Review broken products instead of new ones
buyforlife.com
buyforlife.com
For once, let's turn it all upside down:
We should build a collection about how things break - review broken and worn-out products to teach how to identify cheap products (where are the stress points, what manufacturing techniques exist to alleviate those). Then compare those with used products well past their warranty period that hasn't broken, and look at why they haven't.
PS: I'm the creator of the community-driven Buy For Life platform. Let's overcome cheap products and keep corportaions accountable.
Also, I noticed that the cost/month math seems off here https://www.buyforlife.com/products/10/kitchenaid-refrigerat.... For a 2 year warranty, looks like it calculates it as Total Price / 24 / 12, rather than Total Price/12.
I actually do have a Casio calculator from High School (30+ years ago) that I still use, but no other computing devices that are more than 10 years old. Even if they still work, there just isn't much practical you can do with them.
Same for mice. I'd certainly use a mouse for 10+ years if it's good enough. I've invested in a quite expensive ergonomic, mechanical keyboard and I have a very old mechanical cherry keyboard at work and I do expect them to last forever.
If you don't need the latest sh*t (touch bars and what not) you'll probably be fine with current characteristics of laptops for quite a few years.
This kind of living has pros and cons, but I guess not everybody wants to live like that. For instance, some people would prefer to have some shitty but portable kitchenware instead of expensive, bulky and representative "professional" units.
This is a bit of "urban" lifestyle against "suburbia" lifestyle, or "downshifter" lifestyle, or "countryside" lifestyle.
For instance, I am a bit aware of the "zero waste" community. These people would probably buy a single macbook (because it is stylish and looks as if you had taste, not neccessarily because it is high quality), but no kitchen device at all, because such devices express the "wrong" style of life. Similar arguments could probably be made about some certain kind of hacker culture. People buying hoodies and thinkpads because it is "in vogue".
This is probably the main reason why just another review page won't take off: The products are not "in vogue".
Just my two cents. Very emotional, not objective at all.
Boots. I can afford the boots I can afford today and I like them. But I am sure that 10 years from now I’ll be able to afford better ones.
Coffee mugs. I currently sport a Yeti that will likely last me at least 50 years. But I also expect that better coffee mugs will come.
Smart watch and mobile phone and laptop. No matter what, Moore’s law will catch up with you. And developers dislike worrying about running software on old hardware.
Clothing. Yes I know, but I do to an extent care about how I look and showing up somewhere in pleated pants and a plaid suit today because you bought it 30 years ago and it’s still holding up isn’t something I can pull off.
Vehicles. Yes, even your Tesla will become obsolete. There will be one that will be a no brainer upgrade.
This isn’t to say that I want to buy junk. But a $6 T shirt lasts me about two years and a $60 T shirt will need to last me more than 20 to make it worth it. In the mean time my body might change, my tastes might change, and styles might change. Timeless styles are a thing but when you spill red wine on it and can’t get the stain out four years in, who is your next move?
Also emotional and not objective, FWIW.
not sure if this is tongue-in-cheek; your Tesla will become obsolete far sooner than your Honda civic will, and it's already 20 years old.
There's a lot of variation. Materials change. Stuff wears out. I have old gear and I have gear I've replaced because what I wanted wasn't available 10 years ago.
As for boot. I have custom boot that I've had for a couple decades (and have had repaired). But they're heavy and I don't wear them for everything.
Boots: I specifically mostly wear motorcycle boots and the tech on those is evolving quite fast.
And then there's the $120 T-shirt they endorse: https://www.buyforlife.com/products/33/outlier-ultra-fine-me...
That better last more than 40 years and be wholly responsible for saving my life +1 family member, wash/dry on any cycle I want, and never get chewed up by mice if I leave it on floor.
If you can get 10 years out of a pair of boots it means they were good. I've had a pair of Caterpillar boots break after 2 years. I'm happy to see a review site with a strong focus on long term ownership.
I _DO_ want an electric car, but I want it with a built in nuclear energy source that'll last at least 500k km before needing replacement.
Any effort to judge product quality is going to have some skew towards more expensive products--the stakes are just higher--but I think there's a risk here of conflating style, quality, durability, and price.
Most of us have probably had at least one ~expensive product marketed on quality that broke jaw-droppingly fast. We've probably all also bought some cheap utilitarian workhorse that lasted for decades.
Some of us care a lot about style and signalling, it's true, but I don't think many of the rest actually want to own crap?
