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Some of these products already exist. They are expensive. If you go back and look at the long-lasting appliances of the past, they were also expensive.
One example is Speed Queen washers/dryers. Also Bosch dishwashers.
And I will sell it in a store called “in stock” because we have these things called “computers” that can reorder a product once one sells so the shelves aren’t empty. Because American companies have never heard of that concept.
The problem is that you think that would make the ‘just’ products cheaper. The reality is that the data and advertising subsidize the costs of the existing options and make them cheaper then what ‘just’ could sell for.
Case in point: Smeg already does this, and all their products are considered upmarket. They’re just really solid normal appliances.
That isn’t true anymore nowadays. You pay the full un-subsidized price AND get your data sold and ads displayed
Only if there’s a lack of competition in that market. For most devices, you’re just flat out wrong.
Noone said it would be cheaper
I’m never going to buy a fridge with a tablet embedded in it, but I don’t really think they are making that much money from that. You can buy cheaper equivalent versions of appliances that don’t have the ability to display ads or collect/send data anywhere.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, how I just want a basic bitch electric car. No centre console, no futuristic screens, no sensors, no cameras. Give me a normal fucking car with dials, a speedo, some padles on the steering wheel to adjust power output to replace gears and no driver assist. Sell it to me for cheap and let me drive my car. That’s all I want.
I haven’t seen speedometer shortened to speedo before. I was wondering why you wanted to get a speedo (like swimwear) along with the rest of your normal car accessories.
Little from column A, little from column B
You can join me with outsized expectations for the Slate pickup that will inevitably be dashed.
some padles on the steering wheel to adjust power output to replace gears
What? The foot pedal adjusts power. You don’t need a replacement for gears.
I would very much like a manner to manually adjust how hard the regenerative coasting works, which would sort of be a replacement for gears. If I’m going down a steep hill I’d like to be able to adjust the regen to maximize energy recovery while also managing vehicle speed.
I recently bought an ebike that has peddle assist settings of 1-5. With 1 being lowest and 5 being maximum. These settings essentially act like gears setting the maximum motor power.
In crowded areas I set the speed to 1 so the bike can’t exceed 15kph, on open roads I set the speed to 5 which is unlimited. I would definitely want this in a car.
Interesting. A car with peddle assist. I know that’s not what you meant, but that’s where my head went.
The Sims did it first, except the brand was called “Justa”. Justa dishwasher. Justa fridge.
Ahead of their time.
It would be more feasible to de-fang modern appliances.
That’s a legit great idea. Create a new firmware for smart TVs too.
People always call me crazy but I buy commercial displays. You can get them cheaper if you do it the right way. So speakers, no tuner, no smart functions, usually only 1 or 2 inputs, and basically no bells or whistles.
But that’s how I like it, so I don’t care if it makes me 🤣😧🤣😧
Call me crazier that’s a “monitor”.
There might be some liability concerns if you run a open source firmware on your washing machine and it decides to never shut off the water inlet…
Yes, the new company would be providing a new warranty based on that. Same as usual.
He’ll be out of business in a years time!
Seriously a great idea though. I’d buy all their stuff.
If you want this today, SpeedQueen has decent models that last forever and are very simple.
The reason is that they will be so durable that you buy one and it’ll be an heirloom for multiple generations.
Since it would make small quantities (at least at the start) and with better materials, I bet it would be also more expensive so maybe it evens out.
I would also buy it, I’m tired of household items that randomly break and the manufacturer doesn’t care.
Deshittification
Probably better than my idea of just starting to wash my clothes in a bucket
Like No Name does for groceries.
Does ordinary skincare count too?
Id buy their stuff, some of it at least
I would buy just enough.
This often actually exists still, but those companies dont do big marketing and their products will cost 3x that of a “normal” one.
As I’ve heard it:
- Bosch makes the best dishwashers
- Speed Queen makes the best laundry machines
- Asko
and Mielemake the best stoves and fridges
And yes, they are all very expensive. But I want to get me a Speed Queen so bad.
