FTA: "Voyagers 1 and 2 have been flying for more than 47 years..."
That should be written on a poster that is put on each desk of each employee of each car/washing machine/fridge/television manufacturer.
That should be written on a poster that is put on each desk of each employee of each car/washing machine/fridge/television manufacturer.
"The $3.57 you save on capacitors per unit will cost you $50 in lost good will."
On the other hand there is a balance between longevity through simplified maintenance and replacing aged appliances with newer and significantly more efficient models.
Given the economics, I wonder if best buy could pay customers $10 for a survey of their old products, knowing that it'll inspire upgrades etc.
its shocking how amazon went from 'me getting a package every week' to 'i go there only if i have too'
Even in areas where they have brand name products, it's often impossible to surface them through their search. (I've, many times, failed to find something there and then went and searched Google/etc and the top result has been... an Amazon link to exactly what I'm looking for.) And if you purchase through Amazon, there's no reason to believe it's not gray market or something else where you may end up having issues with support/warranty if you ever need.
And combined with the inventory commingling, even if you find brand name products there you can't be sure you'll actually receive it and not a knock-off. So it really only makes sense to order things that are already the cheap/knock-off quality anyway.
So... yeah, there was a nice period of time there where Amazon was just "shopping made more convenient". These days it's "Aliexpress made more convenient". Unless I'm setting out to buy cheaply made Chinese imports with no warranty, I'm not even go to start looking on Amazon. There's little reason to.
Over the volume of say Amazon, The noisiness of varied intent will normalize itself out across a sector.
They could surface this as a reliability metric on some kind of relative scale.
They could...
Guess what theyre gonna do?
Isn’t the company going to make more sales in the future (and hence more profit)? And isn’t replacing stuff with new versions going to lead to improvements in people’s lives through more efficient, quieter, and more effective technology?
So, yes, replacing stuff with new versions will bring more and more sales as opposed to building something that will last. Hence "planned obsolescence" and the war on making things repairable that we've seen lately. Great for business, bad for the customer.
Modern electronics certainly can be made with much higher reliability than their mid-century ancestors, but the driving factor that prevents this is aggressive cost cutting that happily shaves pennies off COGS to shift the statistical distribution to the left. Unless consumers are willing to pay more for long-lived devices, this is doomed to continue.
Yet people understand it with cars. Maybe because it’s moving?
I've got a relative's dryer right now that's acting up. Do I really want to do the work of calling around to a bunch of repair guys to find out which one won't charge me a fee to come out and say "it's going to cost more to fix than to buy a new one, and we can have the new one installed and delivered tomorrow" ? I've heard this trash spiel so many times at this point I don't even care to try engaging, despite not even having to pay for it myself.
No, I'll spend the 20 minutes taking a few screws off and looking at the thing. Then order parts. Then next week, an hour or two to replace the part. Then it will likely be sorted for the next decade, but if it does break again it will continue to be repairable rather than effectively a consumable.
Only if you don't overdo it. When your products break too quickly many customers will stay one-time customers and switch to products from the competition. There's also the reputation damage to consider.
And of course it works best if you have a fairly high market share. If you have a low market share most products on the market are from your competitors, so you can you are better off boosting your reputation with longer-lasting products (compared to other products at the same price point).
Come to think of it, the "break it faster to sell more" strategy works mostly in monopolies, duopolies or with market collusion (like the Phoebus cartel that lowered the lifespan of light bulbs)
It is the behavior of the buyers that drives costs down. People are extremely cost sensitive in the mid to low segments, shifting their purchase decisions from one product to another just because of less than $1 price difference. Some companies cannot survive at all without saving those $3.57.
Unlike Voyagers 1 and 2
Are we still expecting to make significant efficiency improvements for appliances in the next 30 years? Will it be enough to justify the production of a new appliance?
Legal warranty for appliances like washers, dryers, refrigerators among others should probably be raised to at least 5 years.
An LG dishwasher with a similar 10 year warranty on the pumps and what not in the dishwasher. Awesome, great. The display panel has failing LEDs. Is that under that warranty? Nope. Who cares about the pump not technically failing if one can't know what mode the dishwasher is in?
If they're going to stick a sticker on the face advertising their warranty on an appliance it should cover the whole appliance. Not just a small handful of parts that should practically never fail under regular use while all the surrounding stuff has a nearly useless warranty.
I'm so salty about warranties and support these days I usually try and do every possible thing I can do to fix the problem myself before obviously voiding a warranty before I ever bother calling their support. So worthless most of the time.
Uh oh, a moral judgement from a peasant? Say it aint so. Anything but that. I'm literally shaking right now.
