O Holy Crap • Hacker News Board

Re: O Holy Crap

#61

Post by cfeduke » Thu, Dec 22, 2022, 2:05 PM UTC

wincy wrote: post #7

My $4000 GE refrigerator has broken twice now in the five years we have owned it, both times in the exact same way. The way the fridge works seems simple: the cold freezer is on the bottom, and then a fan blows air up through a shaft to the relatively warmer refrigerator as needed to keep it just above freezing. Instead, the failure state is that the fan that handles this broke with no warning. I lost a bunch of groc…

I have the original refrigerator the previous owners installed when we purchased the house. It's from the 1990s. It is sometimes loud, but I am afraid to replace it. I am sometimes awed by the new, sleek fridges in the home improvement store but then Admiral Ackbar's voice rings in my head and gives me a +8 to my Will save. So far so good.

Every 2-4 years I replace the dishwasher, dryer, and washing machine. The first replacement dishwasher caught on fire; we are on dishwasher #4. The current washing machine has a leak, the water sensor* which somehow functions after being there for over four years (four!) notifies me reliably.

* Samsung has discontinued the water sensor

Re: O Holy Crap

#62

Post by groovybits » Thu, Dec 22, 2022, 2:05 PM UTC

cfeduke wrote: post #42

The thing in this space that has always bothered me was the simple can opener. (For those not in the US, yes, in the US we still need can openers.) The new ones which can be purchased in the grocery store break within a month or two. I don't even want to think about modern electric openers. I found a used vintage can opener from the 1970s on eBay six years ago and use it practically every day; as it was used it cost…

Spot on. Even at the 'nicer' grocery stores in the US, can openers are made of the cheapest materials I've ever seen. At the moment you pick it up, you just know its going to break before a year from now.

By now, you'd think we'd have reached a minimum viable quantity of products that have been ubiquitous for so long.

Re: O Holy Crap

#63

Post by S_A_P » Thu, Dec 22, 2022, 2:06 PM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #36

yetihehe wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Metal, vs plastic gears. Sintered metal gears, last only a little longer than plastic and then fail catastrophically destroying half of the device so that you can't repair it. But at least they are much cheaper than proper machined gears.

My KitchenAid mixer ate a gear many years ago. They would lead you to believe they are a high quality brand, no? After disassembly, it turned out to be perhaps the only plastic gear in the thing. It occurred to me that it was perhaps designed to fail rather than the mixer continuing to break the bones of the person who got their hand caught in the paddle. So, I throw the engineer a bone for that one. I was bummed tho…

The real crime is that there are only like 5 appliance parts companies that stock parts and they each seem to look at the other companies for what to stock. Meaning, if someone else has it they won’t. But what ever they do stock ends up selling for 500% or more of the wholesale price.

Re: O Holy Crap

#64

Post by derbOac » Thu, Dec 22, 2022, 2:06 PM UTC

vages wrote: post #4

Be aware that survivorship bias may fool you when comparing the quality of new and old items. The single juicer that lasts 70 years may be the only one of its kind to last that long, the others from the same production year being left to rot and rust in a landfill. That being said, I definitely believe that planned obsolesence and unintentional bad quality is a plague on modern consumer items. I am lucky enough to ha…

I used to think if you looked hard enough and researched things, maybe paid more sometimes, you could get around it. I still think that is necessary, but not sufficient. It won't save you; you also need a bit of luck.

My biggest bugaboo in this area is with clothes. At some point I started being more careful, but found the published specs won't help because they don't actually tell you everything you need to know, or the company selling them is being defrauded themselves by manufacturers making things out of spec. In many cases too I'm convinced people have lost communal knowledge of what good items look like because theyve never seen them. So, say, they're happy with a sweater that is made out of very poor yarn that obviously won't last because it's warm and has a good zipper. We're at 2/3 now I guess.

However, even places like Consumer Reports will say they don't recommend an entire class of appliance, but then proceed to provide ratings, that are ostensibly good. How are those supposed to be interpreted? "None of these are worth buying but they are 95/100 in quality if you take that into account"? No wonder people are confused.

I've bought clothes from reputable vendors, with fabric from named mills to specs that should be quality, and found instead the cut was off spec and wouldn't fit. Or something about the fabric just didn't last anyway. It seems like it's always something, like I'm constantly being tricked in some new way once I figure out some other problem. It's such an enormous waste of money, time, and resources.

