However, I can never tell if this 5x premium actually gets me a better core product, or just gets me better branding, advertising, aesthetics, and/or superfluous features.
So I usually just buy the cheapest and hope for the best.
[−4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung_Warentest – the article also has a few pointers to international, similar organisations near the bottom.
If they give your product good marks, you are not allowed to mention it in your marketing (Not sure how they enforce it; maybe they stop reviewing your stuff).
I worked at a company that regularly got top marks from them, and our Marketing folks would have fits, because they couldn't mention it.
https://www.aim.org/aim-report/aim-report-a-black-eye-for-co...
'The media lied to you about COVID-19 – TAKE ACTION NOW'
'Critical Race Theory in schools, take action now!'
'Gender activists are politicizing the dictionary: TAKE ACTION NOW'
'Stand up for Rush – TAKE ACTION NOW'
'VOX buries the truth'
'CNN admits Hunter Biden ‘a real problem’ for Joe Biden, not ‘a right-wing media story’'
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Accuracy_in_Media
I am less confident about either your contention or about the position you are attacking than about the idea that this particular website is going to lie to me about it.
RIP Neil Peart
Kirk: Send some red shirts.
Spock: They're all in Agile training today.
Kirk: Do we have any rock drummers?
That's kind of how it worked when Zep was one of the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors a few years back, with Ann and Nancy Wilson + Jason Bonham, son of John, + others doing Stairway to Heaven.
This is basic critical thinking, you don't have to be as shallow as many readers of that website probably are, you're just choosing to be.
The opportunity they have to lie to somebody who is unfamiliar with the subject is immense. Falsehood could be hiding in any of a thousand places, and it could easily require you to hire a team of experts for weeks to find it and conclusively debunk it, line by line. It may well require decompiling what is functionally or literally the source code behind the piece to dismiss one's suspicions. "Basic critical thinking" is not trivial against a determined adversary.
Whether to take the claims within on face value depends on your purpose and on what you know of the writer. In this case, it is very easy to become quite familiar with this motivation and ethics of the writer in under a minute by clicking around the website, and come to the reasonable conclusion that this is a place that generally attempts to deceive their reader to secure material gain for their patrons & movement, and there are likely deliberate lies somewhere in the body of the piece. You don't even need to read the body.
Indeed, the real story would appear to be rather more nuanced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzuki_Motor_Corp._v._Consumer....
Please list one of those that are false, so you can be educated.
It did not get little media attention. Indeed, the lawsuit got rather a lot.
> AIM has submitted an amicus brief in the case, arguing that Suzuki should be allowed to present its evidence to a jury. It is hard to understand how any judge could honestly rule that the evidence in this case does not prove that the defendant knew that its claim that the Samurai “rolled over easily” was false.
The source definitely has a dog in this hunt.
Who are we to believe, a partisan in the lawsuit, or the trial judge? And why?
It's very likely that AIM's goal is to present the best facts in their argument, and ignore or minimize other factors. Or as CU put it (quoting https://www.theautochannel.com/news/press/date/19970422/pres... ): "First it was the cigarette makers, now it's an automobile manufacturer. Different industries, same desperate tactics. Throw up a smoke screen, hurl ludicrous charges, and falsely claim (despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary) that their product is safe -- all to avoid liability for defective and dangerous products." ...
> "We welcome and invite NHTSA to evaluate our honesty and integrity. Courts have done so and found unanimously that our methodology was beyond reproach. For example, the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York -- one of the nation's most highly respected courts -- has said that our work 'exemplifies the very highest order of responsible journalism.'"" ...
> "On the other hand, Dr. Pittle said, in a decision that the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review, a Federal Court of Appeals stated that Suzuki and its attorneys "engaged in an unrelenting campaign to obfuscate the truth."
> "The truth that was revealed despite Suzuki's cover-up is that Suzuki knew -- prior to first selling the car in the U.S. -- that the vehicle had a 'rollover problem' and that General Motors refused to sell the car because its evaluation demonstrated the danger of rollover," Dr. Pittle said.
Do you really expect HN readers to act like trial court judges and decide which of these two partisans are correct, and dig through decades old material to offer a point-by-point rebuttal?
If the evidence is so clear-cut, why did Suzuki and CU end up with a rather mundane settlement?
Critical thinking does not require you to carefully parse every bit of garbage on the planet.
The ruling on an appeal makes the argument better than i could.
