Here’s a lovely british fridge from the 50’s: https://c7.alamy.com/comp/R2K1Y1/original-1950s-vintage-old-print-advertisement-from-english-magazine-advertising-frigidaire-refrigerator-circa-1954-R2K1Y1.jpg
the larger, budget model (250 liters, so about 2/3rd of a current single-door basic fridge) is 152 guineas. For those of you not usally paying in pre-decimal british currency, that’s 152 pounds and 152 shillings or 159,60 decimal pounds. Inflation from 1955 makes that about 2000 pounds/dollar/euros today.
No auto-defrost, no actually closing door, and a barely-adequate temperature controller. It did come in sherwood green though, with a kickass counter top!
It’s like any other luxury.
Back in 1960, minimum wage was $1.00/hour. You could get a meal at a diner for under $1.00 or go to a really swanky place and spend $4.00 or $5.00.
Today, minimum wage is $7.50, a diner meal is $20.00, and a luxury meal is $100.00
You can go out a find a really well build product that will last, but it will cost ten times as much as the one you can afford.
Ah yes, the Sam Vimes’ boots theory
Nope, totally different.
Look at the price of Super Bowl tickets.
First Bowl tickets were $10.00. This year they were going for $6,000.00
Top luxury car in 1960 was $7,500.00 for a sports car and $35,000.00 for a Rolls or Bentley. Most expensive car today is $30 million.
The rich have gotten much, much richer and ‘need’ to spend more so people will notice.
People have mentioned energy use and safety, but adjusting for inflation they were also way more expensive, a washing machine in the 50s was over $1000 in today’s dollars. If you’re willing to spend that much, you can find great reliable appliances with long lives.
You could get something like this: https://c7.alamy.com/comp/3CRWJFN/hoover-washing-machine-magazine-advertisement-1953-3CRWJFN.jpg
For the equivalent of 425 dollars. Note that the “automatic pump” doesn’t FILL your machine, nor does this machine heat the water.
I paid 1K for a Whirlpool 6620.
I am ready to give that money, if the device will last for 50 years. But it is really hard to rely on the machines. Even the best ones may break after a few years.
Lol 1000 doesn’t even get you half way to a speed Queen. You just get the same low end shit except it’s got app or screen that with show you add eventually.
My Miele was €1500, and they are known to be super reliable. They engineer for at least a 20 year life span.
I think I paid around $1200 for my Maytag commercial, not one single problem in the last 5ish years.
I wonder how much that high cost could be reduced by modern manufacturing. Same/similar designs, but modern tooling and logistics.
I mean, they did not have CNC mills back then.
You are paying more for materials and labor though especially RnD
and uses four times the electricity and substances that have been banned since the 80s
…and burns people’s homes down due to lack of safety features.
…and children choke to death from easily removable small parts.
…and people get electrocuted because of a lack of warning label telling them not to use it in the bath.
You say this like it’s a bad thing.
You do see how many mother fuckers are around now a days?
Mmm asbestos
Mmm ya and give me some lead to go with that asbestos please. Best combo
Get that asbestos, lead, microplastics trifecta in ya. You could be unstoppable!
And require regular matinence and still fail
Counter point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
Counter-counter point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpoint
Count pointer:
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Happy cake day
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I don’t think that’s relevant to this post. They aren’t saying that they want to recreate every old patented appliance. I am sure they would be cherry picking just the best ones from that era.
There are good appliances being made now. They’re just much more expensive than the cheap and “midrange” which is usually the cheap stuff with a coat of paint.
Or it’s just the cheap stuff with more “features”, so it actually breaks faster.
Guess how much its gonna cost
That would be relevant if we had no idea why the device broke down. In a plane shot down we can assume it was hit in a place that is critical to flight. We don’t know what took it down. We know the 5 year old fridge is not working because a $3 thermostat has stopped working but the part is not available and the computer onboard will not accept a generic one off the shelf.
You can buy appliances which will last that long, but they cost a lot of money. The reality isn’t that people forgot how to make things durable, it’s that consumer demand is so conditioned by price, most people “prefer” to spend less on appliances they will replace more often.
The average appliance these days is actually significantly cheaper when adjusted for inflation compared to the 60s and 70s.
Especially when it comes to things like Tvs.
“Would you like the extended warranty out to 5 years for an extra $200”
No because that would have made my $600 tv an $800 tv which will be made to look like a piece of crap by a $400 tv in 5 years.
One caveat I would note: lots of people can’t afford expensive, durable appliances.
It’s expensive to be poor.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. … A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. … But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness.
Yes, I’ve heard about that theory. The boot example is good because everyone can relate.
THIS.
