I briefly lived in a studio apartment. The kitchen was spacious and had tile flooring, so that's where the bandsaw went. I didn't cut food with it, but food packets were fair game.
Though -- I'd argue that using a bandsaw for blisterpacks isn't overkill; it's the safest way to get them open.
That sounds incredibly slow in comparison to a bandsaw (also cheap crap from harbor freight -- but I got mine 20 years ago and it's still ticking along fine)
I'm pretty sure that I established that a bandsaw is a kitchen implement (and, it's not even a stretch -- they're common in butcher shops). Is it Alton Brown who says that single-use kitchen appliances are verboten? I tend to agree.
You can also use a bandsaw to cut a sliver off a sheet of 16ga steel and use that to light a cigarette. It's truly all-purpose
I mean, I love the idea of finding more uses for tin snips, but I use a standard utility knife on a cutting board and it works great. The key is to cut all the way around, and press hard through the plastic. Don't force yourself to lever up the plastic, because that's how you slice open your hand.
I appreciate the link and summary for McMaster-Carr[1].
It is so pleasing to use this site and it is simultaneously full of utility as they stock a wide array of fixtures and hardware that are difficult to search for elsewhere.
If you place an order before noon (typically) the box of goods will be in your hands the next day.
The user interface is a wonder. It's too good to be true. In fact, using the UI actually saddens me because you know some kid who thinks they are a design genius is going to get hired there and "improve things". It's almost a physical law.
I’m not surprised to see you evangelizing McMaster - mentally, I bin you and them in the same category of “no bullshit” suppliers. Products for competent people, by competent people, when most suppliers seem to be targeting the lowest common denominator of consumer.
My curiosity would not let me pass this up. I had to find out what requirements specifically made it nuclear grade, and apparently it is certified to lack chlorides so it won't chloride-corrode (no word on galvanic corrosion) whatever it is slapped onto [1].
The results are indeed good. Makes you wonder how much we're really getting from the newer technology -- people have much better tools available, but use them to make a much worse user experience. (The data point we're missing is what McMaster would look like if they used newer tools, however. It might be even better, if such a thing is even possible.)
100%. I've been thinking about writing an article about McMaster-Carr's design and user experience. I've been using it for 10+ years. It's so much deeper than the web design - the moment you place an order, their return process, obtaining technical specs, datasheets and alternate unit system measurement, the entire experience of shopping on McMaster-Carr. Furthermore, their physical catalog design is also exceptional - from typography to layout, it's the pinnacle of what good design is and exemplifies what's wrong with everything today.
I just fear one day some new intern, engineer, designer or manager is going to join and ruin it. It will be a sad day.
I've kind of noticed this in general with MRO (Maintenance, Repair, and Operations/Overahaul) organization suppliers in general, and any site that caters to procurement organizations or frequent repeat direct buyers. They tend to be very no-nonsense and streamlined, and very pleasant to work with. This might just be a cultural bias on my part, thought.
Interestingly, Far Eastern sites I've seen, even MRO and procurement-oriented sites, but especially consumer-facing sites, tend to be extremely information-dense. To my Western site-accustomed sensibilities, they feel "too busy", but after awhile I understood the aesthetic (calligraphic script languages tend to have a higher information throughput per unit area than alphabet-script languages, and this seems to bleed over into aesthetics as well).
I love to use professional-grade items where i can, but sometimes "overkill" means a worse product. like the professional-grade fan - it's not just designed for a high duty cycle, it's also probably designed to be operated in an environment where people regularly use hearing protection, so quiet operation is not a consideration.
Agreed 1000x. There is rarely a single best in all categories good for something. Instead, you have to pay attention to what you’re optimizing for. The industrial/commercial cookware he lists is definitely durable but also it’s huge, may consume a ton of energy and will not match the decor of the rest of your kitchen.
Yup. First thought on the shopping bag was "how heavy is that empty?". Designers were not worried about over burdening whatever carried it, necessarily.
That mixer likely won't handle a small load (as in, a single family sized loaf).
Spot on though about some of the stuff. That knife is nice, although being edged on both sides is a liability.
> The industrial/commercial cookware he lists is definitely durable
No, it is plain wrong. He recommends borosilicate beakers for beer. I think he never worked in a lab: borosilicate beakers break. Their thermal expansion tolerance is a non feature for cold beer: when did one of your beer mug broke because you served yourself boiling beer?
> Does your glassware meet ASTM Specification E960, Type II requirements? Is it manufactured from 33 expansion, low extractable borosilicate glass conforming to USP Type I and ASTM E438, Type I, Class A requirements? I didn't think so.
I call that hacker syndrome, when the typical hacker thinks a long line of impressive specs and numbers matter, because he has no idea of the customer requirements.
> Used to contain a life raft. Now, my groceries.
How easy it is to clean when there is a spill? How easy it is to replace? I have carried BRICKS inside the nylon woven bags some supermarket sell for $1.99. Rinced with water, ready in 5 minutes.
> For less than $100, I can buy a short USMC Short KA-BAR or a real M9 from Ontario for $150. This is the real thing, used by the US military.
Show off!!
If you want something to bring in a fight, get a Mark 1 trench knife: has brass knuckles for punching (and limit the risk of dropping your knife), a long thin blade for more lethality (easier puncture wound regardless of angle than with a wider blade). And in the kitchen it is ideal to break walnuts :)
Of course it does not look "nice" - like carrying bricks in a nylon supermarket bag. It is about knowing the needs you optimize for.
I think you're missing the point. Nobody cares what ASTM Specification E960 is, it just sounds cool. Some people like industrial/military stuff for its own sake.
The beaker example is the worst one, because the shape of the beaker is meant for controlled pouring out one point and no spills anywhere else around the perimeter. A drinking glass is designed for sipping which is completely different. If you tried drinking out of a beaker the flanged opening would tend to make the beverage pour down either side of your mouth.
It's also sort of a bad idea to normalize drinking out of laboratory glassware. Granted your home is different from a real lab, but lab workers have died drinking something they thought was water.
In my dad's lab in the 1970s, they used to make coffee in a large Erlenmeyer flask and filter it under vaccuum with a Buchner funnel. The safety director eventually banned it and made them buy a Mr. Coffee.
I wonder how many undergrads will disassemble their bongs made from spare bits of chemistry glassware after reading your warning about drinking from lab equipment.
I agree. “Worse” considering the scenarios where your needs are not exactly the ones that guided project development.
A simple example would be gloves. What would be the pro version of a glove? The ones used in steel mills? If you want a glove for riding a bike, you’re better of with regular biker gloves. If it’s a glove for winter, maybe skier gloves and so on.
Work/utility gloves are a good example where the commercial-grade options are awesome compared to what is at Home Depot.
For example, Ansell HyFlex gloves are standard issue in Amazon warehouses and they’re awesome for chores around the house too. They fit really well (and come in more sizes), they’re durable, and they are comfortable to wear for extended periods of time.
Interesting, had no idea that work gloves not designed for use by NASA could cost almost $300/pair. What kind of work are these used for? Safecracking?
Winter "pro" gloves are not ski gloves, even if they are used for skiing. In the French Alps, wearing gloves [1] that identify you as not a tourist is quite common.
The main reason to wear these is abrasion resistance for working with ropes and tools. They are not needed for everyday skiing and a goretex glove is going to be a better and easier choice. Unless you really need that snowgun maintenance crew chic.
In the US, a pair of 20 dollar kinco full leather gloves + snoseal will immediately give you "local" cred and save you from overpriced name brand junk that doesnt hold up.
In the 90's wearing road construction worker gloves while skateboarding was the cool thing in Sweden, works pretty well. And now I use insulated carpenter gloves while bicycling in the mild Danish winters.
Also, that stand mixer isn't going to fit in my kitchen cabinet. Compare that to my consumer-grade Sunbeam. It's smaller, and the top part (motor, etc.) separates from the stand part via a quick-release button, so it fits on a shelf which isn't very tall at all.
eh. the 5 quart hobart is the same capacity as the 5 qt plastic gear break the first time you knead machine. and it really is a joy to use and break down.
it does stand a bit taller and weight about twice as much.
Those Hobarts are usually rated for 1 kg of water. So this gives around 2.5 kg doughball. But they are rated for it so you can do it reliably. Without worry. But this is like 3 loaves of challah or 4 artisan breads.
For dedicated dough makers - spiral, fork or diving arm mixers are the standard. But planetary mixers are good if your dough is side affair or you need to whip some eggwhites from time to time.
We made the mistake of ordering a Sunbeam set of chef knives w/wood storage block off Amazon for the kitchen at my last startup.
Every knife was dull and identically serrated like a budget steak knife, despite presenting as a comprehensive set of chef knives. The whole set was almost completely useless.
Sunbeam is not the reasonable quality brand it once was back in the Sears days, stay away.
Neither is Sears/Craftsman. The stuff they're selling now under that name really doesn't live up to the historic quality of that brand in its heyday, and a lot of old-timers I've talked to don't seem to have caught on yet.
I have some older Craftsman tools that seem indestructible, and I really hope they are, because you can't get replacement parts or support for pretty much any Craftsman tool any more (even the newer ones).
Dishwashers are another example. You could buy a commercial one but it will come with no roll-out trays (you load up different plastic racks for different things and you can load a rack while the dishwasher is running) and it’s designed for an environment with lots of ventilation (you just open it when it is done and let the steam get ventilated away) which people are unlikely to have in their own kitchens.
Other items tend to be designed for people who can put more work in regular cleaning and maintenance. You could buy a commercial espresso machine and coffee grinder to make yourself coffee every morning but the machine is designed to warm up at the start of the day, pull a lot of shots, and get thoroughly cleaned later. You will still need to warm it up and make sure it is behaving well before your coffee and you’ll still need to properly clean it afterwards.
Tangentially related: if you do want an amazing electric coffee grinder, feel free to piggy back on my countless hours of research and go with this: Baratza Virtuoso+
How much static electricity does it generate? That is my biggest complaint on burr grinders, they act like Van de Graaff generators and then the grounds get stuck all over the machine.
In my two days of usage so far…. not much. I read about other grinders having issues with grounds being stuck in the container but this one doesn’t appear to have that problem.
I think I read that the + model has a redesigned ground container to tackle the static issue - had seen some mention that static was more of an issue with the older “non +” model
What's the main difference between Virtuoso+ and Encore? From just a quick glance, Virtuoso+ has a number of features that aren't very useful (like a timer, or LEDs/display) while having seemingly identical burr system?
I have a Macap M5D. This has a timer with three presets. It’s perfect and while expensive, even second hand, I wouldn’t say it’s overkill for home use. The timer means I don’t get the grind wrong. I’m not sure why you wouldn’t want one. I suppose I’m quite good at ‘eyeballing’ the quantity now, but the timer means consistency.
I bought an encore after much research myself and had to return it after just a few weeks. It started grinding my beans to an ultra fine espresso type consistency no matter what setting I used. After much troubleshooting, they sent me a new unit (in transit now), but not a great experience from the device perspective (customer service was great).
On the other hand: if you drink 1-2 cups of coffee a day, and don't mind putting in some elbow grease — a manual grinder like a Comandante or Kinu often produces much better grinds for the same price, since money can be allocated towards a better burr set instead of a motor.
I've had a few friends whose only experience with a manual grinder was a Hario Skerton or its clones, and get turned off manual grinding because of how bad the experience is. The pricier hand grinders have much better UX.
Absolutely. Much prefer a small hand-operated device that I can easily store in a cupboard to a big heavy device with a cord that needs to be near an outlet and takes up counter space all the time.
I have come to really, really resist buying plug-in kitchen gadgets. I have a few, such as a toaster and a kettle, that I actually use. For anything else I've found that they just end up living in the back of a base cabinet and I forget that I have them.
I was ready to go all-in on manual grinders. But their supply chain completely evaporated in the pandemic, and I could not find one I wanted anywhere. For months. That ended that.
Life hack: link your manual grinder to a drill. Now you have a automatic grinder that’s reasonably priced and have a superb burr.
Have not tried this myself but I was told by a professional this is way cheaper and better than any automatic grinder below USD$1000, if you’re spending around $200 for a top end hand grinder
The main issue with doing this is the potential to damage your grinder. Your arm has a built in torque limiter, has a feedback loop and only operates at a low speed. If you want to do this with a drill I would recommend one with a torque limiter and a variable speed so you can use it at a low speed.
There are also other niceties that proper electric grinders give you.
I have a Vario, that has struggled with a fine espresso grind. The burrs are ceramic but the carriage is plastic and it affects the tolerance. I gave up repairing/troubleshooting it and bought a beat to hell SuperJolly off EBay for $170.
Dropped in a new set of burrs and have an unstoppable overkill grinder with a huge motor and all metal parts
If you want espresso you probably want steel burrs mounted in steel with good bearings.
If you are on a budget and don't want to spend £500 ($700 + tax and shipping) on a niche then you can usually find used smaller commercial machines. Research the burrs they use and see if you can find new burrs, this way you can spend probably somewhere around $200 on what would function like a brand new high quality burr grinder.
Yes Baratzas are great grinders but they are not one-size-fits-all depending on what kind of coffee you make. For example Baratza Encore is everyone’s darling with good reason (I have one and I use it for espresso every day!) but it’s not a great espresso grinder because fundamentally speaking its tiny motor just doesn’t have enough torque to drive big burrs, so it has small ones. Which means when you grind at espresso sizes it’s going to lose its tight spread and it’ll output some grains that are too big for espresso, some are too small and some are just right. Since espresso is very dense coffee, this is something that is very clearly tastable even to a skeptical non-expert like me.
This spread of grain sizes is something to some degree any grinder does, but grinders designed for espresso have tighter spreads, so they provide much more of the size you want (so your water can actually pass through) and much less of what you don’t want.
Incidentally this is something I like about specialty coffee industry compared to other connoisseur stuff like wine. Wine experts walk around talking about the earthy aromas, if some coffee ‘expert’ tries to do the same, someone in the audience busts out a refractometer and says ‘aight, let’s see’.
It’s still a money pit, but it’s at least on a much more scientifically solid ground.
The key is to buy them when they are described as broken, then they are very cheap. As far as I can tell they are almost never broken as such. Either something inside needs plugging back in, or the on/off switch needs replacing (it’s got spades on it, so just plug a new one in).
They are nearly entirely metal, with the few plastic components readily available.
The are quite easy to sand and repaint too, so you can match them to other bits of equipment or decor. The correct colour choice is a 1970s orange.
You are right, but there are some exceptions. For example, I own a commercial Miele dishwasher and it's exactly like their consumer version but even more robust and simple. Furthermore, it's equipped with gigantic blades to destroy food leftovers.
Other examples of overkill objects I like are some commercial vacuums for clean room environments with spectacularly good filtration and seals, therefore no itching if you are allergic to dust (e.g. some Nilfisk made in Denmark). Or industrial fanless PCs which are sealed and have fantastic copper coolers (e.g. Compulab, Tranquil and many others).
A lot of products even in the supposedly "disposable" everyday category people buy for lower prices have maintenance instructions that would significantly increase their lifespan if actually followed. Misuse resistance means consumer products generally still work if you skip maintenance the manufacturer told you was necessary (which industrial products might not), but it may shorten the product's lifespan, increase operating costs or reduce performance.
My friend owns a dishwasher. Recently little specks of dirt were left on plates sometimes after the wash completed. Guess what, there's no salt in the softener re-charge. So that dishwasher is soldiering on with hard water instead of soft, and it no longer gets things clean. Fill the salt back up, and sure enough the machine's performance quickly improves. I'm sure lots of people are shouting "That's not maintenance". Well, it probably depends how you look at the problem. From his point of view he purchased "all in one" dishwasher tablets which said he didn't need salt. If he'd examined them very carefully they admit that actually you might still need to add salt periodically, but that wouldn't be very "all in one" so it's not emphasised.
Yeah, I grew up in a house with well water and we had a water softener for the whole house. I've just never seen a place to add salt in a dishwasher, unless it's the rinse aid.
The salt compartment is usually on the floor of the dishwasher. The salt is used to soften the water. Not directly, but as the source of sodium ions for an ion-exchange resin. [1]
It’s not the same as the rinse-aid, which reduces the surface tension of the water so droplets won’t stay on the dishes (i.e. a surfactant).
In one sense, "Yes". A water softener using this principle just needs a source of Sodium ions, and Sodium Chloride aka salt is exactly what's called for in this application. They do literally just need salt.
But in another sense, "No". The people selling you table salt know it's for cooking and eating not to run a water softener, so they may tweak the product for these purposes. The product should be labelled, but we saw earlier that people don't read the fine print.
For example isn't it annoying when the little grains of salt stick together in a salt shaker? In some environments it's difficult to prevent plain salt from doing that, especially if it sits in the shaker for a few weeks because you (sensibly) don't use extra salt in most food. But an anti-caking agent reduces this problem while not making any difference (in a tiny quantity) to the taste or dietary effects of the salt. A water softener does not need anti-caking agents, so the manufacturer recommends using dishwasher salt.
Another example: Humans are supposed to have the element iodine in their diet. Some countries historically had a big problem with insufficient iodine, and so the "ordinary" table salt in those countries is laced with (a tiny amount of) iodine. Result: Fewer children with mental development problems. A water softener has no need for iodine, maybe it makes no difference, it clearly can't help, hence, the recommendation specifically for dishwasher salt.
This is the same for laptops, but most of the people (I assume?) buy Macbooks for programming which is... kinda weird, since it's difficult to repair. Than business laptops like the Z-book, ThinkPad or insert Dell business laptop eg; Latitude 7000 series (Dell XPS isn't a business laptop from my perspective.)
I agree, the Z-book are really amazing, but HP still has a bad reputation so it is hard to make people realize how far they went with this serie (from the old modela to the recent ones).
I agree that the Dell XPS line does not reaaly fit the "business" look-and-feel like a Latitude or Thinkpad. But after several years of doing heavy sofware dev on one, it is has earned my respect. It is nice to have a machine with a non-brick-like form that still does not compromise in performance (and you can bring to a businesses meeting and not look too RBG....). IMHO the XPS line is designed to compete with MBPs as high-end work-capable machines and it does a darn good job of it...
Except my $3500 XPS 9500 (64GB RAM 2TB, 8 core CPU, Nvidia 1650Ti, 4K Touch Display) that thermal throttles so much that a 3 years older MBP gives much much better performance and I continued using that machine for work. Fortunately by switching teams at work I was then able to get a new Mac and I'm thrilled with my M1!
I spoke with a very nice person from Dell via Twitter who out of personal interest went above and beyond to help me calibrate that XPS, but no luck. Booting Windows is enough for fans to reach max speeds and thermal throttling to begin.
Yeah, I will concede that one to you. I have heard that the thermal paste on some of those XPS models was complete trash. Know some folks that had some luck re-applying new paste, but that does not really absolve Dell....
My friend had a Toshiba Satellite that was running the fans at 100% all the time. The fins on the radiator we’re blocked with dust. Easy to fix - unscrew the bottom plate and unscrew the fan and make the airflow path clean again. Low risk fix as they were about to throw it out it was so annoying. Sometimes it is unobvious how to remove the bottom plate - usually there will be a video on YouTube for the model.
Yeah, the Dell is not that problem, but just saying for others that other brand/model laptops with the same symptom might be easy to fix.
Mine, this goes away if I restore windows factory image or boot to linux.
The windows refresh joy typically lasts about two weeks and then the jet engine starts again, laggy, some long waits - something in some windows apps/drivers it really does not seem to like and I havent tracked it down yet.
I had an XPS M1330 about 10 years ago, and if I could figure out the apparent thermal issue I might still use it sometimes. At the time I found it incredibly portable (compared to my iBook and ThinkPad) without being slow, and the design was striking yet professional. Dell still isn't my favorite brand, but they've come a long way from the crappy Dimensions I had in the early 2000s.
Dell ca. 2000 had some great stuff. Optiplex desktops were good, Latitude laptops were good. Anything that they sold out of an insert in the Sunday paper was junk.
See, there's my problem. I had a handful of Dells in the mid-2000s that all came out of the cheap end of the catalog, and I skimped on some of the specs to fit them in the budget. I did definitely get my $20 worth out of the optional floppy drive, though.
Macs are not generally repairable, but some models are incredibly reliable.
I’ve been using a 2012 MBPr that still works great/is pristine, other than losing some rubber feet.
Having a user friendly OS with *nix-ish tooling in a high build quality package is (debatably) only available from Apple. I will happily upgrade to an M1 MBP once the next gen is released.
Emphasis on some though. My previous Macbook (2013 or 2014?) had a screen delamination issue. My current one (2016) had an issue with the speakers that required the whole top to be replaced - known issue, recall program, etc but still, and currently has another known issue with the ribbon cable to the screen being broken so the colors go all weird. It's impractical and too expensive to fix, but it's the kinda thing that shouldn't need to be fixed. And of course there's the issue some models have with the cruddy keyboard, etc.
I mean I want to believe Macs are skookum devices but they're really not the best.
Yeah, there was a bad spell in the mid/late 2010s with the butterfly keyboard failures and the "stage light" display issues. I skipped these on my 2012 personal mac, and somehow work issued devices never ran into them.
Assuming Apple has figured out recent design issues, I'll be interested to see the longevity of the current generation. It seems like the thermals on the M1 are fantastic, which should minimize non-mechanical failures. Time will tell I guess.
Because it's annoying and will interrupt your work much longer, especially if it's something that could have been easily fixed in e.g. a Thinkpad. Even more so, if it's your own device.
