Pretty much.

It's always the same story: "well this fridge from 1973 worked fine for over 40 years!"

Yeah, and that fridge cost the equivalent of $2k and would be considered super basic today. Buying a giant one with fancy features everywhere for less than $1k means that they had to cut corners somewhere.

You can absolutely quality stuff. It just costs a lot more and you have to know whatvto look for.

Most manufacturers know that people want the most features for the lowest cost, which is the opposite for durability. But there are still plenty that do the opposite.

What are you looking for?

Then why can you buy long-lasting appliances?

I'll give a simpler explanation: most consumers just don't care about durability as much as they say they do.

Here's a fun experiment you can do: ask a friend of yours how much they would be willing to pay for X appliance that lasts 20 years. I guarantee that number will be well below what that kind of appliance actually costs.

My wife's family thinks I'm insane for much I spent on my appliances even though I tell them it will last until I'm retired. And they are not poor.

Durability/longevity are one of those things that people talk about but never put their money where their mouth is.

Planned obsolescence isn't a thing. It is a myth.

I am an engineer and I know dozens of other engineers across multiple industries. None has ever been asked or told to make things fail faster.

Even your own example doesn't really work: the lighting industry moved from incandescent to LED despite LED lasting much much longer. According to planned obsolescence that cannot happen.

It doesn't even make sense: if I have something that breaks immediately after buying it, why would I go out and buy from the same manufacturer? It just sends people to their competitor.

You can also find long-lasting appliances or whatever without issue. Again, planned obsolescence says that shouldn't happen either.

Any commercial toaster will have parts for decades.

Fair, but there are other commercial brands as well.

A smartphone that lasts a long time is not going to be cheap. It costs more to make something more durable.

My response was about "swapping antennas" to upgrade to 5g. Cellular radios don't work like that. That's not possible. There are a variety of technical and regulatory hurdles that prevent that from working.

>cheap

>Lasts a lifetime

Yeah, good luck with that.

You can get phones that last a long time but they certainly are not cheap.

The upgradability idea you have for radios is not possible. That is a limitation because of how sensitive modern radios are. You have to certify with identical environments and surroundings.

This should last forever

This is the correct answer.

You could also go with the commercial phones used for things like warehouses where they are expected to get dropped quite a bit.

Oh then for washing machine you're looking at commercial models.

Miele supposedly has really good vacuum cleaners though I've never used them. Electrolux seems to also make some good stuff if you go high end.

I looked at Friedrich air conditioners for some rentals I manage. They are made for industrial environments and can take a beating and last a long time. I ended up being able to repair the old one and didn't need it, but that's what I found as a BIFL alternative that I will get when it breaks next.

You're confusing lifetime with warranty.

No appliance has ever had more than a 5 year warranty as far as I know. Most stuff at a big-box store is just 1 year. Even my "built like a panzer tank" Miele came with 3 years despite it being built to last 20, though I could pay to extend it to 5 years but I didn't see a point.

Warranty just covers things breaking from early failure or something not being put together at the factory correctly. It's not meant to cover the whole lifetime of the appliance.

Even the stuff you mentioned that lasted 15+ years didn't have more than a 3-5 year warranty, guaranteed. You can check yourself.

Like, Toyotas have a 100k mile warranty. Would you expect it to only last 100k miles?

It says 5 years for electronics control, 3 years for mechanical.

No there are plenty of appliances that can last 20+ years, they just cost a lot more so they aren't popular with consumers.

The electronics thing is the same: there's nothing special with making electronics last for decades: it just costs more. Most consumer appliances are a race to the bottom so that's one of the first things where quality can be cut without it being immediately obvious.

If you are buying commercial or a high-end brand, having electronics controls should not be an issue.

Even Speedqueen is abandoning their mechanical controls, but they are designing it correctly. The electronic controls actually have a longer warranty than their mechanical ones.

"BIFL" and "budget" are contradictory to each other. You can't have both when it comes to appliances.

You said that the older ones were direct drive and the newer ones weren't. I assume direct drive is having the motor directly connected instead of a transmission. Both machines have transmissions. If that's not what you meant you'll have to clarify.

Looking at the pictures of the transmissions I agree that it appears that cost saving manufacturing steps were made. Whether that affects lifetime I'm not sure.

If it does affect lifetime, I expect that these will disappear from laundromats pretty quickly in favor of more durable models. Laundromats keep track of this stuff and it will be obvious they cost more to operate.

>If everyone else is cheapening their design to maximize profit, follow the trend to survive. I also think they're coming out with new designs and not spending enough time with research and development.

Well the first problem is that this will kill long-term profits. These are private families that own these brands. They are not beholden to shareholder promises or quarterly promises. German companies are notorious for filling small-volume niche markets like this and just never leaving. I doubt the families are more greedy than they were 50 years ago, nor that german economic policy has changed much during that time either. So again, assuming this is even happening, why now?

The problem is that "everyone" isn't doing it. All you need is one company that doesn't go along for the whole scheme to fall apart. US carmakers already tried this twice and both times some import came in and destroyed them.

