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I wish companies would be forced to do that same for everything, and at a reasonable cost. It's infuriating how if I buy, say, a dishwasher, and the heater pum

I wish companies would be forced to do that same for everything, and at a reasonable cost. It's infuriating how if I buy, say, a dishwasher, and the heater pump goes, it's around £100 for a new one, but the whole machine costs maybe £400. Are you telling me that all that steel and plastic and motors and controllers and labor and profit and shipping and everything is actually 75% of the cost, and 25% of the entire value of my dishwasher is tied up in the value of that one part, the one that happened to need replacement? And don't get me started on cars! If we as species cared about sustainability (we don't), companies would have to sell their parts for little enough that you could buy all the parts for a whole new machine for no more than the cost of the new machine. That would focus their minds on using interchangeable, standard, COTS parts to avoid having to maintain SKUs and also avoid having the parts fail in the first place. Rather, now, it's highly profitable to make parts fail: you either get to ding the customer for a replacement part at 500% markup, or they give in and buy a whole new machine, and the old one goes to scrap.

superjan 5y ago
> companies would have to sell their parts for little enough that you could buy all the parts for a whole new machine Something like that could be a law. We could allow them a little markup to cover distribution cost, but one could argue it could be that simple.
a-priori 5y ago
What this could be saying is that it’s very inefficient to buy the parts in units. If you were to buy a thousand of these parts, as a manufacturer might, I doubt they’d each cost £100.
imglorp 5y ago
Yeah motors are expensive, but I have saved so many large appliances needing a minor component from the trash with a little basic troubleshooting and a site like appliancepartspros. So often, it's a sensor, a pawl, heating element, belt, or roller that's 1% of the machine's price. This is in reach of anyone with a few hand tools and the internet. A repair company (always 3rd party now) will charge %50 of the machine's price for a trip charge, marked up parts, and labor.
- adhesive_wombat 5y ago
  Oooh yes, don't get me started on inaccessible little plastic sacrificial parts. Yes, having one part be sacrificial to protect the others is good engineering, but only if it's also easily replaced and inexpensive. If you can't get replacements or they're 3 hours of disassembly away, that's just planned obsolesce in a dress. And the number of times I've broken a little plastic tab! How much can it cost to put a extra 0.5mm of plastic in the mould just there? What fraction of a penny was saved and now requires a whole new part, comprising probably at least thousands of times more material plus shipping energy?
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Re: sacrificial parts, I recently had to rebuild a two-car wood (read: heavy) torsion spring garage door system. The cleverest part was the plastic coupler [0] between the door-connected shaft and motor. When the system originally locked up, the coupler broke. Consequently after restoring the system, I needed a $9 piece of plastic, rather than a $xxx new motor. Made me sad that more modern things aren't designed with such value-protective degradation modes. [0] https://www.amazon.com/LiftMaster-Coupler-Chamberlain-Craftsman-Garage/dp/B007VP7A5A https://www.amazon.com/LiftMaster-Coupler-Chamberlain-Crafts...
    - a_mechanic 5y ago
      FYI motor couplings are not typically designed to fail as a method of protecting the motor. Overload protection is usually handled electrically, with fuses/circuit breaker which will remove power when too much load is applied to the motor (stuck door) or via controller board and load sensing. https://www.prairielectric.com/blog/how-do-circuit-breakers-protect-appliances/ https://www.prairielectric.com/blog/how-do-circuit-breakers-...
  - xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
    There is no cost savings associated with the size of tabs, for example. It's an assembly thing. Usually you want the easiest to assemble as labor and QA is expensive. Ease of disassembly has by comparison very little upfront value.
swores 5y ago
While I'm not defending the fact that many companies do rip people off in their spare parts prices, > Are you telling me that all that steel and plastic and motors and controllers and labor and profit and shipping and everything is actually 75% of the cost, and 25% of the entire value of my dishwasher is tied up in the value of that one part, the one that happened to need replacement? You're forgetting that the spare part also needs similar logistics, shipping, support, etc. around it, so you would expect ordering one of every part separately to cost far more than ordering a single machine even before they put any further markup on it.
