How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court | Hacker News Reader

How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court

blog.simonrumble.com

408 pointsAaronn317 comments

> Now an old fashioned light bulb shouldn't be expected to last a decade, but an oven?

Funnily enough, there actually was the Phoebus cartel [1] which sought to reduce the lifespan of incandescent light bulbs to around 1,000 hours and raise prices.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

Reminded me of Bastiat's candlestick maker's petition:

http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html

There's also the Centennial Light [1], a light bulb made in the late 1890s. It was first lit in 1901 and it's still alight today.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Light

i guess a lot of lights will work a lot longer if powered at such low voltage and not switched on/off like most ppl do, but this would reduce a lot nr of cases where such a light can be used

I love incandescent twinkly colored christmas mini-lights, so much that I use them for providing walkable light at night around the doors to the backyard for roommates. They have a warm glow that LED’s just don’t replicate yet, and the filament and glass make them more gem-like. And the twinkle bulbs are truly “random” and also create subtle and pleasing variations in brightness in the whole line, due to voltage fluctuations.

Not a single one has burned out in something like 4 years of runtime. Honestly the paint inside the bulbs is going to fade away completely before these things go out. The trick is 2 things:

1. Don’t move them

2. Use a dimmer and run them around 75% power

Which to be honest has the power efficiency of a dim campfire

It barely glows. The "lightbulb cartel" was basically a consumer protection because barring major inventions, any deviation from the thousand hour lightbulb would have severe drawbacks in terms of power efficiency or light output.

This, to me, is a red herring.

The free market is designed for this. If the bulb lasts 5000 hours, but burns 1/2 as bright, consumers can easily decide what they prefer.

And further, the cartel did not have exceptions for product enhancements, or improvements, which might have enabled > 1000 hrs without any drawbacks.

Why are people defending this cartel? Market collusion is generally frowned upon.

They absolutely sold long lasting lightbulbs. There were horrible and no one bought them except for specialty scenarios.

The standards were set around what could be sold as a standard lightbulb.

The centennial bulb is less a lightbulb than it is a toaster oven. Planned obsolescence is real, but the centennial bulb is not evidence of it.

There was, but also the hotter 1000-hour bulbs are more efficient, and the alternative of 2500 hours still gets you nowhere near a decade of use.

Planned obsolescence is very real, but the reality of incandescent light bulbs means that lifespan, efficiency, and luminosity are not independent.

The 1000 hours limit is in practice a lower bound to a combination of luminosity and efficiency

Literally in that linked wiki article:

> "A longer life bulb of a given wattage puts out less light (and proportionally more heat) than a shorter life bulb of the same wattage"

As long as we can recycle (or at least safely get rid of) the burned out ones I'd say its a win from ecology perspective, and at least in some cases also for end users. But this wasnt the main driver of the change, it was the good ol' corporate greed as per the same wiki page.

I believe that the main drive was to stop a race to the bottom where everybody would advertize 1000000 hours lightbulbs but they all sucked and the technology would be considered worthless.

I seriously doubt you can recycle the tungsten as it literally evaporates and oxidize on the lightbulb.

LED diodes can theoretically last decades given the correct drivers (current and heat needs to be significantly limited), unfortunately they are the very definition of planned obsolescence.

https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-l-e-d-quanda...

A stable DC current and temperature limited LED can easily last decades.

I remember seeing a relevant video about Dubai and some bulb company working together to create a longer life led bulb.

Ok here it is --

The lamps you're not allowed to have. Exploring the Dubai lamps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klaJqofCsu4

> These fascinating lamps are a result of a collaboration between Philips Lighting and Sheikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum - the ruler of Dubai. They are designed to be the most efficient available, matching high lumen output with very long life. Once you see the construction and circuitry you'll realise this isn't just marketing spin.

Now I want to actually look into and see if they're available elsewhere, because my LED bulbs really do seem to fail pretty frequently...

I agree that LED lights are a better example of planned obolescence.

I recall reading a quasi-debunking of this. I didn't go down the rabbit hole far enough to understand all the details, but it seems the situation was more complicated than just corporate greed. [1]

The topic has been discussed here in the past a few times, including [2] and [3]

1: https://readmedium.com/en/the-phoebus-cartel-was-never-reall...

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21596792

3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606748

I would not call any of that a debunking, even quasi. Just a different dance around the same hard-to-swallow pill.

Company X makes a great product that everyone only needs one of and lasts a long time. Over time, the market starts to dwindle and. Company X is going broke. Now, Company X must either invest in innovation or reduce the lifespan of its current offering.

There's nothing inherently evil about this concept, but we tend to want to chalk it up to greed when Company X really just wants to survive and make a profit, which I suppose is the point.

The problem is the concept is ripe for abuse. If Company X makes their product worse, but starts charging more while laying off employees, posting record profits during recessions, adopts unnecessary subscription models cosplaying as continued service and development, etc...now we get to the greed part. There seems to be a line between designing a product to secure the longevity of Company X and straight up using your customers as micro-transaction ATMs with planned obsolescence. Some companies conspire to cross it.

How do the manufacturers of long-lasting one-off-purchase products survive? Stuff like doors, windows, roof tiles, floor tiles, faucets, staircase railings, fences, etc. Are they filling Chapter 13 or are they in the process in reducing the lifespan so their products are replaced every couple of years? What's their secret?

Some do go broke. We rely on New York Replacement Parts for cartridges for our bathroom faucets, the original manufacturer being long out of business. Double-glazed windows may get blurry over the years, I guess, and then one would replace those. But that should take ten or more years.

A properly protected door should last many years. One that we bought was not up to outside use, and failed. That manufacturer ended up purchased by a competitor, I think.

I have replaced or added many of those things. People remodel, build new houses, etc. There are certainly business models around goods that people aren't renewing on an annual basis. Collectively it's probably fair to say that people in a country like the US buy a lot of doors even if it's a rare purchase for an individual.

This place https://www.franklumber.com/ has been selling only doors for 50+ years.

One can model their business around market rules. It just might not be as huge as you want.

I just ordered a butcher block counter from a local company. I've also ordered butcher block from a different company. At a rather larger scale there's Andersen Windows and Doors. None of these are or ever going to be--or presumably have ambitions to be--Home Depot.

They go broke or rely on an ever growing market, ie housing is always being built (most of your examples).

But Instant Pot is the classic example of going broke because everyone bought exactly one of their products and never needed another (ignoring the three we have...)

I wish there was more tolerance for the Instant Pot situation in big business. Build a great product, sell wildly for many years, inventor becomes a multi-millionaire, many people are employed at good wages for a while, stock holders / investors make a reasonable return, millions upon millions of satisfied customers, and... that's it. The end of that particular story.

Keep a perfunctory tidbit of the once great company chugging along to provide replacement parts, do some servicing, and sell new ones at a much reduced volume. Just enough to keep a handful of people employed at good wages and turn a miniscule profit.

I know it is heresy to suggest this kind of thing when our entire way of life is predicated on infinite growth, but our entire way of life is also grossly inefficient (not to mention inequitable) and we are facing ever more scarce resources on a planet with less and less carrying capacity for our wasteful and destructive tendencies.

Of course this is all just yelling at clouds, because billionaires and the people who service them cannot be made to think in these terms, else they wouldn't be where they are in the first place.

> chugging along to provide replacement parts

That's the expensive bit. That's a lot of machinery and tooling sitting around mostly doing nothing.

Is it? From what I've read, Instant Brands (the company behind Instant Pot) merged with Corelle Brands (of the private equity firm Cornell Capital) in 2019. Corelle Brands had a portfolio of house and kitchen products from Corelle, Pyrex, SnapWare and CorningWare. In 2021 they decided to change the name from Corelle Brands to Instant Brands. And in 2023 they filled for chapter 11 bankruptcy.

It is my understanding that when Instant Brands filled for bankruptcy, they weren't selling just the Instant Pot. It wasn't even the original Instant Pot company. They were selling a wide range of kitchen products. I don't think they went broke because people bought exactly one Instant Pot.

The story doesn't end here. Apparently, Instant Brands emerged from chapter 11 as Corelle Brands.

> They go broke or rely on an ever growing market, ie housing is always being built (most of your examples).

Wouldn't that mean those new houses have new families which want a new Instant Pot? In fact I can think of other situations: people moving, going to college, splitting some of their items in divorce, etc. Sure, it's not much but it's not like the demand grinds to a halt.

> are they in the process in reducing the lifespan so their products are replaced every couple of years?

My experience: swan-neck kitchen taps all now seem to be quite different in design from one-another. To replace a washer, you have to dive under the sink, completely dismantle the tap, replace the washer, and re-assemble the tap. And the new taps start dripping after just a couple of years.

So you have to hire a plumber; and he'll probably work faster (i.e. lower charges) if he's fitting a new tap than repairing an old one. So you might as well order a new tap before you call the plumber out.

> There's nothing inherently evil about this concept, but we tend to want to chalk it up to greed when Company X really just wants to survive and make a profit, which I suppose is the point.

No, that's exactly the problem. Company X surviving isn't a good enough justification for it to start making shittier products. Especially when they don't inform the customers of the degradation.

This is a business model problem, or perhaps a whole-market problem; papering over it with "oh just a little planned obsolescence is good, because it lets the vendor survive" is kind of a bailout, and prevents the problem from being corrected. By now, this has happened in so many places across so many industries that it's a rot that runs deep through entirety of the market.

Sounds to me that Company X sold their product for too cheap if they really lasted that long. Which then it becomes: "Company X undervalued their product, leading to bankruptcy".

Nice video from the well known channel Technology Connections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY => It's complicated. Yes, there was a cartel, but it was not all bad. There were legitimate reasons to go for 1000h light bulbs.

>but it seems the situation was more complicated than just corporate greed

Then their strategy worked - if you really believe it's more complicated. Haven't investigated this particular subject, but many others subjects are _made_ complicated to achieve a particular outcome. Along lines of: 'let's protect the children' argument.

It wasn't as simple as them wanting to make more money: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY

Key points from an AI summary:

- Incandescent bulbs had to balance factors like light output, efficiency, and lifespan - hotter filaments produced brighter, whiter light but reduced bulb lifespan.

- Longer-lasting bulbs were less efficient and produced dimmer, yellower light, so they were not simply "better" products being suppressed.

- The 1,000 hour target was a reasonable compromise that balanced these competing priorities, not necessarily a sinister plot.

- Even after the Phoebus cartel dissolved, the 1,000 hour lifespan remained the industry standard for general-purpose incandescent bulbs.

You're missing the fact that the Phoebus cartel fined members that sold lightbulbs lasting longer than 1,000 hours. Aftr reaching a stable equilibrium, it's not surprising that 1,000 hours remained the industry standard. It drove sales!

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-04/cheeri...

The reason for this, as I understand it, is that it's super easy to make a lightbulb that lasts 30 years. But there are two main trade-offs that make it bad for consumers:

1. Stronger filaments that last longer will be a lot less efficient, so the consumer ends up using a lot more electricity.

