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.
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)
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 🤷🏻♀️?!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Worked for a college that went under and we had a bunch of dehydrators that were used in the labs. My co-worker was going to snatch one up because hey, dehydrator for practically free, what could go wrong?
He asked one of our professors about it who said in no uncertain terms, “do not use those dehydrators for food if you value longevity of life”
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.
$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 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.
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Although intense marketing is a sign of enshittification 🤔 Perhaps looking at the ownership structures would almost be a better startegy. AFAIK enshittification predominantely affects publicly traded corpos.
the cost is going to be higher, though, because "smart" widgets can offset their initial costs through the projeted sale of the data harvested over the life of the widget
most people being ignorant to this and to the inevitable issues with corporate-built "smart" widget infrastructure, the cheapest option will generally be the most popular
my inner doctorow says that the twiddlers did this on purpose to undermine competition, especially considering the attempts to keep those widgets from being liberated
I think the price difference has more to do with scale than it does data. The main reason good, simple products can't be cheaper is because the small companies who make them can't put in the same gigantic bulk orders of raw materials, nor do they have the specialized manufacturing processes or assembly lines.
The data is damn near an afterthought. Putting a touchscreen on a fridge is a great way to pretend a piece of shit is a premium product. If they can scrape your data too, then for sure they'll go for it, but the main reason the screen is on there is because most people are still buying that shit.
Take washers, for example. I was looking at Speed Queen washers to replace mine. On paper they are great, more durable. But it turns out that while they have physical knobs and switches, newer models still hide a circuit board inside, so the gap between commercial and consumer models is shrinking (and not in the direction we want.)
The Speed Queen washers also have nearly half the capacity of off the shelf consumer washers, and use twice the amount of water and electricity. I did the math, and at the current utility and washer prices I'd break even replacing the washer every 5 years.
Furthermore, the local appliance repair shop that I trust told me it could take them weeks to get replacement parts for Speed Queen. For a laundromat that's not a huge deal when it's one washer out of twenty, for a single machine home it's a problem.
Yes, I do wish that consumer appliances were more reliable. But barring that, the next best thing is easily and quickly repairable, and on that matter there's brands that are qualitatively and quantitatively better in that regard than others.
I also want to point out that for some products (such as smart phones) there's an additional trade-off between repairability and quality:
When you have screws in your phone instead of having everything glued together, that means you have additional moving parts and probably gaps between the parts, where water can enter and cause corrosion. If everything is glued together, it's not repairable but it's also less likely that it needs to be repaired because there's fewer problems to begin with.
A total absense of tech would be bad for a washing machine. With a really simple conductivity sensor (basically just two electrodes on the sides of a plastic pipe) and an opacity sensor (an IR LED and an LDR on opposite sides of a clear pipe), you can measure how much stuff is dissolved in water and how much insoluable stuff is suspended. That then means that you can keep circulating the soapy water until it stops getting dirtier, then keep rinsing it out until it stops getting cleaner, which then means you can have the cycle times adjust themselves to how soiled the load is, instead of just making them as long as the worst case scenario might require and wasting energy, water, and time on an average load.
My husband loves building elecronics. And there's a lot of cool low-tech tech.
I feel like basic circuit board stuff should be allowed, as it can be easy to repair if you know how.
Just have the schematics available.
The problem for me is when it needs an Internet connection for remote access on top of a lot of flimsy parts that wear out too quickly.
i think this is a typical "just install linux" situation. While to you it might seem simple, you're vastly overestimating most people's affinity to tech.
Right to repair isn't about everyone knowing how to do it, but providing the accessibility and potential for repairs, compared to purposely obfuscated tech which is at the mercy of corporate overlords. Yes, a lot of people won't know how to repair it, but if they want to repair it without paying a professional, they still have the ability to research and learn how to do it themselves.
No, I get it. But everything is hard to fix until you know how to do it.
To me, This is about owning things you or someone else can repair with readily available parts. The problem now is remote bricking of purchases by the manufacturer through the internet. And things so cheaply made, the parts either don't exist or the too much of it broke. Or having to pay subscriptions for the privilege to use the things you bought.
It's just that if you have a electronics nerd friend or curiosity, there's a lot of basic electronics that can be repaired with incredibly cheap parts.
For example, if your microwave completely dies, it's probably a common $0.10 fuse. It's not on the circuit board but it's technically part of the electronics. You have to be careful to not touch the capacitors. But watch a video and you've brought something dead back to life.
If you don't trust yourself, call that friend that loves that kind of stuff, share a pizza and avoid buying a new microwave that spies on you.
I think ive never seen a washing machine that doesnt do a pre-determined amount of cycles. That exists? And I thought I had a rather sophisticated washing machine.
I think the way it normally would work would be to do the existing steps for a bit longer if necessary or stop them early if possible, but the washing machine I've got at the moment sometimes gets its timer all the way to one minute and then adds an extra ten and starts rinsing again. In theory, that should be less likely to happen if you're separating the washing by soiling levels like the manual says, but some of my family don't believe the manual.
Ah ok. I havent really read much of mines manual. But i did notice that the timer is often wrong, it seems to go slower than actual time. Would make sense if it is measuring something in the water and just putting an estimated timeon the display. I thought it was just a bad clock...
I just want everything with a heating element to use a heat pump instead. Electric heating elements are so horribly inefficient and wasteful in comparison.
I have a ventless heat pump combo washer/dryer. It takes up half the space that two machines would, plugs into a regular 110V outlet, gets HOT (way hotter than I expected a heat pump has any right to achieve), drains all its drying water into the drain, vents none of my indoor air outside, doesn't require changing laundry from one machine to the other. Practically and mechanically it seems brilliant and I can't imagine why I would ever buy a traditional machine ever again. Except...
It's chock full of horrible apps and shit that I'll never use. It's way too "smart", and those "smarts" are not there for my benefit. After a month or two it finally gave up trying to pester me to connect it to a network and install the app, which I'll never, ever do. It's never going to see an update or new firmware if I can help it, but I'm afraid that if/when it ever breaks, I'll have no choice. I know it's going to do things like eventually refuse to work until the computer has been "updated" to be "compatible" with new parts. And it's not even just that it's going to be expensive. It's that I don't trust it, and I don't trust it to remain functional in the future, even if there are parts, that they won't let me install the parts, or will require me to agree to play by their "rules" before I can.
