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I just don't see it. Were I to go shopping at wal-mart, and if I didn't understand anything about failure modes, I might, but I find it very easy to find thing
by eternityforest 4y ago
I just don't see it. Were I to go shopping at wal-mart, and if I didn't understand anything about failure modes, I might, but I find it very easy to find things that last.
Partly because out lifestyle now is lighter on things, and we need fewer of them. I don't need a juicer because... I don't juice.
Another factor might be that we still have an obsession with "Power". Look at how impact drivers are reviewed, based on how fast they screw some insane fastener most people won't ever need.
If consumers prefer and recommended more powerful stuff rather than stuff that's better at protecting itself, stuff is gonna break.
My vacuum does shut off if you run over the wrong thing. That's not a case of clogging and choking, that's a sensor detecting that I've given it something it's not meant for, protecting itself. I would take that any day over something that would happily self destruct on something, or even chew up whatever it hit.
My Rite in the Rain pen never has issues and very well could last my whole life with no refills. There are bad pens out there, but I have no memory of any time when cheap ballpoints actually worked correctly.
I have not had any experience with a new washer or dryer for very long.
However, new appliances are lighter, cheaper, and more efficient. If the scrap is recycled, they may well be just as good as old ones in terms of cost and environmental concerns, even if they break faster.
There are certain categories of things that may be worse overall, but in general, there's close to nothing I'd prefer the old version of.
However, there are probably lots of things where the cheap version now is worse than the old version. But that old version probably cost $40 in today's money and the cheap version cost $20.
- jtbayly 4y agoA broken fridge ruins lots of food, worth lots of money. A broken washing machine or dishwasher can flood your house, costing 10s of thousands of dollars. A broken dryer can burn your house down. And even if some of those aren’t common failure modes (fridge is common), it is incredibly inconvenient and expensive to be without a major appliance for (insert supply chain guesstimate number of) weeks every year or so.
- eternityforest 4y agoI've only personally seen one failure like that, a bad washer flooding a friend's house. I would imagine a heat pump dryer would be very unlikely to burn anything down. It is a really big inconvenience when they go offline, but there are still lots of brands that seem to work fine for 10 to 20 years. I'm surprised ultra high reliability isn't more of a consumer selling point. Refrigerators in particular could do it with a redundant compressor and valves, they could share the evaporator and condensing coils. It's not like fridge compressors cost that much to make. They could even use 2 small ones and run them all the time, so if 1 fails you get half power but it still works. Washers and dryers could do redundancy by selling pairs of identical combo units instead of 1 washer and 1 dryer, but I suppose people don't need to replace both at once very often.
- mindslight 4y agoAppliances probably don't need redundancy, but rather a guaranteed service person you could call that will fix the thing for a reasonable price instead of just telling you its the "control board" to try and sell you a new one. Perhaps some engineering to support easier diagnostics, and definitely to reduce the number of replacement part SKUs.