I've been quite impressed with the few of their commercial items I have. The important parts are metal, and clearly a lot of though went into design (things like the blender jar being designed so there's nowhere for water to pool after you wash and set it upside down). The only unimpressive thing is the price.
We are "lucky" to have a Target, Walmart, Meijer, Nieman Marcus, Khols and Macy's nearby. (Sears and Hudsons have gone). But, from my experience, on many product lines, they sell the same "crap".
Part of the reason we equate "old" with "good" like that 70 year old juicer is survivor bias. We don't dig through the landfill to find out how many broken 70 year old juicers are buried there.
That said, I suspect that in another 70 years, Walter's juicer will still work, but you won't find any working examples of juicers from 2022.
It should be obvious to most people at this point that any appliance with the word "smart" in its marketing really means "smarter than you, sucker".
Isn't there something to be said for the volume of anecdotal evidence of older appliances of higher quality? Like, is it really survivor bias if older appliances have a (perceived) significantly higher probability of lasting? Sure, some items may not have lasted, some may be flukes, but if you compare the relative quantities of "older appliances still working" vs "new appliances still working", the proportion of older appliances to the total from "that era" is likely much higher than now.
I have no evidence to back my statements up, and I'm using extremely vague language, but this is at least my perception of this idea that "they don't make 'em like they used to."
It's the proliferation of credit combined with increasing ubiquity of equating consumerism with success.
Using other people's money to act like you can afford the things that other people who have much more money than you can actually afford.
The easier and more common this has gotten, the crummier deal everyone ends up getting for their money.
Back when average consumers still had to save money for years before making big-ticket purchases, the shrewdest of manufacturers achieved the greatest success with product lifetimes having quite good multiples of those saving years.
When that became no longer as much of an issue, then never mind.
Expanded credit opened up opportunities for spendthrifts to dominate, who love to consume so much that they replace purchases that are still perfectly good after a few years anyway.
Remember all those 70-year-old juicers where there's far more in the landfills than remaining in the kitchen? Most of those were landfilled while they were still working.
Be aware that survivorship bias may fool you when comparing the quality of new and old items. The single juicer that lasts 70 years may be the only one of its kind to last that long, the others from the same production year being left to rot and rust in a landfill.
That being said, I definitely believe that planned obsolesence and unintentional bad quality is a plague on modern consumer items. I am lucky enough to have the time, knowledge, persistence and money to research and buy long lasting goods. For example, I have bought kitchen knives made out of a single piece of metal, which are therefore less prone to breaking than the run-off-the-mill ones. My jeans are from a Swedish jeans company that offer in-store repairs as long as it's practical. This is saving me money and effort in the long run. However, I do not believe in such individual solutions to what is essentially a systemic problem; people should expect good consumer items without researching beforehand like it was their hobby.
I'm glad that the EU is working hard on right-to-repair laws.
Metal, vs plastic gears. Bigger vs tiny electric motor. Metal vs plastic moving parts in contact with the fruit. Plug-in vs battery powered. These are the things that I would place money on as the reasons the 70 year old one is still functioning, and none sold today will work in 5 years. (I’ve never looked at one of these items. I’m just guessing. But I’d still place money on it.)
Sintered metal gears, last only a little longer than plastic and then fail catastrophically destroying half of the device so that you can't repair it. But at least they are much cheaper than proper machined gears.
My KitchenAid mixer ate a gear many years ago. They would lead you to believe they are a high quality brand, no?
After disassembly, it turned out to be perhaps the only plastic gear in the thing. It occurred to me that it was perhaps designed to fail rather than the mixer continuing to break the bones of the person who got their hand caught in the paddle.
So, I throw the engineer a bone for that one. I was bummed though to have to order a replacement gear from some obscure place in Florida for like $75 or whatever.
Yeah, sometimes there are plastic gears designed in specifically for this, in blenders and kitchen appliances, some lathes even have a set of several copies of one plastic safety gear. But sintered metal gears in planetary gearbox of a cordless screwdriver which fails faster than it's battery (Einhell) - not acceptable.
The real crime is that there are only like 5 appliance parts companies that stock parts and they each seem to look at the other companies for what to stock. Meaning, if someone else has it they won’t. But what ever they do stock ends up selling for 500% or more of the wholesale price.
I had the same gear fail. It's called a worm gear and is, indeed, intended to fail before damaging the other gears. They're much cheaper if you buy a non-oem part. I bought one from amazon for ~10 USD.
> It occurred to me that it was perhaps designed to fail rather than the mixer continuing to break the bones of the person who got their hand caught in the paddle.
This is a good call out of potential other reasons an engineer team might make something cheaper & easier to break. It would be awesome to read a summary of the trade-offs the teams discuss in their process.
My Electrolux Assistent N8, from 1978, also has a worm drive. Not plastic though, instead it has an electromechanical stall detector that shuts down the motor if it stalls. No need for sacrificial parts!
Capitalism is successfully optimizing for what I as a consumer can detect. I am not capable of simply looking at a device and knowing whether the metal is the quality metal it needs to be, or if it is merely some cheap metal that will bend if I breath on it too hard.
($YOU may be. I'm not.)
Except that nowadays I tend to just guess the latter and I'm statistically correct anyhow.
Superman has a quote about living in a world of cardboard, where he must control his every move lest he rip through everything. I'm beginning to feel that way myself with these consumer products. If you take them even 5% out of spec expect them to catastrophically fail. They'll catastrophically fail even if you use them entirely within spec. I'd happily pay a bit extra for something that wouldn't but there's no way for the manufacturer to successfully convey to me that this is such a thing even if they wanted to. The metaphorical water is so metaphorically muddied that it's just dry dust now anyhow, with fake 5 star reviews and decades of refinement on marketing messages about how this vegetable peeler peels vegetables so well that it will even enhance your marriage prospects.
Reliability now isn't done with the same methods as it was then.
Back then, the good stuff might have been good because the motor was big.
The modern good stuff probably has a brushless motor that can prevent stalls. It doesn't matter if it's big or small, the computer won't let it overheat, so they can make it smaller to save money that they can spend on whatever part is the actual failure mode.
The trouble is finding manufacturers that actually do that, rather than just using a tiny motor with no computer and plastic gears with no torque sensing. If you design things with old fashioned methods, you need to use old fashioned heavy parts.
Nylon gears in contact with ozone, and switches and connectors of all kinds seem to be the problem on everything I've seen. Which is why I always say I would gladly use 10k lines of code to save one moving part or one switch.
100% agree, but I think the issue here comes with a typical phased design process:
- Mechanical: "Here's the physical specs, no need to account for A, B, or C, as it's been handled in software"
- Electrical: "Here are the physical constraints and electrical spec. No need to account for X, Y, or Z, as it's being handled in software."
- Firmware: "You need to handle A, B, C, X, Y, and Z, but if you run out of time or don't have the budget to make up a test rig for validating all those cases are handled correctly, no worries we'll just ship it anyway."
Completely anecdotal, but my experience was that a large amount is attributable to systems engineers and project managers not having adequate software background. Invariably, this leads to software rigor being deprioritized or with just little oversight. After all "it's just software"
>I would gladly use 10k lines of code to save one moving part or one switch
This creates a whole new reliability problem. Software reliability is notorious for its interface failures and there can be many more of those modes (where hardware typically has a few wear-out style failures). I think about my relatively high-end TV that seems to always struggle with software updates without any glitches. It seems like we've just been lulled into accepting software glitches as the price of having software control everything. Luckily, most of the software is not safety critical.
I think this is one of the dangers of relying on software to close reliability gaps. Yes, you can change it quickly and cheaply and it's versatile, but it's often very hard to identify all the failure modes.
True embedded software is a lot different. Smart TVs are desktop or phone class computers, and even then, the glitches are usually "A power cycle fixes it" or "One feature that wouldn't exist at all without software stops working" type of thing.
For non safety critical stuff it's much better to crash every week than to wear out in 5 years.
Maybe I'm becoming a curmudgeon or maybe it's my bias as a former reliability engineer, but the fact that we've normalized this drives me crazy. Imagine your frustration if your car needed to be "power cycled" on a regular basis just to keep it moving forward, yet we've become accustomed to that in our day-to-day interactions with electronics.
It's the bane of my existence that I have to continuously power cycle a device to do something seemingly simply like change a tv streaming service or scan a document. Interface failures are rampant.
I have no issue if it automatically recovers to a safe or known state. My issue is when this doesn't happen and the user has to perform the recovery via a power cycle. From my perspective, this means the system has failed and is, by definition, not reliable. We just seem to accept low reliability in consumer software.
It's definitely not ideal, and I obviously try to do better than that in any product I work on.
But I've seen so many things fail due to bad switches, connectors, and other simple parts, to me it's a great tradeoff to occasionally reboot something as opposed to having it totally fail at some random time within a few years.
I wouldn't trust my life to it, but I'll trust my watch party to it.
Plus, a consumer now only needs to power cycle or factory reboot, so untrained people can keep stuff going.
I'd much rather they need reboots than need skilled work like they used to, that just wouldn't be practical in a digital first world.
Oddly enough having failures be so normalized makes them less problematic, because the victim doesn't get many complaints. People who have to wait just assume that's how it is, nobody will tell you you shouldn't have used a computer for that
Before all these complex systems we used pen and paper and things subject to human error, and we had to deal with that quite a bit.
Computers suck compared to what they could be but they are amazing compared to a lot of older stuff.
We can design hardware to last, but I think we often don’t for economic reasons. My larger point is that using software just trades one well-understood failure mode for a group of unknown, hard to test failure modes, usually because it’s cheaper. I think my biggest complaint comes as a result of the data economy. You can still find “dumb” tvs but they are usually a lot more expensive than their smart variants, I assume because they cannot monetize your viewing habits.
My SO convinced me to get rid of my old laser, USB interface printer. That one always worked but was old. My new WIFI enabled one requires logging into an app to use, and the USB interface maybe works 10% of the time. The app and hardware constantly require power cycling before it works. Many times it never does.
One thing becomes apparent in quality engineering: often, adding more components/interfaces undermines reliability because there are often exponentially more failure modes. It feels like we’re being trained to no longer expect reliability, and the beneficiaries are not the consumers but the companies that create unnecessary interfaces to monetize data.
I think that definitely applies when you have updatable software or software that interacts with something updatable, but less so for the 8 bit embedded MCU stuff typically used to replace hardware.
If you, say, use a microcontroller to soft start a motor instead of making it bigger, or use a capsense pad instead of a switch(Yes they can be obnoxious, but at least they last!), you are unlikely to get into a permanent bricked state because you're not writing to flash at all.
Your failure modes might increase in number as software complexity increases, but for the most part they stay ephemeral.
I'm not sure exactly why experiences are so varied on things like smart TVs and WiFi printers. I have the "Smart" version of almost everything, and it usually works very well, but some people seem to have generally bad experiences.
I think some of it might be because they only test on fairly generic consumer setups with the latest stock Android, no firewall, no VPN, Bluetooth never turned off, no custom DNS, gmail for the email account, etc, and more tech savvy people tend to have a few things that modern tech doesn't like.
It always seems like people who tinker have problems other people don't. I also notice iOS users seem to have trouble with random gadgets and peripherals not being too happy, but a my iPhone using friends aren't a big sample size.
If I was designing a product, I'd definitely be more careful, but as a user at home, I tend to avoid anything heavily customized, so I don't usually see as many of the bugs.
I have a fancy OLED TV, not connected to the internet. A powerful desktop running MS Windows 10. And a fancy sound system with Dolby Atmos.
First MS Windows is the only way to get Netflix and similar to stream the 4k HDR Dolby Atmos stuff outside of smart TV applications. It will silently stream the lower quality without telling you. So if you do not tinker, you must use the smart TV crap to get any chance of watching content at the capability of your hardware.
Then comes the bugs. Randomly the TV and Sound system decide they cannot transfer sound anymore. It's just as if it is on mute.
To be clear the connection is pc -> tv-> sound system. Using 48gps HDMI cables.
The only solution is to unplug both the TV and the sound system. Reboot is not enough. Unplug one is not enough. It has to be both.
Btw if you do not have the right HDMI cable you will also get lower resolution and refresh rate. Without any recourse. No information reported anywhere until you learn that pressing 7 times the green button on the LG TV remote finally gives you the details on the active HDMI connection.
Oh and by default the sound setting of the TV will also decide atmos and convert it to 5.1 PCM before forwarding to the sound system, while you really want a passthrough to the sound system.