I have to disagree. One of the reasons I've used Macbooks for work for ages now is if something goes wrong, I can just pop over to the apple store and have a replacement within about 30 minutes. Don't even have to restore, can just target boot my backup and be back working immediately, and can save the restore until the evening. I've had one instance where this saved me 5 figures easily (wasn't even the macbook's fault, I fell on my bike going over rail road tracks).
Yeah, you pay a premium in terms of price for that, but it's a no brainer imo.
That said, I have a lot of Dell hardware I like too. I still use two 2407wfp wide gamut monitors on my gaming PC and don't see any reason to change them until there's a 4k monitor I really want. They're bulletproof, and I even bought them used off Dell's outlet site.
That's you, but a lot of people don't live next to the Apple store and with business laptops, people come to you, to replace the device , repair or anything else.
Yup. I have coworkers in central America where getting a new apple is both a huge PITA and far more expensive than in the US.
One of my other friends had a Dell service business for a couple years, so I'm definitely familiar with how it all works. He uses macbooks these days too.
Working with smaller / early stage startups I've never had an IT dept that I could pass it off onto.
With Apple Business leasing-program laptops, Apple Store employees come to you to replace/repair the device. Of course, that only exists in the places that Apple Stores do.
This didn't work out for me in spite of going to the apple store: I was told to drop off my laptop. They then proceeded to 'lose track' of the machine and I eventually got it back after nearly 5 weeks and multiple escalations with 'customer support'. This is a 6 month old mbp pro 16" from work with applecare.
Exactly this. You make yourself and your ability to work depend on applecare. If everything works fine, lucky for you, if not well that is when the problem starts.
When you repair the device yourself you are independent from such a service. You could get hardware parts from any store you like and you might have some replacement parts at home.
Don't get me wrong I don't think that applecare is bad, but I do think it is better to have more options. Therefore I think it is best to have something like applecare plus the ability to repair the device yourself if necessary.
Migration Assistant on a Mac has pretty painless for me for years. If you attach a thunderbolt cable between the two computers, it can migrate a 2TB SSD in usually under a couple hours.
Yes - have a backup of your dev machine to restore from. Apple’s TimeMachine is a godsend. I’ve never had a windows backup program work w/o a lot of fuss.
An extra $150 external backup HDD is worth any crash at work, get your company to get it for every dev.
Because when it breaks, your company won't want to use 3rd party repair, so they will send it straight to Apple. That means that it will take at least a month to get back and all your data getting erased is pretty much a guarantee, even if all that was broken was one resistor in the power supply circuit.
Even if they buy a new one, how long will it take you to set it up from scratch?
Meanwhile, any other vendor will have competent technicians available almost anywhere (with a support package maybe even 24/7/365), who will be able to at worst transplant your storage media into a working machine while they refurb your old one. The downtime can be shorter than a big Windows update.
A modern Mac laptop uses a motherboard where everything is soldered on, everything is tiny, and it's basically impossible to repair. Leaving aside whether that's good or bad, it's just a fact that you should know up front.
Consequently, most failures are "repaired" by swapping the motherboard, and so your flash drive contents are gone.
Happily, you are using Time Machine (right?) and so you plug your backup drive into a spare machine, do the restore, and you're back to where you were an hour before the disaster. You do the same again when your newly repaired machine comes back from the store.
Yeah, it sucks more than swapping an SSD. But hey, you knew that before you bought a shiny, thin, light Macbook.
Board-Level repair isn't that difficult with the right tools. Plenty of 3rd party repair, as well as Apple's refurbishment do it just fine. The only real reason it's impossible to repair is an artificial lack of parts/documentation.
Ok, sure -- I was lazy. It's sometimes possible, but it doesn't make economic sense.
Paying for people and equipment to can safely swap a motherboard and reassemble the laptop is not cheap, but it's not expensive.
Paying people who can diagnose a fault in a modern motherboard, do the board-level repair, test it, and turn it around to the customer doesn't make sense. Do a quick board swap and be done with it. Maybe forward the faulty board to some central facility for refurb or at least analysis to find out what's breaking in the field.
This isn't unique to Apple -- very little consumer electronics is repaired because it isn't worth the cost.
Now Apple makes the choice to solder everything on the motherboard (both for size & weight, and likely reliability reasons too). That means even peripheral failures junk the whole motherboard. But that's a trade-off they, and their customers, make.
While Louis Rossmann [1] is well-known in the US for basing an entire, profitable small business around boards' component-level repair in one of the most unforgiving retail service markets in the US (NYC midtown Manhattan) [2], there are hundreds of shanzhai and tens of thousands of more generalized repair shops in China [3] who also demonstrate that with sufficient specifications and parts availability, what appears "basically impossible to repair" becomes the start of a journey towards a cradle-to-cradle ecosystem.
Apple has led the industry in the past, and is hopefully leading the way towards such a cradle-to-cradle future. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that their recent designs that are perceived by Rossmann and others as anti-RTR (Right To Repair) are more unintentional side effects of their rapid vertical integration design strategy (the A* and M1 processors being only the most visible part of the strategy).
> This is the same for laptops, but most of the people (I assume?) buy Macbooks for programming which is... kinda weird, since it's difficult to repair.
Personally, I don't think I've found anything that beats Apple's laptop trackpads, and I think that my UX matters more than repairability.
Then again, I'm still using a 2013 MacBook Pro with an upgraded NVMe SSD.
…and all the time you’re not having your MacBook in for repair, its trackpad is still night & day better than its competitors. This was true in 2009 and somehow remains true in 2021 (though it would be a very pleasant surprise to be proven wrong)
I've heard the latest Surface lineup and the XPS 13 have trackpads that seriously rival Apple's. Up until a few years ago, however, it was true that nothing came close to Apple.
Although personally, the lack of a touchscreen on any of Apple's laptops is much more of a dealbreaker for me and despite working remotely, I really don't use a trackpad for work all that often. I imagine RSI would be unavoidable if you used it constantly, wouldn't it?
I’ll have to test those out the next time I’m in a store with an electronics department. I don’t have any desire to re-learn Windows as my main OS, but having some hand-on demo would still be more than the approximately zero Windows usage I’ve had in the past 5 years.
I never considered the RSI angle about the attraction of touch screens. I still have exactly zero desire to do serious work on a touchscreen where I’d have my fingerprints overlapping the display. Plus, I imagine touchscreens would be less ergonomic than a trackpad in a normal laptop form factor.
Regarding RSI, I was thinking more trackpad vs mouse, not trackpad vs touchscreen - I want a touchscreen (with a stylus) for other reasons like photo editing and taking notes. In theory, a trackpad looks to me like a device perfectly designed to cause RSI, so I always carry a mouse with me, but I know many people use them a lot without any issues.
And yeah, I totally get not wanting to use Windows on a daily basis - win10 is a mess and I really only keep it installed for Adobe software and a few games. But the hardware of "Windows" laptops is quite competitive with Apple's these days.
If you don’t have a (preferably bootable) backup that you can use any time your machine explodes / gets dropped / gets soaked in coffee / gets a random hardware failure / gets hit by a ransomware / is stolen - then you have a serious redundancy problem no matter what OS you are running.
On any OS you use it’s possible to have both a long-term backup and a bootable drive clone that is synced from your internal drive and updated on a schedule. I haven’t needed to use it often, but when I did it was priceless to be back up and running 30 minutes later without having to waste two days setting up a new machine or losing any data.
Of yeah, definitely, and Apple makes it far easier than other OS vendors. But I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of people don't actually do that - even programmers, sysadmins, etc.
> Of yeah, definitely, and Apple makes it far easier than other OS vendors.
Unfortunately, it seems like the Apple Fabric storage system on the M1 laptops broke bootable backups, and it's possible that Apple has no plans to fix this:
> Personally, I don't think I've found anything that beats Apple's laptop trackpads,
Trackoads are one of those items that I don't know of a good way to compare them, because most differences become unnoticeable habits over time. Sure, there's an obvious difference between a 20-year old copier whose buttons require a small hammer to activate and modern capacitative touchscreens, but beyond that I can't tell much difference.
Definitely if I use the trackpad on a new computer or on somebody else's computer, it feels wrong. The mouse moves to quickly or too slowly. The mouse continues moving after I thought I lifted my finger up, or stops slightly too soon. But those feel more like acclimatizing to a particular set of device parameters, rather than there being anything actually better or worse with the device.
Repairability is a red herring. As a professional, I care about “time in service” and “maintenance cost”.
A completely unrepairable tool that is in service a lot longer for way less maintenance? I take that any day of the week.
And here’s the thing, I don’t really care that you can repair your Dell. I wouldn’t be able to do so without putting in a lot of time and it would be a little stressful. Reducing that time requires a significant investment.
RAM is just an example. In my Thinkpad (T430) I'm able to swap out the CPU, mainboard, keyboard or screen if necessary, like in an ordinary PC. The question is, how likely is it that some component will break. From my experience it's not very unlikely over a lifespan of a few years. I mean sure you can have luck with all your computers and you never have any hardware failures, but I wouldn't count on that.
The failure mode I've seen most often is that one bit of each byte will fail to store or retrieve correctly. Memtest86 will store an FF and read back an EF, for example. Computers with this problem may boot, but crash often.
The other failure mode I've seen is that a RAM module will fail to be recognized or cause a POST error, and the computer will not boot until it is replaced.
Neither happens often, but I've seen each of these more than I'd like. I could imagine both issues might possibly be less likely with a solid soldered connection vs. a port which can become damaged or dusty, but I don't have enough experience with soldered RAM modules to be able to say anything about its reliability.
Presuming a centralized corporate IT department that has 100+ of the same laptop in service, one advantage of repairability over time-in-service is that two half-broken laptops can be made into one working laptop. Very-repairable products are essentially just bags of parts that happen to come assembled; you can buy a few extra, take them apart, and now you have a couple of full sets of parts to use to repair any problem that comes up in the rest of the "fleet."
If you have a centralized corporate IT department you probably also have a maintenance contract with eg Dell. It's much faster and easier to just keep a stock of ready-to-go spare machines so you can immediately swap out any broken ones, then send those broken ones back to Dell to be repaired or replaced and returned to you to replenish your ready-to-go stock.
This is how it works on most industrial job sites - your drill breaks, you go to the locker and check out another one. When the Hilti guy comes around, he collects the broken ones and they get serviced or replaced.
Interesting. I've been buying thinkpads throughout most of my career. However, my latest laptop is a XPS 13. I really enjoy it, I use it to develop and it works very well both in docked mode as well as on the go. It's lightweight and super powerful yet quiet.
Meanwhile, my business laptop, the one the company provides me, has been macbooks for the most part, recently I've got a dell latitude. The latitude is one of the worst laptops I've had, bulky, heavy, noise. Yet, in terms of performance, I can't say I really see any differences in my day to day usage. On top of it all, the bluetooth is constantly causing issues, which I've never had with any of my previous laptops.
My work laptop is a dell 7420, my personal one is a dell xps 13. I can't come up with one thing that's better in the latitude laptop. Maybe it has a usb port? But that's irrelevant while docking and on the go, everything is either bluetooth or usb-c these days.
Commercial dishwashers, esp. the fast cycle ones beat the living light of any mugs/plates/etc. unless they're plain white.
They use way more pressure and heat, and resulting clean is much more aggressive, shortening life of everything inside them. Only plain glass and plain porcelain came out relatively unaffected. All decorations doesn't stand a chance.
This is why some mugs denote "Safe for normal dishwasher use".
I stayed at an art school that was housed in an old military barracks. They had a massive steel dishwasher that used hot water and pressurized air to just blast the dirt off. It was extremely loud, and only needed about 10 seconds.
You need to spend at least £600 to get a decent home espresso set up but it will get you something pretty close to good cafe grade coffee.
The reason those big £3000+ machines are impractical for the home is not the cleaning or even the warm-up time (as both of those factors are the same for any espresso machine even the home ones) but rather with the fact that the bar grade espresso machines expect to be plumbed into a reverse osmosis filter and take up a shitload of space.
Commercial machines may need a little bit more time to warm up but I still let my gaggia warm up for around 15 minutes before I use it otherwise I find consistency falls and I just get frustration.
Regarding cleaning, the process is the same for home machines and just needs to be performed less often (I do this around once every week depending on use. I pour 1-4 shots a day every day). There are powdered detergents which are used to backflush the group head and solenoid valve to clear out coffee oils, this process takes about 5 minutes to perform and doesn't require much manual effort except for clearing out the drip tray and wiping things down a bit.
When it comes to cleaning the boiler, this isn't done by disassembling the machine or anything crazy like that. An acidic solution of usually some combination of primarily citric acid and/or potassium bitartrate is added to the water reservoir, the boiler is then flushed to get the solution in the boiler, I will then usually leave it in for 15 minutes with the boiler turned off to prevent water from boiling (to make sure all areas of the boiler are in contact with water at all times). Then this gets flushed with clean filtered water to get rid of the acid.
This process takes longer but also doesn't require much work.
Anything under £600 will give you mediocre espresso (due to grind inconsistency and temperature stability problems) or fauxpresso (any pod machine or bean to cup machine basically maxes fauxpresso, there are very expensive commercial grade true-espresso bean to cup machines but these, even when dialled in correctly, still usually make a mediocre espresso).
Any machine (even the fauxpresso ones) will likely require almost as much cleaning effort. Any manufacturer which claims otherwise (especially for bean-to-cup machines) is just trying to reduce the lifetime of your machine so it fails out of warranty and you buy another one.
> You need to spend at least £600 to get a decent home espresso set up but it will get you something pretty close to good cafe grade coffee.
There are also the lever espresso makers like the Flair or Cafelat Robot, which are cheaper, more robust (no fancy heating elements), but also a bit more troublesome.
I am a big fan of my first espresso machine - the Rancilio Silvia. It’s got many commercial components in a small form factor. It’s easily repairable too, but probably doesn’t need it.
Mine did approximately 15,000 coffees in the 20 years of use it had, and had one service for about $US75. It’s still around as an emergency backup.
Certainly london water would kill any espreso machine in no time flat but would also kill the flavour of any espresso it makes. Most people who lived in areas with terrible water would be filtering it somehow at least through a brita filter.
I distill brita filtered water and then re-mineralise it by adding solutions of various minerals in specific quantities. Although not everyone has the time for that. I think brita filtered water and a good regular descaling cycle should be more than enough to make any machine last a very long time.
> You could buy a commercial espresso machine and coffee grinder to make yourself coffee every morning but the machine is designed to warm up at the start of the day, pull a lot of shots, and get thoroughly cleaned later.
It is. But with home use you don’t pull 300+ shots, it can be cleaned less.
I have a 20 something year old Cimbali and it’s just great. It’s on a smart plug to turn on early and warm up.
It had a load of leaks and I decided to upgrade, but first talked to the local agent. He gave 4 washers and said try them.
20 mins later it’s completely fixed at a cost of $0. That’s the only repair it’s had in the years I have owned it. I thoroughly clean it every few weeks.
A commercial dishwasher is like an entirely different appliance. It is designed to be fast. It achieves this by requiring rinsing, being hotter (and staying hot) and more aggressive, and by not having a dry cycle (you just open the door and let the steam out).
Time is important in cleaning, and home dishwashers take advantage of that by running for several hours at low power, it is not like you are going to need these plates immediately after you have finished eating.
About commercial espresso machines, another thing to consider is that these machines usually require plumbing. There are high end home espresso machines that are also built like tanks and will serve you better unless you are planning to pull hundreds of shots a day. Commercial machines have an advantage when it comes to temperature stability because they are so big and heavy but smaller machines are still able to do an impressive job.
Presuming you have enough workspace to place one of the plastic racks down beside your prewash sink, loading the trays is way more ergonomic than loading+unloading a regular dishwasher. They don't just do it for throughput. Personally, I'd love to have a residential-class dishwasher that has that kind of modular load system. Would be wonderful on my back.
> and it’s designed for an environment with lots of ventilation
Speaking of, you know what the #1 thing I would design into a residential kitchen if I were building one from the ground up? A fume hood. Just a literal chemistry-lab fume hood box, but where the shroud folds away and the base of it is an induction cooktop. (In other words, it's just a really fancy above-the-range ventilation system.)
Imagine what you could do with that:
• No fear of burning your food setting off your smoke alarm — just drop/shut the shroud around the cooktop, and all the smoke would definitely be going out the vent, not into your house.
* You can grill indoors (with e.g. a Hibachi) with no fear of CO / CO2 poisoning. (Just shut the shroud while the food cooks, and only open it at the end. As a bonus, the extra airflow will make the grill into a convection grill!)
* You can vent your kitchen (and through it, the rest of your house) really quickly, if you're e.g. clearing something rotten out of your fridge.
* You can do real chemistry to make stuff, if you like. For example, given a fume hood, it'd be safe to make a CO2 generator to refill your soda-carbonator gas canister.
* Landlords would no longer have to worry about their tenants turning a house into a meth lab, because even if they did, the house would in some sense be safe to use as a meth lab, with much lower risk of volatile chemical explosions.
There is a lot I want to appropriate from chemistry labs for my kitchen besides fume hoods, which kind of makes sense because they both overlap in many similar activities for my use case (meal prep once a week to once a month when I have sufficient freezer space). I'm willing to pay the premium for repairability, maintainability and time efficiency to optimize that use case.
Laboratory-grade flooring: epoxy resin. Durable protection, withstand frequent pedestrian traffic. Slip resistance. Impermeable, non-absorbent surface, resists chemical exposure. Low maintenance, easy and economical cleaning and sanitizing properties.
Floor drains and gullies with oil/water separator.
Compressed air supply.
Chilled water supply.
Overhead service carriers for power, chilled water, hot water, natural gas, and air.
Lab-grade furniture, especially countertops.
All packaged in a proven layout taken from modern submarine galley designs.
This isn't from a lab (but from a sushi restaurant), to indicate I don't have a "kitchen as lab" fetish: circulating water Teflon-lined raceway behind all counter runs catches debris that is diverted to a auto-turned compost pile, and the excess moisture of the pile drained off to crops, which in turn drain off to an aquaculture pond.
I could go on, but my ideal dream kitchen would at first glance would probably look like a very cramped lab. "Modern" residential kitchens cause me all kinds of unnecessary movement and labor for my specific use case.
This can't be overstated. There's a lot of overlap between safety in labs, and safety in (especially professional) kitchens. Heck, there's more danger in kitchens with how familiar people are with processes, causing them to lower their guard.
The biggest parallels are probably the slip resistance, and the protective clothing. If you weren't aware, most chefwear is super easy to remove, has a hydrophobic coating, is not tight-fitting, usually layers over itself where it fastens, and often uses fasteners that are completely separate from the garment. (all of these examples are a result of me thinking about the dangers of scalding-hot fryer oil as in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOk2Akqb3CI)
I think lab coats and chef jackets are similar, but one targets corrosive liquids, and the other targets dangerously hot liquids.
TL;DR: get some labcoats, teflon pants, protective shoes, and eye protection for your kitchen.
I used to love browsing McMaster-Carr but pretty quickly realized there is nothing worth buying as a consumer. Anything remotely practical for personal use is cheaper on Amazon.
McMaster is pretty good as a consumer for fastener hardware, a good assortment of various geometries of various metals, and mixing supplies in sense of both availability, exotics (such as aluminum flake 12.9 screws), and absolute zero bullshit with regards to knowing what you're actually getting, the fact it's always there, and that it's same day-next morning delivery in most parts of the US.
I've had my fair share of actual 12.9 steel screws from Amazon that are actually 12.9 steel, and my fair share of 12.9 steel screws that were actually made of cheese.
Plus... this is something maybe only a CAD user can understand - McMaster Carr provides an outright sex bible of importable 3D CAD objects.
Like, I really thought my CAD instructor in University was joking when they said McMaster would be your Bible if you're ever designing in CAD for hobby/industry. Then I got a job, and holy shit were they right. So I like to think whenever I pay slightly more on McMaster for what I could get on Amazon or eBay, I'm supporting the bible for all of the goodness it's given me for my hobby designing and in making actual work less stressful as well.
> Plus... this is something maybe only a CAD user can understand - McMaster Carr provides an outright sex bible of importable 3D CAD objects.
Luckily many suppliers are doing this. Misumi for example has plugins for CAD packages like Solidworks that even generate CAD parts for parts with custom configurations (like aluminum extrusion cut to size) so going from assembly to BOM to purchase order is a few clicks.
Oh yeah, I got turned on to McMaster while doing some fabrication projects with industrial designers. We needed bags of machine screws, cable carriers, aluminum extrusions, lubricant, random brackets, rubber tubing and such it was truly miraculous.
Great industrial shelving for the garage, that hard-to-find bolt with the specific threads, or rock salt for icy driveways. The second time you call them they greet you by name. You can say a part number, a quantity, thanks, and hang up, and you're getting a box of awesome really soon. McMaster-Carr is an amazing company for people who do things.
You’re totally correct about the noise, however I actually use a commercial all-metal box fan to ventilate my apartment and it’s really awesome.
I only run it at night, and I put it in a window in another room, facing out with some material around it to make a snug fit. The result is a steady breeze coming in the bedroom windows at night and a muted hum from the other room. It makes regular plastic box fans look like a joke. It easily moves 10x the air on low as a plastic one on high.
