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> Reputable brands that used to make quality products now need to compete on price I don't think it's just that. Many people (like myself) stopped buying "repu

> Reputable brands that used to make quality products now need to compete on price I don't think it's just that. Many people (like myself) stopped buying "reputable" brands because they have betrayed their reputation. Nowadays when buying electromechanic devices even when putting 10x the price i have no clue if it's going to last more than 2 years (minimum warranty in EU) and that's a fucking awful problem. In my view, we need 20+ years warranty (minimum, i personally would argue for 50+) on all products mandated by law, then we can start to see some improvement. This is a public policy problem and as much as i hate the EU institutions they are the only entity i know doing anything about this very serious problem creating tons of waste/pollution.

b112 5y ago
Quebec, a province in Canada, passed a law a few years back. Essentially, the language states that the product must last "a reasonable period of time" for its usage case. This is the new province wide, legislated warranty. Buy a washer, are a single man, use it once a week? It breaks in 15 years? Covered. Are a family of 8, wash 2x daily, it breaks after manufacture's stated warranty? Probably, not covered. This helps, because it stops parts that are designed to fail due to time, instead of usage, from destroying the product. There are a few government agencies which will help you with this too, instead of going to court, by merely a form to fill out.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > Are a family of 8, wash 2x daily, it breaks after manufacture's stated warranty? Probably, not covered. That sounds fair, until it's not. It's perfectly normal that a washer as a whole fails after 15 years: the thing is the belt is the only part that should fail and it should be easy to replace. Like with IT parts, manufacturers go to great lengths to ensure parts are incompatible with one another and hard to replace. Most electro-mechanic devices i've seen fail in the past two/three decades were due to electronics: heater thermostat (not the IoT kind, the dumb kind), washing machine program selector (also dumb kind), etc. Likewise in auto industry it was reported that most vehicles being recalled in the past years in USA were due to electronics failing, not mechanics. I personally find that outrageous and bet everyone would be better off if consumer products had standard bodies mandating use of specific interchangeable parts (like we have for electric/USB sockets or lightbulbs), and if it was illegal to sell hard-to-repair products (no glue breaking the device when you tear it apart). Mandating a >20y warranty and duty of available spare parts is in my view the path of least effort for regulators: it will significantly raise the overall price of pushing out new incompatible models. Manufacturers would only release a device once every decade once they have achieved some significant efficiency/usability gains, instead of releasing parts-incompatible new designs for bad products every month just to profit. If you add in some standards regulations dictating interoperable formats for specific parts, that would start to look like an eco-friendly user-benefiting regulation. Of course amateur industry like Pine64 needs to be exempt from such regulations to allow for innovation, but customer devices are a currently a nightmare destroying our planets and ruining our lives and wallets. I applaud Quebec for taking those steps, but they simply won't cut it. PS: How is IoT even legal? In 99% of cases, it introduces unnecessary complexity and fragility, and in most cases has glaring security concerns.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    "It was illegal to sell hard-to-repair products (no glue breaking the device when you tear it apart)." To please the 'mah free market' types, we shouldn't make it illegal - we should ship broken good back to the manufacturer and have them disasemble the device into pristine materials for perfect recylcing. Breach of recycling laws shiould be a criminal offence - if I litter on the streets, I can literally go to jail, so why is a company above the law in this regard? (and so many others) It will be so expensive to do, the effect will be the same
    - voxic11 5y ago
      As long as everyone is arrested for not recycling I am pleased. So if anyone puts one of these products into the trash rather than mailing them back to the original manufacturer they should be jailed.
      - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
        Right after we execute whoever invented resign codes, so that I have to check which part of plastic packaging from the super market uses which exact type of plastic, and have to cross-refrence if that plastic is reprocessed by my particular local authority. After that we have to get the people that get government subsidied for reprocessing, but their reprosessing is to ship our plastic illegally to poor nations where they are dumpled in the ocean
        nonrandomstring 5y ago
        I say we nuke the whole industry from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Sharlin 5y ago
Right. More than ever you’re just paying for the brand, the quality is just as bad (or inconsistent) as the equivalent H&M selection.
KarlKemp 5y ago
For most consumer appliances, it’s vastly more wasteful and energy intensive to run them for 20 years than to replace them at ten. That’s true for cars, refrigerators, washing machines, and obviously IT. That’s because energy efficiency does tend to improve. The lack of appliances that last this long is itself a result of better production: if you have some large number of components, each one must have a 50 year expected lifetime if you want a chance for the machine to work for even a decade. It’s improvements in precision and knowledge of materials that tightened down the variability for individual components, making it possible to construct something that is likely to survive the decade, then see everything failing at around the same time. Cutting down on over-provisioning in this manner obviously saves resources and costs, as well.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > For most consumer appliances, it’s vastly more wasteful and energy intensive to run them for 20 years than to replace them at ten. That might be true in terms of CO2 and energy efficiency, although the only sources i've found on the topic gave very opposite results. But no study that i know of accounts for pollution (waste water and polluted surroundings of extraction sites, refinement sites, assembly sites, and "recycling" sites) so i'm tempted to argue that anything we don't manufacture is better for the environment than better efficiency. > The lack of appliances that last this long is itself a result of better production: if you have some large number of components, each one must have a 50 year expected lifetime if you want a chance for the machine to work for even a decade. I strongly disagree with this interpretation. First, because industry routinely employs bad parts and bad design on purpose (planned obsolescence, eg. televisions placing heat-sensitive capacitors near heat sources). But also because an individual part failing is in my view OK as long as this part is standard and easy to source. There are some environmental/logistic concerns if you want to repair old devices given the gazillion incompatible spare parts they each use. But if they all used standard parts, we could and should have repair shops run as a free public service to avoid throwing stuff away. This in itself would do more for the environment than any "green new deal" would ever do.
  - KarlKemp 5y ago
FredPret 5y ago
I’ve lost faith in the concept of brands. They’ve almost all been MBA’ed. Hopefully the wheel will turn soon and product people will rule the roost once again. We need some MBA types as well, but there needs to be balance in the force.
- Mordisquitos 5y ago
  > I’ve lost faith in the concept of brands. They’ve almost all been MBA’ed. This is the first time that I've seen the term "MBA" being verbed (at least with that meaning) and yet I understand exactly what you mean and I fully agree with you. Congratulations if you coined this usage, it's a great way of expressing something for which I was missing a word.
  - mechanical_bear 5y ago
    I’ve heard it used in conversation previously, fwiw.
  - ericmay 5y ago
    It’s one of the popular tropes that’s repeated here and people use it as a lazy way of assigning blame for a phenomenon they do not understand whatsoever. Something bad happened? Couldn’t have possibly had a good reason for it, must be those MBA types. When Apple (as an example) turns around and produces groundbreaking chips and fantastic computers at an affordable price nobody gives Mr. MBA (Fuqua) Tim Cook credit for business decisions and leadership that enable this. I’d recommend avoiding this lazy intellectual path because it’s not only incorrect in this context, it perverts your thinking in other contexts as well.