Miele was sold to a private equity firm and they’ve been reputation-fracking, so their recent stuff is supposed to be pretty mediocre but priced as if it’s top-end.Do you have a source for that? Their wiki page says that they are still family owned.
I do not - I’ve heard it so many times from so many places that I didn’t bother checking it before repeating it, but it looks like it was wrong.
Damn. I hate to hear that. Guess I’ll scratch them off my list.
Cafe (spinoff from GE) does a pretty good job with stoves. AFAIK they are still pretty well respected.
The brands to stay away from at all costs are LG and Samsung.
As I posted a little lower down:
If the company has ever made a TV or a cell phone I’m not buying their appliance.
Samsung burned me once….
The cheapest LG refrigerators that are 2 door freezer on top are pretty well regarded. Their more expensive refrigerators have linear compressors that aren’t a great design to begin with and an even worse design for the refrigerant used in the USA compared to the refrigerant they were designed for in Korea. (As I understand it)
LG is actually pretty highly regarded for their clothes washers and dryers.
Their refrigerators have been a mess. That makes it hard for me to trust their other appliances.
If the company has ever made a TV or a cell phone I’m not buying their appliance.
Samsung burned me once….
Just get a Speed Queen. Incredibly durable, easy to repair, and surprisingly quiet.
That’s not true at all.
Someone already pointed that out, so I edited the post with strikethrough hours before you replied.
Speed Queen IPOd recently. Make of that what you will.
They overdosed on Internet Protocol‽ /s
For those like me who actually didn’t know: Initial Public Offering. It’s the first time (initial) the company sells shares (offering) on public stock exchanges. Aka: they went public.
In addition, in a well functioning economy, companies only go public when they want to raise a lot of new money, because they have ambitious plans that can’t be achieved with their current sources of funding. Now, really, that’s bullshit. Companies mostly go public because the insiders want to cash out. Going public allows them to sell their shares for actual money. But, still, in theory the company should be going public with a story about how they’re going to use all the new funds they’re raising, otherwise they (in theory) won’t be able to con people into investing.
The end result of going public is that the company is no longer in the control of the founders or even the early investors. Now it has a bunch of public investors who don’t care about the company culture, don’t care about the relationships with the employees or the customers. They just want to see a 15% year-over-year growth in the value of their stocks. That means that pretty often once a company goes public its products or services start to suffer, because you can make more money by squeezing suppliers, finding the cheapest parts, outsourcing jobs, etc.
It’s kind of crazy that like heating air is not perfectly mastered in every stove, heating and pumping water in every dishwasher and laundry machine etc. It’s very simple stuff after all.
How fuckin cheap du you have to be to make a non perfect machine 🤷🏻♀️?!
For stoves, the thing that breaks is the control board. Hot + electronics is bad.
An induction stove avoids most of that problem because the hot happens in the pot and not inside the stove.
But I agree, there’s not much reason a stove can’t last 50 years. In fact, my parents have a 50 year old resistive stove that still works.
Washers have the most to go wrong of things you listed.
the hot happens in the pot and not inside the stove
The pot is sitting on the stove. And induction involves electromagnetism, which means it involves metal pots and pans, and metal loops of wire to induce current in that cookware. Metal parts conduct heat very well. So, induction stoves don’t get quite as hot as conventional stoves. But, they still get very hot because they have a hot metal pot sitting on them.
Also, while induction stoves don’t get quite as hot as other kinds of stoves, they involve large currents and large amounts of magnetism. That means both stress on the electrical parts, and mechanical stress from the magnets.
Overall, I’d guess that an induction stove is probably going to have fewer things that can go wrong with it than a gas stove, a glass-top stove or an olde fashioned electrical resistance stove. But, it isn’t like an LED light or something that should last decades because there’s no moving parts, no heat, no big currents, etc.
Yeah definitely isolate hot things well, it also uses less energy and heats up the surroundings less.
For the washers, maybe but its just like 2 pumps a motor and a control board, it should be simple mechanics to switch those out if they break, IMO.
