3 ms·
> 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 norm
by 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 agoAs 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 agoRight 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 agoI say we nuke the whole industry from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.