    - FredPret 5y ago
      I would not be so quick to regard this as lazy thinking. It's merely shorthand for this idea: product people produce value, "MBA's" turn value into money. Obviously we need both sides. Tim Cook is an Industrial Engineer with an MBA - a perfect combination. Apple is actually a great example of a company that produces a lot of value and also captures it in the form of dollars. From this point of view, to be "MBA'ed" is to focus on profit while forgetting about producing value. This then waters down brands that were established on the bedrock of value produced by product people.
gingerlime 5y ago
There's already a law that covers it. IANAL but my here's my understanding of things: When you buy something in the UK/Europe, anything really, it needs to meet 3 criteria[0]: 1. Fit for purpose: i.e. if it says "running shoes", then shoes should be suitable for running. If you use them to hammer nails, then it's on you. 2. As described: match the description, model number, etc 3. Satisfactory quality: this is the key ... and it depends on the product, but generally it relies on common sense. i.e. if you bought a washing machine for 2000EUR, you can expect it to last, let's say, 20 years of regular family use... If you bought a 2nd hand washing machine for 50EUR, probably can't expect it to last more than a year... The problem is not with the law, but generally speaking, companies don't give a toss. Nobody's going to fine them... And worse, consumers are easily misled by warranty periods and just don't expect the protection. Even if they paid 2000EUR for a washing machine and it failed after 2 years, they are more likely to just get a new one. Even if legally they can require the retailer (not even the manufacturer) to replace or repair it because the product wasn't of sufficient quality. The burden of proof is usually on the consumer though, which kinda makes it harder though. [0] https://www.moneyhelper.org.uk/en/getting-help-and-advice/consumer-rights/consumer-rights-what-you-need-to-know https://www.moneyhelper.org.uk/en/getting-help-and-advice/co...
UncleMeat 5y ago
Yup. Why spend 2x more for a washer when it will crap out at the same rate?
chrischen 5y ago
They also need to start mandating transferrable warranties. There’s no sensible reason to block transfers except to suppress the used market.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  I'm not a lawyer, but is non-transferrable warranties even a thing? I've never had a single product where they asked me for identity to use the warranty. At worst, they asked for a proof of purchase, which some second-hand sellers are happy to provide when they still have it. Also worth noting: hardware manufacturers have found a better option to suppress the second hand market. Hardware locking (iCloud/Knox lock) is terribly efficient at this, essentially turning perfectly good devices into bricks. It's even "better" because they can advertise it as a security feature for gullible users who don't realize Apple/Samsung still has the master key and there's an entire corrupt grey market of company workers getting money under the table to defeat the lock in almost every phone store across the planet...
  - chrischen 5y ago
    Yes, many product segments have non-transferrable warranties. NVIDIA warranties are non-transferrable, as are Herman Miller warranties. That being said, you can have the original purchaser make the claim for you or you can pose as the original purchaser/doctor the receipts, but it creates a big hurdle for secondary markets. I don't understand what you mean by iCloud/Knox lock. As far as iCloud lock is concerned, it is only for stolen devices in which the owner did not deactivate their own icloud account. Where are your sources for gray market of company workers defeating the lock? I'd imagine if an Apple activation lock is bypassed it would have to do with resetting the password on the iCloud account.
ghaff 5y ago
One of the big issues in clothing and related is mostly market dynamics. The market used to be full of relatively niche brands (and stores) that sold genuinely differentiated, often higher quality, and typically somewhat more expensive clothing etc. Over time, a lot of those companies got bought out by conglomerates and started selling the same Asian-made stuff as everyone else (for the most part; there can still be differences. Premium brands often manufacture in Asia as well). It’s harder to charge a big premium for random clothing and soft goods. To pick a random example Lands’ End is a case in point.

