less.


The reply comment, where another repairmen shared convincing experience-based evidence of good reliability of modern compressors, eviscerates the argument.

Also, the assertion that mid-1900s compressors were efficient is absent any facts to back it up. If the main power-consuming part of old refrigerators was so efficient, how can newer refrigerators be so much more efficient? Sure, better insulation can help, but I don’t see how you get around that newer compressors need so much less power to get the job done.


For newer appliances, I've weirdly found that spending less money is key to achieving longevity.

Smaller, fewer features, less moving parts. Avoid gimmicky features that your grandparents never needed.

I'm a real cheapskate when it comes to appliances and have yet to have one crap out on me.


PCBs, sensors, and switches seem to cover most failure modes of modern appliances. I try to minimize the number of each in every purchase.

My favorite recent buy was a Victory range hood with mechanical switches and no PCB. More like this please.


It's triply annoying as the computers in these devices absolutely pale in comparison to a Raspberry Pi - it would be nice if all appliances used one general purpose board that could be easily sourced; as it is nobody will pay $750 for a control board to fix a washer when a brand new one is less.


The $750 price tag means that either someone is getting ridiculously rich and/or the prices are artificially inflated in order to discourage repair. There's no reason a board with a few relays or MOSFETs and the processing power of a pocket calculator should cost much more than a Raspberry Pi.


It's probably because the new models have incompatible boards and there is a small stockpile of that model left.


It's exactly this - once the line stops making the boards, they stockpile the remainder for warranty support and as that supply dwindles the price begins to skyrocket.


These problems exist because we no longer live in an economy with true competition. Look at the post about Whirlpool owning almost all major appliance brands I see at best buy.


> PCBs, sensors, and switches seem to cover most failure modes of modern appliances.

Let's not forget about software in these IoT times. Yes there is a phone app. But will it be there in 10 years?


> PCBs, sensors, and switches seem to cover most failure modes of modern appliances. I try to minimize the number of each in every purchase.

Digital thermostats are far more reliable than mechanical ones, as well as more consistent. There are surely other cases where solid state electronics (which have PCBs) replacing mechanical systems have improved the reliability of appliances. So your rule of thumb is surely contrary to reality.


Anecdata, but most of my expensive appliance repairs have been from a board frying.

Replacing a standard thermocouple is trivial. Replacing a PCB may not even be possible if the part isn’t being produced. Doesn’t mean you’re wrong, but I’d still rather have the thermocouple in most cases.


I hate all the electronics on ovens/stoves, my brother needed a new one and I found a Canadian company called Unique that makes them without electronics (and some models for propane use off grid).


Good point, our fridge came with an ice maker which we don't use and when something related to it started making a horrible whine I just unplugged the connector, problem solved.


The unix philosophy works with appliances as well as software!


Mises proposed that in a planned economy, there is a fundamental flaw called the economic calculation problem: essentially, it is almost impossible to calculate optimal resource allocation because doing so amounts to knowing every single person’s needs, and every detail of every factor of production, at all times. The information is too hard to get. Only markets can sufficiently simplify the problem by providing price as a universal point of comparison. That was his theory.

Unfortunately, the success of price as a simplifying mechanism also hides all of the information from which the price emerged. This makes it almost impossible to determine whether the price is low because the materials are poor quality, or because the labor was underpaid, or because environmental standards were bypassed through offshoring, or because the manufacturing process was particularly efficient. Clearly we hope it is due to the latter, but determining so amounts to solving the economic calculation problem.

But, rather than abandoning all hope, I believe the answer lies in consumers demanding supply chain transparency. This isn’t going to enable an efficient planned economy, but it might enable individuals to make better decisions about the purchases for which they care most.


Good supply chain transparency is about as difficult as an efficient planned economy, actually. Supply chain transparency was by very very far the biggest issue.

Actually planning the economy is a polynomial time problem to solve exactly for linear situations, and ~n*log(n) to approximate fairly well both for linear and nonlinear situations. Consumer demand is solved by using markets for everything except capital.

And so revealing accurate information turned out to be by far the most difficult task, at which planned economies routinely suffered catastrophic failures. For example, the USSR overestimated grain production by around 2x for the Holodomor due to misreporting and lies at every single level (the ensuing catastrophic and tyrannical resource distribution is a whole other topic). Until the 1990s, Soviet planners highly valued US spy informations on their economic situation as it was vastly more reliable than their own.

Planned economies are far more reliant on this data of course, and that is why they are far more affected. Actually finding a sufficiently efficient organisation of production is not that big of a challenge either in theory or in practice, the issue is mostly figuring out exactly what you've got to organize.