Right to repair needs to be a thing, and people need to be able to break the ridiculous amount of both legal and practical control these manufacturers have over their devices after they've left the factory. We cannot and should not trust the manufacturers to support it. We need to allow independent repair.
Incorrect, no connection to outdoors is required for these appliances. In the case of the ventless combo, it literally hooks up to nothing other than the standard washing machine hookup. 1 normal 15 amp power outlet, 1 hot water hose, 1 cold water hose, 1 drain hose. No dryer vents, no other tubes or hoses, no drilling or cutting, no changes at all required. It is literally a drop-in replacement for any washer, but it also dries, with a heat pump, powered from the same circuit the washer uses and the same drain the washer uses.
Also, let me blow your mind a little bit: theoretically, the cold water main running to your house contains enough heat energy to completely heat your house all winter on its own. It is cold to us, but thermodynamically it's a goldmine and you have an extremely generous supply of it. Water represents an enormous reservoir of heat, and you can play some really fun games with latent heat of evaporation and condensation (which is exactly how heat pumps work in the first place). Dehumidifiers add as much or more heat to a room than a space heater does, using a fraction of the electrical power. That's the power of the heat contained in water. I'm not saying that a heat pump dryer is doing this with your water supply, simply pointing out that once water is in play, it becomes way more of a complex issue than performance figures on paper actually represent.
Obviously, clean drinkable water is also a scarce resource, so using it directly for any form of heating would be wasteful in its own way, but the point is that it would be technically possible. Including water in the discussion adds a lot of really interesting possibilities to the way we manage heat and energy, and we will eventually need to start understanding how much heat we literally throw away down the drain and how wasteful that actually is. And in the process we'll learn to save some money and maybe even make our lives a bit more convenient.
Heat pumps absolutely do not need to connect indoors and outdoors, every fridge and freezer is just a heat pump connected to a box.
Ive had a ventless heat pump clothes dryer, about 5 years ago, maybe 6. Technically it made the room it was in slightly colder while it ran, but that heat from my house was just concentrated inside the box and then allowed to escape back into my house.
I also think there have been advances in heat pump technology either with the refrigerant used to transfer the heat or with cascading systems that run multiple loops with different heat capacity so that one loop takes room temp water to "warm" temps and a secondary loop takes the "warm" water to hot.
I think they mean appliances that don't necessarily heat an area but heat is a function of their purpose.
In the example given, a combo washer dryer, it is not necessary to have a link to the outside it merely uses the ambient air as it's source of heat, The same is also common among heat pump water heaters.
Yeah my heat pump is something like 2000% efficient. It can cheat because it doesn’t convert electricity into heat, it uses electricity to move heat from the outside to the inside (or vice versa).
So, 1 kwh electric energy to an electric heater produces 1 kwh of heating energy.
So to give you an idea how a heatpump would do: looking at my heat pump's data registers right now, it says it used 3.6 kwh electric energy in the last hour to produce 12.7 kwh heating energy (air to water).
GE Profile PFQ97HSPVDS. Not a sponsor, and not even a recommendation. It feels icky even admitting it. The only reason I am mentioning it at all is because I did manage to get it to (eventually) stop aggravating me about installing the app and connecting it to wifi and now it just works without annoyance as it should have from day one, and I recognize the possibility of having access to that feature alone may be valuable to someone. I can't guarantee the one you buy now will even act the same way, as these things can be and are updated without notice.
I found some third-party home assistant stuff for GE smart home products on github if that's important to you, but I haven't even tested it for this as it still involves the appliance phoning home and everything is still gatekept through GE's website and like I said I refuse to ever let this thing touch any form of internet connection or wireless.
For maintainability heat pump dryers are shit though. You can't take the heat pump condenser out and thus you cannot properly clean it 😐. If you get lint stuck in there it starts reeking. The old condensers you could just take out and rinse.
A GE washing or drying machine from 30 years ago has easily removable panels, about 4 to 6 screws each and large easily identifiable parts, but one from a couple of years ago requires the top to be propped up or secured and the panels removed in a specific order such that you can them remove the internal plastic panels through which wires need to be dismounted around the drum with like 8 or more screws each of varying sizes and when it comes time to put it back together I hope you've got more than three arms because fuck you thats why.
I'd go even further and say, release documentation that shows how to DIY new parts from scrap you got laying around or can find in construction debris and junkyards.
50/50 chance it sells at a premium compared to other models, making the entire idea useless
Source: Like every project that pretended to do this with their respective market
Why the hell is a light phone more expensive than a mid to high range model smartphone. I'd rather just buy that and swap the ROM if I want to remove google.
Yeah I know my sample size is pretty useless, but this was just a dumb excuse to complain about light phone because even SMB manufacturing cost wise, it should be almost comically cheap to produce.
There are lots of other hardware accessories in the same range that cost much less to buy as a consumer, that are produced by more expensive vendors.
Great idea for a quick cash grab but then you will lose growth. You will run into insta pot problems where the product was too good and lacked room for innovation. But someone should do it anyways.
I would be totally cool with running a business like that. I don’t need to be making more and more every year if I have enough money to be comfortable, and I’d feel way better if I was in charge of a company making products that respect their user.
The unfortunate truth of modern business is that if you’re not growing, you’re on the path to failure. If we weren’t societally so fixated on profits, I could see lots of companies making “forever” products, but this sadly isn’t the case.
Maybe treat it like a business instead of a "quick cash grab" like instapot did? They should have used those early profits to diversify into other product areas. When demand for home cooking equipment predictably fell after COVID, they weren't prepared.
The jokes on them! I buy one for every friend who somehow doesn't already have one. I also manage to kill one about every two years. My lifestyle is very challenging to technology.
it just shrinks to a fairly stable demand. Until something new happened then demand will track up. Or you can (honestly) update to a new model if you figure out some new improvement then also increase in demand.
Just plan for it.
I hate the mentality that infinite and perpetual growth is some how a sustainable or even rational goal
Good news! I definitely thought of that before my comment. That is one of my all time favourites.
I even referenced that comic Friday night when my friends were drunk and in an argument with each other because they were both being insecure and idiots to each other. I'm their relationship counselor apparently. I don't know how I got the job and I'm not qualified...
No, but investors tend to treat companies as either growing or dying. If you have a boring and reliable product you're going to saturate the market at some point, which means that revenue will fall. Arguably there's still a lot of value in sticking around selling replacements as people break things, but this is nowhere near as lucrative as the growth phase.
