6 ms·

Common things that existed 20, 30, or even 40 years like refrigerators, coffee machines, dishwashers, washers, and dryers, often lasted 10 or 20 years in some c

Common things that existed 20, 30, or even 40 years like refrigerators, coffee machines, dishwashers, washers, and dryers, often lasted 10 or 20 years in some cases, and could be repaired. We have witnessed the steep decline of device reliability in my lifetime, and our expectations are so low that the latest appliance we buy we consider lucky if no problems develop in 2-3 years. Anything serious requires you to usually toss it out and buy a new one.

mytailorisrich 6y ago
Miele appliances (for example) still last decades and all efforts are made by the manufacturer to find you spare parts if you need. But they cost 3-4x more than a budget appliance. That's a key aspect of the market here: People tend to compare on purchase price. If manufacturers have to compete on price, of course something has to give in order to make cheaper appliances... The market tends to give consumers what they want. It's not all bad, though, because this also puts pressure on manufacturers to optimise, including by using less material. Appliances tend not to be that bad either unless perhaps if you buy really cheap cr*p.
- wizzwizz4 6y ago
  > The market tends to give consumers what they want. The market tends to give consumers what they buy. This is distinct from what they ask for, which too is distinct from what they want, which too is distinct from what they like (and, while we're at it, from what they approve of).
  - BurningFrog 6y ago
    It's very hard to know what people, including yourself, really want. So best we can do is observing "revealed preferences", which is what Economists call "what people actually choose".
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      And "revealed preferences" are mostly bunk, because of what GP alludes to. It's evaluating people's choices out of options available on the market, not what they would buy if they could freely optimize the feature/price matrix. Another way to put it: "revealed preference" is just what one considers the least bad of the bad choices available.
      - mytailorisrich 6y ago
        Perhaps but that should be an unstable equilibrium, i.e. temporary. As long as real competition exist, if it is possible to deliver what consumers really want then sooner or later someone will discover it, make a killing and prompt everyone in the market to follow suit or die. It's easy to blame corporations but in fine I believe that the current situation has been driven by the choices of the consumers, i.e. all of us. Sure we want better quality, repairability, longevity, but we also want cheaper, among other things. I think product ranges simply reflect where our priorities really lie.
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        It should be in theory, but in practice it's pretty stable on relevant time horizons. There are many factors fixing such equilibria. For instance, most consumers aren't rational actors carefully evaluating purchasing decisions. Or, when they pick, they may optimize for multiple targets simultaneously. There are economies of scale that create barriers to entry for new competitors. Trust takes time to develop. Etc. To use two relevant examples: Audio jack on phones: a lot of people want one, but companies seem to - one by one - eschew including it, and gain on the BOM savings and getting customers to purchase additional dongles/adapters. Phones are something you don't pick based on one particular feature. A new competitor that'd like to offer a good smartphone with an audio jack will have to first match many other features of competing smartphones. They won't be able to do all that and achieve similar price point, as incumbents benefit both from established supply chains and scale. Therefore, a new offering is going to be significantly worse in terms of features or price (or both), way beyond what established companies have saved on removing the jack. Reliability of fridges: the three most important parameters that matter for customers are internal volume, price point, and overall aesthetics. The consumers would prefer a fridge that lasts a decade over one that last three years, but such