- chris_wot 5y ago
  It works fine for cars, there is a massive third party market.
- adhesive_wombat 5y ago
  Right, and those aspects are expensive because they don't have economies of scale because they either don't really want people to use them too much, and if people do want to use them they'll squeeze them. They'd rather people scrap machines and get new ones. And even if I then swear off "unreliable" Hotpoint machines and go for Siemens, some Siemens customer will make the reverse trip, so they all profit together. If they all had to provide all the parts at a reasonable cost, they'd figure out a way to get it done. I'm sure Siemens, say, can figure out a way to ship a part by part number efficiently, considering its already on a shelf somewhere. And if you a company don't want to pay for that? Use a standard part. Now it's not your problem. It'll never happen, but it's nice to think about as the world drowns in piles of ruined single-use equipment, while the money spent on replacing them flows endlessly corporate pockets.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    That’s the thing: they’re already selling the service parts at a reasonable cost. What’s “too cheap” in your situation is the highly automated, continuous conveyance, mass production line that can take in parts by the container load and pump out fully-functioning dishwashers for less than a week’s wages.
ChuckNorris89 5y ago
>Are you telling me that all that steel and plastic and motors and controllers and labor and profit and shipping and everything is actually 75% of the cost, and 25% of the entire value of my dishwasher is tied up in the value of that one part, the one that happened to need replacement? Obviously not, but that's how economies of scale, combined with planned obsolescence and rent seeking works. That's how Apple who makes disposable earphones that last two years is worth trillions and Sennheiser who makes headphones lasting 20+ years is going bust. It's not profitable making fair priced products that last forever or are cheap and easy to repair.
- adhesive_wombat 5y ago
  Which is why it should be required (if sustainable manufacture was deemed a bugger social benefit to profit). If Apple had to make headphones that were either robust or repairable (or both, can you imagine), they'd find a way, if only to avoid losing money on replacing broken ones.
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    Yes, because if it wasn’t required, companies like Apple could make products that people wanted beyond the robustness and repairable aspects. By keeping all companies hobbled by the same regulatory requirements, Apple can no longer cheat with better functionality and aesthetics. Of course, there is obviously a trade off.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      I think that back in the day before Sennheiser become the last man standing to produce robust and repairable headphones, they competed with other manufacturers of robust and repairable headphones on factors like functionality and aesthetics. TL;DR: Nice strawman ya got there. Would be a shame if it burned down.
- afandian 5y ago
  Is Sennheiser going bust? Can't the pro market sustain them?
sokoloff 5y ago
If you bought a dishwasher one part at a time, how much more is it reasonable to expect for it to cost? I think a $500 dishwasher costing $2500 if ordered one part at a time is reasonable. Your car is likely well over $100K if you ordered it one part at a time. If you want to insist that the sum of the parts costs no more than the MSRP of the dishwasher, you won’t find the parts falling to 1/5 their current cost, but rather the dishwasher now listing for $2500 (and likely having frequent deep-discount sales).
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  >Your car is likely well over $100K if you ordered it one part at a time. I guess I agree, but when I read it I couldn't help but think that Johnny Cash built his Cadillac one part at a time and it didn't cost him a thing!
  - DarylZero 5y ago
    didn't cost him a DIME
- buran77 5y ago
  And yet if you buy a computer one part at a time, through the magic of standardization you may end up even cheaper than the fully build OEM option. You won't see too many industries attempting this kind of standardization anytime soon.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    That was maybe once true. If you're literally starting from zero today and buying new parts? I sort of doubt it. (Though I don't really disagree that it's generally easier to swap out parts on a (home-built) tower computer than it is with most things because of standards.)
    - buran77 5y ago