A government should do it, then share the designs so that repair shops can do their jobs better. People should be employed by repair shops, not that much in factories that produce disposable crap. After spreading the product to the population, the factories should slow down and produce repair parts, while the workers move to the repair shops.
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 🤣😧🤣😧
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.
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.
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.
Gonna have to rebrand all that to Just A Dream, unless you have a plan to secure the capital to start that all up, and also somehow not be beholden to short term profit crazed investors who will change that business model.
The problem is they start including features no one wants. Like my dishwasher has an app, why?
It's not like it can fill itself so I can put the dishes in the dishwasher and I can start it remotely, but since I have to put the dishes in the dishwasher it's pointless to then not immediately turn it on, it's not like the dishes will care if they're sat in the dishwasher for a few hours. What is the point in me being able to remotely turn it on from my phone?
The app also lets me set a start time, which is a doubly pointless feature because I could just remotely turn it on with the app whenever, if for some reason I cared about that.
Imagine how much better the dishwasher would be if the people who'd spent the time building the world's most pointless app, instead worked on literally any other aspect of the dishwasher.
The dishwasher is a part of what I'd really like from open smart appliances: water-using appliances coordinating with my water softener to determine if they should start now or if they should wait for the softener to finish regenerating (including kicking off that softener regen). That would require at least the ability to start it via API, though it would also help to be able to query how much water it's about to use. I'd also like the washing machine to have similar capabilities.
If they build in an API that can handle doing some actions and returning some status data, then people could build apps to do whatever they want with them. If the APIs are standardized, genetic apps could handle the annoying stuff like establishing the connection, while exposing a way to customize commands and coordinate between multiple appliances.
But I have to admit, there aren't many other things I'd want to do. I don't like the idea of preheating the oven while I'm not home, even though I'm not one of those people who store plastic/flammable things in the oven. Maybe thermostat control and leak detection stuff with control over the main water valve.
Patents tend to last 20 years. Most major appliances probably don't have any currently valid patents that are likely to get in the way unless you're trying to make them "smart."
The story section page 1 more entry in the French version than in the English version: project was suspended in Feb 2020 because they couldn't find an industrial partner. 🙁
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.
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.
There already was a company called Brandless that tried to do the same thing with basic groceries like ketchup and paper towels. Looks like they're in the process of getting back to market, but seems like they had the same mindset.
Would be really nice to have something similar for clothes.
I've been pondering if one could make open source controllers to replace the "smarts" in these with something that actually just does the job, and even customizable. With different sensor addons/adapters for different makes and models.
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.
None of those are particularly long-lasting, and definitely not built well. 4 out of 5 of their "best" are all whirlpool family appliances, which have been getting so cheaply built in the last few years that they feel flimsy. The list is basically an ad for whirlpool.
I have yet to see laundry that has to be connected to internet to work - there are several that can be connected, but no one can really answer why a consumer would want to (even the mfr reps kinda just stutter and mumble about vague "convenience" features). I wouldn't say laundry is heavily spying on us... yet...
I wouldn't buy whirlpool family because it all feels incredibly cheap and breaks easy. They have service techs almost everywhere, but their part supply is garbage so you are often waiting on parts. LG service is nearly non-existent. If you live in a big city they might have one or two techs that they can send out, but that's it. They are better on parts, but they very rarely admit the appliance is FUBAR and replace it.
Speed Queen makes absolute units. Like, you could probably drop it down a flight of stairs and then hook it up and run a cycle. BUT, they come with downsides - mainly price point and capacity, but they are also very hard on clothes, and the TR series wash cycle sucks because the agitator is fixed to the tub (this design has been tried so many times and sucks every time) - the TC wash cycle is fine.
Samsung units are very similar to LG units, but their service is generally better - much more parts in stock in the US already so fixing it when it breaks is usually pretty quick. They don't have a great service network, but they are quick to admit they can't get a tech out and just offer replacements.
Frigidaire/Electrolux units are "fine". They generally also have service everywhere and reasonably part supply chains, but they aren't built fool-proof.
Cheap GE units are probably the place to be for cheap units, they aren't built as cheaply as the whirlpool family typically, service is generally decent. They still aren't build to last more than 7-10-ish years. Most appliance companies in the US realized their average customer was buying new every 5-7 years anyway due to moving or remodeling. That meant building them to last considerably longer than that means they are building them to be used by the second hand market. Similar to the gaming industry in the last several years, they don't want that because they don't make money on that. Save money during production, make a worse product, more sales/profit.
I feel like this post is already too long... I've been working with appliances both repairs and sales for about 12 years now. If people have questions I'm happy to answer :P
Could you please elaborate on Speed Queen washers being hard on your clothes? Do they not have the same wash settings that other washers do (like delicate or gentle)?
They have a lot of power, so the agitation is applying more force to the clothes. They have a delicate cycle but... It's like a big cat, like a tiger. Even if it is being friendly to a person, their "rub up against the thing they love" could crack a rib because they are just so damn strong. Kinda similar here. They do everything stronger. It isn't just the washers, the dryers are too. They typically get hotter than other brands. I've seen even on the low heat cycle, synthetic, plasticky fabrics, like athletic wear or basketball shorts can melt against the metal grate in the back as it tumbles. Speed Queen said that was normal and advised using the No Heat setting for "those types of fabrics".
Also, heaven help you if you use too much detergent... The drain pump is so strong it will whip the drain water into a sudsy frothy mess that will erupt out of the top of your drain stand-pipe or wall box and leave you with a nasty surprise on the floor. Once you see that, it will do it for the next few cycles even without adding new soap as it clears out the residue in the machine.
How to use a Speed Queen is basically completely different to anything else on the market, and most people don't read the manual because they've "been doing laundry for 40 years and know what they are doing".
With TVs, which have had a smart version for a longer time than appliances, the dumb, spyware-less versions have actually become somewhat more expensive. Nothing stopping other devices from going the same way.
That's a large part of why "things aren't built the way they used to," is wrong. People don't want to pay a lot for appliances now, so they get built with cheap parts to meet that price point.
There were cheap garbage appliances in the old days too.
Yeah, those suckers were the equivalent of like $2k today.
But even cheap appliances can last years if repaired. Washers and dryers are pretty simple to fix (electric only), and it's cheaper than you might think for common issues. Lid switch replacements, drum rollers, heating elements, sensors, etc. run like a max of $50, and you can always find a YouTube video of someone replacing the part in the exact model you own.
Cars too!!
Just a basic car, without too many bells and whistles. Electric windows and central locks are nice but unnecessary. Just more things that can break.