My burner igniters aren’t electronic-control and they still failed in a less than decade old stove that was not heavily used at all (I live alone and use the stove, not even the specific burners that failed, maaaaaaaaybe monthly)
They just make their parts cheap overall. Induction isn’t enshittification-proof. If anything it’s more susceptible, being entirely electronic.
That said I’d trade my gas stove for induction if I could, even with enshittification.
Is Asko stil good? Owned by Gorenje since 2010
I bought a Bosch dishwasher because of this reputation, and I hate it.
The drying function is a joke. Everything plastic comes out with water still all over it. My Maytag (which admittedly died) used to dry everything perfectly.
Also the racks on the Bosch are poorly organized. It’s always a challenge to find places to fit everything.
Not to mention that newer low end Bosch dishwashers require an account and app for some functionality.
High end ones do too if you want to access all of the wash features; they can’t be entirely programmed from the device itself.
Miele is the GOAT. Love our Miele appliances. All of them are now 15 years old and not a single problem. Buying the 10 year warranty was a waste. Buy once, cry once. Only appliances I would consider are Miele and Bosch Benchmark.
Got links?
Anything made for commercial kitchens.
Also second hand lab equipment. I was tired of my kitchen scale breaking and having annoying features like auto off after like 60 seconds. Got an ohaus lab scale off eBay for like $50, handles 18lbs, has a configuration menu with tons of options and features like count mode, sequential weight summing, and lets you set auto off for up to 30 minutes or completely disable auto off. Takes regular AAs or plugs into an outlet. I love it and it’s built like a tank.
Man, having worked in a couple research labs in a previous life, there’s no way I’d use a used lab scale for food. Especially when $50 will actually get you a pretty decent scale that has not been potentially used for weighing everything from diseased mice to stool samples to unidentified precipitates from a failed chemical reaction.
Since you’re here to type this, it was probably not used for anything too nasty, but I do not endorse that as a way to save a few bucks!
Idk worrying about a lab leak type pathogen scenario through an ebay sale seems far fetched to me. I picked one that looked lightly used and clean and wiped it down with disinfectant when I got it. The chance of a pathogen surviving that long doesn’t sound like a realistic concern. Most things it plausibly would have been exposed to, save for like highly radioactive dust getting lodged in its crevices, is easily handled with basic sanitation and hand washing. And it’s not like I’m putting food on the surface anyways.
Only thing I would be scared of is ethidium bromide on your food, but that probably wouldn’t be measured on a kg scale.
Yeah I think if I was gonna start using used lab equipment, a new autoclave would be my first purchase.
Salmonella recall? Nah, I’ve got a kitchen autoclave, I’ll be fine
In general anything made for businesses. They might be fine with us having stuff that doesn’t work, but businesses still need things that work to produce things that don’t.
Speed queen is one for washers and dryers
$1700 for a seven-year warranty. How much you want to bet it’s specifically engineered to last no more than eight years?
The water heater that came with my house I bought in '98 lasted 20 years. I replaced it with the best I could afford at the time, which had a seven-year warranty. It lasted just over seven years. I replaced that one a couple of months ago with the longest warranty one I could find, which is twelve years. I know I’ll be replacing it in twelve years.
One thing to note is that planned obsolescence for machines is not something that is easy to do to the level that you’re describing it.
Even if they use substandard materials at specific junctures with an estimated wearout time limit, there’s always the chance that a manufacturing flaw can increase the time between breakdowns
I think a good follow-up plan would be something more like finding the parts that break down and then digitizing them and then contracting with a service like JLCPCB to manufacture those individual parts on demand.
You could probably start a fairly successful company on just that if you had the time and energy to get the whole process rolling.
A combination of a SLS 3D printer to make the parts out of metal, or, you know, really high-quality 3D printer to make them out of nylon or whatever plastic is necessary, and getting the appropriate springs and levers and bearings and everything to fill in the gaps, you probably could make a nice side business for yourself just custom making the parts that break down the most often for appliances.
The water heater that came with my house I bought in '98 lasted 20 years.
And by the time you got rid of it it was criminally inefficient.
