From what I have observed, there seem to be three major driving forces in consumer and commercial appliances: 1: Energy regulations 2: Transition from high-co

From what I have observed, there seem to be three major driving forces in consumer and commercial appliances: 1: Energy regulations 2: Transition from high-cost luxuries to being more common (Similar to air travel) 3: Massive increase in global competition The first one is really easy to see in the commercial space especially. Do things like plastic fan blades and VFDs make units more efficient? Yes. Do they also make them more likely to fail/add new failure points? Yes. The energy regulation on consumer and commercial appliances is very strong in the US. If you compare even things like washing machines, you can see energy usage dropping hundreds of watts in some cases. However, that has come at the cost of reliability. As for #2, airplanes are a great comparison. At one time they were a luxury and you expected a certain level of service. As they got more affordable, that dropped away and people get packed in like sardines. That's the price of making it available to everyone. Today isn't like the period when a washing machine was a luxury good. Now everyone has one - so the motivation is to produce them as cheaply as possible to undercut competition. Reliability and energy usage aren't mutually exclusive, but because of #2 a cheap, less reliable way of saving power will almost always be taken over a more robust yet still efficient design. These two explanations combined with a bit of Hanlon's razor explain almost all of modern appliance unreliability. There is no active attempt to make units less reliable - but there's no motivation to do otherwise for most manufacturers given the shear amount of cheap competition present.