2. The filament doesn't burn per-say, but actually evaporates. This is why it'll eventually break. But where does the evaporated metal go? It condenses on the inner surface of the glass, making the lightbulb dimmer than when it was new.

So 1000 hours is a good middle ground. The lightbulb is fairly efficient and 1000 hours isn't long enough for the inside of the glass to get too dark from the condensed filament metal.

Price of the bulbs was also reasonably low. It's cheaper to change out a lightbulb every 1000 hours than the electricity costs of a 10 000 hour lightbulb that emits the same amount of visible light. I don't have hard numbers for that, but it's my understanding.

Watch the youtube video linked by one of the grandparent comments. It's super informative and also contains some experiments to show the trade-offs.

I really don't see this as a debunking of the idea that the cartel was set up primarily to increase profits among its members. The engineering tradeoffs make sense, but it doesn't follow that because of these tradeoffs, the companies manufacturing lightbulbs were compelled to set up an organization that fined its members for making bulbs that lasted too long. The tradeoffs explanation seems like a post-hoc justification for something that was clearly done with anti-competitive intent.

Ultimately which scenario makes the most sense: that these businesses went through the time and effort to set up this testing organization out of a desire to ensure they all made better products for consumers, or out of a realization that they could all stabilize their revenues if they all sold products that would need to be replaced on a regular basis?

This also strikes me as an area where consumer choice can be particularly effective: most of the attributes of a lightbulb aside from energy consumption are pretty tangible to the end user, and since they are fairly inexpensive and replaceable, the buyer is more able to evaluate them side by side than many other things. It makes total sense to me that the manufacturers would see this as a problem, and choose to limit consumer choice instead of competing to make better products.

This is a both can be true situation. Its legacy was a cartel oriented around protecting profits, but the coordination nevertheless also reflected an array of engineering compromises that made sense. The situation we have now is that those compromises continued to have a rationale beyond the existence of the cartel.

If I remember right from the last time I looked into this, they also fined members for making bulbs that lasted shorter than 1000 hours. The goal was a standardized product, largely to protect regional sales agreements rather than any specific concerns about long bulb life vs sales.

Which cartel is making consumer bulbs and streetlights with advertised 50000 hour led but with 5000 hour drivers? Indian market BTW.

Well, without the cartel there could have presumably been bright white, 1000 hour bulbs on the shelf next to dim yellow 2500 hour bulbs, and people could have chosen accordingly.

Additionally, the companies set up a whole compliance regime with bulb testing and fines, not for bulbs being too dim, but for bulbs that lasted too long, which I think clarifies the intent more than anything else.

There were long-lasting bulbs on the shelf, but they were niche products because they produced poor quality light and were inefficient. Here's an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQpqyt3oeqk . Note that it consumes 40 watts but produces the same light output as a standard 25 watt bulb.

This sounds like classic corporate bamboozlery. Find some real trade off that actually exists and then exaggerate its importance or pretend that no other solutions can be found when in fact they don't want solutions because the problem is profitable.

Undoubtedly there are some alternate materials you could make a light bulb out of that present a trade off between longevity and efficiency. But there will also be materials that last a long time and have high efficiency. Moreover, even if they want to use the filament material that emits whiter light and then burns up faster, they could then use more of it so it still doesn't burn out quickly. But they don't want to do that, because it would cost marginally more and more importantly then you wouldn't have to buy as many light bulbs.

It's no good to pretend this isn't possible. There isn't an inherent trade off between brightness and efficiency, because inefficiency is just the percentage of the electricity that goes to producing heat rather than light. At the same power consumption, a more efficient bulb is brighter. LEDs are rated as "100W equivalent" even though they consume ~20W. And the LEDs themselves last far longer than the equivalent incandescent light, but then they purposely combine them with a power converter that burns out much sooner. It's marketing, not physics.

I call this the "Prager-U law":

For every issue created by cartels or monopolies, there will be at least one "Akschually..." competitive explanation from libertarians that will either give a completely benign explanation of why this is actually good for your or blame the government/regulations for the issue.

Those explanations will become memes and every single time the subject is discussed they will be brandished by the faithful as axiomatic truths in ad nauseam fashion.

PragerU isn’t libertarian. This indicates you don’t understand their biases. The “Akschually” snark indicates both that you don’t observe HN guidelines and that you are not arguing in good faith.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

    Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

You assume too much stuff, man.

This is just an internet forum for us technology well paid proletarians, you shouldn't take it that seriously.

Non-answer

The better way to understand libertarianism is to characterize regulation as something like "a rule anybody makes up and then punishes people for violating it even if they never agreed to follow it." Now you don't need to resort to weird contortions to handle cartels and things because they're just a form of government and therefore something to be limited in order to restore the benefits of free market competition.

> Undoubtedly there are some alternate materials you could make a light bulb out of that present a trade off between longevity and efficiency.

You seem to be out of your depth here, while accusing people of propaganda.

Anyway, no there aren't. The efficiency x longevity trade-off is inherent to the incandescent bulbs, you can't just wave all of Quantum Mechanics away. Material changes will increase or decrease the entire pair, and bulbs were already made with the best material that could possibly be used.

And leds, of course are different.

Anyway, nobody on the entire thread is denying that the cartel wanted to increase profits. What people are trying to say is that reality is more complex than looking at a single organization goals and deciding what happens.

> The efficiency x longevity trade-off is inherent to the incandescent bulbs, you can't just wave all of Quantum Mechanics away. Material changes will increase or decrease the entire pair, and bulbs were already made with the best material that could possibly be used.

What you're ignoring is that although a different material would still have the trade off, the optimal point on the curve for that material could be in a different place. Material A lasts for 1000 hours at a given amount of light/watt, Material B only lasts for 500 hours at that amount of light/watt, but lasts for 3000 hours at only 15% less light/watt, which some people might want. As an example, there are some applications where the bulb is repeatedly being turned on for only short periods of time, which would tend to shorten lifespan from thermal stress but also implies that power efficiency is less important because the bulb isn't continuously on.

The optimal trade off would also be different for different people. If your light bulb is hard to reach, saving two bucks worth of electricity over its lifetime may not be worth having to drag out a ladder or disassemble a piece of equipment to change it more often. If you have electric heat in a cold climate, a bulb that generates a higher ratio of heat to light isn't costing you anything because you were only going to use a different kind of electric heater regardless. But the cartel took those peoples' options away, claiming that the trade off could only be made one way.

And even for a given material, the failure mode is that enough of the material evaporates for it to lose structural strength and snap. Implying that you could use more of the same material with the same efficiency but improve structural strength.

> And leds, of course are different.

They don't operate in a universe with different physical laws, proving that incumbent incandescent bulbs are nowhere near the limits physics imposes on efficiency.

You don't have to ban longer lifetimes unless you're afraid someone will find a way to do better.

It's a question of temperature.

Hotter filament gives more efficient and whiter light (the black body radiation has more visible and less infrared), but the hotter filament doesn't last as long (faster evaporation rate).

It's perfectly possible for end users to use a dimmer switch to make incandescent lamps last much, much longer at the expense of less light and a "warmer" colour.

Lifespan is very, very sensitive to the temperature.

I'm convinced this happened recently with LED bulbs as well, even though I've found no definitive proof. The LEDs I installed in my house 10-12 years ago are still going strong, but every newer one I've purchased gives up the ghost within a couple of years. And I only purchase brands with a good reputation, like Feit and the like.

There's a variety of reasons:

- Lower-quality components (especially capacitors) being used to meet the lower price point. This is by far the most common failure mode I have experienced, it's never the LEDs dying but the power supply.

- Higher-quality LED light is usually result of driving the LEDs harder, causing them to fail earlier.

- Probably some other reasons too.

The design may also be completely ignoring heat dissipation, and cook its components.

From what I've seen, it's usually skimping on the heatsink over the rectifier.

The LEDs themselves are made in a handful of factories around the World and are usually robust. The power supplies are the weakness. Each bulb manufacturer makes their own, and it's a race to the bottom.

The rule of thumb I've found with light bulbs is similar to the Boots Theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory), which is you need to spend at least $8-$10 on a bulb to get something that will actually last. Feit is good but its hit or miss on life span, especially when I get them close to the same price and incandescent, often times its the little A/C to DC converter that dies (really need DC light circuits or dedicated converter in the light fixture). I feel its worth spending the extra to not replace them.

Having lived most of my life with incandescent bulbs which you could buy at four for a dollar if you watched for sales, the idea of paying $8-10 for a light bulb is insane to me. I have probably close to 50 bulbs in my house.

But yes, the reasonably-priced LED bulbs don't last any longer than incandescents. I am replacing a few every year around the house. The saving grace is that they generate a lot less heat. I was in a house the other day that still had incandescent bulbs in the bathroom fixures, and could feel the heat from them as soon as I switched them on.

In a bathroom, a hot lamp is likely intentional. It's typically on its own circuit for use while taking a hot shower.

No, these were just ordinary (clear) bulbs over the sink/vanity

You'd have to do the math, but similar to boots theory, if you're spending 2-3 times as much for something that lasts 5-10 times as long (50k hours for a good LED vs 1.2k hours for incandescent) you will save a lot more money in the long run (lets assume the 4/$1 deals are a thing of the past with inflation and reduction in production). Also cheap DC converters create more heat than the bulbs with decent ones. It's worth slowly buying expensive bulbs, at least start with the most used lights in your house and replace those with the expensive ones. You can keep cheap bulbs in your closets, spare rooms, etc assuming you don't forget to turn them off often (then you should get the most efficient/long lasting or get one with a motion timer).

I actually swapped out my shower light because it got so hot the insulating wire melted and it created a short. Took forever to figure out, but once I did, I got a nice $30/$40 shower light fixture that went right in the same spot and its much nicer now. I'm just glad the short was running through metal wire/fiberglass and never started a fire.

At least you have a fighting chance of fixing your LED bulb, unlike an incandescent.

Usually they’re over-driven and you can jump a burned out LED and scrape off a bit of a resistor to reduce the amount of current going through to (over-)account for the reduced current need.

https://youtu.be/JBKF7rKB3zc

There is definitive proof. They over-drive the LEDs which is why they die so quickly. If they were under-driven they last much much longer. It's the heat that kills them IIRC.

That design doesn't prove anything about any malicious intent to decrease the lifespan of the bulb, any more than it proves that they're optimizing lumens/dollar for the customers who want it.

They are optimizing dollars extracted per customer. Either that, or they are so incompetent designing electronics they shouldn't be allowed to.

Unfortunately, electronics design does not operate outside the bounds of economics. Given a target retail price of ~$1.25/unit -- many of these bulbs are the best design possible.

The existence of poor quality products does not indicate malice -- many buyers demand low end products.

Cost/quality/performance is an engineering tradeoff without a "correct" answer. The answer is up to the opinion of the customer.

I think that argument only holds when the customer is informed about those specific tradeoffs. The customer will choose the cheap bulbs because they can't be sure the expensive ones are better quality. They often aren't.