> [The] først theory is that CU know it was probably lying because its employees tries to make the samurai flip and we're happy when they suceeded. The second is that CU purposely avoided the truth by failing to address a potential source of experimental error. Neither of these theories withstands serious scrutiny
The opinion end up concluding that the entire reason for changing the test setup, along with a description of the changes, was present in the article.
What a non-story.
SUVs evolved to address the risks pointed out by CR and other entities. They mostly have wider wheelbases and lower centers of gravity.
Tell me again how it was some cover up. They literally published your argument along with the review.
Within 2 years, every single one had failures. For instance, the oven's convection fan failed in a month. The washer AND dryer completely failed within 3 years. I bought refurbished units from a local guy, and when I told him what I had, he didn't even want them to flip again.
I, too, resigned myself to the fact that, unless you pay for commercial-grade appliances, it's all crap, and you may as well just buy the cheapest thing at Lowe's, and replace it when it fails. The industry deserves all the loss of trust they have earned.
FWIW, I do love my Ford Edge and it is still the daily driver for our household
Sometimes they start with a premise they want to prove instead of just providing a straight review of the products. They may do this by selecting the criteria (key performance metrics), for example.
Sometimes, they just don't competently evaluate the products because they fail to take into account real world consumer needs.
The quality of reviews in CR these days doesn't hold a candle to what CR used to provide, but I remain a member because even a weak signal is better than the other random stuff out there like Amazon reviews.
Emails, social media posts, website landing pages, collateral in-store/retail is all fully acceptable. You can also pay additional fees to them for additional materials to use in communications.
rtings does good work, I'd pay a flat fee for it. But a subscription for a website I check every 2-3 years when I'm upgrading some tech? I'll just clear my cookies.
If you're specifically looking at mice, you might want to check out RocketJumpNinja. The reviews are pretty biased towards suitability for FPS, but they are quite in depth, and the reviewer is pretty knowledgeable.
I think that's largely due to car enthusiasts having insufficient self-awareness about the degree to which their priorities differ from those of mainstream consumers. PC gamers and PC building enthusiasts are also frustratingly prone to this kind of thing. (I spent several years reviewing PC hardware for a living, which included constantly fielding comments from readers who seemed to be genuinely unable to understand how their could be a market for low-end components.)
I assume that other articles have similar issues, and that I'm just unaware because they're not within my area of expertise.
Yeah, exactly. I really love the idea, but not the results.
ETM [0] is subscription funded and their tests are far more detailed, and they even show the data (e. g. power usage curves for a toaster, measured air replacement curves for a fan, etc.).
Anyway, in this case, they simply have not tested any dehumidifiers.
Yeah same, those reviews are either bought, or made on a whim by people who aren't critical of what they buy - especially if the company or seller goad them into reviewing with giveaways or whatever. There will be good reviews, but they will be buried in the thousand+ mediocre ones.
They often are somewhat marginal at the edges - e.g., for computers. But otherwise they are useful for consumer products.
Here for France: https://www.60millions-mag.com/tests-comparatifs
(I just laughed as I see they even review fries brands, and sex toys...)
They also provide help to launch class action. ( that exists differently than a US class action )
Manufacturers can't justify producing a more reliable product at a higher price point, because there isn't really a way to get consumers to trust that it really is a more reliable product worthy of the price.
Of course, many execs look at brand value as something to be harvested for short term gains to the value of their options, but that’s a different problem.
See this Drill is DW345, we sell DW350, it is 5 better
Craftsman, Portal Cable, Bosch, Stanley, the list goes on and on, of once independent brands that have been bought out by mass marketers to sell lower quality tools under those names
From a PE/market perspective, the sweet spot seems to be the 95 year old with a good reputation that still carries weight.
I imagine it's because of the good spread between current price and expected returns, as the 'old' brands this is done with aren't usually very profitable, if at all.
We found Miele for dishwashers. Zwilling for our toaster, JennAir for microwave...
We explicitly avoided "smart" anything. I shouldn't need to connect my refrigerator to wi-fi.
But we've watched the crap curve take hold on a bunch of product categories, especially U.S. brands. Hannah Anderson used to make good quality, reliable children's clothes that didn't wear out when you looked at them funny. Not any more. Other brands that used to make clothing that lasted 20+ years now makes thin garbage that might last a season. Many of these transitions were to "Made in China" manufacturing.
We went to replace a ten-year old electric coffee grinder and couldn't find one for less than $1700 that wasn't garbage. We switched to a hand grinder as the only reasonable alternative.
It is very frustrating to try to find things that will last. My parents bought one refrigerator, and it lasted for more than 30 years. Most of their stuff they were able to get once. Not every two or three years.
