Expensive fridges are dying, leading to fraud claims

Our 20 year old fridge gave up the ghost. First thing I did was get a month of Consumer Reports and read through their Fridge section. Something I noticed, same with Vacuums ... there is no clear winner. They gave top scores to LG fridges people vehemently disliked in the comments. Almost everything got low scores in owner satisfaction. Their #2 pick had an owner satisfaction of 1/5!

We decided to get a $700 Whirlpool, but that started making weird noises almost immediately (like a bad fan bearing).

I have tried recording the sounds from my phone but its too difficult. Does anyone recommend a consumer-level vibration-analysis product? Something you could stick to your fridge, etc, for days, weeks, and it detects and records outlier noises, etc?

We're currently living through a race to the bottom in everything: technology (degradation of platforms like Google and FaceBook — Google has become practically unusable; proliferation of bots, SEO junk, AI junk; also the degradation and over-complication of hardware, e.g. these fridges: overly-complicated smart appliances that don't last long; "they don't build things like they used to"), society (social media, polarization, siloing, echo chambers), politics (Trump, fake news, the death of a well-educated electorate), media (the death of editorial and journalistic responsibility, the death of the institution of the brick-and-mortar press), products and markets (all of the utterly cheap and crappy products on Amazon), the environment (pollution, climate change, mass extinction)... I could probably go on and on. We're about to lose our ability to know what is true and what is real as AI becomes more powerful. The race to the bottom is happening everywhere, all at once. Which means there's a set of root causes behind all of these seemingly-disparate effects: globalization + erosion of barriers to entry in all industries + externalization of costs + technological amplification of capabilities + Moloch + tragedy of the commons + Lord of the Flies (i.e. no adults in the room, no one to step in and stop us from destroying ourselves) + who knows how many other factors.

There are a lot of brands but only a few actual manufacturers for large appliances, so yeah, they don't typically vary a whole lot in terms of what's inside them. high-end, expensive kit isn't necessarily much better. A Sub-Zero, for instance, can be a maintenance nightmare.

We just replaced a 30-year-old GE with a Whirlpool, so far so good, but we don't expect another 30 years out of it.

> Also, without being an engineer or technician, it did always seem to me that fridges were like cars in that you had "luxury" models that were standard frames with fancy (often less-than-useful) features, and then actual luxury with brand names most people had never heard of, which had normal features implemented to a high standard and with excellent support.

As a consumer, would there be a way to tell the difference between the two when buying?

Are there any residential refrigerators that offer that?

Seems that'd mainly be desirable in uncomfortably warm climates. In cooler spots, a refrigerator's waste heat may be a welcome addition to indoor heating.