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Comment by tompccs | Hacker News Reader

There's a simple reason why this toaster was discontinued, and that's because it can't be made from commodity components which are used by all toaster manufacturers, as well as in a variety of other domestic appliances.

Plus, assembly looks quite intricate and probably highly manual.

It's beautiful, sure, but go and buy a toaster today and see how much premium people are willing to pay for a designer brand with no functional advantage.

Sadly toasters all work "well enough". This is a textbook example of great engineering being trumped by globalised economics and fickle consumers.

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Toasters do not all "work well enough". Shout if you have a toaster that you bought less than 5 years ago, that is still working. I think they're supposed to start failing after a year or two.

[Edit: if it's older than ten years, say how old - they made them better back in the olden daze]

These devices are sold for ten euros/dollars, or so. You really can't do good product design to that sort of price point. People expect to have to "recycle" them.

I bought a toaster for which you can order replacement heater elements, or a new timer. You can dismantle it and reassemble it with a normal electrician's screwdriver. The timer is clockwork. The whole thing's very steampunk.

It cost about 8 times as much as a "disposable" toaster. I don't know if it was a good deal; I'll tell you in a few decades. But if I don't have to bother with replacing it, from my POV that will be money well-spent; I'm sick of replacing stuff that should still be working. I'm sick of "hardware" that's really made of tissue-paper. And I'm sick of furniture that's made of wood-chips.

</rant>

I agree with every point you made, especially the wood chips. however I am still peeved at you because you did not include a link to this toaster you bought. How do I get one?

This toaster is a Dualit. I cannot recommend it as a consumer product; the company is quite nasty to deal with, I think. Also, my Dualit toaster is only two years old; for the price I paid, I'd need something more like 10 years service to be able to recommend. HTH.

We bought the cheapest toaster we could find at a Target probably 5 - 6 years ago. Still works fine.

What you are saying is sadly the reality today within most product categories.

For example, go to a totally different category: clothing.

In the great age of US sports clothing, tees were slowly knitted by machines called loopwheelers. E.g. tees from Champion.

These days, they are crap. If you want a nice tee that will age well and last really long, you need to buy from some Japanese brands that try to imitate old Champion tees. The price is really high, and you'd most likely need to import or buy from a high end shop.

I try to buy good stuff that lasts ages. I don't care paying a big premium. I try to live with around 100 items. But its really hard.

I'm pretty sure a lot of the "improvements" in price attributed to international trade over the last ~4 decades have more to do with the lowest end of the current product range simply not existing before, i.e. the worst versions of a product are worse (and cheaper) than the worst version that was available decades ago. Those products take over—for reasons that may include consumers legitimately preferring them but also probably includes difficulty consumers have finding reliable information about products other than price—and the nicer version that used to be the norm might actually get more expensive as new market segments develop and production scale drops.

This is a good point - some of what we are calling cheap crap just wasn't being made before.

Besides there being more stuff of every type of buy, the purchasing power of the dollar has declined, so maybe people can't afford a toaster that's as good any more?

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SA0R

I guess you'd have to multiply this by whatever the average wage was for each year.

"can't afford"

I don't think that's right. I think it's less expensive to make stuff that doesn't need to be replaced.

Do you have examples of brands to look at?

The Real McCoy's, Tezomeya, Studio D'Artisan, Buzz Rickson, Strike Gold...

Jeez, never heard of all these brands. I favour Fruit Of The Loom for tees. Maybe I'm just not hip.

for tees ?

it depends what you are looking for.. if the only criteria is quality :

- Maison Cornichon. It is actually a french brand but Japan is by far their biggest market. They use old french machines. the resulting tee is very strong, probably heavier than what you expect. They do have a lot of shrinking when you wash them (and you can expand them again afterwards).

- Merz B. Schwanen : simple high quality german tshirts

- The Real McCoy's : japan brand specifically trying (successfully) to reproduce americana pieces.

- lots of other japanese brands make good tshirts.. it kinda depends what you are looking for. Blue blue japan pieces are often very beautiful but also indigo dyed (so they leak a LOT of pigment the first time they are wet).

- Taylor Stitch actually makes one of the heaviest tshirts I have ever seen.

