Everything's broken and nobody's upset

Re:Everything's broken and nobody's upset by jws on Monday September 17, 2012 @09:52AM (#4532535)

We will have perfected it when you can again expect them to last 20 years without failure and at failure there is a diagnostic code that tells which reasonably priced part needs to be replaced.[1]

They are probably optimized now, but not for the consumer's benefit.

Also, people's thoughts on dishwashers vary hugely with the number of people in the household. When I am alone I never use a dishwasher. When in a household of four, always.

EOM

[1] As near as I can tell from family experience, the difference in reliability between the high end brands and the normal brands is that the repair parts are more expensive on the high end.

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Re:Everything's broken and nobody's upset by genwin on Monday September 17, 2012 @11:18AM (#4532936)

> They are probably optimized now, but not for the consumer's benefit.

I suspect you mean they've been optimized for the shareholder's benefit.

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Re:Everything's broken and nobody's upset by maxerickson on Monday September 17, 2012 @12:32PM (#4533338)

It's fun to chase consumer benefit in a circle. At least some of the drive towards more features and low upfront price comes from consumers giving more weight to those aspects of the design (rather than reliability and lifetime cost).

I would still agree that cost optimization has certainly done its part in trampling all over maintainability.

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Re:Everything's broken and nobody's upset by icebraining on Monday September 17, 2012 @11:41AM (#4533064)

Not to plug or anything, but our Miele dishwasher is still working fine after 18 years, and the clothes washer only required a cheap fix a couple years ago.

That said, they're definitively more expensive. We only got them because they came with the house.

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