I suspect that if you gave everyone a choice of what products they want, they would gravitate toward the better made, longer lasting ones. However those often cost considerably more for incremental improvement, or for improvements you may not need (eg massive service interval for something rarely used).
Up front cost is a massive consideration.
Will it be shared by the community?
I don't trust your company .. or any single company. This task should be done a Wikipedia kind of company and the data should be available for anyone for free or a small fee.
What do you think of the fact that many of the products are in fact disposable by backed by a "lifetime" warranty precisely because they're so highly marked up that the manufacturer can give you a new one for free instead of attempting even trivial repairs? Osprey is the king of this. This seems to be the opposite of the buy for life mentality - things should be repaired if economical, but no one repairs what they can get replaced for free.
I especially like the idea of rating products by their monthly/daily cost.
I imagine this growing in a direction where the manufacturers and producers have added initiative to produce durable products again.
Of course for real change to occur governments, regulation, large scale action would have to happen.
One vector which would be interesting to see this with is bigger and maybe even less consumer centric products. How durable is a delivery van? How durable and cost effective is a factory machine?
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvgS71fU12Mbx-w18Chu_...
[1] - Arduino vs. Evil - Bored of Lame Tool Reviews
He uses his own colorful language to describe things. If it’s not appealing to you (I eventually grew tired of it) I’d still suggest you look past it and watch a few dozen of his videos anyway.
Lots of good insight on the manufacturing industry/process that I haven’t seen anywhere else.
He has a pretty deep knowledge of many things though.
People do the same thing in software, but it's not as readily visible as with physical products.
Maybe you actually do need an angle grinder rated for an 8-hour duty cycle. But don't buy one just because a YouTuber told you you do. That DeWalt is probably fine.
This is the exact same method I've used to buy tools for ages. Still using the same 19€ corded hammer drill I got 20 years ago to punch some holes in a concrete wall.
On the other hand, my cordless drills is the more skookum version after the cheapo one crapped out on me mid-drywall.
Most people don't need most hardware tools most of the time.
Craftsman was a good example of this. They use to have high quality tools with lifetime warranties. Now, that warranty is gone and they don’t seem much different than any other low end manufacturer.
Anyone have other examples?
THAT was the real driver for Craftsman.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/pyrex-glass-is...
In any case, I've daydreamed about doing something along these lines, plus an aggressive list of policies that companies/products/brands are delisted for violating (i.e., delisting brands when teardowns find anything they went out of their way to engineer for predictable failure).
So if you had to do a repair job it is entirely possible that a replacement PCB has to be designed from scratch. Doing this for every model is not possible so there would have to be a standard PCB used by all models. Considering the high degree of integration in many products, that is a pipe dream.
The only real solution is longer warranties to keep the manufacturer accountable.
> maintain availability of replacement parts
That sounds like requirements for military use. On a civilian level, there are certainly other, less hard-nosed possibilities. Legislature could mandate the following instead:
• The manufacturer is forbidden to prevent a supplier from offering replacement parts on the free market.
• The manufacturer is forbidden from coercing a supplier to slightly modify a standard part just to make it incompatible and thus cripple third-party repair.
• The manufacturer must supply a repair manual with component data sheets and schematics so that a suitable replacement part can be produced by third parties.
Thus we return to the standard of repairability we enjoyed in the previous century. These ideas are free to implement or certainly magnitudes less expensive than keeping stock of replacement parts which takes the wind out of the sails of opposition to these changes in ordinance or law.
What I care about is good intent and reasonable measures to support me for the lifetime of the product. In most cases, I can't get replacement parts because manufacturers discontinue them after a few years as a business choice, not because they have to. Most manufacturers rotate product models every year, and I presume it's expensive and not good business to stock parts for models from a decade ago. That's what I want to avoid. I'd like a manufacturer that will continue supporting me as long as reasonable.
What I do now is I look at manufacturer's web pages, and see the oldest products they still support. It's pathetically short.
My last vacuum lasted 15 years before replacement parts ceased to exist. I've been looking at upscale Dyson vacuums, and the oldest ones with replacement parts are a decade old from date-of-introduction (less from date-of-purchase, of course). For a $800 vacuum, that means you're looking at an annualized cost of $80-$160 before you're dumped on the curb.
Of course, there are companies which simply don't offer replacement parts. If a roller or belt fails, the vacuum is disposable. The TCO seems similar, since those don't run $800, though, and a $150 vacuum will probably last a couple of years before something breaks.
What I'd really like is a web site which compiles this sort of information.