Basically nothing really works. So if you do not tinker I am not sure you even get the advertised quality and features. With that said ignorance is bliss.
Are you on a network with some kind of firewalling or tracker blocking? I wonder if they are programmed to stop working if they can't phone home after exiting dumb mode?
Or if there's an activation step they never planned to need recovery from failure of?
What's so sad is that usually bricking is a pure software bug. That overwrites whatever code boots the device far enough so thatnl it can update itself.
If you have the hardware programmer you can most often update the flash directly.
I don't expect everybody to have all the hardware programmers on hand. But I would gladly go to a repair shop to get a quick firmware flash to unbrik some device. Of course this is probably not worth it for manufacturers. It's so infuriating because most device even have a relatively standard programming port already (though you need to open open the device to access it)
> It seems like we've just been lulled into accepting software glitches as the price of having software control everything. Luckily, most of the software is not safety critical.
And the thing is, somehow every vendor seems to skip out on ensuring a working out-of-band upgrade process - despite U-Boot bringing everything you need with it to provide recovery via whatever means you want. Ethernet, USB, a serial debug port... hell, I did A/B partition support and bootloader checks with a watchdog years ago, hacked together in an afternoon but able to first attempt booting from the fresh firmware, if that failed three times it would attempt the B partition containing the old image, and if that failed it would attempt booting from a recovery partition that was intelligent enough to bring up the base board with enough networking to be able to bring up a web server and accept a signed firmware image.
Or, if that's too complex, a fucking button that the user has to hold and it will boot into the recovery image directly.
It's not rocket science, it's not even much effort, all you need is a fucking week at least and a couple of cents for a switch. Pure penny pinching, and I hate companies that produce hardware that can turn to e-waste because of it.
It even makes the development of the product easier for the programmers. Maybe when they don't need to fight the flashing process they can focus on writing better code.
> The trouble is finding manufacturers that actually do that, rather than just using a tiny motor with no computer and plastic gears with no torque sensing. If you design things with old fashioned methods, you need to use old fashioned heavy parts.
Oh yeah. Like Surefeed smart cat feeders. They don't use end reed or contact switches to control the lid motor - they use current sensing on the motor and stop it when the current surges due to reaching the end position. The problem is, they also use cheap-ass plastic gears on an apparently pretty strong motor... my old Surefeed from five years ago is still going strong, but the newer revision (which is, admittedly, easier to clean) failed after not even a year because the motor had shred the gears and could no longer detect if the lid was fully closed or opened, making noise for so long that the cat refused to use it.
Fucking hell, these things cost 150€+ apiece. Two contact switches and wiring would have cost them less than ten cents. Now they have to pay for the cost of handling the warranty claim... but I'd rather like to have a well-designed product in the first place.
(Oh, and it doesn't like rechargeable C cell batteries either, because they apparently saved the dollar that would have given them a boost voltage regulator, so you're stuck buying disposable alkaline batteries)
One of my general rules is not to buy anything that uses disposable batteries, unless battery life is measured in years. Not only does NiMh always seem to be a hassle, it usually seems like rechargable-based devices are more up to date in general.
They probably wouldn't even need a reed switch, just a wad of foam for some buffering plus a more sensitive stop algorithm. Or better yet, don't give the motor enough current to shred gears even at full stall.
Meh, I have grown to dislike devices with integrated batteries. For whatever the fuck reason, I seem to burn through batteries... like eight or so phone batteries, original Samsung at that, an Apple MBP2015, various gadgets, all gone to swelling, and often enough an utter PITA to replace. No, no bad chargers either - Anker and original chargers that came with the devices only.
The old model was impossible to clean. Did the designers never meet a cat?
I've got two sure microchip cat doors. They've been reliable. Same problem, hard to clean. When one of our cats figured out how to break through the door sure sent me a 3d printed plastic part that clipped on over the latch. I think their customer care is pretty good.
He's a big cat. There was a little gap at the bottom where the latch came up into the door. He would get his claws under the gap and then he could wrench it open. The clip on part covers the gap. I guess they have enough people with that problem to have designed a fix but not enough to update the product.
I'm really rooting for getting the onslaught of rubbishware to end but don't see the right to repair laws making a dent there. Those laws are engineered to make it possible to repair complex, expensive things. Dealing with intentionally misengineered things that are trash cheap is a completely different discipline.
My partner and I joke that nothing we buy remains unmodified for more than a day. It’s an exaggeration of the truth: that many many of our purchases require some customization before they’re really useful. We’re both the type to research heavily before a purchase, and we’ll gladly spend more for quality. Yet still the manufactured designs never quite meet our standards.
We survive comfortably by sharing practical skills in the household: sewing, woodworking, metalworking, electronics, CAD (for 3D printing replacement parts), painting, etc. Products straight from the factory are often substandard, but a good set of tools, library books and tutorials can close the gap to usability if you have the time.
My solution is handle this through enforced long warranties. And require muni waste transfer stations to back charge manufacturers for broken appliances under warranty
AKA: Your dishwasher dies and you send it to the dump. They'll look it over document the failure and back charge the manufacturer for the retail price.
> My solution is handle this through enforced long warranties. And require muni waste transfer stations to back charge manufacturers for broken appliances under warranty.
You have given me a new utopian dream. This is a clever solution.
I used to think if you looked hard enough and researched things, maybe paid more sometimes, you could get around it. I still think that is necessary, but not sufficient. It won't save you; you also need a bit of luck.
My biggest bugaboo in this area is with clothes. At some point I started being more careful, but found the published specs won't help because they don't actually tell you everything you need to know, or the company selling them is being defrauded themselves by manufacturers making things out of spec. In many cases too I'm convinced people have lost communal knowledge of what good items look like because theyve never seen them. So, say, they're happy with a sweater that is made out of very poor yarn that obviously won't last because it's warm and has a good zipper. We're at 2/3 now I guess.
However, even places like Consumer Reports will say they don't recommend an entire class of appliance, but then proceed to provide ratings, that are ostensibly good. How are those supposed to be interpreted? "None of these are worth buying but they are 95/100 in quality if you take that into account"? No wonder people are confused.
I've bought clothes from reputable vendors, with fabric from named mills to specs that should be quality, and found instead the cut was off spec and wouldn't fit. Or something about the fabric just didn't last anyway. It seems like it's always something, like I'm constantly being tricked in some new way once I figure out some other problem. It's such an enormous waste of money, time, and resources.
I've run into this issue with jeans. They develop holes around the crotch six months after buying a new pair.
A decade ago I'd buy jeans and they'd last years. Unfortunately my waist line has since increased and none of those survivors now fit me.
I started with Levi 511s and -- when they started failing -- moved to Nudie Jeans (2x price) as they offer free repairs. When I tried to get them repaired though I was told there was a six week waiting time which seemed excessive.
Next I went with a local atelier (3x price) figuring if I spent more that would solve the problem but it happened again.
Have you tried selvedge denim jeans? Try a pair of Uniqlo brand ones for an entry level good value before getting into the more rarefied brands that are even more durable but more expensive.
I got these from uniqlo and like them quite a bit but, beware, they're unwashed and will shrink some when first washed so keep that in mind when buying.
In my experience, this often indicates a poorly-fitting cut. If your belt naturally sits below your hips, you'll probably want jeans specifically designed for that.
In my experience this means they're fitting wrong and there's undue stress in the place that they're failing. For crotch area specifically, look into Duluth Trading's "Ballroom" pants.
Alternately, the moment you buy new pants, add some iron-on patch reinforcement across the area. A two-dollar giant patch can spread the force out quite a bit and probably double the lifetime of the unreinforced fabric.
But really, a tailor should be able to tell you what's wrong with the fit and how to fix it.
As someone who has also had these issues with the crotch of pants wearing out, I would also suggest trying these options.
It's a combination of stretching and friction. Jeans have it especially bad because they have prominent seams right where the thighs touch, causing an extra large amount of friction. A gusseted crotch (which I believe the Ballroom jeans have) both helps with the stretching and moves the seams around.
I've tried various expensive jean brands and really expensive with custom fitting and none of them lasted longer than the cheap local brand I buy from now. Not only can I get 3 pairs or more for the same money, they do repairs for free if it's their fault or really cheaply if it's my fault.
Bonobos brand jeans have served me well. I highly recommend them.
I too notice the decline in jeans quality. The cheap jeans I had as a kid in the 90’s were nearly indestructible. Sometimes I’d skin my knee but my jeans wouldn’t get a hole…
Agree. Even if you make a hobby out of researching purchases and pay top dollar, you still need a great deal of luck.
Our 5000 euro door, made by local craftsmen with high quality materials, had an installation mistake that ruins ergonomics and compromises the airtightness. I even went for a non-sliding door in the expectation that it would be more reliable. Maybe the sliding door would have been entirely non-functional by now.
My ~400 euro yamaha reface mini-synth has internal speakers that buzz. It's a known problem affecting every one ever made AFAIK.
I'd guess only maybe 1/3 of the top dollar expensive stuff I have bought has been free of glaring defects, despite researching before buying.
I ordered a pair of buffalo jeans the other day and they arrived missing a belt loop on the front. Pretty frustrating as I've ordered jeans from this company without issues before this. I generally only have 2 pairs of jeans on hand at any time so my go to brand shipping flawed jeans was a bummer.
Sewing denim, leather, canvas, etc. is generally a pain in the ass. Even old consumer grade machines would have a tough time. You either needed an industrial machine or an old-school treadle machine that you could overpower.
What I want is someone that I can pay to sew stuff for me and have it not suck.
The problem is that someone who does that is continually having to hunt down new clients since their stuff doesn't fall apart. And they can't charge enough because the crappy stuff is soooo cheap that it sets the floor of the pricing.
If we want artisans to make a comeback, we're going to have to help them somehow.
Quality manufacturing in the Good Ole Days is a myth. The Japanese are our lunch in auto in the 70s due to a lack of Quality.
Planned obsolescence is a thing. So is building or making for the short term. There just wasn’t this great era where people made things for the long haul out of pride or something else. People always took the short term view when the market structure or incentives encouraged it.
>when the market structure or incentives encouraged it.
I think one argument is exactly this. There has been a march towards a market that expects a constant supply of cheap shit. When all the margins have been wrung out of globalization, reduction in quality provides the next mechanism of lowering price.
People know where to find $150 denim that lasts, just like in times past. But there has been change in expectations that makes $25 denim the norm.
> People know where to find $150 denim that lasts, just like in times past.
Do they? There have been times I'm willing to pay whatever needs to be paid for quality items, and I just don't know where to find it. You can find the brands that used to make quality items, selling for the same premium prices, but often they're just selling the same unreliable stuff in slightly spiffier dress.
I distinctly recall the existence of television repair shops, which suggests there was a time when market structure / incentives did not encourage planned obsolescence.
> Be aware that survivorship bias may fool you when comparing the quality of new and old items.
Indeed. So I skim the article and wind up agreeing with how some things seem to be built to fall apart or under perform (modern HE washers, I'm looking at you). Then I get called to the shop floor to check a machine and the operator, an older gentleman gets to talking with and starts the same conversation! He is in his mid 60's his you'd think he'd go on lamenting the loss of the sturdy goods from his youth but nope! He too said there was plenty of cheap flimsy crap to be had.
Though one thing I will say has changed: the ability to repair stuff. Computers stuffed with proprietary code have taken control of even the simplest appliances (washers, stoves, refrigerators). Things that were made from multiple pieces of stamped or cast metal are now made from a single piece of plastic that is less sturdy which melts or deforms under heat (some eventually become brittle and crumble). I can see how it makes things cheaper and easier to make but they don't sell the plastic bits separately requiring me to toss everything over a single broken piece. And even if something is made of metal, the stamping or casting is so thin that it might as well be made of plastic (e.g. the tin foil harbor freight stock carts.)
But the retailers and consumers are adjusting to this model: goods are so cheap they are disposable. Don't bother returning it, just toss it. This has lead to people buying new items and tossing them right into the trash because amazon will ship another. Or maybe return the broken item in its place. Or you buy a new item to take a part off and toss it because amazon told you to. Consumers get to keep buying cheap crap and companies keep the money rolling in. This low effort thinking is filling landfills with unused or barely used items at an alarming rate which is a great example of unchecked capitalism. Whats worse is I guarantee you most people could live happily without most of the shit they buy.
