James Dyson answers design questions from Twitter [video]
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https://whoownsengland.org/2017/09/19/why-is-james-dyson-hoo... "By July 2017, Farmers Weekly was reporting that Dyson’s empire had grown to 13,355 hectares, or 33,000 acres."
1) Move to Singapore, citing that Britain won't join the euro as a factor. 2) EU energy efficiency test goes against his product 3) Campaigns for Brexit
I had one of his vacuum cleaners and it was under powered and always needed cleaning inside. I got a Meile with a bag afterwards. Much more powerful for less money.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/22/covid-lan...
I own one; if it is better than the rest then the whole genre of stick vacuum cleaners should be taken out back and shot.
Core function (sucking things up from my carpet and disposing of the content): charitably I would say it is poor for the half a room that the battery charge lasts for. Build quality: terrible cheap brittle cheap shattering cheap plastic. Price: extremely expensive, 2x anything else.
I have had some shitty appliances over the years, but those tend to at least be so cheap that the only guilt you feel throwing them in the bin is that you are destroying the planet and not your finances.
Honest I never had any issue with them.. maybe if you have a huge house? Or really thick carpets. I find it incredibly convenient and it works well enough, convenient means you can use it every day and do not need to get through that barrier of getting something out of the closet. I have the charging station mounted next to the fridge and honestly I will never buy another kind of vacuum.
I can think of a few small flats with all laminate flooring I have lived in that it would have been great in, but the $20 small plug in thing I had worked probably just as well, and not a lot less convenient.
I haven't seen a cordless vacuum that actually worked and have resorted to corded vacuums for my entire life.
Vacuums should suck, they should suck a lot but Dysons don't really suck all that much (haha)
If I had carpets in the house I think I would get corded as well. But why have carpets is a better question.
Great (and amusing) comment; we have three vacuums in the house: a 1984 Central Beam, a 2002 Miele corded canister, and a Dyson cordless stick vac. I've replaced the bearings, motor brushes, power head belt and beater, and smooth floor head exactly once each on the Beam. Other than changing bags and HEPA filters, the Miele hasn't needed a thing, and the Dyson, well as I detest throwing things out, I've fixed it several times to-date, but it truly is shoddy quality for the price.
The battery pack died twice - the first time, I replaced it with another Dyson pack thinking I could repair the original - no such luck as the PCB is sealed with a thick layer of silicone, and the thermal cutout pretty much has to be destroyed to be removed as it's epoxied between two of the batteries. I managed to remove all six batteries and found one faulty cell, damaging the PCB in the process. I repurposed the rest of the cells to fixing a laptop battery pack.
We were careful with the second pack and ensured it was only charged for three hours at a time after the batteries were drained, but it also died, while its cheap ($60 vs. $250) Amazon replacement has been solid ever since.
Then the powerhead stopped working. After taking it apart, it was obvious that the wires traveling through the swivel joint lacked mechanical protection from repeated stress . Most of the wires on "good" vacuums that pass through a swivel joint are protected by a coiled spring with plenty of slack. In the Dyson, there are two 18GA wires with thin insulation passing through the joint. The positive wire was severed, and the negative wire was very close to failure. I managed to strip away enough insulation to attach two new wires with appropriate slack within a protective spring (from a ballpoint pen). So far, so good.
I'd have to say Dyson stick vacs are engineered to fail in several ways. Interestingly, my wife purchased a Dyson canister vacuum for the night cleaners at her office, and it's still going strong 10+ years later.
I will keep in mind your experience, the nature of this beast and break out the tool kit at the first sign of trouble, as it appears many of the faults are really just quality or design issues.
Repurposing battery cells is probably just beyond how far I will go, I never got the battery building merit badge in my scout days, but never too late to try!
Does anyone really use 'slow' mode?
Cleaning day just got a whole lot more fun.
Sounds like Dyson would be a perfect to start making consumer printers!
If you want to suck sand out of a groove in a hard floor with sheer power, or get the most debris you can out of a thick carpet, Dyson might be a great choice. But if you just want to quickly do a routine vacuuming of your (smallish) home I think there are better cheaper options.