Buyers want cheap bulbs, they don't want crap bulbs. If that means $1.25/unit is impossible, so be it.

Or alternatively, the customer simply DGAF about the quality of their $1.25 purchase.

I have $1.25 bulbs in my home. I use them in unimportant locations with infrequent use. They are perfectly serviceable for this use.

> The customer will choose the cheap bulbs because they can't be sure the expensive ones are better quality. They often aren't.

This is a big problem for all consumer products. The root of the problem is that most consumers are wholly unqualified to be a judge of engineering quality themselves, few even know how to effectively obtain trustworthy information about quality, and those who do often value their time more than the effort required to do so. For larger purchases, some people who care to be informed will do some research, but I don't really think there's a solution for products <$500.

It is so much more difficult than it used to be to get trustworthy information about the quality of products. Seems like you have to already know of a hobbyist turned youtuber/blogger who has ideally done deep dives into a class of products or at least some relevant product reviews (or has a large subscriber base with active discussion threads).

Even trying to find such a content creator on the fly can be dicey since so many of them are doing paid reviews or at the very least are sent free products + incentives. That, or get lucky googling site:reddit.com/r/[subreddit] [product] to find a thread that isn't too recent, isn't overrun by shills and isn't woefully out of date and full of deleted/overwritten content.

The availability of that information is probably worse than ~10 years ago, but still better than any time in the past before that.

Another problem is that there are just too many products these days. 40 years ago someone might have 5 options for a vacuum cleaner, period. Someone on the internet today might have 500 options. It's just information overload. Someone who really cares to, might go through the 236 options that Consumer Reports has tested [0]

But most people aren't the type of people who would spend a half-hour arguing about consumer product quality on the internet. Most people aren't willing to spend any time to evaluate their options for relatively small purchases beyond the immediate moment of purchase.

[0]: https://www.consumerreports.org/appliances/vacuum-cleaners/b...

Good information for the quality of cheap consumer goods is hard to find because the information is not particularly valued by most people.

> The customer will choose the cheap bulbs because they can't be sure the expensive ones are better quality.

This can't be understated. You never know with a bigger price tag if you are actually paying for a better build or just for branding + tidy profit. So you see two light bulbs with similar specs and the pictures on the box look indistinguishable.. unless you have specific experience or knowledge you are often doing yourself a favor to buy the cheaper one. Sometimes things are priced because they are actually better, but too often it is purely branding that justifies the price tag.

Not specific to lightbulbs, but I've also noticed a trend where a more expensive product with a big name and obviously more of an ad/branding budget actually is better for a few years... and then at some random date the bottom drops out and the product becomes almost indistinguishable from cheaper options while the price tag remains the same. Or even increases if they have enough market share and brand recognition.

> They often aren't.

And sometimes the better quality isn't worth the price. I bought a "Coochear" brushcutter on Amazon for a whopping $125 when my more expensive Husqvarna died due to a spun main bearing. At $125, I didn't care if it lasted longer than the time it would take me to remove the saplings that I needed to. The thing goes through 2" trees like they weren't even there. Yeah, it vibrates a lot more than it should and runs really rich, but it works a lot better than I expected for that price.

I know that I could have gotten another Husq that would work great but I really don't want to spend $600 for something that only gets used a couple times a year.

Sounds like their competitors need to advertise better

WTF do you mean? All led lamps are PWM meaning they flicker meaning they are not at 100% over time.

https://blog.1000bulbs.com/home/current-underdriving-and-ove...

That barely answers anything. If you want more light make the pwm cycle on longer, even up to just driving it with the smoothest dc you can.

I recommend watching this:

https://hackaday.com/2021/01/17/leds-from-dubai-the-royal-li...

Only shows you bulbs can be made well and last long. But those are not for you. (Assuming most readers here are not Saudi)

The candle that burns twice as bright lasts half as long. The converse is just as true of tungsten filaments as it is of candles.

I know this is a common pop-history thing to cite on the Internet, but I would think hackernews would understand the benefits of standardization.

If every brand's lightbulb has different luminousities how on earth would architects decide how to space fixtures?

This "cartel" is how we avoided a dimness war, like the loudness war we had in digital music a decade or so back

We've got a similar thing in New Zealand: the Consumer Guarantees Act. The people who sold the broken thing to you can either fix it, replace it, or refund you the cost of it. The decision is unfortunately up to them, so they sadly often replace things rather than fixing them.

Consumer NZ is usually used as the independent source for expected product lifetimes: https://www.consumer.org.nz/articles/appliance-life-expectan.... Interestingly, they specify 15 years for an oven, which is more than the company in this article claimed electric ovens should last for.

Replacing seems fair enough...eliminates buyers remorse.

It's not as good for the environment, though.

Some companies like Apple try to make up for this by replacing broken devices, then refurbishing and reselling the formerly broken device.

Hand-repair of mass-manufactured objects is really expensive, unfortunately. Especially in the West, where you require a bunch of scarce resources like "city land" and "human time".

Not if the manufacturer plans for it. The first macbook I had, you could replace the battery in less than 10 seconds. You could replace a defective ram stick in 5 minutes if you were going slow. The price of service was cheap enough that the guy who sold me the RAM let me watch over his shoulder as he did it for free.

> It's not as good for the environment, though.

Depends on other laws, here they have to take it back and recycle it. This also applies to old appliances. I had some empathy for the poor guys who had to take my extremely cheap, completely rusted washing machine away when I bought a new one.

While repairing might be better, it's not the worst outcome to replace it.

My guess: These companies have an internal repair division that will try to sell it as "warranty repaired" later. Or, they sell it at a discount to a company that specialises in oven repairs. They will fix it, then resell it. My guess: Apple's devices are way harder to repair than your average oven or refrigerator.

They did at Kitchen Aid (American company) but only for higher prices goods. They'd refurbish stand mixers but not <$100 USD stuff like stick blenders or hand mixers.

Stand mixers were solid metal so I'm guessing a decent portion of the cost was casing/housing

At least in the U.S. this stuff tends to be called "manufacturer refurbished"

I expect the cost of the cast, cleaned up and painted metal parts is a small fraction vs stuff like assembly and overhead. The raw materials aren't that expensive and they have enough sales to use high volume processes.

It’s fantastic.

No, I wouldn’t like the extended warranty thanks - I’m covered already.

If you are willing to offer an extended warranty for X years, then that's pretty good evidence that I should be covered by the CGA for at least that long.

In a way, Aus and NZ are taking advantage of other countries’ paltry consumer protection laws. I’m sure manufacturers have not priced in the cost of handling consumers in those countries who use those protections. If they ever do, you can bet they’ll spread the cost to all territories.

It’s silly that the US doesn’t set up similar protections. While manufacturers race to the bottom, we (consumers) could race to the top.

15 years seems darn short for an oven. The (electric) one I have now is from the late 1960's, and perfectly functional. At church, our (gas) kitchen oven is about a century old - and the last service man we had said that it should be good for another century, if we're careful not to let it rust out.

phew, at that age I'd really be worried about the seals for the gas oven and about the insulation of the wiring for the electric one.

[Took a look at my stove] Nope, all the easily-accessed wiring (under the stove top - which lifts like a car hood, for quick clean-up after a pot boils over) is in excellent shape. Insulation colors look a bit faded, but that's it. (Yes, all those wires bend a bit when you either remove a burner, or lift the top. But the design is such that the radius of those bends is extremely large, compared to the diameter of the probably-solid-copper wire.)

Guess: "Gas Seals" was a checklist item for that last service man at church. I think we have our gas stove, water heater, and furnace looked at every 7-ish years by someone from the local gas company.

Sounds like they really don't make them like they used to. Most things have moved to stranded wires due to their lower resistance per weight properties, despite their higher likelihood of breaking during bends.

Lower resistance per weight doesn't seem right to me. Spot checking a few values on a chart provided by a wire manufacturer[0] shows that stranded wire has greater resistance per weight. Stranded wire is much more flexible, easier to work with, and handles rebending much better than solid wire and I assume this is why it's more commonly used.

[0] https://www.calmont.com/wp-content/uploads/calmont-eng-wire-...

I'm not an electrical engineer, but I am pretty sure that every cable that moves should be made from stranded wires. Stranded wires last longer when bent repeatedly.

Solid wires are used for fixed installation (eg. inside walls). Any cable with solid conductors must be mounted in such a way that it does not move or bend during use.

Electrical resistance is very similar for solid vs stranded conductors.

Faded colors in something that's usually covered point towards a serious degradation of the insulation.

I'd recommend you get an isolation tester device and an instruction on how to use it by a local electrician. That way you can (relatively) easily check your house installation - not just devices but also the home's wiring itself - against danger due to insulations going bad, before someone gets hurt or devices start tripping the GFCI.

Speaking of GFCI, I seriously hope you and everyone else reading this thread has all their wiring protected by one. If not, please please please get it retrofitted ASAP, and if you can afford it, retrofit a combination of thermal fuse, GFCI and arc fire detector. Electrical issues are a leading cause for domestic fires.

> Guess: "Gas Seals" was a checklist item for that last service man at church. I think we have our gas stove, water heater, and furnace looked at every 7-ish years by someone from the local gas company.

Good, then you should be good to go (and it's crazy that the pipes, fittings and interior seals are still intact at that age and not dried out!), although 7 years is quite the stretch. Here in Germany, the norm is once a year for furnaces/water heaters - personally I had an emergency repair to be done as in well below a year the water heater went from "perfect emissions" to "dangerous CO levels". The cause turned out to be cat fur being sucked in and burning up, depositing soot on the burners.

Wires subjected to repeated flexure in normal use are very likely to be stranded copper rather than solid copper.

When I lived in Hongkong, my oven failed after less than 10 years. When my landlord came to replace it, he told me that it was common due to the extreme humidity that eventually ruins the circuit boards. I'm still a bit skeptical of that explanation -- but he has probably replaced more "white goods" (refrig, oven, etc.) that I will in a lifetime. Weirdly, my washing machine by Bosch was tough as nails and never had any issues. One would assume that it would be similarly affected by the humidity.

The washing machine was probably sealed much better against humidity since it would be in proximity to water all the time.

Yeah in my experience the boards in a washing machine are conformally coated which makes it a real treat to replace a relay on the control board.

The nice thing about conformal coating is that in general you don't have to do as many repairs versus non conformal coated boards.

Did you not have air conditioning?

Unless you are made of money, you don't run air con in HK while not at home. Daylight hours, I am always out of the house. It regularly gets to 35C in the summer in HK with batshit crazy humidity levels.

Proximity to the sea does shorten the lifetime of electronics. Salt deposition is a way worst problem than humidity.

There are ways to protect against that. And actively cooled equipment (like computers) get way worse problems than stuff with no air circulation.

I wonder if this takes into account all the cheap crap installed in apartments/for-rent units. Those seem to last closer to 10 years depending on abuse and quality (usually just getting scraped up, cosmetically damaged).