Indeed repairability may have been the biggest change. Major appliances centralize virtually all functions including on one or two main circuit boards including the high-voltage relays which in my experience are very prone to failure (they used to be mounted separately in a different location on older appliances). Those circuit boards typically cost ~1/3 the cost of a new appliance assuming you source and swap it yourself.
In conjunction with the decline of repairability in the appliances I think there's a corresponding decline in repair skills among the general population as well.
The 'plague' - the one that feels utterly needless, is deplorably bad quality crap.
The key is that there are 2 completely different things going on and I think it's very bad that we keep conflating the 2:
* Bad quality crap, which took shortcuts which impair repairability for no reason other than to save a cent, make it impossible to find replacement parts because it's a fly by night operation that didn't think about it in the slightest, and which in general is going to break down on you within the year.
* Devices which are hard to repair.
That second category contains a lot of reasons ('save half a cent on a screw' is one of them, as is 'planned obsolescence' / 'make sure our pricey resellers get plenty of work'), but some of those reason are GOOD - such as 'it is a heck of a lot easier to make a robust product if we don't make the battery swappable (e.g., iPhone, which got plenty of flak for this)'.
For the first, the only 'good' reason to do that, is to ensure some product is available even to those who have _very_ little to spend, but, [A] environmentally this isn't a good idea, and [B] how 'available' is it when the only category you can buy is dinky crap that doesn't work well and breaks down within 6 months?
So how do we get rid of _that_?
Right-to-repair laws are barking up an entirely different tree, e.g. fighting the kind of bullshit where a farm tractor manufacturer intentionally makes it impossible to work on computer-guided stuff basically just to be dicks and get more money from their official repair/reseller program. And to a lesser extent, acts where a manufacturer makes a device significantly harder to repair with as only goal to save a cent or two on an errant screw, or cheaper glue or whatever.
People forget things used to cost a lot of money. I remember when our family bought our first color TV set back in the early 70's. You can buy a 65" HDTV set today for the same amount of money - and that's in today's dollars which are significantly less valuable than the dollars in the early 70's!
That TV didn't last 20 years - it was a huge hassle continually testing and replacing tubes.
Meanwhile I bought a 55" HDTV almost 20 years ago that's still running fine.
20 years ago tvs didnt have all manner of "smart" crap stuffed into them. If you buy a TV today there is a good chance much of it will stop working or change for the worse in an overnight update.
I remember asking for a color 13" TV for Christmas back in 1988 I think?
For months I would grab the Sunday paper and pull out all the ad inserts looking for the perfect TV. It had to be cheap; I didn't want to ask for anything crazy. I finally found one that was under $200 and showed it to my parents. It was some unknown brand. It wasn't "Cable Ready", and it still had separate tuner knobs for VHF and UHF. I didn't care, main use would be for Nintendo.
Parents decided to splurge instead and spent almost $400 on a Toshiba unit with a digital channel display and a remote(!). It also understood cable. I could watch Nick at Nite on it when I went to sleep.
$400 for a 13" TV, in 1988. That's $1,000 in today's money. A 75-inch 4K TV.
Another nice feature of that TV was the ability to play the audio from otherwise-restricted... um, "premium" cable channels. Good enough for this 13-year-old. :)
In our new house this summer, I sprung for a 77" LG C2 OLED. Almost embarassed by it looking back, since I could have bought a 75" "standard" 4K TV for about 1/4 the price.
Those screens are so good, I use our LG OLED TV as a computer screen more often than to watch movies. In fact I now feel uneasy working on standard 60hz 4k LCD monitors.
> Swedish jeans company that offer in-store repairs
That's cool. I like high quality clothing too but noticed as I age that it's my body that needs the repairs. It's been a tight-fitting last couple years and my clothes still have so much life left.
I'm willing to bet that the "survivorship bias" of old products narrative is being pushed by modern planned obsolescence companies; back then people were still figuring out how to make a successful company, and many companies believed that if you made a product that lasted forever people will tell their friends and those friends would buy their product and so they would be rewarded for a job well done, now there is not a single company that believes that, the results came in and economically it makes much much more sense to make stuff that breaks after a few years, so no; I don't buy for a second is survivorship bias, at least not in most applications.
For me, it's no replaceable batteries. Anything with an internal battery has a finite span of usefulness. There's no real excuse for making batteries inaccessible, other than forcing people to rebuy.
A great example is Tile, little tracking tags for your keys. I bought one, and in a year the battery died, just in time to get an email from the company offering a 10% discount on a new one.
Products with guarantees are for a replacement with the same short-lasting product, not a guarantee on the one physical item you originally purchased. It's cheaper for manufacturer's to send you another POS than to spend the time and charging a bit more for a product that will last. People have been conditioned to follow the percolator-drip-French press-espresso machine-Keurig cycle! I keep a steel cone sieve and buy beans I have the store grind for me. I too have gone through 3 or 4 coffee grinders. I just got back from Saudi after working there for 6 months, and being sober for years, I found it a land of coffee shops vs. pubs and bars. Most people had a simple, traditional Arabic (now rebranded "Saudi") coffee setup, or a Keurig or Nespresso machine in their home or Bedouin tent. My Mom and Dad had the same percolator for over 18 years. Maybe not a coffee connoisseur's preference, but it always worked if the gas bill was paid!
My $4000 GE refrigerator has broken twice now in the five years we have owned it, both times in the exact same way. The way the fridge works seems simple: the cold freezer is on the bottom, and then a fan blows air up through a shaft to the relatively warmer refrigerator as needed to keep it just above freezing.
Instead, the failure state is that the fan that handles this broke with no warning. I lost a bunch of groceries, but luckily managed to figure out the issue and replace the part myself.
Then a few months ago I heard a clack clack like a fan was about to fail, so this time I replaced the fan after only about two days of no refrigerator.
I don’t understand how such an expensive device can have such a terrible failure mode that ruins basically everything inside my fridge, twice now (the freezer is fine though, it just gets colder).
Before this fridge my wife and I were totally broke and just had a $400 hand me down fridge that we literally never had any problems with. I don’t really know why modern stuff seems so bad.
I know I know, survivorship bias and whatnot, I don’t see all the broken refrigerators in the landfill, but even if that’s the case why not fire half your design engineers just trot out those old 1945 GE Ultracool (or whatever) designs and sell those?
1. Newer fridges have much more complicated air flow patterns requiring more fans and elaborate designs (my fridge runs all its fans for 2 seconds to homogenize air every time I close its door, for example).
2. That fan is a standard fan in GE line-up which happens to fit that bill. It's not a fan made extra robust and reliable because it's going to end in a $4000 fridge.
We got a compressor fridge from the now non-existent GDR 50-ish years ago, and it finally broke this year. Still cools, just non-stop (the temperature sensing switch gave up the ghost). I occasionally think about cybernetically enhancing it with an ESP8266, a relay and a sensor.
I have the original refrigerator the previous owners installed when we purchased the house. It's from the 1990s. It is sometimes loud, but I am afraid to replace it. I am sometimes awed by the new, sleek fridges in the home improvement store but then Admiral Ackbar's voice rings in my head and gives me a +8 to my Will save. So far so good.
Every 2-4 years I replace the dishwasher, dryer, and washing machine. The first replacement dishwasher caught on fire; we are on dishwasher #4. The current washing machine has a leak, the water sensor* which somehow functions after being there for over four years (four!) notifies me reliably.
Ah yeah I paid for Consumer reports and instead of buying an expensive dishwasher got the $500 Bosch that they claimed washed as well as the $2000 Thermador dishwasher. It has been going strong for a few years, no complaints here.
I know Consumer Reports can’t really account for durability although I think they survey their members to see what’s still working, so it’s better than most places.
Every 2-4 years?! That's wild. I live in a rental house that still has all of its appliances from the 90s. They definitely look dated - all white, lots of plastic, no stainless steel or water dispenser or anything - but they all still work perfectly. I haven't had a single problem with any of them since I moved in several years ago, with the exception of the dishwasher coming unplugged and having to be removed so it could be plugged back in. This post is making me grateful for my shabby appliances (and the fact that I'm not on the hook for fixing them if they do break)!
My washing machine is over thirty years old, a no-name Italian one. Electromechanical controller, so no electronics. The only fault is that the program knob fell off, I tied it back on with a piece of string ten years ago. It looks like it should keep going for another decade or two.
I have a 2nd fridge in my garage, an old philco one - still running perfectly, 365 days a year for almost 70 years. Never needed a repair in the 25 years I have owned it.
Throw it away! It is costing more in annual electricity than a new one. Never mind it's old; it's insulation is worthless and its compressor is very inefficient.
But how much did that cost, and how long ago was it? Have you recouped the cost yet? I ask because if it’s a 5 year payback, that’s ignoring the cost of food spoilage from your new fridge that quits after 6 years.
The idea is to have inexpensive refrigerators that use less energy and last many decades. (And when they are superseded by even more efficient models there should be a clear recycle/reuse "exit" for the old appliances. I hear they have laws to that effect over in Germany, something like that. Keeps the old obsolete appliances out of the landfill.)
We have laws like it in Norway too. Old appliances can be taken to the local recycling centre or to any shop that sells appliances of the same general type. All shops that sell electrical goods have to be willing to take back discarded appliances even if they did not sell that specific article or even brand.
No, that's the whole point (as far as I understand it): the manufacturers can't just throw it in a landfill, the law says they have to e.g. disassemble it and reuse or recycle the parts.
baloney - what is the cost to the environment of producing, transporting and then throwing away a refrigerator every 7-10 years? How about the gas used for the service calls?
My old fridge is running perfectly, and costs me less than $10-$15/month.
A typical modestly price refrigerator these days cost $1000 at home depot (and easily more) - even if I could cut electricity by 50%, saving 7.50 a month in electric, a typical new fridge won't even last long enough to justify the savings..
yes, amazingly it really is - built in the early 1950's and still works perfectly. Not pretty enough to keep in the house anymore, but still hums away day after day. They truly don't make them like they used to.
In contrast the $120 freezers in my garage have given improbably years of service without a single issue. New from big box store; reviews warned of possible failure and loss of content. But mine must be the good ones. Somebody has to get the good one I guess.
Chest freezers cannot be compared to household kitchen refrigerator-freezer combinations. There's way, way, way less complexity.
* No need to split & balance the refrigeration between fridge & freezer
* No expectation of a defrost cycle on the freezer
* Generally less stuff: no water or ice dispenser, less lights, less fancy bins & trays & veg drawers etc.
* Chest freezers get opened less, and the top-opening lid lets less cold out when they are opened, and without the defrost cycle the compressor just doesn't have to work as hard.
* Usually greater consumer tolerance for these items being large/heavy machinery so the designers don't even have to worry too hard about keeping things compact.
I think there's a real opportunity for a company to release a (affordable) fridge that has zero gadgets, and markets the quality of the cooling system. How can a 40 year old fridge that lives in the garage be more reliable than a new Samsung (or GE in this case)? Obviously, it's cheap components. But, considering how much of a pain in the ass moving a refrigerator is, "won't break" is highly marketable here. I'd certainly buy one.
> Many blamed these problems on the government. They believed it had crippled certain products (major home appliances, especially)
This is a claim that was already present in Death of a Salesman. Here's the quote:
> I am always in a race with the junkyard! I just finished paying for the car and it's on its last legs. The refrigerator consumes belts like a goddam maniac. They time those things. They time them so when you finally paid for them, they're used up.
The play came out in... 1949.
It's not been my experience that everything is crap nowadays. But of course one needs to shop wisely.
The difficulty is that the abundance of cheap crap often makes finding the good stuff like finding a needle in a haystack. Yes, price is the first indicator, but there are plenty of chancers who are quite happy to sell the cheap crap at the premium price point.
Yes that is exactly the problem. Especially with cheap as garbage direct sales from China and internet shopping being the norm, your chances of finding legitimate high quality sellers on amazon or else are practically zero. Even worse, nowadays on amazon you find the exact same product in all the price ranges sold by "different" sellers.
Trademarks identify the origin of goods that a business wishes a consumer to believe. We need to expand that law to also indicate _actual_ origin.
For example, this DVD player came from this manufacturer and then got badged as Alpha Inc, but this other DVD had the same technical origin (despite the different case) and got badged as Beta Inc ... consumers should get that information. Capitalism relies on such things so that the best products can be chosen.
Instead, we get things like companies selling the same product code from different factories with wildly different quality. Or, far more egregious companies sending a product to reviewers and early adopters, then making a worse product and passing it off to consumers as the same.
