Boots theory yes, but there also seem to be a paradox of reliability of cheap things.

Manufacturers which are aiming at being dirt cheap and selling lots of products, have low margins and simply cannot afford too many replacements / warranty repairs. High margin products don't care, they could make you three in that price and still be ok.

The issue is that the 10k fridge is not actually any better.

The "luxury" appliances can be double that and are still shit.

Not quite accurate as a blanket statement. Munro did a very detailed tear down series of a sub zero refrigerator that’s very interesting. Youtube link: https://youtu.be/KAYj6m9QtDU

I wish more content like this existed. It’s the only type of review that is worth paying attention to.

Long story short if you live in an energy market like california the energy savings of the sub zero will likely offsets its additions cost over the lifetime of the unit.

It's so crazy that even though California is in some ways the center of the technology universe we have had a dysfunctional electrical grid and market for decades. This has been an ongoing governance failure across multiple administrations and political parties. If we ever want to build stuff here and cut the cost of living then cheaper electrical power is a necessity.

It's a little funny that, by far, the worst power and internet I've ever had [0], both by cost and by quality, has been in the Bay Area. The easiest way I'm aware of for me to cut my internet bill in half, cut my power bill 4x, have 30 fewer days per year containing electrical outages, and get back up to normal fiber speeds is to move to the Midwest.

[0] Excluding anywhere I lived for less than a couple months, like the middle of the Pacific or an exceptionally rough road trip through Wyoming.

When was that? Lots of people have solar here, we’ve had maybe 2 power outages for an hour or so in the last decade, and I pay $60 for 10Gbps fiber. Sure, electricity’s cheaper in the Midwest. We’re not exactly deprived of it in the Bay Area though.

Here and now, for the last nearly a decade. I pay $70/mo for, on a good day, 20Mbps down, 100Kbps up, 400ms ping, with a data cap. I have at least two major power outages each year and dozens of minor incidents (with the general quality -- phase stability, surges, etc being less than elsewhere I've lived even when it's working). Good utilities are localized in the Bay.

I see three videos and I don't see any mention of how much electricity they use?

Looking up the fridges myself, a Sub-Zero BI-42UFD/O is rated at 693kWh yearly, and a Frigidaire FG4H2272UF is rated at 671. There's no difference.

Depends if it's luxury or commercial. Commercial products are generally able to be fixed, but there is a quite a price premium on them.

Commercial and consumer dishwashers are only the same in that they're both called "dishwashers" and use water. The former expect little to no food, have cycles measured in minutes, and run at temperatures that would eat more sensitive dishes alive.

You were close.

A commercial dishwasher will cut right through amounts of food that a normal residential dishwasher wouldn't touch (pre-wash is more for efficiency and to keep crap from piling up in the bottom tray of the dishwasher) and it will actually be ever so slightly less harsh on whatever goes in it (plastics are the problem mostly) because while it washes and rinses way hotter it doesn't have a stupid heating element that runs to dry things.

It will also use fucktons more water and more power and make more noise.

Haven't worked in a commercial kitchen, and I've been wrong before (in this chain, no less), but how would the water be hotter without a heating element? Consumer dishwashers are plumbed into the hot water, so it can't be a difference in a direct hook-up. Without it's own heating element, I wouldn't assume it has its own built-in and ready-on-demand hot water tank, either.

My last guess is more frequent cycles, meaning hotter water already at the spigot / dishwasher outlet, similar to the consumer recommendation to run the hot water for a minute prior to starting the dishwasher?

Plastics / tupperware were actually what I had in mind lol

Some dishwashers blow hot air to dry, some get the rinse water extra hot, some do neither.

If they're talking about the water being hotter, but not a "stupid heating element that runs to dry", then it sounds like they mean the hot air.

At least the commercial ones I've been using on and off do not have a drying cycle at the end of the program; they just steam the heck out of whatever is inside, then once the cycle is through, you are expected to remove the tray with whatever you were washing and let it air dry on the bench.

This in contrast to the consumer unit at home which heats the interior of the dishwasher for 45 minutes or so after it has done its washing cycle to dry things while still inside the dishwasher.

