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O Holy Crap

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Re: O Holy Crap

#131

Post by bumby »

mathattack wrote: post #124
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…

Quality manufacturing in the Good Ole Days is a myth. The Japanese are our lunch in auto in the 70s due to a lack of Quality. Planned obsolescence is a thing. So is building or making for the short term. There just wasn’t this great era where people made things for the long haul out of pride or something else. People always took the short term view when the market structure or incentives encouraged it.

>when the market structure or incentives encouraged it.

I think one argument is exactly this. There has been a march towards a market that expects a constant supply of cheap shit. When all the margins have been wrung out of globalization, reduction in quality provides the next mechanism of lowering price.

People know where to find $150 denim that lasts, just like in times past. But there has been change in expectations that makes $25 denim the norm.

Re: O Holy Crap

#132

Post by HeXetic »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #100
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…

In contrast the $120 freezers in my garage have given improbably years of service without a single issue. New from big box store; reviews warned of possible failure and loss of content. But mine must be the good ones. Somebody has to get the good one I guess.

Chest freezers cannot be compared to household kitchen refrigerator-freezer combinations. There's way, way, way less complexity.

* No need to split & balance the refrigeration between fridge & freezer

* No expectation of a defrost cycle on the freezer

* Generally less stuff: no water or ice dispenser, less lights, less fancy bins & trays & veg drawers etc.

* Chest freezers get opened less, and the top-opening lid lets less cold out when they are opened, and without the defrost cycle the compressor just doesn't have to work as hard.

* Usually greater consumer tolerance for these items being large/heavy machinery so the designers don't even have to worry too hard about keeping things compact.

Re: O Holy Crap

#133

Post by bumby »

eternityforest wrote: post #67
jtbayly wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 findi…

>I would gladly use 10k lines of code to save one moving part or one switch

This creates a whole new reliability problem. Software reliability is notorious for its interface failures and there can be many more of those modes (where hardware typically has a few wear-out style failures). I think about my relatively high-end TV that seems to always struggle with software updates without any glitches. It seems like we've just been lulled into accepting software glitches as the price of having software control everything. Luckily, most of the software is not safety critical.

I think this is one of the dangers of relying on software to close reliability gaps. Yes, you can change it quickly and cheaply and it's versatile, but it's often very hard to identify all the failure modes.

Re: O Holy Crap

#134

Post by oblio »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #95

Carrot peeler? What nonsense. Back of a knife does a fine job. Still, lots of crappy 'appliances' out there. If the labels aren't peeling or fading, then the knobs come off or there's too many parts to keep track of, and one falls behind something and, well, throw it away now. Our fancy dishwasher had a soap flappy thing in the door. Convenient location! Fill and fold shut and... the manufacturer didn't think beyond…

> Carrot peeler? What nonsense. Back of a knife does a fine job.

It does, but it's both slower and less safe than one of these things, if you know how to use it right:

https://www.ikea.com/nl/en/p/ikea-365-vaerdefull-potato-peel...

Personally I'd recommend that style over the "default" peelers that look like this one:

https://www.ikea.com/nl/en/p/ikea-365-vaerdefull-peeler-blac...

The vertical one is much faster.

Re: O Holy Crap

#135

Post by crystaln »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #100
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…

In contrast the $120 freezers in my garage have given improbably years of service without a single issue. New from big box store; reviews warned of possible failure and loss of content. But mine must be the good ones. Somebody has to get the good one I guess.

If years of service is the expectation for a refrigerator, then something is wrong.

Refrigerator life should be measured in decades.

Re: O Holy Crap

#136

Post by willglynn »

blueblob wrote: post #114
nosianu wrote: post #82

I don't quite know what to say to what I found near the end in this article: > Recently, my wife needed a carrot peeler. She needed one rather quickly. Off to Target. The one she bought (the only one on sale)... I stopped at the phrase "the only one on sale". Inevitably the next part reads: > looked handsome enough, and the brand was one she recognized, but it failed in the useful department, miserably. It wasn’t sha…

They also complained about pyrex not being durable because they dropped it. My pyrex has lasted 2 decades of use and I think it's an example of a durable product.

Corning invented a particular kind of borosilicate glass about a hundred years ago and called it PYREX™. They left the consumer goods market about twenty years ago, divesting the brand. Nowadays that name might refer to either borosilicate glass or to soda lime glass.

Re: O Holy Crap

#137

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: O Holy Crap

#138

Post by crystaln »

blueblob wrote: post #114
nosianu wrote: post #82

I don't quite know what to say to what I found near the end in this article: > Recently, my wife needed a carrot peeler. She needed one rather quickly. Off to Target. The one she bought (the only one on sale)... I stopped at the phrase "the only one on sale". Inevitably the next part reads: > looked handsome enough, and the brand was one she recognized, but it failed in the useful department, miserably. It wasn’t sha…

They also complained about pyrex not being durable because they dropped it. My pyrex has lasted 2 decades of use and I think it's an example of a durable product.

Pyrex replace borosilicate with cheaper and far less temperature resilient soda lime glass decades ago.

Re: O Holy Crap

#139

Post by crystaln »

willglynn wrote: post #136
blueblob wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also complained about pyrex not being durable because they dropped it. My pyrex has lasted 2 decades of use and I think it's an example of a durable product.

Corning invented a particular kind of borosilicate glass about a hundred years ago and called it PYREX™. They left the consumer goods market about twenty years ago, divesting the brand. Nowadays that name might refer to either borosilicate glass or to soda lime glass.

Depending on the capitalization.

The good stuff is PYREX.

Re: O Holy Crap

#140

Post by 83 »

jtbayly wrote: post #5
tarr11 wrote: post #2

[flagged]

Where, pray tell, is one supposed to shop in order to find real products that will last? And I’ll go further. Is there a single brand you can recommend that will last, regardless of where I’m supposed to purchase it?

https://hamiltonbeachcommercial.com/

I've been quite impressed with the few of their commercial items I have. The important parts are metal, and clearly a lot of though went into design (things like the blender jar being designed so there's nowhere for water to pool after you wash and set it upside down). The only unimpressive thing is the price.

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