- Outside of cottons tshirts, there are also tons of merino ones. Outlier would be the most well known in the USA. It is was less resistant to abrasion that a cotton one, but it absolutely does not retain smells (so you could hike 10 days with it if you wished to, it would barely smell anything).

The machines that a lot of these brands use are actually pretty interesting. These are often very old machines. Their use had been almost completely abandoned because they are pretty slow. There are 'lots' of them in Japan in the first place because several decades ago they were pretty standard. The industry has moved to new machines with better yields but some niche brands saw an opportunity there.

E.G. there are some Youtube videos on how a brand like Momotaro makes denim : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek5520fSymY

With clothing, I generally find that the less I spend on clothes, the better they are. A $10 pair of Wranglers from Walmart holds up much better than the $100 pair that comes from a name-brand outlet.

Probably the best pairs of shorts I ever bought were some weird brand that cost $8 apiece at Sam's Club...

That's not the case when it comes to certain types of clothing. For instance, I'm thinking of Oxford cloth button down shirts (OCBDs). Mercer makes high quality, heavy weight shirtings and as a result of the cloth and stitching the shirts last a long time and look great: http://www.mercerandsons.com/

Perhaps far brom being the nicest shirts, but the $15 OCBDs I have bought at JCPenney's have lasted more than 10 years with barely any fading. They seem indestructible.

I received a toaster as a wedding present 7 years and about a week ago. We’ve used it almost everyday since then(when we are home). It’s a breville, we have a lot of their products and they all seem to hold up really well. I bought a breville coffee grinder 10 years ago that I still use every morning.

Happy Anniversary! :)

My toaster growing up was a wedding present, for my grandparents. It still works.

My mother-in-law bought Her first toaster made in China from Wal Mart circa 2000, it burned up in about a week. Since then the toasters i have seen don't burn up but they are incredibly slow and try to make up for it by having more slots. It doesn't help much because usually i want one slice or at most two.

Did old toasters have asbestos in them?

Did old toasters have asbestos in them?

Yes. Asbestos was everywhere at least in the first half of the 20th century. The type, amount used, and typical exposure is not really a concern, however. I'm not aware of any problems caused by using asbestos-containing toasters daily --- on the assumption that if there were, it would've been all over the news.

I had that same sunbeam toaster shown in the video. It worked great for the first year, then we had to throw the bread in with increasing amounts of force to get it to start.

Eventually we were dropping bread from high above the toaster to get just the right amount of force. It often took many attempts, would not recommend.

He has a second video showing how to adjust the toaster. There is a screw at the bottom under the crumb tray which adjusts the tension.

Right. It’s unreal how hard it is to find decent shit built to last, and don’t tell me I’m not willing to pay a premium for it, because I am willing. What I don’t like buying is shit branded as upscale high quality that is really the same garbage underneath.

I’m sure there a number of different elements at play here, but one aspect I’ve seen happen time and again is private equity buying out a company and using that strong brand to make progressively shittier and shittier goods, for the same or higher price, while still retaining enough critical mass mindshare that the brand is still “quality”.

> shit branded as upscale high quality that is really the same garbage underneath.

and this is how bad money drives good money out of the market. What is the general solution for this, assuming the quality level isn't illegal?

I imagine the solution is going to be some sort of parallel to open source, that I can't quite visualize atm.

Maybe the next generation beyond 3D printing will be able to do multi-component assembly tasks, and you can get/print your own high quality components, and assemble your own high quality toaster... Maybe

The open source angle is an interesting concept. The raspberry pi seems to be doing quite alright, despite its design being completely open sourced. Can that model be tweaked a little to apply to all sorts of manufactured goods...? I’m mean, a brand name can have value.

The Raspberry Pi isn't a great example: You can't make a clone of it, because Broadcom will not sell you the SoC for it.

The parent mentioned 3D printing: I think that's the space were right now this plays out the most. Many designs are open or at least have open components, and people build and sell variations, but brands and brand loyalty are very much a thing.