It seems like those Samsung/LG smart appliances are constantly breaking (especially fridges)

Really it seems anything with a circuit board is more likely to break (which I suppose is somewhat intuitive given mechanical parts are fairly durable)

Around here (Ann Arbor, MI) - I hear far more complaints about failed household appliances from friends living in houses than apartments. Possibly that's because the homeowners can't "just call Maintenance" to fix the problem. But I've also heard that many appliance manufacturers have "rental" models - relatively basic, but much more reliable - because landlords buy at scale, and don't tolerate unreliable crap.

Ovens CAN last for 15 years, but should ALL of them?

Who gets to decide how long something gets to last for?

As (ostensibly) our collective agent, the government seems like a decent candidate.

Here is some UK government-adjacent advice on the lifespans of appliances (expected lifespans for products in rental properties): https://www.tenancydepositscheme.com/wp-content/uploads/2024...

(Landlords in the UK are obliged to register their tenant's deposit with a scheme upon the start of an tenancy, and raise any objections to the full return within a short period of the tenants move-out (possibly as short as 14 days) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenancy_deposit_scheme_(Englan...

Maybe two things can happen:

1. We create a law that says companies _are_ responsible for the environmentally-conscientious disposal of any good they make.

2. Then we let them decide.

I bought a cool wifi, internet connected picture frame from a thrift store. It had someone else's pictures on it, so I went into the menu and selected "Factory Reset"

After that it never booted past the setup pages with a "unable to get token" message. I messaged the company who was very responsive but the end result was that they said it was unfixable and to return it to the store.

It was only $8, but I was looking forward to a wifi connected picture frame.

At a certain point we have to stop describing these situations as you "owning" something which broke, and instead describe it as you leasing the picture frame from that company for $0 (with an initial upfront cost) and the company failing to holdup on it's side of the deal.

Well you do own the physical frame itself. It's more so the "smart" part being leased.

In this case I'd be more inclined to call it planned obsolescence

Or just a defective product. It sounds like the company didn't even manage to test Factory Reset.

MHBKD recently made a video on Apple testing lab [1], and one thing he talked about and that was kinda new to me is seeing repairability as a spectrum. I.e. on one side is "indestructible" product and on the other is "perfectly repairable". And that those properties (being hard to damage/destruct and being easy to repair) might be mutually exclusive.

In a hindsight it seems obvious, still this video was the first time I've heard this verbalized so clearly.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8reaJG7z-is

In France, the "Repairability Index" was mandatory since 2021 [1, in French], and will be superseded by the "Durability Index" starting on 2025 [2, in French]

[1] https://www.ecologie.gouv.fr/indice-reparabilite [2] https://www.ecologie.gouv.fr/indice-durabilite

Is the idea of these indices to encourage buyers to choose more repairable / durable goods? I can remember shopping for a new fridge with my parents as a kid: The energy efficiency labels (mandated by the gov't) made a big difference on their purchasing decisions.

I'm of the opinion that manufacturers should be required to prominently list the "expected total monthly price" on their packaging, calculated as product_price / months_of_warranty. This basically assumes that the product may break immediately after the warranty expires.

Such a price would incentivize manufacturers to make warranties last as long as possible. This encourages repairability where it's economically and physically viable, without the tradeoffs necessary if repairability is mandated by law.

> Such a price would incentivize manufacturers to make warranties last as long as possible.

Or keep warranties short, but push consumers into a pay by month model, because the amount per month is less than than the advertised "expected monthly price". The company then gets a regular income stream.

I think that would be one last straw that would make customers rebel. But I heard apple managed to pull this off, so maybe I'm out of touch.

I like this idea. Currently I usually buy cheapest things available, because I assume they break immediately after the (mandatory) 2 year guarantee.

Disclaimer: I haven't seen the video (I'm in a quiet place right now.)

> And that those properties (being hard to damage/destruct and being easy to repair) might be mutually exclusive.

I disagree on a fundamental level.

You could say such a thing when talking about really small (micro/miniature) devices. But as size increases, the validity of such arguments rapidly goes down. A phone case/bumper for example - makes the device larger, yes - but increases strength while not hurting reparability.

The "problem", imo, is two-fold: 1. Apple does not care too much about making repairs easy. If it costs $100 to make a board they can charge a customer $500 to repair, or $800 for a new phone, it's easy for them.

2. (Some) people prefer sleeker designs. Samsung has its active range of phones, CAT makes durable phones - but many prefer a smaller thickness/bezel etc. This means that when tech improves to make smaller bezels, manufacturers decrease the bezel a little and add protective padding a little... haha no. It's only bezel reduction. Because it sell, I suppose.

For example gorilla glass/protective glass has improved in technology, but thinner screens (for thinner devices) have eaten up the benefits of stronger tech.

The real "killer" argument? The presence of companies like Framework. I'm typing this out on my FW13 & its build quality is really good. Perhaps a 10 year old thinkpad may be similar or better, but this is almost certainly thinner. But it is almost definitely more repairable.

It's possible, but requires companies to offer products, and people to use and buy them.

> I haven't seen the video ... I disagree on a fundamental level.

Right )

For those who are downvoting. This was an extreme example of a debate not worth having.

There is no better way to show that you don't care about truth and only care about defending your current opinion than to say "I don't know your arguments, but I disagree".

It's not on people to watch hour long youtube videos to rejoin your argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

Good point, but this would apply to ongoing debate. In this case person jumped in into conversation with the premise "I don't have time to listen to arguments but here's mine opinion".

The thing is, all the theories of communication for persuasion (Social Judgement Theory and Elaboration Likelihood Model mostly) boil down to "hear your audience". If you really want to convince or persuade anyone, the starting point is to understand what's in the head of the audience you are trying to persuade. It's not often easy to get this information, so you start by expressing your views and carefully listening to the answers and arguments of those who have different views.

So if you have a chance to get the arguments in advance – before communicating your opinion – it's a blessing. It's a free lunch for persuasive communication. You're given people's opinions and arguments on the plate, basically.

And here this free lunch is thrown away just to be replaced with "here is my opinion and I don't care about arguments" communication style. That's not a starting point for debate at all.

> And here this free lunch is thrown away just to be replaced with "here is my opinion and I don't care about arguments" communication style. That's not a starting point for debate at all.

I'm sorry if it came across that way but I absolutely didn't mean it like that. I'm happy to have my point refuted. I am a (mechanical) engineer but haven't worked in this specific field professionally, so I felt I might be able to contribute, as making devices sturdier is something I think a lot about. I normally don't mind watching MKBHD's videos, at that point of time I was in a silent place where I couldn't have done it.

Parent of parent explained the premise of the video correctly. For someone who's complaining about the parent not watching the video, it really comes off as you having not even watched the video.

> it really comes off as you having not even watched the video.

I fail to understand the link here. The video contains arguments and examples of that premise. Dismissing arguments and jumping straight into the "here's my opinion" is exactly the communication style I chuckled upon.

> but many prefer a smaller thickness/bezel etc.

There would not be an issue for Apple or Samsung to design a backplane that uses screws to hold the phone together, eliminating the need for glue entirely.

It just looks a bit ugly.

It is so easy indeed that Samsung has been making such phones for over a decade. If people started putting their money where their mouth is, maybe they'd even sell.

People buy what is advertised to them, let's be real. Yes, Samsung offers such devices, and I for example have an Active Tab 3 as my daily driver (despite its issues, such as the screen being glued to the case, and the glue is not water-tight when it gets even remotely warm).

But most people are going to buy what their telco offers on sale, and that is iPhones and Samsung Galaxy S series. Everything else is specialty that you need to buy in cash.

    > For example gorilla glass/protective glass has improved in technology, but thinner screens (for thinner devices) have eaten up the benefits of stronger tech.

This is an interesting point. I didn't think about it, but it makes sense. Are there any "chonky" mobile phones with very thick cases & screens... like the Panasonic ToughBook?

A variety of manufacturers has them, CAT e.g., but even Samsung has been having a line of them for over a decade.

Manufacturers also keep making phones with headphone jacks, sd slots, swappable batteries, and all the other features that people loudly insist they want in their phones, right until it comes to choosing a new phone to buy. Then they buy something thin and flimsy again and repeat the whine cycle; and every year another manufacturer drops their sturdy&servicable line because nobody cares enough to actually buy it.

what's the name of the Samsung line? I might be in the market for a new phone soon-ish

I mean, if you want a supported phone with a headphone jack and swappable battery, you're pretty much just down to the Samsung Galaxy Xcover now, which has a CPU from 6 years ago and no fingerprint reader. It's definitely possible, but nowadays there's major tradeoffs to get features that used to be standard.

> Apple does not care too much about making repairs easy.

They do. iPhone 14 internals was redesigned to be more repairable [0], which extended to pro models with iPhone 15 [1].

[0] https://www.ifixit.com/News/64865/iphone-14-teardown

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/News/82867/iphone-15-teardown-reveals...

But repairability isn't only about the components being accessible (the glue holding in the battery is an absolute nightmare). It is also about the availability of authentic parts.

Historically, Apple made sourcing genuine parts an impossible feat. This potentially wouldn't even be a problem, if Apple didn't go to such great lengths to detect "non authentic parts". They changed that somewhat, but only for private consumers. Their model for their repair/replacement parts program still makes it borderline impossible to operate an independent repair service business, effectively protecting Apple from any competition.

It's more of a triangle really. Size/packaging being the third corner.

Plenty of devices are indestructible and repairable, they're just bulky.

I have a Rainforest Automation Eagle 200 radio box that pairs with a PG&E meter to enable real time data egress. The onboard software is brittle and the device fails to boot up completely, though it is responsive to local network requests.

Rainforest Automation is uninterested in debugging it and is offering only a discount on replacement hardware. But this is likely a software problem (I suspect failed certificate rotation to connect to their backend) and I don't want to give them more money.

I live in California and the right to repair goes live next month. Anybody know how I can use that right to actually get a repair?

I would presume it's not retroactive, and would only apply to devices sold after the law went into effect. And perhaps only even devices manufactured before then.

not so.

via[0]:

   Manufacturers must also make available documentation, parts, and tools for at least three years after the product was last manufactured for products priced between $50 and $99.99 and for at least seven years after the product was last manufactured for products priced at $100 or more, regardless of any warranty periods.

   The law broadly covers electronic and appliance products, including cell phones, laptops, tablets, and various home appliances, that were manufactured and sold or used for the first time in California on or after July 1, 2021.

[0] https://www.sidley.com/en/insights/newsupdates/2023/10/calif...

edited to add source URL.

> So you have a reasonable expectation that your appliance will last a reasonable amount of time. So how long is reasonable?

FOREVER. Just design them so parts are replaceable and buildable by any third party and provide the documentation.

Does anyone know whether and how this translates to other places in the world?

For me, it's the most interesting with EU/Sweden. We don't have courts like this do we?

I've got a friend who claims to have sued dozens of companies in the equivalent in the UK; he called it "Small Claims Court", but perhaps it has a more specific technical name. Here's an example:

https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/law-and-courts/legal-syste...

Apparently they are no longer called 'small claims' officially, but everyone I know still calls them that.

