The main obstacle is that the water is too expensive for anything except for residential usage, and therefore does very little to solve the water shortage in the southwest.

And this is how people get the attitude of "it's all the same so I'll spend the bare minimum to replace it" and then are never able to escape the garbage cycle and then insist that there is no other way.

Listen to this person, because this is exactly right.

Consumers *say* they want long-lasting and durable, but as soon as it's time to open their wallet, they want more features/gimmicks for the price or better aesthetics, or lower price, etc.

There's decades of sales/marketing data that shows this.

This is all consumer-driven. There are high quality versions of everything, and they are consistently low sales, because that market is only like 1% of the population.

A few things:

• The "lightbulb" cartel was to ensure uniformity over consumer bulbs. 1000 hours was chosen as the best compromise between lifetime and brightness. There were still 10k bulbs made and sold by members of the "cartel". You could still buy long-lasting stuff. Also and as an aside, it's always funny to me that the only proof anyone can offer of planned obsolescence is an industry cartel that hasn't existed since before WW2. Literally nothing else.

• Apple solders the ram directly to the board because it's cheaper. Connectors are expensive. We do the same at my company. It probably saves several dollars per connector. And well, Apple customers just don't enough about it to buy something else that's upgradeable. I know that's not the satisfying answer but that's certainly it: consumers don't care enough to buy upgradeable models from elsewhere.

• As also mentioned elsewhere, I doubt they can get the same thinness with the RAM slots put in. Thinness seems to be what their consumers want, so they are naturally going to focus on that.

>Also, companies that restrict your ability to repair a product is planned obsolescence.

The idea behind that isn't to make it fail faster or sell more. The purpose behind it is because counterfeiting is a huge problem, especially for Apple. There's literally an entire shadow industry that buys broken iphones, puts generic parts in them to make them work again, then resell them, and then when those break because they aren't repaired properly, the people who bought them take them to Apple for repair, which costs them money.

This isn't just for computers: tractors, industrial equipment, aircraft parts, etc are very easy to forge and have some factory somewhere in China make a substandard version for it for less than half the cost. Fake aircraft parts were implicated in some plane crashes in the 90s until regulators clamped down on it.

I'm sure there's a revenue component to the service subscription aspect as well, but again, people aren't willing to buy other stuff over it, so clearly it's not important enough to buyers to go elsewhere.

Again, not a satisfying answer, but that's a large component of it.

>Planned obsolescence is indeed a thing. > >I don't drink coffee but paid around $150 for one of those K-cup coffee makers for my brother just a few years ago.

This coffeemaker isn't a k-cup, so the $150 isn't comparable there.

Here's a drip coffeemaker that's about $150 that should last decades.

>Several months ago, the topic came up, and I asked how his coffee maker was doing, and he said that he is now on his now on his 3rd one, and that they simply stop heating coffee after a couple of years use.

Again, not quite comparable.

Also I said you have to buy a quality maker. There is also overpriced junk out there. Spending more on something doesn't necessarily mean you will always get the best thing, but spending less will always mean you aren't getting quality.

>The same is true for cell phones, televisions, and just about everything we purchase these days.

Consumers don't want durable versions of these. The models that are built to last 5-10 years aren't even in the top 10 selling phones. I doubt they are even in the top 50.

>They are all built in a manner that their parts break down under normal use.

They are built to be cheap. That involves cutting costs. Cutting costs necessarily means quality and durability suffer.

It is impossible to drastically reduce costs and end up with the same durability.

It isn't. I'm an engineer that works on consumer electronics. I'm frequently in meetings that decide the cost of these things.

Most consumers want cheap junk more than they want durability.

I've never been in any meeting where anyone was told to make things fail faster in some misguided attempt to sell more. We are given a cost target because we know many units will sell at each price cutoff and the overwhelming scale is at the lower end.

I also know dozens of engineers across multiple market segments. None has ever been told to make things fail faster.

The whole idea of planned obsolescence doesn't even make sense: when I buy something that breaks immediately or is shoddily made, I don't go out and buy the same thing again.

The whole idea only works if you have a monopoly on the market and literally can't buy anything else. But obviously that's not true since you can find quality versions of whatever you want. It just costs more. Most consumers don't want to spend more. They want to spend less.

You can literally have the long lasting version right next to cheap junk and even tell them that the longer lasting one will last decades, and consumers will still buy the junk one. I know because I've literally done this at the store. Still haven't had a single person I've talked to go for the long lasting one.

Planned obsolescence isn't a thing.

They aren't built as well because consumers want a $20 coffeemaker and that cost reduction has to come from somewhere.

This coffeemaker was $55 in 1985. That is $150 in today's money.

Spend $150 on a good quality drip coffeemaker and you should have one that lasts as long.

FWIW, I just had a similar problem. I needed a bedroom at a higher temperature than the rest of the house because of a disabled relative, but it had to be a consistent temperature.

They have extension cords with built in thermostats but I like something more programmable.

I bought a Philips wiz wifi-controllable plug socket (I already use their bulbs) and I took my ecobee room sensor and put it in the room. Then I used smartthings so it turns on/off the heater based on temperature.