Anyway, here are some actual incentives:
- If you do some shady corner-cutting, you'll be legally compelled to trade in your Bugatti and drive a used Kia the rest of your life
- If this chemical causes bodily harm to me, we shall inflict bodily harm on thee
- A portion of the profits will be placed in a trust and will be passed down to your children, if and only if your product lasts long enough to be passed down to our children
- If you (banker) lose our money, you will lose your head
No. They encourage new businesses to start without compromising on the fundamental stuff.
Or it might cost you $0 in lost good will, and will gain you $5 in sales because many price-sensitive people will buy the thing that's cheapest, without doing an omniscient analysis of its quality.
Not to mention that gold-plating your capacitors won't do you much good if some other part is expected to fail first.
I do get the value of iterating quickly towards a solution but that does not invalidate the conservative engineering approach other people have to take to build something much more stable/reliable where they have to be very cautious and can't just break things until you have a solution.
“In order to reduce costs and overheads, NASA decided to leave design and construction of the Mariner Jupiter-Saturn spacecraft to JPL, rather than to Boeing, General Electric, Hughes, Martin Marietta, and North American Rockwell, all of which had some level of preparation for a Grand Tour proposal. The largest aerospace firms lobbied NASA Headquarters and Congress for the contracts. In order for expensive projects to pass congressional scrutiny as part of the NASA budget, they often had to include an intention to contract out much of the work” voyager - Andrew J. Butrica
I think they also did build a test spacecraft ?
Anyways the approach (smaller focused team) contrasts with the big SLS type projects that are contracted out for political reasons.
The thing with consumer products is not evil, they are made to consumer expectations. Would you buy a $10k washing machine? Probably not, even if is designed to outlast you. Of course you also won't buy a washing machine that lasts a week, no matter how cheap it is. Manufacturers did studies and noticed that there is a sweet spot at around 10 years or so of lifetime for typical household usage. More than that and it become too expensive and people might want to change anyways to benefit from new technologies or some other reasons.
Once the "ideal" lifetime have been established, you are going to have parts that last the expected 10 years, others that last less, and other that last more, possibly forever. The parts that break too early need to be addressed as it may cause expensive warranty returns and a loss in reputation. But the parts that last forever also need to be addressed. Let's say the water pump is over-specified, sure it is great, it will never fail, etc... but all that doesn't matter because the machine will be trashed because of some other failure. So why would the manufacturer and ultimately the customer pay extra for that pump they have no need for. Instead, a cheaper should be used. The ideal consumer product is one where every part breaks down at the end of the expected life of the product, but not before, any more than that is a waste of money.
That's thanks to that value engineering that we all can afford cars, washing machines fridges and televisions, with cash to spare. These are not luxuries for the elite anymore. They are not made like they used to, but we don't pay them like we used to either.
The "secret" solution is it was one of the last years made in Japan, not China.
I just move it from apartment to apartment over the years while everything else breaks.
* Environmental regulations require additional or more complicated systems - which adds points of failure (IE: Variable-speed motor controllers, Exhaust Gas Recycling, etc). They also require other changes - like using lightweight plastics where metals would have been used previously. Plastic fan blades crack, metal ones don't.
* Consumers, on the whole, only care about price and features. Those are tangible. Some people care about things like maintainability and longevity - but they make up a tiny, insignificant fraction of consumers. Thus, companies optimize for price - even if it comes at the cost of longevity. Any company that doesn't quickly loses market share to global competition from dozens of others that are more than willing to make that sacrifice and offer a better deal.
Those two factors explain everything about why modern appliances fail the way they do.
https://theconversation.com/explainer-how-hostile-is-space-2...
Now, how do you get the people buying these things to buy the better engineered one when the one sitting right next to it is $200 cheaper?
People don't buy quality: people buy cheap!
I went to look up my purchase but not only is that listing gone, the brand no longer exists.
Problem is... they're expensive. Real pricey. This kinda industrial-tier consumer stuff does exist, but very few people bother buying it.
As always, ask or imitate an expert with aligned incentives. A seasoned local auto shop owner guided me towards Acura after two of my fancy German cars needed multiple expensive repairs. He doesn’t service Honda group vehicles, but drives an Acura himself and I couldn’t be happier after listening to his advice.
And consumer. Very few people would use 50 year old devices even if they were/are perfectly functional.
Their costs really did increase all the time. Not needlessly, despite what some people thought: their cost per spare part really did grow quite a lot, as the number needed per year decreased and the fixed overhead slowly increased.
Keeping it alive is a remarkable feat, but costing taxpayers eye watering sums of money, due to the ever increasing shortage of skills, while a modern cloud alternative is developed. Be careful what you wish for.