There's much more to do (I should be able to see exactly what a product had done to acquire it's 'country of origin' - another area companies deceive consumers), but this would be a start.
I am surprised that nobody pointed out the obvious : avoid items with the minimum legal manufacturer warranty.
Though this too can become hard in categories dominated by cartels : warranties for (magnetic) hard drives have been going down (not to mention the recent frauds by Western Digital, how they have fallen, sigh...), or, for (non-related) reasons, boycotting Intel and Ryzen CPUs (or Android an iOS smartphones) doesn't leave you many options, though RISC-V (and "real" Linux) have been making great strides in the recent years.
> I am surprised that nobody pointed out the obvious : avoid items with the minimum legal manufacturer warranty.
I have to admit that particular strategy hadn't occurred to me - but it's a good idea. Of course, it has to be an actual part-of-the-standard-deal warranty, not the hard-sell extended warranty that's really just an add-on insurance policy...
(Wondering where I find a box of staples warranted to pierce more than five sheets...)
Carefully buy b2b and you can still get to decades of service life for many types of equipment. It is also much more expensive than the most expensive "prosumer" grade offerings you see. But for some of this type of equipment, that's because they staff competent technicians supporting 24x7x365 service calls coming in from shops hiring certified technicians rolling repair trucks any time of the day or night for the right fee.
For what it's worth, some things in my lifetime have seemed to get much better, and cars and refrigerators happen to be in that class.
Many other things seem to have gotten worse though, like clothes and linens. I suspect there's some pattern to those things that have improved and those that have declined, and everything in between, but I couldn't explain it.
watching many youtube mechanic channels, i get the sense that they seem to think that 2000 era cars were better than today's car. The common missive is that they now have really cheap parts, and the cars are over controlled by computer systems making them brittle and expensive to repair.
>cars are over controlled by computer systems making them brittle and expensive to repair
I've heard this many times while at auto body shops. It seems that it's not the electronic parts cost that is expensive but you have to dissemble much of the car to replace the parts.
and impossible to replace with the same part from a scrapped car due to the module being paired to the specific car and the reuirement for the dealer to install it. All car parts should become open source 10 years after the last one was produced to prevent them just getting scrapped.
2000 era cars were the sweet spot of good enough power and efficiency vs complexity.
Current cars get more power and fuel efficiency, but its at the cost of complexity like high pressure direct injection, stop/start, variable length intakes, cam phasers, etc.
Its nothing to do with computer control making them brittle, more that there's just so many extra components to fail that just didn't exist on older cars and the techs need training on how they operate and troubleshoot.
Regulations. Also probably how cars and refrigerators need energy to work ?
The downside is that cars especially have not gotten cheaper. (This is starting to change, sadly by necessity rather than choice, ~ton personal vehicles will soon be the thing of the past even in rich countries.)
I have some anecdotal evidence to the contrary on refrigerators. I want a fridge to do one thing. Keep food cold. No ice maker, no water, no godforsaken app, or camera on the inside. Make a robust, reliable cooling system that's built to last. That's the only thing I want to pay for.
One perhaps continued to this day, if maybe in a different way (we'll know in a few decades) : toxic fluorescents and most diode bulbs not having separated transformers (they are DC !)
I’ve been singularly unimpressed with the rate my LED bulbs are failing.
Definitely not even close to 10-15 years I was promised.
And this is why warranties are pointless. How am I supposed to get one of these bulbs from a four-pack replaced by the manufacturer two years after I bought it?
Yep, bulbs are now all complete crap - they used to last decades.
Was having my house painted a few years back, I have a triple set of spots near the very top of the roof (so about 30 feet in the air) - painter helpfully suggests - do you want me to replace those bulbs up there while I have my ladder up there? I agreed.
Big mistake, the bulbs their were still working 17 years after I moved in - now I have to replace them about every 18 months with the cheap crap the government only allows to be sold.
Not sure how replacing bulbs and throwing them in the landfill every 1-2 years is doing anything good for the environment.
The LEDs themselves are very robust, solid-state semiconductors that will function for a very long time, but they need additional electronics to function in a 110/220V socket, and those electronics seem to be crummier than the old incandescent filaments.
Yep - I've done a post mortem on a few LED bulbs that failed and each time the LEDs were fine but the driver failed.
This is anecdotal, but I had a bunch of bulbs of the same brand that started to fail, on the remaining bulbs I drilled a few air vent holes into them as they are used indoors only, and since then haven't had another failure.
I'm suspecting most LED bulbs fail from thermal stress on the driver circuitry.
Might be worth mentioning the name of the conspiracy: the Phoebus Cartel.
It sounds cartoonishly evil, but "cartel" is just an economic term for a market where a small number of participants collude to control supply and pricing. Like OPEC.
IMHO, we should be more aggressive about converting industries which gravitate towards cartels into regulated natural monopolies, like power/water supplies. Some kinds of markets really are more efficient with fewer participants, and we should find ways to encourage that efficiency without letting the lucky winners indefinitely dictate the terms of the market.
In contemporary America, cartels are euphemized as "trade associations" and they dominate Washington DC (and our national consciousness) with their collective lobbying and PR resources.
It's a matter of shopping wisely and, at least sometimes, of spending more money up front. People always reach for the smelling salts when I tell them how much my (hand) coffee grinder cost, but that thing is almost certain to outlast me.
I've got my selling salts, please tell me which coffee grinder you own?
And by the way, since the topic of "where do I find the good stuff" keeps coming up, why is there no site that is your one-stop recommendation destination for finding quality appliances, tools? We all know we can no longer trust Amazon reviews.
Consumer Reports has been around for ages but I don't feel they've kept in lockstep with the changing times. Maybe the Cool Tools site? But it seems a little too casual and not as rigorous as CR, too eager to direct you to Amazon as well. I don't know really. Just spitballing.
1. The prosumers can get detached from the needs of ordinary consumers (see: audiophiles)
2. Some products just don't generate enthusiasts. I recently had to buy a washing machine. All the reviews are sponsored and slightly suspicious crap because nobody cares enough to be the Tom Laundry Tips of the world
I feel like there’s a great opportunity for a founder to start a new eCommerce site with supply chain verification to weed out fakes, and who would do their own testing a la Consumer Reports in addition to customer reviews.
I have a knife. It is a simple piece of metal that peels carrots, apples, and many other things with great reliability. It also performs other functions that a "carrot peeler" could not. It has done so for 20 years and can be expected to remain functional for several more decades.
"Coffee grinder"? how many iterations of the idea of the blender does one kitchen need? (I count a half dozen in my kitchen without trying. 4 more if you add in the lab gear)
I mean I use a peeler because my kids like to help cook and I don’t want to give a four year old a sharp kitchen knife.
I don’t drink coffee but a nicely built hand powered coffee grinder is great at home or even on a camping trip for people who are really into coffee.
But you’re probably right, I bet my $400 Vitamix could grind coffee. Actually, I just googled it, and Vitamix helpfully sells a coffee grinder attachment! Haha, the gadgets never end.
You probably have a typical coffee brewer. Those aren’t too picky about their grind, but they take up a lot of space and only do one thing. Most don’t last long.
You could instead get a V60 for about $10 and a nice hand grinder, neither of which take much space. Combine those with an electric tea kettle, and you’ve got nicer coffee in a smaller footprint. The tea kettle still takes up space, but it’s a tea kettle. The grinder is the size of a pepper mill, and the V60 is an indestructible little plastic cone. Tired of cranking the grinder by hand? Hook it up to a drill.
You could use a blender-style grinder with a V60, but you’re going to run into trouble getting it to work right.
I had a knife. It wasn't a simple piece of metal - it had a nicely sculpted handle with that horrible tactile silicone coating which gets gross and sticky over time and is really hard to clean (mild abrasive such as bicarbonate of soda will either clean it or remove it - and frankly I'm good with either outcome!) A few months back this knife fell to pieces when the handle split, causing the blade to do an interesting backflip maneouvre that I'd have preferred to spectate from much further away.
While I'm ranting about kitchenwares, I'm getting tired of saucepans with a life expectancy of less than two years - they're another item I'd expect to last decades. But again the existence of the cheap crap makes it harder to find the better stuff, and certainly hard to have any confidence that what you're looking actually is any better, and not just the same crap with a higher price tag.
well, using a peeler (not just for carrots) is a way faster way to peel things and it's tiny. Mine has lasted years and peeling potatos is just so so fast. I understand what you mean, but in this case I think it is a pretty useful tool
A friend owns a bagless early 1960s Electrolux canister vacuum cleaner. It is still going strong. Really nice design, cast aluminum parts and sucking like a champ. Dyson? Don't make me laugh....
I have Philips vacuum cleaner, I guess it's 30 years old. Some ducttape on the hose but still going strong. I bought a cordless one 2 years ago (also Philips, 8000 series), really love it, but it's starting to fail. I go back to the shop and the thing just works like normal, come back home... brush and leds fails periodically. So annoying.
I also own a lot of supossed 25.000 hours-of-life Leds, that failed after 1-2 years of incidental use. Also annoyes the sh** out of me.
> I also own a lot of supossed 25.000 hours-of-life Leds, that failed after 1-2 years of incidental use. Also annoyes the sh* out of me.
Of all the compact florescent and LED bulbs I have bought, I has died because of a faulty component prematurely, and one has a whining driver. Other than that I failed to reach end of life of any of them. So, I never bought the second round because of that.
Oh, I killed a couple of CFLs because of heat, possibly.
Speaking of vacuums, I bought a $70 upright Bissell 10+ years ago now. It is one of my examples of "win some, lose some" in products, and how high prices don't mean quality or durability.
I've replaced the belt once. With the amount of hair I pulled out of the beater bar at the same time, I'm not sure the belt was the cause. Works as well as the day we brought it home.
LED's will last 25,000 hours. The drivers (the components that convert AC to the required DC, at a constant/steady rate) however, apparently die long before the actual LED does. I've replaced many so far. It's not hard if you can use a soldering iron (and the light in question supports it). If your LEDs are blinking, that's a sure-fire sign that the driver is bad (not the LED).
And, from my experience, it's probably the battery that's failing in your cordless vac.
It keeps the vacuum, it's really the brush head with the rotating brush and leds that fails periodically. Feel like as I move some conctact are broken and restored.
We had a few cordless vacs - each one has died due to the battery. No replacements available :/ Even the very expensive Dyson.
So far, my Dewalt cordless vac (which has a replaceable battery, by design, since it's a Dewalt) works OK. It's a mini shop-vac, but we pull it out for various household uses as needed.
Yeah, if this one really fails I'm going for this Makita [0] or similar, I have a bunch of those batteries + double fast charger already and the price seems right, although perhaps it will function less well, it seems to be a lot simpler of a device (plus, I love anything with those batteries, it's an addiction ;)).
I had this issue in my house that was built six years ago. Lights going out all over the place that are supposed to have really long lives. When I finally replaced a few of them, it didn't seem to be the lights. The lazy ass subcontractors hired by the worthless builder installed a bunch of the wiring incorrectly. Every light I have replaced so far wasn't even grounded. Ground wire just flapping in the wind.
When I was growing up, my mom got a Kirby vacuum. It was built like a tank, and seemed to hold up like one, too. When I was at college a few years later, I found a Kirby on a curb for the trash (landlord cleaned out an apartment). I took it, spent $100 on belts, bags, and attachments, and it's been with me for 15 years. When the pandemic hit, I finally bought more bags, and while I was at it, replaced the cord and light bulb. It very well might outlast me.
I have empathize with the author's plight, but I don't have much sympathy for him buying multiple coffee grinders and throwing them all out because he bought cheap ones.
> I can’t say the same about my coffee grinders. I use the plural because I’ve owned a lot of them, all bought in their original packaging and dead within a year. They’re good ones, supposedly, with burrs not blades, but they stop performing before long, ending their long journeys from overseas factories in unmarked graves in my local Montana landfill.
A Baratza encore will last literally forever, and if it doesn't, you can replace everything in it.
I have the exact same sentiment when it comes to the Baratza line of products. I have the Preciso, which is similar to the Encore. I have rebuilt parts of it twice and you could build a unit from parts if so desired. In fact, they should consider offering DIY editions ala Frame.work for enthusiasts.
The existence of a Cadillac product doesn't refute the proliferation of absolute crap. Somebody sells a coffee grinder, it should grind coffee for years. No exceptions.
I echo the sentiment of this article. Im nearly 40 and for most of my adult life I’ve found that most things are frustrating to use, have unnecessary tech bolted on (and that’s coming from a technologist), and in many ways barely work.