Anyway, not sure on your application but there are lots of options for this.

HVAC people just really hate heat pumps. I ran into the same problem for my rental which is basically the poster case for it (small size, well insulated, Midwestern area)

They never have specific answers to anything. "It just can't do it."

They don't have any response when I say that these are used all over Scandinavia without problem.

Unless the person spoke with has installed one and had specific problems that they can articulate, you can ignore them.

No, they do make them like that, it's just that consumer expectations regarding price have become unrealistic.

Like, how much did that Kenmore Elite sell for brand new in 2003? Plug that into an inflation calculator and I think you'd be surprised at high the price ends up being.

This is also a common feature on many Miele's as well.

Not sure why I've seen it only on German-made dishwashers.

Miele. It's like having a panzer in your kitchen.

You won't find one, at least unless you have it really really dim.

A single dim LED takes about 5mA to light. A single li-ion cell is about 3600mAh. Do the math and that's 720 hours before the battery needs to be charged. At 8 hours a day that's about 90 days.

You would have to get a large battery pack for it to last years, especially with multiple LEDs and high brightness. Or you could light it with like 1mA but it will be so dim that you would only see it if looking straight into it.

One avenue you could try is having a small solar panel with battery. That lets you get away with a smaller battery pack since you'd be recharging it almost daily. That depends on the location and setup though.

Yes, it is.

There's just a lot of people here who don't know what they are talking about pretending to be experts.

Not really. You either buy commercial or you can find which particular brands are fine.

High price doesn't necessarily mean high quality, but low price is a guarantee of low quality.

Planned obsolescence isn't a thing.

Source: am engineer.

To answer your question, they made junk because there wasn't any incentive to make anything good: the economy was closed. You couldn't import anything, so there was no competition. If there were only two TV makers, and no one got fired or lost their jobs because one TV was worse than the other, well it's just a race to the bottom to make it as shitty as possible.

I've used soviet-era stuff. My family lived with it for decades. It was garbage. It's not a coincidence it disappeared or broke shortly after everything opened up.

Sure, but then everything you want to buy will be 2-3x more costly.

You can find long-lasting stuff without issue. It just costs a lot more. Durability costs money.

No it would not have. My family in Hungary had soviet-made junk in the 80s.

It was all garbage. It's why it all disappeared as soon as the economies opened up. No one wanted a TV that takes 10+ minutes to warm up before it can show you a picture. No one wanted a deathtrap car made of cotton composite, no matter how easily it could be fixed with a screwdriver or how long it would last.

To be clear: they were capable of making quality stuff, but that was for export. That typically wasn't available for the average person.

If there is some kind of collusion, then that is a clear and provable anti-trust violation, and anyone at any of these companies can make a lot of money being a whistleblower.

Yet somehow no whistleblower ever seems to show up. No proof is ever offered.

And for the oligopoly idea to work, you feel full cooperation between everyone. As soon as one company doesn't play along the whole thing falls apart.

Since there are indeed no shortage of long-lasting choices, that leads me to think this isn't really a problem.

Engineers are not being told to make thing fail faster. I promise you that is not a thing.

The only proof anyone can ever come up for it is the dumb "phoebus cartel" thing from the 30s. No other proof is ever offered. It also conveniently ignores that you could still buy long life bulbs during that time as well, which planned obsolescence says shouldn't be possible. And as mentioned, which you still didn't address: the lighting industry universally moved to LED. Those last way longer. Planned obsolescence says that's impossible.

The "cartel" was to make a consumer standard: you cannot have both long life AND high brightness bulbs. Those two goals contradict each other. 1000 hours was decided as a compromise, but as mentioned, you could still get 5k or 10k hour bulbs: they were called rough service or commercial. They were also noticeably less bright for the same power hence why they weren't popular.

The idea doesn't even make sense: why would consumers go back to buying the same thing that just broke on them? Like, if I have a washing machine that breaks after 6 months, why on earth would I go out and buy the same thing? The only way this idea ever works is if you have a full monopoly on that item. Otherwise it is just driving people to their competitors.

I know all about it.

It has lasted this long because they have a 60W (or whatever) bulb running at 4W. You can do that just as easily with any new incandescent and also make it last hundreds of years. It will just be barely as bright as a candle just like the centennial light is.

The carbon filament garbage the article talks about has nothing to do with it.

No company made a century bulb. That was never a thing.

What you see are regular bulbs that the owner runs at really low voltage which makes the filament not burn out. They barely put out the same amount of light as a candle.

You can do the same thing with modern incandescents.

My general rule is determine what features you want first. Like what features do you want as a minimum that would make you happy for whatever you buy. Then find the cheapest appliance with those features.

Then take that price and multiply it by 2-3x. That's the actual range you can expect for a durable model with those features.

It's not a perfect rule but it gets you in the general neighborhood.

But in general you will not find durability at low cost. That is a fiction.

Miele dishwasher.

Miele owners will always make sure to notice a Miele appliance in someone else's house and mention it. It's kind of a cult.

Which ones?