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How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court

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Re: How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court

#91

Post by consp »

promiseofbeans wrote: post #65
Ylpertnodi wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replacing seems fair enough...eliminates buyers remorse.

It's not as good for the environment, though. Some companies like Apple try to make up for this by replacing broken devices, then refurbishing and reselling the formerly broken device.

> It's not as good for the environment, though.

Depends on other laws, here they have to take it back and recycle it. This also applies to old appliances. I had some empathy for the poor guys who had to take my extremely cheap, completely rusted washing machine away when I bought a new one.

While repairing might be better, it's not the worst outcome to replace it.

Re: How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court

#92

Post by mmkhd »

gnicholas wrote: post #63
r4indeer wrote: post #21

> Now an old fashioned light bulb shouldn't be expected to last a decade, but an oven? Funnily enough, there actually was the Phoebus cartel [1] which sought to reduce the lifespan of incandescent light bulbs to around 1,000 hours and raise prices. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

I recall reading a quasi-debunking of this. I didn't go down the rabbit hole far enough to understand all the details, but it seems the situation was more complicated than just corporate greed. [1] The topic has been discussed here in the past a few times, including [2] and [3] 1: https://readmedium.com/en/the-phoebus-cartel-was-never-reall... 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21596792 3: https://news.ycombinat…

Nice video from the well known channel Technology Connections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY => It's complicated. Yes, there was a cartel, but it was not all bad. There were legitimate reasons to go for 1000h light bulbs.

Re: How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court

#93

Post by mschuster91 »

bell-cot wrote: post #89
promiseofbeans wrote: post #36

We've got a similar thing in New Zealand: the Consumer Guarantees Act. The people who sold the broken thing to you can either fix it, replace it, or refund you the cost of it. The decision is unfortunately up to them, so they sadly often replace things rather than fixing them. Consumer NZ is usually used as the independent source for expected product lifetimes: https://www.consumer.org.nz/articles/appliance-life-expe…

15 years seems darn short for an oven. The (electric) one I have now is from the late 1960's, and perfectly functional. At church, our (gas) kitchen oven is about a century old - and the last service man we had said that it should be good for another century, if we're careful not to let it rust out.

phew, at that age I'd really be worried about the seals for the gas oven and about the insulation of the wiring for the electric one.

Re: How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court

#94

Post by mytailorisrich »

baq wrote: post #79
mytailorisrich wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well there was no court case. Considering the cost of sending a lawyer attend the hearing and the potential risk of creating a precedent, it may simpler and cheaper to send an engineer when someone complains too loudly...

That's the point. If customers don't complain strongly enough, the manufacturer is incentivized to develop products prone to malfunction. If the cost of malfunction is raised, the incentives change. If they got invited to a hundred cases at the same time, they'd send a lawyer and perhaps even would tweak the design to include some extra $1 parts which actually work.

It's a trade-off. People don't want appliances that break down after a few years but they also want cheap appliances...

In this case it seems to boil down to: "In the end he replaced the light bulb (which hadn't worked for years, we hadn't bothered replacing it) and the message had gone away anyway."... i.e. the guy could have replaced the light bulb when it broke and perhaps nothing would have happened in the first place. So this article comes across as complaining too much, frankly.

Re: How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court

#95

Post by Youden »

r4indeer wrote: post #21

> Now an old fashioned light bulb shouldn't be expected to last a decade, but an oven? Funnily enough, there actually was the Phoebus cartel [1] which sought to reduce the lifespan of incandescent light bulbs to around 1,000 hours and raise prices. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

It wasn't as simple as them wanting to make more money: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY

Key points from an AI summary:

- Incandescent bulbs had to balance factors like light output, efficiency, and lifespan - hotter filaments produced brighter, whiter light but reduced bulb lifespan.

- Longer-lasting bulbs were less efficient and produced dimmer, yellower light, so they were not simply "better" products being suppressed.

- The 1,000 hour target was a reasonable compromise that balanced these competing priorities, not necessarily a sinister plot.

- Even after the Phoebus cartel dissolved, the 1,000 hour lifespan remained the industry standard for general-purpose incandescent bulbs.