Defo no screens or 'smart' stuff.
Sounds like something Tim Allen would do. It’d have a big block V8 for more power, ahh, ahhh ahhh ha ha ha! Sprays water all over the kitchen and fills the house with smoke!
So, right now you have like a modern Samsung fridge with a screen and app, or something, but if a company produced a nicer simple one, then you'd finally decide to build your own?
Right now I have a dumb fridge from the 2000s that works just fine, thank you very much.
A company could produce a nicer, simpler one, but given the state of similar products and their adoption (fairphone, pinephone, framework, ecogeek), they'll never reach a market share and price point that makes them competitive as compared to me putting together an insulated box, some copper coils, and a compressor. I already made a fridge as a college project, after all.
Which is exactly what I plan to do once my current fridge croaks.
Yanks those things are expensive. I get the repairability aspect but I'm not sure I'd want to sell my kidneys just so I could have a user replaceable battery.
Its very hard to sell a product based on it being "reliable" and "good quality". This is because everyone fucking lies in their marketing about those exact qualities and its inevitable that you will get breakdowns and your customers will complain about those breakdowns and destroy your reputation.
Everything is fake now. Its just a matter of using marketing to tell the customer your product is exactly what they want.
All others are "just" too. You just have to download an application and just connect you bidet to the cloud, then just subscribe for additional 50GB of cloud storage with 30 days free trial (only applies if you chose annual billing) and you will be able to just wash you ass.
Murdered. Killed. Assassinated. Victim of criminal homicide. Flayed alive. Burned at the stake. Killed, raped, boiled alive, his house and family burned down in arson and pedophilic murder.
Sometimes words mean what everyone knows they mean rather than the strict definition. Context clues made this totally obvious. No need for pedantry when the original post was clearly communicated to everyone except you apparently.
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:
and Mielemake the best stoves and fridgesAnd 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.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.
Do you have a source for that? Their wiki page says that they are still family owned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miele
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.
That’s not true at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miele
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.
Is Asko stil good? Owned by Gorenje since 2010
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 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.
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.
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.
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
Worked for a college that went under and we had a bunch of dehydrators that were used in the labs. My co-worker was going to snatch one up because hey, dehydrator for practically free, what could go wrong?
He asked one of our professors about it who said in no uncertain terms, “do not use those dehydrators for food if you value longevity of life”
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.
And by the time you got rid of it it was criminally inefficient.
How can a resistive water heater be inefficient? (other than not being a heat pump?)
As recently as the 1990s, even the most efficient gas water heaters only had a UEF of around 0.70 (i.e., 70%), meaning that at least 30% of the fuel used (or 30 cents of every dollar spent) was wasted and not producing usable hot water.
Where did OP say what type of water heater it was?
Replace your sacrificial anode before that time and you'll be good.
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.
https://speedqueen.com/products/all-products/
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.
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 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.
There’s a huge demand from consumers for that. Just not from investors.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Investors need not be shareholders, to be fair.
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? 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.
"No enshitification" is the new top tier marketing strategy.
Although intense marketing is a sign of enshittification 🤔 Perhaps looking at the ownership structures would almost be a better startegy. AFAIK enshittification predominantely affects publicly traded corpos.
these exist, see speed queen
the cost is going to be higher, though, because "smart" widgets can offset their initial costs through the projeted sale of the data harvested over the life of the widget
most people being ignorant to this and to the inevitable issues with corporate-built "smart" widget infrastructure, the cheapest option will generally be the most popular
my inner doctorow says that the twiddlers did this on purpose to undermine competition, especially considering the attempts to keep those widgets from being liberated
ding ding ding
there can be no (valid) competition against capitalistic cronyism.
The same thing is happening with cars. Good luck trying to get a new unconnected vehicle, and good luck to the company who plans to sell them.
I think the price difference has more to do with scale than it does data. The main reason good, simple products can't be cheaper is because the small companies who make them can't put in the same gigantic bulk orders of raw materials, nor do they have the specialized manufacturing processes or assembly lines.
The data is damn near an afterthought. Putting a touchscreen on a fridge is a great way to pretend a piece of shit is a premium product. If they can scrape your data too, then for sure they'll go for it, but the main reason the screen is on there is because most people are still buying that shit.
This kind of anti-enshittification marketing is starting to gain traction I think.
A big part of Valve's launch was saying stuff like "of course you can run whatever you want on it, it's yours!"
thats just the first step of enshittification!
Unshittyify and Reshittify. Back and forth forever ))<> ((
I think you're being down voted because of Valve being used as the example and they have been seen as the exception to the rule.
Your point, though, is valid.
So if that happens install a different distro.
The Sims did it first, except the brand was called "Justa". Justa dishwasher. Justa fridge.
Ahead of their time.
Until private equity gets their grubby paws on the company.
Make that shit a self-funded slow growing cooperative.
Or at the very least steward ownership
It's the Linux philosophy in appliances. I'm down.
I want to produce boxed recipes under a product line named "Jamaican"
I also wanna make a perfume line named "Eureka," following the same general idea but with awfully generic scent names
What Jamaican?
There's tradeoffs - simplicity, repairability, efficiency.
Take washers, for example. I was looking at Speed Queen washers to replace mine. On paper they are great, more durable. But it turns out that while they have physical knobs and switches, newer models still hide a circuit board inside, so the gap between commercial and consumer models is shrinking (and not in the direction we want.)
The Speed Queen washers also have nearly half the capacity of off the shelf consumer washers, and use twice the amount of water and electricity. I did the math, and at the current utility and washer prices I'd break even replacing the washer every 5 years.
Furthermore, the local appliance repair shop that I trust told me it could take them weeks to get replacement parts for Speed Queen. For a laundromat that's not a huge deal when it's one washer out of twenty, for a single machine home it's a problem.
Yes, I do wish that consumer appliances were more reliable. But barring that, the next best thing is easily and quickly repairable, and on that matter there's brands that are qualitatively and quantitatively better in that regard than others.
I also want to point out that for some products (such as smart phones) there's an additional trade-off between repairability and quality:
When you have screws in your phone instead of having everything glued together, that means you have additional moving parts and probably gaps between the parts, where water can enter and cause corrosion. If everything is glued together, it's not repairable but it's also less likely that it needs to be repaired because there's fewer problems to begin with.