      It's perfectly true today if you ignore the recent price hikes which happen under different forces (silicon shortage, crypto stuff). An OEM might be cheaper because they will put in lower quality stuff you'd never buy yourself (the absolute cheapest part that fits the bill, the cheapest motherboard, the worst thermal paste), and they have to cover extra services, warranty, building and distributing the systems, etc. I think you can still get cheaper and/or better systems by yourself.
agilob 5y ago
My friend bought a smart fridge from Samsung with 2 years warranty. After 26 months of usage thermostat failed. This fridge is purely electronic, without old-type thermostat that "clicks". Seller shop refused fixing it, Samsung quoted fix for more than the fridge cost 2 years ago. There it goes £1800 "worth" of more electronic waste. My coworker damaged dishwasher seal, no way to buy new seal at all, could only be acquired from another dishwasher of this model. Had to give it for recycling and buy another one. I just hope this doesn't happen to me, so I always do days of research online before buying a hairdryer...
- adhesive_wombat 5y ago
  It happens at all levels. Try buying a pair of kitchen scissors that don't have overmoulded plastic handles that break at the end of the handle tangs. There are about 2 models of all-metal scissors.
  - syshum 5y ago
    Stop shopping on Amazon or Consumer store. Go to a Kitchen Supply store, or for scissors look outside kitchen branded ones, nothing about scissors need to be "kitchen" a Kitchen supply shop will have more than 2 models, some will have plastic but they will be over molded full-tang metal under them, then you can just get scissors designed for something other than kitchen use, lots are out there
    - Schroedingersat 5y ago
      Kitchen/carving scissors are a specific design with features (curved notch, semi-serrated, steep blade angle) for cutting up ie. a chicken not found on other scissors. That said, plenty of all metal ones exist
    - adhesive_wombat 5y ago
      "Why didn't I just?" so glad you asked. Funnily enough, choice was so limited specifically because I didn't want any plastic and I refused to consider the ones on Amazon on general principle, which ruled out the Newness ones and I didn't like the Grunwerg ones because I suspect those over-handles are sintered crap that's barely better than plastic. So now it's a choice between the ones on Sinplastico, a Chinese brand and a handful of artisan "best of British" brands that were very expensive (and also generally have ostentatiously old-fashioned styling).
throw0101a 5y ago
> It's infuriating how if I buy, say, a dishwasher, and the heater pump goes, it's around £100 for a new one, but the whole machine costs maybe £400. The heater pump when originally manufacturer costs £20 because it is done in lots of (tens of?) thousands and assembled in bulk by cheap labour, and shipped in a large container that costs not-a-lot of to move over an ocean. The replacement part is stored by (potentially) a third-party company that ordered it for £30, by an employee who is paid £40,000 per year, in a warehouse that costs >£100 per square metre to rent (potentially for years), and when requested then has to be delivered by someone paid £20/hour, to be installed by someone paid >£50/hour (with a three hour minimum). And don't forget the VAT.
- ornornor 5y ago
  > to be installed by someone paid >£50/hour (with a three hour minimum). That one shouldn’t factor into the part price. It’s your choice to hire someone to install the part and at what price vs doing it yourself.
Tams80 5y ago
Sustainability-wise, parts need to have a significant mark-up. Otherwise: 1. People will either themselves bodge devices together, or get someone else to do so. 2. Companies will find it hard to sell new products if they can all be fixed easily. If the parts have a mark-up, they can be a good revenue stream. Unfortunately, companies are greedy and still make stuff hard/impossible to repair while charging high mark-ups for what can be.
- adhesive_wombat 5y ago
  Sustainable in the "humanity gets to live above ground in 2100" sense, not "CEO yachts-per-year must never fall" sense. Funnily enough the second sense does eventually require the first, but not in this accounting period.
technobabbler 5y ago
Why would they do that when they could sell you the dishwasher AND the razor blades? Unreliability is service profit.
Schroedingersat 5y ago
The parts in a product should be available anywhere it's sold for at least 5 years and sum to less than the lowest price it has sold for.
sly010 5y ago
Perhaps some rental model could work, where appliances are not owned but rented. Although the renter would probably still be on the hook for breakdown due to mis-use and once mis-use is an excuse, there is no incentive to make things last.
- svilen_dobrev 5y ago