Anything that’s sold in Canada? I’m in the market for a new washer after my last two died on the 2 year mark.
No warranty? If you bought with a credit card they usually have a warranty extension feature and will extend the manufacturer’s warranty for you.
The first one was 2 weeks outside of warranty, the second one we’re currently waiting on the manufacturer and their mechanic. It’s a whole thing but it’s looking like it might be a refund at this point since it’s taking so long for them to even come look at it.
The first one wasn’t repaired because the part was back-ordered and by the time we repaired it it wouldve ended up costing the same as a new one.
Speed queen washing machine
If it’ll run in a Laundromat for 30 years… it’ll run in your home.
My cousin had a coin operated speed queen washer when I briefly lived with her. The laundromat was getting rid of it not due to functioning, but because it would cost too much to retrofit it to use credit or bills, when it was already quite old.
You could use coins to make it work, but the panel was missing and you’d just stick your hand in and flip the switch. Always felt like you’d electrocute yourself.
Sucker ran great and she was doing 2 loads a day minimum (clearly no understanding of birth control, but she got her tubes tied after the 6th kid came out, so…)
She got it for far less than the price of a new bare-bones machine, so that could be a great option for anyone who may want one!
Speed Queen for washer / dryer.
Vzug. Sadly only 2 year warranty
Yeah I was gonna say you can do this today by looking for the company that only makes whatever it is you’re trying to buy and costs double what you expect to spend on it based on the competition.
If you want something that lasts, you generally need to pay for it.
(Though if you get the opportunity, ask someone who repairs the thing you’re trying to buy what the best brand is, they’re the people that know)
Yup, the whole, “They don’t make things the way they used to,” thing is part survivorship bias, and part people not understanding that appliances used to be very major purchases.
If you spent the equivalent of what they cost back then, you’ll get an appliance that lasts decades.
Adding to this: just call around to different repair shops for the product you’re shopping for and ask them. Not only might you get some great advice, but you’ll also get an idea of who to call when you do need their services. How they respond when they know you’re not spending any money is a pretty good indicator of their true customer service.
For groceries, Hofer (Aldi Süd) kinda does that where i live. They sell very basic, barely-processed food from no-name brands. Stuff typically costs about half (or at least it feels like it to me) of what you’d spend in other supermarkets, where they sell highly-processed foods (think fast food and such).
There’s a huge demand from consumers for that. Just not from investors.
There’s a huge one-time demand from consumers. But, if it’s an amazing device that never needs repairs (or that can easily be repaired by the consumer) and it has no bells and whistles, that’s a problem: there’s no repeat business.
Who cares?
The people running the business, presumably. Generally people don’t want to go out of business because they can’t find any customers.
Once you’ve supplied everyone with it, figure out how to keep a buffer stock and move onto the next product. By the time you’ve sold every viable customer a washing machine, vacuum cleaner, fridge, freezer, mixer, cooker, dryer (whatever) they’d be fine, new stock still needs to be sold eventually so keep a trickle coming. Replacement parts etc.
Biggest issue is it’s going to be expensive - will people pay?
That sounds like a difficult way to run a business.
It’s how businesses were run for literally hundreds of years.
Not true at all. Businesses didn’t move onto the next product, they specialized, making the exact same thing year after year. Because manufacturing tolerances weren’t great, things would need repairs and replacement, so there was repeat business. Nobody kept a buffer stock and moved onto the next product.
There’s a huge demand from consumers for that.
Is that actually true, though?
Very likely. Why not?
Because consumers have shown to prefer features over reliability:
French Door refrigerators are the most popular and most complex design.
Built in ice makers are popular but also complex and prone to failure due to physics.
They still sell very basic refrigerators and washer/dryers. But these don’t sell as well as more feature rich models.
In my albeit anecdotal experience, these ‘very basic’ appliances suffer their own variant of faults. They take no modern design cues; they are more prone to reliability issues from bargain bin components; or they somehow cost only slightly less than their fancy feature rich counterparts.