This approach greatly reduces the number of nights we need to use the AC in early summer/early fall in NYC, when it’s warm but not so humid as in July and August. I’ve tried the same thing with a plastic fan and it’s way less effective...we can come home to a hot stuffy apartment on a Sunday night after a weekend away and have it totally comfortable inside in a matter of minutes.
yeah, i don't mean to say that no commercial-grade products are suitable for home use, just that you need to be a lot more careful if you're buying products for a use they aren't intended for. if you buy a product designed for home use, you can be reasonably sure that it will work in a home setting if you buy a commercial-grade product, you just need to pay close attention to what trade-offs have been made that might be a poor fit for home usage.
it's almost always a good idea to buy the professional-grade items you've used at work and know are awesome, it's almost never a good idea to buy a professional-grade item sight-unseen unless you know there's a local used market for it.
I have been, over-time, retro-fitting my home with pro/commercial-grade infrastructure items such as: quarter-turn marine-grade ball valves for the water-main; toilets, clothes washer, fridge and dishwasher; recessed sillcock valves; outdoor hose reels and hoses; sprinklers (this is a biggie as so many sprinklers are one-season junk); heavy-duty light switches; ceiling fans (the wonderful Big-Ass fans stuff); locks and latches, fencing hardware; outdoor lighting, and so on. Stuff that is fairly invisible but which offer high utility and, especially, durability and trust without being inconvenient or weird.
At one point, years ago, my brother and I considered creating a web site that explored these kinds of high-integrity options, and acted as a directory and maybe a review site as well. A site that evangelizes high-quality, well-engineered items that are easily integrated into a home and provide much greater longevity without costing a fortune. "Overkill" is probably too strong a term for the idea.
I'd be interested in a site like that, as I have a similar appreciation for high-quality stuff that's built to last. What kind of dishwasher/fridge/laundry appliances did you end up getting?
I apologize as I wasn't clear enough: I was not focused on the appliances themselves but, rather, the water valves, and hoses, used to supply the water. The small but really important stuff.
Crummy valves break. Most builders use the cheapest crap they can get. They save a couple thousand dollars building a house but replacing the $2 crap can sometimes cost a fortune. One of the worst offenses I have had to deal with is the use of C-PVC pipe which is brittle and will eventually crack or burst.
Ideally, the site I thought about would be to educate folks about the kinds of things, components, they should specify when building or remodeling.
These are the ones that are really annoying because the cost difference is so minimal between the cheap junk and the good quality stuff, and most of the cost is the installation.
Awesome idea! How do you distinguish professional vs overpriced normal stuff?
For example, Festool, Makita, and DeWalt offer awesome products but are very pricy. All the tools from the DIY shops are rubbish. Things from Bosch are slightly better. But these are all expensive. Meanwhile, the tools from Lidl around €30-50 price point are quite cool.
Or resale value, which is also a great proxy for longevity. Festool stuff, for example, has been damn near impossible to get for several months of the pandemic and I've seen used Dominos going for more than new MSRP.
Sounds kind of like what thewirecutter.com used to be, or a higher end consumer reports?
Nowadays youtube channels like Project Farm have kind of replaced that niche, I could see a channel dedicated to hands-on reviews, funded by affiliate links. I'd watch long videos on several of the topics you mention above...
I’d really appreciate a site like that. Light switches in particular piss me off. Every single switch sold at Lowes or Home Depot are crap and I’ve yet to figure out where to buy something that’s actually decent with proper tactility.
The $5 Levitons rather than the $1 Levitons. They have an ever so slightly larger handle and a significantly heavier "throw." They are built way better. They are available at Home Depot. Lutron builds the best outlets, they're just better made but they are pricey.
For the specific case of light switches, ironically, sometimes all you have to do is not shop at big box stores. If you buy the exact same 5262 receptacle from Home Depot or from Zoro, you'll see they're completely different beasts! This is pretty brazen -- usually HD has the decency to add a suffix to the cheap-out version.
Longer form: there are three major manufacturers of switches and receptacles: Hubbell (Bryant), Leviton, and Pass&Seymour-Legrand. Hubbell is generally the highest price and quality. Leviton switches just feel "right" to me. I don't care for P&S much even though there's nothing wrong with them. All are completely interchangeable except for small visual details. This is really only noticable on wallplates (Hubbell stainless wallplates look the best -- and they're 302/304 SS so they don't rust in bathrooms like the 400 series trash at HD) and, if you mix them too nearby, switch rockers.
Pick your brand, then get their PDF catalog and find some part numbers. (There are plenty of other ways to do this, I just find catalogs effective.) You want "frameless" switches if you're going down this path: "framed" switches are the consumer junk you're running away from. (I dislike Decora -- I think it's harder to operate in the dark, and that's kind of a thing for light switches, but if it's your thing, go for it.) You'll find many possible part numbers to pick from. You want ONLY things marked as "Fed Spec" (more formally W-C-596). A lot of lesser stuff is "Spec Grade", which is a cop-out for "we think this is up to spec but we didn't actually list it". "Fed Spec" means "yeah, this one's good". (I will accept "spec grade" for oddballs like weird configurations -- it's not like they sell a ton of those -- since it really is decent, but don't settle for that on your main switch or receptacle, because you don't have to.) You can buy the cheapest things that are actually Fed Spec and you'll be golden.
You don't need the high-end Extra Heavy Duty stuff unless you're outfitting a shop or something. And you probably don't want Hospital Grade with those annoying pull-out forces, ugly green dots, and hospital prices. But none of those will hurt anything but your pocketbook, if you are so inclined. You'll just never appreciate them.
You should, for receptacles, get the ones that are Back And Side Wired. That means the side screws and the holes on the back, with the screw needed to grab the holes (i.e. not those horrid stabby-only holes on the super cheap receptacles). I made this mistake (Leviton BR15 vs CR15) and regretted it during install. Oh well.
If in doubt, look for the part number with the most color choices. It's probably popular for a reason. And don't forget that neon ("pilot") switches exist. They make understanding 3-ways and finding the staircase light in the dark way easier. Especially if the staircase lights are 3-way. Worth every penny!
Now that you have some part numbers, you just have to buy them from a trade supplier or industrial supplier and you're done! One place that's reliable is Zoro. They even used to have great pricing when they still offered coupons; seems those are rare now. But anywhere that's not big-box can sort you out.
Oh, and if this is your first time doing this, get a #1 square or Robertson screwdriver. No, not just a bit, you'll use it more than that and it's slimmer this way. The recesses on these things accept multiple bit shapes and I find that one by far the easiest to work with in that recess (due to the multiple-shape thing it's not great at holding any of them...).
I would add, if you can afford it, install AFCI outlets as the first outlet in the circuit, or an AFCI breaker in the circuit panel. These are required for residential (non-commercial) bedrooms for new construction in the latest revision of the NEC fire code recommendations, but they are way more expensive than you'd expect to pay for the he dead-simple outlets.
Thank you very much for this comment. I've installed hospital-grade power outlets and been using hospital grade power cords in my home office for some time now. I don't agree that folks won't appreciate it, it makes a big difference in my opinion as to preventing accidental unplugging when moving things, and reduces arcing.
I'm going to go get some catalogs and start shopping, I might just be replacing all the light switches in my house in a few weekends from now :)
For stuff you are not moving often that does make sense. But if you truly have hospital-grade outlets and cordsets (cordsets should have the transparent circular molding and a U-shaped ground pin), I'm impressed that you can tolerate them, I hate moving those things :)
You probably wouldn't want those on frequently-swapped outlets, though.
I've got that in our attic with a nice little light switch in our bedroom to turn it on. Crack open the window, turn on the attic fan and the whole house cools down nicely.
The only problem is that I forget to turn it off in the morning. Out if sight out of mind. Switching it to a timer is on my list.
Yeah I was inspired by an amazingly effective attic fan in an airbnb I stayed in a few years ago...definitely will be installing one in any future attics I own.
I purchased a 30-in steel barrel fan from home Depot 3 years ago and I maintain it is the best fan I've ever owned. I put it in a different part of my house entirely pointing out a window and I open a window in my bedroom and it sucks that air right in.
Another obvious example here given the people on this website is servers: if you're going to have a home server, unless you can go put it in a soundproofed room in the basement, you're going to want to use consumer-grade fans that aren't inherently screamingly loud.
I found this out the hard way. Picked up a cheap surplus ProLiant to mess around with, and quickly realized it would be far better for my use case to use a business-class desktop or laptop and avoid the unnecessary noise, space, and power draw of pro server hardware. It sure looked cool, though.
I went for a tower server for those exact reasons - sensible idle power draw and quiet even under full load (I've got an x265 encode running at the moment, and it's not quite silent but there's just a very gentle hum) without losing ECC.
Some of the older dual Xeon servers on eBay were tempting, but the noise/power draw made it a non-starter.
Your home server can be a RasPi or a NUC or similar. Or it's possible to make/convert rackmount server to be quiet.
Right now, I have a silent 4U rackmount GPU server running 24/7 in my living room, cooled just fine by a 120mm Noctua fan (plus a silent consumer ATX PSU fan).
I also have a commercial 1U Atom server that I've adapted for living room. The Atom and mirrored HDDs are passively-cooled (though you can also get Xeons in the same chassis). The Flex-ATX PSU was loud, but I opened it up and soldered in an effectively silent Noctua.
The noise-no-object jet engine servers are a problem, especially full-depth 1U ones with a phalanx of jet engine fans. But people have had some luck removing fans and replacing some of them with quieter fans, or liquid cooling.
There's a few problems with that review. It's confusing air speed at a point with volume of air displaced, and assuming that volume at all frequencies is perceptually the same, which it isn't. Psychoacoustically, something with a sound profile at ~80Hz sounds quieter than the same dB noise at 250Hz, which is quieter than at 1000 Hz.
The Dyson fans tend to have a particularly quiet sounding noise profile compared to their volume of air displaced at low to mid power in particular, and also are far quieter and low powers than traditional fans.
They're not worth the money they cost, but there's a lot more nuance than this presents.
Another example is weight. The average consumer Rogue or Titan power rack or machine will outlive the one or two people using it. It is completely sufficient even for light-commercial use while still being light enough to move around with only a couple people.
Commercial gym equipment, on the other hand is more expensive, much heavier, and doesn't bring many advantages over a high quality consumer product.
If you're running a gym where thousands of people use it every year the extra weight and cost makes sense but for a single person it's just a pain.
Hmm, there's a lesson hidden somewhere here about junior developers itching to implement everything in multi-region distributed services, because Google does it that way.
Also there is question of scale. Like the mixer, the capacity is just too big for regular use. It would be massive waste for me to make much anything with it. As I don't think it scales to small enough amounts.
digikey and mcmaster are wonderful things to know about.
at least in 2012 or so, digikey still had call centers in minnesota and the upper peninsula, and still taught all their call center reps the nato alphabet. There is nothing more crisply charming than a call operator who sounds like Bobby’s mom from Bobby’s World reading you back your resistor SKUs in flawless and rapid phonetic alphabet.
RS doesn't deign to even talk to people who don't have VAT IDs here :-(
It's a shame; as far as I can tell, the only reasonably-priced source for bulk machine screws that I've been able to find was Aliexpress/Alibaba (depending on quantities), and even that has gone to shit with the new import tax rules. (I'm not opposed to paying import taxes. I am opposed to paying a €20 processing fee in addition to €0.30 tax for €1.50 worth of stuff)
In France, they have a different website for the general public ( https://www.rs-particuliers.com ). Its search function is terrible: you basically have to look up the RS ID of whatever your are looking for on the pro site first. But you even have free shipping when ordering during the week-end.
Don't they have similar sites for other EU countries?
Thanks to your comment I just found https://www.rsonline-privat.de but the site doesn't seem to have free shipping during the weekend (at least now 1h before the end of Sunday).
It used to be like that many years ago. Then it got flooded with posts like "I found this unused tool in my garage, it has been sitting there for 40 years in original packaging, it still works". Has it gone back to its root recently?
"I don't think corporations/businesses are to blame... The average consumer is extremely ill-informed."
This is very unfair - the average cobsumer is purposefully mislead on a daily basis, for example applle forbids apps from informing consumer that 30% of their donation to a charity is taken.
With industrial goods, there is a whole department who's job is proqurement and to know what they are buying. And lets not pretent no funny business ever happens there either.
But lastly, some consumer good are better - DSLR's beat any industrial cameras, and commercial dishwashers are a toally different beast, unsuitable and dangerous to a naive user.
I agree consumers are misled but Apple is a poor example here. I know the App Store fee is a popular topic right now but they are one of the few companies making a consumer product that is bounds ahead of military or industrial versions.
They are a perfect example of a company that purposefully misleads, and forces other companies they work with to mislead, for example on the subject of repairs - to be authorised repair shop for apple, you have to lie to a customer that recovering their data is impossible, and is my view that shoupd be illegal.
They products might be good, but their methods are ruthless - they are wanna-be like mexican cartels.
I was surprised that the App Store would take a cut of charity donations, so I looked it up and pretty much every forum post I found says that you’re actually forbidden from collecting donations using in app purchases, and have to do so through out of band methods to get through App Review? [1]
Kind of difficult to take a cut of payments you explicitly don’t allow on your platform, isn’t it?
I don't use Facebook so I don't know if that page is misleading, but it certainly looks like you can donate money (in the legal meaning!) through Facebook's iOS app.
I think most of the recent takes were about Twitter's tip jar that would potentially let you send money to nonprofits. But, Twitter so far has avoided using the word "donate" and its legal implications.
> from informing consumer that 30% of their donation to a charity is taken
For me the biggest concern is that people want this to happen and even would go as far as say that people get a perverse sense of satisfaction from Apple's unfair behavior. Because it validates the widespread pessimism and 'everything is broken' mentality that is normalized nowadays
Using a ka-bar for hiking is a terrible idea. At 0.7lbs it weighs as much as a quality sleeping bag/tent/pack. Also, you likely don’t need a knife. Scissors are much more useful, and micro scissors weigh less than an ounce.
Ultralight hiking adds an interesting forcing function to gear - correctly “built” (as in not overbuilt or under built). Bring the gear which matches the need. In essence, the complete opposite sentiment of this post.
I bring a fixed blade knife hiking. Can split wood in a pinch. Not nearly as heavy as a ka-bar, though.
Your point still stands, though. I had a military pack and couldn’t believe how heavy it was even when empty. Ultralight hiking gear is pretty amazing and optimized for an entirely different goal. That said, I still feel like specialty gear like this is a different class than the average consumer stuff.. closer to industrial or military in design than Amazon junk.
I use a knife all the time while hiking - good luck cutting a salami with scissors. That said, the ka-bar is not worth the weight. I really like my benchmade hidden canyon.
I’ve always got by with a simple folding spyderco knife. Small. Lasts forever. Does 90% of jobs when backpacking or around the house, etc. a ka-bar is a fine car camping knife though. Meant to take abuse and be a multi purpose heavy duty tool. We mostly overland and car camp these days. Different tools for different purposes and all that.
I use a $4 folding "outdoor" pocket knife from Wal-Mart. I have used it for cooking, digging holes, cutting branches, rope, plastic, fabric, tightening screws, fixing zippers, opening cans of food, hammering random things... I honestly can't remember the last time I sharpened it, it doesn't seem to be dull yet.
It’s double edged so maybe not. I think if I needed to split wood I’d want a hatchet.
With the hiking I like to do, I hike all day, boil water for food with a canister stove, and pass out. So I optimize for weight - less weight = more miles (and is much more comfortable).
Which is - obviously - very different than backcountry winter camping in which you’re already pulling a sled behind skis. Bring that axe, fresh food and bottle of wine.
Yeah I really like that style too. Sometimes we hike to a nice spot and just stay there a couple of days. I'll pack differently for that. It's so much fun with little kids that don't have as much range. You could still baton through wood with the k bar but there are better options.
> You don't need a knife backpacking either. I did 200 miles on the PCT without even bringing a knife.
I don't generally need a knife in my daily life either, but I still carry one at all times. In the same sense that I often wear a seatbelt, despite hopefully never needing one, and having driven many hundreds of thousands of miles without one ever proving useful.
It's just when it comes to hiking vs. backpacking, the calculus of what to carry changes significantly because when backpacking you implicitly are carrying much more junk than on a hike.
For me hiking is much closer to a long walk in civilization than backpacking; I encounter more people, and carry my knife just like I do around town. Hiking is actually especially unique since it tends to be done civilization adjacent, and for some idiots that's the most accessible source of cover for criminal fuckery or desperate homeless living.
A lot depends on the wildlife you could expect to encounter - a pair of micro scissors weighing less than a ounce won't be useful against even a smallish dog went feral. (Lots of stray dogs around the places I live, not all of them good boys)
Having a rugged piece of metal that you could use for defense, prying stuff apart, lever, axe is a must for me. Especially one that is easy to re-sharpen with a simple rough whetstone.
I go hiking with esee 6 - it is comforting to know it is there if the going gets rough since it is nigh indestructible
Like the Hobart mixer from this article, I always find it interesting that many of the best "overkill" objects are simply ones from the early/mid 20th century before manufacturers figured out it makes more economic sense to pump out low quality shit that will break just after the warranty expires.
I'm into old school espresso machines, and there is a robust market (and some fascinating refurb videos) for older, lever espresso machines - the quality and design is just much better than any consumer-grade equipment that is sold today.
I've been considering the economics around a startup company that exclusively produces home appliances & tools that are purely electro-mechanical in design.
I know I am not alone in saying that I would happily pay a 2-3x premium for any appliance if it were engineered properly and actually left out all the ridiculous technological bullshit it never needed in the first place. To this day, no one at Best Buy can explain to me how WiFi helps me clean my clothes better or faster.
Also consider the current economics around the chip shortage... Relays, A/C induction motors, electromagnets, switches and all other essential macro-scale components required for building a washing machine or clothes dryer can still be built by human hands in any factory on earth. Not only are all of these things available now, they are arguably the superior engineering choice when making something intended to deliver value to the end user.
Take my idea. Produce the same children's toys which make noises and make the same thing with maximum volume a lot less. That's it. Your marketing is taken care of right there.
The technological bullshit often makes the device much better.
Let's take an object I'm quite familiar with: an espresso machine. Some like the classic Rancilio Silvia are 100% electromechanical. It's nice and simple, but there are downsides:
* Temperature regulation is very coarse, because it's done with thermal relays.
* There's no timing. All manual.
* There's no water sensor.
* There are potential failure modes.
It's a machine that'll be happy to try to keep pumping nothing until the pump burns out, and that produces variable results depending on the user's timing and precision. Popular add-ons include a PID controller to fix the temperature regulation, a pressure gauge (analog is fine there, but digital could also be used for safety), and a stopwatch.
Once you look into coffee forums frequented by the fans of well made coffee, you see that one really sought after thing is control and precision. Precisely controlling the grind, the amount of coffee, the amount of water, the temperature and the timing. Notice something? It's all stuff that electronics excel at, and humans suck at. Controlling timing, weight and water flow is a perfect task for a machine, which it can do with impeccable precision.
And along with that stuff, it can improve safety eg, by noticing things like "The heater has been on for a minute yet temperature doesn't seem rising -- maybe the sensor is broken". Plus quality of life thing like warming up on a timer, and automatically turning off afterwards.
The issue isn't with electronics but with electronics being applied in the wrong direction.
> The issue isn't with electronics but with electronics being applied in the wrong direction.
This is also an issue with IoT in general. The internet functionality replaces basic functionality instead of being built on top. No, I don't want to wash my clothes with an app! But I would not mind the fscking machine to shut the fuck up at night and remind me in the morning to empty it. Not a hard thing to do. Same with e.g. light switches, if there's no internet it should still work, some don't, awful.
To be fair... there was _a lot_ of heavy-duty crap back that was badly designed, poisonous/polluting or novely. It's just that you don't see it now because it's all rusted away or lives in junkyards.
At the same time, there is other stuff that is good quality but that could never be produced today because of liability concerns, but if you're in a home without small children running around you're probably good.
I'm the proud owner of a La Peppina espresso machine (image: https://www.home-barista.com/levers/my-first-lever-la-peppin...). It makes great espresso, but it also keeps a kettle of boiling water suspended on a relatively small pedestal where you push down on the lever next to it. I'm glad I own one because something like it will never be produced again.
The lines of the one in your picture are a bit softer, rounder, where those of the one in the GP's link are a bit more squared off. I'm guessing same basic model, but yours a few years older and theirs younger; yours before and theirs after the mid-model-life facelift.
I'm not really seeing the point here. Lever espresso machines exist and continue to be manufactured. La Pavoni and Olympia continue to make lever espresso machines that work just fine.
A lot of the reliability concerns from tools of the past are frankly quite well justified, and to this date we continue to sell and produce tools that are dangerous if not properly operated.
Older machines, like La Peppina and Caravel, are open boiler machines, meaning the boiler is not pressurized. The way the water flows means they have excellent temperature stability for espresso (the boiler is of course at 100C, so the brew temp is right around 95C).
Of course, an open boiler means there are a lot more potential safety issues.
> The average consumer is an idiot, so the bean counters keep milking them... They want pizzaz over functionality and durability. They want shiny stuff in a bigger box... The industrial, military and commercial market doesn't mess around. They want to purchase equipment that works reliably and performs to a specification. It's professional and their livelihood depends on it. It sort of self filters the entire market. Shitty things drop off the radar due to poor sales.
This sounds like a cool hobby and conversation starter. But it's hard to take the author seriously when he proselytizes on the practical virtues of buying ejector seats over retail chairs. Industrial goods are often built for very specific use-cases. If those use-cases don't align with your own needs, you're just paying a lot of money for something you don't need. And often, something that fails to deliver on your actual needs.
> The entire consumer market is rotten. TV? It's going to come with smart apps. Get one from NEC that's meant for commercial use.
A TV has the potential to be a lifetime purchase, but the software on it can render it obsolete. I can always plug my streaming device of choice into the back of a "dumb TV."
