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I dont know why but it gives you massive pride, to remove planned obsolescence from a very cheap item. Take the water heater of my mum - the toplid did no longe

I dont know why but it gives you massive pride, to remove planned obsolescence from a very cheap item. Take the water heater of my mum - the toplid did no longer work, because the axis it used was made from cheap plastic, resting on even thinner plastic holders. Solution: Hot screw driven through. Now this cheap item works trouble free since 5 years. Same thing with a fancy looking scale- the wires internal where glued together with a sort of ducttape. Two solder points later - meet the eternal scale. I sometimes wonder, why this is not a buisness model. There must be money in making cheap items ever lasting.

ghaff 8y ago
I'd be willing to bet that the failure points you found are far from the only places in the design where they cheaped out. People tend to buy based on price and/or superficial details. It's hard to sell people on substantially hardened designs absent a brand that allows for charging a real premium.
hopler 8y ago
Am I going to pay you $100 to come fix my scale, or am I going to buy 10 scales? Manufacturing is cheap. Labor is expensive. wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
- scotty79 8y ago
  Repair is custom job. Custom jobs are expensive.
hoorayimhelping 8y ago
>I sometimes wonder, why this is not a buisness model. There must be money in making cheap items ever lasting. It is, and it's wide out in the open. I bet the high end water heater with a solid reputation for quality would have proper hinges and insulation. It's just that most people are wary of paying a premium for what they perceive to be the same item.
stevehawk 8y ago
Thanks to the Internet everyone thinks engineering and manufacturing is all about "planned obsolescence". Consumers want to blame the maker for the cheap product they bought instead of blaming themselves for only wanting cheap products.
- bartread 8y ago
  This has been an issue since before the internet. Growing up in the 80s my parents and grandparents would always be making comments like, "They don't make things like they used to!" Well I, for one, am extremely glad they don't. I remember cars from the 1960s and 1970s, and they were ####ing terrible: unreliable, unsafe, slow, poor handling. Cars today are vastly better, although I think the accelerating trend for packing them full of complex electronics and gizmos may bite us in the arse. There is simply a lot more to go wrong in a car from 2019 than a car from 1979, even if individual parts and subsystems are much more reliable. My uncle and my step-dad both have more realistic views. My uncle used to ride motorcycles back in the 60s and 70s and looked at me askance when I'd complained that the problem with doing long distances on a bike with chain rather than shaft drive is that you always needed to carry chain lube with you to oil the chain every 200 - 300 miles. His comment, about an old Norton he'd had, was that he needed to strip down and rebuild the engine every time he'd done 100 miles (he didn't keep it long; even back then this was considered awful). Likewise, about 15 years ago I'd mentioned some relatively minor part needing replacement after 50,000 miles on my first car, and my step-dad pointed out that with a lot of the cars he'd driven in the 60s, after 50,000 miles you'd need a replacement engine, never mind the odd part.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    And if the engine didn't need rebuilt, the frame was probably rusting out by 50,000 miles if you lived anywhere that it snowed regularly in the winter. 50K miles was about how long my parents' cars lasted. 100K miles was considered exceptional at the time and the owner probably babied the car and didn't drive it in places or seasons where it would be exposed to salt.
  - addicted 8y ago
    This has been an issue, however, once upon a time durability was actually a marketing term used for regular appliances. Companies sold people on it. Now durability as a term exists only for things like jeans and trucks where it’s not supposed to indicate that you can use the thing for long, but rather, to indicate a macho DIY culture. I believe marketing has played a large role in moving consumers away from even considering how long a product will last.

ghaff 8y ago

I'd be willing to bet that the failure points you found are far from the only places in the design where they cheaped out. People tend to buy based on price and/or superficial details. It's hard to sell people on substantially hardened designs absent a brand that allows for charging a real premium.

hopler 8y ago

Am I going to pay you $100 to come fix my scale, or am I going to buy 10 scales? Manufacturing is cheap. Labor is expensive. wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

scotty79 8y ago
Repair is custom job. Custom jobs are expensive.

hoorayimhelping 8y ago

>I sometimes wonder, why this is not a buisness model. There must be money in making cheap items ever lasting. It is, and it's wide out in the open. I bet the high end water heater with a solid reputation for quality would have proper hinges and insulation. It's just that most people are wary of paying a premium for what they perceive to be the same item.

stevehawk 8y ago

Thanks to the Internet everyone thinks engineering and manufacturing is all about "planned obsolescence". Consumers want to blame the maker for the cheap product they bought instead of blaming themselves for only wanting cheap products.

bartread 8y ago
This has been an issue since before the internet. Growing up in the 80s my parents and grandparents would always be making comments like, "They don't make things like they used to!" Well I, for one, am extremely glad they don't. I remember cars from the 1960s and 1970s, and they were ####ing terrible: unreliable, unsafe, slow, poor handling. Cars today are vastly better, although I think the accelerating trend for packing them full of complex electronics and gizmos may bite us in the arse. There is simply a lot more to go wrong in a car from 2019 than a car from 1979, even if individual parts and subsystems are much more reliable. My uncle and my step-dad both have more realistic views. My uncle used to ride motorcycles back in the 60s and 70s and looked at me askance when I'd complained that the problem with doing long distances on a bike with chain rather than shaft drive is that you always needed to carry chain lube with you to oil the chain every 200 - 300 miles. His comment, about an old Norton he'd had, was that he needed to strip down and rebuild the engine every time he'd done 100 miles (he didn't keep it long; even back then this was considered awful). Likewise, about 15 years ago I'd mentioned some relatively minor part needing replacement after 50,000 miles on my first car, and my step-dad pointed out that with a lot of the cars he'd driven in the 60s, after 50,000 miles you'd need a replacement engine, never mind the odd part.
- ghaff 8y ago
  And if the engine didn't need rebuilt, the frame was probably rusting out by 50,000 miles if you lived anywhere that it snowed regularly in the winter. 50K miles was about how long my parents' cars lasted. 100K miles was considered exceptional at the time and the owner probably babied the car and didn't drive it in places or seasons where it would be exposed to salt.
- addicted 8y ago
  This has been an issue, however, once upon a time durability was actually a marketing term used for regular appliances. Companies sold people on it. Now durability as a term exists only for things like jeans and trucks where it’s not supposed to indicate that you can use the thing for long, but rather, to indicate a macho DIY culture. I believe marketing has played a large role in moving consumers away from even considering how long a product will last.