Brands like Ceado and Eureka make a bunch at various price ranges. 600 gets you a decent one, 1200 and you're well into very nice grinder territory (unless you wanna go all audiophile here).
There's not a ton to go wrong: good motor, bearings, a well designed adjustment mechanism and a good hopper design. Of those I'd really only expect the bearings and motor to die in any reasonable time frame.
If you're that concerned you could always get a commercial model. There's no way home use will kill one of those, but it'll just be big and impractical.
Very sturdy, easy to use, easy to clean, and surprisingly quiet.
Random review: https://www.home-barista.com/blog/bplus-apollo-hand-grinder-...
Went with the BPlus Apollo. See my response below to yaldiz.
The one weakness it has is the plastic ring that holds the upper burr set. This appears to be intentionally designed to break as a sacrificial part if anything jams. Replacements are a few bucks.
If I was choosing between brand A and twice as expensive brand B, and brand B said "we trust that our stuff will last so we offer a 10-year, no questions asked warranty", I would go for B in a heartbeat. (As long as it was a brand with some history so I can trust they don't just go out of business.)
* insert terms so onerous you’re very unlikely to claim, you have to ship the item on your own dime halfway across the world, if defect is deemed not covered (and you bet it won’t be) disposal at your expense or return as is at your expense, extended warranty void if you didn’t do $frivolousThing at time of purchase and not a day later, extended warranty doesn’t transfer to new owner, etc.
like help lines which charge 80 cents/minute to not help you?
That is what warranties are for. You say it is reliable? Put it in writing how long you think it will keep working and what will you owe the customer if it ain’t so.
MTBF is exec poison. Too high, and the customer doesn't come back, you see, or worse, it's too expensive to build! (According to finance).
In power tools for instance, there's a number of YouTube channels that do high quality testing. In some cases some identified faults appear to have caught the eye of the manufacturer. Hopefully over time this feedback loop will result in higher quality products that still hit their price target.
The motor doesn't sound as good these days, so I considered replacing the whole thing. Fortunately after I wiggled the gasket it seemed to stop leaking!
Your statement would be correct for the majority of companies however, but Vitamix is actually distinct in that regard (currently)
Newer models are typically much lighter. This means they now have far less internal material to reduce noise. I can't use mine without ear protection since it's about chainsaw level of noise. The reduced weight means I also need to hold onto it during use otherwise it will vibrate itself off the counter.
The company seems to be most interested in selling smoothie recipe subscriptions for their blender companion phone app. Aside from subscription selling the app is pretty much useless -- who wants a phone app to remotely control a blender?
I am sure some next generation developers are already demanding to install VSCode on fridges so one can code on Samsung Smart refrigerators screens.
Wouldn't it be great that while fridge telling about running short on Kale green also download a gigabyte of NPM garbage to display image of Kale green in a bag?
Do better.
Here's an idea: if you find the blender to be too loud, go into a different room, close the door, and remotely trigger the blender with your smartphone app.
We put our blender in our pantry because we can close the door and blend without waking up the baby. Otherwise it (Blendtec) is too loud!
EDIT: to the downvoters, this was tongue in cheek. It would obviously be better for them to spend more money on soundproofing and less on a useless app!
Having my smoker self-manage its temperature and graph the amount of heat it's dumped in is nice. Checking on the temperature ramp of the sous vide is nice, too.
We’ve had ours for 8 years and it works like new and doesn’t smell like the motor is burning out like so many cheap blenders do.
For a wide range of consumables and gear that hackers of the physical world would probably like, check out Project Farm, protoolreviews, ToolGuyd, and of course AvE on YouTube.
For kitchen gear, check out America's Test Kitchen.
I hang out in r/bifl but it isn't as good as it used to be for my personal tastes, as there isn't as much of an emphasis on repairability as I'd prefer.
I wish there was a trend of someone like AvE doing a teardown of junk-quality consumer gear, then by replacing certain parts like bad capacitors, plastic gears, etc., turning it into much higher-quality equipment, and open-sourcing those small parts' design and manufacturing specs.
One hack I employ is I go straight to the servicing departments and find the service technicians, and lately I only go to commercial B2B offerings. They are usually more than happy to tell you which manufacturers and product lines are easiest to diagnose and service (and whether that conjunction of characteristics leads to reliability), have a reliable supply of parts, maintain that parts supply the longest, and have retained all those characteristics the most years. It is no more than a 10-15 minute conversation most service technicians are happy to have.
