Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

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This is a signal for larger movements in our society:

- OEM products and rebadging, have you ever sent your DeWalt drill back and hoping they'd repair it? They'll just send you a new one.

- Repairability is deprioritized or abandoned

- Throwaway-culture is expanding

- IoT gadgets are providing miniscule feature bait to fish customers into falling for it only to realize it was all a lie

- Increasing thrift through drop-shipping and other goodwill-less businesses don't want to be accountable for their shitty gadget made in Guangduong.

Never has been a better time to build a marketplace that puts the business and their ethics at the forefront, their legacy and goodwill at stake, hold them accountable in a fair competing arena, free of unregulated advertisement and independent reviews (such as iFixit score).

I personally want us to go back to early 1900's where businesses had pride in their history, they truly cared about quality and workmanship. Not saying there aren't businesses like that today, but ffs just look at what Amazon is filled with.

The problem - for customer, at least - that it's hard to find the "quality" of the product. We think that a hundred years ago that was implied, and products without enough quality lost on the market; today the opposite is true.

Can we somehow take into account all those advancements which happened over last century or so in materials science, electronics and software etc. to build a quality-meter for an arbitrary product? So customers could better understand what it really is - that is, how long and well it's going to serve under what conditions - for what they are paying X dollars today?

This is the whole issue. A free market can not possibly correct what it cant see. In this case, consumers are not able to tell how repairable or well built a product is.

Of all the things I have had fail, very rarely do they fail in a way I would have expected. Recently I had a fridge die because the light bulb fried which caused a short somehow on the main board frying the entire board. I could not have possibly predicted this was a problem so I could not have used the info to select a better made product. This fridge was from one of the big name reputable brands.

All of the big and reputable brands are doing the same thing so its almost impossible to find the well built stuff unless you are looking at something trivial like a shoe or non power tool where a basic observation will tell you its build quality.

> All of the big and reputable brands are doing the same thing so its almost impossible to find the well built stuff unless you are looking at something trivial like a shoe or non power tool where a basic observation will tell you its build quality.

Or unless you consult independent consumer research material that does more work than basic observation to quantify quality differences. (The entire value proposition of, for instance, Consumer Reports, which indicates that this isn't a new problem, given how long they've been around with the sole selling point being solving it.)

We rely on basic observations - that worked a century ago, now not so much. We need some better mechanism - especially for people who doesn't know properties, failure modes etc.

I think what we really need is strong, mandatory warranties for everything. It should just be law that an appliance like a fridge or TV are expected to last 10 years (and adjust this value for all expected product lifetimes)

And if samsung pushes out a software update that breaks the original experience (adding adverts for example) you are entitled for at least a partial refund. So if you owned it for 9 years and on the 9th they added adverts, you get a 1/10th refund.

That way it becomes unprofitable to pump out IoT junk and then discontinue support a year later.

> I think what we really need is strong, mandatory warranties for everything.

Maybe, but laws so far are slow and being circumvented in some areas of significant commercial interest. Maybe some technological approach could be better. A crude example - we already have more and more available spectrometers, which can analyze surface composition of many things, from which some properties can be estimated; of course, it's a long way to "quality meter".

> And if samsung pushes out a software update

With software we can have some differential analysis systems. Maybe we can have a working system where the software is analyzable - say, is stored on an easily analyzable module. Then we can try to check changes...

> its almost impossible to find the well built stuff unless you are looking at something trivial like a shoe

Granted, there are no software in shoes. Yet, I'd like to know how you manage to assess the build quality of one without being a professional.

> Granted, there are no software in shoes

Oh, you'd be surprised: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/14/nikes-s...

You don't even have to go that far back!

RIP:

- Hewlett-Packard (err...Agilent, I mean Keysight)

- Tektronics

- IBM Thinkpads

- Screws and modular assemblies

and the declined quality that nearly brings a tear to my eye of:

- Craftsman (the real Craftsman)

- the manufacturer of my old clothes dryer with a schematic of the whole thing taped to the inside of the front panel (at least my new one has WiFi and NFC!)

You can certainly accuse me of rose-tinted glasses, and I probably shouldn't even have nostalgia for a company, but it does really just make me a little sad. Just look at Tek's old employee handbook: https://vintagetek.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/EmployeeHa...

Signed,

A life-long tinkerer

That Tektronix manual is a gem. Also... a very different age. They set aside 22.5% of gross revenue for profit sharing and 7.5% for a retirement fund. They boasted about a technical library made largely of contributions from the employees. Obviously a white male-dominated roster. The explanation of the phone/paging system is baroque and sort of cryptic, taking 13 steps.

When I was young I wanted to start a company like that (not the white male-dominated part, duh). Then I was sued unjustly in two different cases under California law. I will never have an employee again.

Yeah it always rang true to me as a company that did right by its employees, a mutual respectful relationship. Not to mention engineering was definitely seen as a priority. They even drew little doodles in the schematics.

But yes, an absolute gem and a nice little snapshot in time.

That's a shame about the lawsuits. I'm only bringing up (not blaming at all!) lawyers since it's the example you gave, but thinking about it, I think a sue-happy culture is just one of the symptoms or maybe foreshadowing our slow descent into not assuming good faith on the part of others or trying to lift everyone up rather than extract as much as you can from everyone else. It's as though we've moved from cooperation to being adversarial (in very general terms.)

I suppose that might be why that employee handbook attracts me so much--the contrast between their relationship with their employees is stark against what we seem to have today. Like before, it's a relationship of mutual benefit vs. the asymmetry between employers/employees we have now.

I'm awful with words and getting my ideas out, and I reiterate that I've nothing against law as a profession. It just serves as a nice exemplar.

I dont think you emphasized the "white male dominated" part enough

- The dollar buys less than ever before and will continue to do so.

- Real wages suck compared to, let's say, the "golden age" of driving.

- Because of the above, high quality widgets cost more than ever. You can still find them, but you'd have to see it as an investment.

The problem is with identifying which items are priced representative of their quality, and which are overpriced. Everyone advertises quality, reviews are faked, forums are astroturfed. I’d gladly pay for quality if there was some way to know what I was getting.

I can't believe how much blatant lies there are with products now. I was looking at tools on Amazon since I was given a gift card for it and I see tools listed as being "stainless steel" but in the reviews you have 90% of the reviews saying the product was blessed by Jesus and 10% giving one star reviews with pictures showing the "stainless steel" was rusting immediately and fracturing under normal use.

How does a product flat out lying about its specs and getting called out end up still on the store selling well?

That's due to the "leave a good review and we will give you a gift card" tactic that's been somewhat common these days.

Example: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/here-is-how-they-g...

I understand how the reviews get faked but not why Amazon and the seller get away with flat out lying. The product is clearly not made of stainless steel so its basically fraud to keep selling it knowing its a lie. Obviously something is going wrong with consumer protection laws where a company is getting away with large scale lying about products.

At least with the Milwaukee tools I've had repaired (and that's three so far) they sent back the original tool fixed - I could tell by the markings on said tool.

It's understandable that at some point the "replace" becomes cheaper than "repair" but even now that line can be crossed.

or maybe more about avoiding pollution and environmental effects of printing?

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