It's last year model though, not sure what the improvements are now!
Hiyo neighbor! I love my Miele bagged vacuum (Powerline C2), my partner hate it because it is lumpy to move around. So we have a second vacuum, the Shark one, for "less lumpy". I always use my Miele when I want to vacuum because I need powerful suction and brush to remove my dog stubborn fur which Shark one failed to do so.
The Miele is excellent and strong and the official bags aren't even that expensive.
I've got myself a Miele vacuum and a Winix air filter. They are simple, and work great.
(And I hear the hair products aren't all that.)
Check it out.
Bag is in the "lower-end" "better", than bagless.
With bagless to get mostly the best experience (until you figure it out yourself) you will need the original bags from the manufacturer since they fit the best. Otherwise you can use other ones if you figured out it's been the same.
I choose for a bagless one, since my apartment isn't that big and my floor consist of wood. But the filter needs to be cleaned too, yes even the bagless ones need to be cleaned. But it depends how much stuff you are vacuuming and big your house is.
If I had two kids and a partner, I would take a industrial vacuum cleaner. (Since the price is not much higher than the consumer one.)
https://agfundernews.com/gates-if-not-for-climate-then-why-i...
how is a non-profit able to make farmland investments at all? What exactly is the difference between an investment vehicle and a non-profit?
But... these guys care for us!
* not hatred, actually, just greater expectations of those with greater power
Nor did you lobby an entire country to do something stupid to enrich yourself.
I've ways wondered what clout James Dyson gets for being confused with Freeman Dyson, an actual genius.
Expensive products are one thing, but products that are upmarketed primarily because a big name wants more money, rub me the wrong way. It shows a disdain for your customer.
I feel holding him up as some guru perpetuates this annoyance.
Why would he do that in a design Q&A session? Wouldn't people who tuned in to hear him talk about design feel like their time had been wasted to benefit people who wanted him to discuss his unrelated and thematically irrelevant political opinions instead?
Do you also think Freeman Dyson should explain his position on climate change to your satisfaction?
Asking a nonagenarian, alive, at the tail end of their life specifically their position on climate change is hardly a "tough question" anyway. It is a question of the future, unless one is challenging them on their past misdeeds (congratulations for berating a 90 something year old), which they will sadly experience very little of. I suspect in every scenario the position of the person asking the question will be a lot more insightful.
While I completely agree with your point; if for a single issue any person is giving regular interviews, putting out press releases, commenting frequently on their social media and funding single issue political campaigns, and in all ways is identifying themselves with said issue, then mentioning it is fair game.
Perhaps Nero would be better to ask about the wall, you might need to explain the whole fall of the roman empire, the sailing over the horizion, discovering americas, chucking tea into the harbour, baseball, stealth bombers, kim kardashian, twitter. And yes after all that, Nero thinks Mexico should pay for the wall.
My pet hate is the 100x added friction between the retractable bristles and my plush carpet. It's costing me extra in time and energy to push this thing around.
My next vacuum cleaner will instead be a janitor-grade Nilfisk.
I definitely think that people hate more things, in the past few years. It's no longer enough just to dislike something, you have to really despise it, tell all your friends, and advertise that online.
I don't think I like this trend.
The lever to dump the contents broke after a year, so it works but doesn't stay attached to the handle. I have to be careful opening it to avoid dumping the small bin in the big bin. It doesn't click back on without some force, so you can be pushing it around looking like it's working while there isn't actually a seal, so it pushes the dirt around the floor.
The filter clogs at the slightest provocation, so if you don't wash (and dry) it daily, it will start pulsing uselessly until you do. It doesn't work unless the filter is bone dry.
The high-powered speed busts your eardrums; my children scarper when I use it for even a few seconds and I find it painful. It burns the battery up in under 3 minutes.
So it is fine but there are a lot of trade-offs that you have to learn about.
I still keep their mains-powered vacuum too, which is a lot less stressful. Also because I like pain, their robot Heurist 360, which is generally awesome except for 5% of the time when it gives up in the middle of a run for no obvious reason.
