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Comment by emodendroket | Hacker News Reader

While planned obsolescence is probably a factor I'd also consider the desire for more complicated features, efficiency requirements, and high (upfront) price sensitivity on the part of consumers. To the last point in particular I think you will find that a refrigerator was way more expensive in real dollars in 1950.

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I think many people won't mind paying a higher price for a longer-lasting product. But there's just no way to know it will really be longer-lasting.

If a manufacturer is confident that their product will last, they can convey this to the buyer by providing a really good warranty.

A really long warranty only helps if the company remains solvent.

I would be happier with something the manufacturer was confident was serviceable. Control boards that approach the cost of a high end smartphone are unreasonable, but also common.

I always had this dream of starting a company where my disruption to whatever industry, say home appliances, or cars, isn't that I'm doing something new, per say, its that I'm engineering everything the company would sell with DIY easy access fixes in mind, and actually publish (and ship with the product) the repair manual so people can just order the parts (with some margin, nothing crazy i'd think) and be on their way. Sell it to the self reliant, tinkers, and generally just people who hate to pay the high cost of repairs on things.

I wonder, truly, if this would be successful. I have no way of even wrapping my head around how to get something like that off the ground.

I think if someone designed and shipped a car, for instance, that was completely serviceable by the owner and designed with that in mind first and for most, you could easily disrupt the car market for a very broad amount of people today.

Many cars are largely DIY-friendly already. I do all of the work on our cars except tires, exhaust, bodywork/paint, and manufacturer recalls.

In the last 15 years, I can only recall one time a car went into a shop for a reason other than the above and that was an independent shop where I was too busy to deal with the job. That's across a Mercedes, a Jeep, a Honda CR-V, and Alfa Romeo, and some classic Mustangs.

There are a few marques that are DIY-unfriendly (hello, BMW), but most cars can be effectively DIY maintained. A DIY-friendly car would not be as disruptive as perhaps you think.

True, but even this trend is slowly changing sadly. Remember when fuel filters used to be inline? Sure, it's still DIY, but it's now no longer safe or easy to change them yourself without relatively expensive equipment, and a prayer you don't break a bolt or strap. Ever tried to change a battery on the reintroduced Beetle? As time goes on, drive by wire becomes more prevalent, etc...cars are slowly becoming harder to repair for the shadetree mechanic. Even the things that are still possible have become, in general, more cumbersome.

Perhaps. However I don't think they were built in mind for maximum owner repairability. I suspect they wouldn't be fighting the right to repair so hard otherwise

Most people never open up their cars though.

I don't think you need to make it easy enough for an average person, but easy enough for a repair person to do repairs in about 30 minutes, so the service call is kind of reasonable.

Combine that with trying to keep parts compatible over years and you would develop a following.

This is how a lot of Sears products worked. When I was a kid we had a little Craftsman tractor, and the entire repair manual and parts were available online. This was also true of their vacuums, and was how I got a $200 vacuum for $20 in college(a belt was broken). You could even buy parts in Sears.

We cleaned up by buying the extended warranty on our dreadful dishwasher. For a modest charge upfront, Sears sent out technicians 5 or 6 times, replaced the electronic control panel, a valve, and the entire washer motor. It took months and months of angry phone calls, but the damned thing works now.

You can purchase an additional warranty for decent money. Handling repairs is still a huge mess and burden - even if you're not paying for them. I read a couple of "four weeks without refrigerator" horror stories. That they happend on the warranty time did not make them any better.

I don't want a good warranty, I want a well working equipment.

Those are pretty much worthless. They usually exclude all the most common reasons the thing would break.

A good warranty from the manufacturer is different, since it incentivizes them to make a product they don't have to repair in the first place. Once you're paying for a warranty, that goes out the window.

I'm willing to bet manufacturers actually went and did market research, and found out the opposite. As if there was a market demand, they would have build and market such products.

Thats always the assumption isn't it? That they already did the research and found no demand for x.