I thought buying a TV was bad, but today I wanted to find a good digital picture frame. What a shit show, it seems that search term has even more fake review sites and SEO spam than other electronics, Amazon is full of Chinese brands with random names selling the same few models, and with even the apparently good ones it's hard to find out what they actually do and what not. And then in the fine print you find you they want to sell you a subscription, too, and presumably the thing will be worthless if the company decides to pull their app or shut down their servers.
I just want a frame that I can send pics to, or that pulls from google/dropbox/whatever shares, and maybe turn off when it's dark.
as someone that has worked with tvs for a few years I disagree strongly. Speakers are a lifetime purchase. A TV is not. Professional displays are super expensive (and often dont come with speakers). The pricing will also change a lot depending on the size. They are made to run 24/7 on airports etc. Today there aren't many display manufacturers anyways.
I would never spend 4k-20k on a professional display to use it as a TV.
you can still buy 30year old speakers for 200-400 and consider it as a buy it for life purchase.
I would highly recommend a 787 cockpit seat instead. Much more comfortable and adjustable than an ejection seat and also kind of futuristic looking from behind.
If you mind the gap between your knees for the controls too much, look for an Airbus seat. They also have nice armrests because the stick is on the side.
A friend of mine is a chief pilot for an (astonishingly) wealthy family. One day he toured me through their 2-year-old Bombardier Global Express jet. I asked how much one of the somewhat flimsy-looking passenger-cabin seats cost and he said, "About $40,000."
He pointed out that virtually every single element in the $60+ million aircraft is engineered for flight and occupant safety, and to be as light as possible.
I have a couple of seats I pulled from a VW GTI that seemed very comfortable when they were in the car, but when I've sat in them outside of the car I feel like I need to be going faster. I imagine an ejector seat might have a similar effect in the absence of the G-forces it was designed to handle.
Love my infrared thermometer for steeping tea at exact temperatures. These things are terrible for medical purposes since they only measure surface temperature, but they're perfect for diagnosing industrial machinery and tea. Also more versatile than those expensive programmable tea-brewing contraptions!
I do this but for everything in my kitchen. I bought a very expensive HVAC-grade Fluke IR thermometer which can handle temperature ranges from -40C to 550C.
Being able to instantly & remotely measure the temperature of anything (with reasonable emissivity characteristics) is like a super power. There is nothing in my kitchen or grill area that can exceed the range of the IR sensor on this unit. There are only a few things that have problems with direct sampling. I cook almost exclusively with cast iron, so IR readings are always dead accurate.
The unit runs on a single AA battery, has a backlight, and somehow still hasn't needed a new battery since I bought it 4 years ago (used almost every day).
I had to cook in someone else's kitchen not too long ago, and found myself going insane at not being able to tell exactly how hot the oil was in a pot used for frying.
The problem is the emissivity calibration, as different materials have different IR characteristics. For food, the best by far is the fast contact Thermapen (get the original British version rather than the heavily marked-up US licensee's).
I'm all for this type of thinking, but like the others point out, you still need to keep yourself in check and put active effort into figuring out when it makes sense. 'Spartan' isn't the only relevant quality. The Hobart mixer is cool, but might it consume too much energy, or is it too heavy to move around when needed? The beakers are sweet, but am I yet wealthy enough to pretend money isn't real?
All things considered, I would love to see more people put together their own lists of ways you can do better than the consumer default. I'm sure there's plenty of opportunities of this kind.
For skiing, if you want to do it for life, always buy decent boots and ask pros where they get them fitted. Most people ski in boots a size or two too big or with poor cuff alignment (even people at a high level). It is much harder to improve and enjoy your time on snow with these things not addressed.
The consumer approach would dismiss getting a professional fitting as overkill and unnecessary but they really limit their enjoyment.
"Military grade" has very different connotations if you have been in the service. So yeah, great conversation starter, interesting worldview; can't say I share it though.
This is my periodic comment reminding everyone who has to support more than one computer to not buy the consumer versions from Dell, HP, whatever. They're built from whatever was in the parts bin today. No two of them will be the same.
Problem with the spec is often that the military "needs a car". But the specification process forces them to design all the parameters, and they end up with a very rigorous spec for "Toyota Camry, no A/C, coyote brown, steel wheels" which adds up to 800 pages and a product that even Toyota can't produce for less than $250k/unit. Meanwhile, by the time they've written the spec, the CyberTruck has been designed, marketed, produced, and iterated, and exceeds the spec in every meaningful dimension. The military has required an entirely US-based supply chain that will sustain their vehicle for the next 30 years, but accepts that it's entirely reasonable, in that circumstance, that each washer (Type 304 stainless, O.D. +/- 0.00001 inch) is $47.82/unit.
The cybertruck won't meet milspec because it runs solely on battery power. A military vehicle needs to be able to run in expeditionary environments with the ability to store and carry extra fuel for long range operations and refuel quickly. Neither one of those requirements can be met by a battery vehicle.
It's just a couple of made-up examples to illustrate a possible scenario; I'm sure the military didn't really ask for a Toyota Camry either.
This does bring up a different issue though, which is that any time someone uses a hypothetical example to illustrate a point on the Internet, responses end up picking apart the example instead of the point itself.
That's a really interesting point that explains the $600 hammer urban myths - the military has a ton of constraints in their specs that are defendable, but result in much higher costs than equivalent consumer spec.
Just buy a toy tested according to European Union standards, and labelled with the "CE" mark.
> Drop the toy, or the relevant toy component, five times through a height of (850 ± 50) mm on to a 4 mm thick steel plate with a 2 mm thick coating of Shore A hardness (75 ± 5) as measured according to EN ISO 868 or ISO 7619-2 and which is placed on a non-flexible horizontal surface.
> Prior to release, orientate the toy in a position that allows the most onerous impact onto the coated surface of the steel plate.
(850mm is 2¾ ft.)
More seriously, I think some of these regulations do prevent the lowest-quality stuff you might find in the USA being legally sold in the EU.
Are you teasing us: do you actually use a compass camping? I've never met someone (who wasn't a Boy Scout) that camps so hard they need a compass! (Said in a joking yet genuinely curious voice.)
and the first thing to know when bringing a map and compass into the backcountry is that if you didn't use them (properly!) to get in, it'll be hard-to-impossible to use them to get you back out. There's more to it than you think!
Orienteering is a deep enough subject to be a tool, hobby and sport. Recommended skill, just for the entertainment value
Side note: Oriente(e)ring is still, AFAICT, part of phys. ed. in Nordic schools just like it was decades ago when I went. Conscription also helps, of course.
On the whole, I'm pretty damn satisfied with the overweening cradle-to-grave nanny state, making sure you get at least the rudiments of basic life skillz and all.
If you are going into the wilderness, you should really check a map beforehand. At very least, figure out which cardinal direction you can go to get back to civilization. Even just knowing "walk west and eventually you'll hit a highway" greatly improves your odds if you get very lost.
Funny you mention that. Last year in Oregon a man stepped off the trail near a place called the Gorge while hiking too close to sunset, its is a huge wilderness north of the 26. People kept saying: dude, if you just went south you'd hit the freeway, but apparently he tried that and there were unscalable hills/cliff faces/vegetation for dozens of miles that when he followed them for a place to descend got him even more lost! Beyond me why someone would go off trail, or even start hike that late in the day!
Yep, I do! I camp deep in the woods, sometimes alone, and I have a tremendous respect for the danger of getting lost and have several layers of plans to prevent, and react to, that outcome. A good reliable compass is a part of that.
Trijicon scopes were top dog for a very long time and to this day are still fantastic hardware. They're just one of many examples where the supplier cares about the product and it's reflected in the quality.
"Military grade" Is an entirely useless marketing buzzword. We are at the point where products are being marketed with "Military grade PCI-E slots" and "Aerospace grade aluminum spoon"
> I want a Martin Baker ejection seat as a chair in my living room
I get the draw, but comfort in these seats is mixed. You should be able to sit in them for a few hours, but remember that the foam is dense enough to handle 7Gs.
If you're older, like really old, you can actually remember a time where products were of a much much higher durability before the industry figured out that low durability products were more profitable.
So in actuality some of the suggestions on that site aren't necessarily overkill as industrial products aren't deliberately engineered to fail.
“Engineered to fail” and “planned obsolescence” are both pejorative rephrasings of “consumers prioritize price”
Engineering is an exercise in prioritization. If 90% of consumers buy the cheapest blender on the shelf, the blender made with the cheapest materials wins. Hobart still exists, and still makes good blenders. Consumers just started buying new designs that were more cost efficient.
If you look at the prices of mid twentieth century appliances in some old periodicals, and adjust for inflation, they’re about the price of commercial appliances today.
Before value-engineering, people didn’t have a kitchen full of appliances, they went without.
Value engineering is often criticized, but the plain truth is that it is primarily responsible for the high standards of living we enjoy today.
the shop vac pro i bought had a one-time current fuse soldered down (not replacable with a holder). over time all of these machines get a little friction in the fan assembly and blow this fuse.
yes, you could argue that making this fuse replaceable would add $0.05, but we all know that its not because 99% of the purchasers wont crack it open, figure out whats going on, and short the fuse.
you can argue that by keeping the volume up shop vac can lower prices. but i dont think you can argue that efficiency has been gained.
The 1% of people who try to fix their shop vac are probably the same 1% who are comfortable using a soldering iron. Reducing part count is value engineering 101.
The number of consumers who buy a shop vac based on whether it has a socketed fuse is negligible. It’s simply a feature with zero commercial value. It’s all cost with zero benefit.
Only because a good chunk of the true costs are externalized. If the vendor would have to pay for disposal of their product, suddenly that socketed fuse would become a cost-cutting measure.
For one item maybe, but every item on a BOM for a mass manufactured product is (hopefully) multiplied by many thousands or millions of units.
If these types of features mattered to consumers, then one would expect we’d see success from the companies who prioritize it. These companies and products do exist, but they are niche.
What consumer wouldn't want a vac that can be fixed easily by putting a new fuse in a socket? The issue is the consumer doesn't know about this possible fix. The Company Engineers this fact into the product AND into the marketing and into the warranty length. Common sense. A human is irrational and lacks knowledge, but a human made aware of his irrationality will usually choose the rational choice.
Companies are just taking advantage of a consumers lack of knowledge, awareness, and intelligence. If you were perfectly aware of two competing vacs and all the actual technical specifications of course the one with a replaceable fuse would be counted as a positive feature.
The problem is that companies that try to market the fuse as a feature will have a hard time communicating this fact to the consumer especially. Thus it is in the interest of every company to engineer shorter lifespans into their products as consumers can't see past 2 years at the point of sale.
Industrial products on the other hand are usually massed purchased and reliability is measured from an accounting perspective. This makes industrial owners more knowledgeable and able to make more rational choices as they have quantitative metrics that effect their profits during accounting time.
If that fuse blows, does swapping it help? Wouldn't the blown fuse typically mean the fan bearings are broken and a new fuse would just blow soon again?
So, the end result of having a soldered fuse was exactly the same as a socketed one: it was successfully repaired. I don’t see the justification for the extra BOM item.
For the 99% of people who don’t attempt electrical repairs on their vacuums, that fuse socket would be sitting inside of a vacuum in a landfill.
Drive around any US suburb on trash night and pick up a couple of appliances. Most of them either still work 100% or have trivially fixable issues. People (US consumers especially) don’t fix stuff.
Don’t get me wrong, I love fixing things myself. I’ve probably saved $10,000 over the past 5 years by fixing things people were throwing away instead of buying. The ease with which this is possible to do demonstrates how few people attempt repairs themselves.
>So, the end result of having a soldered fuse was exactly the same as a socketed one: it was successfully repaired. I don’t see the justification for the extra BOM item.
You joking? You realize houses and cars have socketed fuses that can be replaced almost turnkey. This is a simple solution to build into the product a UI that let's the user know a socket was blown and allow the user to replace a fuse like replacing a AA battery. FUSES are designed to fail and be replaced. Making those FUSES inaccessible is ALSO a design choice because it's contradictory.
There was a point in time where every phone had a replaceable battery. You think that replaceable batteries disappeared because companies wanted to save costs? Sockets for batteries have been part of the design philosophy for consumer products for decades, the fact that these sockets are removed from phones is not a cost saving measure.
My above point is was that cost is an example of an engineering tradeoff, not that it is the only engineering tradeoff.
Phone batteries are designed to be replaceable. They’re internal because of design considerations, not cost. In fact, nearly all cell phone batteries are secured with removable adhesive because they’re specifically intended to be replaceable.
Homes have circuit breakers (fuses haven’t been mainstream for a while) because the load is not predefined, and can be occasionally exceeded by the end user. This is not the case for a consumer appliance with a known load. An unexpectedly high load is an indication that another component has also failed. There’s some diagnosis that should be done when replacing a fuse on a system with an unexplained over current situation.
Your logic doesn't make sense for why socketed fuses even exist. So why do cars have socketed fuses then? Do cars have unexpected loads? Not nearly as much as houses. Cars have socketed fuses same as houses because fuses are designed to fail and be replaced. This is the logical intention of fuses.
Making something that is designed to fail and be replaced (fuses) inaccessible is a contradictory design philosophy... Unless this design philosophy is INTENDED to make the product fail. You place a component designed to fail inside a vac and make it inaccessible then that means you are designing the vac to fail.
Phone batteries are not designed to be replaceable this is a lie or pure stupidity. You realize that glue or adhesive is not designed to be removed right? It's designed to be permanent. Screws and socketed components are designed to be removed.
Additionally the iPhone isn't even designed to be opened. It's extremely hard to open that device and it's completely obvious the reason is because that device is designed to both fail in a certain time frame and only be serviceable by apple technicians. Here's how easy it is to "replace" a battery you claim was glued into the phone as a design decision to be "replaceable": https://youtu.be/gkCyl7kRGns
>My above point is was that cost is an example of an engineering tradeoff, not that it is the only engineering tradeoff
Who in the universe isn't aware that tradeoffs outside of cost don't exist? Kind of useless if the point is to obvious. How about you address my point in the fact that deliberate decisions were made to make products fail and that these failures are not design tradeoffs.
A thinner phone for an irreplaceable battery in the iPhone is not actually a tradeoff. In fact if you look inside the phone they very much could've screwed the battery in without increasing the thickness of the phone.
You realize that Steve Jobs once said the iPod was designed to only last a year?
> Your logic doesn't make sense for why socketed fuses even exist. So why do cars have socketed fuses then?
1. Cars cost 600x what a shop vac does, so more people attempt to fix them.
2. Some fuses in cars are, in fact, not socketed. Particularly for the higher-current and more dangerous circuits where unexpected overloads are of a greater safety concern and are less likely to be due to fluke events. For instance, fusible links[0]. It would certainly be possible for automotive designers to design a socketed fuse in place of a fusible link, but the cost to do it would be 'high' relative to the frequency of failure, the risk, and the likelihood of user-serviceability. Again, an engineering trade-off.
Yes, every car I've ever been in has accessory circuits that a user could easily overload. And I have done so myself many times. Also, there are a lot of electrical parts on a vehicle with limited lifetime that are prone to mechanical failure: relays, bulbs, accessory actuators, etc. When these items fail, they can stall/short and cause an overcurrent condition.
You wouldn't throw away a $30k car because a bent pin on a $1 tail light bulb shorted out. You'd replace the $0.10 fuse and get another $1 tail light bulb. But, you'd probably throw away a $25 blender when the $18 motor laminations short out, because the failure would cost more to fix than the entire product is worth, especially if you're paying labor to fix it.
Fuses exist to fail when some other failure condition happens. Many failures on a car are economical to fix. A blender is totaled if nearly anything happens to it.
> Phone batteries are not designed to be replaceable this is a lie or pure stupidity. You realize that glue or adhesive is not designed to be removed right?
Mainstream phones (iPhone, Samsung, etc) are typically designed with adhesive that has removal tabs which deactivate the adhesive and allow someone to remove it cleanly. They could simply leave this feature out if they didn't want it to be replaceable, but they didn't. Their intentional adding of this feature is evidence that they do intend for the battery to be replaced. Example: https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/yAxAcOuZkVKD1xAY.hug...
> Additionally the iPhone isn't even designed to be opened. It's extremely hard to open that device and it's completely obvious the reason is because that device is designed to both fail in a certain time frame and only be serviceable by apple technicians.
It's hard to open as a result of the design/engineering trade off. Just because it's hard to open doesn't automatically imply that someone must have plotted to make it hard to open. It just means that end-user serviceability wasn't a high-priority design feature. It's hard to open simply because glue is a cheap way to make something thin, waterproof, and cheap to manufacture. If Apple really wanted to waterproof their device while intentionally make it unserviceable, the electronics industry has way better ways to do that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potting_(electronics)
> Who in the universe isn't aware that tradeoffs outside of cost don't exist? Kind of useless if the point is to obvious. How about you address my point in the fact that deliberate decisions were made to make products fail and that these failures are not design tradeoffs.
Your point is valid for instances of proven malice, but one should not assume malice where a valid alternative explanation...
1. People would like to fix vacs too. Cheaper doesn't mean everybody just replaces a vac every year.
2. Fusible links are designed that way for safety. The hood of a car is designed to be opened so that even a fusible link can be fixed.
3. When I asked: Do care have unexpected loads? I answered that question right after I asked it. The question was rhetorical.
I'd rather replace a fuse in a 25$ blender then buy a new one. But either way, you wouldn't throw away a $100 dollar vac or a $500 dollar iPhone just because a $0.10 fuse shorted out.
>Mainstream phones (iPhone, Samsung, etc) are typically designed with adhesive that has removal tabs which deactivate the adhesive and allow someone to remove it cleanly.
True. BUT these batteries are still extremely hard to remove as they are locked into the case. They were designed to be hard to remove so that apple service people can repair the few phones that statistically beat the warranty.
We both know that the iphone is basically designed with a battery that is so hard to remove that it can be basically classified as not removable by the average layman. Very different from the way all phones use to have removable batteries.
>It's hard to open as a result of the design/engineering trade off. Just because it's hard to open doesn't automatically imply that someone must have plotted to make it hard to open. It just means that end-user serviceability wasn't a high-priority design feature.
That's my point. How do you know it's a tradeoff? How do you know it's not a design decision? Basically Apple is incentivized to make the phone hard to open. Additionally all apple policies of "repairing" a phone basically make "repairing" the phone cost as much as buying a new one. With every policy surrounding the phone is positioned, it's more than likely that the decisions are deliberate.
>Your point is valid for instances of proven malice, but one should not assume malice where a valid alternative explanation exists.
My point is valid for instances of suspected malice. The motive exists. Do you trust someone trying to sell you a new crypto just because there's no evidence of malice and that an alternative explanation exists? No. It's stupid to believe there is no malice.
It is far wiser to assume malice exists wherever profitable incentive exists, such is the nature of business.
eh. even if it takes you a few seconds to wonder why its not spinning up they usually dont burn out right away. and if they do there is a little puff of smoke, nary even a pop.
The ironic part of that is that often people will end up spending more on crappy stuff, as they end up buying several {thing} over the time period one more expensive one would have lasted. This is also an example of why it's expensive to be poor.
I did this with office chairs. I was buying a new mediocre chair every few years before finally buying a Herman Miller several years ago. It was expensive compared to anything else I'd owned, but (1) it's an order-of-magnitude better chair, and (2) I had probably spent about the same money on several crappier chairs over the prior decade. I am still sitting in this chair now, and it's still just as good as the day I bought it.
If you’re often using a computer chair (as many of us do use in a commercial setting), you probably legitimately need a chair with a high duty cycle.
Meanwhile, I have a $7 toaster that’s 10 years old. I don’t make toast very often. Even if my toaster fails today, a low-end commercial toaster wouldn’t pay itself off over my lifetime.
Poor people also have alternatives. Much of the world doesn’t worry about the repair bills for their clothes dryer or their dishwasher, because they hang their clothes on a line and wash their dishes in a basin.
> “Engineered to fail” and “planned obsolescence” are both pejorative rephrasings of “consumers prioritize price”
No. Of course, a part of potential lifetime loss is due to price. Manufacturing a case in plastic instead of carbon fiber is simply far cheaper and most consumer will go for that. However, we see cheaped out components even in high-priced or prosumer gear, while the existence of this market already pretty much proves that price is not everything to every consumer. Additionally, there are many examples of behaviors that save no money or are actually more expensive, but help the bottom line by forcing people to buy new (see the Phoebus cartell [0] or the slowing down of older iPhones by Apple).
Yes, true planned obsolescence has happened. But it’s a lot less common than people think, and often prohibited by law.
Even the “slowing down of old iPhones” is an example of that. This was a bug fix for crashing due to current demand that exceeded the battery’s capability.
Most people aren't even aware of planned obsolescence. There's also very little data on how much of this actually happening as no company will admit to this practice. So really no one can make a statement on whether it's common or uncommon without a big data gathering effort.
The statement we can make that is very realistic is that companies are incentivised to do do "planned obsolescence" and because of this "planned obsolescence" has happened, is happening and will continue to happen in the future.
Something "engineered to fail" may be cheaper because materials that don't last so long are cheaper.
But it's also possible that the material isn't cheaper at all, but the manufaturer gains because if the part wears out sooner they can sell a replacement sooner. That isn't a case of "consumers prioritize price".
For instance, manufacturers have tried to sell printers which refuse to print when there is still quite a bit of ink left in the cartridge. Printers which refuse to let you use all the ink are engineered to fail, but they aren't cheaper than printers that do let you use all the ink. The manufacturer is relying on the fact that obtaining good information is costly; testing printers to rigorously prove this takes resources, and even when it gets discovered, many consumers won't know that the printer is doing this, so they won't use that information in comparing otherwise similar-looking printers.