This is something that really bothers me about the current market in North America (not sure if this applies to the rest of the world but I assume it does), there is no such thing as a basic well made product anymore. You either get cheap crap designed to be disposable, or you pay a whole bunch for a "smart" product that is really the same crap as the cheap thing in a nicer housing, but now you have software that works worse than a physical interface and will become a brick in a year when the company stops supporting it. To get anything worth purchasing you pretty much have to find a craftsman for your object, or find a fully private company that doesn't desire to maximize their profit.

The particularly infuriating part about it is that I work in product design, and it isn't something we can fix. If I were to start my own product company, it would absolutely be something with a significant "smart" component to it. Not only is it what the customer seems to want, but you need it to prevent someone else from copying your IP and undercutting you.

All the "buy quality stuff" people seem to ignore the fact that it's nearly impossible to recognize quality stuff.

I can spend $10 or $40 on a toaster. Both will do the job. One will maybe look slightly nicer. Maybe the $10 toaster will break after 2 years (if it breaks before that, it's still within the mandatory warranty period), then I'm out $10 at worst.

But when I get the $40 toaster, it might be higher quality, or someone just put even worse crap into a nice box and charged me a ridiculous price for it. I can't distinguish those two scenarios. It might last 10 years, or it might crap out after 2 and now I'm out $40.

And the cheap toaster might also last 10 years (mine is 5 years old, so even if it craps out now, the $40 toaster would have had to last for 20 years to be "cheaper"). In the end, it's a gamble, and I'm not convinced that paying a factor of X more increases your chance of not getting crap by that much.

In fact, I've been quite happy with most products, cheap or otherwise, and the occasional disappointment is much less of a problem when you buy cheap.

I'm just pissed off with owning stuff taking up space that doesn't work. I REALLY don't need a washing machine that doesn't work taking up space in my home.

You're quite right: price is not a good guide to quality. But I am beginning to think that "consumer" products fail much sooner than "industrial" products. So I'm thinking that my next utility room will be kitted out with industrial washers. Stuff the "consumer" stuff where it don't shine.

Yeah, they did this with all the good British bicycle brands. Raleigh, Dawes and so on; they were good bikes. Nobody makes good bikes in the UK any more. The good bike makers got bought by Chinese companies, and the results are crap. Get a USA bike. Trek are good value.

Trek makes 99% of its bicycles overseas.

As do 99% of bicycle manufacturers producing CF frames - the expertise and manufacturing base are primarily in Taiwan, and everyone from Trek to Canyon are sourcing from the same few people. There are some boutique brands still doing lugged carbon builds that may be assembled in the USA with the AL components manufacturer here as well, but they'll be more expensive and worse performing models for the crowd who hasn't moved on from their "steel is real" phase.

Yeah, same with a lot (but not all) US bike companies. Cannondale was a family owned business, got bought by private equity, and manufacturing moved overseas. I can't say much as to the quality of their bikes, they're probably still fine, as high end bikes are all about geeking out over the tech, and you don't cut corners on that kind of market, but still.

My Kenwood thing off Amazon is still working fine after over 10 years. Wasn’t expensive, certainly isn’t artisanal.

I bought an $8 toaster from Walmart some years ago when I consider the economy better(cause I was also able to buy a $20 microwave).

It has a plastic exterior, and a metal interior. The thermal regulator was luckily designed for this, if you start more bread immediately after the first pair it will finish faster and with less cooking.

It's a very reliable toaster for $8 , and if it breaks I'm going to feel like an asshole when I throw it in the garbage.

I used it in January when I toasted some banana bread.

I have a toaster just about 6 years old now. It wasn't a spectacular one, just not the cheapest one from Walmart. It cost £50, still works as well as when I got it. The toaster in my rental property is now 10 years old and still going strong too.

Fridges on the other hand... I've had 3 die over the same period.

> Toasters do not all "work well enough". Shout if you have a toaster that you bought less than 5 years ago, that is still working. I think they're supposed to start failing after a year or two.

> [Edit: if it's older than ten years, say how old - they made them better back in the olden daze]

> These devices are sold for ten euros/dollars, or so. You really can't do good product design to that sort of price point. People expect to have to "recycle" them.

> I bought a toaster for which you can order replacement heater elements, or a new timer. You can dismantle it and reassemble it with a normal electrician's screwdriver. The timer is clockwork. The whole thing's very steampunk.