They will be especially happy to talk with you if you ask them how you can plan to accommodate their service visits more pleasant and efficient to work in. HVAC techs in particular will trade around site porn of customers who planned ahead, put in a proper-sized and sited pad easy to roll up to with all their equipment in their work van, with provisions for ample shade that doesn't obstruct the equipment airflow. They will <squee> over that more than tween girls over the heartthrob du jour.
Then I talk up staff at businesses who have to use the equipment every day to find out the most annoying aspects of using that equipment to determine whether I can put up with those idiosyncracies myself.
There are some manufacturers I will absolutely not even consider in the US for some equipment, for example. Samsung refrigerators; they are not designed to last past the warranty, not designed to be easily diagnosed and serviced, and their parts supply network reflects that. There are some categories of equipment I have absolute requirements no matter where I am in the world. Rigging gear where a failure puts life and safety at risk I will outright refuse to purchase and use from anywhere but Japan, Germany, and the US from long-standing manufacturers making it in those nations. I will pay the price to import it to where I am and wait for as long as it takes to get through customs. I'm beginning to stop using Amazon and switching to direct from manufacturer, distributors, or retailers listed on the manufacturer's web site; the SKU commingling issue has gotten out of hand, and Amazon's poor inventory control has robbed whatever unique value proposition their logistics arm painstakingly built up.
3D printing could resolve some of that, but brands have been known to issue take downs or other legal threats over people sharing models so....
It's a pretty elegant design. Unfortunately, a lot of people (including my wife, initially) would be prone to concluding that the whole unit was “worn out and needed replacing”.
I have an immersion blender that also has plastic gears, and even though the motor is sold as a single unit that is not an FRU, you can take it apart and service it with off-the-shelf gears you can source from eBay.
The two coffee grinders I have, high quality metal burrs, plastic gearing, for the same reason.
My higher quality power tools- track saw, drills, etc, all plastic gearing, metal everywhere else.
It just makes sense when it comes to repairs, though can be frustrating when they strip out.
That said, most consumer crap made today is complete shite.
I preferred metal "shear pins" for this function ... much easier to find replacements for at the local hardware store.
You can try to watch teardowns, like this DeWalt by Ave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHCS7JXfuv0
Gears at 16:40
Go watch some teardowns of cheap stuff vs expensive stuff and stop being a jerk.
I'm not your mom. I'm not gonna explain everything AND shop for you.
The shopping aspect was uninteresting to me to begin with and was not what I was joining the discussion for. :)
Unfortunately, it's an open system, so the grease usually dries out after 5-10 years. Undo the 6 screws and put some marine grease on them every couple years everybody.
The motor is in the base of course, driving a shaft that comes up through the center of the housing. So far, so good. The problem is that this beefy-looking motor is screwed onto three plastic pillars that are just part of the otherwise thin outer housing. Each pillar is essentially an "asterisk" cross-section, probably to minimize material, and it had just snapped off the outer shell. You can buy things like the blades or the plastic bowl, but not random parts from the inside (or, outside).
I managed to get it together with a screw through the housing and a large glob of epoxy putty, but the experience really emphasized that it was pretty much designed to fail.
Sometimes they can be a right bastard to replace, but its still cheaper and much quicker than replacing a blown hydraulic pump and flushing the system to ensure no filings escaped the filters.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45280/45280-h/45280-h.htm
A deacon designed a horse cart where all the parts were designed to last a hundred years. Most cart had a weak spot which meant the cart wore out but never broke down. This thing was built with no weak spots.
So on the hundredth and one year to the day, all of a sudden everything failed at the same time and it collapsed into a cloud of dust.
1. They don't sell this coupler as a part. I could get one from abroad for like $7+postage and wait weeks for it.
2. This plastic crap is glued to the motor shaft. I might deform the shaft while trying to fix it.
FWIW you can buy used one for that price
I don't think it is planned obsolescence, it is just a race to the bottom on price. At $30, an immersion blender can't have metal gears. Most people value cheapness more than quality, so we get cheap junky products. Nylon gears are a travesty, but most people prefer replacing crap to paying 7x for the Vitamix.
Often the components he designs cost more to manufacture that components that would last much, much longer. . To build a pump that will 99 percent make it to 3000 hours, that means half will make it to 9000 hours or more. Unless you really, really make sure that 90 percent will also fail by 4000 hours. It’s not easy to do.