The “razors and blades model” you’re referring to isn’t really the same thing as obsolescence. People know these items have consumables when they purchase them, and the original item doesn’t “break”, it just inherently requires another product.
The ink cartridge isn't actually consumed. The printer falsely reports that the cartridge is consumed so that the consumer has to purchase another one.
Value engineering is not a idea known only to kitchen appliances engineers. This was just the example at hand.
Many of the products and services that people buy to support their health, education, security, etc have been made more accessible by value engineering either directly, or in their supply chain.
Sure, but when is having lots of cheap stuff related to standard of living? I still maintain that access to healthy food, good education, healthcare and security are what determines standard of living, not the amount of stuff you have.
The human activities that enable someone to have access to healthy food, good education, healthcare and security make use of value-engineered products.
There's no doubt "value engineering" occurs. Your claim is that early obsolescence is not planned but rather a side effect of value engineering.
There's nothing in the universe that stops a feature that meets a design goal of lowering value from also meeting the design goal of planned obsolescence. So it's 100 percent possible that a company still has two design goals: making a cheaper product and obsolescescing that product.
So if you claim that it's basically not happening. Tell me in what way is a company not incentivised to plan the early obsolescence of a product and what evidence do you have that this is basically not happening as a deliberate design decision?
Your evidence is only an example that a company can both meet the goal of obsolescence and lower value with a singular feature of cheaper materials. I have stated that this is not evidence because a company can still have the design goal of obsolescence while meeting that goal with a singular design feature intended to make the product cheaper as well. You need to counter this reasoning because it invalidated your evidence.
The phrase "planned obsolescence" implies and is a claim of intent. The obsolescence wasn't "planned" if it was simply a side-effect of value engineering... it was simply consequential. There are some proven instances of obsolescence being planned, but this is by far an exception, not the norm.
The broad root claim above that "Consumer grade products are deliberately designed to fail." is the assertion with insufficient evidence. The video attached to that claim has a few valid examples, but a few examples over the past century is not indicative of the current state of the entire manufacturing industry... especially when there is a textbook engineering practice that does explain the same.
> The phrase "planned obsolescence" implies and is a claim of intent. The obsolescence wasn't "planned" if it was simply a side-effect of value engineering... it was simply consequential. There are some proven instances of obsolescence being planned, but this is by far an exception, not the norm.
You are missing the point. I am claiming that ONE feature can be built to meet TWO objectives. One for value engineering and the other for planned obsolescence. That would make NEITHER of the two objectives a side effect.
Example: Airplanes are painted with colored paint both to prevent the metal from degrading AND to give the plane a better aesthetic. ONE feature meeting TWO objectives.
>The broad root claim above that "Consumer grade products are deliberately designed to fail." is the assertion with insufficient evidence. The video attached to that claim has a few valid examples, but a few examples over the past century is not indicative of the current state of the entire manufacturing industry... especially when there is a textbook engineering practice that does explain the same.
My broad root claim is that the practice has happened, is happening and will happen.
My evidence for this is examples of this actually occurring. And real incentives for this practice to exist.
I made no claim about how widespread the practice is. That is more your claim. Your claim is basically saying that the amount of entities practicing planned obsolescence is so minuscule that it's basically negligible.
Your evidence for your claim is that value engineering exists in a text book. That's it. You know what else exists in certain text books? How crypto works. Does that make crypto frauds and scams negligible? No.
No doubt your claim is hard to prove, the burden of proof for you is astronomically harder than it is for my point. But then think about it... why do you hold strong opinions and stances on topics that are almost impossible to prove?
Really? It’s definitely not true for education, good education is essentially completely independent of technology, and it seems to me that healthy food at reasonable prices is more a question of mechanized agriculture and supply chains.
Healthcare, maybe I can see it, but not really. The proliferation of single use stuff in hospitals for example seems like a different thing than cheap bicycles and shoddy clothes that last a single season.
Maybe I misunderstood what value engineering is, but I don’t really see how the philosophy behind cheap consumer goods is very related to those things.
> good education is essentially completely independent of technology
It can be, to a point, but most developed societies have schooling systems that use various types of supplies and equipment in the course of education. More affordable transportation, facilities, supplies, and equipment is generally good for students.
> Healthcare, maybe I can see it, but not really. The proliferation of single use stuff in hospitals for example seems like a different thing than cheap bicycles and shoddy clothes that last a single season.
Well, yes, those are very different things. But, cheap disposable medical supplies both lower barriers to access those things. Not only does this mean that someone who is low-income might be able to more easily access something like, say, an oral thermometer ... but it also means that things like equipment with a high infection risk can be disposed of instead of reused. Many hospitals, for instance, have started switching to disposable surgical tools, because that's now a possibility, and it decreases infection risk.
The bottom line is, cheap stuff enables more people to have more tools at hand to solve problems.
Did you watch the video? It's not just about cheap materials. It's literal design decisions made for the express reason so that the product will fail.
The iphone not having a replaceable battery is a design decision, it doesn't make the phone cheaper.
You are taking two independent phenomenons and trying to group them together as if they are the same phenomenon. Yes making a product cheaper has the side effect of reducing its' lifetime but the video and what I'm talking about is DIRECT engineering decisions for the purpose of shortening lifetimes NOT making things cheaper.
I did watch it. (And I have watched it once before years ago.) Design is also an engineering constraint. All of these constraints are interconnected. None are wholly independent.
The “fashion” argument is particularly silly. Fashion and style are concepts that have existed as a part of human nature longer than manufacturing, corporations, or even money itself have even existed.
Having the latest flashy accessories to show off to potential mates is something that was literally invented (at least) 75,000 years ago by Neanderthals, not GM or Apple.
> Design is also an engineering constraint. All of these constraints are interconnected. None are wholly independent.
Did I say they weren't interdependent? My response to you LITERALLY stated an interdependency.
Also when does "design" being an engineering constraint have to do with anything? Are you talking about aesthetic design choices made by an artist/product designer that an engineer has to take into account? You should be more specific because engineers "design" solutions around constraints as well, and the statement makes no sense when viewed from the engineering perspective.
>The “fashion” argument is particularly silly. Fashion and style are concepts that have existed as a part of human nature longer than manufacturing, corporations, or even money itself have even existed.
What fashion argument? You say the "fashion" argument is "silly" but I'm over here thinking, what "fashion" argument? I NEVER made such an argument. What's silly here is that you're talking about some weird imaginary tangent that I never even touched upon.
If you actually did watch that video or even read my posts I'm thinking you read it really quickly and you skimmed that video. I think you skipped some words and sentences and made a huge assumptions about what I'm talking about.
>
The part of my response that you didn't even address is that I'm saying FAILURE is engineered into the design DELIBERATELY. It's not a side effect of creating a cheaper product. It's a actual design choice making the consumer more likely to buy a new product.
You realize that the filament for those bulbs weren't picked because the filament was cheaper. A deliberate R&D effort was created to pick filaments that were roughly the same cost but failed quicker. That's counter to your entire argument. R&D costs money so costs are actually INCREASED to make the product fail quicker.
I've learned through experience that people like kube-system are blinkered in this context [1], and best routed around. This is usually by conscious but not obtusely malicious choice. The shrugged-shoulders, learned-helplessness, "of course it's that way, what can anyone do about it" choice. This is the mass-market default, I wouldn't get too worked up over it; you won't convince them of a position until it benefits their personal scope of attention. You don't need kube-system's consent for change, they'll go along with pretty much any status quo, go ahead and find the levers of change you want to see created and yank them.
An aspect of planned obsolescence I don't see discussed much is the built-in incentives for factories (giant sinks of capex) and how we conceive manufacturing in general to lead the cart before the horse in our current dominant economic paradigm. They and their logistical tail including the staff are so expensive to re-tool and re-skill that it leads to many perverse incentives. There are vanishingly few US anvil and vise factories left because they made such a good product up to and into the 20th century that when industrialization's per capita saturation curve inevitably flattened, their market nosedived as their products were literally outliving their initial customer base. Entire manufacturing ecosystems are built around trying to avoid that outcome, and it is nearly impossible to a priori tell whether an industry in a nation is hidebound avoiding necessary technological change or undergoing another anvil and vise experience.
I have some hope in automation and cell-based flexible manufacturing though I strongly suspect the economic case for both is not nearly as straightforward as the narrative exposed to laypeople like us makes it out to be. I think we're missing quite a few pieces of the puzzle (design-to-floor-changes automation being one example) before we can tell the story that the flexible industry/factory narrative would like to tell.
[1] I'm carefully trying NOT to slight kube-system here. There is only so much attention any one individual can apply to any given context. The situation could easily be reversed between kube-system and you in a different context. We need cognitive density in all the wide-ranging human endeavors our species engages in, there is room enough for everyone.
>I'm carefully trying NOT to slight kube-system here. There is only so much attention any one individual can apply to any given context. The situation could easily be reversed between kube-system and you in a different context. We need cognitive density in all the wide-ranging human endeavors our species engages in, there is room enough for everyone.
In the arena of the internet I wouldn't worry too much about slighting people. It's all fair game, they can "slight" you too. This necessity to be overly polite over moderately polite so you can avoid hurting someones precious feelings is overblown on the internet. First of all the feeling will pass, second of all it's the internet, you're anonymous so the chances of permanent damage is basically zero.
Worrying about slighting someone hinders you from getting your point across, it also stops the other party from emotionally engaging with you. Conflict often fuels the fire of a debate giving the opponent incentive to try to expose every single logical flaw in your argument.
The internet is the perfect arena for this kind of heated discussion. It also goes both ways. If I have a wrong idea that I think is right, by god I will fight for that idea to be right until all possible logical alternatives are decimated and even then I'll only admit that I'm wrong 5 years later. Still my efforts allowed the other party to strengthen their arguments and expose flaws in my arguments and the discussion is open to public record. Even more important my attempts at vindicating myself could actually expose a real flaw in other parties argument, thereby maintaining a healthy dose of scientific doubt.
My philosophy is don't try to deny your own human bias. Be aware of it, and revel in it. You and others were naturally selected to have this bias because it helped you survive. Trying to deny it and be above this base emotion could hinder your competitiveness in the game of life.
> Did I say they weren't interdependent? My response to you LITERALLY stated an interdependency.
I am referring to:
>> The iphone not having a replaceable battery is a design decision, it doesn't make the phone cheaper.
>> You are taking two independent phenomenons and trying to group them together as if they are the same phenomenon.
>What fashion argument?
14:25 in the video. :D
> The part of my response that you didn't even address is that I'm saying FAILURE is engineered into the design DELIBERATELY. It's not a side effect of creating a cheaper product.
Yes, there are examples of this deliberately happening. However, there are reasons why it happens as a side-effect of the engineering process, and this is an exponentially more common scenario (because it is common engineering process!).
>I did watch it. (And I have watched it once before years ago.)
This is a total and deliberate lie. The video came out march 2021. There is no way you watched this years ago. You didn't watch it at all. I recommend you actually watch it.
Does the following scenario often happen with value engineering or is it just my mind playing tricks on me?
A product category exists at around $450–500 and there are plenty of household who do without. It gets value engineered down to a $100 product and sees mass adoption. However, 90% of the market for the original $500 product also chooses the half-broken $100 version, leading to the $500 quality moving upmarket (such that it now costs $1000) or disappearing altogether (or moving to a commercial appliance that is unfit for household use).
I think that scenario may be why so many people have a hatred for value engineering: once cheaper becomes available, the market bifurcates into value-engineered wares for people who don’t care and the high-quality end becomes higher quality and three times the price it used to be. The choices of other customers deny you the continued availability of the optimal price+feature set for your needs & budget.
Yes, we hate value engineering because of this bifurcation (it's real, and I've been whining about it for a while too). But I see it somewhat differently than you described:
> value-engineered wares for people who don’t care
You say it like there is a choice involved here. There isn't. This is something that needs repeating - customers choose out of what's available on the market, not out of the space of all possible products. So all products that are hard to make and sell yourself are primarily vendor-driven.
If a market bifurcates like this, I can't announce my preference for the missing middle at all. The split may have happened against my preferences, or it may have happened before I cared, or it may have happened before I was even in the market for that product category. But once it happened, people who'd prefer something better than barely-fit-for-purpose can't get it.
> high-quality end becomes higher quality and three times the price it used to be
If it becomes higher quality. As you mentioned higher up, it frequently becomes different, as it's no longer targeting a large audience.
> The choices of other customers deny you the continued availability
Yes, but again, what choices? These things stick in a feedback loop, a self-fulfilling prophecy. And it doesn't take people choosing the lower-tier option. It takes a company choosing a somewhat lower quality this year than they did the last year, because if done gradually people won't be able to quickly tell (the very job of marketing is to confuse customers about this).
I hate "revealed preferences", I consider them mostly bullshit given the lack of actual choice - but if we want to frame the situation like this: the bifurcation doesn't require that most of the middle-tier consumers "actually prefer" the cheaper option over the middle one. A company will attempt this even if it meant losing middle-tier customers altogether, as long as they believe the expanding lower-tier customer base will make up for it.
What's even more maddening is the interplay with economies of scale - the middle-tier product could've gotten better and cheaper over time, if its broad customer base wasn't stolen by the low-quality option. So the households that couldn't afford the quality option yesterday, would be able to afford it tomorrow - and today would be making use of used ones, because there is such a thing as a market for used goods, which works best when items are durable. But companies often do try to sabotage it, too.
Also: the downwards quality spiral doesn't stop at a reasonable point, it stops at the lowest point where the customers can be duped en-masse, unless stopped by regulatory means either. I'll happily argue that, for most products, the lowest-priced options shouldn't exist in the first place, because they deliver negative value (after accounting for total use costs, with possible future replacement, which most people don't) and endless frustration. I see them as an environmental disaster.
If the missing-middle is, in fact, a real consumer desire, then you’re identified a market failure that might be a good startup idea.
And I’m not saying this sarcastically, many wildly successful businesses have been built on finding untapped markets that established players have missed. There is always room for improvement. The question is whether that improvement is strong enough to change people’s buying decisions.
Even if the missing middle is a real consumer demand, it may not be enough of a real demand to achieve the economics of scale to be profitable (or it is profitable but with 15% margin instead of 30% and the bean counters can’t stand that).
As an espresso enthusiast with a rather robust prosumer setup, I considered 'overkill' commercial options, which are widely available and roughly the same price (sometimes less, with work).
The overkill options...well, they're not made for home, which actually makes them worse for home use cases. Sure, a La Marzocco Linea can pull a thousand shots a day with extreme consistency and temperature stability.
My Lelit Bianca can't keep up on volume, but it is smaller, reaches operating temperature more quickly, and is temp stable for the number of shots I pull even with a dozen people over for a party. It uses a standard electrical plug, it has a consumer-grade warranty, and it's relatively easy to maintain for a regular Joe like me.
So sure, a commercial version of a thing might be more robust, longer-lasting, etc., but what tradeoffs are you making to achieve those characteristics?
The recommendation for a commercial panel which avoids built smart TV functions is one I'm taking seriously. We have an Apple TV connected and use nothing else. Does anyone have experience or recommendations?
A nag every 5 minutes to do so, lags and slow startup time due to all the stuff running in the background and, to top it off, horrible settings menus as the actual picture is not the main focus.
My Vizio M55-E0 has a noticeably (much, much) slower UI if it's not connected to the internet, though it's probably just poor design rather than an intentional thing. Definitely never buying another Vizio, though.
I bet we bought the exact same panel, since I bought mine based on the same HN discussion. The Sceptre 65" something something? Very happy with it so far.
Find the hospitality version of whatever you want from CDW (Samsung and LG do a lot of them, idk about Sony). They are designed for hotels and hospitals, and have the same picture quality but no smart stuff.
Yeah....BUT those panels are designed for, more or less, static images in well lit rooms.
Things like contrast ratio, how well it does dark colors in a dark room or fast intesity refreshing (like 60Hz "fast") may be questionable. It probably also expects super consistent and clean power...some houses dont have that.
Sure you could make it a giant Dakboard with a giant static image and not really worry about burn in for years.
Ultimately. I went with a cheap panel from say costco and a roku on a separate vlan (so my overkill is a network that can do vlan segmentation). Ultimately the roku TV's can scan themselves to death and report that they are on a network with other roku TV's all they want. Or you could just get a cheap-o smart TV and hook up the appleTV (cost came into play for me). I do have some LG smart TV's, one died within 3 years already...Meanwhile my Samsung 55" Plasma from 2008 had taking a direct lightning strike that took out the others and keeps on ticking. (and resulted in the TCL roku and LG tvs being installed).
So all of that is to say. I just go cheap panel that i dont mind replacing. And just keep them isolated entirely.
I have an LG 'smart' TV but I just don't use any of the smart functionality. I don't have any problem with it, it just defaults to the HDMI my GoogleTV is on. Sometimes the dog will bump the TV controller (which sits untouched on the coffee table) and it will pop up a menu for a second, but it goes away by itself. I haven't interacted with the TV itself other than to change the picture mode to nighttime in about a year.
So why go to the trouble of not having the smart menu stuff rather than just not using it?
+1 for restaurant supply stores. You can find at least one in any reasonably sized city and they have just about everything you could possibly need, from tableware to cookware to appliances to bulk dry goods to cleaning and safety equipment. No frills and competitively priced.
I've ordered from [0] several times and can recommend them as an online option.
Only major downside is that shipping is expensive (unless you join their Amazon Prime equivalent, which is $99/month and doesn't really make sense for a household). I think my last order was around $30 s&h on a ~$200 order.
My workaround is that I save up a big wishlist and then order from them about once a year, and get friends & family to tack on any items they want as well.
A sentence I never thought I'd say: Gee, that ejector seat doesn't look very comfortable.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it feels fine even if you sit in it long periods of time. However, I'm sure that it only comes in one size, that size being the right size to pilot a plane with an ejector seat. Anyone too big or small wasn't considered in its design because they'd never make it into the relevant flight program to begin with.
My point is, consumer objects have to be designed a bit more inclusively than that, to be able to sell to a wider range of buyers. That big Hobart mixer is in the same boat: It's designed for people who wouldn't have gotten that bakery job if they couldn't work with a large, heavy piece of kitchen equipment.
Positively uncomfortable for long periods. Having sat in a number of MB seats in aircraft museums for short intervals, this is exactly the wrong seat to choose for comfort. They are quite adjustable though, interesting provenance:
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 350 ms ] threadMy recipes requires adjusting, but once I fixed them up, they were great.
Though -- I'd argue that using a bandsaw for blisterpacks isn't overkill; it's the safest way to get them open.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=MatthiasWandel
You can also use a bandsaw to cut a sliver off a sheet of 16ga steel and use that to light a cigarette. It's truly all-purpose
It is so pleasing to use this site and it is simultaneously full of utility as they stock a wide array of fixtures and hardware that are difficult to search for elsewhere.
If you place an order before noon (typically) the box of goods will be in your hands the next day.
The user interface is a wonder. It's too good to be true. In fact, using the UI actually saddens me because you know some kid who thinks they are a design genius is going to get hired there and "improve things". It's almost a physical law.
[1] https://www.mcmaster.com/
Will I ever find the rs-232 transceiver that I need on Amazon? Unlikely.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/shutupandtakemymoney/comments/15jwv...
Apparently it is an ASP.NET app, served by IIS, cached on Akamai's CDN. Not quite what you're going to see on your average HN blog post.
The clarity of information presentation is unparalleled.
I just fear one day some new intern, engineer, designer or manager is going to join and ruin it. It will be a sad day.
Interestingly, Far Eastern sites I've seen, even MRO and procurement-oriented sites, but especially consumer-facing sites, tend to be extremely information-dense. To my Western site-accustomed sensibilities, they feel "too busy", but after awhile I understood the aesthetic (calligraphic script languages tend to have a higher information throughput per unit area than alphabet-script languages, and this seems to bleed over into aesthetics as well).
That mixer likely won't handle a small load (as in, a single family sized loaf).
Spot on though about some of the stuff. That knife is nice, although being edged on both sides is a liability.
No, it is plain wrong. He recommends borosilicate beakers for beer. I think he never worked in a lab: borosilicate beakers break. Their thermal expansion tolerance is a non feature for cold beer: when did one of your beer mug broke because you served yourself boiling beer?
> Does your glassware meet ASTM Specification E960, Type II requirements? Is it manufactured from 33 expansion, low extractable borosilicate glass conforming to USP Type I and ASTM E438, Type I, Class A requirements? I didn't think so.
I call that hacker syndrome, when the typical hacker thinks a long line of impressive specs and numbers matter, because he has no idea of the customer requirements.
> Used to contain a life raft. Now, my groceries.
How easy it is to clean when there is a spill? How easy it is to replace? I have carried BRICKS inside the nylon woven bags some supermarket sell for $1.99. Rinced with water, ready in 5 minutes.
> For less than $100, I can buy a short USMC Short KA-BAR or a real M9 from Ontario for $150. This is the real thing, used by the US military.
Show off!!
If you want something to bring in a fight, get a Mark 1 trench knife: has brass knuckles for punching (and limit the risk of dropping your knife), a long thin blade for more lethality (easier puncture wound regardless of angle than with a wider blade). And in the kitchen it is ideal to break walnuts :)
Of course it does not look "nice" - like carrying bricks in a nylon supermarket bag. It is about knowing the needs you optimize for.