  this same idea was suggested in another thread, i think for cars, few days ago, and still yes, there's no real incentive. There are excuses all over.
WanderPanda 5y ago
You are free to open a company that operates to your standards and serve customers with similar demands. But why do you need to force your ideals on other customers?! There is only one answer to that: You think you know better what they want than they themselves which is a very sad world view imo.
- Angostura 5y ago
  > But why do you need to force your ideals on other customers?! Because we all share the same limited ecosystem.
TaylorAlexander 5y ago
In my mind, if everything was open source or there were no IP restrictions, a lot of this stuff would happen automatically. Companies would tend to standardize on parts after a while as everyone would clone the good parts of everyone else. Open source 3D printers always have cheap replacement parts widely available. These regulations are trying to use the state to correct for problems that in some cases occur because the state granted them monopoly protections for their IP. The state could simply not offer those protections to prevent a lot of these issues. See also a recent comment I wrote on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30512363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30512363 As well as this on the ground report of a culture without IP restrictions: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284
- flowerbeater 5y ago
  Wouldn't the manufacturers just take over, and only survive in the lowest cost place for manufacturing? The inventors/designers would get nothing and no one would want to do that anymore. What would be the incentive to share your open sourced designs? Like it'd be pretty easy for one state-supported giant manufacturer to just build every single open sourced product, and sell it direct. The whole world would buy from this cheapest producer. No one else would get anything, and supply chains would become even more brittle. Another way to think about it is if knockoffs were guaranteed identical to the originals, but at a lower price. Everyone would just buy the knockoffs. No one would want to make anything new anymore.
- bsder 5y ago
  > As well as this on the ground report of a culture without IP restrictions: The Chitubox people are the counterexample. Because they exist in a situation without IP restrictions, they are trying to tie everything to subscription and add encryption to the harwdare in order to extract money. And, I'm not entirely unsympathetic. My personal opinion is that you should be able to get paid for developing good software. However, without IP protections, people can just scarf up your work. I see this from both the perspective of machine tools and electronic test equipment. Anything under $5K has shit customer support--deal with it. Anything above $25K generally has ok customer support. Anything in between gets crushed out of the market.
reaperducer 5y ago
And don't get me started on cars! The cost of replacing a key for my wife's car ($1,200) is more than the value of the car. If she loses her key again, it's cheaper to just buy a new car. What a strange world we've made.
- userbinator 5y ago
  Can you buy a new car, especially in today's market, for $1200?
  - dboreham 5y ago
    Parent probably means "new to me".
e-clinton 5y ago
I just paid $475 to fix the door latch on a $1000 washing machine. It’s obnoxious. I do think cars are much better than most items. Maybe not some of the electronics which are all tightly integrated, but certainly the mechanics.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
fennecfoxy 5y ago
It's expensive because they have to manufacture that part specifically as a replacement and then store it for x years sitting in a box until someone needs it. I can understand that some businesses overcharge for replacement parts, but otherwise it's also just as understandable that the price is a little bit higher for a part in a model they no longer actively manufacture for sale.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > It's expensive because they have to manufacture that part specifically as a replacement Eh, what? No, they're manufacturing a lot of them to put in the machines already. They only have to manufacture a few more of them, not set up anything specifically at all. > and then store it for x years sitting in a box until someone needs it. That can't be all that expensive, considering the Ali Baba guys can sell a corresponding part for ten bucks.
  - fennecfoxy 5y ago
    You forget that car models change over time. People don't buy new cars every year. My car is from 2009, I doubt that all the parts on it are the same in a brand new model today. I wouldn't trust an Alibaba/Aliexpress part when it comes to the mechanical bits of the car, myself. Not sure if you're American and without WoF/MoT but I'd only go with that stuff for unimportant stuff like trim.