Some products actually incorporate extra parts such as batteries that serve no other purpose than to cause the unit to degrade after a certain time (honeywell thermostats I’m looking at you … their round thermostat includes a lithium cell. When the lithium cell degrades, the at328p processor switches to a limping mode that regulates +/- 10 degrees, but never less than a little over freezing. The (soldered) battery just goes through a resistor to a GPIO pin. It’s just a chemical timer. It serves no other purpose than to make the unit need to be replaced.)
I could go on and on and on, but stuff is definitely designed to fail in predictable ways in a predermined timeframe. Considerable expense is invested in this behavior.
...so the company making parts with them can then extoll the virtues of "biodegradable" in their marketing...?
Also, for those who doubt the claim about the Honeywell thermostat having a battery, I did some further research, and it does appear to be true:
https://forum.heatinghelp.com/discussion/128526/honeywell-th...
https://www.amazon.com/review/R3V5R0MJGEFNXH
But then this video shows that it is relatively easy to replace, it's not soldered in place, although the comments there do mention that the presence of the battery isn't documented anywhere in the original instructions:
Many people add ficituous evidence of their views because they are so sure they are right.
Also, the gears inside of refrigerator defrost timers in the 160 refrigerators we bought for an apartment complex. Shockingly, still mechanical. And one of the gears is date coded and has teeth made of a rubbery, disintegrating plastic around a regular nylon wheel. The vast majority of the timers failed in a two years window. At 7-8 years. The cheap replacement timers have no such nonsense and I’ve never seen one fail. Most people just would have replaced the cheap apartment fridge.
This is just some of what I’ve personally seen.
But you are right, I’m just some guy on the internet, I could be just making this up.
And corporations would never make things with life limitations to make more money. Surely. I mean, that would be like a subscription model! Ridiculous!
If the latter, how does it help Honeywell that you have to replace it?
Since we had over a hundred of these deployed in an apartment complex, when they started failing I carefully characterized their behavior. It just makes them go wonky when it is removed or dies. The at328p functions fine without it, there is no RTC or anything that needs a battery., and the chip is not powered by the battery when power is removed. In fact, there is no discharge from the battery when power is off. The at328p has nonvolatile eeprom and flash storage.
Interestingly, the wonky behavior it exhibits is the same (but doesn’t go below 40 degrees (f) ) as an old electromechanical one failing lol.
This is exotic enough that replacements are very hard to find. I can either get the 2 cells needed from the manufacturer at about 70% the cost of a new light, or get a new light. It’s technically repairable/user serviceable, it’s just not practical to do. Apple is playing a similar trick with their 80lbs iPhone repair kit to change the battery yourself: technically user repairable, practically not.
Huh? You seem to be contradicting yourself: you say it's a standard 18650 cell. That's not something custom, that's something you can buy from an electronics supplier quite easily. And no, having both poles on the same end isn't something custom either, that's just a variant you can buy. You should be able to find this exact part on digikey.com.
>This is exotic enough that replacements are very hard to find.
If you can buy something on digikey.com, it's not "exotic". They even ship small orders by USPS for cheap. It might be "exotic" to a typical consumer, but those people don't know how to use a soldering iron.
We all know the typical HN reader thinks a fun weekend would be spending 6 hours researching part numbers and getting out the soldering iron, but we are atypical. Most people will assume their product is at the end of its life because the warranty has lapsed and it doesn't work anymore. Companies are apparently betting on that and it's an environmental travesty.
Yes, I know. I said this exact thing above.
The parent said these devices used "custom batteries", implying that Honeywell et al were custom-designing and manufacturing their own special nonstandard batteries just for these applications. This is incorrect, and needed to be corrected.
But it’s rare enough that it’s hard to find. So much so that it actually doesn’t make economical sense to find this (rare, at a premium) variant because it would cost about as much or more than a new light (which includes new batteries, ironically)
You can't pick up a standard 18650 battery at Walmart either, but that doesn't make it some kind of special battery. It's bog-standard. Availability at Walmart has nothing to do with something is standard or even common. Brake pads for some random mass-market 2015 model year car (GM, Toyota, etc.) are nothing special or difficult to find either, but you're not going to find them at Walmart.
Engineering is both easy and incredibly difficult. It is relatively easy to design something that does a particular task (at least for many of the applications being discussed here). It is incredibly difficult to design something that does its job well or last for a long time.
No, that's relatively easy as well. What's incredibly difficult is doing so while keeping the BOM cost under control in a competitive market.
Recall the classic saying, "Any idiot can design a bridge that will stand up. It takes an engineer to design a bridge that will barely stand up."
I have never seen any example of 'planned obsolescence' which was anything more than giving the consumer what the consumer wants. Modern economy is essentially the peak optimization of cost vs utility, i.e. value maximization.