b112 5y ago

Quebec, a province in Canada, passed a law a few years back. Essentially, the language states that the product must last "a reasonable period of time" for its usage case. This is the new province wide, legislated warranty. Buy a washer, are a single man, use it once a week? It breaks in 15 years? Covered. Are a family of 8, wash 2x daily, it breaks after manufacture's stated warranty? Probably, not covered. This helps, because it stops parts that are designed to fail due to time, instead of usage, from destroying the product. There are a few government agencies which will help you with this too, instead of going to court, by merely a form to fill out.

southerntofu 5y ago
> Are a family of 8, wash 2x daily, it breaks after manufacture's stated warranty? Probably, not covered. That sounds fair, until it's not. It's perfectly normal that a washer as a whole fails after 15 years: the thing is the belt is the only part that should fail and it should be easy to replace. Like with IT parts, manufacturers go to great lengths to ensure parts are incompatible with one another and hard to replace. Most electro-mechanic devices i've seen fail in the past two/three decades were due to electronics: heater thermostat (not the IoT kind, the dumb kind), washing machine program selector (also dumb kind), etc. Likewise in auto industry it was reported that most vehicles being recalled in the past years in USA were due to electronics failing, not mechanics. I personally find that outrageous and bet everyone would be better off if consumer products had standard bodies mandating use of specific interchangeable parts (like we have for electric/USB sockets or lightbulbs), and if it was illegal to sell hard-to-repair products (no glue breaking the device when you tear it apart). Mandating a >20y warranty and duty of available spare parts is in my view the path of least effort for regulators: it will significantly raise the overall price of pushing out new incompatible models. Manufacturers would only release a device once every decade once they have achieved some significant efficiency/usability gains, instead of releasing parts-incompatible new designs for bad products every month just to profit. If you add in some standards regulations dictating interoperable formats for specific parts, that would start to look like an eco-friendly user-benefiting regulation. Of course amateur industry like Pine64 needs to be exempt from such regulations to allow for innovation, but customer devices are a currently a nightmare destroying our planets and ruining our lives and wallets. I applaud Quebec for taking those steps, but they simply won't cut it. PS: How is IoT even legal? In 99% of cases, it introduces unnecessary complexity and fragility, and in most cases has glaring security concerns.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  "It was illegal to sell hard-to-repair products (no glue breaking the device when you tear it apart)." To please the 'mah free market' types, we shouldn't make it illegal - we should ship broken good back to the manufacturer and have them disasemble the device into pristine materials for perfect recylcing. Breach of recycling laws shiould be a criminal offence - if I litter on the streets, I can literally go to jail, so why is a company above the law in this regard? (and so many others) It will be so expensive to do, the effect will be the same
  - voxic11 5y ago
    As long as everyone is arrested for not recycling I am pleased. So if anyone puts one of these products into the trash rather than mailing them back to the original manufacturer they should be jailed.
    - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      Right after we execute whoever invented resign codes, so that I have to check which part of plastic packaging from the super market uses which exact type of plastic, and have to cross-refrence if that plastic is reprocessed by my particular local authority. After that we have to get the people that get government subsidied for reprocessing, but their reprosessing is to ship our plastic illegally to poor nations where they are dumpled in the ocean
      - nonrandomstring 5y ago
        I say we nuke the whole industry from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Sharlin 5y ago

Right. More than ever you’re just paying for the brand, the quality is just as bad (or inconsistent) as the equivalent H&M selection.

KarlKemp 5y ago

For most consumer appliances, it’s vastly more wasteful and energy intensive to run them for 20 years than to replace them at ten. That’s true for cars, refrigerators, washing machines, and obviously IT. That’s because energy efficiency does tend to improve. The lack of appliances that last this long is itself a result of better production: if you have some large number of components, each one must have a 50 year expected lifetime if you want a chance for the machine to work for even a decade. It’s improvements in precision and knowledge of materials that tightened down the variability for individual components, making it possible to construct something that is likely to survive the decade, then see everything failing at around the same time. Cutting down on over-provisioning in this manner obviously saves resources and costs, as well.

southerntofu 5y ago
> For most consumer appliances, it’s vastly more wasteful and energy intensive to run them for 20 years than to replace them at ten. That might be true in terms of CO2 and energy efficiency, although the only sources i've found on the topic gave very opposite results. But no study that i know of accounts for pollution (waste water and polluted surroundings of extraction sites, refinement sites, assembly sites, and "recycling" sites) so i'm tempted to argue that anything we don't manufacture is better for the environment than better efficiency. > The lack of appliances that last this long is itself a result of better production: if you have some large number of components, each one must have a 50 year expected lifetime if you want a chance for the machine to work for even a decade. I strongly disagree with this interpretation. First, because industry routinely employs bad parts and bad design on purpose (planned obsolescence, eg. televisions placing heat-sensitive capacitors near heat sources). But also because an individual part failing is in my view OK as long as this part is standard and easy to source. There are some environmental/logistic concerns if you want to repair old devices given the gazillion incompatible spare parts they each use. But if they all used standard parts, we could and should have repair shops run as a free public service to avoid throwing stuff away. This in itself would do more for the environment than any "green new deal" would ever do.
- KarlKemp 5y ago

FredPret 5y ago

I’ve lost faith in the concept of brands. They’ve almost all been MBA’ed. Hopefully the wheel will turn soon and product people will rule the roost once again. We need some MBA types as well, but there needs to be balance in the force.