superjan 5y ago

> companies would have to sell their parts for little enough that you could buy all the parts for a whole new machine Something like that could be a law. We could allow them a little markup to cover distribution cost, but one could argue it could be that simple.

a-priori 5y ago

What this could be saying is that it’s very inefficient to buy the parts in units. If you were to buy a thousand of these parts, as a manufacturer might, I doubt they’d each cost £100.

imglorp 5y ago

Yeah motors are expensive, but I have saved so many large appliances needing a minor component from the trash with a little basic troubleshooting and a site like appliancepartspros. So often, it's a sensor, a pawl, heating element, belt, or roller that's 1% of the machine's price. This is in reach of anyone with a few hand tools and the internet. A repair company (always 3rd party now) will charge %50 of the machine's price for a trip charge, marked up parts, and labor.

adhesive_wombat 5y ago
Oooh yes, don't get me started on inaccessible little plastic sacrificial parts. Yes, having one part be sacrificial to protect the others is good engineering, but only if it's also easily replaced and inexpensive. If you can't get replacements or they're 3 hours of disassembly away, that's just planned obsolesce in a dress. And the number of times I've broken a little plastic tab! How much can it cost to put a extra 0.5mm of plastic in the mould just there? What fraction of a penny was saved and now requires a whole new part, comprising probably at least thousands of times more material plus shipping energy?
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Re: sacrificial parts, I recently had to rebuild a two-car wood (read: heavy) torsion spring garage door system. The cleverest part was the plastic coupler [0] between the door-connected shaft and motor. When the system originally locked up, the coupler broke. Consequently after restoring the system, I needed a $9 piece of plastic, rather than a $xxx new motor. Made me sad that more modern things aren't designed with such value-protective degradation modes. [0] https://www.amazon.com/LiftMaster-Coupler-Chamberlain-Craftsman-Garage/dp/B007VP7A5A https://www.amazon.com/LiftMaster-Coupler-Chamberlain-Crafts...
  - a_mechanic 5y ago
    FYI motor couplings are not typically designed to fail as a method of protecting the motor. Overload protection is usually handled electrically, with fuses/circuit breaker which will remove power when too much load is applied to the motor (stuck door) or via controller board and load sensing. https://www.prairielectric.com/blog/how-do-circuit-breakers-protect-appliances/ https://www.prairielectric.com/blog/how-do-circuit-breakers-...
- xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
  There is no cost savings associated with the size of tabs, for example. It's an assembly thing. Usually you want the easiest to assemble as labor and QA is expensive. Ease of disassembly has by comparison very little upfront value.

swores 5y ago

While I'm not defending the fact that many companies do rip people off in their spare parts prices, > Are you telling me that all that steel and plastic and motors and controllers and labor and profit and shipping and everything is actually 75% of the cost, and 25% of the entire value of my dishwasher is tied up in the value of that one part, the one that happened to need replacement? You're forgetting that the spare part also needs similar logistics, shipping, support, etc. around it, so you would expect ordering one of every part separately to cost far more than ordering a single machine even before they put any further markup on it.

chris_wot 5y ago
It works fine for cars, there is a massive third party market.
adhesive_wombat 5y ago
Right, and those aspects are expensive because they don't have economies of scale because they either don't really want people to use them too much, and if people do want to use them they'll squeeze them. They'd rather people scrap machines and get new ones. And even if I then swear off "unreliable" Hotpoint machines and go for Siemens, some Siemens customer will make the reverse trip, so they all profit together. If they all had to provide all the parts at a reasonable cost, they'd figure out a way to get it done. I'm sure Siemens, say, can figure out a way to ship a part by part number efficiently, considering its already on a shelf somewhere. And if you a company don't want to pay for that? Use a standard part. Now it's not your problem. It'll never happen, but it's nice to think about as the world drowns in piles of ruined single-use equipment, while the money spent on replacing them flows endlessly corporate pockets.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  That’s the thing: they’re already selling the service parts at a reasonable cost. What’s “too cheap” in your situation is the highly automated, continuous conveyance, mass production line that can take in parts by the container load and pump out fully-functioning dishwashers for less than a week’s wages.

ChuckNorris89 5y ago

>Are you telling me that all that steel and plastic and motors and controllers and labor and profit and shipping and everything is actually 75% of the cost, and 25% of the entire value of my dishwasher is tied up in the value of that one part, the one that happened to need replacement? Obviously not, but that's how economies of scale, combined with planned obsolescence and rent seeking works. That's how Apple who makes disposable earphones that last two years is worth trillions and Sennheiser who makes headphones lasting 20+ years is going bust. It's not profitable making fair priced products that last forever or are cheap and easy to repair.

adhesive_wombat 5y ago
Which is why it should be required (if sustainable manufacture was deemed a bugger social benefit to profit). If Apple had to make headphones that were either robust or repairable (or both, can you imagine), they'd find a way, if only to avoid losing money on replacing broken ones.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  Yes, because if it wasn’t required, companies like Apple could make products that people wanted beyond the robustness and repairable aspects. By keeping all companies hobbled by the same regulatory requirements, Apple can no longer cheat with better functionality and aesthetics. Of course, there is obviously a trade off.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    I think that back in the day before Sennheiser become the last man standing to produce robust and repairable headphones, they competed with other manufacturers of robust and repairable headphones on factors like functionality and aesthetics. TL;DR: Nice strawman ya got there. Would be a shame if it burned down.
afandian 5y ago
Is Sennheiser going bust? Can't the pro market sustain them?

sokoloff 5y ago

If you bought a dishwasher one part at a time, how much more is it reasonable to expect for it to cost? I think a $500 dishwasher costing $2500 if ordered one part at a time is reasonable. Your car is likely well over $100K if you ordered it one part at a time. If you want to insist that the sum of the parts costs no more than the MSRP of the dishwasher, you won’t find the parts falling to 1/5 their current cost, but rather the dishwasher now listing for $2500 (and likely having frequent deep-discount sales).