In my dad's lab in the 1970s, they used to make coffee in a large Erlenmeyer flask and filter it under vaccuum with a Buchner funnel. The safety director eventually banned it and made them buy a Mr. Coffee.
A simple example would be gloves. What would be the pro version of a glove? The ones used in steel mills? If you want a glove for riding a bike, you’re better of with regular biker gloves. If it’s a glove for winter, maybe skier gloves and so on.
For example, Ansell HyFlex gloves are standard issue in Amazon warehouses and they’re awesome for chores around the house too. They fit really well (and come in more sizes), they’re durable, and they are comfortable to wear for extended periods of time.
[1] https://www.deltaplus.eu/en/article-details/-/article-detail...
it does stand a bit taller and weight about twice as much.
For dedicated dough makers - spiral, fork or diving arm mixers are the standard. But planetary mixers are good if your dough is side affair or you need to whip some eggwhites from time to time.
Every knife was dull and identically serrated like a budget steak knife, despite presenting as a comprehensive set of chef knives. The whole set was almost completely useless.
Sunbeam is not the reasonable quality brand it once was back in the Sears days, stay away.
The mixer I have is a hand-me-down from probably the 1970s. (Model 1-7A, in "beautiful" almond color scheme.) Still works perfectly.
I have some older Craftsman tools that seem indestructible, and I really hope they are, because you can't get replacement parts or support for pretty much any Craftsman tool any more (even the newer ones).
Other items tend to be designed for people who can put more work in regular cleaning and maintenance. You could buy a commercial espresso machine and coffee grinder to make yourself coffee every morning but the machine is designed to warm up at the start of the day, pull a lot of shots, and get thoroughly cleaned later. You will still need to warm it up and make sure it is behaving well before your coffee and you’ll still need to properly clean it afterwards.
It is excellent.
I think I read that the + model has a redesigned ground container to tackle the static issue - had seen some mention that static was more of an issue with the older “non +” model
It doesn't matter if "burr grinders suffer from static build up" when they're categorically far better than anything else when it comes to grinding.
STOP! Don’t Dump It – Fix It!
https://baratza.com/stop-dont-dump-it-fix-it/
(Paired with a Moccamaster)
Wasn’t willing to pay even more for one with a scale
I always grind to measure, in which case I don't need timer.
I've had a few friends whose only experience with a manual grinder was a Hario Skerton or its clones, and get turned off manual grinding because of how bad the experience is. The pricier hand grinders have much better UX.
I have come to really, really resist buying plug-in kitchen gadgets. I have a few, such as a toaster and a kettle, that I actually use. For anything else I've found that they just end up living in the back of a base cabinet and I forget that I have them.
It looks like 1zpresso and Timemore are readily available, at least, and the 1zpresso JX Pro is top-of-the-line.
Have not tried this myself but I was told by a professional this is way cheaper and better than any automatic grinder below USD$1000, if you’re spending around $200 for a top end hand grinder
Grinding coffee beans manually helps me get that little bit of arm exercise though.
There are also other niceties that proper electric grinders give you.
Dropped in a new set of burrs and have an unstoppable overkill grinder with a huge motor and all metal parts
If you are on a budget and don't want to spend £500 ($700 + tax and shipping) on a niche then you can usually find used smaller commercial machines. Research the burrs they use and see if you can find new burrs, this way you can spend probably somewhere around $200 on what would function like a brand new high quality burr grinder.
Yes Baratzas are great grinders but they are not one-size-fits-all depending on what kind of coffee you make. For example Baratza Encore is everyone’s darling with good reason (I have one and I use it for espresso every day!) but it’s not a great espresso grinder because fundamentally speaking its tiny motor just doesn’t have enough torque to drive big burrs, so it has small ones. Which means when you grind at espresso sizes it’s going to lose its tight spread and it’ll output some grains that are too big for espresso, some are too small and some are just right. Since espresso is very dense coffee, this is something that is very clearly tastable even to a skeptical non-expert like me.
This spread of grain sizes is something to some degree any grinder does, but grinders designed for espresso have tighter spreads, so they provide much more of the size you want (so your water can actually pass through) and much less of what you don’t want.
Incidentally this is something I like about specialty coffee industry compared to other connoisseur stuff like wine. Wine experts walk around talking about the earthy aromas, if some coffee ‘expert’ tries to do the same, someone in the audience busts out a refractometer and says ‘aight, let’s see’.
It’s still a money pit, but it’s at least on a much more scientifically solid ground.
I’ll add a pointer towards Mazzer grinders too.
The key is to buy them when they are described as broken, then they are very cheap. As far as I can tell they are almost never broken as such. Either something inside needs plugging back in, or the on/off switch needs replacing (it’s got spades on it, so just plug a new one in).
They are nearly entirely metal, with the few plastic components readily available.
The are quite easy to sand and repaint too, so you can match them to other bits of equipment or decor. The correct colour choice is a 1970s orange.
Other examples of overkill objects I like are some commercial vacuums for clean room environments with spectacularly good filtration and seals, therefore no itching if you are allergic to dust (e.g. some Nilfisk made in Denmark). Or industrial fanless PCs which are sealed and have fantastic copper coolers (e.g. Compulab, Tranquil and many others).
A lot of products even in the supposedly "disposable" everyday category people buy for lower prices have maintenance instructions that would significantly increase their lifespan if actually followed. Misuse resistance means consumer products generally still work if you skip maintenance the manufacturer told you was necessary (which industrial products might not), but it may shorten the product's lifespan, increase operating costs or reduce performance.
My friend owns a dishwasher. Recently little specks of dirt were left on plates sometimes after the wash completed. Guess what, there's no salt in the softener re-charge. So that dishwasher is soldiering on with hard water instead of soft, and it no longer gets things clean. Fill the salt back up, and sure enough the machine's performance quickly improves. I'm sure lots of people are shouting "That's not maintenance". Well, it probably depends how you look at the problem. From his point of view he purchased "all in one" dishwasher tablets which said he didn't need salt. If he'd examined them very carefully they admit that actually you might still need to add salt periodically, but that wouldn't be very "all in one" so it's not emphasised.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rBO8neWw04
It’s not the same as the rinse-aid, which reduces the surface tension of the water so droplets won’t stay on the dishes (i.e. a surfactant).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion-exchange_resin#Water_softe...
If they do, it's usually a compartment at the bottom of the thing with a sealed screw-cap.
Oh, and don't bother buying "dishwasher salt", just buy medium-grain table salt, it's 10x cheaper.
Is it the same thing?
But in another sense, "No". The people selling you table salt know it's for cooking and eating not to run a water softener, so they may tweak the product for these purposes. The product should be labelled, but we saw earlier that people don't read the fine print.
For example isn't it annoying when the little grains of salt stick together in a salt shaker? In some environments it's difficult to prevent plain salt from doing that, especially if it sits in the shaker for a few weeks because you (sensibly) don't use extra salt in most food. But an anti-caking agent reduces this problem while not making any difference (in a tiny quantity) to the taste or dietary effects of the salt. A water softener does not need anti-caking agents, so the manufacturer recommends using dishwasher salt.
Another example: Humans are supposed to have the element iodine in their diet. Some countries historically had a big problem with insufficient iodine, and so the "ordinary" table salt in those countries is laced with (a tiny amount of) iodine. Result: Fewer children with mental development problems. A water softener has no need for iodine, maybe it makes no difference, it clearly can't help, hence, the recommendation specifically for dishwasher salt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rBO8neWw04
I spoke with a very nice person from Dell via Twitter who out of personal interest went above and beyond to help me calibrate that XPS, but no luck. Booting Windows is enough for fans to reach max speeds and thermal throttling to begin.
Yeah, the Dell is not that problem, but just saying for others that other brand/model laptops with the same symptom might be easy to fix.
The windows refresh joy typically lasts about two weeks and then the jet engine starts again, laggy, some long waits - something in some windows apps/drivers it really does not seem to like and I havent tracked it down yet.
we don't care really, they are still great. Besides, they don't break much (typing this on mbp 2015 while waiting for m1 16" to happen)
I'm writing from a Dell Latitude 7390.
If this had the trackpoint, ThinkPads would be dead to me.
It's 99% perfect. So much so that I'm thinking of gettin an exact replica as a personal laptop.
I’ve been using a 2012 MBPr that still works great/is pristine, other than losing some rubber feet.
Having a user friendly OS with *nix-ish tooling in a high build quality package is (debatably) only available from Apple. I will happily upgrade to an M1 MBP once the next gen is released.
I mean I want to believe Macs are skookum devices but they're really not the best.
Assuming Apple has figured out recent design issues, I'll be interested to see the longevity of the current generation. It seems like the thermals on the M1 are fantastic, which should minimize non-mechanical failures. Time will tell I guess.
Why would I care? If it breaks, I tell my company to pay the repair bill or buy me a new one.
Yeah, you pay a premium in terms of price for that, but it's a no brainer imo.
That said, I have a lot of Dell hardware I like too. I still use two 2407wfp wide gamut monitors on my gaming PC and don't see any reason to change them until there's a 4k monitor I really want. They're bulletproof, and I even bought them used off Dell's outlet site.
One of my other friends had a Dell service business for a couple years, so I'm definitely familiar with how it all works. He uses macbooks these days too.
Working with smaller / early stage startups I've never had an IT dept that I could pass it off onto.
When you repair the device yourself you are independent from such a service. You could get hardware parts from any store you like and you might have some replacement parts at home.
Don't get me wrong I don't think that applecare is bad, but I do think it is better to have more options. Therefore I think it is best to have something like applecare plus the ability to repair the device yourself if necessary.
Maybe I’m doing it wrong?
An extra $150 external backup HDD is worth any crash at work, get your company to get it for every dev.
Even if they buy a new one, how long will it take you to set it up from scratch?
Meanwhile, any other vendor will have competent technicians available almost anywhere (with a support package maybe even 24/7/365), who will be able to at worst transplant your storage media into a working machine while they refurb your old one. The downtime can be shorter than a big Windows update.
Consequently, most failures are "repaired" by swapping the motherboard, and so your flash drive contents are gone.
Happily, you are using Time Machine (right?) and so you plug your backup drive into a spare machine, do the restore, and you're back to where you were an hour before the disaster. You do the same again when your newly repaired machine comes back from the store.
Yeah, it sucks more than swapping an SSD. But hey, you knew that before you bought a shiny, thin, light Macbook.
Paying for people and equipment to can safely swap a motherboard and reassemble the laptop is not cheap, but it's not expensive.
Paying people who can diagnose a fault in a modern motherboard, do the board-level repair, test it, and turn it around to the customer doesn't make sense. Do a quick board swap and be done with it. Maybe forward the faulty board to some central facility for refurb or at least analysis to find out what's breaking in the field.
This isn't unique to Apple -- very little consumer electronics is repaired because it isn't worth the cost.
Now Apple makes the choice to solder everything on the motherboard (both for size & weight, and likely reliability reasons too). That means even peripheral failures junk the whole motherboard. But that's a trade-off they, and their customers, make.
While Louis Rossmann [1] is well-known in the US for basing an entire, profitable small business around boards' component-level repair in one of the most unforgiving retail service markets in the US (NYC midtown Manhattan) [2], there are hundreds of shanzhai and tens of thousands of more generalized repair shops in China [3] who also demonstrate that with sufficient specifications and parts availability, what appears "basically impossible to repair" becomes the start of a journey towards a cradle-to-cradle ecosystem.
Apple has led the industry in the past, and is hopefully leading the way towards such a cradle-to-cradle future. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that their recent designs that are perceived by Rossmann and others as anti-RTR (Right To Repair) are more unintentional side effects of their rapid vertical integration design strategy (the A* and M1 processors being only the most visible part of the strategy).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Rossmann
[2] https://www.rossmanngroup.com/
[3] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-broke-my-phones-screen-awes...
Personally, I don't think I've found anything that beats Apple's laptop trackpads, and I think that my UX matters more than repairability.
Then again, I'm still using a 2013 MacBook Pro with an upgraded NVMe SSD.
Although personally, the lack of a touchscreen on any of Apple's laptops is much more of a dealbreaker for me and despite working remotely, I really don't use a trackpad for work all that often. I imagine RSI would be unavoidable if you used it constantly, wouldn't it?
I never considered the RSI angle about the attraction of touch screens. I still have exactly zero desire to do serious work on a touchscreen where I’d have my fingerprints overlapping the display. Plus, I imagine touchscreens would be less ergonomic than a trackpad in a normal laptop form factor.
And yeah, I totally get not wanting to use Windows on a daily basis - win10 is a mess and I really only keep it installed for Adobe software and a few games. But the hardware of "Windows" laptops is quite competitive with Apple's these days.
On any OS you use it’s possible to have both a long-term backup and a bootable drive clone that is synced from your internal drive and updated on a schedule. I haven’t needed to use it often, but when I did it was priceless to be back up and running 30 minutes later without having to waste two days setting up a new machine or losing any data.
Unfortunately, it seems like the Apple Fabric storage system on the M1 laptops broke bootable backups, and it's possible that Apple has no plans to fix this:
https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/05/24/apples-moves-poin...
Trackoads are one of those items that I don't know of a good way to compare them, because most differences become unnoticeable habits over time. Sure, there's an obvious difference between a 20-year old copier whose buttons require a small hammer to activate and modern capacitative touchscreens, but beyond that I can't tell much difference.
Definitely if I use the trackpad on a new computer or on somebody else's computer, it feels wrong. The mouse moves to quickly or too slowly. The mouse continues moving after I thought I lifted my finger up, or stops slightly too soon. But those feel more like acclimatizing to a particular set of device parameters, rather than there being anything actually better or worse with the device.
I am using my unibody ASUS from 2013 with upgraded SATA SSD.
A completely unrepairable tool that is in service a lot longer for way less maintenance? I take that any day of the week.
And here’s the thing, I don’t really care that you can repair your Dell. I wouldn’t be able to do so without putting in a lot of time and it would be a little stressful. Reducing that time requires a significant investment.
The other failure mode I've seen is that a RAM module will fail to be recognized or cause a POST error, and the computer will not boot until it is replaced.
Neither happens often, but I've seen each of these more than I'd like. I could imagine both issues might possibly be less likely with a solid soldered connection vs. a port which can become damaged or dusty, but I don't have enough experience with soldered RAM modules to be able to say anything about its reliability.
This is how it works on most industrial job sites - your drill breaks, you go to the locker and check out another one. When the Hilti guy comes around, he collects the broken ones and they get serviced or replaced.
Meanwhile, my business laptop, the one the company provides me, has been macbooks for the most part, recently I've got a dell latitude. The latitude is one of the worst laptops I've had, bulky, heavy, noise. Yet, in terms of performance, I can't say I really see any differences in my day to day usage. On top of it all, the bluetooth is constantly causing issues, which I've never had with any of my previous laptops.
What do you like about the dell latitude line?
(0) Same goes for ThinkPads, not every ThinkPad is equal, even if it's the same one.
Which is totally fair, everything is fair. I'm not a negative person. (I think.)
Commercial dishwashers, esp. the fast cycle ones beat the living light of any mugs/plates/etc. unless they're plain white.
They use way more pressure and heat, and resulting clean is much more aggressive, shortening life of everything inside them. Only plain glass and plain porcelain came out relatively unaffected. All decorations doesn't stand a chance.
This is why some mugs denote "Safe for normal dishwasher use".
I want one.
The reason those big £3000+ machines are impractical for the home is not the cleaning or even the warm-up time (as both of those factors are the same for any espresso machine even the home ones) but rather with the fact that the bar grade espresso machines expect to be plumbed into a reverse osmosis filter and take up a shitload of space.
Commercial machines may need a little bit more time to warm up but I still let my gaggia warm up for around 15 minutes before I use it otherwise I find consistency falls and I just get frustration.
Regarding cleaning, the process is the same for home machines and just needs to be performed less often (I do this around once every week depending on use. I pour 1-4 shots a day every day). There are powdered detergents which are used to backflush the group head and solenoid valve to clear out coffee oils, this process takes about 5 minutes to perform and doesn't require much manual effort except for clearing out the drip tray and wiping things down a bit.
When it comes to cleaning the boiler, this isn't done by disassembling the machine or anything crazy like that. An acidic solution of usually some combination of primarily citric acid and/or potassium bitartrate is added to the water reservoir, the boiler is then flushed to get the solution in the boiler, I will then usually leave it in for 15 minutes with the boiler turned off to prevent water from boiling (to make sure all areas of the boiler are in contact with water at all times). Then this gets flushed with clean filtered water to get rid of the acid.
This process takes longer but also doesn't require much work.
Anything under £600 will give you mediocre espresso (due to grind inconsistency and temperature stability problems) or fauxpresso (any pod machine or bean to cup machine basically maxes fauxpresso, there are very expensive commercial grade true-espresso bean to cup machines but these, even when dialled in correctly, still usually make a mediocre espresso).
Any machine (even the fauxpresso ones) will likely require almost as much cleaning effort. Any manufacturer which claims otherwise (especially for bean-to-cup machines) is just trying to reduce the lifetime of your machine so it fails out of warranty and you buy another one.
There are also the lever espresso makers like the Flair or Cafelat Robot, which are cheaper, more robust (no fancy heating elements), but also a bit more troublesome.
Mine did approximately 15,000 coffees in the 20 years of use it had, and had one service for about $US75. It’s still around as an emergency backup.
It’s shown in the wiki. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rancilio
I distill brita filtered water and then re-mineralise it by adding solutions of various minerals in specific quantities. Although not everyone has the time for that. I think brita filtered water and a good regular descaling cycle should be more than enough to make any machine last a very long time.
It is. But with home use you don’t pull 300+ shots, it can be cleaned less. I have a 20 something year old Cimbali and it’s just great. It’s on a smart plug to turn on early and warm up.
It had a load of leaks and I decided to upgrade, but first talked to the local agent. He gave 4 washers and said try them.
20 mins later it’s completely fixed at a cost of $0. That’s the only repair it’s had in the years I have owned it. I thoroughly clean it every few weeks.
Time is important in cleaning, and home dishwashers take advantage of that by running for several hours at low power, it is not like you are going to need these plates immediately after you have finished eating.
About commercial espresso machines, another thing to consider is that these machines usually require plumbing. There are high end home espresso machines that are also built like tanks and will serve you better unless you are planning to pull hundreds of shots a day. Commercial machines have an advantage when it comes to temperature stability because they are so big and heavy but smaller machines are still able to do an impressive job.
> and it’s designed for an environment with lots of ventilation
Speaking of, you know what the #1 thing I would design into a residential kitchen if I were building one from the ground up? A fume hood. Just a literal chemistry-lab fume hood box, but where the shroud folds away and the base of it is an induction cooktop. (In other words, it's just a really fancy above-the-range ventilation system.)
Imagine what you could do with that:
• No fear of burning your food setting off your smoke alarm — just drop/shut the shroud around the cooktop, and all the smoke would definitely be going out the vent, not into your house.
* You can grill indoors (with e.g. a Hibachi) with no fear of CO / CO2 poisoning. (Just shut the shroud while the food cooks, and only open it at the end. As a bonus, the extra airflow will make the grill into a convection grill!)
* You can vent your kitchen (and through it, the rest of your house) really quickly, if you're e.g. clearing something rotten out of your fridge.
* You can do real chemistry to make stuff, if you like. For example, given a fume hood, it'd be safe to make a CO2 generator to refill your soda-carbonator gas canister.
* Landlords would no longer have to worry about their tenants turning a house into a meth lab, because even if they did, the house would in some sense be safe to use as a meth lab, with much lower risk of volatile chemical explosions.
Laboratory-grade flooring: epoxy resin. Durable protection, withstand frequent pedestrian traffic. Slip resistance. Impermeable, non-absorbent surface, resists chemical exposure. Low maintenance, easy and economical cleaning and sanitizing properties.
Floor drains and gullies with oil/water separator.
Compressed air supply.
Chilled water supply.
Overhead service carriers for power, chilled water, hot water, natural gas, and air.
Lab-grade furniture, especially countertops.
All packaged in a proven layout taken from modern submarine galley designs.
This isn't from a lab (but from a sushi restaurant), to indicate I don't have a "kitchen as lab" fetish: circulating water Teflon-lined raceway behind all counter runs catches debris that is diverted to a auto-turned compost pile, and the excess moisture of the pile drained off to crops, which in turn drain off to an aquaculture pond.
I could go on, but my ideal dream kitchen would at first glance would probably look like a very cramped lab. "Modern" residential kitchens cause me all kinds of unnecessary movement and labor for my specific use case.
This can't be overstated. There's a lot of overlap between safety in labs, and safety in (especially professional) kitchens. Heck, there's more danger in kitchens with how familiar people are with processes, causing them to lower their guard.
The biggest parallels are probably the slip resistance, and the protective clothing. If you weren't aware, most chefwear is super easy to remove, has a hydrophobic coating, is not tight-fitting, usually layers over itself where it fastens, and often uses fasteners that are completely separate from the garment. (all of these examples are a result of me thinking about the dangers of scalding-hot fryer oil as in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOk2Akqb3CI)
I think lab coats and chef jackets are similar, but one targets corrosive liquids, and the other targets dangerously hot liquids.
TL;DR: get some labcoats, teflon pants, protective shoes, and eye protection for your kitchen.
I've had my fair share of actual 12.9 steel screws from Amazon that are actually 12.9 steel, and my fair share of 12.9 steel screws that were actually made of cheese.
Plus... this is something maybe only a CAD user can understand - McMaster Carr provides an outright sex bible of importable 3D CAD objects.