The N1 form is to be sent by post[1] and there is also an online version which can be used in some cases[2].

[1]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/65eb13af62ff4...

[2]: https://www1.moneyclaims.service.gov.uk/eligibility

Here you go :-)

https://e-justice.europa.eu/42/EN/small_claims?SWEDEN&member...

This link also contains a reference for all other EU member states

Cool, thank you!

The ESCP can be an option.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_small_claims_proced...

I don't think the courts really matter, what does matter are the legal guarantees. In the EU it is an explicit two years, so I think a situation like this, where a 9 year old appliances is being repaired under threat of legal action, simply won't arise as the customer has no legal basis for his claim.

Depends on the country, in the UK, in addition to the EU mandated 2 years, we have the same "reasonableness" law, although there's a 6 year limit.

I mean, there are normal consumer protection rules. But it's actually commonplace for a lot of appliances at least in Germany and Japan to have a 10 year operational guarantee. I don't really how you can enforce it in either place, but it does seem to me that at least the big traditional companies to stick to these periods for bigger appliances such as air conditioning, fridges, washing machines etc. Interestingly for smaller more modern devices, like say, a table top dishwasher, you're lucky if these things last a year and you'll have a hard time enforcing the 2 year warranty even with the help of the consumer protection agency.

>But it's actually commonplace for a lot of appliances at least in Germany and Japan to have a 10 year operational guarantee.

But these are a voluntary guarantee from the manufacturer, which naturally are much harder to enforce legally. As you are not arguing the law, but the manufacturers wording of his guarantee.

2 years is the EU-wide minimum, individual countries can raise that bar. The Netherlands for example has the same reasonable expectation rule as discussed in the article. You absolutely will win a similar court case here (I know people who've done it).

A not often discussed problem with the EU guarantee is that in the first 6 months, every defect is presumed to have been present at the time it was bought. After 6 months it is on the consumer to prove it, and for most things it is just not worth it to pay for an expert opinion.

So in practice the iron clad guarantee is only 6 months for most consumer products.

At least that's the interpretation of the law in the UK.

edit: small claims courts are quite accessible in the UK, so often the threat of small claims can get thing moving.

The term at which burden of proof shifts from the retailer to the consumer has been raised to 1 year in the EU (maybe not in the UK due to Brexit). As this is a matter of civil law, the standard of proof is also "more likely than not" proof, not "beyond reasonable doubt". You don't necessarily need an expert opinion, it _can_ be sufficient to collect a bunch of reports of similar failures.

> The term at which burden of proof shifts from the retailer to the consumer has been raised to 1 year in the EU

This is great to know. Unfortunately yes, UK won't pick it up automatically.

And yes, in practice you need enough proof to convince a small claim judge, which might not be a lot, especially if the defect is well documented.

> A not often discussed problem with the EU guarantee is that in the first 6 months, every defect is presumed to have been present at the time it was bought. After 6 months it is on the consumer to prove it, and for most things it is just not worth it to pay for an expert opinion.

I don’t think the EU says anything that specific (https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/dealing-with-customers...)

> At least that's the interpretation of the law in the UK.

If that’s true, I think it would be specific to the UK.

Also, what the UK says isn’t relevant for discussing EU consumer rights anymore.

That's just the summary. If you follow the link to "EU Directive on the sale of consumer goods and associated guarantees" [1], Article 5.3 states:

"3. Unless proved otherwise, any lack of conformity which becomes apparent within six months of delivery of the goods shall be presumed to have existed at the time of delivery unless this presumption is incompatible with the nature of the goods or the nature of the lack of conformity."

A sibling comment states that this might have increased to one year though.

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:31...

In the EU there are 2 years warranty for pretty much anything (not services), so the reverse bathtub descent is bit more than that.

As for courts - there is a customer protection commission/service in most (all) EU member states. However, they won't do anything if the item is out of legal claim for 'free' (any) repairs.

My personal issue is not the warranty/courts, though. While I can repair all kinds of stuff (from laptops board repair to gas lawn mowers), the fact you get a piece of junk that serves no purpose until repaired, is damning. A story may make a decent material for a blog post, but in real life you generally don't have luxury to pursue a slow process for repair/replacement, if it's an important piece of equipment.

I know EU law requires a two year warranty on everything, it was one of the few good things the UK got out of it.

The law in the UK is a bit more complex than that. It has to be of what used to be called merchantable quality (they changed the term I think) which means that if something breaks because of something like a manufacturing flaw or design defect you are covered for the reasonable life of the product (so could be a very long time for something like an oven).

This is old law (common law, although now redefined in legislation). EU law added some protections on top of this, and non-EU UK law added more. I am not up to date with the details, but there are plenty of readable guides out there to anyone who needs them.

Check Swedish law; there are no EU-wide laws like the Australian one, but some member states di have extra laws similar to the Australian one. I don't know about Sweden specifically.

I don't know about Sweden particularly but in Norway "Forbrukerkjøpsloven" [0] gives you up to a 5 year warranty on any items which are obviously meant to last for at least that long. For instance, shoes have a two years warranty, but a laptop or most kitchen appliances have an automatic 5 year warranty which cannot be waived.

I'm not that knowledgeable about all the details here, but I've done it once for a PSU which stopped working after four years.

[0] https://www.forbrukerradet.no/cause-for-complaint/

5 years feels pretty long for a laptop warranty to be honest. (I'm typing this on a 2019 Intel MBPro, but it's getting pretty long in the tooth, and if it had died already or last year, I would not have felt like I got an unreasonably short lifespan out of it.)

Do I expect a laptop to last 5 year? Yes, most of them. Do I think it's inherently problematic or that consumers were "cheated" if say 25% of laptops only last 4 years instead of 5? I do not.

I don't think it's actually what you meant to ask (I think you are actually interested in legally mandated warranties rather than the courts where they're enforced) but I think most countries have something equivalent to "small claims court" to make low-stakes suits viable.

I have successfully used exactly the same technique of "get a court date, wait for your opponent to contact you and resolve the issue, cancel the court date" in the past to challenge an illegal rent increase in Switzerland. The court for that here is called the Schlichtungsbehörde.

Yeah, I guess I was/am curious about both.

It seems like we have 2 year legally enforced warranty (which I knew about), and some sort of small claims court (which I did not know about).

I think I would have heard about legally mandated warranties that extended beyond the 2 years I knew about. The Australian system seems quite reasonable, I wonder why we don't have something like that? 2 years for everything seems pretty weird.

What's the small claims court named in Swedish?

Sweden does have Small claims courts, you can also contact Konsumentombudsmannen (The Consumer Ombudsman)

It's kinda same here in Thailand; with much more bureaucrat issue though.

Although we didn't explicitly have a consumer court, we have a court department in both municipal and Provincial Courts. (ศาลจังหวัด/ศาลแขวง... แผนกคดีผู้บริโภค)

People can file a complaint themselves both in-person or via e-Filing system. Although very tedious to do so, at least in my opinion, it still workable.

Same as the blog's author, any plaintiff I've help with, need some patient and times on both evidence collecting and consulting with the court's appointed lawyer to draft the complaint. But, for the case against big company at least, it mostly worked out for them.

Similar law in the UK. There is also trading standards who can sometimes help but the small claims court is fairly straight forward. On top of that if you pay with a credit card or any other form of credit specific to that purchase (e.g. a car loan) you also have a claim against the credit provider.

Don't usually need to even go to court anymore as there is a mediation step offered before court. I did this to get a refund for a smartphone that stopped working after a couple of years.

This is the way. You just need to be patient. Threatening to file a case with the consumer court (India) often gets a better response from big businesses. Though, I am surprised why you are allowed to sue the retailer here (unless they were selling the product under their own brand name)?

Many countries place the regulatory burden on the importer/retailer of products to make enforcement easier.

It can be difficult to directly sue a foreign manufacturer but importers and retailers tend to have domestic legal entities that can be compelled to attend court appearances etc.

Because your contract was with the retailer. UK consumer law works the same way.

Works the same in the UK. It makes sense that the retailer is responsible for ensuring goods they sell are fit for purpose, especially when many of these laws predate online shopping. Also it would be difficult to sue a manufacturer who isn't in your country.

There are three companies involved (maybe more): The retailer, with which you have a contract, the importer and/or distributor, with which you don't, and the manufacturer, which is in another jurisdiction. Given that the manufacturer is usually somewhere abroad, which company will the legislature pick? There are two options, so I'd be shocked if the lawyers agreed on which option is better to write into the law.

https://toroid.org/exide-warranty-nightmare is an Indian story you might like BTW.

Regardless, you should still never ever buy an HP printer.

Tell your friends and family.

I mean, a LaserJet 4L is still quite a decent printer today. Just don't buy an HP printer that was made in the last 25 years, and you should be fine!

That’s true, but that 4L cost $1200 30 years ago which according to some random inflation calculators works out to about $2500 today. It’s hard to believe that’s a better value than a $100 HP ink jet and a lot of ink.

You're being hard on poor old HP. My HP LaserJet 1200 is still going strong, and it was bought only 20 years ago!

I'd be curious to hear about stories of this working in the U.S., if ever.

Sadly, the US doesn't seem to have particularly great consumer guarantees - you just have to rely on warranties given as an extra marketing point by a company.

In more developed countries like Australia, NZ, and the UK, warranties last less time than the guarantee offered by consumer law and only exist to try and confuse consumers into not asking for repairs after the warranty expires (but not necessarily the consumer law guarantee)

In the US the consumer would be taken to court instead. /s

"In soviet Russia, party comes to YOU."

From my understanding, small claims court in the US can be particularly effective because sending a company representative there costs more than just refunding the product.

However, I suspect that if something breaks out of warranty, you don't have a legal right to get it replaced/repaired.

There have been a few stories on HN over the years of people taking advantage of arbitration that so many companies insist on.

Here’s one, but there are others as well: https://www.shuchow.com/so-i-took-a-huge-corporation-to-arbi...

I predict that this is going to get more and more common: Companies enshittify their service, hiding behind impenetrable walls of AI chatbots and useless outsourced template-reply service centers, customers respond by taking one attempt to resolve it with the company and then straight to court.

If you have a working small claims court system, I can recommend giving it a try. It can be way less frustrating than trying to deal with a company that just doesn't want to.

They're rolling out the arbitration clauses like mad recently though. There was an HN post a few years ago about going to arbitration and winning, so it's not a complete lost cause but I guess the damages would be less.

Arbitration is great for companies for multiple reasons:

- it avoids costly class actions in "big" cases - it avoids costly discovery in "big" cases - it avoids sky-high damages claims in extreme cases - it allows small everyday fuck-ups to be handled more cheaply than a court

However, I'd argue that for this kind of issue, arbitration isn't necessarily worse. Especially in a clear-cut case, you don't need the court to win, you just need the court to trigger an escalation at the company. Arbitration is good enough for that.