A total absense of tech would be bad for a washing machine. With a really simple conductivity sensor (basically just two electrodes on the sides of a plastic pipe) and an opacity sensor (an IR LED and an LDR on opposite sides of a clear pipe), you can measure how much stuff is dissolved in water and how much insoluable stuff is suspended. That then means that you can keep circulating the soapy water until it stops getting dirtier, then keep rinsing it out until it stops getting cleaner, which then means you can have the cycle times adjust themselves to how soiled the load is, instead of just making them as long as the worst case scenario might require and wasting energy, water, and time on an average load.
My husband loves building elecronics. And there's a lot of cool low-tech tech. I feel like basic circuit board stuff should be allowed, as it can be easy to repair if you know how. Just have the schematics available.
The problem for me is when it needs an Internet connection for remote access on top of a lot of flimsy parts that wear out too quickly.
i think this is a typical "just install linux" situation. While to you it might seem simple, you're vastly overestimating most people's affinity to tech.
It really reminds me of this meme:
Right to repair isn't about everyone knowing how to do it, but providing the accessibility and potential for repairs, compared to purposely obfuscated tech which is at the mercy of corporate overlords. Yes, a lot of people won't know how to repair it, but if they want to repair it without paying a professional, they still have the ability to research and learn how to do it themselves.
Also, love this one! I should get a framed version.
No, I get it. But everything is hard to fix until you know how to do it.
To me, This is about owning things you or someone else can repair with readily available parts. The problem now is remote bricking of purchases by the manufacturer through the internet. And things so cheaply made, the parts either don't exist or the too much of it broke. Or having to pay subscriptions for the privilege to use the things you bought.
It's just that if you have a electronics nerd friend or curiosity, there's a lot of basic electronics that can be repaired with incredibly cheap parts.
For example, if your microwave completely dies, it's probably a common $0.10 fuse. It's not on the circuit board but it's technically part of the electronics. You have to be careful to not touch the capacitors. But watch a video and you've brought something dead back to life.
If you don't trust yourself, call that friend that loves that kind of stuff, share a pizza and avoid buying a new microwave that spies on you.
I think ive never seen a washing machine that doesnt do a pre-determined amount of cycles. That exists? And I thought I had a rather sophisticated washing machine.
I think the way it normally would work would be to do the existing steps for a bit longer if necessary or stop them early if possible, but the washing machine I've got at the moment sometimes gets its timer all the way to one minute and then adds an extra ten and starts rinsing again. In theory, that should be less likely to happen if you're separating the washing by soiling levels like the manual says, but some of my family don't believe the manual.
Ah ok. I havent really read much of mines manual. But i did notice that the timer is often wrong, it seems to go slower than actual time. Would make sense if it is measuring something in the water and just putting an estimated timeon the display. I thought it was just a bad clock...
I just want everything with a heating element to use a heat pump instead. Electric heating elements are so horribly inefficient and wasteful in comparison.
I have a ventless heat pump combo washer/dryer. It takes up half the space that two machines would, plugs into a regular 110V outlet, gets HOT (way hotter than I expected a heat pump has any right to achieve), drains all its drying water into the drain, vents none of my indoor air outside, doesn't require changing laundry from one machine to the other. Practically and mechanically it seems brilliant and I can't imagine why I would ever buy a traditional machine ever again. Except...
It's chock full of horrible apps and shit that I'll never use. It's way too "smart", and those "smarts" are not there for my benefit. After a month or two it finally gave up trying to pester me to connect it to a network and install the app, which I'll never, ever do. It's never going to see an update or new firmware if I can help it, but I'm afraid that if/when it ever breaks, I'll have no choice. I know it's going to do things like eventually refuse to work until the computer has been "updated" to be "compatible" with new parts. And it's not even just that it's going to be expensive. It's that I don't trust it, and I don't trust it to remain functional in the future, even if there are parts, that they won't let me install the parts, or will require me to agree to play by their "rules" before I can.
Right to repair needs to be a thing, and people need to be able to break the ridiculous amount of both legal and practical control these manufacturers have over their devices after they've left the factory. We cannot and should not trust the manufacturers to support it. We need to allow independent repair.
Incorrect, no connection to outdoors is required for these appliances. In the case of the ventless combo, it literally hooks up to nothing other than the standard washing machine hookup. 1 normal 15 amp power outlet, 1 hot water hose, 1 cold water hose, 1 drain hose. No dryer vents, no other tubes or hoses, no drilling or cutting, no changes at all required. It is literally a drop-in replacement for any washer, but it also dries, with a heat pump, powered from the same circuit the washer uses and the same drain the washer uses.
Also, let me blow your mind a little bit: theoretically, the cold water main running to your house contains enough heat energy to completely heat your house all winter on its own. It is cold to us, but thermodynamically it's a goldmine and you have an extremely generous supply of it. Water represents an enormous reservoir of heat, and you can play some really fun games with latent heat of evaporation and condensation (which is exactly how heat pumps work in the first place). Dehumidifiers add as much or more heat to a room than a space heater does, using a fraction of the electrical power. That's the power of the heat contained in water. I'm not saying that a heat pump dryer is doing this with your water supply, simply pointing out that once water is in play, it becomes way more of a complex issue than performance figures on paper actually represent.
Obviously, clean drinkable water is also a scarce resource, so using it directly for any form of heating would be wasteful in its own way, but the point is that it would be technically possible. Including water in the discussion adds a lot of really interesting possibilities to the way we manage heat and energy, and we will eventually need to start understanding how much heat we literally throw away down the drain and how wasteful that actually is. And in the process we'll learn to save some money and maybe even make our lives a bit more convenient.
Are you Alec from Tech. Connections?
Unfortunately not, but I am proud to be compared to him.
I can definitely read your comment in his voice, particularly the "also, let me blow your mind a little bit" part.
Heat pumps absolutely do not need to connect indoors and outdoors, every fridge and freezer is just a heat pump connected to a box.
Ive had a ventless heat pump clothes dryer, about 5 years ago, maybe 6. Technically it made the room it was in slightly colder while it ran, but that heat from my house was just concentrated inside the box and then allowed to escape back into my house.
I also think there have been advances in heat pump technology either with the refrigerant used to transfer the heat or with cascading systems that run multiple loops with different heat capacity so that one loop takes room temp water to "warm" temps and a secondary loop takes the "warm" water to hot.
I think they mean appliances that don't necessarily heat an area but heat is a function of their purpose.
In the example given, a combo washer dryer, it is not necessary to have a link to the outside it merely uses the ambient air as it's source of heat, The same is also common among heat pump water heaters.