I've always heard this "oh everyone is doing it" but I still have no trouble finding durable and long-lasting versions of stuff. If Whirlpool (or whoever) is reducing quality, look elsewhere and I guarantee you'll find it.

>They come out with a new engine/transmission design and by the time they fix all of the problems, they crank out another design and the process repeats itself.

The new designs are for regulatory compliance. They don't do it for fun. You can blame the federal government for this. This has nothing to do with the carmakers themselves (source: I know automotive engineers at 2 of the big 3 automakers).

Same thing for the transmissions. That's all for fuel economy compliance. They aren't doing it for fun or in some vain hope that it will fail and bring repeat business.

You can still find the old engine/transmission designs in developing markets where emissions/fuel economy requirements basically don't exist. Up until recently (like within the past 10 years, I believe), Egypt was making a licensed version of a western car from the 70s.

This is one of the major drivers behind automakers going to EV: fuel and emissions compliance is no longer an issue and they don't need to spend so many resources redesigning stuff.

Miele.

I don't expect to have to replace it until I'm retired and my kids are long out of the house.

They can be better if you are looking in the right places and are willing to pay for it.

But people expect a fridge to always be the same price and never take inflation into account.

How much did this "basic" fridge cost when it was bought? I'd wager the equivalent price today is $2k or more. Most people wouldn't pay more than $500 (well, $1k now because of shortages) for something like this. Well that price difference had to come from somewhere, and it came out of durability and longevity.

Depends on what you're buying and how much you're willing to spend.

In general you want to spend more for fewer features to get the best quality.

Apple does this because they want total control over their ecosystem and that includes control over the hardware. There's a variety of business reasons for this (some reasonable, some asinine), but that's what it is. One reason for this policy is because they are so highly desirable around the world and they are expensive. People will literally buy broken phones, shoddily repair them, and then sell them as new in some bumfuck country somewhere else, and when it stops working they want apple to fix it.

Apple is far from the only company doing this with their products, though most other companies are doing it for other reasons.

And no that is not planned obsolescence. Planned obsolescence (at least in the textbook definition) is designing something to fail sooner or to not function after some period of time. Unless I'm missing something, Apple isn't doing that. They just aren't supporting repair outside of their ecosystem.

The whole concept of causing something to fail quicker in some vain hope that consumers will go back to you to get their next version never made sense to me: if I have an appliance or phone that breaks within a few months, the very last thing I'm going to do is go back to the same manufacturer for a new one. It's just a guaranteed way to drive people to your competitors. The only time it could even work is if you have a total monopoly on that product.

>but they clearly made an anti consumer decision to incentivise throwing your old computer away and getting a new one. Thus, planned obselecense.

Anti-consumer is not the same thing. Those are two totally different concepts. I completely agree that Apple is awful to its customers, but their customers keep coming back so they get away with it. Walmart isn't much different in that regard. But they aren't designing their stuff to fail quickly.

I mean, if they wanted to do planned obsolescence, why even bother with all of this? They could literally just make the phone self destruct at two years on the dot and people would still come around to buy more.

>If your washer is 15 years old then it has the direct drive transmission which is a completely different animal than this one.

What's different about it? I'm looking at the parts diagram for the one I posted vs. the 15 year old one I own and I'm not seeing much of a difference in transmission. I'm not an an expert though so I could be missing something.

>Modern day electronics could have changed that.

I work in consumer electronics. Electronics can easily be made to last decades. All you have to do is go to any factory that is still in business from the 70s/80s and you'll almost certainly still see a lot of original controllers around the place.

The tradeoff is that longer-lasting electronic components cost more money. If you're making something that's only expected to be used for a few years, then yeah the manufacturer will gladly go to lower lifetime parts to save a few cents. The capacitors in most low-cost smartphones are only rated to last about 2-3 years (basically just enough to last a typical upgrade cycle).

>There's been complaints about the electronics prematurely dying on newer Miele dishwashers

Every brand has complaints. Even a 99.99% perfection rate means thousands of complaints when you're shipping millions of units. The expectations are also a lot higher when you spend that much money on an appliance. The questions to ask are 1) were the problems fixed? 2) How difficult is it to service yourself or get parts when it's out of warranty? Miele is good on #2. I've only dealt with Miele support once (over something the installer did wrong) and they were way better than any other customer support I've dealt with.

It's possible they went down in quality, I suppose, but why now? They've owned this market segment for over a century and are privately owned. There isn't an incentive for them to suddenly change gears.

It was never a guarantee. You can buy something expensive and have it still be crap.

However the reverse is patently false: you can't cheap out on cost and end up with quality. It is impossible to buy quality without spending more money for something like this.

We have example of stuff lasting 20+ years in today. This isn't a lost art. There are companies that still make quality stuff, especially since commercial businesses rely on these. Ive designed stuff that is sitting on shelves right now and I know how the business works.

If you don't want to believe that, that's on you, but you're just making things hard on your self for no reason.

OK, so 6 gallons and 10kWh instead of 1 gallon and 2 kWh.

Not really significant in terms of household use.

Same in my Miele.

I'm of the opinion after reading thread after thread of this over years that people are just buying junk and then get disappointed with it.

And then when you point this out to people, they downvote you and say you don't know what you're talking about