Just because I don’t want off-white equipment in my kitchen, I shouldn’t have to buy an ‘AI’ oven. But the companies want to know when and what I’m cooking so when I go to the grocery in the middle of dinner prep, the AI price labels can adjust a bit higher because they know I need an ingredient right now for a meal I’ve already started making.
The variant of fault these normal appliances have aren’t truly a fault. It’s intentionally made to be less appealing, less reliable, and more expensive than it should be, so when we’re looking at a white oven in the store for $800, we’ll opt instead for the $1,000 Alexa powered stainless steel double range that’s sitting right next to it.
Oh and if you’re in a spot and need to finance your new appliance, sorry but our financing isn’t available for the budget tier.
This comment kind of went off the rails, didn’t it.
People would likely want products with new features and reliability.
But what we actually have on the market is products with new features that are mostly unreliable, and slightly cheaper products with less features that are similarly or more unreliable. Our products are clearly regressing in quality even if the existence of luxury features or designs are rising.
We are in a hostile relationship economically where almost every manufacturer is engaging in planned obsolescence (instead of using resources appropriately and making the products we want which also last).
Corporations want us to keep buying - they are hyper-focused on perpetuating that reality.
My recent experience buying such is that it is very very hard to find basic but quality models. If you’ve had a water dispenser or ice maker once, you realize how awful they are. They take up massive amounts of fridge and freezer space and need expensive filters every 3 months and break as soon as the short warranty is over. But if you want double door and bottom freezer you pretty much have to buy the crap extras as well.
I don’t think complex design is the opposite of “just” it’s more that the refrigerator is just a kitchen refrigerator that doesn’t have weird proprietary temperature management system, and easily accessible replacement parts. It’s not also a built in tablet for example
But are there simple fridges that don’t look like rental apt fridges? If there was a nice simple fridge with a big bottom freezer, in stainless, I bet it’d sell. Tho water dispensers and ice makers are damn convenient when they do work.
“all the companies are dumb and refuse to earn money this simple way that I discovered in a showerthought”
Half of people on lemmy, facebook, reddit, twitter…
Ok, how about I would have bought one for a couple houses I’ve renovated?
Yes. Cars especially right now.
I’m just going to run my car until it no longer functions because I can’t be doing with all of these crappy infotainment systems. My car has a non-functional radio and that’s it, it’s so old it has headlights that don’t even blind people, and buttons to control the AC.
But does it have AI?
My washing machine and dryer likes to throw about AI. The model came out around or just before the current LLM craze started, and I’m guessing they wanted to capitalise on the buzzword.
AI in the case of my washing machine means that it keeps track of the time and day of week, and what washing programmes I tend to run within a certain timeframe. It then suggests that programme when you turn it on. For the dryer, AI means “suggest the programme matching what the washer just washed.”
Lately the washer has taken to flash “AI Cycle Complete” on its stupid little screen whenever it completes a wash, even if I keyed in every single setting myself. Such AI.
Lately the washer has taken to flash “AI Cycle Complete”
Lately? Does that mean your washer is getting some kind of regular firmware updates? Why? In case “laundry” changes?
Nothing has Ai. Everything that does refuses to explain what their use of that term means. It’s like buying the name brand cereal over the generic because someone slapped an “asbestos free” sticker on it.
Investors need not be shareholders, to be fair.
That’s like Ali G saying he invented the PlayStation 2 because he thought about it when the playstation came out.
I was annoyed as a kid when I independently came up with the idea of a flying car then found out that the world beat me to it.
Someone didn’t have a childhood where they only watched the Jetsons and the Flintstones
That happened to me a few years back, a friend just had his clutch fail in his car. I started thinking how to make a better way to transfer power from motor to wheels.
Turns out I just reinvented the fluid coupling used in automatic transmissions…needless to say my idea wasn’t that impressive after that.
Before electric skateboards were a thing, and electric motors and batteries became better and better, i thought I had a great idea for an electric skateboard. I cut some holes into my longboard, attached an upside down truck on top and an electric motor, made a lot of mistakes and then someone launched an electric skateboard that was pretty slick and i just saw that and thought: that’s way better.
Haha, you ran into the mechanically inclined adult version!
