This is always an important point that seldom gets brought up these days when people are complaining about "they don't make things like they used to." Of course they don't, and we're generally better off as a result.
And regardless, modern features are pretty much frivolous crap anyway. I mean, a smart refrigerator? A smart oven? Please. Older ovens are designed to bake—not sell ads.
When my TV just magically started showing ads I decided it’s time I go to the library and read more books. Books were designed to better humanity.
For the average person who has one or two projects every year, Husky or Harbor Freight is more than enough.
Not a fan of mid-century sci-fi mass-market paperbacks, I take it? :-)
(they often have some glossy ad pages stuck in the middle, typically at least one of them for cigarettes)
It was priced at like $15, about the same as today.
But if you did the math for inflation, it would cost like $120.
So of course they lasted forever. And they were made of metal and designed to be workhorses. They cost $120!
When you make a plastic desk fan for $15, even with razor thin profits for everyone involved there just isn’t much money left to put into lasting quality parts.
A lot of us have way too much disposable odds and ends--I don't even want to tell you how much tech logo clothing I've ended up with over the years. But not everything needs to be pass down to your grandchildren quality.
But yeah most grandchildren auction off their parents belongings anyway. That’s why birds make nests and then they go somewhere else and maybe return, make a new nest.
People are fixated on permanence—perhaps that’s another way to build housing: design it so it is sustainable, then tear it down and recycle the materials every 10 years.
It's amazing, and unlike the plastic ones didn't die in 2-3 years. Way more powerful (the "low" setting is somewhere between "medium" and "high" on the plastic fans we've owned), cord's thicker and heavier, whole case and the screens are heavy metal so they're difficult to break and I could probably repair them somehow, if they did.
Unfortunately, last I checked nobody makes anything like it now. Guess we'll have to look for some kind of shop-fan if this one ever dies and can't be fixed, assuming those haven't been shittified by then.
Cheap goods make things more accessible to more people. Planned (or even unplanned) obsolescence is an unfortunate side effect.
Re: planned vs. unplanned: I don't think the cheap fan manufacturer really builds it that way so you keep having to come back when yours breaks. At least, I don't think that's the primary motivator. More likely, their goal is just to sell more units in the first place, and lower prices are usually a good way to do that.
(Meanwhile, companies like Apple have found the holy grail: an expensive, high-margin, premium product that's difficult to repair.)
If you did spend $150 on a fan today, it would probably last just as long as a $15 one. Emphasis on probably, there are good quality items... just not a lot.
TVs are a great example: a $900 Sony smart TV I got 5ish years ago lasted barely longer than its 3 year warranty (before a hardware-related bootloop). A crappier cheaper TV would have lasted the same.
Seems to be the trend when introducing smarter software features. Near every appliance I had to replace in the last decade died because of "the motherboard" (according to several technicians), which was coincidentally about 50% the price of the appliance. I guess manufacturers like to cheap out on embedded hardware components?
> Near every appliance I had to replace in the last decade died because of "the motherboard"
Part of this is because appliance repair techs are not skilled in component level repair. They are trained to understand module-level repair, and that's it. It is possible to do more precise repairs, but mass manufacturing makes new modules cheaper than skilled (western) labor.
https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/galvanizati...
My first car, built in 1987, was partially galvanized (I know because the sales brochure was proud of this fact), but had rust streaks down the doors at 50k miles and the frame rusted completely through at 80k miles.
The improvements in automotive coatings in the 90s and 00s have been immense.
I think the 70s were more notorious for cars rusting out. It’s still a slight concern for older cars coming from colder states. I watch two people on YouTube who specialize in 90s and 00s Mercedes and BMWs. Many times they are looking in specific spots for rust on older cars.
And farmers and other rural people all knew how to do this, had welders and other power tools and access to spare parts (or at least a junkyard). The frame parts themselves were made with enough slack that even if you had a crash with something, it needed to be a fairly serious collision to cause damage beyond the frame. Hell, even a 1994 VW T4 could collide with the rear end of a traffic jam, be 10cm shorter than before and it would still run (I speak from experience on that one).
Today, most cars are locked down so hard you need specialized software from the manufacturer to swap a fucking stereo, and the frame is packed with bits and pieces so even a tiny ding on a parking lot can end up with a five figure repair bill.
A return to this would likely require unwinding decades of global crash and pedestrian safety legislation - it's this more than anything else that has made cars less resilient to small knocks, especially the pedestrian safety rules found in many markets. Yes old cars were easier to fix, but survivability for occupants and anyone else involved in your accident was significantly worse. Personally, I'll take the safety features of 2022 over 1994 - the changes are massive.
From an environmental perspective it is a reasonable position. But a democracy is never going to support any such transformation. “Make appliances more expensive so that I cannot afford new ones easily” said nobody.