I thought electric heaters were 100% efficient? All the electricity you put into it becomes heat yeah?
Yea but heat pumps have a coefficient of performance of greater than 1 cause you're moving heat instead of generating it.
Yeah my heat pump is something like 2000% efficient. It can cheat because it doesn’t convert electricity into heat, it uses electricity to move heat from the outside to the inside (or vice versa).
So, 1 kwh electric energy to an electric heater produces 1 kwh of heating energy.
So to give you an idea how a heatpump would do: looking at my heat pump's data registers right now, it says it used 3.6 kwh electric energy in the last hour to produce 12.7 kwh heating energy (air to water).
What brand is it? I want a heat pump dryer, but I don't like "smart" stuff.
GE Profile PFQ97HSPVDS. Not a sponsor, and not even a recommendation. It feels icky even admitting it. The only reason I am mentioning it at all is because I did manage to get it to (eventually) stop aggravating me about installing the app and connecting it to wifi and now it just works without annoyance as it should have from day one, and I recognize the possibility of having access to that feature alone may be valuable to someone. I can't guarantee the one you buy now will even act the same way, as these things can be and are updated without notice.
I found some third-party home assistant stuff for GE smart home products on github if that's important to you, but I haven't even tested it for this as it still involves the appliance phoning home and everything is still gatekept through GE's website and like I said I refuse to ever let this thing touch any form of internet connection or wireless.
Got it! I saw a Samsung one the other week, so that's why I was curious. I still want a heatpump dryer, just a better one that doesn't beg for clicks.
For maintainability heat pump dryers are shit though. You can't take the heat pump condenser out and thus you cannot properly clean it 😐. If you get lint stuck in there it starts reeking. The old condensers you could just take out and rinse.
And easier to repair, too.
A GE washing or drying machine from 30 years ago has easily removable panels, about 4 to 6 screws each and large easily identifiable parts, but one from a couple of years ago requires the top to be propped up or secured and the panels removed in a specific order such that you can them remove the internal plastic panels through which wires need to be dismounted around the drum with like 8 or more screws each of varying sizes and when it comes time to put it back together I hope you've got more than three arms because fuck you thats why.
There's a supermarket in Canada, that has a brand like that. It's bright yellow and black and only has the product name in bold writing on it.
Loblaw's and their subsidiaries. The brand is literally called No Name (Sans Nom). It always gave me a chuckle when I lived in Canada.
Obligatory fuck the Loblaws, but the No Name thing is a neat concept and certainly very recognizable.
and sometimes it's actually good value!
I still don't buy it because fuck Loblaws, though
Great marketing from a terrible company
Fuck Loblaws.
Maybe not only just work for 15+ years. But allow parts to be purchased and easy manuals to read for at home repairs.
It's now required by law in Europe that spare parts needs to be available for at least 10 years.
That's been a law in the US for cars for ages.
This specifically makes me so much more likely to buy a product.
seriously, being able to fix the washer/dryer ourselves has saved us so much money
I'd go even further and say, release documentation that shows how to DIY new parts from scrap you got laying around or can find in construction debris and junkyards.
Hell yes
Deshittification
Where do I sign up?
50/50 chance it sells at a premium compared to other models, making the entire idea useless
Source: Like every project that pretended to do this with their respective market
Why the hell is a light phone more expensive than a mid to high range model smartphone. I'd rather just buy that and swap the ROM if I want to remove google.
Economies of scale and not capturing data as part of your profit model
Yeah I know my sample size is pretty useless, but this was just a dumb excuse to complain about light phone because even SMB manufacturing cost wise, it should be almost comically cheap to produce.
There are lots of other hardware accessories in the same range that cost much less to buy as a consumer, that are produced by more expensive vendors.
Yeah but what is the volume they are selling and are they profiting from user data both of those things have a significant impact on price.
He'll be out of business in a years time!
Seriously a great idea though. I'd buy all their stuff.
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.
If you want this today, SpeedQueen has decent models that last forever and are very simple.
Great idea for a quick cash grab but then you will lose growth. You will run into insta pot problems where the product was too good and lacked room for innovation. But someone should do it anyways.
Imagine making a billion dollars off putting a device in everyone's home and thinking that's not enough
That's what pisses me off about Hollywood. That movie made 12million dollars. What a colossal failure that was.
It is when it cost $20 million to produce.
I would be totally cool with running a business like that. I don’t need to be making more and more every year if I have enough money to be comfortable, and I’d feel way better if I was in charge of a company making products that respect their user.
The unfortunate truth of modern business is that if you’re not growing, you’re on the path to failure. If we weren’t societally so fixated on profits, I could see lots of companies making “forever” products, but this sadly isn’t the case.
So what are you doing with your employees when your company is done selling products to users? Just lay everyone off?
Maybe treat it like a business instead of a "quick cash grab" like instapot did? They should have used those early profits to diversify into other product areas. When demand for home cooking equipment predictably fell after COVID, they weren't prepared.
Is instant pot losing money on their product? I just got one last month and it’s been amazing for making meat tender and making bone broth.
That's their problem: their product is very good and very reliable, which means once everyone who wants one has one, there's no more demand.
The jokes on them! I buy one for every friend who somehow doesn't already have one. I also manage to kill one about every two years. My lifestyle is very challenging to technology.
People are born everyday. People break things.
There's no such thing as no more demand.
it just shrinks to a fairly stable demand. Until something new happened then demand will track up. Or you can (honestly) update to a new model if you figure out some new improvement then also increase in demand.
Just plan for it.
I hate the mentality that infinite and perpetual growth is some how a sustainable or even rational goal
yeah reminds me of this meme:
Good news! I definitely thought of that before my comment. That is one of my all time favourites.
I even referenced that comic Friday night when my friends were drunk and in an argument with each other because they were both being insecure and idiots to each other. I'm their relationship counselor apparently. I don't know how I got the job and I'm not qualified...
No, but investors tend to treat companies as either growing or dying. If you have a boring and reliable product you're going to saturate the market at some point, which means that revenue will fall. Arguably there's still a lot of value in sticking around selling replacements as people break things, but this is nowhere near as lucrative as the growth phase.
A government should do it, then share the designs so that repair shops can do their jobs better. People should be employed by repair shops, not that much in factories that produce disposable crap. After spreading the product to the population, the factories should slow down and produce repair parts, while the workers move to the repair shops.
Like No Name does for groceries.
Does ordinary skincare count too?
