Generation Junk

Oster still sells a blender with a single toggle switch. I have it. Its's loud as hell but it works. Cheap, too.

Speaking from my own experience (anec-data being a home-owner for about 20 years and a member of a family who owned a home my entire life).

(1) How "high-end" something is does not equate to how long it will last or how reliable it will be. Sometimes it's entirely the opposite (early generation Plasma did not outlive CRT equivalents but cost substantially more).

(2) Targeting a specific brand "known historically (to you) as reliable" is pointless most of the time. All brands have levels, and the low end is same old crap.

(3) Consumer reports turned out to be a sometimes useless great resource. Often the model being recommended is no longer available. Buying the next model burned me -- badly -- because the following model year dishwasher was required to use less water (EPA), it was the first generation of this new design and it meant not really having a dishwasher.

(4) Dishwashers these days positively suck. I went through four of them in two years, returned two, resold one, suffering with the last (a Bosch that is -- at least -- quiet). The manual instructs not to pre-rinse the dishes, just "shake them off in the sink". Do they actually test these things with real food? Heaven forbid a kernel of Cocoa Krispies ends up on a bowl ... when mixed with milk and sent through a hot cleaning cycle, it turns into chocolate stone epoxied onto whatever in the hell it attached itself to. Oh, and that one kernel will turn into 40 little versions and attach themselves to everything.

My buddy has dishwasher-something-he-got-from-Sears from the 90s with a garbage disposal built in. You can put a Crock Pot with the leftover roast in the thing, put in your hearing protection, turn it on, and everything is shiny in about 60-90 minutes.

(5) There's a real market opportunity for a microwave without a weird UI. That's it: "without a weird UI". Mine has 25 buttons and a dial. Figuring out how to microwave something on anything other than "high" is sort of like figuring out an Escape Room. The microwave's "30 second" button sets the time for 30 seconds and starts it immediately. Hitting it again adds another 30 seconds. So that button's almost got a hole in the center where the text once was and the entire family either rounds up or stares at it until it's almost done, popping the door open with 15 seconds or so left. Of course, as a result of this behavior, the door safety switch is malfunctioning so you have to very slowly/carefully close the door while applying pressure in a very specific way or the microwave will refuse to start.

(6) Sometimes you'll buy a cheap-o gas mower with every intention of upgrading it "when it kicks the bucket". And sometimes that mower will run, faithfully, every week, 3 months a year for 25 years. Some will continue to start on the first or second pull despite still having the original spark plug, wires, air filter, having never been tuned up, maintained, or cleaned and despite it having only had oil added (never changed) ... twice? ... in 25 years, when it was blowing black smoke out the exhaust. Sometimes the thing you want to fail will outlive you.

Really ... do you need more than one button for "make it soggy and unevenly warm?"

Depends what era of cars we're talking. There's a ton of stuff from the 90s and 2000s like GM trucks, that I strongly suspect will be on the road longer and in greater numbers than stuff 10 years newer. The mid to late 90s and early 2000's seems to be the sweet spot where fuel injection and simple electronic ignition, and stuff using older designs (engine's, etc.) that had to be built heavier, combined with better metallurgy, better oils, better gas, and so on, meant that the vehicles, when taken care reasonably, would go well past a quarter million miles. There's a ton of stuff now, that given much weird crap is on there and how much stuff is done to squeeze every last MPG out (like a lot of GDI setups, auto start/stop, transmissions that pull into neutral automatically at a stop, etc.) that I really doubt will make it as far. Even as far as repairability, a 90's 4L60E or 4L80 can be repaired way, way more easier by way more people, in an economic fashion than a lot of later transmissions (that you may as well just throw away). I'm sure this holds across other brands too; Volvos come to mind, as the older rear wheel drive red block cars were certainly far better built, more reliability, and had an unbelievably better lifespan than the absolute garbage Volvo has put out after Ford bought them.

There are brands built to super high standards, but no-one wants to pay for them or deal with their compromises.

We have been buying Miele appliances, and have nothing but excellent experiences. They aren't cheap, but the general opinion I've seen online is that they are one of the few brands that build quality modern appliances. My experiences would tend to back that up.

Specific to the Miele washer and dryer, we hang dry most things and live in a very dry area, so having a heat pump dryer that doesn't get things crisp and dry is perfectly fine with us. We hardly use the dryer at all actually; clothes last longer if you don't use the dryer and we do spend the money on quality clothes (also hard to find and expensive).

+1 for Samsung laundry machines being unreliable. I was in an apartment for 3 years and went thru 2 washing machines due to a “unrepairable” circuit fault on the first one, and a drum leaking perpetually on the second one.

The model of the washing machine was on the lease, was one of the expensive ones, I felt bad that they were buying #3 my last year there. They’re maybe only slightly above landfill in terms of entropic stability.

Edit: to be fair I bet they were warrantied, but still