Microwave Oven Failure: Spontaneously turned on by its LED display (2024)
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Microwave Oven Failure: Spontaneously turned on by its LED display (2024)
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Re: Microwave Oven Failure: Spontaneously turned on by its LED display (2024)
#2168 points and 116 comments at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41480038
Re: Microwave Oven Failure: Spontaneously turned on by its LED display (2024)
#3Very impressive engineering on the door switches. On the display, not so much.
Re: Microwave Oven Failure: Spontaneously turned on by its LED display (2024)
#4This is literally evidence of stuff being designed to fail. An extra diode costs less than a cent at production scale. This was a manufacturing choice, not an error.
Re: Microwave Oven Failure: Spontaneously turned on by its LED display (2024)
#5This is literally evidence of stuff being designed to fail. An extra diode costs less than a cent at production scale. This was a manufacturing choice, not an error.
Don't underestimate the appeal of saving one cent per unit. So long as the costs are externalised, anyway...
Re: Microwave Oven Failure: Spontaneously turned on by its LED display (2024)
#6This is literally evidence of stuff being designed to fail. An extra diode costs less than a cent at production scale. This was a manufacturing choice, not an error.
It’s not exactly designed to fail, they just don’t care. If they could add a one-cent part that made it fail sooner, they wouldn’t do that either.
Re: Microwave Oven Failure: Spontaneously turned on by its LED display (2024)
#7This is literally evidence of stuff being designed to fail. An extra diode costs less than a cent at production scale. This was a manufacturing choice, not an error.
Capitalist profit motive strikes again. The invisible hand expands tech and the visible hand keeps making tech worse.
People usually respond to this by saying that it would be absurd to suggest the company did this for its own benefit, when anyone who engineers knows these are often caused by revising design to minimize costs... and increase profits.
Re: Microwave Oven Failure: Spontaneously turned on by its LED display (2024)
#8This is literally evidence of stuff being designed to fail. An extra diode costs less than a cent at production scale. This was a manufacturing choice, not an error.
Eh, I don't agree.
LEDs are diodes (Light emitting diode). Certainly this was a cost saving measure, but it's not a bad assumption that the LED wouldn't allow reverse current flow.
Re: Microwave Oven Failure: Spontaneously turned on by its LED display (2024)
#9More proof blue LEDs are the devil and should have never been put into all of our electronics to be the shining beacon of "OW MY EYES" at 2 AM.
Re: Microwave Oven Failure: Spontaneously turned on by its LED display (2024)
#10You can do an awful lot to make a device like a microwave safe with loads of failsafes...
But rarely do those failsafes protect reliably against 'the mainboard was splashed with salt water'.
Even with triple redundant relays, how do you know the salt water didn't just wet them all?