decision is somewhat beyond the calculation horizon of most people (the reasoning is instead, "if and when it breaks, we'll deal with it") - and even if it was, it's very hard to verify. A company selling reliable fridges would have to first be able to reliably signal their reliability, which is hard to do. You could try offering very long (or lifetime) warranties, but unless you're an established brand, people ain't gonna believe it. Then there's the general aspect of customer irrationality[0] wrt. price. People without much spending money prefer cheap products. There's a phenomenon in markets that probably has a name, where a market for a product bifurcates into race-to-the-bottom low-quality but cheap products, and high-end products (often for professional users) with low sales volume and high markup. The middle - quality products at moderate prices - disappears entirely. A new competitor, wanting to target the middle in such a market, will find themselves losing to both cheap and expensive ends. -- [0] - Though I'm becoming less certain that this is truly irrational. The other day I saw some article highlighting that humans like to optimize for maximizing available options, in a way that comes close to mathematical optimum. Since in money-based economies money is, quite literally, unit of options available, this would suggest that this behavioral heuristic applies.
  - ska 6y ago
    And on the producer side, what they market as is distinct from what they make, what they try to make is distinct from what gets shipped, etc. A major point of markets is to try and figure this out iteratively. You can usefully think of it as an optimization algorithm that in practics prone to local minima but has some mechanisms to try and get out of them, which sometimes work.
- mch0lic1 6y ago
  What I really hate about Miele is their stupid will to push their stupid branding on the retailers (online), it always feels broken and its absolutely a pain to try to navigate any sites that integrates with them. Their tight grip on retailers also makes it hard to buy their products outside EU because nobody is willing to go through the pain. Add higher than average price and most smaller retailers just sell samsungs, lg and random chinese brands. The biggest problem remains, manufacturers are not required to sell repairable devices and parts everywhere, requirement is only applicable to EU, so they will continue to manufacture trash and will never have their parts available outside EU. And no, those EUR parts will definitely won't fit 99% of their products outside EU.
gruez 6y ago
>Common things that existed 20, 30, or even 40 years [...] often lasted 10 or 20 years in some cases It's worth mentioning that the common problem with these anecdotes is that it doesn't account for survivorship bias. That 30 year old refrigerator at your parent's house might lead you to conclude all refrigerators back in the day lasted 30 years, but in reality you're only seeing the refrigerators that lasted 30 years, not the ones that broke down and were replaced.
ska 6y ago
This is true, but it seems to be mostly consumer preference. That 30 year old refrigerator cost more (normalized) and does less than most of the ones you can buy today. When people offer longer lived, better built versions for more money, most people don't buy them. The same thing happened to furniture.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  Its hard to tell whats a quality product and what is overpriced swindle. You can buy a phone for 2 grand but it won't last
inglor_cz 6y ago
The situation is not so clear-cut with domestic appliances. Modern fridges are much more energy-efficient. So there is a tradeoff: either you buy a new fridge, thus polluting the environment with the old fridge, but saving energy. Or you let your good old 30 year old fridge run, saving the resources needed for a new fridge, but burning a lot more energy in the process.
- gsich 6y ago
  It's a simple calculation. How much energy costs do I save compared to keeping the old one. Also I wouldn't expect any "modern" appliance to last more than 5 years.
  - fy20 6y ago
