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Goodbye non-KISS appliances

willbush.dev

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Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#461

Post by EasyMark »

jmcharnes wrote: post #366
EasyMark wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, analog stuff can be built tough too. See the vacuum cleaners that still work after 50 years lol, because they were overengineered. That's not nearly as profitable, though. So bean counters (fail early, but after warranty period, fail often) are ever at war with engineers who'd rather make a good product for a fair price. I have heard good things about Bosche but yet to buy anything. I will definitely consider th…

My uncle gave me his used (!) Bosch dryer 12 years ago. It’s outlasted every other appliance we’ve bought since then.

I inherited a 10 year old frigidaire washer and dryer combo, they are still going 10 years later, I haven't even had to replace any of the dials.

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#462

Post by TeMPOraL »

Liftyee wrote: post #349
nextos wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also you can't operate e.g. a dishwasher with kitchen gloves now, as those silly touchscreens won't cooperate. Few brands know how to keep it simple. Even Miele and Liebherr are falling into these absurd trends.

Can't believe that none of these designers thought that one might want to use a kitchen appliance with gloves on before slapping capacitive touch on everything...

It's market efficiency at work: appliances are well past the point of being good enough, they're now being optimized to the point of being as shit as they can be without becoming unsellable.

Capacitive touch buttons became cheaper than mechanical buttons. That's why they're suddenly on everything now.

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#463

Post by strawberryfie »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #445
strawberryfie wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it was unfixable, without disabling an essential feature?

The yoder loop on a fridge is designed to prevent condensation near the door seals. Depending on your climate you may be able to get away without one. When I'm talking about the heater on mine not working, I'm talking about the heater for the evaporator. Without a working heater I'd get enough ice built up on the evaporator within a week to cause problems with the evaporator fan. If the fan doesn't work you're not go…

You didn’t mention the evap heater. What could LG have done differently to fix your fridge to factory spec?

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#464

Post by TeMPOraL »

BoxFour wrote: post #460
hansvm wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're talking past each other a bit. The person you first responded to said that some problems exist, you said they don't, and I expanded a bit, agreeing with them. Your position seems actually to be though that you can make smart devices acceptable if you're careful enough. That's probably true. However, I've seen the code people write, and I still personally wouldn't want a smart oven or any number of other…

> The person you first responded to said that some problems exist, you said they don't, and I expanded a bit, agreeing with them. The person I responded to said: > I cannot turn my lights on because somewhere, potentially thousands of miles away, some datacenters failed, even if those datacenters could, ostensibly, only give me ads and "improvements" and not any core feature. That problem doesn't exist. Your smart li…

> That problem doesn't exist. Your smart lightbulbs fallback to being regular lightbulbs in the absence of an internet connection, even for the most popular centralized service ones today (Hue).

What about my robo vacuum cleaner?

Also, you keep mentioning Hue as if this is what people buy. People with lots of disposable income buy Hue. Everyone else buys some cheap $noname Tuya crap (or get it installed by the contractors), and whether or not it works offline, they find out during their next Internet outage.

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#465

Post by TeMPOraL »

coldtea wrote: post #173
darreninthenet wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really have no idea how to reply to this without sounding like an ass so apologies in advance. Well yeah duh if the door was shut properly every time fridges wouldn't need door or temperature alarms at all (most have an audible one already). But it's called an alarm for a reason, sometimes shit goes wrong and it's handy to know before all the food has been at room temperature all day. We had a freezer door pop open…

I too really have no idea how to reply to this without sounding like an ass so apologies in advance. Well, our parents, and for the younger, our grandparents too, and us, have managed to do fine for like 60+ years of using fridges without an fridge door alarm. Fun fact: for an alarm for when you are away for days, and you want to know if the fridge power went off and back on in between, you can freeze a jar of water…

Today, we call such tricks "life hacks". For when the defaults don't work well enough, even if they probably should. This is indeed a cool life hack. But it kind of feels like something that should've been built into the goddamn fridge.

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#466

Post by TeMPOraL »

coldtea wrote: post #425
scrollaway wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And without open door alarms, food would sometimes get spoiled and cause waste. Why are you fighting the guy over this feature? Everybody here is in agreement that network-connected fridges are not particularly useful but you're trying to make a point about open door alarms.

