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I was going to say the same thing. And it always seems to be some little thing for which having made it in metal would've had a negligible impact on price. I h

by prawn 4y ago

I was going to say the same thing. And it always seems to be some little thing for which having made it in metal would've had a negligible impact on price. I had it with a car door opening mechanism - something you interact with countless times during a day. Less than an inch long. Surprised it lasted as long as it did. There needs to be an equivalent of Choice/Consumer Reports/etc that dismantles products and calls out anything that should've been made from metal instead of plastic. It's frustrating dealing with unnecessarily broken parts.

CamperBob2 4y ago
There needs to be an equivalent of Choice/Consumer Reports/etc that dismantles products and calls out anything that should've been made from metal instead of plastic. It's frustrating dealing with unnecessarily broken parts. I would pay a crazy amount of money to subscribe to a service provided by a professional reverse-engineering outfit that takes the Consumer Reports concept to the next level, with highly technical teardowns and critical analysis of a wide variety of products that covers everything from the BOM to the firmware. This kind of thing happens sporadically -- e.g., some of the Juicero postmortems offered a lot of engineering insight. And there is no shortage of passionate amateurs like AvE who don't have a consistent methodology and/or don't always have the domain expertise needed to give a given product design a fair assessment. What's needed is a consistent, professional, and above all objective approach to informing the purchase decisions of technically-literate consumers.
- prawn 4y ago
  I think beyond tear-downs, it needs to be influential enough to guilt companies into going the right thing. Consumers shouldn't need to browse a detailed tear-down of an object to guess whether something has been made to last or not.
  - CamperBob2 4y ago
    My thinking is that the people who watch it will do the influencing.

by prawn 4y ago

CamperBob2 4y ago

There needs to be an equivalent of Choice/Consumer Reports/etc that dismantles products and calls out anything that should've been made from metal instead of plastic. It's frustrating dealing with unnecessarily broken parts. I would pay a crazy amount of money to subscribe to a service provided by a professional reverse-engineering outfit that takes the Consumer Reports concept to the next level, with highly technical teardowns and critical analysis of a wide variety of products that covers everything from the BOM to the firmware. This kind of thing happens sporadically -- e.g., some of the Juicero postmortems offered a lot of engineering insight. And there is no shortage of passionate amateurs like AvE who don't have a consistent methodology and/or don't always have the domain expertise needed to give a given product design a fair assessment. What's needed is a consistent, professional, and above all objective approach to informing the purchase decisions of technically-literate consumers.

prawn 4y ago
I think beyond tear-downs, it needs to be influential enough to guilt companies into going the right thing. Consumers shouldn't need to browse a detailed tear-down of an object to guess whether something has been made to last or not.
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  My thinking is that the people who watch it will do the influencing.