    I bought an apartment nearly 5 years ago, and so shortly after that went on the appliance shopping trip. I tried to get what I thought were good quality appliances, and everything is still mostly working ok, but there have been teething problems with everything: - Bosch Fridge Freeze - a couple of the shelves have broken and I have no idea where to get replacements. - Bosch Fan Oven - sometimes cuts off if it is left on above 250c for more than 30 mins. - Bosch Dishwasher - had to take it apart once to clean as some paper got stuck in the impeller. - Bosch Condenser Dryer - no issues so far, other than not RTFM about the drain hose which needs to be elevated above the unit for some reason. - Samsung Washing Machine - One day I came in and there was water all over the floor from the washing machine. Took it apart and I could see signs of leaking, but couldn't see anything wrong, after that it worked fine. Recently it starting making a lot of noise on the spin cycle, turned out the feet needed leveling, now it's good as new. - Electrolux Induction Cooktop - There are some cosmetic issues (stains that won't come off) on the glass.
varjag 6y ago
About any fridge you buy now would last a decade easily. Several decades even, if you bother to invest into its maintenance and repair like people did 40 years ago.
- stretchcat 6y ago
  Getting appliances repaired is harder than it once was. Disposability culture drove many repair shops out of business. Many repair shops I and my family used to are now gone or dying. The guy who used to do sewing machine repairs for my mother is gone. The cobbler that used to repair my boots is gone. Furthermore, appliances that used to come with repair manuals no longer do, and finding the manual online is often a real chore. Fewer people will repair things on their own when manufacturers make it difficult to find even basic documentation.
  - varjag 6y ago
    It's a good point, but it's not really a failure of product design. Appliances themselves now are not any less reliable than they were in mid-century. There is no grand conspiracy of manufacturers filing down screw threads to make them fail. I did not repair any of my fridges (they never failed in all of my adult life), but I did repair my washing machine (AEG 15y.o.) and my beans-to-coffee DeLonghi (10+ y.o). Both were very repairable and it was a matter of identifying the failure and finding the right part on eBay.
    - stretchcat 6y ago
      I don't think manufacturers are conspiring. I think this widespread behavior emerges from market circumstances and is not evidence of any sort of collusion between manufacturers. You don't need grand conspiracies to explain things like this, nor have I proposed one!
    - neop1x 6y ago
      True, except there are manufacturers like Apple or Sony which won't provide genuine spare parta to retail people (tried that). Then you have to buy parts from "for parts" eBay auctions or counterfait/bad quality batteries from random Chinese seller...
acdha 6y ago
We’ve had declines in some areas - IoT being an obvious culprit - but there are two major confounds belying that anecdotal belief: 1. You don’t see the junk which never lasted 20 years - plenty of stuff died back then, too. Cutting corners to save a buck is a very, very old practice - I’d be surprised if you couldn’t find some Babylonian tablet complaining about it. 2. Manufacturers generally switched from letting prices go up to introducing new products. If you buy stuff which costs as much (adjusted for inflation) as what your parents laid, it often lasts just as long. The problem is that a lot of us only buy the cheapest thing and are then surprised when a $400 purchase now doesn’t hold up as well as a purchase which cost $1,000 in today’s dollars – and the one costing $1,000 today probably does much better. Styles also change - for example, a lot of athletic gear became very focused on ultralight performance: great for racers but almost always less durable. Does that mean you can’t buy the older style or just that you need to shop differently? It’s definitely the case that there are areas where it’s harder to find durable options (IoT causing a generation of devices to lose features or fail long before the hardware does) but it’s less pronounced than old people complaining believe. It’s really harder to correct for subtle biases for things like inflation which happen over long periods of time.