My fancy Bosch dishwasher can’t clean a dish if there’s a tiny bit of food on it. My GE dryer takes two cycles and at least 1.5 hrs to dry some cotton clothes. Don’t get me started on Bluetooth headphones. My coded garage opener takes 3 or 4 attempts each time because I guess the button push don’t register? When I want to watch TV sometimes I need to sit through a system upgrade which means I have to wait to watch. My town voted that cell phone towers are ugly, so there’s basically no cell service anywhere and most calls have between 1 and 5 drops (I live on Long Island, not in rural America). Every year there’s at least $1-3k of maintenance on my 4 year old “luxury” car. My smart lock works well as long as my fingers are perfectly dry and perfectly aligned. I replace my towels once every year or two because they completely fall apart. My “learning thermostat” doesn’t seem to learn anything even though I’ve been setting the temp at the same every night. I replace my jeans at a similar rate to the towels because they get holes in knees and pockets. Holes develop at the same rate in a $25 pair and a $125 pair. Self checkout at every store is a horrendous experience and I’ve never successfully checked out without the support person scanning their badge to fix some absurd error, like the weight of the item placed on the bagging area scale not being the weight the machine expects it to be.
Modern dishwashers should be able to clean basically anything, most often when they don’t perform well, something got stuck in the water dispensers and there is just not enough water reaching the dishes (this will rarely create an error code). At least that’s my experience and I abuse those machines quite a bit in terms of what I put in there.
There was a technology connection video about that - dishwashers are still good, the tabs are the problem. Use powder and make sure some is available in the first cycle (by putting it outside the container if necessary) and performance will come back.
Who was the guy that said "humanity signed its death certificate once MBAs found out that they can literally sell trash as long as it is cheap enough to make it inconvenient to return"?
Perhaps a little, people who knew had higher end options for plenty of things. Now with a inflationary recession ongoing I fear we are back to initial purchase price.
Cheap imitations of an artifact from a bygone era. Where playing with it too much or too hard will it break.
They're more of a display item than an actual appliance. Only meant for looking at and instilling the idea of a useful tool. But don't dare use it!
The reason is producers don't care if it works or not. The product is successful so long as they can trick enough people into buying it.
The mental, emotional, and financial exhaustion borders on psychological warfare from foreign advisories.
America needs to reboot it's manufacturing base with a focus on absolute best quality hands down, no excuses, survive nuclear winter American made products.
Let's break this wasteful Earth destroying, GHG creating cycle of madness!
My house came with a large high quality washing machine from the 80s I’m pretty sure, or maybe even earlier. It crapped out at some point last year, and we were about to buy a brand new appliance, but I did some research, got out the multimeter, and was able to diagnose a blown fuse caused by a faulty part (replacing the fuse just blew it out immediately). I ordered the part online and installed it and now the washer has been fine since then. I don’t think this would have been easier with a newer part.
My washer and dryer have the schematics for them inside the button console. I have only had to repair a faulty closed door sensor but it was very simple.
I did this with my washer for years and kept it running until it was 20 years old. One day it broke again and I knew from experience the part that broke would take hours to fix. At the same time Lowes was having a sale where the fancy new units were on sale and included 5 years of 100% paid for labor and parts maintenance.
The new washer / dryer wash more clothes at once using less detergent and far less electricity. They're also quieter. Like, a LOT quieter. And they text us when they finish which I thought was silly at first but in practice it means we get more loads done per day.
It's been 3 years and we've had to use the Lowes warranty once for a leak. Watching the repairman it seemed like a huge hassle to work on these new machines so I don't see these being fun to own once the 5 year maintenance plan expires.
We donated the old washer / dryer to a pet rescue group so hopefully they're still going.
Besides echoing the survivorship bias warning in other comments, I'd like to point out that just a bit of skill and will can turn the fate of a lot of this 'crap' around.
Dull peeler? Sharpen it. Now you have a sharp peeler that can probably last 10 years with occasional attention.
Dead grinders? I'm sure at least one of them could've been fixed and extended its life significantly.
Sure, things are getting less and less repairable, but most still can be fixed of some common faults. It just takes a pinch of skill and a bunch of will.
We got a hand (immersion) blender. Plastic gear to the metal shaft. Stripped out. Non-repairable. Can’t find one without a plastic gear. Meanwhile, mother-in-law’s is metal and who knows how many years old, still working fine.
Under the Christmas tree this year: another Cuisinart electric kettle. Same model as always, this year recommended by wirecutter. They last two to three years and then break in various ways. This is our third one :(
My dad gave me the advice "buy cheap now and be guaranteed to buy it again at least once if not more, or wait, save up, and buy the more expensive thing only once" as I was becoming an adult. I've tried to follow that but sadly I don't think the advice really holds anymore.
My Tefal kettle is 10 yr old now and I have really hard water. Looks like Tefal still maintains some quality, I've bought a sandwich maker 3yr ago and it still works perfectly, their pans are still top-notch.
Your experience gets markedly better with a healthy fear of gadgets. Basic vehicles, appliances and tools are seemingly indestructible. Their fancy counterparts find the most creative ways to fall apart.
The thing in this space that has always bothered me was the simple can opener. (For those not in the US, yes, in the US we still need can openers.) The new ones which can be purchased in the grocery store break within a month or two. I don't even want to think about modern electric openers. I found a used vintage can opener from the 1970s on eBay six years ago and use it practically every day; as it was used it cost less than the shiny new ones in the store. Maybe there are modern high quality non-commercial can openers but they aren't at the grocery store or Pampered Chef or any of the other kitchen appliance stores at the local mall.
Spot on. Even at the 'nicer' grocery stores in the US, can openers are made of the cheapest materials I've ever seen. At the moment you pick it up, you just know its going to break before a year from now.
By now, you'd think we'd have reached a minimum viable quantity of products that have been ubiquitous for so long.
You get screwed either way. Buy something on amazon and it's quite likely to be just as bad, counterfeit, etc. - how many times have people complained about that?
It happens, but it's not common. Amazon lets you get stuff a generation ahead of what's in stores, which often uses better tech and fixes issues in the last generation.
When "Cheap crap" first became common 20 years ago stuff got a bit worse, but it seems to be improving.
I don't think the comment about generation ahead is relevant or true.
As a final thought, I'd say at least in a store, if you have the ability to determine if something is junk by looking and touching it, you can practice that.
I have an Ikea can opener too, I think it's going on a decade of quality service. It's mostly light blue plastic, I thought it would fall apart, but it still works great. One of those that cuts through the side of the can instead of the lid itself.
My cheap ugly turquoise manual can opener from Target has been a pleasure to use for years. I didn’t even realize good can openers were hard to find. Sorry for your bad luck :(
Who knows. The responses people in the US get from Europeans on HN for things are just the absolute oddest. “Gasp! You still write checks?” Or “Gasp! You use credit cards? Well I never!” I’m sure we do the same thing to them for other stuff, but I totally understand the desire to head off any of the faux outrage that often pops up here for such mundane things.
I haven't tried a new one, but good to hear you've had good luck. We have one that belonged to my wife's grandmother. We've been using it about 12 years. It started to perform poorly about 8 years ago, and was replaced with something new at the time. When the new one turned out to be unable to actually open a can, I ended up oiling and sharpening the swing away, and it performed like new. It started deteriorating again recently, so I saved myself the frustration and just did the maintenance again. Hopefully I'll be good for another 8 years or so.
Can anyone recommend a large room humidifier that might actually work reliably (assuming proper care and maintenance, no weirdly hard water) for multiple winter seasons? The last FOUR I bought from diff brands failed either DoA or within a couple weeks. Willing to pay for actual basic quality.
In my opinion there is only one humidifier that is worth the money, the honeywell warm mist humidifier [1]. It works great for us, just put it in a little tray in case it leaks. It also got one of the best written customer reviews on amazon I ever saw [2]. TL;DR, they use it on McMurdo station in Antarctica and love it.
Don't buy a ultrasonic humidifiers, they actually reduce the air quality considerably [3], you need to get an evaporative humidifier and frankly there aren't that many.
I think the degradation in quality could be a result of advancements in marketing. With such powerful tools, the determining factor for winning products is now marketing not quality. The marketing arms race incentivizes companies to invest more in convincing customers their product is better and invest less in improving their product.
I just don't see it. Were I to go shopping at wal-mart, and if I didn't understand anything about failure modes, I might, but I find it very easy to find things that last.
Partly because out lifestyle now is lighter on things, and we need fewer of them. I don't need a juicer because... I don't juice.
Another factor might be that we still have an obsession with "Power". Look at how impact drivers are reviewed, based on how fast they screw some insane fastener most people won't ever need.
If consumers prefer and recommended more powerful stuff rather than stuff that's better at protecting itself, stuff is gonna break.
My vacuum does shut off if you run over the wrong thing. That's not a case of clogging and choking, that's a sensor detecting that I've given it something it's not meant for, protecting itself. I would take that any day over something that would happily self destruct on something, or even chew up whatever it hit.
My Rite in the Rain pen never has issues and very well could last my whole life with no refills. There are bad pens out there, but I have no memory of any time when cheap ballpoints actually worked correctly.
I have not had any experience with a new washer or dryer for very long.
However, new appliances are lighter, cheaper, and more efficient. If the scrap is recycled, they may well be just as good as old ones in terms of cost and environmental concerns, even if they break faster.
There are certain categories of things that may be worse overall, but in general, there's close to nothing I'd prefer the old version of.
However, there are probably lots of things where the cheap version now is worse than the old version. But that old version probably cost $40 in today's money and the cheap version cost $20.
A broken fridge ruins lots of food, worth lots of money.
A broken washing machine or dishwasher can flood your house, costing 10s of thousands of dollars.
A broken dryer can burn your house down.
And even if some of those aren’t common failure modes (fridge is common), it is incredibly inconvenient and expensive to be without a major appliance for (insert supply chain guesstimate number of) weeks every year or so.
I've only personally seen one failure like that, a bad washer flooding a friend's house.
I would imagine a heat pump dryer would be very unlikely to burn anything down.
It is a really big inconvenience when they go offline, but there are still lots of brands that seem to work fine for 10 to 20 years.
I'm surprised ultra high reliability isn't more of a consumer selling point. Refrigerators in particular could do it with a redundant compressor and valves, they could share the evaporator and condensing coils. It's not like fridge compressors cost that much to make. They could even use 2 small ones and run them all the time, so if 1 fails you get half power but it still works.
Washers and dryers could do redundancy by selling pairs of identical combo units instead of 1 washer and 1 dryer, but I suppose people don't need to replace both at once very often.
Appliances probably don't need redundancy, but rather a guaranteed service person you could call that will fix the thing for a reasonable price instead of just telling you its the "control board" to try and sell you a new one. Perhaps some engineering to support easier diagnostics, and definitely to reduce the number of replacement part SKUs.
I recently replaced a knockoff Leatherman (which of course broke without being old) with a real one. It worked so well, I bought two. https://www.leatherman.com/ I first discovered these when I worked in the USAF in the 90's. They're not cheap, but one should support quality products with your hard earned cash.
I also needed to replace my belt recently. Discovered https://ansonbelt.com/. I'm not sure where they're manufactured, but they're quality belts with a unique self-measuring system and a latching mechanism.
Would suspcription based applicances be better? Softwar supscription definitely did lead to a quality decline in software, as there is always a channel to fix even the sloppiest of implementations.
Funnily enough, Juicero is a great example of a rugged product. It had ridiculously over-engineered mechanicals and a very beefy motor. The whole concept was silly and the business model was ridiculous, but it was built to last!
I mean, the whole idea of an internet-connected device to squeeze a juice pouch is silly, and I’m sure the additional DRM makes them worthless, but the mechanical engineering was apparently well-done: https://blog.bolt.io/juicero/
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 322 ms ] threadAnd I’ll go further. Is there a single brand you can recommend that will last, regardless of where I’m supposed to purchase it?
I've been quite impressed with the few of their commercial items I have. The important parts are metal, and clearly a lot of though went into design (things like the blender jar being designed so there's nowhere for water to pool after you wash and set it upside down). The only unimpressive thing is the price.
We are "lucky" to have a Target, Walmart, Meijer, Nieman Marcus, Khols and Macy's nearby. (Sears and Hudsons have gone). But, from my experience, on many product lines, they sell the same "crap".