Unfortunately Mises did not have the algorithmic intuition to figure out that the calculation part is completely doable (even when you assume a perfect efficient market which is theoretically impossible unless P=NP and entropy stops existing and even then only for linear systems, the exact solution can be found at worst in cubic time to the number of industries).


I suspect that many manufacturers would love more transparency in the supply chains they themselves depend on, and are only a little less in the dark than their consumers. [no personal knowledge of industry, just an observation from various news accounts over the years];


Most definitely, the issue is they won't want to be the ones providing transparency into their own operations, for a variety of reasons.


One thing I’ve noticed compared to childhood appliances is plastic mechanisms (gears, actuators, brackets, etc). These tend to become brittle or soft with age or exposure to chemicals and lead to early failure. Of course metal also suffered from fatigue and there are quite strong and durable thermoplastics but today I see cheap plastic used liberally.


Sounds like BMW. I can't believe how much plastic crap they put under the hood where the heat destroys everything.


i've got an 2000 bmw with coolant flange made of plastic, real ticking time bomb there, right against the firewall too, if it breaks I'll scrape the car coz it's in such a PITA area. They designed it that way.


This. The times I’ve fixed my appliances rather than replace them, the cause was most often a broken plastic part!


I was going to say the same thing. And it always seems to be some little thing for which having made it in metal would've had a negligible impact on price.

I had it with a car door opening mechanism - something you interact with countless times during a day. Less than an inch long. Surprised it lasted as long as it did.

There needs to be an equivalent of Choice/Consumer Reports/etc that dismantles products and calls out anything that should've been made from metal instead of plastic. It's frustrating dealing with unnecessarily broken parts.


There needs to be an equivalent of Choice/Consumer Reports/etc that dismantles products and calls out anything that should've been made from metal instead of plastic. It's frustrating dealing with unnecessarily broken parts.

I would pay a crazy amount of money to subscribe to a service provided by a professional reverse-engineering outfit that takes the Consumer Reports concept to the next level, with highly technical teardowns and critical analysis of a wide variety of products that covers everything from the BOM to the firmware.

This kind of thing happens sporadically -- e.g., some of the Juicero postmortems offered a lot of engineering insight. And there is no shortage of passionate amateurs like AvE who don't have a consistent methodology and/or don't always have the domain expertise needed to give a given product design a fair assessment.

What's needed is a consistent, professional, and above all objective approach to informing the purchase decisions of technically-literate consumers.


I think beyond tear-downs, it needs to be influential enough to guilt companies into going the right thing. Consumers shouldn't need to browse a detailed tear-down of an object to guess whether something has been made to last or not.


My thinking is that the people who watch it will do the influencing.


This is something I’m interested in. There are strong plastics, but a lot of stuff nowadays seems to be the cheapest plastic imaginable. Anyway to know if what you’re getting?


I don't think so. MFGs are likely to swap in new parts without notice --they may keep track through serial numbers, lots or similar, but not something they would expose to end users.


Take it apart and see? If you have experience you can usually roughly tell what kinds of plastics are used, although some are nearly indistinguishable.


Walk in to an appliance store or website, or someone's house or a car park if secondhand, with your tool kit and expert knowledge and do a full teardown on anything your considering purchasing.

Sounds time consuming.


I bought a house in 2011 and am currently on my third refrigerator. We originally bought a Samsung and it kept on breaking until the warranty expired. We learned our lesson and bough an extended warranty on an LG. That broke so many times, and as part of the extended warranty contract, they gave us our money back. We took the money and bought another LG and over the last two years have not had issues.

I have a dorm refrigerator that was purchased in 1986. It survived numerous moves and ex-girlfriends but is still going strong. I currently have it sitting in my office as my drink fridge. Wife has been asking I throw it out. Hell no.


Samsung and LG make poor quality appliances with fancy techno junk features. GE, whirlpool, and other US brands are a much better value. I'm sure they don't last as long as the ones built prior to the 1990s, but they're worlds better than Samsung and LG.


Yeah, I'd stay well away from Samsung for appliances. There was a big thing here about a big recall because of their washing machines catching fire here a little bit before I bought my house, and I'd heard about their fridges breaking. I bought an Electrolux fridge and a Bosch washing machine instead and they're still going strong after six years. The fridge was on the recommendation of my parents who had bought one five or so years before, and theirs is still running well, never having needed any repairs.


My Bosch fridge from 2011 is still going strong. Cheapest model of the big fridges at 400€.


