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> They bury the lede in the last fucking paragraph. The reason this toaster is immensely better than the toaster you have at home is very, very simple: this toaster's 1949 price would be hundreds of dollars in 2021 terms.

From the article it seemed that it's better because it has a radiant temperature sensor rather than a simple timer. Unless you're disputing that and saying it's good for some other reason that would cost a lot of money, a temperature sensor and little control system for it would not cost hundreds of dollars to make today.

EDIT: The problem seems to be that regular consumer appliances seem to have raced to the bottom in the past 30 years or so. It's not that a significantly better toaster would cost hundreds of dollars more, it's that it would cost a few dollars more. The high end things that are 10x the price seem to be priced that way mostly because there is not a strong mid range market, or maybe they compete on gimmicks rather than basics. Because you don't need a $300 powder coated steel toaster with an a glass oven door and 5 cooking regimes including steaming that was mentioned in the article (https://us.balmuda.com/collections/toaster) to get the functionality and robustness of their simple 1940s sunbeam toaster.

Watching the video with the article I'm truely amazed at the engineering involved in this. In some ways it's so simple, in other ways its crazy complex. Without the timer and automatic io of the toast, I think it would be expensive to manufacture. The internal design might be harder to automate to keep cost down.

I think*

Basically all toasters use temperature to stop rather than time. Am I missing something?

I actually looked for a timer based toaster for ages and couldn't find one.

Some toasters have a simple timer circuit that releases an electromagnet to trigger the toast to pop up. There is usually a resister to adjust darkness that controls how long the timer runs.

The cheapest toasters apply current to a bimetallic strip that heats up and bends away from the contact causing the heating to stop and the toast to pop up. These are variable due to ambient temperature and because the bimetallic strip is still warm if you do a second batch of toast and will trigger too soon.

These are both indirect proxies for doneness of the toast, not a direct measure like the toaster featured in the article.

I don't know, I'm just going by the article and youtube video referenced.

From the article: and it’s got a mechanical thermostat inside that stops your bread toasting when it’s toasted and ready, NOT after some arbitrary amount of time.

From the video: Modern toasters operate based on a timer...

Having used the Balmuda toaster, I am willing to bet it is better than the 1940s sunbeam toaster.

I recommend the book Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture. The author talks about how the market for consumer goods has been bifurcated into insanely cheap and stupid expensive.

> and it doesn't particularly matter whether it is good at its job.

I would amend that to: "it doesn't matter whether it excels at its job, as long as it's good enough." And those modern, cheap toasters are good enough.

>You can have the good toaster, the good mixer, etc, but it sure looks like people don't actually want that. The pattern of product offerings in your average store suggests people want something affordable, and it doesn't particularly matter whether it is good at its job.

I've always wondered if we could fix this through legislation that forces manufacturers of consumer goods to provide an estimate of product lifetime according to some agreed standard - the same way that manufacturers of large appliances have to provide information about energy and water use.

As it stands, it's really hard for the consumer to know whether or not the $1000 coffee machine is actually better quality than the $500 one, or whether they're just milking a fancy brand name and relying on FUD.

>>I've always wondered if we could fix this through legislation that forces manufacturers of consumer goods to provide an estimate of product lifetime according to some agreed standard

We can, but again, I feel like a lot of customers don't want that. Even here on HN I hear people saying that well, if I want to buy a $200 washing machine that falls apart in 3 years, then it should be my god given right to do so. If consumers want better appliances then they can just buy them without the need for regulation.

I don't really agree with that mindset, but I think it's common enough to prevent the change you're talking about.

I'm not arguing that we ban washing machines that break in 3 years, just that they're properly labelled.

Why not?

Because providing this information to the consumer would be much easier to implement, face much less resistance and have an arguably greater effect (if there's a law saying that every washing machine must last at least 5 years, for example, that doesn't incentivise manufacturers to make something that lasts for 20).

Also, to be honest, it just seems "neater" mathematically/economic to not set hard borders anywhere.

> if I want to buy a $200 washing machine that falls apart in 3 years, then it should be my god given right to do so

The $200 unrepairable washing machine has a massive negative externality for the planet. Most people don't think in those terms (especially when the budget is tight, or they are landlords and just need to put checkmark items in the apartment), that's why we should have strong regulations to prevent mass-creation of electro crap.