So, yeah, I'd like to see a model number as well.
The plastic tub that contained the rotating drum was hung up on springs just like in any other washing machine.
The holes in the tub where the ends of the springs went through were just that, holes without any reinforcements.
The inevitable happened (because the strain in the plastic where it met the unforgiving steel of the springs was too much) and over the years, the holes wore through the plastic, resembling an oblong shape more and more.
I simply pressed a metal bushing into the enlarged hole on one side and on the other, I used two small strips of steel (with holes in it for the spring) clamped to the tub with bolt and nut.
And voilà the machine easily did another two years (electronics now messed up).
This case is either a pitiable engineering failure or 100 % planned obsolescence.
Merely equipping the holes in the plastic tub with metal bushings would have easily made this part outlive every other failure.
Well, it would help tremendously if costs per month/year/lifetime were more obvious. A lot of people just don't know how long certain appliances are supposed to last at what price points comparatively. 7x is only a hefty price tag upfront when you know it will pay for itself over time, but even that is no longer certain.
I value quality and price. Unfortunately, while price is clearly stated, poor quality is often hidden.
Cheaper things aren't necessarily bad either. You don't want things like fridges and blenders to be items only the rich can afford and less robust things are probably fine if it was clear under what conditions you can use the item to make it last and if the item was easily repairable.
Lastly, I don't think you can blame the manufacturers alone either. I know people who don't like used things even if they are still good and will always buy new.
This is for example why flying commercial is such a miserable experience: people will look for the cheapest ticket that gets them to their destination because the whole thing is like being treated like cattle. Why then should you pay a single cent more for the same shitty experience? Airlines that used to offer a slightly better experience have figured this out and also treat you like cattle now so they can also offer the route for a low or lower price.
This is not unique to airlines, and this is my default mode of purchasing things because I’ve been burnt too many times. Unless I know for sure that X brand is much more durable and repairable than another, I’ll always go for the cheapest I can find that meets my needs.
The high-end blender lines of both brands are made domestically, and rate at the top in Consumer Reports. I can vouch that both are pretty quiet in operation, for what are essentially food-violence machines.
Just because it's a German brand like Bosch doesn't mean it's made in Germany, from quality parts, so, buyer beware.
But you're absolutely right. Buying cheap stuff is bad in so many ways. Since they wear out faster, you end up replacing them much more often, which is environmentally bad, and in the long run, costs more. The problem is that being expensive does not necessarily correlate with lasting long.
When our TV died a few years ago, my kids pooled together and bought me a 50" Samsung 4k TV. It's a great device in so many ways, but after 3 years, the backlights started failing. Right now half the screen is dark, and it would cost almost as much as a new TV to get them replaced, with a part that probably costs all of $5 to manufacture. So it's been hanging on the wall for the last year, because I've been too cheap to replace the whole TV, and too scared too attempt the repair on my own, since it involves stripping the thing down to the frame (and removing that enormous panel). I still might try some day. It's worth a $50 gamble to get the TV back. Either that or I'll just replace the darn thing. This TV (like all modern TVs) is a miracle of engineering, and the thing that stopped it from being usable is probably the simplest and one of the cheapest components.
My first TV was a hand-me-down from my parents that eventually died in late '88 or '89. It was an RCA from 1968. Then I bought a 26" RCA TV in 1989 and used it until we replaced it with an HD TV in 2012. It still worked fine when we got rid of it, and I was sad to see it go, even though we had no use for it.
How about replacing appliances with new ones? Washers can now do both - wash and dry AND it has heat pump. Induction cooktop are way more efficient. Instant hot water taps translates to smaller hot water cylinders. Japanese style fridges spoil less food.
The annoying part is that you can end up missing on new features.
I look at the Zojirushi rice cooker that I bought in college - a hefty purchase at the time - the Jaguar of rice cookers at a time when I should have been buying the $10 Black and Decker rice cooker. It's still with me, over a decade later, through countless moves, a handful of girlfriend (who all had opinions on it, interestingly), and at least 1,000 bowls of rice cooked.
The battery that keeps the time died (I could replace it, but I'd have to take it apart and it's technically non-replaceable), but other than that it's working perfectly. The rice is as good as it ever has been.
My oh most first world of problems? A while ago Zojirushi released rice cookers also function as pressure cookers in the same device. I'd love to upgrade so I can quickly make stews in it, but I cannot possibly retire my old one just because it's old.