I disagree that consumers are to blame. Believe me, I would be willing to pay 50% more for my fridge if I could know for certain that it would last decades longer than another. It is incorrect to say that consumers have a choice between "high quality/long lasting" and "cheaper but dies sooner", and for multiple reasons!

1. An uneducated consumer cannot distinguish between the two. Both products will bear labels reading "Extremely high quality, we take pride in our work, energy efficient AND better quality than all our competitors!"

2. Brands and manufacturers are taking these shortcuts uniformly. So consumers can't simply rely on buying a machine of a certain brand.

3. These issues don't show up for (apparently) 13 years! Even IF a consumer identifies a brand with a strong evidence-based reputation for quality, that brand may have lowered standards sometime in the past 13 years and they would have no way of knowing.


It was a premium product at the time and it was priced accordingly. Only 85% of Americans could afford one at that time. Appliances today are dirt cheap for a reason.

The reasons everyone has a fridge today isn’t because everyone is rich, it’s because fridges are cheap.


It would be pretty cool if we made decisions that led both to better pay for most Americans and for higher quality projects. We've destroyed the labor movement so most workers have no bargaining power. Real wages have barely risen since 1980, despite huge gains in productivity. Then in order to make products cheap enough for impoverished workers to afford, we cut every corner we can.


Real compensation has tracked with productivity gains quite nicely, though a growing gap did start to emerge in 2008. https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/gr...

Two things that _are_ real issues are

- Compensation includes benefits, and much of the increase in compensation has been eaten up by healthcare costs. This means wages haven't increased nearly as much.

- There is a growing gap in productivity inequality within labor which has led to growing income inequality. Those productivity and income increases have disproportionately gone to the upper percentiles of workers.


> Real compensation has tracked with productivity gains quite nicely

This goes counter to what I have read. For example: "Net productivity grew 59.7% from 1979-2019 while a typical worker’s compensation grew by 15.8%, according to EPI data..."

https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequalities-reflecting-gro...


The EPI's numbers are wrong/misleading for a few reasons.

- The productivity and compensation graphs are often inflation-adjusted using incomparable deflators. Productivity is measured using a GDP inflator (which includes investments) whereas compensation is measured using a CPI deflator (which only includes consumer products). CPI is historically higher[1] which means compensation is artificially being deflated more than productivity.

- The most well-known graph from the EPI[2] shows productivity for all workers but shows compensation for only 80% of workers, with the provided reason being to exclude high earners like management and executives. Which, sure I guess, but surely the two metrics should be kept consistent.

If you correct for these errors you end up finding a productivity/compensation gap that is much smaller than the EPI claims, though notably not zero. The EPI themselves have a figure that includes all workers and uses matching deflators ([3], figure C, "Real producer average hourly consumption") so perhaps some of the blame here is on readers.

I think this BLS paper on the subject[4] is well worth a read. An interesting result they found is that the industry with the greatest productivity/compensation gap is...computing. Probably not the jobs people usually imagine when they think of stagnating pay.

1. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2016/article/comparing-the-cpi-...

2. https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

3. https://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the-historic-d...

4. https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/pdf/understanding-the-...


Interesting, I will take a look thanks!


What if I'm rich and just want reliable appliances? It's a wild goose chase.


GE Cafe line. Now you can be broke like everyone else but your appliances won't


Continuing gp train of thought you would need to search for a supplier that 85% of people can't afford anymore.


I found a company called Unique based in Canada that makes ovens and stoves without all the electronics (which are really the only part in stoves I've ever had issue with, the rest is very simple mechanically and either doesn't fail or is easily repaired). My brother got one and is really happy.


Buy commercial appliances from a restaurant supplier.


It's a good idea, but commercial equipment is often ugly in the context of a hole kitchen, and usually aren't built to fit in standard sized alcoves which many newer homes have.


The trick is to have two kitchens. One for actual use (maybe even by staff) the other for representative purposes or for light use once per month ;-)

This tongue-in-cheek comment is inspired by relatives who actually have two kitchens: One in the house with the store and manufacturing space (with space for 6 people to eat), one in the house they live in (and about twice as big, with no sitting space). The former is used all the time (often it's "the boss" cooking for the employees and visitors), and the other one, well... she said they don't actually need it, but he enjoys cooking a lot and is really good at it, so a spacious and nice kitchen was his treat for their successful store (it happens to look representative as well, but the purpose is actual cooking).


How rich?

Start making quality appliances that work, are serviceable and affordable (maybe financing?). There seems to be a market and I think lots of people would be happy to work in an American factory making quality stuff for American homes.


Premium/commercial brands exist.


Heck even without going "premium", you can pretty much just buy LG or low-end Bosch models of most things and be fine. But if you buy Samsung, you might as well budget for a replacement ASAP.