Like, I really thought my CAD instructor in University was joking when they said McMaster would be your Bible if you're ever designing in CAD for hobby/industry. Then I got a job, and holy shit were they right. So I like to think whenever I pay slightly more on McMaster for what I could get on Amazon or eBay, I'm supporting the bible for all of the goodness it's given me for my hobby designing and in making actual work less stressful as well.
Luckily many suppliers are doing this. Misumi for example has plugins for CAD packages like Solidworks that even generate CAD parts for parts with custom configurations (like aluminum extrusion cut to size) so going from assembly to BOM to purchase order is a few clicks.
I only run it at night, and I put it in a window in another room, facing out with some material around it to make a snug fit. The result is a steady breeze coming in the bedroom windows at night and a muted hum from the other room. It makes regular plastic box fans look like a joke. It easily moves 10x the air on low as a plastic one on high.
This approach greatly reduces the number of nights we need to use the AC in early summer/early fall in NYC, when it’s warm but not so humid as in July and August. I’ve tried the same thing with a plastic fan and it’s way less effective...we can come home to a hot stuffy apartment on a Sunday night after a weekend away and have it totally comfortable inside in a matter of minutes.
it's almost always a good idea to buy the professional-grade items you've used at work and know are awesome, it's almost never a good idea to buy a professional-grade item sight-unseen unless you know there's a local used market for it.
At one point, years ago, my brother and I considered creating a web site that explored these kinds of high-integrity options, and acted as a directory and maybe a review site as well. A site that evangelizes high-quality, well-engineered items that are easily integrated into a home and provide much greater longevity without costing a fortune. "Overkill" is probably too strong a term for the idea.
Impossible to break, engineered to was several loads every day, etc. But they’re not cheap.
https://www.staber.com/residential-clothes-washers
Crummy valves break. Most builders use the cheapest crap they can get. They save a couple thousand dollars building a house but replacing the $2 crap can sometimes cost a fortune. One of the worst offenses I have had to deal with is the use of C-PVC pipe which is brittle and will eventually crack or burst.
Ideally, the site I thought about would be to educate folks about the kinds of things, components, they should specify when building or remodeling.
For example, Festool, Makita, and DeWalt offer awesome products but are very pricy. All the tools from the DIY shops are rubbish. Things from Bosch are slightly better. But these are all expensive. Meanwhile, the tools from Lidl around €30-50 price point are quite cool.
Nowadays youtube channels like Project Farm have kind of replaced that niche, I could see a channel dedicated to hands-on reviews, funded by affiliate links. I'd watch long videos on several of the topics you mention above...
What light switches do you use?
Longer form: there are three major manufacturers of switches and receptacles: Hubbell (Bryant), Leviton, and Pass&Seymour-Legrand. Hubbell is generally the highest price and quality. Leviton switches just feel "right" to me. I don't care for P&S much even though there's nothing wrong with them. All are completely interchangeable except for small visual details. This is really only noticable on wallplates (Hubbell stainless wallplates look the best -- and they're 302/304 SS so they don't rust in bathrooms like the 400 series trash at HD) and, if you mix them too nearby, switch rockers.
Pick your brand, then get their PDF catalog and find some part numbers. (There are plenty of other ways to do this, I just find catalogs effective.) You want "frameless" switches if you're going down this path: "framed" switches are the consumer junk you're running away from. (I dislike Decora -- I think it's harder to operate in the dark, and that's kind of a thing for light switches, but if it's your thing, go for it.) You'll find many possible part numbers to pick from. You want ONLY things marked as "Fed Spec" (more formally W-C-596). A lot of lesser stuff is "Spec Grade", which is a cop-out for "we think this is up to spec but we didn't actually list it". "Fed Spec" means "yeah, this one's good". (I will accept "spec grade" for oddballs like weird configurations -- it's not like they sell a ton of those -- since it really is decent, but don't settle for that on your main switch or receptacle, because you don't have to.) You can buy the cheapest things that are actually Fed Spec and you'll be golden.
You don't need the high-end Extra Heavy Duty stuff unless you're outfitting a shop or something. And you probably don't want Hospital Grade with those annoying pull-out forces, ugly green dots, and hospital prices. But none of those will hurt anything but your pocketbook, if you are so inclined. You'll just never appreciate them.
You should, for receptacles, get the ones that are Back And Side Wired. That means the side screws and the holes on the back, with the screw needed to grab the holes (i.e. not those horrid stabby-only holes on the super cheap receptacles). I made this mistake (Leviton BR15 vs CR15) and regretted it during install. Oh well.
If in doubt, look for the part number with the most color choices. It's probably popular for a reason. And don't forget that neon ("pilot") switches exist. They make understanding 3-ways and finding the staircase light in the dark way easier. Especially if the staircase lights are 3-way. Worth every penny!
Now that you have some part numbers, you just have to buy them from a trade supplier or industrial supplier and you're done! One place that's reliable is Zoro. They even used to have great pricing when they still offered coupons; seems those are rare now. But anywhere that's not big-box can sort you out.
Oh, and if this is your first time doing this, get a #1 square or Robertson screwdriver. No, not just a bit, you'll use it more than that and it's slimmer this way. The recesses on these things accept multiple bit shapes and I find that one by far the easiest to work with in that recess (due to the multiple-shape thing it's not great at holding any of them...).
This YouTube channel has recently done a number of great teardowns of electrical outlets (receptacles).
Go with Commercial grade.
https://youtu.be/cRJLqCnLsDU
I would add, if you can afford it, install AFCI outlets as the first outlet in the circuit, or an AFCI breaker in the circuit panel. These are required for residential (non-commercial) bedrooms for new construction in the latest revision of the NEC fire code recommendations, but they are way more expensive than you'd expect to pay for the he dead-simple outlets.
I'm going to go get some catalogs and start shopping, I might just be replacing all the light switches in my house in a few weekends from now :)
You probably wouldn't want those on frequently-swapped outlets, though.
The only problem is that I forget to turn it off in the morning. Out if sight out of mind. Switching it to a timer is on my list.
Then you can turn the fan off after a period of time, at a specific time, at a certain temp etc.
It risks over complicating things though.
The fans were about 1 inch on a side but between them they sounded like a fully loaded 747 spinning up.
It's not even That loud though
Some of the older dual Xeon servers on eBay were tempting, but the noise/power draw made it a non-starter.
Right now, I have a silent 4U rackmount GPU server running 24/7 in my living room, cooled just fine by a 120mm Noctua fan (plus a silent consumer ATX PSU fan).
I also have a commercial 1U Atom server that I've adapted for living room. The Atom and mirrored HDDs are passively-cooled (though you can also get Xeons in the same chassis). The Flex-ATX PSU was loud, but I opened it up and soldered in an effectively silent Noctua.
The noise-no-object jet engine servers are a problem, especially full-depth 1U ones with a phalanx of jet engine fans. But people have had some luck removing fans and replacing some of them with quieter fans, or liquid cooling.
https://youtu.be/dS0oFmzU06g
The Dyson fans tend to have a particularly quiet sounding noise profile compared to their volume of air displaced at low to mid power in particular, and also are far quieter and low powers than traditional fans.
They're not worth the money they cost, but there's a lot more nuance than this presents.
Commercial gym equipment, on the other hand is more expensive, much heavier, and doesn't bring many advantages over a high quality consumer product. If you're running a gym where thousands of people use it every year the extra weight and cost makes sense but for a single person it's just a pain.
at least in 2012 or so, digikey still had call centers in minnesota and the upper peninsula, and still taught all their call center reps the nato alphabet. There is nothing more crisply charming than a call operator who sounds like Bobby’s mom from Bobby’s World reading you back your resistor SKUs in flawless and rapid phonetic alphabet.
It's a shame; as far as I can tell, the only reasonably-priced source for bulk machine screws that I've been able to find was Aliexpress/Alibaba (depending on quantities), and even that has gone to shit with the new import tax rules. (I'm not opposed to paying import taxes. I am opposed to paying a €20 processing fee in addition to €0.30 tax for €1.50 worth of stuff)
Don't they have similar sites for other EU countries?
This is very unfair - the average cobsumer is purposefully mislead on a daily basis, for example applle forbids apps from informing consumer that 30% of their donation to a charity is taken.
With industrial goods, there is a whole department who's job is proqurement and to know what they are buying. And lets not pretent no funny business ever happens there either.
But lastly, some consumer good are better - DSLR's beat any industrial cameras, and commercial dishwashers are a toally different beast, unsuitable and dangerous to a naive user.
They products might be good, but their methods are ruthless - they are wanna-be like mexican cartels.
On the laptop side, they're using ThinkPads.
Kind of difficult to take a cut of payments you explicitly don’t allow on your platform, isn’t it?
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/136983/would-apple...
I don't use Facebook so I don't know if that page is misleading, but it certainly looks like you can donate money (in the legal meaning!) through Facebook's iOS app.
I think most of the recent takes were about Twitter's tip jar that would potentially let you send money to nonprofits. But, Twitter so far has avoided using the word "donate" and its legal implications.
For me the biggest concern is that people want this to happen and even would go as far as say that people get a perverse sense of satisfaction from Apple's unfair behavior. Because it validates the widespread pessimism and 'everything is broken' mentality that is normalized nowadays
Ultralight hiking adds an interesting forcing function to gear - correctly “built” (as in not overbuilt or under built). Bring the gear which matches the need. In essence, the complete opposite sentiment of this post.
Your point still stands, though. I had a military pack and couldn’t believe how heavy it was even when empty. Ultralight hiking gear is pretty amazing and optimized for an entirely different goal. That said, I still feel like specialty gear like this is a different class than the average consumer stuff.. closer to industrial or military in design than Amazon junk.
Ka-bars are kind of a meme. They are made fairly cheaply. You won’t find knife enthusiasts (eg USN) recommending ka-bars.
Still like to carry a knife, though!
With the hiking I like to do, I hike all day, boil water for food with a canister stove, and pass out. So I optimize for weight - less weight = more miles (and is much more comfortable).
You can only have this opinion if you're going hiking with your wife's boyfriend.
I don't generally need a knife in my daily life either, but I still carry one at all times. In the same sense that I often wear a seatbelt, despite hopefully never needing one, and having driven many hundreds of thousands of miles without one ever proving useful.
It's just when it comes to hiking vs. backpacking, the calculus of what to carry changes significantly because when backpacking you implicitly are carrying much more junk than on a hike.
For me hiking is much closer to a long walk in civilization than backpacking; I encounter more people, and carry my knife just like I do around town. Hiking is actually especially unique since it tends to be done civilization adjacent, and for some idiots that's the most accessible source of cover for criminal fuckery or desperate homeless living.
A lot depends on the wildlife you could expect to encounter - a pair of micro scissors weighing less than a ounce won't be useful against even a smallish dog went feral. (Lots of stray dogs around the places I live, not all of them good boys)
Having a rugged piece of metal that you could use for defense, prying stuff apart, lever, axe is a must for me. Especially one that is easy to re-sharpen with a simple rough whetstone.
I go hiking with esee 6 - it is comforting to know it is there if the going gets rough since it is nigh indestructible
I'm into old school espresso machines, and there is a robust market (and some fascinating refurb videos) for older, lever espresso machines - the quality and design is just much better than any consumer-grade equipment that is sold today.
I know I am not alone in saying that I would happily pay a 2-3x premium for any appliance if it were engineered properly and actually left out all the ridiculous technological bullshit it never needed in the first place. To this day, no one at Best Buy can explain to me how WiFi helps me clean my clothes better or faster.
Also consider the current economics around the chip shortage... Relays, A/C induction motors, electromagnets, switches and all other essential macro-scale components required for building a washing machine or clothes dryer can still be built by human hands in any factory on earth. Not only are all of these things available now, they are arguably the superior engineering choice when making something intended to deliver value to the end user.
Let's take an object I'm quite familiar with: an espresso machine. Some like the classic Rancilio Silvia are 100% electromechanical. It's nice and simple, but there are downsides:
* Temperature regulation is very coarse, because it's done with thermal relays.
* There's no timing. All manual.
* There's no water sensor.
* There are potential failure modes.
It's a machine that'll be happy to try to keep pumping nothing until the pump burns out, and that produces variable results depending on the user's timing and precision. Popular add-ons include a PID controller to fix the temperature regulation, a pressure gauge (analog is fine there, but digital could also be used for safety), and a stopwatch.
Once you look into coffee forums frequented by the fans of well made coffee, you see that one really sought after thing is control and precision. Precisely controlling the grind, the amount of coffee, the amount of water, the temperature and the timing. Notice something? It's all stuff that electronics excel at, and humans suck at. Controlling timing, weight and water flow is a perfect task for a machine, which it can do with impeccable precision.
And along with that stuff, it can improve safety eg, by noticing things like "The heater has been on for a minute yet temperature doesn't seem rising -- maybe the sensor is broken". Plus quality of life thing like warming up on a timer, and automatically turning off afterwards.
The issue isn't with electronics but with electronics being applied in the wrong direction.
This is also an issue with IoT in general. The internet functionality replaces basic functionality instead of being built on top. No, I don't want to wash my clothes with an app! But I would not mind the fscking machine to shut the fuck up at night and remind me in the morning to empty it. Not a hard thing to do. Same with e.g. light switches, if there's no internet it should still work, some don't, awful.
I'm the proud owner of a La Peppina espresso machine (image: https://www.home-barista.com/levers/my-first-lever-la-peppin...). It makes great espresso, but it also keeps a kettle of boiling water suspended on a relatively small pedestal where you push down on the lever next to it. I'm glad I own one because something like it will never be produced again.
This?
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/79/82/72/79827236408416d55d8f...
A lot of the reliability concerns from tools of the past are frankly quite well justified, and to this date we continue to sell and produce tools that are dangerous if not properly operated.
Of course, an open boiler means there are a lot more potential safety issues.
This sounds like a cool hobby and conversation starter. But it's hard to take the author seriously when he proselytizes on the practical virtues of buying ejector seats over retail chairs. Industrial goods are often built for very specific use-cases. If those use-cases don't align with your own needs, you're just paying a lot of money for something you don't need. And often, something that fails to deliver on your actual needs.
> The entire consumer market is rotten. TV? It's going to come with smart apps. Get one from NEC that's meant for commercial use.
A TV has the potential to be a lifetime purchase, but the software on it can render it obsolete. I can always plug my streaming device of choice into the back of a "dumb TV."
I just want a frame that I can send pics to, or that pulls from google/dropbox/whatever shares, and maybe turn off when it's dark.
https://www.samsung.com/us/televisions-home-theater/tvs/the-...
you can still buy 30year old speakers for 200-400 and consider it as a buy it for life purchase.
If you mind the gap between your knees for the controls too much, look for an Airbus seat. They also have nice armrests because the stick is on the side.
He pointed out that virtually every single element in the $60+ million aircraft is engineered for flight and occupant safety, and to be as light as possible.
Being able to instantly & remotely measure the temperature of anything (with reasonable emissivity characteristics) is like a super power. There is nothing in my kitchen or grill area that can exceed the range of the IR sensor on this unit. There are only a few things that have problems with direct sampling. I cook almost exclusively with cast iron, so IR readings are always dead accurate.
The unit runs on a single AA battery, has a backlight, and somehow still hasn't needed a new battery since I bought it 4 years ago (used almost every day).
I had to cook in someone else's kitchen not too long ago, and found myself going insane at not being able to tell exactly how hot the oil was in a pot used for frying.
Laser pointers marketed as cat toys are often tiny little things that require annoying & expensive button-cell batteries.
My infrared thermometer / cat toy has a pistol grip so it's easier to hold, and runs off a 9V battery that lasts much longer.
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/12/02/more-dakka/
All things considered, I would love to see more people put together their own lists of ways you can do better than the consumer default. I'm sure there's plenty of opportunities of this kind.
The consumer approach would dismiss getting a professional fitting as overkill and unnecessary but they really limit their enjoyment.
This does bring up a different issue though, which is that any time someone uses a hypothetical example to illustrate a point on the Internet, responses end up picking apart the example instead of the point itself.
> Drop the toy, or the relevant toy component, five times through a height of (850 ± 50) mm on to a 4 mm thick steel plate with a 2 mm thick coating of Shore A hardness (75 ± 5) as measured according to EN ISO 868 or ISO 7619-2 and which is placed on a non-flexible horizontal surface.
> Prior to release, orientate the toy in a position that allows the most onerous impact onto the coated surface of the steel plate.
(850mm is 2¾ ft.)
More seriously, I think some of these regulations do prevent the lowest-quality stuff you might find in the USA being legally sold in the EU.
https://law.resource.org/pub/eu/toys/en.71.1.2014.html#s8.5
Orienteering is a deep enough subject to be a tool, hobby and sport. Recommended skill, just for the entertainment value
On the whole, I'm pretty damn satisfied with the overweening cradle-to-grave nanny state, making sure you get at least the rudiments of basic life skillz and all.
I get the draw, but comfort in these seats is mixed. You should be able to sit in them for a few hours, but remember that the foam is dense enough to handle 7Gs.
This is why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5v8D-alAKE&t=833s
If you're older, like really old, you can actually remember a time where products were of a much much higher durability before the industry figured out that low durability products were more profitable.
So in actuality some of the suggestions on that site aren't necessarily overkill as industrial products aren't deliberately engineered to fail.
Engineering is an exercise in prioritization. If 90% of consumers buy the cheapest blender on the shelf, the blender made with the cheapest materials wins. Hobart still exists, and still makes good blenders. Consumers just started buying new designs that were more cost efficient.
If you look at the prices of mid twentieth century appliances in some old periodicals, and adjust for inflation, they’re about the price of commercial appliances today.
Before value-engineering, people didn’t have a kitchen full of appliances, they went without.
Value engineering is often criticized, but the plain truth is that it is primarily responsible for the high standards of living we enjoy today.
yes, you could argue that making this fuse replaceable would add $0.05, but we all know that its not because 99% of the purchasers wont crack it open, figure out whats going on, and short the fuse.
you can argue that by keeping the volume up shop vac can lower prices. but i dont think you can argue that efficiency has been gained.
The number of consumers who buy a shop vac based on whether it has a socketed fuse is negligible. It’s simply a feature with zero commercial value. It’s all cost with zero benefit.
Only because a good chunk of the true costs are externalized. If the vendor would have to pay for disposal of their product, suddenly that socketed fuse would become a cost-cutting measure.
If these types of features mattered to consumers, then one would expect we’d see success from the companies who prioritize it. These companies and products do exist, but they are niche.
What consumer wouldn't want a vac that can be fixed easily by putting a new fuse in a socket? The issue is the consumer doesn't know about this possible fix. The Company Engineers this fact into the product AND into the marketing and into the warranty length. Common sense. A human is irrational and lacks knowledge, but a human made aware of his irrationality will usually choose the rational choice.
Companies are just taking advantage of a consumers lack of knowledge, awareness, and intelligence. If you were perfectly aware of two competing vacs and all the actual technical specifications of course the one with a replaceable fuse would be counted as a positive feature.
The problem is that companies that try to market the fuse as a feature will have a hard time communicating this fact to the consumer especially. Thus it is in the interest of every company to engineer shorter lifespans into their products as consumers can't see past 2 years at the point of sale.
Industrial products on the other hand are usually massed purchased and reliability is measured from an accounting perspective. This makes industrial owners more knowledgeable and able to make more rational choices as they have quantitative metrics that effect their profits during accounting time.
For the 99% of people who don’t attempt electrical repairs on their vacuums, that fuse socket would be sitting inside of a vacuum in a landfill.
Drive around any US suburb on trash night and pick up a couple of appliances. Most of them either still work 100% or have trivially fixable issues. People (US consumers especially) don’t fix stuff.
Don’t get me wrong, I love fixing things myself. I’ve probably saved $10,000 over the past 5 years by fixing things people were throwing away instead of buying. The ease with which this is possible to do demonstrates how few people attempt repairs themselves.
You joking? You realize houses and cars have socketed fuses that can be replaced almost turnkey. This is a simple solution to build into the product a UI that let's the user know a socket was blown and allow the user to replace a fuse like replacing a AA battery. FUSES are designed to fail and be replaced. Making those FUSES inaccessible is ALSO a design choice because it's contradictory.
There was a point in time where every phone had a replaceable battery. You think that replaceable batteries disappeared because companies wanted to save costs? Sockets for batteries have been part of the design philosophy for consumer products for decades, the fact that these sockets are removed from phones is not a cost saving measure.
This issue is much more widespread than you think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4
Phone batteries are designed to be replaceable. They’re internal because of design considerations, not cost. In fact, nearly all cell phone batteries are secured with removable adhesive because they’re specifically intended to be replaceable.
Homes have circuit breakers (fuses haven’t been mainstream for a while) because the load is not predefined, and can be occasionally exceeded by the end user. This is not the case for a consumer appliance with a known load. An unexpectedly high load is an indication that another component has also failed. There’s some diagnosis that should be done when replacing a fuse on a system with an unexplained over current situation.
Making something that is designed to fail and be replaced (fuses) inaccessible is a contradictory design philosophy... Unless this design philosophy is INTENDED to make the product fail. You place a component designed to fail inside a vac and make it inaccessible then that means you are designing the vac to fail.
Phone batteries are not designed to be replaceable this is a lie or pure stupidity. You realize that glue or adhesive is not designed to be removed right? It's designed to be permanent. Screws and socketed components are designed to be removed.