That said, I suspect that in another 70 years, Walter's juicer will still work, but you won't find any working examples of juicers from 2022.
It should be obvious to most people at this point that any appliance with the word "smart" in its marketing really means "smarter than you, sucker".
I have no evidence to back my statements up, and I'm using extremely vague language, but this is at least my perception of this idea that "they don't make 'em like they used to."
Using other people's money to act like you can afford the things that other people who have much more money than you can actually afford.
The easier and more common this has gotten, the crummier deal everyone ends up getting for their money.
Back when average consumers still had to save money for years before making big-ticket purchases, the shrewdest of manufacturers achieved the greatest success with product lifetimes having quite good multiples of those saving years.
When that became no longer as much of an issue, then never mind.
Expanded credit opened up opportunities for spendthrifts to dominate, who love to consume so much that they replace purchases that are still perfectly good after a few years anyway.
Remember all those 70-year-old juicers where there's far more in the landfills than remaining in the kitchen? Most of those were landfilled while they were still working.
That being said, I definitely believe that planned obsolesence and unintentional bad quality is a plague on modern consumer items. I am lucky enough to have the time, knowledge, persistence and money to research and buy long lasting goods. For example, I have bought kitchen knives made out of a single piece of metal, which are therefore less prone to breaking than the run-off-the-mill ones. My jeans are from a Swedish jeans company that offer in-store repairs as long as it's practical. This is saving me money and effort in the long run. However, I do not believe in such individual solutions to what is essentially a systemic problem; people should expect good consumer items without researching beforehand like it was their hobby.
I'm glad that the EU is working hard on right-to-repair laws.
Sintered metal gears, last only a little longer than plastic and then fail catastrophically destroying half of the device so that you can't repair it. But at least they are much cheaper than proper machined gears.
After disassembly, it turned out to be perhaps the only plastic gear in the thing. It occurred to me that it was perhaps designed to fail rather than the mixer continuing to break the bones of the person who got their hand caught in the paddle.
So, I throw the engineer a bone for that one. I was bummed though to have to order a replacement gear from some obscure place in Florida for like $75 or whatever.
I bought an official replacement from KitchenAid for $12 including shipping.
This is a good call out of potential other reasons an engineer team might make something cheaper & easier to break. It would be awesome to read a summary of the trade-offs the teams discuss in their process.
($YOU may be. I'm not.)
Except that nowadays I tend to just guess the latter and I'm statistically correct anyhow.
Superman has a quote about living in a world of cardboard, where he must control his every move lest he rip through everything. I'm beginning to feel that way myself with these consumer products. If you take them even 5% out of spec expect them to catastrophically fail. They'll catastrophically fail even if you use them entirely within spec. I'd happily pay a bit extra for something that wouldn't but there's no way for the manufacturer to successfully convey to me that this is such a thing even if they wanted to. The metaphorical water is so metaphorically muddied that it's just dry dust now anyhow, with fake 5 star reviews and decades of refinement on marketing messages about how this vegetable peeler peels vegetables so well that it will even enhance your marriage prospects.
Back then, the good stuff might have been good because the motor was big.
The modern good stuff probably has a brushless motor that can prevent stalls. It doesn't matter if it's big or small, the computer won't let it overheat, so they can make it smaller to save money that they can spend on whatever part is the actual failure mode.
The trouble is finding manufacturers that actually do that, rather than just using a tiny motor with no computer and plastic gears with no torque sensing. If you design things with old fashioned methods, you need to use old fashioned heavy parts.
Nylon gears in contact with ozone, and switches and connectors of all kinds seem to be the problem on everything I've seen. Which is why I always say I would gladly use 10k lines of code to save one moving part or one switch.
- Mechanical: "Here's the physical specs, no need to account for A, B, or C, as it's been handled in software"
- Electrical: "Here are the physical constraints and electrical spec. No need to account for X, Y, or Z, as it's being handled in software."
- Firmware: "You need to handle A, B, C, X, Y, and Z, but if you run out of time or don't have the budget to make up a test rig for validating all those cases are handled correctly, no worries we'll just ship it anyway."
You'll see stuff like a lack of battery level monitoring, or relays without current sensing.
I'm not sure why we don't do things the other way, have firmware people present at every step. Some things can't be fixed later.
If mechanical puts a weak link gear designed to fail before the motor, firmware might not have enough margin to not wear it out with auto-stop.
This creates a whole new reliability problem. Software reliability is notorious for its interface failures and there can be many more of those modes (where hardware typically has a few wear-out style failures). I think about my relatively high-end TV that seems to always struggle with software updates without any glitches. It seems like we've just been lulled into accepting software glitches as the price of having software control everything. Luckily, most of the software is not safety critical.
I think this is one of the dangers of relying on software to close reliability gaps. Yes, you can change it quickly and cheaply and it's versatile, but it's often very hard to identify all the failure modes.
For non safety critical stuff it's much better to crash every week than to wear out in 5 years.
Maybe I'm becoming a curmudgeon or maybe it's my bias as a former reliability engineer, but the fact that we've normalized this drives me crazy. Imagine your frustration if your car needed to be "power cycled" on a regular basis just to keep it moving forward, yet we've become accustomed to that in our day-to-day interactions with electronics.
It's the bane of my existence that I have to continuously power cycle a device to do something seemingly simply like change a tv streaming service or scan a document. Interface failures are rampant.
you'd be surprised how often watchdogs get their GIGO conditions triggered and things perform a cleanup reboot while you drive
But I've seen so many things fail due to bad switches, connectors, and other simple parts, to me it's a great tradeoff to occasionally reboot something as opposed to having it totally fail at some random time within a few years.
I wouldn't trust my life to it, but I'll trust my watch party to it.
Plus, a consumer now only needs to power cycle or factory reboot, so untrained people can keep stuff going.
I'd much rather they need reboots than need skilled work like they used to, that just wouldn't be practical in a digital first world.
Oddly enough having failures be so normalized makes them less problematic, because the victim doesn't get many complaints. People who have to wait just assume that's how it is, nobody will tell you you shouldn't have used a computer for that
Before all these complex systems we used pen and paper and things subject to human error, and we had to deal with that quite a bit.
Computers suck compared to what they could be but they are amazing compared to a lot of older stuff.
My SO convinced me to get rid of my old laser, USB interface printer. That one always worked but was old. My new WIFI enabled one requires logging into an app to use, and the USB interface maybe works 10% of the time. The app and hardware constantly require power cycling before it works. Many times it never does.
One thing becomes apparent in quality engineering: often, adding more components/interfaces undermines reliability because there are often exponentially more failure modes. It feels like we’re being trained to no longer expect reliability, and the beneficiaries are not the consumers but the companies that create unnecessary interfaces to monetize data.
If you, say, use a microcontroller to soft start a motor instead of making it bigger, or use a capsense pad instead of a switch(Yes they can be obnoxious, but at least they last!), you are unlikely to get into a permanent bricked state because you're not writing to flash at all.
Your failure modes might increase in number as software complexity increases, but for the most part they stay ephemeral.
I'm not sure exactly why experiences are so varied on things like smart TVs and WiFi printers. I have the "Smart" version of almost everything, and it usually works very well, but some people seem to have generally bad experiences.
I think some of it might be because they only test on fairly generic consumer setups with the latest stock Android, no firewall, no VPN, Bluetooth never turned off, no custom DNS, gmail for the email account, etc, and more tech savvy people tend to have a few things that modern tech doesn't like.
It always seems like people who tinker have problems other people don't. I also notice iOS users seem to have trouble with random gadgets and peripherals not being too happy, but a my iPhone using friends aren't a big sample size.
If I was designing a product, I'd definitely be more careful, but as a user at home, I tend to avoid anything heavily customized, so I don't usually see as many of the bugs.
First MS Windows is the only way to get Netflix and similar to stream the 4k HDR Dolby Atmos stuff outside of smart TV applications. It will silently stream the lower quality without telling you. So if you do not tinker, you must use the smart TV crap to get any chance of watching content at the capability of your hardware.
Then comes the bugs. Randomly the TV and Sound system decide they cannot transfer sound anymore. It's just as if it is on mute.
To be clear the connection is pc -> tv-> sound system. Using 48gps HDMI cables.
The only solution is to unplug both the TV and the sound system. Reboot is not enough. Unplug one is not enough. It has to be both.
Btw if you do not have the right HDMI cable you will also get lower resolution and refresh rate. Without any recourse. No information reported anywhere until you learn that pressing 7 times the green button on the LG TV remote finally gives you the details on the active HDMI connection.
Oh and by default the sound setting of the TV will also decide atmos and convert it to 5.1 PCM before forwarding to the sound system, while you really want a passthrough to the sound system.
Basically nothing really works. So if you do not tinker I am not sure you even get the advertised quality and features. With that said ignorance is bliss.
These are relatively common phrases now that would have baffled anyone 30 years ago.
They sent me a replacement that works great and is entirely ignorant of the outside world (and will stay that way.)
Or if there's an activation step they never planned to need recovery from failure of?
If you have the hardware programmer you can most often update the flash directly.
I don't expect everybody to have all the hardware programmers on hand. But I would gladly go to a repair shop to get a quick firmware flash to unbrik some device. Of course this is probably not worth it for manufacturers. It's so infuriating because most device even have a relatively standard programming port already (though you need to open open the device to access it)
If products would all just use a Wemos D1 or something on their board, none of this would be an issue.
But sadly software defined products need(or think they need) proprietary firmware and Arduino isn't set up for strong DRM.
And the thing is, somehow every vendor seems to skip out on ensuring a working out-of-band upgrade process - despite U-Boot bringing everything you need with it to provide recovery via whatever means you want. Ethernet, USB, a serial debug port... hell, I did A/B partition support and bootloader checks with a watchdog years ago, hacked together in an afternoon but able to first attempt booting from the fresh firmware, if that failed three times it would attempt the B partition containing the old image, and if that failed it would attempt booting from a recovery partition that was intelligent enough to bring up the base board with enough networking to be able to bring up a web server and accept a signed firmware image.
Or, if that's too complex, a fucking button that the user has to hold and it will boot into the recovery image directly.
It's not rocket science, it's not even much effort, all you need is a fucking week at least and a couple of cents for a switch. Pure penny pinching, and I hate companies that produce hardware that can turn to e-waste because of it.
One can still hope.
Oh yeah. Like Surefeed smart cat feeders. They don't use end reed or contact switches to control the lid motor - they use current sensing on the motor and stop it when the current surges due to reaching the end position. The problem is, they also use cheap-ass plastic gears on an apparently pretty strong motor... my old Surefeed from five years ago is still going strong, but the newer revision (which is, admittedly, easier to clean) failed after not even a year because the motor had shred the gears and could no longer detect if the lid was fully closed or opened, making noise for so long that the cat refused to use it.
Fucking hell, these things cost 150€+ apiece. Two contact switches and wiring would have cost them less than ten cents. Now they have to pay for the cost of handling the warranty claim... but I'd rather like to have a well-designed product in the first place.
(Oh, and it doesn't like rechargeable C cell batteries either, because they apparently saved the dollar that would have given them a boost voltage regulator, so you're stuck buying disposable alkaline batteries)
They probably wouldn't even need a reed switch, just a wad of foam for some buffering plus a more sensitive stop algorithm. Or better yet, don't give the motor enough current to shred gears even at full stall.
I've got two sure microchip cat doors. They've been reliable. Same problem, hard to clean. When one of our cats figured out how to break through the door sure sent me a 3d printed plastic part that clipped on over the latch. I think their customer care is pretty good.
The new one isn't much better tbh...
> When one of our cats figured out how to break through the door sure sent me a 3d printed plastic part that clipped on over the latch.
I mean, my cats are smart enough to open doors, cupboards and drawers, but how on earth can a cat break through a cat flap?! Brute strength?
We survive comfortably by sharing practical skills in the household: sewing, woodworking, metalworking, electronics, CAD (for 3D printing replacement parts), painting, etc. Products straight from the factory are often substandard, but a good set of tools, library books and tutorials can close the gap to usability if you have the time.
AKA: Your dishwasher dies and you send it to the dump. They'll look it over document the failure and back charge the manufacturer for the retail price.
You have given me a new utopian dream. This is a clever solution.
My biggest bugaboo in this area is with clothes. At some point I started being more careful, but found the published specs won't help because they don't actually tell you everything you need to know, or the company selling them is being defrauded themselves by manufacturers making things out of spec. In many cases too I'm convinced people have lost communal knowledge of what good items look like because theyve never seen them. So, say, they're happy with a sweater that is made out of very poor yarn that obviously won't last because it's warm and has a good zipper. We're at 2/3 now I guess.