Regulation is good, because it sets a baseline. W/o regulation it's race to the bottom so if company X does something better but it's $50 more expensive, the cheaper company Y. If you have baseline, they both will figure out a $250 machine which is better. Companies who can't create durable items do not have god given right to exist and sell crap which harms the planet.

Thankfully EU has been working on this recently, and will require the vendors to offer N years of spare parts availability.

> If consumers want better appliances then they can just buy them without the need for regulation.

See above. I have a low-repairability fridge whose rubber-magnet got old. Fix? Replace whole door, which costs as much as the new fridge. I don't think my landlord was taking weeks to research repairability and warranty rules for the fridge, because why would they? The law should provide reasonable defaults.

I do hope we'll move towards fewer long-lived models with good repairability, even if it costs more short-term, than 7 new fridge model each years with half-life of 2 years. It's nuts.

Another thing we have in EU is power-hungriness of devices (they get labeled prominently A, B, C, D, E). IMO should be the same with warranty / spare parts availability length: One year = E, ten years = A etc.

In the U.S. the manufacturers have figured out that they can make more money selling an "extended warranty" than they can selling the product itself. So the included warranty is as short as they think they can get away with, to encourage you to pony up for the upgrade. It's actually in their best interest for you to believe the item will die the day after the warranty expires.

I want legislation that the manufacturer has to publish, online and in a conspicuous place, full board-level schematics, parts lists, and service notes for household appliances no later than the day after the first unit of a model goes out of warranty. Or that such documents are placed prominently in the packaging the product arrives in and that installers are required by law to provide it to the customer. You can sell something that breaks in 3 years but you have to give me the documents I need to repair it including the logic board. My biggest fear in getting a new washer/dryer is that it starts my wife and I on the same junk treadmill everyone else is on.

how do you imagine this working for the manufacturers of, e.g. hardware security modules? in fact, for any product, the manufacter can just claim the product consists of one 'part' and the service notes state 'obtain new part', adjusting for whatever level of granularity/number of parts they feel is optimal, unless you want to get into a game of definitions and semantics that will always be incomplete and incorrect and unenforceable...

> My biggest fear in getting a new washer/dryer is that it starts my wife and I on the same junk treadmill everyone else is on.

In my experience, the more expensive washers/driers (e.g. >$1000) are actually higher quality and last 5 times longer than the cheap, or even mid range ones.

I have had the exact opposite experience. The cheap ones with physical buttons and timers last longer and are way cheaper to fix if it does break.

The issue with those products today is that some are more expensive because they include new tech like AI, wifi and crap like that. The core or the product is low to mid range but the adding (useless) tech means that it will be high priced. If you buy a low tech/high range product, you'll be able to serve it easily and it will outlast you.

My Washer/dryer is going on strong.... 17 years later

Cheap toasters today don’t have a shorter lifetime than this one. In fact, they have fewer moving parts.

> legislation that forces manufacturers of consumer goods to provide an estimate of product lifetime according to some agreed standard

isn't this exactly what a guarantee or warranty is? we have this now, where the manufacturer is legally obligated to provide a device that performs/operates/works according to the published specification for at least that long. of course, it doesn't work since consumers will then complain about 'planned obsolescence' when products actually live up to these estimates...

This would make more sense if manufacturing hadn’t improved in that time. But isn’t it reasonable to expect the price of these items to have reduced over the past 100 years?

How, exactly, has anything improved in manufacturing?

As a rule of thumb, any time you see a Phillips head or Pozidrive screw, you are looking at a product that was assembled by hand, the way things were done 100 years ago.. If that seems prohibitively expensive for the product you are holding in your hand, well, that is why manufacturing has fled the USA. It's hard to make a $10 toaster if your workers demand reasonable wages.

A Hobart mini-mixer is still made more or less the same way it was in 1935, out of rather similar input components and materials, and it is still assembled in the USA.

We can make electronics a lot cheaper than we did in 1935 (transistors are lots cheaper than valves aka vacuum tubes!) but we can't do that for an electric motor, or for the chassis, or the various tools that attach. Those are all very similar to their 1935 versions.

I think this says more about the decreased purchasing power of the average US household than it does about what people want. The Venn diagram of what a person wants and what they can afford is rarely a circle.

> I think this says more about the decreased purchasing power of the average US household

What does it say about that?

Compared to the way it was during the lifetime of this model from a major company offering all price points, there is no longer a sizable enough percentage of Americans able to afford supporting this level of quality/superior-engineering for production to have continued past a certain year.