This just means it's only a matter of time before LG/Bosch realize they're leaving money on the table and start cutting corners (while still keeping the prices high).


Agreed. Bought all new appliances 10 years ago, and the only ones that have given me trouble have been Samsungs.


i wonder if samsung products in Korea are better? How did they get so big outside of phones?


Samsung has long been a huge conglomerate before smartphones ever existed. Smartphones just make them a household name in the US.


I've been using looria.com lately, and it seems to be tracking a pretty good "signal" using Reddit and other sources of consumer feedback that are currently more reliable than Amazon ratings.


Nah, that’s for normal consumers looking for a good value. If you’re rich, whoever buys your appliances for you will get them from the local Viking/Sub-Zero/etc dealer.


It's not a "too bad we can't make it more durable because that would increase the parts cost" situation, at least not solely. It's also a "how can we make this product break quickly and make it badly repairable so that you have to buy a new one" situation, aka planned obsolescence.


In monopolistic industries, this happens. But in other consumer markets, value manufacturing still win, because of significant information disparities and/or consumer preferences.

If your competition makes a shitty fridge for $1000 with bearing that will fail at 15 years on average, and you make the exact same thing with bearings that will last 30 years for $1010, most people will look at the exterior, say “these look the same”, and buy the competitors model.

And you can advertise that all you want, and next week your competition will put $3 of extra steel in the door handle to make it feel more solid than yours and write the word “professional” on the door. Now your product looks like a bad deal.

Now you might say that people are making bad decisions. But are they really? Most Americans don’t keep their house for 30 years, so why do they care if the fridge fails before then? It’s someone else’s problem.

This is why market positioning is a complicated discipline. It isn’t just “make a good thing for a good price”


It is a bit of a lemon market, because no one can tell (or few can) from the claims, looks, etc. how reliable it will actually be.

I am keen to research stuff online more. I avoided buying the more expensive "Zip" water system, and instead got a RO system and my own chiller. An RO system is mostly plastic and pipes, with most of the $ going into the cartridges. So good value for money. Ugly... but it is under your sink so who cares.

It was cheaper (about 1/3 of the price all up), and all the Zip users bemoan how unreliable it is. I also remember anecdotally how many times I have seen an out of order tap of theirs in an office or other place. They also don't filter quite as well as an RO (but they do filter well enough if taste is the concern).

You don't always get better buy paying more, or going with the famous brand. I think you have to research all the things.


In the mass consumer market there really isn’t much variation in the design lifetime. Everyone prioritize low construction costs and shoots for about the same timeline (last long enough that you don’t piss people off or get warranty work). Most of the difference in observed reliability isn’t planned, but circumstantial: bad design decision, etc.

If you really want something engineered differently, you need to look at something where cost is not prioritized, which won’t be something that costs 20% more, or even 100% more. It’ll probably cost at least an order of magnitude more at least.


As I'm in the middle of replacing a one-year-old LG fridge I've been doing a bit of reading. Apparently rotary compressors like this require exceptionally precise tolerances to achieve any manner of reliability.

Thirteen years doesn't strike me as particularly bad. Not great, but not bad. That 80-year-old fridge the repair shop guy is bragging about is almost certainly not an auto defrost unit. So, sure, it's probably close to a modern fridge in power consumption but the tradeoff is you'll have to scrape ice out of it periodically.

https://hbr.org/1989/03/cold-competition-ge-wages-the-refrig...

Edit:

Pretty early on I got a couple wireless temperature probes and used rtl-sdr to pipe the data into a TimescaleDB instance (and slapped Grafana in front of it).

I have no idea what the actual problem was because LG was keen on a refund over a repair. The symptoms were failure to cool and ice buildup on the evaporator getting into the fan and making a racket. The tech diagnosed a bad thermistor which brought the freezer temp during defrost down from 50°F to about 30–40°F. Even though the tech took a steam gun to the evaporator, it took about two weeks before enough ice built up and fell into the fan again. At this point the fridge wasn't getting below 40°F either and my landlord decided to take them up on the refund offer.

Could've been a bad compressor as one of the failure modes is inability to pump refrigerant. The compressor itself sounded like a ringing bell. I stopped caring because nobody at LG cares and they are not positioned to actually service their appliances. It's likely a design flaw they either already know about or don't want to know about. Getting through to a person empowered to do anything is nearly impossible and their techs have a miserable time trying to get parts from their poorly run warehouses. I'm a bit apprehensive that other companies have joined the race to the bottom, but for now LG is solidly in never again territory for me.

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