I admit I'm too lazy to Google, but are arbitration services regulated, so that if they flagrantly refused to rule in favor of a plaintiff in a case where (999/1000) lawyers would agree, can the arbitration service be sent to review the same way a doctor or lawyer could be disciplined? I can't imagine how you could legally sign over the right to sue to an agency that fails to apply basic principles of justice.

The standard is "manifest disregard of the law" - which, roughly speaking, means the arbitrator “understood and correctly stated the law but proceeded to ignore it.”

Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc. v. Bobker, 636 F. Supp. 444 (S.D.N.Y. 1986)

There is no regulation of arbitration services.

thank you!

pre-dispute arbitration agreements is still worse for consumers in almost every possible way: https://arbitrationinformation.org/docs/problems/

TFA describes Electrolux as a mid-range manufacturer. I guess that's about right; their products aren't cheap "break-on-day2" crap, but they're not up there with Miele and Bosch.

Electrolux is a Swedish company that has quietly bought-up most of the European brands, like Hotpoint and AEG. When you buy one of those brands, you are buying the Electrolux standard of service. The service engineers are a third-party. Last time I looked, there was no contact information on the Electrolux website. And TBH, I think it must be at least a decade since I saw Electrolux-branded products in stores.

I think Electrolux' business is like those cheapo Chinese companies that buy up good bicycle brands, and then drastically downgrade the product. So be careful if you're buying white goods in Europe: you could be buying Electrolux in mufti.

I disagree.

I have a similar situation right now. Washing machine is leaking when load is anything bigger than light load. Initial guarantee claim to Whirlpool was sent 8 weeks ago. It's dead, no response from anyone.

Under consumer rights shop should refund, but claim is without response for 3 weeks (14 calendar days is upper limit according to EU law + local regulations).

Today I was supposed to contact the lawyer, but I figured out that f** this s**. It's weeks of legal battle over 300€. They won. Stress enough isn't worth it.

Oven is a different thing though, as I don't think it's as essential as washing machine (and dragging clothes every week for washing).

Maybe I should file a claim to refund after it was made, but it's still a net loss. Lesson learned: stay away from manufacturer Whirlpool, don't ever spend a dime on a shop and live on.

> It's weeks of legal battle over 300€.

We are not alike. As soon as it costs them several tens of billable hours (people on phone, someone making appointments, discussions, emails, lawyer doing it's thing etc) I'm all fair game and will definitely spend my time screwing with them simply to make them pay even if I lose in the end.

Since I'm going to be frustrated when I'm being screwed over I see no reason not repay that and to act out that frustration in the worst possible way I can manage for the companies involved.

Same here. It's also possible to buy a new one during the "fight" period, and resell/donate the repaired one after

Why ask for a repair at that point? At that point, demand the purchase price back.

But it also costs me.

Conversations with lawyer is 1.5h, preparing documents another hour. I need to keep appliance somewhere, which is a storage cost. Average time to resolution is 8 months. I need to pay lawyer up front, and the costs are going to be returned, but this is yet another process. Initial costs are 200€ to even start, not to mention legal fees.

Even a simple form for costs reimbursement has 4 pages and based on requirements would require approximately 2h of gathering receipts, proving communication.

If I'd earn 30€/hour (and my rate is much higher), it would cost me around 600€ to get into the process. Anything outside original amount requires follow-up process so another 8 months.

Do I want to spend 2 years to get approximately 1000€ in total, during which I have not usable washing machine stuffed somewhere in my apartment? Nope.

As for "legal billable hours". Companies of specific size have lawyer on payroll. It doesn't increase the cost for them and they won't blink an eye or even notice. Facebook post will do more damage to them than above stunt, but it won't bring me anything in return.

So yes, they win, because my cost is higher than theirs. And I will stress about it, shortening my lifespan and they won't care at all.

That’s the same situation with the appliance but not with the law, because you have to use a lawyer.

Under New Zealand and Australian consumer law (the laws are different but similar) we have access to a low-cost tribunal. In fact in New Zealand you’re not allowed to be represented by a lawyer - on either side. It’s a single hearing with immediate resolution. Appeals and re-hearings are very limited and pretty rare.

I’ve used it twice. Both times the vendor magically found the warranty to be valid and fixed the issue before the tribunal date arrived. You don’t get a refund on the filing fee, but on most home appliances it’d be NZ$45, or about €25.

It depends a lot of how much expensive is the court on your jurisdiction. If you live in a place with some kind of small claims court, where you don't need to hire a lawyer, yes. If not, your only hope is by pooling with other victims in a class action, in the jurisdiction where this exists.

Those companies hire a lot of lawyers, have extensive data on customer behavior, court costs and generally know that most people don't have the time and/or the money to sue, and will find that it is more economical for them to just forget the matter and buy a brand new item.

In the U.S. you can usually file a complaint with the state's Attorney General's office. Sometimes there is a regulatory authority like for utilities or the Consumer Protection Bureau.

Usually a complaint gets forwarded to the company which requires some sort of authoritative response (which wastes time and money) so you can have reasonable success there.

Same issue as the article explains, it still takes a lot of time on the consumer side (who wants to be without an oven 2 months while they file paperwork and wait)

I think there is a way to resolve this sort of thing. If there are a certain number of tribunal appointments for the same type of issue, it becomes a criminal case for the CEO.

> NSW (and I think all the other states) has a tribunal especially for consumer claims, what used to be the "small claims court" is now the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal, NCAT. It's specifically designed to be low cost and straightforward. You shouldn't need a lawyer and can turn up with your documents.

I’ve never actually used small claims court in the US. Curious if those who have can answer if it’s a similar experience?

Of note, Australian Consumer Law applies to almost all consumer products and can have very big $$$ implications for selling defective junk: https://legalwiseseminars.com.au/insights/defective-range-ro...

If you're in the US, this method isn't directly available to you (though small claims court is and can work), but most (all?) states have a procedure to complain to the attorney general's office. I've found that companies are willing to play ball when they get a letter on the AG's letterhead.

Did the same years ago in the UK with an iPod. Was like a week out of the warranty, I tried to argue it was a premium device - nope, denied.

Did a claim with MCOL, they waited until the day of the hearing to pony up what I was claiming for, with interest. In the UK the individual gets to choose the venue with MCOL, so they'd have had to send a lawyer to Cheltenham to contest it.

I've had good success with tweeting the company and explaining how the problem is still unresolved.

The court of public opinion :)

That system fails unprivileged people though. Even if the "privilege" is "a number of Twitter followers".

That's probably why a tradition of more formal courts arose. But they probably worked better when they operated at a communal scale.

Think: "walk down the road to the courtroom on the second Wednesday of the month and wait your turn" and if you win, you get to boast about it at the pub for a few weeks: "can you believe ol' Jon thought he could pull the wool over my eyes?! Ha! Shame on him! He had to pay me for two days labor, the bastard!"

I wonder how we bring some of that convenience and public shaming back?

My sense is that there's not enough personal accountability because the courts and companies are too big for "ol' Jon" to held to account.

Can someone explain the downvotes? This is still one way to get satisfaction.

>Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It would be nice to have a public record of time before repairs, the fees and manufacturer estimates before buying.

Ideally everything is shipped back to the manufacturer at the end of the life span. Those dates would also be nice to have.

I don't envy Australian's most things but this is one worthy of it.

Out of curiosity, as an Australian, what is unenviable?

your gigantic spiders

Australia's most venomous spiders are actually small.

But yes, pretty much everything in Australia will try to kill you: it has world's most venomous snakes, world's most venomous spiders, saltwater crocodiles, sneaky dropbears, dengue fever carrying mosquitoes, world's most venomous jellyfish and sea snakes, and, of course, the IT consultants who will eat one alive.

Your pro-coals politicians perhaps. And you don’t drive on the right side of the road.

> And you don’t drive on the right side of the road.

Well. There is nothing left to discuss then.

The total lack of free speech is pretty messed up. Am I correct that you can’t even have blood come out when someone is hurt in a video game marketed to adults?

I am not a free speech absolutist, but I don't know that free speech in Australia is lacking very much compared to any other English speaking country, including America: I don't really believe that your constitutional right protects you the way that you might think it does, assuming you're American.

As to the latter point, no, that's incorrect. There were some issues in the past with getting a game approved at a 15+ age rating instead of 18+, but those have gone by the wayside as videogames in general have become more mainstream & accepted.

What types are harm can go their US Small Claims court? For example, does it have to be a monetary loss or can you sue to address recurring issues or force an exit of contract (w/o penalty)?

My dad usually writes the CEO and has pretty good luck getting issues resolved, with a lot less trouble than a court case.

The trick is to figure out the corporate email name format, find out the names of the members of the board and email them.

I have had succes with that approach as well. Don't expect the CEO to answer of course but whoever gets tasked with it is usually still much better positioned to get your issue resolved than a call center drone.

The EU gets a lot of heat for many things (and rightfully so), but this is an area where it is actually doing wonders in favor of consumers.

Here is the directive adopted by the EU Council to promote the repair of broken or defective goods, also known as the right-to-repair (or R2R) directive:

"The directive adopted today enshrines a new right for consumers: the right to have defective products repaired in an easier, cheaper and faster way. It also gives manufacturers the incentive to make products that last longer and can be repaired, reused and recycled."

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2024...

The US, the UE and China have wildly different approaches to many important topics, and the fact they are all affecting the entire world has the tendency to break political stale matches and balance things out.

It shows that diversity is a good thing, you end up having to compromise no matter how rightful you feel.

I'm often guilty of missing mistakes in my own posts, but as a PSA: please proofread your posts, especially if using prediction on a phone.

You can edit your post if you do so soon after posting, and sometimes the meaning isn't lost (stale matches -> stalemates) but other times it (subjectively) is. For example I don't know what "rightful" should be here.

I always thought it would be a good idea to have a suggest spelling improvements on social media & forums. Gives a low-key way of improving things without wasting comment space and potentially saving embarrassment. But I’m sure it needs a good ux or otherwise will be abused

I agree. Stack overflow has/had something like this where users with at least N karma could make edits to others' posts. I believe that was done with an aim like what you've described, though of course it is also subject to some abuse.

English may not be their first language. I found the post to be perfectly understandable.

ESL commenters are perfectly capable of learning to avoid and correct mistakes. In face, in written language some kinds of errors are more common in native speakers in my experience.

Indeed, I'm French.

The thing is, if you say something stupid, people forget about it. If you write it down, it stays.

But often I write like I speak, not thinking about the consequences.

The problem is people keep trying to stamp the diversity out.

The model in the US is nominally to have few regulations limited to things like enforcing contracts and antitrust laws and pricing major externalities, then leave the rest of it to free market competition. That isn't compatible with a model where regulators are trying to run the economy, because then the regulators get captured by industry and thwart rather than protect competition, and competition can't save you from needing complicated rules if it is not present. And those kinds of complex competition-destroying regulations are showing up everywhere, including in the US.