bryanrasmussen 5y ago
>Your car is likely well over $100K if you ordered it one part at a time. I guess I agree, but when I read it I couldn't help but think that Johnny Cash built his Cadillac one part at a time and it didn't cost him a thing!
- DarylZero 5y ago
  didn't cost him a DIME
buran77 5y ago
And yet if you buy a computer one part at a time, through the magic of standardization you may end up even cheaper than the fully build OEM option. You won't see too many industries attempting this kind of standardization anytime soon.
- ghaff 5y ago
  That was maybe once true. If you're literally starting from zero today and buying new parts? I sort of doubt it. (Though I don't really disagree that it's generally easier to swap out parts on a (home-built) tower computer than it is with most things because of standards.)
  - buran77 5y ago
    It's perfectly true today if you ignore the recent price hikes which happen under different forces (silicon shortage, crypto stuff). An OEM might be cheaper because they will put in lower quality stuff you'd never buy yourself (the absolute cheapest part that fits the bill, the cheapest motherboard, the worst thermal paste), and they have to cover extra services, warranty, building and distributing the systems, etc. I think you can still get cheaper and/or better systems by yourself.

agilob 5y ago

My friend bought a smart fridge from Samsung with 2 years warranty. After 26 months of usage thermostat failed. This fridge is purely electronic, without old-type thermostat that "clicks". Seller shop refused fixing it, Samsung quoted fix for more than the fridge cost 2 years ago. There it goes £1800 "worth" of more electronic waste. My coworker damaged dishwasher seal, no way to buy new seal at all, could only be acquired from another dishwasher of this model. Had to give it for recycling and buy another one. I just hope this doesn't happen to me, so I always do days of research online before buying a hairdryer...

adhesive_wombat 5y ago
It happens at all levels. Try buying a pair of kitchen scissors that don't have overmoulded plastic handles that break at the end of the handle tangs. There are about 2 models of all-metal scissors.
- syshum 5y ago
  Stop shopping on Amazon or Consumer store. Go to a Kitchen Supply store, or for scissors look outside kitchen branded ones, nothing about scissors need to be "kitchen" a Kitchen supply shop will have more than 2 models, some will have plastic but they will be over molded full-tang metal under them, then you can just get scissors designed for something other than kitchen use, lots are out there
  - Schroedingersat 5y ago
    Kitchen/carving scissors are a specific design with features (curved notch, semi-serrated, steep blade angle) for cutting up ie. a chicken not found on other scissors. That said, plenty of all metal ones exist
  - adhesive_wombat 5y ago
    "Why didn't I just?" so glad you asked. Funnily enough, choice was so limited specifically because I didn't want any plastic and I refused to consider the ones on Amazon on general principle, which ruled out the Newness ones and I didn't like the Grunwerg ones because I suspect those over-handles are sintered crap that's barely better than plastic. So now it's a choice between the ones on Sinplastico, a Chinese brand and a handful of artisan "best of British" brands that were very expensive (and also generally have ostentatiously old-fashioned styling).

throw0101a 5y ago

> It's infuriating how if I buy, say, a dishwasher, and the heater pump goes, it's around £100 for a new one, but the whole machine costs maybe £400. The heater pump when originally manufacturer costs £20 because it is done in lots of (tens of?) thousands and assembled in bulk by cheap labour, and shipped in a large container that costs not-a-lot of to move over an ocean. The replacement part is stored by (potentially) a third-party company that ordered it for £30, by an employee who is paid £40,000 per year, in a warehouse that costs >£100 per square metre to rent (potentially for years), and when requested then has to be delivered by someone paid £20/hour, to be installed by someone paid >£50/hour (with a three hour minimum). And don't forget the VAT.

ornornor 5y ago
> to be installed by someone paid >£50/hour (with a three hour minimum). That one shouldn’t factor into the part price. It’s your choice to hire someone to install the part and at what price vs doing it yourself.

Tams80 5y ago

Sustainability-wise, parts need to have a significant mark-up. Otherwise: 1. People will either themselves bodge devices together, or get someone else to do so. 2. Companies will find it hard to sell new products if they can all be fixed easily. If the parts have a mark-up, they can be a good revenue stream. Unfortunately, companies are greedy and still make stuff hard/impossible to repair while charging high mark-ups for what can be.

adhesive_wombat 5y ago
Sustainable in the "humanity gets to live above ground in 2100" sense, not "CEO yachts-per-year must never fall" sense. Funnily enough the second sense does eventually require the first, but not in this accounting period.

technobabbler 5y ago

Why would they do that when they could sell you the dishwasher AND the razor blades? Unreliability is service profit.