Most likely I'm going to end up having two Zojirushis because well, rice goes pretty well with stew and you can't exactly make both simultaneously. And then in 10 years when they make one that's both a rice cooker, a pressure cooker, and an air fryer; I'll be having this monologue again.
Why not sell it second hand? Someone (even a student like you once were?) will happily extract a decade or more of value from it and you’ll get some of your money back towards the upgrade.
I can also relate to your envy of the new models we don’t need.
It's eight months old. They *have* to replace it under warranty.
But one-year warranties have been a thing everywhere for a long time I believe, so I hope you got your money back for both devices.
A good channel on youtube for these kinds of things is AvE, especially his older videos are good breakdowns and explanations of mostly electric tools where the creator points out things like molding, plastics, but also gears and probable failure modes - often a switch or as you mentioned, plastic gears or bad / missing bearings. The best device he had a teardown of was actually the Juicero, a massively over-engineered piece of hardware that was basically an inefficient press - as in, you get more juice just by hand-squeezing/rolling the overpriced Juicero bags.
Is that company still in business? If it does I'm sure some SF companies with too much money on their hands are still paying their subscriptions / deliveries.
Edit: it is not, they went out of business in 2017.
I would have tried these first:
Light duty:
https://www.restaurantsupply.com/waring-wsb33x-quik-stik-7-i...
Turn it up:
https://www.restaurantsupply.com/waring-wsb40-quik-stik-plus...
Bring the noise!...
https://www.restaurantsupply.com/robot-coupe-mp600-turbo-23-...
You probably don't want a commercial-kitchen dishwasher; IIRC you're expected to have someone in to replace the hoses in them every year or two, because they make those hoses out of plastics that are tolerant to higher temperatures, but at the expense of plasticizer degradation (becoming stiff + brittle) after just sitting around at ambient temperature-and-pressure for a few years. A residential dishwasher, while not able to clean as well, will be able to start up just fine after years of disuse; which is more what you want in a house or apartment that might go years sitting empty.
I really would like one of the bar water jets they use for cleaning the mixers/shakers, tho!
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4415363
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3969534
https://www.printables.com/model/172705-bosch-blender-coupli...
You could try printing it yourself, or using a 3D printing service to get a replacement. It would be interesting to see how different material options hold up.
FDM printed parts are inherently much weaker than injection molded ones, simply it breaks very easily between the layers. Even if you print it in the right direction it will be much weaker. Maybe parts printed with continuous glass fibers could hold up with the original part, which was crap in itself.
Until there are affordable printers that can print metal this will be crap by design. Or I could buy a CNC that can work with steel :)
Best move ever! Our Kitchen Aid mixer, for example, is metal construction, has servicable motor parts, and just works. Well, it did get glitchy a month or two back. I took it apart, saw flour everywhere. Hit it with compressed air, greased up some things, cleaned the motor brushes and mating parts, put it back together and it's like new!
Toaster, blender, can opener, all the same deal. When I get them, I do a quick test and refurb on them. Doesn't take long, and often I can get parts, depending on what it is. Once I know the device, I feel like I can depend on it. And going used = ultra cheap. It's kind of crazy how cheap.
And these things are simple. They have the features they need to and that's kind of it. Attachments are not hard to find either.
Worst case it's a bad call. Oh well, try again.
I am so tired of "cheap" stuff breaking.
Or my new hated phrase "ready to ship" on store websites, in other words they don't have it. Why would I get it shipped to them and then have to call when I can just order it direct.
Between crap quality, apathetic store staff, and no inventory it's become a pain to buy anything locally or online even just a regular toaster.
Plus the company introduces a wait. No blame on hot wheels, they (I think, not sure but want to believe) try to live up to being a cool toy. Good gift. They want to be a good gift, like get a kid saying "Ohhhhh, damnit I mean gosh-darn-it, sorry, hot wheels cars, real cars, wow oh wow oh wow oh wow!" Jumping up and down. But it's still a wait. So the problem is, reminiscing upon childhood, children make promises to themselves about holding out until birthdays and Christmas. So if they break that promise with themselves because a "company" (what's that?) "makes an error" (like on a test?) then it's like...nah, "I'm not a happy kid."
If it's your hobby to cook more elaborately, of course, you still end up in the position of having no quality options. But if you're dealing with something sufficiently disposable, maybe it makes sense to lean into it. Everyone who writes or draws regularly has extra stationary supplies, for example - but not everyone goes down the route of getting a converter fountain pen and filling it with bottled ink. The extra packaging of a disposable pen body is waste, but the all-in-one nature of it makes it portable, fungible.