Conversely, the model in the EU is to not care a lot about small businesses and just regulate the large ones. But that model isn't really compatible with free trade. You can't impose expensive regulations on domestic companies and then put them into competition with countries that don't do that and expect them to succeed. But people want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the expensive regulations but not the correspondingly higher prices, and then the stuff they buy gets made in China where the rules don't exist (or exist on paper but the government waives them in order to capture the market). If you want to have the rules without destroying domestic industry then you have to impose them on the manufacturers of imported products too. Which would actually help the US increase competition, because the regulations would then shackle global megacorps that want to sell into the EU but not smaller domestic US companies that don't. But then foreign-produced stuff sold in the EU would cost as much as domestically-produced stuff -- a boon to local industry but higher prices on local consumers, and apparently they're not willing to suffer the latter.

Doesn't the US allow "diversity" by allowing different states to pass laws that their residence find important? I'm pretty sure CA has some specific right to repair laws.

Also, this (to me) is a strange use for the word diversity.

States and localities can pass their own laws but they can't remove the federal ones, and federal laws preempt state laws. Naturally large corporations then make a point to capture the federal regulators.

It can be slightly more complicated with things like CARB which has an explicit waiver in the Clean Air Act to enact its own standards and given how big it is it basically ends up setting de facto standards for the state (it’s one of the big complaints from Republican states).

A similar issue comes up around education although things are a bit more even there with Texas and Florida also using the size of their markets to set their version of education standards.

The difference of culture between different parts of the world fosters bigger legal variations.

Do US consumers buy less Made In China stuff than EU ones?

According to ustr.gov, US imports from China in 2022 were worth $562.9 billion.

According to eurostat EU imports from China were 627.3€ billion, so a significant difference (note the currency).

As a rate of the total import/export they are actually quite comparable.

It "shouldn't" be a problem for the US to do that, because it's supposed to be minimizing regulatory overhead and promoting competition so its companies are globally competitive. Importing something from a country because they have a large labor market is a different thing than importing things from that country because your country imposes high regulatory overhead on domestic producers but not on foreign imports.

This also gets back to my point about the US increasingly failing at its ideal of not imposing high regulatory overhead.

> The problem is people keep trying to stamp the diversity out.

I'm very cynical about this "diversity is our strength" stuff

In my opinion the problem is that society has been working hard to reduce "diversity" to mean different skin colors, genitals or sexual preferences, with a sprinkling of different cuisine. What most people refer to as diversity is very superficial

Diversity of ideas, diversity of politics, diversity of beliefs are still not very popular

The idea seems to be that the superficial diversity automatically produces the meaningful diversity, but I don't think that is true

Well said. And ironically "diversity" is a topic where diverse opinions are often met with particularily hard scorn.

It’s trivial for companies to avoid complying.

Meta don’t, for instance. They sell their quest headsets throughout Europe, but offer no warranty or support in many European countries in which they sell them, which is illegal under the EU CRD.

I foolishly bought one, knowing the risk - and it stopped working after a week, and that’s the end of the story - they refused to do a return or exchange, said I could ship it at my own expense, which I tried, only for them to “lose” the inbound package. They received it from the courier, mislaid it - my problem. They then kindly offered to ship a replacement controller at my expense (€150), but only to a different country, not to where I live. They then “lost” that too, forcing me to do a chargeback to get my money back, as despite having no proof of delivery to me, they insisted it had been.

As to “take them to court” - they know damned well that it’s not worth it to spend €10,000+ on legal fees over a €500 piece of electronics, which is why they knowingly and willingly act illegally.

The EU needs a simple, pan-European way to deal with bad actors, or it’s just meaningless legislation that provides no protection to consumers.

Does your country not have small claims court?

It does, but there’s a get-out - meta just say that they don’t operate in Portugal, even though they do sell to Portugal, and therefore there’s nobody to claim against. I’d have to go to a higher court, and again, the calculus here is that it’s not worth the consumer’s time - I don’t want to spend years and thousands of euro fighting over it - so the quest just went in the trash, and I’ll never buy anything from them again.

The European Small Claims Procedure[1] might be helpful.

[1] https://e-justice.europa.eu/content_small_claims-42-en.do

Huh. I was not aware of this - will give it a go, thanks!

Did you do a charge back on the card used for the purchase?

Only for the purchase of the replacement controller that they lost in transit, as I had proof that that was delivered to the wrong address in the wrong country - the original purchase, no, as my bank said I could just return it to them for a refund, and I had to exhaust that first - but because they wouldn’t accept a return, I couldn’t be seen to have exhausted that option by the bank. It’s kafkaesque.

> offer no warranty or support in many European countries in which they sell them

Do you mean that you can buy it from the manufacturer website and have it shipped directly to a country where it's not released officially? Or are you taking about third party retailers selling grey market units?

I’m talking about buying from a reputable third party retailer (Amazon) who reasonably passed the buck for RMA support to meta - and ultimately, if you sell your product in an EU country, or allow the sale of your product in an EU country via a retailer, you are liable to provide support for that product.

This article is actually about implicit warranty rather than right to repair, which the EU also has (my memory is at least 2 years, but I don't know if it's higher for different categories of things like in NSW).

It's also a great consumer friendly regulation!

I mean, litigation is fine and all, but what you can do will vary by jurisdiction.

In the past 14 months I've had to deal with two misbehaving insurance companies, one misbehaving utility provider (overcharging), and a few other things as well that I don't really want to talk about here.

I did not get to the point of actually having to take legal action but I did have to threaten it in two cases, along with action from the relevant ombudsmen.

Nothing like this, or on this scale, has ever happened to me before (once, about thirty years ago, I had to threaten a company with small claims for unpaid wages, but that's it).

There are, to an extent, processes you have to follow before you can get to the point where you are within your rights to threaten to throw the legal book at companies. You usually have to have gone through their complaints procedures and got to what you consider an unsatisfactory result. This in itself can take weeks or months of emailing back and forth, phone calls, etc. You gradually escalate your approach, you cover the internet in bad reviews, you contact your local MP and the local media, and so it goes on.

Its an exhausting and kafkaesque shitshow and this is with the backing of authorities, such as ombudsmen, who operate with the backing of legislation.

I understand why you have to do it: because some consumers are vexatious and dishonest. But it takes too long (elapsed) and it takes far too much time (effort) that could be better spent with family and friends (as an example).

I am currently gearing myself up to deal with the other insurance company, who I haven't so far had to threaten with legal action, and file a police complaint due to some new information that's come to light that shows our insurers, and the advice they gave us, in a very bad light.

Honestly, I don't know if I can be bothered any more. Taking the actions that I have, well, I wouldn't say they've left us better off, but they've left us much less worse off, because we haven't been taken for mugs... but the cost to my sanity and my soul. I don't know if the juice has always been worth the squeeze.

And that, of course, is what these companies bank on: that you'll get tired of it all and stop bothering them. It's extremely scummy behaviour, and frustrates me that I have to get to the point of threatening them with legal action just to get them to do the right thing. I strongly resent being forced to act like an asshole just to get a fair outcome.

I welcome any legislation that helps consumers get to a fair outcome more easily, but I also suggest that we need to look at the question of the obfuscatory tactics companies use to force consumers to jump through ridiculous hoops first.

Asking a warranty repair on a 9 years old oven is a bit of a stretch.

I doubt it'd fly in the EU.

The question I ask straight back at you: how long do you think an oven should last?

9 years is a lot to expect it to be under warranty...

Apparently not in Australia.

Well there was no court case.

Considering the cost of sending a lawyer attend the hearing and the potential risk of creating a precedent, it may simpler and cheaper to send an engineer when someone complains too loudly...

There is already a precedent - the law. These go to court all the time, and the consumer almost always wins, hence why the companies want to avoid the lawyer fees, since they know they'll lose.

The law is not a precedent. The law is generic and courts deal with specifics.

These cases do not go to court, they go to a tribunal. They are not heard by a judge (or at least a judge in their capacity as a court justice) and the results are not entered as judicial cases and do not set precedent.

It’s designed so a lay person can represent themselves without having to understand the justice system.

I know in New South Wales companies have to apply for special leave to have a lawyer represent them, and they need to supply a reason why. In New Zealand lawyers are not allowed in the tribunal, a company must be represented by a manager.

That's details on this specific process but does not change the boarder point...

That's the point. If customers don't complain strongly enough, the manufacturer is incentivized to develop products prone to malfunction. If the cost of malfunction is raised, the incentives change.

If they got invited to a hundred cases at the same time, they'd send a lawyer and perhaps even would tweak the design to include some extra $1 parts which actually work.

It's a trade-off. People don't want appliances that break down after a few years but they also want cheap appliances...

In this case it seems to boil down to: "In the end he replaced the light bulb (which hadn't worked for years, we hadn't bothered replacing it) and the message had gone away anyway."... i.e. the guy could have replaced the light bulb when it broke and perhaps nothing would have happened in the first place. So this article comes across as complaining too much, frankly.

and the next day the error came back and ultimately something else had to be replaced.

a failed bulb could result in a 'please change the bulb before the rest of me breaks' on the display, too.

But the flip of that is that if the manufacturer doesn't think it'll work longer than 2 years, that needs to be disclosed forcefully at sale time.

It‘s extremely difficult to predict the lifetime of a consumer product as it also depends on how it’s being used.

Who knows, maybe the author has been using the oven excessively or never cleaned it etc.

So far, we‘ve heard one side only.

Ninety percent of manufactured goods are ultimately trash, pride in craftsmanship has gone by the wayside. Things are shoved through production with little to no f*cks given in regards to quality, if the S.O.B is just a gnats ass within tolerance, just send it, and pump out as many more as you can because we have quotas and due dates to meet.

> It‘s extremely difficult to predict the lifetime of a consumer product as it also depends on how it’s being used.

That's actually false. Almost all of the engineered goods are engineered to a certain lifetime. Usually companies have internal endurance testing results for every item. The ones who care about will release their expectations.

Warranty is not the same as reasonable expected lifetime. Under warranty, the burden of proof is at the manufacturers side. The 2 years is typical for electric appliances, but it is from jurisprudence only. The law actually states that it should last as long as can reasonably expected. Intentionally vague, but yes, I would expect an oven to last longer than 2 years!

In fact, we should be able to build ovens that last a lifetime. And not only ovens, there are many appliances and gear that can easily be made to last a lifetime, except for some wearing parts. However, many companies that did this were competed to bankruptcy by cheap low quality competing products.

With the abundance of low(er) quality products, we tend to expect a shorter lifetime.

I recently replaced an element on our oven. It's 5 years old. Honestly, if manufacturers could make some of that stuff standardised I'd be quite happy to replace or pay to have them replaced. As it happens there are thousands of different shapes of "heating elements shaped to go around the fan". Same with the brushes in our washing machine I changed a while back. Finding the right replacement took more work than actually doing the replacing.

Yea I too want to be replacing every appliance in my home at least every 4 years. Thats a healthy way to live for sure. /s

I think you've been conditioned by anti-consumer companies who want you to BUY BUY BUY to expect that. Ovens should last 20 years or more, and if you're sold a faulty product, it's fair to expect it to be fixed.

Luckily there are still a few countries at the bottom of the world with good consumer legislation.