Just Uncomplicated Socialist Tech
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.
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.
My million dollar idea is a teleporter.
You walk in and get teleported.
Gibe moneeis nao plz
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
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?
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
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.
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).
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.
Someone didn't have a childhood where they only watched the Jetsons and the Flintstones
Gonna have to rebrand all that to Just A Dream, unless you have a plan to secure the capital to start that all up, and also somehow not be beholden to short term profit crazed investors who will change that business model.
Hooray! Hypercapitalist Realism!
I thought about this too. People are sick of this shit.
I'm not against it having an open API to allow it to be controlled by some computer system, though don't even bring up the word "cloud".
The problem is they start including features no one wants. Like my dishwasher has an app, why?
It's not like it can fill itself so I can put the dishes in the dishwasher and I can start it remotely, but since I have to put the dishes in the dishwasher it's pointless to then not immediately turn it on, it's not like the dishes will care if they're sat in the dishwasher for a few hours. What is the point in me being able to remotely turn it on from my phone?
The app also lets me set a start time, which is a doubly pointless feature because I could just remotely turn it on with the app whenever, if for some reason I cared about that.
Imagine how much better the dishwasher would be if the people who'd spent the time building the world's most pointless app, instead worked on literally any other aspect of the dishwasher.
The dishwasher is a part of what I'd really like from open smart appliances: water-using appliances coordinating with my water softener to determine if they should start now or if they should wait for the softener to finish regenerating (including kicking off that softener regen). That would require at least the ability to start it via API, though it would also help to be able to query how much water it's about to use. I'd also like the washing machine to have similar capabilities.
If they build in an API that can handle doing some actions and returning some status data, then people could build apps to do whatever they want with them. If the APIs are standardized, genetic apps could handle the annoying stuff like establishing the connection, while exposing a way to customize commands and coordinate between multiple appliances.
But I have to admit, there aren't many other things I'd want to do. I don't like the idea of preheating the oven while I'm not home, even though I'm not one of those people who store plastic/flammable things in the oven. Maybe thermostat control and leak detection stuff with control over the main water valve.
My refrigerator is still going strong at 22 years
45 years here. It's loud as fuck but it still keeps things cool.
IANAL but somehow I get the feeling that entering those industries as a new guy would be a real pain in the ass at the patent office.
Just commenting that you said IANAL and "pain in the ass" and I'm still laughing
They might not be a lawyer, but they still know what they are talking about
Patents tend to last 20 years. Most major appliances probably don't have any currently valid patents that are likely to get in the way unless you're trying to make them "smart."
For what do they need a patent?
It's more "whose patents will they inadventently end up using?"
I thought multiple times about resurrecting this: https://www.lincrevable.com/en/
What happened to it?
The story section page 1 more entry in the French version than in the English version: project was suspended in Feb 2020 because they couldn't find an industrial partner. 🙁
Thanks!
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.
You can join me with outsized expectations for the Slate pickup that will inevitably be dashed.
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.
What? The foot pedal adjusts power. You don't need a replacement for gears.
I'll invest in this guy today.
No technology huh?
So a bucket, washboard, mangle, and piece of string for laundry.
An ice box or cellar for refrigeration
And an open fire for cooking.
No. Just a pond you have to jump into. We said no technology.
Exfuckingcuse me?
Nothing penned in. Has to be wild and burning down the village.
Pretty sure all of those could as technology too, except maybe the fire.
Ooh a company that sells refrigirators that don't suck. Call it "suckless."
Terrible vacuüm cleaner range though
Just can't branch out into vacuums. Unless sold as the Suckless Sux-a-lot
Still a great dad joke for any brand of vacuum cleaner: "This thing sucks."
you could call them "anglo-sucksons". would also be a cool name for a gay bar
"only stuff that sucks at our company are the vacuum cleaners"
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.
Similar to my idea called to make a clothing brand called “brandless”
No logo, no graphics, no distinguished designs
Just plain basic clothes in basic colors, using fabrics that last.
No itchy washing label either. All product information in detail available on site. At most a product number printed or sown on the inside.
I mean Uniqlo is kinda like this. No brand (at least in most of their basic stuff, I‘m not counting their new shit), long lasting and not expensive
Their new shit isn't long lasting either.
There already was a company called Brandless that tried to do the same thing with basic groceries like ketchup and paper towels. Looks like they're in the process of getting back to market, but seems like they had the same mindset.
Would be really nice to have something similar for clothes.
Muji does this. The name basically means no brand in Japanese. Check them out
There's the unbrandedbrand.com that does this for denim.
I've been pondering if one could make open source controllers to replace the "smarts" in these with something that actually just does the job, and even customizable. With different sensor addons/adapters for different makes and models.
Don't ponder.
We're already doing it.
https://esphome.io/
"no tech"
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.
It looks like they're available, but labeled under "cheap." They seem to be just dials. I'm sure a spyware version has crept into the list though. https://www.popularmechanics.com/home/g38757143/best-cheap-washing-machines/
None of those are particularly long-lasting, and definitely not built well. 4 out of 5 of their "best" are all whirlpool family appliances, which have been getting so cheaply built in the last few years that they feel flimsy. The list is basically an ad for whirlpool.
it is. these lists are likely pay for play and run by a pr firm in tandem with the brands' pr teams
Are the spyware ones long lasting? They're much harder to fix as well. You might be right about the ads, so here's more:
https://www.amazon.com/Pataku-Portable-Washing-Function-Apartment/dp/B0C7V5B59G?
https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-WA40A3005WPR-White-Washer-Dryer/dp/B0BDMQNBCJ?
https://www.costco.com/maytag-45-cu-ft-top-load-power-agitator-washer-and--70-cu-ft-electric-dryer-package.product.4000251701.html
https://www.wellrigged.com/most-durable-washing-machines/
Disclaimer: this is very US centric information.
I have yet to see laundry that has to be connected to internet to work - there are several that can be connected, but no one can really answer why a consumer would want to (even the mfr reps kinda just stutter and mumble about vague "convenience" features). I wouldn't say laundry is heavily spying on us... yet...
I wouldn't buy whirlpool family because it all feels incredibly cheap and breaks easy. They have service techs almost everywhere, but their part supply is garbage so you are often waiting on parts. LG service is nearly non-existent. If you live in a big city they might have one or two techs that they can send out, but that's it. They are better on parts, but they very rarely admit the appliance is FUBAR and replace it.