I think if I have learned anything from Silicon Valley though its this: Never assume that these assumptions are categorically true, or that they were undertaken with due diligence.

Perhaps it is true, and there is not enough interest in this to justify it happening. What if, though, they didn't do the market research properly? Or steadfastly, it actually didn't happen at all?

I don't believe this. In Germany, "built-in" home apliances are standard for a modern kitchen. Replacing a built-in refrigerator if it failed would probably cost around 400-600€ (only replacement costs, not talking about the price of the refrigerator).

OMG, the "features". My stove is relatively simple except for 1 part, the one that sets the oven temperature (and the time, but who the hell needs a third clock in their kitchen). That part is a 300 dollar, proprietary circuit board. Of course it's the first thing to go. I'm sure the board doesn't cost the maker anywhere near $300 but I'm sure it's a lot more than an industry standard knob. If they want to cut a few bucks off the price, there's a good place to start. Put a standard knob only stove on the showroom floor and it might not be the first appliance everyone purchases but it will the be second of anyone that realizes how stupid it is to have a computer where single function piece of hardware belongs.

I don't know about that particular example, but refrigerators with ice makers are an obvious case of people buying appliances way more likely to break down.

Yes, but I replaced my ice maker for $36 and about 30 minutes of my time (10 minutes to figure out what to order; 20 minutes to put it in).

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002GZND6U

In my case it wasn't the ice maker itself, but the plumbing leading up to it within the refrigerator. I finally ended up turning off the water supply after my DIY repair broke a second time.

You can save a lot of money on almost anything if you're willing to get your hands dirty and do the work yourself. I don't think it invalidates the argument.

You're totally right. I was trying to weigh the convenience and time savings of automatic ice for 12 years vs the low cost in time and money to keep it working, but I only cited the latter in my response.

Your observation is spot-on.

And this is a very interesting point. How good is a similarly priced 2017 fridge compared to a 1950's when price is measured in real dollars.

Pretty damn good. You can still buy refrigerators built like a tank, intended for commercial environments, if you're willing to spend 4 figures.

http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/50selectrical.html

https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=329&year1=1952...

That household refrigerator that was $329 in 1952? $3024 in 2017 dollars.

And you will save a lot on heating. People forget that old tech is not known for being efficient be it electric appliances or cars.

I wasn't able to find anything about a fridge, but some searching found a Sears catalog from 1959:

http://www.aei.org/publication/appliance-shopping-1959-vs-20...

From that page, it looks like the price of the washer, adjusted for inflation to 2016, is $1756.12. A comparable washer today, from Sears, appears to be somewhere in the $400 - $600 range, or about 30% as much as it used to cost.

Data for today's washers: http://www.sears.com/appliances-washers-top-load-washers/b-1...

I'm from the US, bought some appliances a few years ago, and can confirm that $500 is about what you would expect to pay for a decent washer or dryer.

And that modern washer would use less energy, water, and need less detergent, reducing the cost-per-load.

Modern washers use the same amount of water, except now you have to manually run the extra rinse program to remove all the detergent.

Try to use less soap. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/your-money/13shortcuts.htm...

I thought the same thing. This is by no means really trustworthy sources, just top Google results, but still:

According to http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/50selectrical.html a washer and dryer set cost around 500 USD (in 1953 USD) which according to http://www.usinflationcalculator.com would be around 4500 USD in 2017 USD.

Since I'm not from the US I don't know what's popular there, but if I look at http://www.homedepot.com/b/Featured-Products-Popular-Laundry... it seems like they go between 500 and 1000 USD. So between 4.5 to 9 times cheaper than in 1953.

I agree and think that this article needs an inflation-adjusted comparison of the cost of different models so we can see how much of the decline might be caused by a race to the bottom in terms of price.

Do many people actually have a "desire for more features" or are most features just being crammed in in a bid to differentiate refrigerator A from refrigerator B?

Personally I usually perfer the least features possible mainly because more features = more stuff to break.

HN users are not typical users of technology.

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