The water is hotter in a commercial dishwasher. I forget the exact numbers but it's substantially more. What the commercial dishwasher doesn't have is an "oven style" heating element running around the perimeter of the bottom (or somewhere thereabouts) to dry the dishes. Most residential dishwashers have this. This is why some dishes say "top rack only". The water coming out the top isn't any different. It's that you're moving the dish farther from the hot element. So a dish that goes through a commercial dishwasher sees higher average temp but substantially lower peak temp.

for commercial there are 2 options chemical and temp sanitization. From fda food code has to reach 171F to sanitize. most use a inline OnDemand heater with a couple taps so constant temp is close to 170 but will also pipe off steam to do a final sanitize. restaurants will also hand wash their plastics in a 3 sink setup water only needs to be 110F

Commercial products usually require knowledge (expertise?), and have their own limitations. Even repairability can be an issue in a different way.

I don't know for dishwashers, commercial printers are expected to be serviced by the maker or affiliated business and getting parts as a mere peasant can be pretty complex. Surely rich people can just throw money at a contractor, but that's not what we're talking about I think (otherwise having a new one delivered everytime would also just work)

I mean, repairing anything requires knowledge. The problem with most home devices is they are not repairable at all and you can't get parts.

While I'm a computer farmer for my day job, I can repair a vast amount of different devices as long as they don't take specialised equipment like vacuum pumps. And while I don't consider myself a rich person, between my wife and I we're in the higher income brackets in the US, I still service as much of my own stuff as possible. And in general commercial stuff is in the same price ranges as the higher end consumer stuff.

The good/bad part of modern consumer appliances is that they are largely giant computers with fewer mechanical parts to fail. They can be more reliable but when something breaks, it almost always requires replacing a main board that costs 25-50% of the replacement cost of the entire unit.

I've had two boards die on appliances this year. Fortunately, warranty coverage paid for the parts. So now I have a practically new refrigerator and furnace. At least until they fail again in 3-5 years.

The old fridge had much smaller usable volume inside. Modern insulation allows for thinner walls which increases capacity. Same for modern ovens.

> you can still find fridges in that price range today with a similar value proposition

Does anyone have examples of consumer fridges like this?

sub-zero or thermadore maybe?

Parents have a sub-zero that’s over 20 years old and in good condition, no idea if the new stuff is as well built.

Miele still has a good reputation, and you’ll pay for it. https://www.mieleusa.com/category/1022129/refrigerators-and-...

Is Liebherr not a thing in the US? At least in Europe all the Miele fridges are basically Liebherr with different interior setup and the Miele logo slapped on them. No smart things, unless you buy the smart box that you can attach, but otherwise they are quite reliable and solid.

I wonder if those expensive fridges are any more serviceable. I'm guessing someone with $10k to spend on a fridge doesn't care how easy it is to fix because they'll never do it.

I'm not sure about that. The issue that I'm having is that if I could spend $10,000 and not have fridge issues for 10, 15, 20 years I might be tempted.

The problem is that there might be problems with the equipment or problems caused by the installer.

A few years ago, we ended up replacing a Sub-Zero fridge (27 years old) with another one because the repair bills were mounting. Because of the way the previous owner did the kitchen, using any other kind of fridge other than the 2' deep, 7' high kind would have involved remodeling. It wasn't quite $10k but it was close.

At our new house, we had a repairman fix the ice maker in our current fridge. It's 17 years old and could have come off the floor at Best Buy or Home Depot (NOT a Sub-Zero, in other words) but he recommended keeping it until it failed because the quality of current appliances is not as good.

Our water heater is going to need to be replaced because it's 17 years old and showing signs that it's getting too old. I want a heat pump water heater because the gas water heater is the only gas-powered appliance we have. Trying to assess reviews of heat pump water heaters and of the local plumbing companies is not fun.

>I'm not sure about that. The issue that I'm having is that if I could spend $10,000 and not have fridge issues for 10, 15, 20 years I might be tempted.