> It cost about 8 times as much as a "disposable" toaster. I don't know if it was a good deal; I'll tell you in a few decades. But if I don't have to bother with replacing it, from my POV that will be money well-spent; I'm sick of replacing stuff that should still be working. I'm sick of "hardware" that's really made of tissue-paper. And I'm sick of furniture that's made of wood-chips.

> </rant>

Might I ask what brand of toaster is it?

Sounds suspiciously like a Dualit... https://www.dualit.com/products/classic-toasters

Oh, you got me. I was trying to avoid mentioning brands.

I have never seen a toaster just randomly break. I have had 2 toasters in my life. The first one broke because someone attempted to clean it and after that it would trip the ground power breaker on use. The second one has been working for about 5 years now.

We have the same toaster we got for a wedding present 13 years ago. It was not an expensive model (probably $30). I didn't realize that this was an appliance category that was prone to failures.

They aren't. The last $5 toaster I bought has been working for 12+ years. There aren't many points of failure in a cheap toaster. Add fancy features and the story changes.

> And I'm sick of furniture that's made of wood-chips.

Yeah, I learned woodworking partially because I wanted furniture I knew wasn't made from crap. It's a fun hobby that lets me step away from the computer.

Nevermind all the chemicals they use in some of this stuff. We bought a dresser and it smelled so bad we had to leave it in the garage for half a year before we used it indoors.

The Dualit toaster in my household was recommended by an appliance repairman. It is reliable so far, but it wasn't until the past year that the medium setting on the timer actually resulted in medium toasting.

>Shout if you have a toaster that you bought less than 5 years ago, that is still working. I think they're supposed to start failing after a year or two.

I bought mine in 2015 and it works. I've never had a toaster fail either. I'm not sure what you're doing with your toasters.

One of my water boilers failed (lid hinge broke). My oven recently broke after 12 years.

All in all I don't have many problems with appliances breaking.

I think it's more survivorship bias to think that old appliances were better. The ones you see surviving are the ones that didn't break a long time ago.

I assume you're not trolling; people don't troll on HN, right?

"2015"

Cool. That's four years ago.

I use toasters to toast stuff. Mainly pre-sliced bread, sometimes bread I sliced by hand. Occasionally bread I baked myself. Srsly - I'm not trying to toast building materials, or bathroom tiles, or garden waste.

And I don't know why four years is supposed to be a good lifespan for a device that has no parts that have any kind of failure-plan. I mean, a toaster should last forever.

"Survivorship bias": The "ones I see surviving" have all failed, in point of fact. They've all broken down. The only "machines" I own that are older than five years are [1] a ROTEL audio amplifier (cheap == < £120, works well), and [2] Monitor Audio bookshelf speakers (about £400 for the pair, they look nice too). Both of these are more than 20 years old.

But my beef isn't about toasters; a cheap toaster costs about EU20, who gives a shit. It's about washing machines and dishwashers. These things cost from EU300 to EU700; and as far as I can tell, it doesn't matter how much you are prepared to spend, it's going to fail within five years (and you're going to have to call out a mechanic several times during that interval).

There's no "survivorship bias" going on here; the stuff I've referred to that survived belonged to my parents. Dude, they've both died.

No, I wasn't trolling. Maybe I'm just extremely lucky but my current oven is 7 years old and works very well.

I'm even an avid baker and cook, so it's not like I underutilize my appliances.

My washing machine is currently only 4 years old.

I think my wife and I have a toaster from when we first got married. It'll be 13 years this month. It's probably a 2009 or 2010 model, so really only about a decade or a little less old.

Except we live in a world where YouTube videos are interrupted by photogenic hipsters selling sunglasses made of titanium and hand cut, old school soap.

Recreating this toaster is exactly the kind of thing I hope that set gets around to.

Plus, there are toasters that cost more than my tablet which don’t have this feature. If you can make a toaster that infuriatingly stupidly expensive and sell it, you can sure as hell afford to make a workalike [of] this mechanism.

Even for that market, the way you make money isn't by making products that are better than the commodity alternative. It's by taking the commodity alternative and dressing it up in fancy packaging and marketing so it looks like a product that's better than the commodity alternative.