However, even places like Consumer Reports will say they don't recommend an entire class of appliance, but then proceed to provide ratings, that are ostensibly good. How are those supposed to be interpreted? "None of these are worth buying but they are 95/100 in quality if you take that into account"? No wonder people are confused.
I've bought clothes from reputable vendors, with fabric from named mills to specs that should be quality, and found instead the cut was off spec and wouldn't fit. Or something about the fabric just didn't last anyway. It seems like it's always something, like I'm constantly being tricked in some new way once I figure out some other problem. It's such an enormous waste of money, time, and resources.
A decade ago I'd buy jeans and they'd last years. Unfortunately my waist line has since increased and none of those survivors now fit me.
I started with Levi 511s and -- when they started failing -- moved to Nudie Jeans (2x price) as they offer free repairs. When I tried to get them repaired though I was told there was a six week waiting time which seemed excessive.
Next I went with a local atelier (3x price) figuring if I spent more that would solve the problem but it happened again.
I got these from uniqlo and like them quite a bit but, beware, they're unwashed and will shrink some when first washed so keep that in mind when buying.
Alternately, the moment you buy new pants, add some iron-on patch reinforcement across the area. A two-dollar giant patch can spread the force out quite a bit and probably double the lifetime of the unreinforced fabric.
But really, a tailor should be able to tell you what's wrong with the fit and how to fix it.
It's a combination of stretching and friction. Jeans have it especially bad because they have prominent seams right where the thighs touch, causing an extra large amount of friction. A gusseted crotch (which I believe the Ballroom jeans have) both helps with the stretching and moves the seams around.
I too notice the decline in jeans quality. The cheap jeans I had as a kid in the 90’s were nearly indestructible. Sometimes I’d skin my knee but my jeans wouldn’t get a hole…
Our 5000 euro door, made by local craftsmen with high quality materials, had an installation mistake that ruins ergonomics and compromises the airtightness. I even went for a non-sliding door in the expectation that it would be more reliable. Maybe the sliding door would have been entirely non-functional by now.
My ~400 euro yamaha reface mini-synth has internal speakers that buzz. It's a known problem affecting every one ever made AFAIK.
I'd guess only maybe 1/3 of the top dollar expensive stuff I have bought has been free of glaring defects, despite researching before buying.
My biggest recommendation is buy 100% cotton and avoid synthetic blends at all costs. Some of that crap looks old after a single wash.
Nudie jeans by any chance?
What I want is someone that I can pay to sew stuff for me and have it not suck.
The problem is that someone who does that is continually having to hunt down new clients since their stuff doesn't fall apart. And they can't charge enough because the crappy stuff is soooo cheap that it sets the floor of the pricing.
If we want artisans to make a comeback, we're going to have to help them somehow.
Planned obsolescence is a thing. So is building or making for the short term. There just wasn’t this great era where people made things for the long haul out of pride or something else. People always took the short term view when the market structure or incentives encouraged it.
I think one argument is exactly this. There has been a march towards a market that expects a constant supply of cheap shit. When all the margins have been wrung out of globalization, reduction in quality provides the next mechanism of lowering price.
People know where to find $150 denim that lasts, just like in times past. But there has been change in expectations that makes $25 denim the norm.
Do they? There have been times I'm willing to pay whatever needs to be paid for quality items, and I just don't know where to find it. You can find the brands that used to make quality items, selling for the same premium prices, but often they're just selling the same unreliable stuff in slightly spiffier dress.
when your $400 TV breaks in 2022, you buy a new one because its relatively inexpensive and you can get a larger one for the same price.
Indeed. So I skim the article and wind up agreeing with how some things seem to be built to fall apart or under perform (modern HE washers, I'm looking at you). Then I get called to the shop floor to check a machine and the operator, an older gentleman gets to talking with and starts the same conversation! He is in his mid 60's his you'd think he'd go on lamenting the loss of the sturdy goods from his youth but nope! He too said there was plenty of cheap flimsy crap to be had.
Though one thing I will say has changed: the ability to repair stuff. Computers stuffed with proprietary code have taken control of even the simplest appliances (washers, stoves, refrigerators). Things that were made from multiple pieces of stamped or cast metal are now made from a single piece of plastic that is less sturdy which melts or deforms under heat (some eventually become brittle and crumble). I can see how it makes things cheaper and easier to make but they don't sell the plastic bits separately requiring me to toss everything over a single broken piece. And even if something is made of metal, the stamping or casting is so thin that it might as well be made of plastic (e.g. the tin foil harbor freight stock carts.)
But the retailers and consumers are adjusting to this model: goods are so cheap they are disposable. Don't bother returning it, just toss it. This has lead to people buying new items and tossing them right into the trash because amazon will ship another. Or maybe return the broken item in its place. Or you buy a new item to take a part off and toss it because amazon told you to. Consumers get to keep buying cheap crap and companies keep the money rolling in. This low effort thinking is filling landfills with unused or barely used items at an alarming rate which is a great example of unchecked capitalism. Whats worse is I guarantee you most people could live happily without most of the shit they buy.
In conjunction with the decline of repairability in the appliances I think there's a corresponding decline in repair skills among the general population as well.
The key is that there are 2 completely different things going on and I think it's very bad that we keep conflating the 2:
* Bad quality crap, which took shortcuts which impair repairability for no reason other than to save a cent, make it impossible to find replacement parts because it's a fly by night operation that didn't think about it in the slightest, and which in general is going to break down on you within the year.
* Devices which are hard to repair.
That second category contains a lot of reasons ('save half a cent on a screw' is one of them, as is 'planned obsolescence' / 'make sure our pricey resellers get plenty of work'), but some of those reason are GOOD - such as 'it is a heck of a lot easier to make a robust product if we don't make the battery swappable (e.g., iPhone, which got plenty of flak for this)'.
For the first, the only 'good' reason to do that, is to ensure some product is available even to those who have _very_ little to spend, but, [A] environmentally this isn't a good idea, and [B] how 'available' is it when the only category you can buy is dinky crap that doesn't work well and breaks down within 6 months?
So how do we get rid of _that_?
Right-to-repair laws are barking up an entirely different tree, e.g. fighting the kind of bullshit where a farm tractor manufacturer intentionally makes it impossible to work on computer-guided stuff basically just to be dicks and get more money from their official repair/reseller program. And to a lesser extent, acts where a manufacturer makes a device significantly harder to repair with as only goal to save a cent or two on an errant screw, or cheaper glue or whatever.
That TV didn't last 20 years - it was a huge hassle continually testing and replacing tubes.
Meanwhile I bought a 55" HDTV almost 20 years ago that's still running fine.
For months I would grab the Sunday paper and pull out all the ad inserts looking for the perfect TV. It had to be cheap; I didn't want to ask for anything crazy. I finally found one that was under $200 and showed it to my parents. It was some unknown brand. It wasn't "Cable Ready", and it still had separate tuner knobs for VHF and UHF. I didn't care, main use would be for Nintendo.
Parents decided to splurge instead and spent almost $400 on a Toshiba unit with a digital channel display and a remote(!). It also understood cable. I could watch Nick at Nite on it when I went to sleep.
$400 for a 13" TV, in 1988. That's $1,000 in today's money. A 75-inch 4K TV.
EDIT: For a nostalgia hit, I went searching for it. This is the model they got me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15wiYAEOYAE
Those 1980's tvs could display Knight Rider, Miami Vice, The A-Team and Moonlighting natively, without the need for any kind of streaming service.
That's cool. But, more than likely it'll be your body that will need the repairs.
That's cool. I like high quality clothing too but noticed as I age that it's my body that needs the repairs. It's been a tight-fitting last couple years and my clothes still have so much life left.
The EU will just give fines and nobody will care. Regulation is not the best path here.
A great example is Tile, little tracking tags for your keys. I bought one, and in a year the battery died, just in time to get an email from the company offering a 10% discount on a new one.
Instead, the failure state is that the fan that handles this broke with no warning. I lost a bunch of groceries, but luckily managed to figure out the issue and replace the part myself.
Then a few months ago I heard a clack clack like a fan was about to fail, so this time I replaced the fan after only about two days of no refrigerator.
I don’t understand how such an expensive device can have such a terrible failure mode that ruins basically everything inside my fridge, twice now (the freezer is fine though, it just gets colder).
Before this fridge my wife and I were totally broke and just had a $400 hand me down fridge that we literally never had any problems with. I don’t really know why modern stuff seems so bad.
I know I know, survivorship bias and whatnot, I don’t see all the broken refrigerators in the landfill, but even if that’s the case why not fire half your design engineers just trot out those old 1945 GE Ultracool (or whatever) designs and sell those?
1. Newer fridges have much more complicated air flow patterns requiring more fans and elaborate designs (my fridge runs all its fans for 2 seconds to homogenize air every time I close its door, for example).
2. That fan is a standard fan in GE line-up which happens to fit that bill. It's not a fan made extra robust and reliable because it's going to end in a $4000 fridge.
Every 2-4 years I replace the dishwasher, dryer, and washing machine. The first replacement dishwasher caught on fire; we are on dishwasher #4. The current washing machine has a leak, the water sensor* which somehow functions after being there for over four years (four!) notifies me reliably.
* Samsung has discontinued the water sensor
I know Consumer Reports can’t really account for durability although I think they survey their members to see what’s still working, so it’s better than most places.
Are you a fridge salesman or something?
You do understand that many of us would pay more for that fridge and gladly pay way more in electricity to have it perform its job reliably, right?
Sure you have the resources to burn all the electricity you want for convenience, you do you.
My old fridge is running perfectly, and costs me less than $10-$15/month.
A typical modestly price refrigerator these days cost $1000 at home depot (and easily more) - even if I could cut electricity by 50%, saving 7.50 a month in electric, a typical new fridge won't even last long enough to justify the savings..
* No need to split & balance the refrigeration between fridge & freezer
* No expectation of a defrost cycle on the freezer
* Generally less stuff: no water or ice dispenser, less lights, less fancy bins & trays & veg drawers etc.
* Chest freezers get opened less, and the top-opening lid lets less cold out when they are opened, and without the defrost cycle the compressor just doesn't have to work as hard.
* Usually greater consumer tolerance for these items being large/heavy machinery so the designers don't even have to worry too hard about keeping things compact.
Refrigerator life should be measured in decades.
This is a claim that was already present in Death of a Salesman. Here's the quote:
> I am always in a race with the junkyard! I just finished paying for the car and it's on its last legs. The refrigerator consumes belts like a goddam maniac. They time those things. They time them so when you finally paid for them, they're used up.
The play came out in... 1949.
It's not been my experience that everything is crap nowadays. But of course one needs to shop wisely.
Trademarks identify the origin of goods that a business wishes a consumer to believe. We need to expand that law to also indicate _actual_ origin.
For example, this DVD player came from this manufacturer and then got badged as Alpha Inc, but this other DVD had the same technical origin (despite the different case) and got badged as Beta Inc ... consumers should get that information. Capitalism relies on such things so that the best products can be chosen.
Instead, we get things like companies selling the same product code from different factories with wildly different quality. Or, far more egregious companies sending a product to reviewers and early adopters, then making a worse product and passing it off to consumers as the same.
There's much more to do (I should be able to see exactly what a product had done to acquire it's 'country of origin' - another area companies deceive consumers), but this would be a start.
Though this too can become hard in categories dominated by cartels : warranties for (magnetic) hard drives have been going down (not to mention the recent frauds by Western Digital, how they have fallen, sigh...), or, for (non-related) reasons, boycotting Intel and Ryzen CPUs (or Android an iOS smartphones) doesn't leave you many options, though RISC-V (and "real" Linux) have been making great strides in the recent years.
I have to admit that particular strategy hadn't occurred to me - but it's a good idea. Of course, it has to be an actual part-of-the-standard-deal warranty, not the hard-sell extended warranty that's really just an add-on insurance policy...
(Wondering where I find a box of staples warranted to pierce more than five sheets...)
Many other things seem to have gotten worse though, like clothes and linens. I suspect there's some pattern to those things that have improved and those that have declined, and everything in between, but I couldn't explain it.
I've heard this many times while at auto body shops. It seems that it's not the electronic parts cost that is expensive but you have to dissemble much of the car to replace the parts.