What kind of fridge issues are you having? I just buy a $1000 Miele/Liebherr and it's fine for 10+ years. 0 repairs.

Maybe we need a new boots theory:

The rich person buys a $3500 pair of boots that comes with surveillance, useless AI, and bricks itself on the next firmware update.

The poor person buys a pair of boots, that are... boots.

It's hard to make the right boots analogy (try it yourself if you think you can), but to speak of fridges —

• The rich person's remodeller (or the developer of the house they buy) buys a commercial-kitchen prep fridge for the house's kitchen. This is a big, powerful, durable, repairable, no-frills, utilitarian fridge, that could be viewed as attractive or ugly depending on your opinion on brutalism. The rich person never sees this fridge. It's kept in the butler's pantry and only their private chef ever touches it.

• The rich person's interior designer then buys an elegant/classy half-sized in-wall glass-door fridge to live in the kitchen itself. This is intended for the rich person's household staff to keep constantly stocked with snacks and drinks for the rich person to grab. (Also, if the rich person thinks they want to cook one day, the staff will prep the exact ingredients needed in advance, keeping them in the butler's pantry until called for, but will then stage any "must stay cold" ingredients here.) This fridge is generally a piece of shit, made with huge markups by companies that make fancy-house furniture. But it sure is pretty! If (when) it fails, the staff can temporarily revert to just serving the role of that fridge, running to the butler's-pantry fridge or other cold-storage area (maybe a walk-in!) when the rich person wants something. (Also compare/contrast: in-wall wine cooler.)

• The rich person's household staff might respond to the rich person's request for more convenient access to snacks/drinks in certain areas of the house by buying + keeping stocked one or more minifridges. There'll certainly be one in the house's bar. (There's always a bar.) These are sturdy commercial-grade bricks, built by the same companies that build the ones that go into hotels; but these companies serve rich people just as often as they serve hotels, so they tend to have an up-market marque that makes the fridge look fancy while reusing the well-engineered core.

Parent was funny but almost a non-sequitor.

I appreciated the kernel of truth: industrial fridges will not come with adware in the foreseeable future. Buy industrial.

I mean, my point was that there are actually three different ways you can spend a lot of money on a fridge, and it's a lot like with PCs.

You can buy:

• a big ugly powerful repairable/durable industrial one (like a server);

• an average-sized, somewhat-fancy (because high-trim), repairable/durable commercial one (like a workstation);

• or an average-sized fancy "aesthetic" one, made by a design company rather than an appliance company, that isn't repairable or durable (like one of those bespoke "sleeper desk PCs.")

The same goes for most things you can spend a lot of money on. A sound system, a vacuum cleaner, a car, etc. In each of these cases, "premium" has these same three distinct meanings. None of which involve showing you ads. But all of which have their own trade-offs. And all of which are usually quite a bit more expensive (each for their own reasons) than the highest-trim product sold directly to the average consumer by what you'd think of as a "consumer brand."

What are the good brands of commercial/industrial we should be looking at?

I think it depends on the field or industry. I seem to remember seeing commercial TVs by Samsung when we were buying ours. Similar display specs, almost twice the price, no smarts, and 5 years warranty. They were designed for hotels I believe and came with a few features for that. Similarly hospitality aimed brands often are designed to withstand more abuse and cost a bit more. If you like whatever product you encounter or use in a commercial setting, just ask about it. There’s a decent chance you’ll be able to buy something similar.

Oh also, for vacuums at least, shop vacs are apparently the way to go. And for audio, DIY beats the pants off anything commercial (unless you don’t mind spending thousands of dollars more).

For fridges? True Manufacturing.

I once bought a commercial dishwasher. It cost twice as much used as a domestic dishwasher would have cost new, and I had to add a 220 outlet and run some new plumbing; but the kitchen in that house had no space for a normal dishwasher, so I had to be creative. I put the big machine on my back porch, just outside the kitchen door: it was ugly, loud, and absurdly fast. Once it came up to temperature, it could wash a tray of dishes in three minutes flat. Great for cleaning up after dinner parties. It was certainly a kind of luxury, in a brute-force way.