You do realize that in the end the manufacturers will just increase prices or move production to low-wage countries, no?

How will moving production to low wage countries help? The importer and/or the retailer still have to comply with the law of the country they sell in.

The only exception is when people buy from a foreign retailer online. However that is a problem regardless of where the retailer is as long as they are not in your country. My daughter (in the UK) currently has a problem with Boox (in the EU) refusing to replace a product that was delivered with a faulty screen claiming that she must have damaged it.

Did she pay with credit card? Often even debit cards offer chargeback although it is not a statutory right.

Yes she did but left it rather long for a section 75 because she was busy. Probably going to try that now.

They're already doing that, so you may as well exercise your rights (and help the environment at the same time).

Yes, they'll increase per-unit prices to do a longer warranty.

But that price increase will go into longer-lasting parts, because that costs a lot less than needing to replace every unit halfway through the warranty period.

And since the 20 year oven is a lot cheaper to build than two 10 year ovens, the per-year price to the consumer will go down.

I'm pretty sure that manufacturers have some room to include a 9-year reliability in the design of a +700€ oven. That's why consumer laws have differents warranties.

In my opinion, maybe 20 years at the very least

This is an interesting question; Netherlands has a similar law, and the general guidelines for stuff like ovens is, depending on the purchase price:

  ≤ € 199       2 years
  € 200 - 299   3 years
  € 300 - 399   4 years
  € 400 - 499   5 years
  € 500 - 599   6 years
  € 600 - 699   7 years
  ≥ € 700       8 years

Note these are just guidelines and not fixed rules.

On one hand this seems rather short to me, on the other hand, it's kind of a "you get what you pay for" affair. I don't really know what profit margins manufacturers have, but when I worked for a store profit margins for us really weren't all that big for us (and also didn't scale as much with price as many people assume).

Note that this doesn't mean you get 8 years of warranty on an expensive oven. Just that if it fails in 4 years you still can claim 50% of the purchase price.

This is not true. You have the right to a "deugdelijk product" (good product) for the entire expected lifespan of the product, and if it breaks in that, they do have to fix it (or provide a comparable replacement).

If, however, for whatever reason you don't want that, you can't demand all your money back, but only 50%. That's only if you agree to the money though, the seller can't unilaterally choose to give you 50% back instead of repairing it.

Note that this table comes from "Techniek Nederland", which is a business association of (among others) technical retailers. They've an interest in lowering the expected lifespan of appliances, as that means their members have less warranty to provide. They actually note (probably for legal reasons) along with their table that it contains average usage, not expected lifespan (i.e. how long people use things before they replace it, as opposed to how long you could use it before it breaks).

Courts will, and have in the past, throw this table out, if you make a reasonable argument why you could expect a longer lifespan.

It was linked from the ACM or consumentenbond, or some such consumer website. I don't have the tab open, but it wasn't just a random link from Google.

But yeah, it's just a guideline like I said. Some people here are throwing out numbers such as a "15 years" or "decades" with no qualifiers, and I'm not sure if that's reasonable for a €230 oven (cheapest in a quick check).

Aside on retailers: I haven't worked in a store in 15 years, but back then a lot of manufacturers just said "lol fuck you" when you tried to claim warranty above their stated warranty period. It was typically up to the retailers to bear the costs. One (of several) reason we left the consumer business: it's hard to compete as a small independent store for many different reasons, and this just made it that much harder. You can't spread out the costs, and you have almost no leverage against Asus or HP.

In short, at least back then the manufacturers could just keep shipping wank without really suffering too much damage to their bottom line, and the retailers with essentially no power to change anything were getting screwed. I don't know if that's changed, but probably not.

> It was linked from the ACM or consumentenbond, or some such consumer website. I don't have the tab open, but it wasn't just a random link from Google.

Yes, it gets often quoted, but things don't become true by being often repeated. It probably wasn't the Consumentenbond, as they actively call out the list from Techniek Nederland (previously Uneto-VNI) as being too short on their website.

[1] https://www.consumentenbond.nl/nieuws/2016/consumenten-hebbe...

An oven should last way longer than 2 years even if it's just 200 euro. These price/lifespan things are cow manure and made by trade associations and have no value in law.

200 euro also says nothing: 200 euro for a small tabletop oven is extremely expensive, for a large build-in one it's cheap. Considering as well it's usually a build in one, you can expect to not have to change it every two years.

> how long do you think an oven should last?

30 years :)

But I actually think it's fine that the warranty shorter than 9 years.

Even, if I agree that 2 years (as is common) is too short.

I would expect an oven to last for decades.

There is a requirement for providing spare parts for 7y [0]:

[0]: https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/en/shopping-internet/spa...

> Hilariously the retailer's parent company, has a blog post that gives explicit ranges for different appliances. Electric ovens should last 13 years according to them.

Is there any reason an oven shouldn't last at least that long?

Which is entirely irrelevant in Australia as the consumer law is based on expectations and the value of the item.

If I buy an expensive fridge and it fails in 5 years due to a faulty component, then that is up to the retailer and manufacturer to sort out between themselves as to who wears the cost of replacement or repair.

How do we know whether this was an expensive oven?

The article says it’s a midrange oven.

Considering an oven is essentially just a control panel, a fan or two, some sensors and a heating element, there's no reason why these shouldn't last for decades.

As long as no exotic or custom components are used they should be easy to find parts and repair too

...so they use "exotic" custom components.

Not that the controller board on a washing machine is particularly exotic; it's made from standard components. But each model of washing machine has it's own controller board, so the boards are low-volume, and ridiculously expensive. And the boards themselves are about as easy to repair as any modern PCB covered in SMDs.

I suspect the reason that white goods nowadays all have digital displays and digital control panels is that those "features" necessitate a proprietary controller board, which turns out (surprisingly! /s) to be the component most likely to fail.

Not to mention that washing machine PCBs have to function in an environment which is notoriously hazardous for electronics: very high humidity/moisture, and very high vibration. The last time I took a look at my washing machine's PCB while I was replacing the door seal, I noticed that it was potted in epoxy, which neatly resolves the durability issue which simultaneously making it impossible to repair. I don't blame them, diagnosing which component has failed on a circuit board which is constantly failing due to abuse and replacing it requires a much higher level of skill (and thus more expensive repairs) than just replacing the board wholesale.

From the article, the parent company themselves clearly say 13 years for ovens.

To quote from that article on the parent company's website:

    According to the American National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) - who
    helpfully released research called the Study of Life Expectancy of Home Components
    - the contemporary average lifespans are as follows:

    • Fridges - 13 years
    • Dishwashers - 9 years
    • Electric ovens - 13 years
    • Gas stoves - 15 years
    • Microwaves - 9 years
    • Dryers - 13 years

http://web.archive.org/web/20240318135242/https://www.winnin...

I went around and around in circles with the Electrolux call centre worker. "So you think an oven should only last for two years?"

To what end? Annoy the people who are responsible for your predicament. Don't take it out on call center workers.

> To what end?

The more time you spend with the call center, the more it costs the parent company. They don't like long calls.

If your call lasts long enough, it will get reviewed by a manager. Your class of complaint will end up on a tally.

Enough of these, and someone does something.

Exactly. Squeaky wheel gets the grease.

If it were my business, I wouldn't make shitty decisions and then force an army of phone operators to run my customers around so that no customer could ever have an effect on my company, while only offering up the customer service reps as any kind of interface with the company.

You want me not to bother the customer service reps? Give me a different way to interact with the company. But I'm not going to pity anyone who stays at that job (I did my time in customer service; I have the wherewithall to leave every emotion from one call with that caller). Reps should understand that the actual description of the job they are signing up for is "repeat talking points until the customer hangs up and weather their anger, until that point. if within your approved talking points - help with their problem".

As one continues to read the article, they'll see that the author "asked to be escalated to a manager who could actually make a decision". This option is more direct and you don't have to accost the call center worker.

Some advice to a co-founder, if you make customers waste their time going in circles with the help desk just to get their concerns reviewed, they'll take their business elsewhere.

Absolutely blows my mind how many people have fallen into the trap that is "SMART" devices and "POWER EFFICIENT" appliances. Only to find out just after the warranty runs out that they ultimately invested in a hawt piece of trash. There is no pride in manufactured goods anymore, imho there's not much pride in anything nowadays. Not surprising when a burger engineer at McDonald's makes more money than even an entry level machinist.

Oral B sell a variety of Electric toothbrushes, dependent on the built in Li ion battery.

Some of them hook up to a mobile phone by bluetooth to track how you brush. The thing is once the battery dies the £150 toothbrush is useless, it's' sealed so replacing the battery isn't trivial.

I think in the battery may last a fair bit longer now.

Electric tooth brushes are quite an improvement over a normal tooth brush.

Why repair something when the repair's cost more than this years model which boasts more privacy pirating features than the one you currently own? Manual brushing is so retro... just walk through the automated car wash with your mouth open and at the end make sure you smile.

There are tradeoffs both ways.

A user replaceable battery can extend the life, but it also introduces a way for water to get in and short it out, thereby drastically decreasing the lifespan. But given the overall power requirements for the device, ensuring that the battery is charged appropriately to extend the lifespan is pretty easy. My Philips is over 4 years old now and if I'm traveling for a week I may need to charge it once (never really tried to let it drain fully), and it gets used twice a day.

I recently had to replace the handle of my Oral B electric toothbrush with a built-in sealed battery. The battery got to the point where it couldn't hold a charge for at least two brushings without it noticeably having its power output diminished.

I bought that brush handle in 2009. 15 years of life, and if I didn't mind about the second brush charge I probably could have squeezed another year or two out of it.

> Absolutely blows my mind how many people have fallen into the trap that is "SMART" devices and "POWER EFFICIENT" appliances. Only to find out just after the warranty runs out that they ultimately invested in a hawt piece of trash

Those two/three things are entirely unrelated.

Power efficient appliances are a must in most countries not powered by low-carbon energy (so in the EU, that basically leaves everyone outside of France and the Nordics), and a good to have for those that are. Quality of those appliances is entirely unrelated to their power efficiency.

Smart appliances are on a spectrum. Some are useless, some are practical. Again, their quality is entirely unrelated to their smartness. Their smartness can be optional, non-blocking and using open protocols; or it can be mandatory, cloud-only so that when the cloud service gets retired to save money the appliance is useless. As an example, my LG washing machine/dryer combo can connect to my Wi-Fi network to be able to send me notifications when it's done, to load custom programmes, to remind me I need to do a wash cycle of the machine itself. Those are useful features, entirely optional, and the machine won't stop working if it can't connect to the Wi-Fi.

Quality has much to do with efficiency. Try driving on bent wheels and let me know how efficient that is. My washing machine tells me its done by making a chime same as my oven... no internet needed.

You're not wrong but misguided.

Consumers voted for this a long time ago, people want cheap s*t. There are manufacturers that do take pride and their products can last a lifetime if not easily repairable. Guess what, nobody actually wants it. (except the HN crowd aparently).

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