FWIW: I like my Dyson handheld and it works well. We had one at my parents as well and it could do the two floors without any issue.
Maybe like reviewing a MyPillow in the US.
For cordless stick vacs, for a city apartment, I say Dyson is really pretty good. But they can get quite expensive, and they look high-end (while also goofy-futuristic) so wealthy people buy them, and they're not the best vacuum of any kind, so ... yeah they really rile up the haters.
But then hate doesn't describe a feeling, in the same way that yuck is not a taste descriptor. Hate's become an individual reflex, that when aggregated seems to boil over online like an orchestra of diet coke and mentos.
To be fair to the vacuum cleaner, it probably has saved its worth in bags :)
Get the battery one. No more hour of dragging it around - you only get 5-7 minutes before it is dead, then back on the wall. The downside is I think they found an even lower bidder for the plastic when they made them, so that 5 minutes feels like a lifetime.
we had the same issue, there should be a slider on the front to turn down the vacuum power. We turn it to about 50% on the deep pile carpets
I asked about it and they said that they can ruin your carpet. Too much suction, I think is what they said. It's been a few years.
He talks about:
- His favourite products
- The worst designed product he owns
- His design heroes (and why)
- On the lack of experience when creating a product and turning that to an advantage (see below)
- On creating a prototype and patenting your physical product
- Speed of execution when creating a product
- Why hand dryers are not quiet
- Why he believes design and engineering is inseparable
An interesting opinion from Dyson on the lack of experience:
> "I think a lack of experience is a great help. An expert thinks he knows it all but he's also rather inhibited by his experience, his knowledge. He finds it difficult to steer off the well-known path.
> Whereas if you have a lack of experience, but huge curiosity, and you approach your new challenge with naivety, I think it's easier for you as inexperienced designer to come up with something different and to follow a different path."
A great quote from someone whose vacuums don’t work very well.
He’s an expert in product user interfaces and marketing. His vacuums and air purifiers are great at that and not so much at doing the job they’re meant to do (the old air multiplier fans before they added filters and the original air blade designs are, of course excellent).
The only issue is Windows no longer recognizes it by default, so you have to manually install drivers off their website. And of course, Windows Update regularly breaks the install so I have to reinstall them. I don’t blame Canon for that though.
Getting new toner cartridges has been no problem as of yet, but I suspect the market is drying up by now because there were mostly off-brand ones available last time I had to get one.
There's no reason it needs to actually block the printing - it could simply pop up with a warning saying that the toner is low and attempt to print anyway.
I'm not sure about Brother, but I do know that some other printer cartridges contain an electronic counter in them that will declare them as "out of ink" after printing a certain amount of pages (even if there's plenty of ink left in the cartridge).
An amazing product. The UI is a touchscreen but it makes up for it by 70% of it being a giant blue button with “SCAN” on it :)
And so fast too.
I purchased one of the LG stick vacuums and I've vacuumed almost the entire house with it. Whereas my housemate picked it up and vacuumed one large room and the battery was half flat, he complained about it, then I caught him vacuuming the entire room on the boost setting simply because he wanted the most suction possible. But it wasn't needed at all.
I would have respected him if he had said "there's a fan in the bottom and we blow air up out the circle in a way that pulls a bunch more in with it" with a glint in his eye. The way he described it made me want to throw up in my mouth.
Of all people? Really?
For some people, the discovery that successful and reasonably charismatic entrepeneurs can be ... well, shall we say less than ideal human beings ... comes as quite a shock.
The internet is littered with great products that weren't patented, then copied (sometimes by their overseas contract manufacturer itself just running a 2nd shift on the production line).
If you don't have global patent protection, you find yourself competing with your own product sold cheaper by someone else and no way to fight it. Super common problem for popular products.
> “An expert thinks he knows it all but he's also rather inhibited by his experience, his knowledge. He finds it difficult to steer off the well-known path.”
One of Dyson’s well-known paths might be wielding patent laws against competitors.