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Comment by ALittleLight | Hacker News Reader

This is smart. I wonder if you could get more of a consumer aesthetic and feature set if you looked at the appliances in luxury apartments. The apartments would have to replace the appliances if they fail, so the apartment company has presumably done research and has experience. The end user is still just a consumer though.

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Apartments don't generally lose much money when appliances fail. They pay "unskilled laborers" low wages to replace the unit within a reasonable time frame. During that time, the tenant continues to pay rent as normal.

There aren't any apartments that compete based on "Our super reliable appliances won't fail!" so any tenants unhappy about this have no marginal benefit to moving somewhere else.

Therefore, apartments usually provide the cheapest appliances which fit the aesthetic of the rest of the build. Or, these days, whichever appliance is available for purchase because there's been a massive shortage of durable goods.

Presumably the apartment complex has to replace or repair their appliances. If the appliances failed a lot that would incur high maintenance costs. I don't understand how the complex employing unskilled laborers would reduce the cost of replacing or repairing failed appliances.

I really doubt there's much of difference between brands and models. Old tech built by a few OEMs with some plastic molding thrown on and white labeled every which way. Cheaper to just replace the rare failure than to find an entirely different higher quality refrigerator pipeline if the MTBF of those things are measured in years regardless of brand.

It's easy, they have a lot of units with the same appliances and in the basement they have a lot of spares. When one is replaced the broken one is used for parts to repair where possible.

they do but afaik most complexes get deep discounts from purchasing cheaper, high-volume units in bulk from hotpoint or whirlpool (for example) that they wouldn't get from buying more "reliable" models

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