8 ms·

FTA: "Voyagers 1 and 2 have been flying for more than 47 years..." That should be written on a poster that is put on each desk of each employee of each car/was

• akira2501 2y ago
  It only really needs to be on the upper managements desk: "The $3.57 you save on capacitors per unit will cost you $50 in lost good will." On the other hand there is a balance between longevity through simplified maintenance and replacing aged appliances with newer and significantly more efficient models.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • sandworm101 2y ago
    And being $3.57 more expensive than the other guy will deny you 90% of sales on amazon or any other online marketplace.
    • asah 2y ago
      Sadly, there's has no system for long term reviews. In my dreams, Amazon/etc would engage customers about their durable products and ask how often you still use the product and it/when you're thinking of replacing it... Given the economics, I wonder if best buy could pay customers $10 for a survey of their old products, knowing that it'll inspire upgrades etc.
      • me_me_me 2y ago
        i lost my faith in amazon. its all alibaba rebrands and mass fake reviews, plus amazon pushing their own chepo brand into every search. its shocking how amazon went from 'me getting a package every week' to 'i go there only if i have too'
        • nucleardog 2y ago
          Amazon is now, largely, just Aliexpress with faster shipping and easier returns (and higher prices). Even in areas where they have brand name products, it's often impossible to surface them through their search. (I've, many times, failed to find something there and then went and searched Google/etc and the top result has been... an Amazon link to exactly what I'm looking for.) And if you purchase through Amazon, there's no reason to believe it's not gray market or something else where you may end up having issues with support/warranty if you ever need. And combined with the inventory commingling, even if you find brand name products there you can't be sure you'll actually receive it and not a knock-off. So it really only makes sense to order things that are already the cheap/knock-off quality anyway. So... yeah, there was a nice period of time there where Amazon was just "shopping made more convenient". These days it's "Aliexpress made more convenient". Unless I'm setting out to buy cheaply made Chinese imports with no warranty, I'm not even go to start looking on Amazon. There's little reason to.
      • lancesells 2y ago
        That's Anti-Amazon behavior. Whatever is going on with their Alibaba-like store is not about finding good products.
      • SoftTalker 2y ago
        I would not spend 10 seconds of my time writing a product review or answering a survey like that. If Amazon is interested in selling good products they can hire product testers who will do teardowns, destructive testing, and running them through a 5-year simulated use durability test.
      • themaninthedark 2y ago
        Do you pay for Consumer Reports?
    • kristopolous 2y ago
      They have the data to infer reliability rates based on things like returns, time to purchase similar item, frequency of repeat purchase, etc. Over the volume of say Amazon, The noisiness of varied intent will normalize itself out across a sector. They could surface this as a reliability metric on some kind of relative scale. They could...
  • ffsm8 2y ago
    Alternative phrasing: "the $3.57 you save (per unit) today will give you a $100.000 end of year bonus, but cost the company millions in future lost sales" Guess what theyre gonna do?
    • andsoitis 2y ago
      > but cost the company millions in future lost sales Isn’t the company going to make more sales in the future (and hence more profit)? And isn’t replacing stuff with new versions going to lead to improvements in people’s lives through more efficient, quieter, and more effective technology?
      • pilchard123 2y ago
        Sure, but if the exec in question has moved on to another company by then, what do they care?
      • godshatter 2y ago
        It's been my experience that newer technology, though being more efficient, etc, breaks much faster than the old powerhouse tech from the 50's, 60's, and the 70's. I don't see my 1950's-something oven dying anytime soon. It will outlive me if I don't replace it for that one shiny new feature I convince myself I just have to have, or because it doesn't match my curtains. So, yes, replacing stuff with new versions will bring more and more sales as opposed to building something that will last. Hence "planned obsolescence" and the war on making things repairable that we've seen lately. Great for business, bad for the customer.
        • Sanzig 2y ago
          To be fair, it's a bit more subtle than that. There's a level of survivor bias involved - all the unreliable appliances from the 50s-70s have long since been hauled off to scrap metal recycling, so what's left are the long-lived ones. Modern electronics certainly can be made with much higher reliability than their mid-century ancestors, but the driving factor that prevents this is aggressive cost cutting that happily shaves pennies off COGS to shift the statistical distribution to the left. Unless consumers are willing to pay more for long-lived devices, this is doomed to continue.
  • aeyes 2y ago
    > replacing aged appliances with newer and significantly more efficient models Are we still expecting to make significant efficiency improvements for appliances in the next 30 years? Will it be enough to justify the production of a new appliance? Legal warranty for appliances like washers, dryers, refrigerators among others should probably be raised to at least 5 years.