Buying industrial works in many circumstances:

- consumer kitchen mops break in 1-2 years. Get the commercial one for 2x and it lasts

- my bike is locked to an 25mm thick toughened steel industrial eye-bolt (set into concrete) which cost < $10. A consumer item intended for that purpose costs ~$70

You're talking about a _very_ rich person, there. Most merely rich people don't have household staff.

If you can't afford a household staff (even just a single person), you aren't actually rich. Very well off perhaps but not rich.

"You are so poor that when AWS goes down, you still can get into your house" -- seen somewhere

Which phase of capitalism is this? Suffering costs extra, and you'll gladly pay for it!

"As the Party slogan put it: ‘Proles and animals are free.’" - 1984

Isn't that reversed now? You can only afford the device that is subsidized by the analytics you will be generating for them while the rich person can afford to by the non-subsidized version.

No, these are US$3500 fridges.

$3500 is about 1/3 of the cost of a "rich person" fridge.

There's quite a spectrum of richness. I think my fridge cost US$100 used. This new 199-liter model costs US$280 new: https://www.mercadolibre.com.ar/heladera-philco-top-mount-ci...

So US$3500 is 12 times the cost of a poor-person fridge (excluding used fridges and "oh, I just go over to my mom's house") and ⅓ the cost of your rich-person fridge, which puts it much closer to the latter.

But I wouldn't be surprised if Wolfgang Puck or Gordon Ramsay has a custom walk-in fridge that cost a lot more than US$10k.

A truly rich person has never seen their fridge.

Certainly, the truly rich person has never seen the main fridge their staff uses to store the ingredients for their meals.

But said rich person has at least one more fridge: a relatively-small, usually very elegant (in-wall, glass-door) fridge, located in the [badly designed for cooking, but pretty] "kitchen" that adjoins the butler's pantry [= nearest, usually secondary, real kitchen].

They use this "kitchen" to whimsically prepare avocado toast when hosting "guests" (e.g. people from Architectural Digest); or when vlogging / hosting their reality TV show about all the cooking they love doing. (At any other time, e.g. when hosting actual guests, if they want to make use of this kitchen [rather than simply speaking in their lounge until dinner is served in their separated dining room], it won't be by cooking there themselves, but rather by sitting around the kitchen island or the [probably open] secondary dining arrangement nearby, watching their private chef cook there, while they or their assistants try desperately to cover for how gimped their workflow is by having to use the faux-kitchen.)

And of course, even if the rich person does some whimsical/performative hobby cooking, the staff will have prepped and mise-en-placed anything they'll need from the butler's pantry onto the (huge) kitchen island in advance. (Like a cooking show!) So even then, they won't be needing the "kitchen" fridge. With the extreme edge-case exception of needing something to stay cool until the very moment it's needed; or needing to repeatedly chill it (think "making croissant dough", though I doubt a rich person would ever try.)

This reads like fiction rather than informed ethnography.

I think I've only been in one hectomillionaire's kitchen, though it can be hard to tell, and the only resemblance to your description is that he had a large household staff. But it wasn't his main house, and I don't know if you consider someone who isn't even a billionaire to be "truly rich".

Honestly, it's mostly just my impression of how things work after watching a lot of https://www.youtube.com/@ArvinHaddadOfficial 's mansion design reviews.

I'm guessing that most rich people do not want the inside of their mansions to appear on a YouTube channel, especially one about mansions. Most of these mansions do not cost even US$100M and so probably do not belong to truly rich people.

> I'm guessing that most rich people do not want the inside of their mansions to appear on a YouTube channel, especially one about mansions.

1. He doesn't film these walk-throughs himself. Real-estate agents film walk-throughs of these places to try to get them sold (it's well worth it for the commission they'll make), post them publically, and then he reviews those videos.

2. The homes in the walk-throughs are always vacant; there are no actual rich people involved to worry about their privacy. (They do almost look lived-in, yes, but that's all stuff that comes with the house. Not even staged; a lot of it is "design flourishes" added by the developer to match the architectural style.)