Making unique, superior products is expensive. Your profit margins are much better if you just take the same crap everyone else is selling and put a sharp suit of clothes on it.

My biggest pet peeve is all sorts of appliance manufacturers sticking touchscreen displays everywhere.

The coffee machine in my office has a touchscreen display. It only dispenses 4 things - lattes, cappuccinos, black coffee, and espressos.

Why does this have to be a touchscreen? It could have easily been more usable buttons.

But I guess you can't charge a $100 premium for buttons

Probably cheaper to localise.

Rather than having to do X front panels, you just put all localisation data in a config file and be done with it.

And yes, I would much prefer actual pushbuttons.

The labels can still go on the LCD, with hardware buttons on the side. The machine at work has those, and there is definitely a language selector hiding somewhere within its menu system...

Doesn’t it also display warnings, cleaning and maintenance messages ?

All coffee machines I’ve seen with any kind of screen made extensive use of it for messaging purposes. It is a lot more useful than some led blinking twice for cleaning and three times when there’s no water in the tank.

Many with screens have actual buttons for input though.

We share a kitchenette at work with another company. They had a Keurig with a LCD display on it that didn't look like it did much of anything. A few months ago they replaced it with a newer model, and this one just has buttons.

I don't know if that's people getting some design sense and not using screens where they don't need to, or just happenstance. But it seemed relevant.

I have worked on embedded software with and without touchscreen UIs, and in some cases a touchscreen was used where it did not make sense. Peak touchscreen was around the time of the huge iPhone / iPad media sensation. Since that is over, it's probably getting better.

Planned obsolescence. The coffee machine can probably go 5-7 years, but the touch panel gets 3-5 with heavy use.

My building is getting new elevators right now, they just finished the first one last month. Biggest unexpected change: There's a touchscreen for selecting what floor you want. All it displays is a static list of numbers.

I would've thought maybe it's a hygiene thing, easier to clean a flat surface, except below it is a number keypad with only 0-9, where you can also pick a floor by typing in your floor number. Plus, ground floor has its own independent physical button.

I've already gotten into the habit of ignoring the touchscreen and using the physical buttons as a mini rebellion - there's a security camera in the elevator, maybe someone will pick up on it.

I like to imagine that whatever company makes these little touchscreens employs the Michael Jordan of B2B salespeople.

> There's a simple reason why this toaster was discontinued, and that's because it can't be made from commodity components which are used by all toaster manufacturers, as well as in a variety of other domestic appliances.

The youtube comments include a response from a former sunbeam employee that suggests that it was discontinued because the companies CEO at the time was someone known for stripping companies and likely laid off the manufacturing staff.

>There's a simple reason why this toaster was discontinued, and that's because it can't be made from commodity components which are used by all toaster manufacturers, as well as in a variety of other domestic appliances.

That's definitely not the reason. We have automation robots and people do kinds of manual assembly for much less than a $200 or so this could easily command (besides, it's still being made).

We also have toasters with custom parts made today, they just aren't purely electro-mechanical like this.

That you can have one for a century and it will still work/be repairable easily is more likely the reason.

where did you find it still being made?

I meant mechanical toaster that strays from modern comodity designs. Not the same brand, but Dualit e.g. still makes 50s still serviceable chrome-platted long running traditional toast making machines:

https://www.dualit.com/products/4-slice-newgen

You can still find the old Sunbeam units on ebay. And there are fan sites:

http://www.automaticbeyondbelief.org/

And even investigative pieces on them:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/10/who-k...

Well Dualit are still making them manually, and seem quite successful. Repairable and last decades.

Sage have tried for the market of "premium, but made like crap really". £120+ for a regular toaster with added LEDs, displays, etc. They sell purely as they paid a celeb chef for their adverts.

Yes! Sage's "Heston" coffee machine is absolute pants too...

Are "pants" good or bad? I can never remember...

bad

I think "pants" are bad in this case

https://cupofjo.com/2008/06/british-slang-thats-pants/

Isn't the great engineering the fact that all toasters are made from commodity parts and are cheap and able to be had by all.

There are many kinds of great engineering. Lego making billions and billions of really cheap little plastic bricks that last forever and click together no matter when you bought them is one kind of great engineering, so is SpaceX.