mytailorisrich 6y ago

Miele appliances (for example) still last decades and all efforts are made by the manufacturer to find you spare parts if you need. But they cost 3-4x more than a budget appliance. That's a key aspect of the market here: People tend to compare on purchase price. If manufacturers have to compete on price, of course something has to give in order to make cheaper appliances... The market tends to give consumers what they want. It's not all bad, though, because this also puts pressure on manufacturers to optimise, including by using less material. Appliances tend not to be that bad either unless perhaps if you buy really cheap cr*p.

wizzwizz4 6y ago
> The market tends to give consumers what they want. The market tends to give consumers what they buy. This is distinct from what they ask for, which too is distinct from what they want, which too is distinct from what they like (and, while we're at it, from what they approve of).
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  It's very hard to know what people, including yourself, really want. So best we can do is observing "revealed preferences", which is what Economists call "what people actually choose".
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    And "revealed preferences" are mostly bunk, because of what GP alludes to. It's evaluating people's choices out of options available on the market, not what they would buy if they could freely optimize the feature/price matrix. Another way to put it: "revealed preference" is just what one considers the least bad of the bad choices available.
    - mytailorisrich 6y ago
      Perhaps but that should be an unstable equilibrium, i.e. temporary. As long as real competition exist, if it is possible to deliver what consumers really want then sooner or later someone will discover it, make a killing and prompt everyone in the market to follow suit or die. It's easy to blame corporations but in fine I believe that the current situation has been driven by the choices of the consumers, i.e. all of us. Sure we want better quality, repairability, longevity, but we also want cheaper, among other things. I think product ranges simply reflect where our priorities really lie.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        It should be in theory, but in practice it's pretty stable on relevant time horizons. There are many factors fixing such equilibria. For instance, most consumers aren't rational actors carefully evaluating purchasing decisions. Or, when they pick, they may optimize for multiple targets simultaneously. There are economies of scale that create barriers to entry for new competitors. Trust takes time to develop. Etc. To use two relevant examples: Audio jack on phones: a lot of people want one, but companies seem to - one by one - eschew including it, and gain on the BOM savings and getting customers to purchase additional dongles/adapters. Phones are something you don't pick based on one particular feature. A new competitor that'd like to offer a good smartphone with an audio jack will have to first match many other features of competing smartphones. They won't be able to do all that and achieve similar price point, as incumbents benefit both from established supply chains and scale. Therefore, a new offering is going to be significantly worse in terms of features or price (or both), way beyond what established companies have saved on removing the jack. Reliability of fridges: the three most important parameters that matter for customers are internal volume, price point, and overall aesthetics. The consumers would prefer a fridge that lasts a decade over one that last three years, but such decision is somewhat beyond the calculation horizon of most people (the reasoning is instead, "if and when it breaks, we'll deal with it") - and even if it was, it's very hard to verify. A company selling reliable fridges would have to first be able to reliably signal their reliability, which is hard to do. You could try offering very long (or lifetime) warranties, but unless you're an established brand, people ain't gonna believe it. Then there's the general aspect of customer irrationality[0] wrt. price. People without much spending money prefer cheap products. There's a phenomenon in markets that probably has a name, where a market for a product bifurcates into race-to-the-bottom low-quality but cheap products, and high-end products (often for professional users) with low sales volume and high markup. The middle - quality products at moderate prices - disappears entirely. A new competitor, wanting to target the middle in such a market, will find themselves losing to both cheap and expensive ends. -- [0] - Though I'm becoming less certain that this is truly irrational. The other day I saw some article highlighting that humans like to optimize for maximizing available options, in a way that comes close to mathematical optimum. Since in money-based economies money is, quite literally, unit of options available, this would suggest that this behavioral heuristic applies.
- ska 6y ago
  And on the producer side, what they market as is distinct from what they make, what they try to make is distinct from what gets shipped, etc. A major point of markets is to try and figure this out iteratively. You can usefully think of it as an optimization algorithm that in practics prone to local minima but has some mechanisms to try and get out of them, which sometimes work.
mch0lic1 6y ago
What I really hate about Miele is their stupid will to push their stupid branding on the retailers (online), it always feels broken and its absolutely a pain to try to navigate any sites that integrates with them. Their tight grip on retailers also makes it hard to buy their products outside EU because nobody is willing to go through the pain. Add higher than average price and most smaller retailers just sell samsungs, lg and random chinese brands. The biggest problem remains, manufacturers are not required to sell repairable devices and parts everywhere, requirement is only applicable to EU, so they will continue to manufacture trash and will never have their parts available outside EU. And no, those EUR parts will definitely won't fit 99% of their products outside EU.

gruez 6y ago

>Common things that existed 20, 30, or even 40 years [...] often lasted 10 or 20 years in some cases It's worth mentioning that the common problem with these anecdotes is that it doesn't account for survivorship bias. That 30 year old refrigerator at your parent's house might lead you to conclude all refrigerators back in the day lasted 30 years, but in reality you're only seeing the refrigerators that lasted 30 years, not the ones that broke down and were replaced.

ska 6y ago

This is true, but it seems to be mostly consumer preference. That 30 year old refrigerator cost more (normalized) and does less than most of the ones you can buy today. When people offer longer lived, better built versions for more money, most people don't buy them. The same thing happened to furniture.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago
Its hard to tell whats a quality product and what is overpriced swindle. You can buy a phone for 2 grand but it won't last

inglor_cz 6y ago

The situation is not so clear-cut with domestic appliances. Modern fridges are much more energy-efficient. So there is a tradeoff: either you buy a new fridge, thus polluting the environment with the old fridge, but saving energy. Or you let your good old 30 year old fridge run, saving the resources needed for a new fridge, but burning a lot more energy in the process.