> Most of these mansions do not cost even US$100M and so probably do not belong to truly rich people.

When this guy records a review, it's to point out the flaws in a property's architecture + developer-furnished interior design. (Because that's the professional service he offers to his clients: inspecting properties for design flaws that lower the place's perceived resale value. His videos are a demonstration of that service.)

Thus, due to needing something worth spending 10 minutes talking about, the mansions he bothers to cover are always the ones that are badly designed.

My understanding is that these mansions exist in markets, and are built at scales, such that they actually should cost a lot more than they do. But their bad design has caused them to sit on the market for a long time; and that means the seller often gets desperate and lowers the price. (This isn't speculation; he often covers the market offer-price + resale-price history of a property as well.)

That being said, they still have all the features a truly-rich-person mansion should have. That stuff repeats over and over; you recognize it like MVC in software. These places are just the architectural equivalent of spaghetti code, putting things in inconvenient arrangements (I recall a recent review of a property where you had to walk down three hallways and cross two great rooms to get from the dining room to the nearest bathroom), stacking things so that rooms you'll spend a lot of time in don't have a great view (another property built into a hill made two bedrooms sub-grade with window wells, rather than just putting the bedrooms on the other side under the living room, where they'd get a panoramic picturesque view), and so on.

A lot of truly rich people live in houses that haven't been on the market for generations, or centuries, or ever. The particular hectomillionaire's vacation home I spent a few months in wasn't one of those (he's self-made) but also didn't have the kinds of features you're talking about at all. No separate hidden "main fridge", no butler's pantry, no second kitchen, no kitchen island, no great rooms, no panoramic picturesque views. It did have a dining room and bedrooms, though. It had been built as a small hotel, so it had five bedrooms (on the upper floor), an atrium, and a small swimming pool. From the street it just looked like a regular house. You could walk from the bedroom overlooking the swimming pool down the hall, down the stairs, down the other hall and dining room, across the patio, up the other stairs, and into the last bedroom, in about two minutes.

My in-laws live near but outside of a community that has been vacation homes for the 0.5% for over a century. Those homes never go "on the market". The owners will quietly put the word out and a year later someone new is spending a month of their summer there.

It used to be industrial powerhouse families. Today, it is more likely to be a hedge fund manager.

I've been in billionares vacation houses (like several of them in an area, not one billionares multiple houses).

They're pretty conventional.

Having been closely acquainted with a woman worth north of a billion dollars, and having met a number of people that are worth probably at least hundreds of millions, I can tell you the kitchen experience for the wealthy (maybe barring like top 10-100 billionaires) is really frankly kind of pedestrian. Are the kitchens nicer? Yeah sort of, I have fixed a bunch of stuff on a couple of certified real money mansions, and a lot of it is gimmicky stuff, some of it is good heavy expensive stuff, but honestly nothing that's doing some sort of extra magic a whole lot better than all of the plain old Whirlpool kit in my own home. Do they have help? Yeah for cleaning, and sometimes from what I've seen the one or two people helping around the house will help cook, but they're not dependent on it and it's more a "hey we're cooking for family, I need to delegate", as well as the sort of person I've met with that kind of money tends to skew much older anyways.

Maybe some nerds in silly valley like to larp as 1800s rich people with actual large numbers of staff, I don't know, but the regular old very wealthy (the sort you don't know who they are, and I think they prefer it that way) live what you would probably consider mostly very pedestrian lives. More trips? Yes. Multiple homes in nice places? Yes. A couple of nice cars and a (reasonably sized) boat? Usually. Chartered flights? Absolutely. An army of staff and never doing even basic shit themselves? Nope and no on the doing basically nothing unless they're really geriatric (and then can you blame them anyways).

It sounds like you're describing idle-rich people. Which makes sense.

Yeah, if you're "rich" as in "retired", your life is usually pretty mundane. Most such people don't even live in any kind of mansion these days†, but rather just in very nice homes that are perfectly-sized and perfectly-cozy for them and what they like to do — with some verrrry long driveways, if they're in the right part of the country for that.