As noted elsewhere, there's usually an abundance of exuberant marketing material about what's to like with a product, but the oft' intentional gaps there are typically only recognised post-purchase by real world users/customers with no agenda.
I wish Consumer Reports or someone would do teardowns each year of their recommended washers/dryers/dishwashers/etc to look for shitty but critical moving parts and rate them appropriately. Finding anything about how these items will fail is an exercise in frustration since model numbers are frequently shuffled around year to year for minor/non-existant feature "upgrades".
I actually don't care all that much about how great a washer or whatever is at cleaning so much as I care that I never have to think about servicing/replacing it.
Takes things apart and critics the design, goes over some of the tradeoffs that might have gone into designing the thing, and tries to figure out what the failure modes are likely to be.
I wonder if anybody in the circle of youtubers around him does the same for appliances.
...so iFixit, but for appliances? I'd pay money for that.
Tbh, those are really big red flags, that I wonder if it's even possible to trust the rest of the article.
Edit:- Seems that Netherlands County, California was on some template T&C that a lot of small firms just copied.
There's a database of companies which have registered.[2] BuyForLife isn't listed. The AAA's reviewers would probably have caught the bogus terms and rejected the clause. A company that didn't register can usually use AAA services after registering late, but there are extra fees they have to pay before they can proceed.
So the arbitration clause is probably invalid. That throws any dispute into court. Which court? Specifying "Netherland, California" as a venue would invalidate the choice of venue clause. So the default rules on venue apply. Consumers can generally sue where the consumer is.
So, any site using that boilerplate probably can be sued in small claims court. Actually, the AAA lets you do that even if consumer arbitration is specified. See rule R-9 in [1]. Consumers usually do better in small claims court than in arbitration. Especially since the company has to send someone, or they lose.
Bad contract drafting of one-sided contracts is a great way to create a legal mess for yourself.
[1] https://www.adr.org/sites/default/files/Consumer_Rules_Web_0...
[2] https://apps.adr.org/ClauseRegistryUI/faces/org/adr/extapps/...
I agree it’s not good though, and if that is the case, they should definitely pay to have some created for specifically for their site
Same text is used by quite a few websites: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22Netherlands+County%2C+Californi...
If it's just a capacitor that failed, it might be repairable for a few dollars. Electrolytic capacitors unfortunately have a finite lifetime, which gets worse with higher temperatures.
(I also was ready for Dolby Atmos and EArc... Things that most people don't care about.)
Do you think it's worth selling the broken receiver on eBay with no reserve?
Sometimes a thing is not broken, but it makes you uncomfortable and you only notice that later. Like one of my washing machines that beeped a couple of minutes before it unlocked its door. If this will fly, please allow to add such details into reviews, e.g. “not broken, but I hate it” status.
I really believe they should teach basic electronic repair in school. A tiny bit goes a long way.
Yea, learning some basic electronics and how solder in school (England, early-mid 90s) was one of the most useful skills they taught me.
[1] https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-...
.. via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup ... point being, sometimes expiring products are superior, it depends upon the use case.
Cracks and noises are OK for some but a huge issue for others - that review you mentioned literally appeals to both sides which is crazy.
It's completely dependent on the individual and their ability to determine what is wrong, what is right and what their experience is to be able to determine that their opinion is in line with what you would expect.
Remember that dress? Was it blue or gold? Same difference.
Buy it for life products are low-tech products that survived, somehow, time. Often, their original producers didn't and we can only buy them in used condition. They are slightly obsolete and not everybody is fullfilled with them. E.g. An old Toyota.
Then there are "Buy it for life" products with a (more or less) guaranteed long lifespan but were not time tested yet. E.g. New gear built using best practices and materials.
Then there are good products. Stuff with a (more or less) guaranteed long lifespan but one day will become obsolete. E.g. Apple product, good shoes, etc.
In 2019 I bought a second hand thinkpad x260 for £200 as a durable travel laptop. It’s almost perfect, the battery life is great, i wish i could fix the two problems with it:
1. It overheats far too easily. I don’t need all the speed of the processor so undervolting would be a good fix but doesn’t appear possible in this bios. Making a custom cooling solution that doesn’t compromise travel-ability is beyond my skillset.
2. The screen is too low resolution, too low brightness and too restrictive on viewing angles. I’d love to be able to swap a better panel in.
I often hear mechanics say "car X is terrible! we get those all the time!" and yeah, car X is the most sold car some years ago, duh.
Reviews will eventually have to rely on non-store, external sites.