Re: O Holy Crap

#65

Post by nonameiguess » Thu, Dec 22, 2022, 2:07 PM UTC

teekert wrote: post #17

I have Philips vacuum cleaner, I guess it's 30 years old. Some ducttape on the hose but still going strong. I bought a cordless one 2 years ago (also Philips, 8000 series), really love it, but it's starting to fail. I go back to the shop and the thing just works like normal, come back home... brush and leds fails periodically. So annoying. I also own a lot of supossed 25.000 hours-of-life Leds, that failed after 1-2…

I had this issue in my house that was built six years ago. Lights going out all over the place that are supposed to have really long lives. When I finally replaced a few of them, it didn't seem to be the lights. The lazy ass subcontractors hired by the worthless builder installed a bunch of the wiring incorrectly. Every light I have replaced so far wasn't even grounded. Ground wire just flapping in the wind.

Re: O Holy Crap

#66

Post by blueblob » Thu, Dec 22, 2022, 2:08 PM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #36

yetihehe wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Metal, vs plastic gears. Sintered metal gears, last only a little longer than plastic and then fail catastrophically destroying half of the device so that you can't repair it. But at least they are much cheaper than proper machined gears.

My KitchenAid mixer ate a gear many years ago. They would lead you to believe they are a high quality brand, no? After disassembly, it turned out to be perhaps the only plastic gear in the thing. It occurred to me that it was perhaps designed to fail rather than the mixer continuing to break the bones of the person who got their hand caught in the paddle. So, I throw the engineer a bone for that one. I was bummed tho…

I had the same gear fail. It's called a worm gear and is, indeed, intended to fail before damaging the other gears. They're much cheaper if you buy a non-oem part. I bought one from amazon for ~10 USD.

Re: O Holy Crap

#67

Post by eternityforest » Thu, Dec 22, 2022, 2:08 PM UTC

jtbayly wrote: post #11

vages wrote: post #4

Be aware that survivorship bias may fool you when comparing the quality of new and old items. The single juicer that lasts 70 years may be the only one of its kind to last that long, the others from the same production year being left to rot and rust in a landfill. That being said, I definitely believe that planned obsolesence and unintentional bad quality is a plague on modern consumer items. I am lucky enough to ha…

Metal, vs plastic gears. Bigger vs tiny electric motor. Metal vs plastic moving parts in contact with the fruit. Plug-in vs battery powered. These are the things that I would place money on as the reasons the 70 year old one is still functioning, and none sold today will work in 5 years. (I’ve never looked at one of these items. I’m just guessing. But I’d still place money on it.)

Reliability now isn't done with the same methods as it was then.

Back then, the good stuff might have been good because the motor was big.

The modern good stuff probably has a brushless motor that can prevent stalls. It doesn't matter if it's big or small, the computer won't let it overheat, so they can make it smaller to save money that they can spend on whatever part is the actual failure mode.

The trouble is finding manufacturers that actually do that, rather than just using a tiny motor with no computer and plastic gears with no torque sensing. If you design things with old fashioned methods, you need to use old fashioned heavy parts.

Nylon gears in contact with ozone, and switches and connectors of all kinds seem to be the problem on everything I've seen. Which is why I always say I would gladly use 10k lines of code to save one moving part or one switch.

Re: O Holy Crap

#68

Post by Jupe » Thu, Dec 22, 2022, 2:08 PM UTC

BlueTemplar wrote: post #35

robinsonb5 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difficulty is that the abundance of cheap crap often makes finding the good stuff like finding a needle in a haystack. Yes, price is the first indicator, but there are plenty of chancers who are quite happy to sell the cheap crap at the premium price point.

I am surprised that nobody pointed out the obvious : avoid items with the minimum legal manufacturer warranty. Though this too can become hard in categories dominated by cartels : warranties for (magnetic) hard drives have been going down (not to mention the recent frauds by Western Digital, how they have fallen, sigh...), or, for (non-related) reasons, boycotting Intel and Ryzen CPUs (or Android an iOS smartphones)…

Unless the company goes out of business, or as may happen more often today, just dissolve the company and re-brand/re-incorporate.

Re: O Holy Crap

#69

Post by masto » Thu, Dec 22, 2022, 2:09 PM UTC

When we got our house 7 years ago, we replaced a bunch of appliances with brand new, modern ones.

Fancy French-door Refrigerator: still going strong. I tightened the screw on the freezer handle a couple of times.

Cheap fridge in the basement: still going strong, no repairs

Washer and dryer: still going strong, no repairs

Dishwasher: still going strong. I replaced a dish rack when one of the tines broke.

Anecdata, it's fun and useless!

Re: O Holy Crap

#70

Post by winReInstall » Thu, Dec 22, 2022, 2:09 PM UTC

Would suspcription based applicances be better? Softwar supscription definitely did lead to a quality decline in software, as there is always a channel to fix even the sloppiest of implementations.