    • vel0city 2y ago
      The thing that gets me about modern warranties on appliances is how weasely they'll market their warranties. I've got GE clothes washer and dryer proudly proclaiming their 10 year warranty. It's a 10 year warranty on the motor and the drum (IIRC). Not on the motor inverter unit, which had a one-year warranty. Guess which part is likely to fail? Guess what that GE service tech is going to recommend you do after he prices out several hundred dollars of parts he thinks he might need because he's too lazy to actually diagnose the issue? An LG dishwasher with a similar 10 year warranty on the pumps and what not in the dishwasher. Awesome, great. The display panel has failing LEDs. Is that under that warranty? Nope. Who cares about the pump not technically failing if one can't know what mode the dishwasher is in? If they're going to stick a sticker on the face advertising their warranty on an appliance it should cover the whole appliance. Not just a small handful of parts that should practically never fail under regular use while all the surrounding stuff has a nearly useless warranty. I'm so salty about warranties and support these days I usually try and do every possible thing I can do to fix the problem myself before obviously voiding a warranty before I ever bother calling their support. So worthless most of the time.
      • aaron_m04 2y ago
        Not to mention binding arbitration with opt-out that is a pain in the ass. I had to go through this for an LG washer recently.
  • VoodooJuJu 2y ago
    >if you cut corners, you may be rich, but then I'll think you're a bad boy! Uh oh, a moral judgement from a peasant? Say it aint so. Anything but that. I'm literally shaking right now. Anyway, here are some actual incentives: - If you do some shady corner-cutting, you'll be legally compelled to trade in your Bugatti and drive a used Kia the rest of your life - If this chemical causes bodily harm to me, we shall inflict bodily harm on thee - A portion of the profits will be placed in a trust and will be passed down to your children, if and only if your product lasts long enough to be passed down to our children - If you (banker) lose our money, you will lose your head
    • saturn8601 2y ago
      These rules discourage new businesses from starting and you end up in a situation like France where their largest company is some fashion company formed eons ago (probably before all the regulations).
      • mmooss 2y ago
        France is an extremely wealthy country with possibly the best quality of life in the world - many would say better than in the English-speaking countries home to most of HN.
      • wiz21c 2y ago
        > These rules discourage new businesses from starting No. They encourage new businesses to start without compromising on the fundamental stuff.
  • vkou 2y ago
    > "The $3.57 you save on capacitors per unit will cost you $50 in lost good will." Or it might cost you $0 in lost good will, and will gain you $5 in sales because many price-sensitive people will buy the thing that's cheapest, without doing an omniscient analysis of its quality. Not to mention that gold-plating your capacitors won't do you much good if some other part is expected to fail first.
• askvictor 2y ago
  On the other hand, it's environment isn't particularly hostile (no moisture, dust, vibration, though it gets more radiation than on Earth), and I think it doesn't have much in the way of moving parts (?)
  • passwordoops 2y ago
    Space is pretty hostile: https://theconversation.com/explainer-how-hostile-is-space-27903 https://theconversation.com/explainer-how-hostile-is-space-2...
  • daedrdev 2y ago
    If I recall its gets more hostile after leaving the heliopsphere
• jampekka 2y ago
  > That should be written on a poster that is put on each desk of each employee of each car/washing machine/fridge/television manufacturer. And consumer. Very few people would use 50 year old devices even if they were/are perfectly functional.
  • dano 2y ago
    My sunbeam automatic toaster is working just fine thank you very much. :-)
    • pilchard123 2y ago
      Alec? Is that you?
    • ajdude 2y ago
      I found one in a thrift store and I was so excited until I realized that they wanted $150 for it... even local thrift stores know what they have now
  • HKH2 2y ago
    Plenty of people buy secondhand equipment. Manufacturers want to stop that; spare parts are hard to get or needlessly expensive, and manuals are woefully incomplete or nonexistent.
    • Arnt 2y ago
      I've contracted for someone whose customers thought so. (My job involved making stuff work with without an important part from a defunct vendor.) Their costs really did increase all the time. Not needlessly, despite what some people thought: their cost per spare part really did grow quite a lot, as the number needed per year decreased and the fixed overhead slowly increased.
  • The-Old-Hacker 2y ago
    Speaking as a writer, I would use an IBM Model M keyboard in a heartbeat. Made in 1985, so 40 years old.
• pif 2y ago
  Nice idea, if you want to go out of business! People don't buy quality: people buy cheap!
  • Szpadel 2y ago
    and that's why iPhones never catched up
    • AxelLuktarGott 2y ago
      Ironic that iPhones are both expensive _and_ come with planned obsolescence
      • nephy 2y ago
        Dog no they don’t lol. My family has been in both ecosystems over the years and by far the iPhones outlast the Android phones they buy both in quality and in updates.
        • sangnoir 2y ago
          Counterpoint: one can only unlock the bootloader on Android phones and extend the device life for much longer than intended or supported by the OEM.