† (Mansions as a concept evolved from palaces; both exist mostly to provide enough rooms to host guests when some other rich person decides to pilgrimage themselves and everyone they know over to your place to stay for three months — in turn because that was really the only good way to visit someone with full amenities, back before air travel. Nobody needs to do that these days. Any modern mansion exists either as a status symbol, or because the owner likes hosting parties [or imagines they might one day host a party, but never actually does]. Mansions are especially useful, in the modern day, for people who throw fundraiser galas, like politicians.)

> Maybe some nerds in silly valley like to larp as 1800s rich people with actual large numbers of staff, I don't know,

I don't think it's SV people doing this. (The SV entrepreneurial "grindset" is a form of protestant work-ethic mindset; most tech millionaires find it hard to allow themselves to have staff. They might have a lot of people on retainer — lawyers, personal trainers, private-practice doctors, etc — but they would find the idea of paying the full salary for the exclusive use of even a maid to be a bit strange, instead preferring to just "hire a service" for that. Right up until they have a security scare, that is... but I digress.)

Rather, the personal-staff (private chef, limo driver, landscaper, several maids, etc) setup is, these days, something for the busy rich — think "runs ten businesses because they don't know how to stop", or "has an infinite queue of people needing them to make a decision about something" [politician, chaebol owner], or "thrives on fame, and so can't stand to turn down packing their schedule with ever-bigger gigs" [celebrity actors]. You find it in LA and in DC, not in SF.

These groups "have people" because they literally wouldn't be able to fit self-care into their schedule without "people."

The fridge example is an interesting problem. A middle class person would probably be much better off just buying a used or cheap fridge. ~$100 - $1000. It will last as long as the $3500 - $5000 fridge and will cost a fraction as much. (and due to not being premium-aka-huge will be much easier to cart inside and outside of your house when it does break down.)

In _principle_ the truly rich person would be better off with a really expensive fridge. Except the chances that it performs better or lasts longer are tiny. So for 4x-10x the price, you have no improvement. The only way to improve your outcome is to spend enough time doing research such that you can figure out if _any_ refrigerators aren't pieces of crap. A for-real rich person has more money than time, so this isn't worth it either. Yes, they might settle on the first fridge that's available and looks nice -- and this _could_ be a premium fridge -- but they really don't get any benefit from a premium fridge either. ie, there's nothing to really push them from a $2k fridge to a $5k fridge unless it's just something like capacity.

In other words, poor-to-middle class should NEVER buy a premium fridge -- but only because the market is terrible and "premium" _usually_ does not mean "more reliable." (if premium meant "much more reliable" then they should buy premium when they can afford it, as it would cost less over time due to longevity.) However, a rich person also accrues almost no benefit from a premium fridge, as the real cost to them is research time and not money.

So, who are these products for? Probably middle class people who want to _appear_ rich.

Sometimes buying a longer-lived fridge for more money is still a bad bargain. If the short-lived fridge lives 20 years and the longer-lived one lives 100 years, the longer-lived one is a bad bargain if it costs twice as much, at any discount rate over about 3.34%. If it costs 4×, it's a bad bargain at any discount rate over 0.59%. At a 3% discount rate, the 4× fridge is a bad bargain even if you have to replace the short-lived fridge every 10 years.

However, probably the major cost of fridge failures is not replacement but the destruction of the fridge contents. A friend of mine recently lost their freezerful of food. Apparently after a power outage the freezer forgot whether it should be a freezer or a regular fridge and defaulted to "neither". This is an example of a "premium" feature making the freezer worse.

There's a midwit bell curve meme lurking here...

Not that dissimilar to Wirecutter's advice on appliances: either buy the cheapest of the cheap because it'll have the fewest parts that can break, or the most expensive since it'll be built with high quality components and hopefully be repairable.

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/modern-appliances...

The cheapest appliance is definitely cheap, whereas you generally have to take on trust the quality of the most expensive. The rule of thumb I use is "you don't get what you don't pay for", which is not the same as "you get what you pay for".

