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> Thing is, producing crappy, cookie-cutter, uninspired, overpriced junk that falls apart within 5 years (generously speaking) pays more to the shareholders. That's how we got from there to here. This summarizes it quite well for me.
A lot of those features are available in today's fridges. Also, they use less power today. And you really don't have to get one with wifi and a touchscreen.
I would hazard a guess and say this was probably expensive by today's standards.
$350 in 1950 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $4,431.04 today.
My last Samsung fridge freezer was £250 and had a 10 year warranty. Was plenty big enough and did everything I wanted it to (keep food cold and fresh).
This idea that 50s devices lasted decades seems odd to someone that grew up in the 70/80s, and everyone seemed to have new devices then (or 10 year old at best). But hey if I spend $4k on a device you bet I'll be fixing it if it breaks!
The complete version is "Capitalism breeds innovation for getting consumers' money out of their hands".
A lot of those features are available in today's fridges. Also, they use less power today. And you really don't have to get one with wifi and a touchscreen.
My personal, completely-unsupported theory is it was a combination of 3 qualities.
(1) New types of things, while unlike anything that came before, were still simple and understandable enough that someone without formal engineering training could understand their use and offer improvements.
(2) Engineering was still seen as something that was approachable by anyone, and so more people availed themselves of the design tools it presented.
(3) Manufacturing was physically colocated with design, increasing agility to implement improvements.
Since then, we've moved into geographically disparate manufacturing of such optimized and tightly-packaged systems that as simple of an ask as "Could that light be red instead of green?" requires overwhelming machinations to design and implement, resulting in "Let's just leave it green." (Repeat for every UX component of a system)
A lot of those features are available in today's fridges. Also, they use less power today. And you really don't have to get one with wifi and a touchscreen.
A lot of those features are available in today's fridges. Also, they use less power today. And you really don't have to get one with wifi and a touchscreen.
A lot of those features are available in today's fridges. Also, they use less power today. And you really don't have to get one with wifi and a touchscreen.
And, it's labeled as a premium, major new feature.
>> "capitalism breeds innovation" haha
Indeed, in many areas, 'capitalism' has not produced innovation that benefits anyone using the products, but merely increases the ratio of cash extracted from buyers in return for reduced value provided by sellers.