Additionally the iPhone isn't even designed to be opened. It's extremely hard to open that device and it's completely obvious the reason is because that device is designed to both fail in a certain time frame and only be serviceable by apple technicians. Here's how easy it is to "replace" a battery you claim was glued into the phone as a design decision to be "replaceable": https://youtu.be/gkCyl7kRGns
>My above point is was that cost is an example of an engineering tradeoff, not that it is the only engineering tradeoff
Who in the universe isn't aware that tradeoffs outside of cost don't exist? Kind of useless if the point is to obvious. How about you address my point in the fact that deliberate decisions were made to make products fail and that these failures are not design tradeoffs.
A thinner phone for an irreplaceable battery in the iPhone is not actually a tradeoff. In fact if you look inside the phone they very much could've screwed the battery in without increasing the thickness of the phone.
You realize that Steve Jobs once said the iPod was designed to only last a year?
1. Cars cost 600x what a shop vac does, so more people attempt to fix them.
2. Some fuses in cars are, in fact, not socketed. Particularly for the higher-current and more dangerous circuits where unexpected overloads are of a greater safety concern and are less likely to be due to fluke events. For instance, fusible links[0]. It would certainly be possible for automotive designers to design a socketed fuse in place of a fusible link, but the cost to do it would be 'high' relative to the frequency of failure, the risk, and the likelihood of user-serviceability. Again, an engineering trade-off.
[0]: https://m.roadkillcustoms.com/understanding-fusible-links/
> Do cars have unexpected loads?
Yes, every car I've ever been in has accessory circuits that a user could easily overload. And I have done so myself many times. Also, there are a lot of electrical parts on a vehicle with limited lifetime that are prone to mechanical failure: relays, bulbs, accessory actuators, etc. When these items fail, they can stall/short and cause an overcurrent condition.
You wouldn't throw away a $30k car because a bent pin on a $1 tail light bulb shorted out. You'd replace the $0.10 fuse and get another $1 tail light bulb. But, you'd probably throw away a $25 blender when the $18 motor laminations short out, because the failure would cost more to fix than the entire product is worth, especially if you're paying labor to fix it.
Fuses exist to fail when some other failure condition happens. Many failures on a car are economical to fix. A blender is totaled if nearly anything happens to it.
> Phone batteries are not designed to be replaceable this is a lie or pure stupidity. You realize that glue or adhesive is not designed to be removed right?
Mainstream phones (iPhone, Samsung, etc) are typically designed with adhesive that has removal tabs which deactivate the adhesive and allow someone to remove it cleanly. They could simply leave this feature out if they didn't want it to be replaceable, but they didn't. Their intentional adding of this feature is evidence that they do intend for the battery to be replaced. Example: https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/yAxAcOuZkVKD1xAY.hug...
> Additionally the iPhone isn't even designed to be opened. It's extremely hard to open that device and it's completely obvious the reason is because that device is designed to both fail in a certain time frame and only be serviceable by apple technicians.
It's hard to open as a result of the design/engineering trade off. Just because it's hard to open doesn't automatically imply that someone must have plotted to make it hard to open. It just means that end-user serviceability wasn't a high-priority design feature. It's hard to open simply because glue is a cheap way to make something thin, waterproof, and cheap to manufacture. If Apple really wanted to waterproof their device while intentionally make it unserviceable, the electronics industry has way better ways to do that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potting_(electronics)
> Who in the universe isn't aware that tradeoffs outside of cost don't exist? Kind of useless if the point is to obvious. How about you address my point in the fact that deliberate decisions were made to make products fail and that these failures are not design tradeoffs.
Your point is valid for instances of proven malice, but one should not assume malice where a valid alternative explanation...
2. Fusible links are designed that way for safety. The hood of a car is designed to be opened so that even a fusible link can be fixed.
3. When I asked: Do care have unexpected loads? I answered that question right after I asked it. The question was rhetorical.
I'd rather replace a fuse in a 25$ blender then buy a new one. But either way, you wouldn't throw away a $100 dollar vac or a $500 dollar iPhone just because a $0.10 fuse shorted out.
>Mainstream phones (iPhone, Samsung, etc) are typically designed with adhesive that has removal tabs which deactivate the adhesive and allow someone to remove it cleanly.
True. BUT these batteries are still extremely hard to remove as they are locked into the case. They were designed to be hard to remove so that apple service people can repair the few phones that statistically beat the warranty.
We both know that the iphone is basically designed with a battery that is so hard to remove that it can be basically classified as not removable by the average layman. Very different from the way all phones use to have removable batteries.
>It's hard to open as a result of the design/engineering trade off. Just because it's hard to open doesn't automatically imply that someone must have plotted to make it hard to open. It just means that end-user serviceability wasn't a high-priority design feature.
That's my point. How do you know it's a tradeoff? How do you know it's not a design decision? Basically Apple is incentivized to make the phone hard to open. Additionally all apple policies of "repairing" a phone basically make "repairing" the phone cost as much as buying a new one. With every policy surrounding the phone is positioned, it's more than likely that the decisions are deliberate.
>Your point is valid for instances of proven malice, but one should not assume malice where a valid alternative explanation exists.
My point is valid for instances of suspected malice. The motive exists. Do you trust someone trying to sell you a new crypto just because there's no evidence of malice and that an alternative explanation exists? No. It's stupid to believe there is no malice.
It is far wiser to assume malice exists wherever profitable incentive exists, such is the nature of business.
I did this with office chairs. I was buying a new mediocre chair every few years before finally buying a Herman Miller several years ago. It was expensive compared to anything else I'd owned, but (1) it's an order-of-magnitude better chair, and (2) I had probably spent about the same money on several crappier chairs over the prior decade. I am still sitting in this chair now, and it's still just as good as the day I bought it.
If you’re often using a computer chair (as many of us do use in a commercial setting), you probably legitimately need a chair with a high duty cycle.
Meanwhile, I have a $7 toaster that’s 10 years old. I don’t make toast very often. Even if my toaster fails today, a low-end commercial toaster wouldn’t pay itself off over my lifetime.
Poor people also have alternatives. Much of the world doesn’t worry about the repair bills for their clothes dryer or their dishwasher, because they hang their clothes on a line and wash their dishes in a basin.
No. Of course, a part of potential lifetime loss is due to price. Manufacturing a case in plastic instead of carbon fiber is simply far cheaper and most consumer will go for that. However, we see cheaped out components even in high-priced or prosumer gear, while the existence of this market already pretty much proves that price is not everything to every consumer. Additionally, there are many examples of behaviors that save no money or are actually more expensive, but help the bottom line by forcing people to buy new (see the Phoebus cartell [0] or the slowing down of older iPhones by Apple).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
Even the “slowing down of old iPhones” is an example of that. This was a bug fix for crashing due to current demand that exceeded the battery’s capability.
The statement we can make that is very realistic is that companies are incentivised to do do "planned obsolescence" and because of this "planned obsolescence" has happened, is happening and will continue to happen in the future.
But it's also possible that the material isn't cheaper at all, but the manufaturer gains because if the part wears out sooner they can sell a replacement sooner. That isn't a case of "consumers prioritize price".
For instance, manufacturers have tried to sell printers which refuse to print when there is still quite a bit of ink left in the cartridge. Printers which refuse to let you use all the ink are engineered to fail, but they aren't cheaper than printers that do let you use all the ink. The manufacturer is relying on the fact that obtaining good information is costly; testing printers to rigorously prove this takes resources, and even when it gets discovered, many consumers won't know that the printer is doing this, so they won't use that information in comparing otherwise similar-looking printers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_and_blades_model
Yes, and prioritizing price is short term and stupid. Prioritize total cost instead and buy high quality items, it's much cheaper in the long run.
Also, high standard of living is not about having your kitchen "full of appliances", it's about health, education and security.
Many of the products and services that people buy to support their health, education, security, etc have been made more accessible by value engineering either directly, or in their supply chain.
There's nothing in the universe that stops a feature that meets a design goal of lowering value from also meeting the design goal of planned obsolescence. So it's 100 percent possible that a company still has two design goals: making a cheaper product and obsolescescing that product.
So if you claim that it's basically not happening. Tell me in what way is a company not incentivised to plan the early obsolescence of a product and what evidence do you have that this is basically not happening as a deliberate design decision?
Your evidence is only an example that a company can both meet the goal of obsolescence and lower value with a singular feature of cheaper materials. I have stated that this is not evidence because a company can still have the design goal of obsolescence while meeting that goal with a singular design feature intended to make the product cheaper as well. You need to counter this reasoning because it invalidated your evidence.
The broad root claim above that "Consumer grade products are deliberately designed to fail." is the assertion with insufficient evidence. The video attached to that claim has a few valid examples, but a few examples over the past century is not indicative of the current state of the entire manufacturing industry... especially when there is a textbook engineering practice that does explain the same.
You are missing the point. I am claiming that ONE feature can be built to meet TWO objectives. One for value engineering and the other for planned obsolescence. That would make NEITHER of the two objectives a side effect.
Example: Airplanes are painted with colored paint both to prevent the metal from degrading AND to give the plane a better aesthetic. ONE feature meeting TWO objectives.
>The broad root claim above that "Consumer grade products are deliberately designed to fail." is the assertion with insufficient evidence. The video attached to that claim has a few valid examples, but a few examples over the past century is not indicative of the current state of the entire manufacturing industry... especially when there is a textbook engineering practice that does explain the same.
My broad root claim is that the practice has happened, is happening and will happen.
My evidence for this is examples of this actually occurring. And real incentives for this practice to exist.
I made no claim about how widespread the practice is. That is more your claim. Your claim is basically saying that the amount of entities practicing planned obsolescence is so minuscule that it's basically negligible.
Your evidence for your claim is that value engineering exists in a text book. That's it. You know what else exists in certain text books? How crypto works. Does that make crypto frauds and scams negligible? No.
No doubt your claim is hard to prove, the burden of proof for you is astronomically harder than it is for my point. But then think about it... why do you hold strong opinions and stances on topics that are almost impossible to prove?
Healthcare, maybe I can see it, but not really. The proliferation of single use stuff in hospitals for example seems like a different thing than cheap bicycles and shoddy clothes that last a single season.
Maybe I misunderstood what value engineering is, but I don’t really see how the philosophy behind cheap consumer goods is very related to those things.
It can be, to a point, but most developed societies have schooling systems that use various types of supplies and equipment in the course of education. More affordable transportation, facilities, supplies, and equipment is generally good for students.
> Healthcare, maybe I can see it, but not really. The proliferation of single use stuff in hospitals for example seems like a different thing than cheap bicycles and shoddy clothes that last a single season.
Well, yes, those are very different things. But, cheap disposable medical supplies both lower barriers to access those things. Not only does this mean that someone who is low-income might be able to more easily access something like, say, an oral thermometer ... but it also means that things like equipment with a high infection risk can be disposed of instead of reused. Many hospitals, for instance, have started switching to disposable surgical tools, because that's now a possibility, and it decreases infection risk.
The bottom line is, cheap stuff enables more people to have more tools at hand to solve problems.
The iphone not having a replaceable battery is a design decision, it doesn't make the phone cheaper.
You are taking two independent phenomenons and trying to group them together as if they are the same phenomenon. Yes making a product cheaper has the side effect of reducing its' lifetime but the video and what I'm talking about is DIRECT engineering decisions for the purpose of shortening lifetimes NOT making things cheaper.
You obviously didn't watch the video.
The “fashion” argument is particularly silly. Fashion and style are concepts that have existed as a part of human nature longer than manufacturing, corporations, or even money itself have even existed.
Having the latest flashy accessories to show off to potential mates is something that was literally invented (at least) 75,000 years ago by Neanderthals, not GM or Apple.
Did I say they weren't interdependent? My response to you LITERALLY stated an interdependency.
Also when does "design" being an engineering constraint have to do with anything? Are you talking about aesthetic design choices made by an artist/product designer that an engineer has to take into account? You should be more specific because engineers "design" solutions around constraints as well, and the statement makes no sense when viewed from the engineering perspective.
>The “fashion” argument is particularly silly. Fashion and style are concepts that have existed as a part of human nature longer than manufacturing, corporations, or even money itself have even existed.
What fashion argument? You say the "fashion" argument is "silly" but I'm over here thinking, what "fashion" argument? I NEVER made such an argument. What's silly here is that you're talking about some weird imaginary tangent that I never even touched upon.
If you actually did watch that video or even read my posts I'm thinking you read it really quickly and you skimmed that video. I think you skipped some words and sentences and made a huge assumptions about what I'm talking about.
>
The part of my response that you didn't even address is that I'm saying FAILURE is engineered into the design DELIBERATELY. It's not a side effect of creating a cheaper product. It's a actual design choice making the consumer more likely to buy a new product.
You realize that the filament for those bulbs weren't picked because the filament was cheaper. A deliberate R&D effort was created to pick filaments that were roughly the same cost but failed quicker. That's counter to your entire argument. R&D costs money so costs are actually INCREASED to make the product fail quicker.
An aspect of planned obsolescence I don't see discussed much is the built-in incentives for factories (giant sinks of capex) and how we conceive manufacturing in general to lead the cart before the horse in our current dominant economic paradigm. They and their logistical tail including the staff are so expensive to re-tool and re-skill that it leads to many perverse incentives. There are vanishingly few US anvil and vise factories left because they made such a good product up to and into the 20th century that when industrialization's per capita saturation curve inevitably flattened, their market nosedived as their products were literally outliving their initial customer base. Entire manufacturing ecosystems are built around trying to avoid that outcome, and it is nearly impossible to a priori tell whether an industry in a nation is hidebound avoiding necessary technological change or undergoing another anvil and vise experience.
I have some hope in automation and cell-based flexible manufacturing though I strongly suspect the economic case for both is not nearly as straightforward as the narrative exposed to laypeople like us makes it out to be. I think we're missing quite a few pieces of the puzzle (design-to-floor-changes automation being one example) before we can tell the story that the flexible industry/factory narrative would like to tell.
[1] I'm carefully trying NOT to slight kube-system here. There is only so much attention any one individual can apply to any given context. The situation could easily be reversed between kube-system and you in a different context. We need cognitive density in all the wide-ranging human endeavors our species engages in, there is room enough for everyone.
In the arena of the internet I wouldn't worry too much about slighting people. It's all fair game, they can "slight" you too. This necessity to be overly polite over moderately polite so you can avoid hurting someones precious feelings is overblown on the internet. First of all the feeling will pass, second of all it's the internet, you're anonymous so the chances of permanent damage is basically zero.
Worrying about slighting someone hinders you from getting your point across, it also stops the other party from emotionally engaging with you. Conflict often fuels the fire of a debate giving the opponent incentive to try to expose every single logical flaw in your argument.
The internet is the perfect arena for this kind of heated discussion. It also goes both ways. If I have a wrong idea that I think is right, by god I will fight for that idea to be right until all possible logical alternatives are decimated and even then I'll only admit that I'm wrong 5 years later. Still my efforts allowed the other party to strengthen their arguments and expose flaws in my arguments and the discussion is open to public record. Even more important my attempts at vindicating myself could actually expose a real flaw in other parties argument, thereby maintaining a healthy dose of scientific doubt.
My philosophy is don't try to deny your own human bias. Be aware of it, and revel in it. You and others were naturally selected to have this bias because it helped you survive. Trying to deny it and be above this base emotion could hinder your competitiveness in the game of life.
I am referring to:
>> The iphone not having a replaceable battery is a design decision, it doesn't make the phone cheaper.
>> You are taking two independent phenomenons and trying to group them together as if they are the same phenomenon.
>What fashion argument?
14:25 in the video. :D
> The part of my response that you didn't even address is that I'm saying FAILURE is engineered into the design DELIBERATELY. It's not a side effect of creating a cheaper product.
Yes, there are examples of this deliberately happening. However, there are reasons why it happens as a side-effect of the engineering process, and this is an exponentially more common scenario (because it is common engineering process!).
This is a total and deliberate lie. The video came out march 2021. There is no way you watched this years ago. You didn't watch it at all. I recommend you actually watch it.
A product category exists at around $450–500 and there are plenty of household who do without. It gets value engineered down to a $100 product and sees mass adoption. However, 90% of the market for the original $500 product also chooses the half-broken $100 version, leading to the $500 quality moving upmarket (such that it now costs $1000) or disappearing altogether (or moving to a commercial appliance that is unfit for household use).
When I was a kid, something like a preset for popcorn, or a turntable, was an a feature you’d get on a very expensive microwave.
Many luxury features of yesteryear are now standard.
> value-engineered wares for people who don’t care
You say it like there is a choice involved here. There isn't. This is something that needs repeating - customers choose out of what's available on the market, not out of the space of all possible products. So all products that are hard to make and sell yourself are primarily vendor-driven.
If a market bifurcates like this, I can't announce my preference for the missing middle at all. The split may have happened against my preferences, or it may have happened before I cared, or it may have happened before I was even in the market for that product category. But once it happened, people who'd prefer something better than barely-fit-for-purpose can't get it.
> high-quality end becomes higher quality and three times the price it used to be
If it becomes higher quality. As you mentioned higher up, it frequently becomes different, as it's no longer targeting a large audience.
> The choices of other customers deny you the continued availability
Yes, but again, what choices? These things stick in a feedback loop, a self-fulfilling prophecy. And it doesn't take people choosing the lower-tier option. It takes a company choosing a somewhat lower quality this year than they did the last year, because if done gradually people won't be able to quickly tell (the very job of marketing is to confuse customers about this).
I hate "revealed preferences", I consider them mostly bullshit given the lack of actual choice - but if we want to frame the situation like this: the bifurcation doesn't require that most of the middle-tier consumers "actually prefer" the cheaper option over the middle one. A company will attempt this even if it meant losing middle-tier customers altogether, as long as they believe the expanding lower-tier customer base will make up for it.
What's even more maddening is the interplay with economies of scale - the middle-tier product could've gotten better and cheaper over time, if its broad customer base wasn't stolen by the low-quality option. So the households that couldn't afford the quality option yesterday, would be able to afford it tomorrow - and today would be making use of used ones, because there is such a thing as a market for used goods, which works best when items are durable. But companies often do try to sabotage it, too.
Also: the downwards quality spiral doesn't stop at a reasonable point, it stops at the lowest point where the customers can be duped en-masse, unless stopped by regulatory means either. I'll happily argue that, for most products, the lowest-priced options shouldn't exist in the first place, because they deliver negative value (after accounting for total use costs, with possible future replacement, which most people don't) and endless frustration. I see them as an environmental disaster.
And I’m not saying this sarcastically, many wildly successful businesses have been built on finding untapped markets that established players have missed. There is always room for improvement. The question is whether that improvement is strong enough to change people’s buying decisions.
The overkill options...well, they're not made for home, which actually makes them worse for home use cases. Sure, a La Marzocco Linea can pull a thousand shots a day with extreme consistency and temperature stability.
My Lelit Bianca can't keep up on volume, but it is smaller, reaches operating temperature more quickly, and is temp stable for the number of shots I pull even with a dozen people over for a party. It uses a standard electrical plug, it has a consumer-grade warranty, and it's relatively easy to maintain for a regular Joe like me.
So sure, a commercial version of a thing might be more robust, longer-lasting, etc., but what tradeoffs are you making to achieve those characteristics?
I see what you did there...
Here is a link to NEC's commercial displays https://www.sharpnecdisplays.us/products/displays#2
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/amazon-devices-will-...
https://frame.work/blog/in-defense-of-dumb-tvs was posted here recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26273169) and concluded that Sceptre, an inexpensive brand sold at Wal-Mart, was worth a shot.
An example from Samsung: https://www.cdw.com/product/samsung-678u-series-55-4k-uhd-le...
https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV-category1category73.htm...
https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-55-4k-conference-r...
The down ide is that they are up 25% in cost over 2019 but
Things like contrast ratio, how well it does dark colors in a dark room or fast intesity refreshing (like 60Hz "fast") may be questionable. It probably also expects super consistent and clean power...some houses dont have that.
Sure you could make it a giant Dakboard with a giant static image and not really worry about burn in for years.
Ultimately. I went with a cheap panel from say costco and a roku on a separate vlan (so my overkill is a network that can do vlan segmentation). Ultimately the roku TV's can scan themselves to death and report that they are on a network with other roku TV's all they want. Or you could just get a cheap-o smart TV and hook up the appleTV (cost came into play for me). I do have some LG smart TV's, one died within 3 years already...Meanwhile my Samsung 55" Plasma from 2008 had taking a direct lightning strike that took out the others and keeps on ticking. (and resulted in the TCL roku and LG tvs being installed).
So all of that is to say. I just go cheap panel that i dont mind replacing. And just keep them isolated entirely.
So why go to the trouble of not having the smart menu stuff rather than just not using it?
https://shop.libbey.com/collections/beverageware/products/ba...
Only major downside is that shipping is expensive (unless you join their Amazon Prime equivalent, which is $99/month and doesn't really make sense for a household). I think my last order was around $30 s&h on a ~$200 order.
My workaround is that I save up a big wishlist and then order from them about once a year, and get friends & family to tack on any items they want as well.
0: https://www.webstaurantstore.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1u-9YqrIJc
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it feels fine even if you sit in it long periods of time. However, I'm sure that it only comes in one size, that size being the right size to pilot a plane with an ejector seat. Anyone too big or small wasn't considered in its design because they'd never make it into the relevant flight program to begin with.
My point is, consumer objects have to be designed a bit more inclusively than that, to be able to sell to a wider range of buyers. That big Hobart mixer is in the same boat: It's designed for people who wouldn't have gotten that bakery job if they couldn't work with a large, heavy piece of kitchen equipment.
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/ed/15/08/beyond-average
Some ejection seats are supposed to be sat in, continuously, for over 10 hours. While letting you still function.
That said, the cockpits tend to enforce certain posture.