Re: How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court

#96

Post by jajko »

afiori wrote: post #61
r4indeer wrote: post #21

> Now an old fashioned light bulb shouldn't be expected to last a decade, but an oven? Funnily enough, there actually was the Phoebus cartel [1] which sought to reduce the lifespan of incandescent light bulbs to around 1,000 hours and raise prices. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

Planned obsolescence is very real, but the reality of incandescent light bulbs means that lifespan, efficiency, and luminosity are not independent. The 1000 hours limit is in practice a lower bound to a combination of luminosity and efficiency

Literally in that linked wiki article:

> "A longer life bulb of a given wattage puts out less light (and proportionally more heat) than a shorter life bulb of the same wattage"

As long as we can recycle (or at least safely get rid of) the burned out ones I'd say its a win from ecology perspective, and at least in some cases also for end users. But this wasnt the main driver of the change, it was the good ol' corporate greed as per the same wiki page.

Re: How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court

#97

Post by arp242 »

Denvercoder9 wrote: post #74
arp242 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting question; Netherlands has a similar law, and the general guidelines for stuff like ovens is, depending on the purchase price: ≤ € 199 2 years € 200 - 299 3 years € 300 - 399 4 years € 400 - 499 5 years € 500 - 599 6 years € 600 - 699 7 years ≥ € 700 8 years Note these are just guidelines and not fixed rules. On one hand this seems rather short to me, on the other hand, it's kind of a "you get w…

Note that this table comes from "Techniek Nederland", which is a business association of (among others) technical retailers. They've an interest in lowering the expected lifespan of appliances, as that means their members have less warranty to provide. They actually note (probably for legal reasons) along with their table that it contains average usage, not expected lifespan (i.e. how long people use things before th…

It was linked from the ACM or consumentenbond, or some such consumer website. I don't have the tab open, but it wasn't just a random link from Google.

But yeah, it's just a guideline like I said. Some people here are throwing out numbers such as a "15 years" or "decades" with no qualifiers, and I'm not sure if that's reasonable for a €230 oven (cheapest in a quick check).

Aside on retailers: I haven't worked in a store in 15 years, but back then a lot of manufacturers just said "lol fuck you" when you tried to claim warranty above their stated warranty period. It was typically up to the retailers to bear the costs. One (of several) reason we left the consumer business: it's hard to compete as a small independent store for many different reasons, and this just made it that much harder. You can't spread out the costs, and you have almost no leverage against Asus or HP.

In short, at least back then the manufacturers could just keep shipping wank without really suffering too much damage to their bottom line, and the retailers with essentially no power to change anything were getting screwed. I don't know if that's changed, but probably not.

Re: How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court

#99

Post by Redneck-Tech »

zeristor wrote: post #80
Redneck-Tech wrote: post #73

Absolutely blows my mind how many people have fallen into the trap that is "SMART" devices and "POWER EFFICIENT" appliances. Only to find out just after the warranty runs out that they ultimately invested in a hawt piece of trash. There is no pride in manufactured goods anymore, imho there's not much pride in anything nowadays. Not surprising when a burger engineer at McDonald's makes more money than even an entry le…

Oral B sell a variety of Electric toothbrushes, dependent on the built in Li ion battery. Some of them hook up to a mobile phone by bluetooth to track how you brush. The thing is once the battery dies the £150 toothbrush is useless, it's' sealed so replacing the battery isn't trivial. I think in the battery may last a fair bit longer now. Electric tooth brushes are quite an improvement over a normal tooth brush.

Why repair something when the repair's cost more than this years model which boasts more privacy pirating features than the one you currently own? Manual brushing is so retro... just walk through the automated car wash with your mouth open and at the end make sure you smile.

Re: How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court

#100

Post by calyhre »

consp wrote: post #78
xlii wrote: post #59

I disagree. I have a similar situation right now. Washing machine is leaking when load is anything bigger than light load. Initial guarantee claim to Whirlpool was sent 8 weeks ago. It's dead, no response from anyone. Under consumer rights shop should refund, but claim is without response for 3 weeks (14 calendar days is upper limit according to EU law + local regulations). Today I was supposed to contact the lawyer,…

> It's weeks of legal battle over 300€. We are not alike. As soon as it costs them several tens of billable hours (people on phone, someone making appointments, discussions, emails, lawyer doing it's thing etc) I'm all fair game and will definitely spend my time screwing with them simply to make them pay even if I lose in the end. Since I'm going to be frustrated when I'm being screwed over I see no reason not repay…

Same here. It's also possible to buy a new one during the "fight" period, and resell/donate the repaired one after
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