Speed Queen makes absolute units. Like, you could probably drop it down a flight of stairs and then hook it up and run a cycle. BUT, they come with downsides - mainly price point and capacity, but they are also very hard on clothes, and the TR series wash cycle sucks because the agitator is fixed to the tub (this design has been tried so many times and sucks every time) - the TC wash cycle is fine.
Samsung units are very similar to LG units, but their service is generally better - much more parts in stock in the US already so fixing it when it breaks is usually pretty quick. They don't have a great service network, but they are quick to admit they can't get a tech out and just offer replacements.
Frigidaire/Electrolux units are "fine". They generally also have service everywhere and reasonably part supply chains, but they aren't built fool-proof.
Cheap GE units are probably the place to be for cheap units, they aren't built as cheaply as the whirlpool family typically, service is generally decent. They still aren't build to last more than 7-10-ish years. Most appliance companies in the US realized their average customer was buying new every 5-7 years anyway due to moving or remodeling. That meant building them to last considerably longer than that means they are building them to be used by the second hand market. Similar to the gaming industry in the last several years, they don't want that because they don't make money on that. Save money during production, make a worse product, more sales/profit.
I feel like this post is already too long... I've been working with appliances both repairs and sales for about 12 years now. If people have questions I'm happy to answer :P
Great info, thanks.
Thanks for the insider info.
Could you please elaborate on Speed Queen washers being hard on your clothes? Do they not have the same wash settings that other washers do (like delicate or gentle)?
They have a lot of power, so the agitation is applying more force to the clothes. They have a delicate cycle but... It's like a big cat, like a tiger. Even if it is being friendly to a person, their "rub up against the thing they love" could crack a rib because they are just so damn strong. Kinda similar here. They do everything stronger. It isn't just the washers, the dryers are too. They typically get hotter than other brands. I've seen even on the low heat cycle, synthetic, plasticky fabrics, like athletic wear or basketball shorts can melt against the metal grate in the back as it tumbles. Speed Queen said that was normal and advised using the No Heat setting for "those types of fabrics".
Also, heaven help you if you use too much detergent... The drain pump is so strong it will whip the drain water into a sudsy frothy mess that will erupt out of the top of your drain stand-pipe or wall box and leave you with a nasty surprise on the floor. Once you see that, it will do it for the next few cycles even without adding new soap as it clears out the residue in the machine.
How to use a Speed Queen is basically completely different to anything else on the market, and most people don't read the manual because they've "been doing laundry for 40 years and know what they are doing".
Its not easy to find durable/high quality cheap machines.
With TVs, which have had a smart version for a longer time than appliances, the dumb, spyware-less versions have actually become somewhat more expensive. Nothing stopping other devices from going the same way.
who the hell pays $1000 for an appliance?
They're top pick is only $500
Who the hell pays $500 for an appliance?
People who want it to last.
That's a large part of why "things aren't built the way they used to," is wrong. People don't want to pay a lot for appliances now, so they get built with cheap parts to meet that price point.
There were cheap garbage appliances in the old days too.
That's fair. I do suspect those live-forever refridgerators probably did cost a bomb way back when
Yeah, those suckers were the equivalent of like $2k today.
But even cheap appliances can last years if repaired. Washers and dryers are pretty simple to fix (electric only), and it's cheaper than you might think for common issues. Lid switch replacements, drum rollers, heating elements, sensors, etc. run like a max of $50, and you can always find a YouTube video of someone replacing the part in the exact model you own.
Shut up and take my money.
Cars too!! Just a basic car, without too many bells and whistles. Electric windows and central locks are nice but unnecessary. Just more things that can break. Defo no screens or 'smart' stuff.
What about all the safety tech?
I'd just build my own, like I did for my water purifier. It ain't that hard.
I have never seen someone build their own washing machine or refrigerator. It's intriguing. A whole new level of diy
Does the Red Green Show count?
If women don't find you handsome, at least they'll find you handy.
Sounds like something Tim Allen would do. It’d have a big block V8 for more power, ahh, ahhh ahhh ha ha ha! Sprays water all over the kitchen and fills the house with smoke!
So, right now you have like a modern Samsung fridge with a screen and app, or something, but if a company produced a nicer simple one, then you'd finally decide to build your own?
Right now I have a dumb fridge from the 2000s that works just fine, thank you very much. A company could produce a nicer, simpler one, but given the state of similar products and their adoption (fairphone, pinephone, framework, ecogeek), they'll never reach a market share and price point that makes them competitive as compared to me putting together an insulated box, some copper coils, and a compressor. I already made a fridge as a college project, after all. Which is exactly what I plan to do once my current fridge croaks.
Simpl, It's that simple
Now available near you, the Simpl refrigerator!
I don’t usually fanboy for brands, but I’m a simp for Simpl!
https://frame.work/ kinda does this for computers, it would be nice to more manufactures follow this lead.
Yanks those things are expensive. I get the repairability aspect but I'm not sure I'd want to sell my kidneys just so I could have a user replaceable battery.
Just sell one, that's why you've got two!
Whatever happened with one of the higher ups there? CEO maybe? Got into some nonsense online?
We need him
Probably better than my idea of just starting to wash my clothes in a bucket
Its very hard to sell a product based on it being "reliable" and "good quality". This is because everyone fucking lies in their marketing about those exact qualities and its inevitable that you will get breakdowns and your customers will complain about those breakdowns and destroy your reputation.
Everything is fake now. Its just a matter of using marketing to tell the customer your product is exactly what they want.
Get ready to make no money
It's Just money, though!
Id buy their stuff, some of it at least
I would buy just enough.
All others are "just" too. You just have to download an application and just connect you bidet to the cloud, then just subscribe for additional 50GB of cloud storage with 30 days free trial (only applies if you chose annual billing) and you will be able to just wash you ass.
He’d get unalivened within a month.
Murdered. Killed. Assassinated. Victim of criminal homicide. Flayed alive. Burned at the stake. Killed, raped, boiled alive, his house and family burned down in arson and pedophilic murder.
We do not need to use the word "unalived."
But also, you can use it if you want.
Refrigeration is a technology.
Or is he proposing just putting a big harvested block of ice in the bottom of a cabinet?
Obviously they are talking about connectivity to the internet and other smart features.
Yes, those would have been better words to use.
Sometimes words mean what everyone knows they mean rather than the strict definition. Context clues made this totally obvious. No need for pedantry when the original post was clearly communicated to everyone except you apparently.
It's always clear until it isn't.