211–220 of 323 posts
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…
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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…
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…
My biggest recommendation is buy 100% cotton and avoid synthetic blends at all costs. Some of that crap looks old after a single wash.
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You get screwed either way. Buy something on amazon and it's quite likely to be just as bad, counterfeit, etc. - how many times have people complained about that?
It happens, but it's not common. Amazon lets you get stuff a generation ahead of what's in stores, which often uses better tech and fixes issues in the last generation. When "Cheap crap" first became common 20 years ago stuff got a bit worse, but it seems to be improving.
As a final thought, I'd say at least in a store, if you have the ability to determine if something is junk by looking and touching it, you can practice that.
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…
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> 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…
True embedded software is a lot different. Smart TVs are desktop or phone class computers, and even then, the glitches are usually "A power cycle fixes it" or "One feature that wouldn't exist at all without software stops working" type of thing. For non safety critical stuff it's much better to crash every week than to wear out in 5 years.
Maybe I'm becoming a curmudgeon or maybe it's my bias as a former reliability engineer, but the fact that we've normalized this drives me crazy. Imagine your frustration if your car needed to be "power cycled" on a regular basis just to keep it moving forward, yet we've become accustomed to that in our day-to-day interactions with electronics.
It's the bane of my existence that I have to continuously power cycle a device to do something seemingly simply like change a tv streaming service or scan a document. Interface failures are rampant.
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…
The EU will just give fines and nobody will care. Regulation is not the best path here.
> Many blamed these problems on the government. They believed it had crippled certain products (major home appliances, especially) This is a claim that was already present in Death of a Salesman . Here's the quote: > I am always in a race with the junkyard! I just finished paying for the car and it's on its last legs. The refrigerator consumes belts like a goddam maniac. They time those things. They time them so when…
Check out the history of light bulbs, an actual amazing conspiracy few people know about :)
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> 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. Oh yeah. Like Surefeed smart cat feeders. They don't use end reed or contact switches to control the lid motor - they use current sensing on the motor and stop it when the…
One of my general rules is not to buy anything that uses disposable batteries, unless battery life is measured in years. Not only does NiMh always seem to be a hassle, it usually seems like rechargable-based devices are more up to date in general. They probably wouldn't even need a reed switch, just a wad of foam for some buffering plus a more sensitive stop algorithm. Or better yet, don't give the motor enough curre…
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Check out the history of light bulbs, an actual amazing conspiracy few people know about :)
Might be worth mentioning the name of the conspiracy: the Phoebus Cartel. It sounds cartoonishly evil, but "cartel" is just an economic term for a market where a small number of participants collude to control supply and pricing. Like OPEC. https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-l-e-d-quanda... IMHO, we should be more aggressive about converting industries which gravitate towards cartels into regulated natur…