          • nephy 2y ago
            True, but what percentage of phone owners will actually do this. Less than a fraction of a percent? The remaining 99 percent chuck their phone in a landfill when it gets slow.
        • kelnos 2y ago
          Both what you are saying and what the GP is saying can be true at the same time.
    • 05 2y ago
      Some products do better as Veblen goods than others. You can't show off your dishwasher as easily as your new Ferrari or iPhone :)
• tweetle_beetle 2y ago
  Conversely, the system which has been described as the longest running computer system after Voyager is the UK's Police National Computer - turning 50 and still in use today. Most UK citizens will be on it in some way, shape or form. Keeping it alive is a remarkable feat, but costing taxpayers eye watering sums of money, due to the ever increasing shortage of skills, while a modern cloud alternative is developed. Be careful what you wish for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_National_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_National_Computer
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• blensor 2y ago
  Voyager is something that I keep thinking every time I see people talking about what great things musk/spacex are doing with their fail often/fail fast approach. I do get the value of iterating quickly towards a solution but that does not invalidate the conservative engineering approach other people have to take to build something much more stable/reliable where they have to be very cautious and can't just break things until you have a solution.
  • jballer 2y ago
    They’re optimizing for different priorities. Obviously you need to be conservative when launches cost so much you can only afford ~one shot.
  • glzone1 2y ago
    Voyagers were built by JPL and not contracted out so align to a degree with the spacex model. In part this was because budget got cut badly. “In order to reduce costs and overheads, NASA decided to leave design and construction of the Mariner Jupiter-Saturn spacecraft to JPL, rather than to Boeing, General Electric, Hughes, Martin Marietta, and North American Rockwell, all of which had some level of preparation for a Grand Tour proposal. The largest aerospace firms lobbied NASA Headquarters and Congress for the contracts. In order for expensive projects to pass congressional scrutiny as part of the NASA budget, they often had to include an intention to contract out much of the work” voyager - Andrew J. Butrica I think they also did build a test spacecraft ? Anyways the approach (smaller focused team) contrasts with the big SLS type projects that are contracted out for political reasons.
• ck2 2y ago
  I have a Sharp carousel microwave oven that is 40 years old and works fine. The "secret" solution is it was one of the last years made in Japan, not China. I just move it from apartment to apartment over the years while everything else breaks.
• raxxorraxor 2y ago
  To be fair, space is quite the decent preservation chamber.
• Night_Thastus 2y ago
  I know people get frustrated with broken appliances and electronics, but I feel like once you look at the forces involved it seems fairly obvious that it'll happen: * Environmental regulations require additional or more complicated systems - which adds points of failure (IE: Variable-speed motor controllers, Exhaust Gas Recycling, etc). They also require other changes - like using lightweight plastics where metals would have been used previously. Plastic fan blades crack, metal ones don't. * Consumers, on the whole, only care about price and features. Those are tangible. Some people care about things like maintainability and longevity - but they make up a tiny, insignificant fraction of consumers. Thus, companies optimize for price - even if it comes at the cost of longevity. Any company that doesn't quickly loses market share to global competition from dozens of others that are more than willing to make that sacrifice and offer a better deal. Those two factors explain everything about why modern appliances fail the way they do.
• themaninthedark 2y ago
  The engineers know this. Now, how do you get the people buying these things to buy the better engineered one when the one sitting right next to it is $200 cheaper?
• apnew 2y ago
  There should be a list of manufacturers who build durable consumer electronics.
• GuB-42 2y ago
  Consumer products like cars, washing machines, etc... are mass produced and made to last for a specified amount of time, at the lowest possible price. Voyagers were unique pieces made with a quasi-unlimited budget. The thing with consumer products is not evil, they are made to consumer expectations. Would you buy a $10k washing machine? Probably not, even if is designed to outlast you. Of course you also won't buy a washing machine that lasts a week, no matter how cheap it is. Manufacturers did studies and noticed that there is a sweet spot at around 10 years or so of lifetime for typical household usage. More than that and it become too expensive and people might want to change anyways to benefit from new technologies or some other reasons. Once the "ideal" lifetime have been established, you are going to have parts that last the expected 10 years, others that last less, and other that last more, possibly forever. The parts that break too early need to be addressed as it may cause expensive warranty returns and a loss in reputation. But the parts that last forever also need to be addressed. Let's say the water pump is over-specified, sure it is great, it will never fail, etc... but all that doesn't matter because the machine will be trashed because of some other failure. So why would the manufacturer and ultimately the customer pay extra for that pump they have no need for. Instead, a cheaper should be used. The ideal consumer product is one where every part breaks down at the end of the expected life of the product, but not before, any more than that is a waste of money. That's thanks to that value engineering that we all can afford cars, washing machines fridges and televisions, with cash to spare. These are not luxuries for the elite anymore. They are not made like they used to, but we don't pay them like we used to either.