gsich 6y ago
It's a simple calculation. How much energy costs do I save compared to keeping the old one. Also I wouldn't expect any "modern" appliance to last more than 5 years.
- fy20 6y ago
  I bought an apartment nearly 5 years ago, and so shortly after that went on the appliance shopping trip. I tried to get what I thought were good quality appliances, and everything is still mostly working ok, but there have been teething problems with everything: - Bosch Fridge Freeze - a couple of the shelves have broken and I have no idea where to get replacements. - Bosch Fan Oven - sometimes cuts off if it is left on above 250c for more than 30 mins. - Bosch Dishwasher - had to take it apart once to clean as some paper got stuck in the impeller. - Bosch Condenser Dryer - no issues so far, other than not RTFM about the drain hose which needs to be elevated above the unit for some reason. - Samsung Washing Machine - One day I came in and there was water all over the floor from the washing machine. Took it apart and I could see signs of leaking, but couldn't see anything wrong, after that it worked fine. Recently it starting making a lot of noise on the spin cycle, turned out the feet needed leveling, now it's good as new. - Electrolux Induction Cooktop - There are some cosmetic issues (stains that won't come off) on the glass.

varjag 6y ago

About any fridge you buy now would last a decade easily. Several decades even, if you bother to invest into its maintenance and repair like people did 40 years ago.

stretchcat 6y ago
Getting appliances repaired is harder than it once was. Disposability culture drove many repair shops out of business. Many repair shops I and my family used to are now gone or dying. The guy who used to do sewing machine repairs for my mother is gone. The cobbler that used to repair my boots is gone. Furthermore, appliances that used to come with repair manuals no longer do, and finding the manual online is often a real chore. Fewer people will repair things on their own when manufacturers make it difficult to find even basic documentation.
- varjag 6y ago
  It's a good point, but it's not really a failure of product design. Appliances themselves now are not any less reliable than they were in mid-century. There is no grand conspiracy of manufacturers filing down screw threads to make them fail. I did not repair any of my fridges (they never failed in all of my adult life), but I did repair my washing machine (AEG 15y.o.) and my beans-to-coffee DeLonghi (10+ y.o). Both were very repairable and it was a matter of identifying the failure and finding the right part on eBay.
  - stretchcat 6y ago
    I don't think manufacturers are conspiring. I think this widespread behavior emerges from market circumstances and is not evidence of any sort of collusion between manufacturers. You don't need grand conspiracies to explain things like this, nor have I proposed one!
  - neop1x 6y ago
    True, except there are manufacturers like Apple or Sony which won't provide genuine spare parta to retail people (tried that). Then you have to buy parts from "for parts" eBay auctions or counterfait/bad quality batteries from random Chinese seller...

acdha 6y ago

We’ve had declines in some areas - IoT being an obvious culprit - but there are two major confounds belying that anecdotal belief: 1. You don’t see the junk which never lasted 20 years - plenty of stuff died back then, too. Cutting corners to save a buck is a very, very old practice - I’d be surprised if you couldn’t find some Babylonian tablet complaining about it. 2. Manufacturers generally switched from letting prices go up to introducing new products. If you buy stuff which costs as much (adjusted for inflation) as what your parents laid, it often lasts just as long. The problem is that a lot of us only buy the cheapest thing and are then surprised when a $400 purchase now doesn’t hold up as well as a purchase which cost $1,000 in today’s dollars – and the one costing $1,000 today probably does much better. Styles also change - for example, a lot of athletic gear became very focused on ultralight performance: great for racers but almost always less durable. Does that mean you can’t buy the older style or just that you need to shop differently? It’s definitely the case that there are areas where it’s harder to find durable options (IoT causing a generation of devices to lose features or fail long before the hardware does) but it’s less pronounced than old people complaining believe. It’s really harder to correct for subtle biases for things like inflation which happen over long periods of time.