Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In store shopping seems to be a great way to pay more for worse stuff these days.
O Holy Crap
151–160 of 323 posts
Re: O Holy Crap
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> What's Undetermined
> Whether Pyrex switched from using borosilicate glass to tempered soda lime glass only after Corning sold the brand to World Kitchen in 1998.
…
> In a January 2011 article on glass bakeware, Consumer Reports stated that they were unable to determine exactly when major U.S. manufacturers (including Pyrex) switched
Re: O Holy Crap
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I've run into this issue with jeans. They develop holes around the crotch six months after buying a new pair. A decade ago I'd buy jeans and they'd last years. Unfortunately my waist line has since increased and none of those survivors now fit me. I started with Levi 511s and -- when they started failing -- moved to Nudie Jeans (2x price) as they offer free repairs. When I tried to get them repaired though I was told…
Re: O Holy Crap
#154I just don't see it. My pens and my matchsticks work fine. My gloves are still gloves five winters later. Potato peeler, peels potatoes. I think the author doesn't understand that there's a tier of disposable goods for just about everything and if you don't shop wisely you'll take some of it home. Appliances for example: don't buy them from web pages and don't listen to Wirecutter. This is just letting marketers tell…
> there's a tier of disposable goods There are some product categories for which no strong options exist. For example, contemporary, top-of-the-line Kitchen Aid mixers have intermittently been produced with plastic motor parts. Go look at the reviews for sewing machines. Klein tools, which have historically been super high quality, made in USA, has started mixing in cheaper made in china products. Chippewa boots (War…
Re: O Holy Crap
#155Be 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…
Our 5000 euro door, made by local craftsmen with high quality materials, had an installation mistake that ruins ergonomics and compromises the airtightness. I even went for a non-sliding door in the expectation that it would be more reliable. Maybe the sliding door would have been entirely non-functional by now.
My ~400 euro yamaha reface mini-synth has internal speakers that buzz. It's a known problem affecting every one ever made AFAIK.
I'd guess only maybe 1/3 of the top dollar expensive stuff I have bought has been free of glaring defects, despite researching before buying.
Re: O Holy Crap
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Though my LED lights do last a lot longer and cost way less to operate overall, so that is nice.
I’ve been singularly unimpressed with the rate my LED bulbs are failing. Definitely not even close to 10-15 years I was promised. And this is why warranties are pointless. How am I supposed to get one of these bulbs from a four-pack replaced by the manufacturer two years after I bought it?
Re: O Holy Crap
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I've run into this issue with jeans. They develop holes around the crotch six months after buying a new pair. A decade ago I'd buy jeans and they'd last years. Unfortunately my waist line has since increased and none of those survivors now fit me. I started with Levi 511s and -- when they started failing -- moved to Nudie Jeans (2x price) as they offer free repairs. When I tried to get them repaired though I was told…
Re: O Holy Crap
#158Be 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…
The key is that there are 2 completely different things going on and I think it's very bad that we keep conflating the 2:
* Bad quality crap, which took shortcuts which impair repairability for no reason other than to save a cent, make it impossible to find replacement parts because it's a fly by night operation that didn't think about it in the slightest, and which in general is going to break down on you within the year.
* Devices which are hard to repair.
That second category contains a lot of reasons ('save half a cent on a screw' is one of them, as is 'planned obsolescence' / 'make sure our pricey resellers get plenty of work'), but some of those reason are GOOD - such as 'it is a heck of a lot easier to make a robust product if we don't make the battery swappable (e.g., iPhone, which got plenty of flak for this)'.
For the first, the only 'good' reason to do that, is to ensure some product is available even to those who have _very_ little to spend, but, [A] environmentally this isn't a good idea, and [B] how 'available' is it when the only category you can buy is dinky crap that doesn't work well and breaks down within 6 months?
So how do we get rid of _that_?
Right-to-repair laws are barking up an entirely different tree, e.g. fighting the kind of bullshit where a farm tractor manufacturer intentionally makes it impossible to work on computer-guided stuff basically just to be dicks and get more money from their official repair/reseller program. And to a lesser extent, acts where a manufacturer makes a device significantly harder to repair with as only goal to save a cent or two on an errant screw, or cheaper glue or whatever.
Re: O Holy Crap
#159Be 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.
Re: O Holy Crap
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'v…
For non safety critical stuff it's much better to crash every week than to wear out in 5 years.