The rich person goes to an exclusive London cobbler who spends 11 days carving out a model of his feet, one for left and one for right, out of expensive hardwood. Once complete, a team of masters and apprentices carefully craft him bespoke shoes out of premium leather (straight from Italy!). When finished, the shop calls his assistant and has them delivered. It only costs about $40,000.

You, the poor person, spend $150 on crappy Nike athletic footware, that isn't sized to fit, will fall apart in 6 months (3 if you're using them for actual athletics), but are unfashionable in 3 weeks (but you'll buy them for your middle school children anyway). And you'll think you're rich doing it. Never mind that the cost was $4.75 (up x2 what it was pre-Covid) in Bangladesh, plus $0.30 shipping across the Pacific. The sweatshop worker got a cut of $0.04 for the pair.

The analogy doesn't work though, because people nowdays are paradoxically even stupider than they were in Victorian times.

It's probably more like a rich person will spend $50 on a pair of boots that will last 10 years, while a poor person will spend $10 on a pair of boots that will last a year. The upper middle class person will spend the $40 on a pair of boots that comes with surveillance and useless AI, while a middle class person will spend $30 for the same, except it bricks itself on the next firmware update.

where, outside of thrift stores, are you finding boots at these prices?

That’s actually roughly the price range to manufacture normal shoes. “The average production cost of a single pair of shoes ranges between $10 and $50. This includes materials, labor, and overhead.” https://hevashoeinc.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-manufacture...

What you actually pay is a large multiple of that covering the taxes, shipping, sales channel, marketing, etc.

Boots and shoes are interesting because they're genuinely an area where premium materials and construction _could_ significantly improve how long they last. We're talking 1-2 years for "normal" boots and decades for $500+ boots (with re-soling) There's also a good middle ground here. I'm not saying everyone needs really expensive boots, but it nice that you can actually spend more money for higher quality rather than a horrible system on a chip that fails after a year and renders a whole product useless.

This is true of most products, actually.

My point was more along the lines of the fact that below a certain price point, you can't be sure whether you're paying $3500 for actual build quality and features or marketing. A $500 fridge could last forever, or it could last exactly as long as the (very short) warranty period. Also, cheap stuff may last forever in some ways, but it's been cost optimized in a million different ways that make it more annoying to use. In my case the compressor is fine, but the plastic interior has some inexplicable cracks in it and the feet broke off. But at least it will never advertise to me.

I got another way of looking at it: it's not worth it having appliances that last 20 years, because in that time the tech itself can and does improve a lot.

Ready example is my aunt: a very good and expensive Miele washing machine, that was made to last as things were before. But now 10 years have elapsed and modern washers come with bigger drums, much lower noises, optimized water and electricity usages, and more effective washing patterns.

But she's stuck with her old and trusty one, because she feels that it's working "like new". And she's not wrong, it works well, so it became a sort of a "golden cuff" so to speak (not knowing any better metaphor). So good and expensive, that now getting rid of it for a new one feels like a waste of money for not much gain.

Maytag/Whirlpool washing machines in the past 10 years come with nylon hubs instead of the metal hubs they used to have. The splines wear out quickly and you’ll need to replace it. Most people will just buy another machine.

> it's not worth it having appliances that last 20 years

Think John Deere tractors as well as adware refrigerators.

That one is sunk cost, I think golden handcuffs are for highly compensated employment.

Sunk Cost is usually something we encourage people to avoid, but in the case of the capital infrastructure of your home, we have to factor depreciation. The aunt is not likely going to re-sell the washer for market value (like a car). It would be recycled when the new more high tech model comes in. A total loss.

She’s not stuck with her appliance unless she has FOMO anxiety, she paid for her appliance once and if it’s still working then all is good. Marginal improvements don’t justify buying the same thing over and over.

Counterpoint: some appliances reach "good enough" status and the only "improvements" are cost-cutting that makes them more fragile or less reliable.

My friend has a microwave from the late 70s. The time/power are set by turning knobs - no fiddling with a bunch of buttons and modes - the turntable is metal so it can't break. The only thing I would consider missing is a popcorn mode, not a big deal.

