Something that most people fail to do on their tools and appliances is maintenance. My house is full of cheap appliances that are pushing 15 or so years of life and running great, but they require work. Filters need to be changed on dishwashers and laundry machines, people never check these often enough. For example, most people I know don’t own an air compressor, which means they never fully clean out all the motor killing dust. Computers, vacuum filters, air purifiers, fridge compressors, all these items need to be blasted with air, way more than you can get from a little can of air like IT people love to use.
Get the proper tools to maintain your things, and even the cheap stuff will last a while.
You can’t really do that on a lot of modern appliances, because what fails isn’t user-repairable.
The gas dryer we had from the 50s could be fixed with a screwdriver and a pulse.
The electric dryer we have now that we live somewhere without gas has a $1200 controller board (that probably costs $4 for the manufacturer) that goes out every 2 years, so we end up paying a $250/yr maintenance subscription to get it fixed under the “extended warranty”.
That is a scam. It is easy to program the board to stop working after x seconds. Samsung did that with my washing machine - the control board died couple of months after the warranty expired.
Planned obsolescence or engineered obsolescence if you prefer.
It’s like light bulbs. They had a cartel form that drove DOWN the hours of use so that they would expire after only about 1000 hours of use instead of multiple times longer that some bulbs were getting.
Afaik it’s one of the earliest big scams for that
For the dumbasses who downvoted:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartelMuch appreciated
just a reminder that survivorship bias is a huge thing. There have been shitty products from back then too. Many. We just don’t see them now, because only the few good products have survived. The same happens today.
Its not all planned obsolescence and not all obsolescence is bad. Imagine having a 40 year old fridge that doesn’t cool shit and burn 3 times the energy.
2 tips for good quality products now: end capitalism and spend money on the right products (not just convenience) and the right people to repair them.
There have been shitty products from back then too. Many. We just don’t see them now, because only the few good products have survived.
So we built on that knowledge and kept making the good ones as they were and didn’t see how cheap we could make them right? …right?
Well, sometimes, actually, yes. Unfortunately you have to do the research to figure out if anyone does it right and the people doing it wrong tend to out-marketing spend the good ones.
For example, house came with a garbage disposal. Within 5 years it rusted through, because why would you bother with stainless steel in something that is constantly soaked with water? Did research, didn’t have to spend too much more to get one actually made using stainless steel and that one is still going 15 years later.
Of course sometimes you just don’t have options. Like if you want a microwave, it doesn’t matter what microwave you get from what brand, all of them are just cosmetic variants/brands applied to the exact same microwave made by one company in China.
I remember a video of Linus from LTT going to check out the Sennheiser factory and their high end electro static ($ 19,000 at the time) headset had like a 40% quality fail. Because only the best would be branded as their high end devices.
Most of the ones that didn’t pass were still absolutely fine, just not hitting all the frequencies correctly so they went in the $8000 bin.
Exact same product just some were slightly less performing but still more than useful as a lesser quality product.
Which iirc Linus commented on after initial surprise to see such a high failure rate.
Now that’s a good brand that cares about quality, lesser manufacturers…
It’s more complicated than that. It’s literally that sometimes two of the exact same item last for radically different times. It’s not a different design or manufacturing process, just an amorphous series of random factors lining up we call luck.
Mean time between failures is something they do actually measure in manufacturing, and you see interesting results like what hard drive manufacturers do to increase reliability: stress test the drives until the ones destined to fail early fail, and then sell the others.
There are things that can increase reliability, but a lot of the things that make the extreme outliers are just random, and no one documents what they were because they didn’t know it was going not have an effect, good or bad.