Schroedingersat 5y ago

The parts in a product should be available anywhere it's sold for at least 5 years and sum to less than the lowest price it has sold for.

sly010 5y ago

Perhaps some rental model could work, where appliances are not owned but rented. Although the renter would probably still be on the hook for breakdown due to mis-use and once mis-use is an excuse, there is no incentive to make things last.

svilen_dobrev 5y ago
this same idea was suggested in another thread, i think for cars, few days ago, and still yes, there's no real incentive. There are excuses all over.

WanderPanda 5y ago

You are free to open a company that operates to your standards and serve customers with similar demands. But why do you need to force your ideals on other customers?! There is only one answer to that: You think you know better what they want than they themselves which is a very sad world view imo.

Angostura 5y ago
> But why do you need to force your ideals on other customers?! Because we all share the same limited ecosystem.

TaylorAlexander 5y ago

In my mind, if everything was open source or there were no IP restrictions, a lot of this stuff would happen automatically. Companies would tend to standardize on parts after a while as everyone would clone the good parts of everyone else. Open source 3D printers always have cheap replacement parts widely available. These regulations are trying to use the state to correct for problems that in some cases occur because the state granted them monopoly protections for their IP. The state could simply not offer those protections to prevent a lot of these issues. See also a recent comment I wrote on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30512363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30512363 As well as this on the ground report of a culture without IP restrictions: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284

flowerbeater 5y ago
Wouldn't the manufacturers just take over, and only survive in the lowest cost place for manufacturing? The inventors/designers would get nothing and no one would want to do that anymore. What would be the incentive to share your open sourced designs? Like it'd be pretty easy for one state-supported giant manufacturer to just build every single open sourced product, and sell it direct. The whole world would buy from this cheapest producer. No one else would get anything, and supply chains would become even more brittle. Another way to think about it is if knockoffs were guaranteed identical to the originals, but at a lower price. Everyone would just buy the knockoffs. No one would want to make anything new anymore.
bsder 5y ago
> As well as this on the ground report of a culture without IP restrictions: The Chitubox people are the counterexample. Because they exist in a situation without IP restrictions, they are trying to tie everything to subscription and add encryption to the harwdare in order to extract money. And, I'm not entirely unsympathetic. My personal opinion is that you should be able to get paid for developing good software. However, without IP protections, people can just scarf up your work. I see this from both the perspective of machine tools and electronic test equipment. Anything under $5K has shit customer support--deal with it. Anything above $25K generally has ok customer support. Anything in between gets crushed out of the market.

reaperducer 5y ago

And don't get me started on cars! The cost of replacing a key for my wife's car ($1,200) is more than the value of the car. If she loses her key again, it's cheaper to just buy a new car. What a strange world we've made.

userbinator 5y ago
Can you buy a new car, especially in today's market, for $1200?
- dboreham 5y ago
  Parent probably means "new to me".

e-clinton 5y ago

I just paid $475 to fix the door latch on a $1000 washing machine. It’s obnoxious. I do think cars are much better than most items. Maybe not some of the electronics which are all tightly integrated, but certainly the mechanics.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

fennecfoxy 5y ago

It's expensive because they have to manufacture that part specifically as a replacement and then store it for x years sitting in a box until someone needs it. I can understand that some businesses overcharge for replacement parts, but otherwise it's also just as understandable that the price is a little bit higher for a part in a model they no longer actively manufacture for sale.

CRConrad 5y ago
> It's expensive because they have to manufacture that part specifically as a replacement Eh, what? No, they're manufacturing a lot of them to put in the machines already. They only have to manufacture a few more of them, not set up anything specifically at all. > and then store it for x years sitting in a box until someone needs it. That can't be all that expensive, considering the Ali Baba guys can sell a corresponding part for ten bucks.
- fennecfoxy 5y ago
  You forget that car models change over time. People don't buy new cars every year. My car is from 2009, I doubt that all the parts on it are the same in a brand new model today. I wouldn't trust an Alibaba/Aliexpress part when it comes to the mechanical bits of the car, myself. Not sure if you're American and without WoF/MoT but I'd only go with that stuff for unimportant stuff like trim.