Edit: Another great example is toasters. Toasters have not gotten better in my lifetime and older toasters are probably more reliable than what I could buy today.

Inverter microwaves are a noticable improvement over regular microwaves. True variable power instead of time slicing means I can precisely heat up almost any food evenly all the way through.

I often want to set my microwave within 5 seconds for small items, so no knobs for me please. And I like having a delayed start option. Modes never happen without me asking for them.

We have a high end bosch (the absolute best model of the best brand the year we bought it), and it’s been wonky for three of the five years it has lasted so far, and now rubber noiseproofing is falling out and the racks are rusting through / breaking.

Definitely keep the old dishwasher till it dies.

(The bosch is quiet and cleans well, fwiw. The magic heat free drying minerals are nice. It’s a shame they’ll be in a landfill in a few years.)

Direct drive models are a little quieter. Modern drums are slightly larger. Many people live where there is plenty of water, so increasing water efficiency isn't very valuable. It's not worth increased fabric wear or energy consumption!

There isn't much gain. That's the point! She's got a device that's nice to use, repairable, is well-designed, and isn't serving her ads. She's fine! Really. If she wants a new washer, Miele washing machines hold value and can be resold.

She probably doesn't think about it, which is the real gift. She's free to think about literally anything else! I have an extension to the Vimes boot theory, where you don't even notice your boots when they're working like they're supposed to. Most of us aren't enlightened enough to notice and appreciate that our feet are dry. This reduced cognitive overhead increases capacity for creativity and play, which further amplifies the life outcomes of people buying cardboard-soled boots vs leather boots.

I have a similar dilemma with my car. I drive a 25-year old Lexus with a bizarre electrical glitch. The ABS sometimes goes off as you come to a stop, for no reason at all. It only ever happens below ~10mph, and only when decelerating gradually. Never happens under heavy braking. It's not a safety hazard, and honestly you get used to it. Yet, anyone who test drives this car will run for the hills because it feels spooky.

It's still a terrific car. Comfortable, well made, fast enough for all practical situations. Unusally low mileage for its age. An engine that's sought after in the tuner community. But, it's unsellable. I'm stuck with it, whether I like it or not.

The good news is that I like it. The funny news is that I took a new job that will move me to the Bay, and whatever my new employer is paying to move my car out there is definitely more than my car is worth.

Check your wheel speed sensors.

I've had 2 dealers and an independent mechanic check them, and they all swear the wheel speed sensors appear to be reading just fine. One dealer has a crusty old Lexus-specific diagnostic tool that indicated it may be the ABS control module, which is a part that hasn't been made in over a decade.

why not fix it?

Do you really believe that a newer washer actually somehow makes clothes appreciably more clean? Quieter, perhaps, and maybe a little less water, but so much so that you'd ever notice if a persons clothes came out of a multi-decade old machine that's in good shape versus a new one, I would wager you'd never notice, and frankly every generation of machine I've owned, even the expensive ones manages to get worse, harder to repair, and last less and less time. If you've got something that works and doesn't require a dozen elves at some factory in Shanghai or Berlin to do ancient satanic rituals just to replace a knob or repair a switch, I think you'd be crazy to get rid of it.

Theoretically it would hold its value and there would be a secondary market. Then she'd pay for the upgrade and not an entirely new machine. I wonder if that's the case for Miele.

> rebrands of Chinese conglomerates

Eh, I've got a very reasonably priced Haier fridge that I've had no issues with at all. Maybe I'm just lucky, and it definitely helps that there's no built in ice maker or water dispenser (those things seem to break first) but it's lived longer than the refrigerators that the rest of my family have.

Miele did the best advertising ever, and I believe it even got a news story. A woman had been using their washer for 25years and Miele reached out and asked if she wanted a new one for free, for no other reason than to upgrade. Iirc she declined as the one she had worked perfectly. I have a vacuum from them, a cheap model, been working for 12 years so far. It’s probably the only appliance brand I would trust, even if I’m sure they have bad stories too.