It’s called the adult version because it involves fluids.
Oh god damn it. Here, lol. 🥇
Even your user name sounds like a youtuber I’d watch about my adult tinker toys (think carpentry).
My million dollar idea is a teleporter.
You walk in and get teleported.
Gibe moneeis nao plz
My million dollar idea is an add-on for your device that kicks every billionaire on the planet in the nut sack every time someone teleports.
OKAY YOU HAB MANIES SO YOU GIBE IMMDITLEE
Find identical twins, dress em the same, have one walk into a cardboard box with “teleporter” written on it by a child, and have the other twin come out another similar cardboard box.
NO TALK YES MONEE GIBE NAO ME
I can teleport you some crypto quantumcoins?
YOU GOBE YOU GEEVING NAO
Five Dogecoins for 25% valuation?
What you have made there, sir, is a horrific copy and kill device!
Eh. You are a piece of software running on meat. Every night, there are long periods where ‘you’, the conscious entity of your awareness, ceases to exist. You only dream for a small portion of the night. There are times when you are simply gone.
Yet we have no problem accepting this fact. We’ve just collectively accepted that there is some continuity of consciousness between each day. But it couldn’t be further from the truth. You have the memories of yesterday, but ‘you’ have not been in continued conscious existence since yesterday. In a very real sense, we are a series of single-day lifetimes stitched together across time.
If you’ve ever gone under anesthesia, it’s even more jarring. When you’re under, you’re not asleep. You’re not dreaming. You’re just gone. The time passes in an instant.
If my consciousness can be discontinuous through time, why can’t it be discontinuous through space? If I can believe that I am the same me as the mes of yesterday and tomorrow, why can I not believe that a remotely assembled copy of me is also me? I used to run on that meat, now I run on this meat. It’s all me in the end.
Yeah and to take what you were describing further, we can’t ever really be sure our lives existed at all. If the universe was created in its current state 5 minutes ago, we would have no way to know.
But anyway, the ease of accepting one’s own continuity from day to day is part of the teleporter problem. It’s at the heart of it, honestly. I think it’s a given that the copy of you that comes out the other side will believe that they are the original you and will assume your identity and life without skipping a beat.
The concern is the likelihood that you experience a quick death by being vaporized while the copy of you experiences the “created 5 minutes ago in current state with memories intact and can’t prove otherwise” phenomenon.
I’ll also add that as far as we can tell, our conscious minds are emergent properties of our physical brains. Losing consciousness while verifiably keeping your brain in a specific spot is quite a bit different than disassembling your physical brain and reassembling it somewhere else.
If we instead had evidence that our souls/identities existed on some other plane and our brains were more like antennas, I might think differently.
NO MOR TOK YOU GIBE MONIE NAO
There is a nonprofit org called Open Source Ecology that is aiming to create what they call the “Global Village Construction Set”, a collection of basic industrial machines required for modern living, designed in a way where everything can be built DIY by a single community (Including modular generators). I imagine that they have a plans for home appliances, I think as of now they’re still working on construction equipment.
That’s so cool. Yeah I’ve been thinking a great design strategy would be to build exclusively out of commonly accessible parts. Like, even repurpouse car parts if they’re more accessible, or use arduinos as the microcontrollers.
The thing about, say, a washing machine is there’s not a ton else that has a hefty spider/shaft/tub combo like that. The forces involved in spinning a few kilos of clothes isn’t trivial. I’ve been harbouring thoughts of open source appliances for a while.
What I kind of feel might be viable are modular, generic controller boards for dryers/washing machines/dish washers.
Love the concept but doesn’t seem to have many plans.
It does seem to have fizzled out a bit, sadly. They need to collaborate with other established groups doing similar things, IMO.
I think this is the way you have to do it. Open hardware designs. If you make a product that’s so reliable that it never breaks, it’s a product where you never get repeat business. If it’s a super simple thing that doesn’t need or get new features, you can never sell someone an upgrade. That’s great for the consumer, but not great for the appliance maker. So, there’s always an incentive for them to enshittify.