I actually made an attempt to calculate what it would take to replace everything I seriously use in my home recently - all the cookware, electronics, toiletries, furniture, office supplies, clothes, cleaning tools. I estimate that it would be under $15k. Whatever I have on top of that is essentially just purchases that turned into waste - extra clothes, extra furniture, etc.
So most of my outgoing costs are strictly recurring service charges: rent, energy, food, transport, insurance, etc. We often get appliances in hopes of beating those service charges, but then it turns into junk.
On balance, most things can be done more easily than they used to be with an appropriate mix of product and service. But we also all got on the hedonic treadmill and the promise of living better by buying better. Maybe that's not how to live better.
Same goes for whiteware that's expected to last more than 5 generally.
Shops still somehow sell extended warranties though. Crooks.
I've had exactly the same problem with blenders, several times, where for example a small plastic tab that secures the blender bowl to the motor base snaps off, making the whole thing useless.
It would not be such an issue if these couplings were standardized in some way, so that you could buy a replacement, other than the manufacturer's hugely price inflated spare part.
Contrast the situation with when your PC graphics card or memory stick fails, you can just buy a commodity replacement, rather than junking the whole PC, screen, keyboard.
The more philosophical problem of course is that market capitalism's one incentive is to make profit. Making good products is only incidental to that imperative, and clearly not always a requirement.
As an aside, AIUI there are two Boschs, and 'consumer Bosch' is merely a marketing/branding department.
Of course you might end up wishing for crappy plastic gears over something with enough torque to shear a finger off...
In total I'm in for about $450 and have a powerful blender that should last for at least the next decade.
Why are you being asked to pay for a replacement? Isn’t this covered under warranty?
Also a 90 day warranty is not uncommon
In Australia a 12 month warranty is required. And for “expensive goods” it’s 24 months.
I’m not sure where the line is, but an iPhone certainly falls into the expensive category.
When those battery woes occurred, Apple was required to replace batteries, and they did.
[edit]
It's not quite "Caveat Emptor" but rather "perfect-tender" which still requires the buyer to inspect the items with "reasonable promptness"
I'm not saying this to dunk on Americans. I'm just saying this is a problem that can be addressed with proper consumer protection regulations. Mind you, products will still fail and need to be replaced but this incentivizes manufacturers to aim for 2 years of use rather than 2 months.
Of course the real problem is that the broken device becomes your problem once the legal guarantee runs out and electronics waste is just handled in bulk, disregarding the environmental impact and resource waste. All the long-term damage becomes an externality so companies will optimize for limiting the lifetime of components to the least they can get away with because longer lasting products mean fewer sales.
As I said somewhere else, first buy cheap, if it fails you know better what you really need and can buy the right expensive stuff. If it does not fail, enjoy your luck.
A commercial one is a problem at home unless you make 20 coffees a day because it is going to retain a lot of grinds (not a problem if you have a lot of throughput, it won't go stale). It will also be noisy and big.
A prosumer one should be quite and good for not retaining grinds, but would be bad for commercial as it wont be fast enough (ten times slower), and you you don't want to wait grind for every shot. Also a prosumer one would look nicer probably.
Economically this is almost always the case.
[1]https://www.ge.com/news/reports/done-deal-ge-sells-its-appli...
They're responsible for what they sold when they sold it. The didn't sell responsibility for stealing my food.
In principle especially a wanna-be socialist country like the Soviet Union wouldn't need to participate in capitalist rituals like this.
The store ships it back to the manufacturer, and if they are smart they tear it down and improve whatever caused it to break.
If enough people did this quality would improve.
1. We bought a Bosch hand blender (maxomixx) because it looked sturdy and was priced near the top at the mall -- thought that the brand and the price tag would guarantee that it would last. It broke after 8 months, turns out that the coupling between the mixer and the body is made of plastic that wore off. I called the Bosch service hotline, they told me that the whole body is one "part" that I can buy for ~80% of the original price.
2. Went back to the mall looking for one with metal coupling, turns out there is NONE. All of them are garbage with the same fault point. But luckily there is a wide selection of standing blenders, where some of them had much more massively looking, metal gears. Bought one from Electrolux. It broke after 3 months, this time the bearing on the bottom of the blender cup started leaking the grease into our food...
3. Gave up trying to get a blender from the mall, bought a Vitamix for 7x the price, which we're happy with for the last 3 years.
Yes, there is plenty of planned obsolence out there, and one of the greenest things you can do is buy premium stuff that will last you a lifetime (if you can afford it :/ )