This sounds great, I’d love to see an example if anyone has one handy for e.g. kitchen appliances.
Basically commercial grade equipment. A $10k oven/range which is designed to work 15 hours per day non-stop in a restaurant will last forever in your home. All the commercial manufacturers make “consumer sized” versions of their restaurant stuff for high end home kitchens.
I have an old Radio from the 50s - big wooden piece of furniture with a turntable and everything. The plug on that thing is absolutely terrifying, super flimsy and so small you have to almost touch the prongs to plug it in.
The only thing I know close to this is Maytag has a “commercial” washer and dryer line. It’s no frills, made in America, and has a 10 year warranty. That’s the line I chose.
Edit: It’s their Centennial line it’s made with their “commercial technology.”
Speed Queen is also quite good, and honestly LG does pretty well in my experience. A big problem I think is people really wanting matching appliance sets.
You should look at the most reliable brand for each category and go that way, because just because Electrolux makes good washers for example doesn’t mean their ranges or dishwashers are going to be any good.
Embrace the mismatched scratch and dent appliances and you will achieve happiness
People match their washer to their dishwasher? I think if you’re going to do that, the Miele recommendation is probably the way to go.
I’ve gotten 15 years out of a Miele washer. Dryers are hard once they went condensing, though. Best you can get is just one where you can at least clean the lint out.
I do think they are onto something. I just want a dishwasher that washes dishes, a dryer that just dries, a refrigerator that refrigerates. I don’t need another camera and tablet or more “smart” crap in my home, it’s just one more thing to break or need updating. I just need things that work reliablely when I need them to work.
Also, less plastic in the manufacturing material would be great. Just me thinking out loud but it also seems like it would be easier to control the life span by using plastic because you can play with the chemistry to start breaking down at a certain amount of usage and temperature and age.
I want a dishwasher that washes dishes, that I have the schematics to so that I can hook up my own arduino and have it broadcast on MY network when its done. Same for everything else. The internet of things wasn’t a bad idea PER SE, its just that people were dis-invited to owning their technology. We don’t have a culture of repair.
Also just use bimetal temperature instead of making everything be digital, in lot’s of cases you don’t need that much and it is much cheaper to replace single simple cheap component than whole electronic board that costs half the price of new machine. Got dad that works on gastro repairs and this is quite common.
Not every old design was better but some were.
My wife absolutely refuses to give up her early 1970’s GE range. It’s impossible to get parts for it so eventually it’s going to have to be replaced. One of the actually nice features it has is is that all the push button controls are on the range hood. Don’t have to worry about them getting greasy while cooking or little kids turning the burners on.
Sure, but such a start up could pick and choose the good ones, making small alterations when called for.
There is an open source hardware movement underway already, I’m hoping they get to large appliances soon.
A lot of appliances could still be viable, but the best refrigerants are all banned. The modern ones supposedly are better for greenhouse effect, but they actively corrode parts of their closed systems, leading to consistent early part failures.
Was gonna say, I do like th modern efficiencies. I’m waiting for a start up to make a heat pump oven
Heat pumps want low temperature differences, so I’m not sure you’re going to have much luck getting a heat pump oven to 475F/~250C.
I’ve read that it theoretically possible but nobody has spent the engineering time yet
They would cost $5000 each and burn your house down
Nah
Modern laws set power limitations (at least in EU)
Planned obsolescence is a cornerstone of the business model of every large corporation. They’re never going to make a product that could challenge that. And no startup will achieve the volume needed to sell these at a price that’s even remotely realistic.
I think there’s two parts to modern electronics that make them hard to repair.
One is indeed planned obsolescence, companies like apple deliberately making things harder to repair. This is easy to solve, but what’s in it for businesses that only exist to make money when the average consumer is happy to suck this crap up?
But there is a non deliberate side. So many things that used to be modules built with discrete components have been moved to a single chip. Radio parts is an example, they used to requir a lot more external discrete parts and you can now get a single chip doing Bluetooth, WiFi etc with minimal external components.
As more goes to a single chip, it’s single expensive parts that can fail rather than what might have been a single capacitor or resistor failing in a larger circuit.
Of course the planned obsolescence uses this by making custom chips that you literally cannot buy if you wanted to. But there is still a legitimate side to this.
For household appliances you could use some standard microcontroller. Pair that with open source software and you have long-term repairability.
Which is why i think we should explore MHz multi-chip computing more. GPUs like that could still run Quake in 3D back then, good enough to render some 2D interfaces anyway. While the move to monolithic chips is justified by GHz lanes can’t be too long, it also made them harder to create and repair, to the point that almost no competition exists, for peak performance most deskop use doesn’t need anyway.