Current cars get more power and fuel efficiency, but its at the cost of complexity like high pressure direct injection, stop/start, variable length intakes, cam phasers, etc.
Its nothing to do with computer control making them brittle, more that there's just so many extra components to fail that just didn't exist on older cars and the techs need training on how they operate and troubleshoot.
The downside is that cars especially have not gotten cheaper. (This is starting to change, sadly by necessity rather than choice, ~ton personal vehicles will soon be the thing of the past even in rich countries.)
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/global-car-sa...
Definitely not even close to 10-15 years I was promised.
And this is why warranties are pointless. How am I supposed to get one of these bulbs from a four-pack replaced by the manufacturer two years after I bought it?
Was having my house painted a few years back, I have a triple set of spots near the very top of the roof (so about 30 feet in the air) - painter helpfully suggests - do you want me to replace those bulbs up there while I have my ladder up there? I agreed.
Big mistake, the bulbs their were still working 17 years after I moved in - now I have to replace them about every 18 months with the cheap crap the government only allows to be sold.
Not sure how replacing bulbs and throwing them in the landfill every 1-2 years is doing anything good for the environment.
It's simple physics :-)
This is anecdotal, but I had a bunch of bulbs of the same brand that started to fail, on the remaining bulbs I drilled a few air vent holes into them as they are used indoors only, and since then haven't had another failure.
I'm suspecting most LED bulbs fail from thermal stress on the driver circuitry.
It sounds cartoonishly evil, but "cartel" is just an economic term for a market where a small number of participants collude to control supply and pricing. Like OPEC.
https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-l-e-d-quanda...
IMHO, we should be more aggressive about converting industries which gravitate towards cartels into regulated natural monopolies, like power/water supplies. Some kinds of markets really are more efficient with fewer participants, and we should find ways to encourage that efficiency without letting the lucky winners indefinitely dictate the terms of the market.
And by the way, since the topic of "where do I find the good stuff" keeps coming up, why is there no site that is your one-stop recommendation destination for finding quality appliances, tools? We all know we can no longer trust Amazon reviews.
Consumer Reports has been around for ages but I don't feel they've kept in lockstep with the changing times. Maybe the Cool Tools site? But it seems a little too casual and not as rigorous as CR, too eager to direct you to Amazon as well. I don't know really. Just spitballing.
And yeah for products like these you really need to search prosumer forums for the specific area in question, Consumer Reports would be useless.
1. The prosumers can get detached from the needs of ordinary consumers (see: audiophiles)
2. Some products just don't generate enthusiasts. I recently had to buy a washing machine. All the reviews are sponsored and slightly suspicious crap because nobody cares enough to be the Tom Laundry Tips of the world
I have a knife. It is a simple piece of metal that peels carrots, apples, and many other things with great reliability. It also performs other functions that a "carrot peeler" could not. It has done so for 20 years and can be expected to remain functional for several more decades.
"Coffee grinder"? how many iterations of the idea of the blender does one kitchen need? (I count a half dozen in my kitchen without trying. 4 more if you add in the lab gear)
I don’t drink coffee but a nicely built hand powered coffee grinder is great at home or even on a camping trip for people who are really into coffee.
But you’re probably right, I bet my $400 Vitamix could grind coffee. Actually, I just googled it, and Vitamix helpfully sells a coffee grinder attachment! Haha, the gadgets never end.
You probably have a typical coffee brewer. Those aren’t too picky about their grind, but they take up a lot of space and only do one thing. Most don’t last long.
You could instead get a V60 for about $10 and a nice hand grinder, neither of which take much space. Combine those with an electric tea kettle, and you’ve got nicer coffee in a smaller footprint. The tea kettle still takes up space, but it’s a tea kettle. The grinder is the size of a pepper mill, and the V60 is an indestructible little plastic cone. Tired of cranking the grinder by hand? Hook it up to a drill.
You could use a blender-style grinder with a V60, but you’re going to run into trouble getting it to work right.
Everything is a compromise.
While I'm ranting about kitchenwares, I'm getting tired of saucepans with a life expectancy of less than two years - they're another item I'd expect to last decades. But again the existence of the cheap crap makes it harder to find the better stuff, and certainly hard to have any confidence that what you're looking actually is any better, and not just the same crap with a higher price tag.
I also own a lot of supossed 25.000 hours-of-life Leds, that failed after 1-2 years of incidental use. Also annoyes the sh** out of me.
Of all the compact florescent and LED bulbs I have bought, I has died because of a faulty component prematurely, and one has a whining driver. Other than that I failed to reach end of life of any of them. So, I never bought the second round because of that.
Oh, I killed a couple of CFLs because of heat, possibly.
I've replaced the belt once. With the amount of hair I pulled out of the beater bar at the same time, I'm not sure the belt was the cause. Works as well as the day we brought it home.
And, from my experience, it's probably the battery that's failing in your cordless vac.
We had a few cordless vacs - each one has died due to the battery. No replacements available :/ Even the very expensive Dyson.
So far, my Dewalt cordless vac (which has a replaceable battery, by design, since it's a Dewalt) works OK. It's a mini shop-vac, but we pull it out for various household uses as needed.
[0] https://www.makitatools.com/products/details/XLC02ZB
> I can’t say the same about my coffee grinders. I use the plural because I’ve owned a lot of them, all bought in their original packaging and dead within a year. They’re good ones, supposedly, with burrs not blades, but they stop performing before long, ending their long journeys from overseas factories in unmarked graves in my local Montana landfill.
A Baratza encore will last literally forever, and if it doesn't, you can replace everything in it.
It's just not a "grinder shaped object"
My fancy Bosch dishwasher can’t clean a dish if there’s a tiny bit of food on it. My GE dryer takes two cycles and at least 1.5 hrs to dry some cotton clothes. Don’t get me started on Bluetooth headphones. My coded garage opener takes 3 or 4 attempts each time because I guess the button push don’t register? When I want to watch TV sometimes I need to sit through a system upgrade which means I have to wait to watch. My town voted that cell phone towers are ugly, so there’s basically no cell service anywhere and most calls have between 1 and 5 drops (I live on Long Island, not in rural America). Every year there’s at least $1-3k of maintenance on my 4 year old “luxury” car. My smart lock works well as long as my fingers are perfectly dry and perfectly aligned. I replace my towels once every year or two because they completely fall apart. My “learning thermostat” doesn’t seem to learn anything even though I’ve been setting the temp at the same every night. I replace my jeans at a similar rate to the towels because they get holes in knees and pockets. Holes develop at the same rate in a $25 pair and a $125 pair. Self checkout at every store is a horrendous experience and I’ve never successfully checked out without the support person scanning their badge to fix some absurd error, like the weight of the item placed on the bagging area scale not being the weight the machine expects it to be.
No one? Was it just me then?
Commercial kitchen equipment is out there and available if you want it, designed to last. It will seriously cost you to get it though.
Cheap imitations of an artifact from a bygone era. Where playing with it too much or too hard will it break.
They're more of a display item than an actual appliance. Only meant for looking at and instilling the idea of a useful tool. But don't dare use it!
The reason is producers don't care if it works or not. The product is successful so long as they can trick enough people into buying it.
The mental, emotional, and financial exhaustion borders on psychological warfare from foreign advisories.
America needs to reboot it's manufacturing base with a focus on absolute best quality hands down, no excuses, survive nuclear winter American made products.
Let's break this wasteful Earth destroying, GHG creating cycle of madness!
The new washer / dryer wash more clothes at once using less detergent and far less electricity. They're also quieter. Like, a LOT quieter. And they text us when they finish which I thought was silly at first but in practice it means we get more loads done per day.
It's been 3 years and we've had to use the Lowes warranty once for a leak. Watching the repairman it seemed like a huge hassle to work on these new machines so I don't see these being fun to own once the 5 year maintenance plan expires.
We donated the old washer / dryer to a pet rescue group so hopefully they're still going.
Dull peeler? Sharpen it. Now you have a sharp peeler that can probably last 10 years with occasional attention.
Dead grinders? I'm sure at least one of them could've been fixed and extended its life significantly.
Sure, things are getting less and less repairable, but most still can be fixed of some common faults. It just takes a pinch of skill and a bunch of will.
My dad gave me the advice "buy cheap now and be guaranteed to buy it again at least once if not more, or wait, save up, and buy the more expensive thing only once" as I was becoming an adult. I've tried to follow that but sadly I don't think the advice really holds anymore.
buy cheap, buy twice
Unfortunately, it seems that now it's:
buy expensive, get some shitty cloud enabled feature, still buy twice.
What features keep drawing you back in?
By now, you'd think we'd have reached a minimum viable quantity of products that have been ubiquitous for so long.
When "Cheap crap" first became common 20 years ago stuff got a bit worse, but it seems to be improving.
As a final thought, I'd say at least in a store, if you have the ability to determine if something is junk by looking and touching it, you can practice that.
The plastic cover on a bad switch looks an awful lot like the one on a good switch.
Glass filled nylon seems to be somwhat reliable thought, not quite as much utter trash has a chassis made of that, at least for tools.
And sheet metal, I usually assume anyone who uses that is cutting corners or wants to appeal to old fashioned types who hate plastic no matter what.
Don't buy a ultrasonic humidifiers, they actually reduce the air quality considerably [3], you need to get an evaporative humidifier and frankly there aren't that many.
[1] https://www.honeywellstore.com/store/news/honeywell-warm-mis...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R911WGTC1OHLL/ref...
[3] https://learn.kaiterra.com/en/air-academy/humidifiers-cause-...
Yet more evidence of the HN community's friendly helpfulness.
Partly because out lifestyle now is lighter on things, and we need fewer of them. I don't need a juicer because... I don't juice.
Another factor might be that we still have an obsession with "Power". Look at how impact drivers are reviewed, based on how fast they screw some insane fastener most people won't ever need.
If consumers prefer and recommended more powerful stuff rather than stuff that's better at protecting itself, stuff is gonna break.
My vacuum does shut off if you run over the wrong thing. That's not a case of clogging and choking, that's a sensor detecting that I've given it something it's not meant for, protecting itself. I would take that any day over something that would happily self destruct on something, or even chew up whatever it hit.
My Rite in the Rain pen never has issues and very well could last my whole life with no refills. There are bad pens out there, but I have no memory of any time when cheap ballpoints actually worked correctly.
I have not had any experience with a new washer or dryer for very long.
However, new appliances are lighter, cheaper, and more efficient. If the scrap is recycled, they may well be just as good as old ones in terms of cost and environmental concerns, even if they break faster.
There are certain categories of things that may be worse overall, but in general, there's close to nothing I'd prefer the old version of.
However, there are probably lots of things where the cheap version now is worse than the old version. But that old version probably cost $40 in today's money and the cheap version cost $20.
A broken washing machine or dishwasher can flood your house, costing 10s of thousands of dollars.
A broken dryer can burn your house down.
And even if some of those aren’t common failure modes (fridge is common), it is incredibly inconvenient and expensive to be without a major appliance for (insert supply chain guesstimate number of) weeks every year or so.
I would imagine a heat pump dryer would be very unlikely to burn anything down.
It is a really big inconvenience when they go offline, but there are still lots of brands that seem to work fine for 10 to 20 years.
I'm surprised ultra high reliability isn't more of a consumer selling point. Refrigerators in particular could do it with a redundant compressor and valves, they could share the evaporator and condensing coils. It's not like fridge compressors cost that much to make. They could even use 2 small ones and run them all the time, so if 1 fails you get half power but it still works.
Washers and dryers could do redundancy by selling pairs of identical combo units instead of 1 washer and 1 dryer, but I suppose people don't need to replace both at once very often.
Too bad all of our manufacturing went to China, a culture that has no concept of honesty. https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/in-china-honesty-is-not-th... https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/1879850/chinese-most-...
I recently replaced a knockoff Leatherman (which of course broke without being old) with a real one. It worked so well, I bought two. https://www.leatherman.com/ I first discovered these when I worked in the USAF in the 90's. They're not cheap, but one should support quality products with your hard earned cash.
I also needed to replace my belt recently. Discovered https://ansonbelt.com/. I'm not sure where they're manufactured, but they're quality belts with a unique self-measuring system and a latching mechanism.
Fancy French-door Refrigerator: still going strong. I tightened the screw on the freezer handle a couple of times.
Cheap fridge in the basement: still going strong, no repairs
Washer and dryer: still going strong, no repairs
Dishwasher: still going strong. I replaced a dish rack when one of the tines broke.
Anecdata, it's fun and useless!