Really cheap? I have a friend who is a single mother with a 7-year-old Lego addict, who also loves all things Jurassic World. The only Lego sets available in the aisles of the big box stores around us (conveniently placed at 7-year-old height) are the egregiously over-priced officially licensed movie tie-in kits. I was shocked to see some of these relatively small kits selling for over $100, the cheap ones being in the $40s to $60s. My friend's income (with food stamps) is roughly $1,000 a month... So her son has to feel constantly deprived of the cool toys he really wants. I confess I ordered a knock-off set from AliExpress for his Christmas present last year, he got dozens of Jurassic World-ish Lego-like bricks and it cost me less than $20, shipped. I had very positive feelings about Lego as a kid. Now I see them as just like any other business, engineering desires into their target market and exploiting those desires for maximum profit.

For the purpose of a discussion about engineering, each brick _is_ really cheap. The argument is that something they manufacture and retail for a dime or less is engineered to exacting tolerances.

Think about it: You buy a Tesla Model X for Unobtainium money, and there are panel gaps. But you buy a bucket of Lego bricks for $20, and each one clicks together perfectly.

Lego may be expensive for a tiny blob of plastic, but the point I'm making is that their engineering is amazing relative to the cost of each brick.

p.s. That being said, I hear you! The sets with authorized franchise tie-ins are expensive, in large part because a sizeable part of their market are adults with disposable income. There is no other explanation for a CAD800 Millennium Falcon with 7,500 pieces.

Think about it: You buy a Tesla Model X for Unobtainium money, and there are panel gaps. But you buy a bucket of Lego bricks for $20, and each one clicks together perfectly.

Automotive body panels are large and relatively flexible, hence harder to get close tolerances on. Small injection-molded parts, however, can be made to much closer tolerances and the process has been around for over half a century.

Their sets have always been expensive, though my older (late 80s through late 90s) ones were much bigger for a comparable price (with similar or smaller part counts—they love putting hundreds of tiny little pieces for really fiddly construction in modern sets, it's awful, I assume CAD or something is to blame) but a regular old box o' bricks is pretty cheap, and if you're not trying to buy complete high-demand sets they're cheap in mixed brick lots on ebay, too.

> Really cheap? I have a friend who is a single mother with a 7-year-old Lego addict, who also loves all things Jurassic World.

Well, like all of us who didn't grow up rich, she has to adapt and get the cheap lego sets, rather than whatever the kid wants.

> Now I see them as just like any other business

That is more on you than Lego.

You can get the big mixed bucket of 3,000 pieces at WalMart for $30.

LEGO sets have always been priced at a premium.

You can also do well at yard sales. I got my son a tote of mixed LEGO’s for $6 recently.

Oh yes I agree, and if some enterprising engineer wanted to buy the trademark and start producing them again I'm sure they'd use a servo and a microcontroller to achieve the same effect.

The design of the toaster reminds me of the design of the first transistor radio which ingeniously needed just four transistors to work. Nowadays that engineering effort would be a complete waste of time. It's sad in a way that that sort of craft has been lost, but it's largely redundant now.

> It's beautiful, sure, but go and buy a toaster today and see how much premium people are willing to pay for a designer brand with no functional advantage.

$200+ easily, just look at KitchenAid or Magimix toasters...

> great engineering being trumped by globalised economics

The art of engineering is not to create a beautiful machine, it's to build something that does the job as efficiently as possible.

It's easy to build a machine that does something, it's hard to build it so it can also be manufactured cheaply. See e.g. the Juicero (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juicero#Controversies).

I don't think the juicero was about solving a problem people actually had. It's real purpose was to add DRM to fruit.

Well, yes, of course, bad engineering was not Juicero's biggest problem, but it was part of the issue and the reason why their DRM machine was so expensive to manufacture.

I went through 4 toasters in quick succession, never bothered keeping box or receipts so had no recourse. 18 months ago I bought a Tesco own brand, under a tenner, and it's still going. BUT it can't take a standard size piece of bread. Beyond the absurd, I rotate my toast daily whilst banging my forehead on the counter. (I did keep the box and receipt this time, I really must take it back)

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