> Why are you fighting the guy over this feature? I'm not fighting anybody. I'm stating my opinion, which happens to be different than his. Isn't this the purpose of a forum? > Everybody here is in agreement that network-connected fridges are not particularly useful but you're trying to make a point about open door alarms. The context here is the fridge sending you online messages about the open door.

Base open door alarm is just an annoying beeper that goes on some 30-45 seconds into the door being opened.

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#467

Post by TeMPOraL »

EasyMark wrote: post #320
arter4 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I agree. I'm not a luddite per se - heck, I make a living out of making stuff talk to one another on a network. But I don't get the appeal, from a customer standpoint, of having all physical objects talk to you or to the Internet. Like, why? I get it when it comes to alarm systems. Being able to get a notification when someone breaks in is nice, because the alarm system is mostly doing its job when you're not at…

the only thing I see worth using "smart" appliances on are lighting, thermostat, and security system. Everything else in my experience is extraneous and useless.

I hacked a few IKEA air quality sensors so, beyond their traffic-light color LEDs, they also log actual numeric measurements to Home Assistant. It's proving to be one of the more useful "ensmartiffication" for several reasons - including being able to check all the meters from one place on the go, and being able to position the device so its LED indicator isn't annoying my wife at night. But honestly, I wouldn't actually buy a smart device for this - soldering a NodeMCU into a cheap IKEA device is the sweet spot of relatively low skill required, and zero bullshit included.

I can't stand vendor apps. They're always garbage. In fact, the main reason I set up Home Assistant, and the main reason my wife embraced it and uses it daily, is because hooking up our A/C to it made it infinitely more useful than having it operated over the vendor shit app. With HA, either of us can reconfigure all A/Cs and then go and make tea or whatever, in time it took the official vendor app to fully open.

IoT is a disaster, Home Assistant and some tinkering is the only thing that makes it reasonable to have a smart device.

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#468

Post by TeMPOraL »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #397
thfuran wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like how there's an alternative market for dumb tvs, except they're more expensive and have worse screens?

TVs are a different type of product than a fridge though. With fridge once you have the basics covered you can be set.

So is the case with washing machines, but here we are.

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#469

Post by TeMPOraL »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #451
thfuran wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that if the manufacturer is going to continue using the appliance for their own business purposes, they shouldn't be permitted to describe the transaction that causes you to possess it as a "sale", because you don't own it free and clear.

I don't get why it matters so much to people. It's all just incentives aligning and how the deals work. Having a subscription can actually be beneficial in terms of incentive to keep up supporting the product in my view. If it's a huge problem psychologically for you, maybe you can just take the following 5 years or whatever time you estimate you will be using the product and calculate that into the base price to mak…

> I don't get why it matters so much to people. It's all just incentives aligning and how the deals work.

Think of it like working conditions getting increasingly poor and abusive year over year, while your salary stays fixed.

It matters not because the deals are increasingly shit and abusive, but also because them being much better is within most of our's living memories, and there's no actual reason for things to go this shit, except a supplier-driven market fucking customers over because they can, and race-to-the-bottom mechanics preventing any single vendor from reversing course.

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#470

Post by TeMPOraL »

Nifty3929 wrote: post #329
jader201 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most consumers don’t need commercial-level quality for appliances. Those appliances are built to handle much more usage, and for a much longer time. E.g. a washer in a laundromat will be used probably 10x compared to a consumer washer over the same amount of time. Also, a laundromat wants the washer to last as long as possible, probably 20-30 years, but at least 10-15. There’s no reason for consumers to spend 10x on…

I totally agree! In a way, this is my point. For the most part, people are rationally choosing to pay less money for lower-quality, shorter-lived appliances. Because they don't need them to last a long time. There are basically two markets for these things: commercial and consumer. Similar with printers as well, or even power tools. The cheaply made junk that most people (rationally!) buy, and the expensive, well mad…

Except when people are made aware of the commercial market and able to score something off it, suddenly it turns out they like the reliability, the ergonomics, the lack of bullshit.

Consumers ain't choosing shit. People are talking here as if most people were drowning in money, and shopping around for low price as a pastime. On the contrary, people are starved for funds, they buy cheap out of necessity, enduring whatever abusive or lazy bullshit the manufaturer pulled off to offer their wares slightly cheaper.

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