Mordisquitos 5y ago
> I’ve lost faith in the concept of brands. They’ve almost all been MBA’ed. This is the first time that I've seen the term "MBA" being verbed (at least with that meaning) and yet I understand exactly what you mean and I fully agree with you. Congratulations if you coined this usage, it's a great way of expressing something for which I was missing a word.
- mechanical_bear 5y ago
  I’ve heard it used in conversation previously, fwiw.
- ericmay 5y ago
  It’s one of the popular tropes that’s repeated here and people use it as a lazy way of assigning blame for a phenomenon they do not understand whatsoever. Something bad happened? Couldn’t have possibly had a good reason for it, must be those MBA types. When Apple (as an example) turns around and produces groundbreaking chips and fantastic computers at an affordable price nobody gives Mr. MBA (Fuqua) Tim Cook credit for business decisions and leadership that enable this. I’d recommend avoiding this lazy intellectual path because it’s not only incorrect in this context, it perverts your thinking in other contexts as well.
  - FredPret 5y ago
    I would not be so quick to regard this as lazy thinking. It's merely shorthand for this idea: product people produce value, "MBA's" turn value into money. Obviously we need both sides. Tim Cook is an Industrial Engineer with an MBA - a perfect combination. Apple is actually a great example of a company that produces a lot of value and also captures it in the form of dollars. From this point of view, to be "MBA'ed" is to focus on profit while forgetting about producing value. This then waters down brands that were established on the bedrock of value produced by product people.

gingerlime 5y ago

There's already a law that covers it. IANAL but my here's my understanding of things: When you buy something in the UK/Europe, anything really, it needs to meet 3 criteria[0]: 1. Fit for purpose: i.e. if it says "running shoes", then shoes should be suitable for running. If you use them to hammer nails, then it's on you. 2. As described: match the description, model number, etc 3. Satisfactory quality: this is the key ... and it depends on the product, but generally it relies on common sense. i.e. if you bought a washing machine for 2000EUR, you can expect it to last, let's say, 20 years of regular family use... If you bought a 2nd hand washing machine for 50EUR, probably can't expect it to last more than a year... The problem is not with the law, but generally speaking, companies don't give a toss. Nobody's going to fine them... And worse, consumers are easily misled by warranty periods and just don't expect the protection. Even if they paid 2000EUR for a washing machine and it failed after 2 years, they are more likely to just get a new one. Even if legally they can require the retailer (not even the manufacturer) to replace or repair it because the product wasn't of sufficient quality. The burden of proof is usually on the consumer though, which kinda makes it harder though. [0] https://www.moneyhelper.org.uk/en/getting-help-and-advice/consumer-rights/consumer-rights-what-you-need-to-know https://www.moneyhelper.org.uk/en/getting-help-and-advice/co...

UncleMeat 5y ago

Yup. Why spend 2x more for a washer when it will crap out at the same rate?

chrischen 5y ago

They also need to start mandating transferrable warranties. There’s no sensible reason to block transfers except to suppress the used market.

southerntofu 5y ago
I'm not a lawyer, but is non-transferrable warranties even a thing? I've never had a single product where they asked me for identity to use the warranty. At worst, they asked for a proof of purchase, which some second-hand sellers are happy to provide when they still have it. Also worth noting: hardware manufacturers have found a better option to suppress the second hand market. Hardware locking (iCloud/Knox lock) is terribly efficient at this, essentially turning perfectly good devices into bricks. It's even "better" because they can advertise it as a security feature for gullible users who don't realize Apple/Samsung still has the master key and there's an entire corrupt grey market of company workers getting money under the table to defeat the lock in almost every phone store across the planet...
- chrischen 5y ago
  Yes, many product segments have non-transferrable warranties. NVIDIA warranties are non-transferrable, as are Herman Miller warranties. That being said, you can have the original purchaser make the claim for you or you can pose as the original purchaser/doctor the receipts, but it creates a big hurdle for secondary markets. I don't understand what you mean by iCloud/Knox lock. As far as iCloud lock is concerned, it is only for stolen devices in which the owner did not deactivate their own icloud account. Where are your sources for gray market of company workers defeating the lock? I'd imagine if an Apple activation lock is bypassed it would have to do with resetting the password on the iCloud account.

ghaff 5y ago

One of the big issues in clothing and related is mostly market dynamics. The market used to be full of relatively niche brands (and stores) that sold genuinely differentiated, often higher quality, and typically somewhat more expensive clothing etc. Over time, a lot of those companies got bought out by conglomerates and started selling the same Asian-made stuff as everyone else (for the most part; there can still be differences. Premium brands often manufacture in Asia as well). It’s harder to charge a big premium for random clothing and soft goods. To pick a random example Lands’ End is a case in point.