I’ve spent 20 days waiting for a part from China to (hopefully) repair my 18 year old very basic fridge because I refuse to get some stupid fucking touchscreen internet connected advertising box.
The difference is almost ALL appliances built today are designed to die around the time the warranty expires. And, yes, I realize that’s been a trope for a long time, but now it’s far more true than it used to be. It used to be a joke, because it happened rarely, now it’s not a joke because it happens often.
Twenty years from now, there won’t be any appliances built today, still running.
This isn’t survivorship bias. The internet taught us that term specifically to excuse enshittification.
Thing is, they don’t have to be designed to die, or not directly anyway. As in enginees don’t usually sit around figuring out how to make a rubber seal break down at a particular speed. The product is just pushed to the absolute limits of the materials - thinnest, cheapest, fastest, and only rolled back if it widely fails and costs the manufacturer more to replace.
I guess the method doesn’t really matter when the end result is the same.
I’ve spent 20 days waiting for a part from China to (hopefully) repair my 18 year old very basic fridge because I refuse to get some stupid fucking touchscreen internet connected advertising box.
I fucking hate the modern world.
its pretty easy to get a fridge still without a touch screen. The 1st two pages on costco here (I didn’t go further) don’t have one.
You can sill get “dumb” appliances.
even fridges within the last 10-15 years are crappy. only the ones from early 2000s, or pre-2000 last a long time.
There were a ton of crappy fridges from back then, too. It’s just that most of them have already died.
The difference is almost ALL appliances built today are designed to die around the time the warranty expires. And, yes, I realize that’s been a trope for a long time, but now it’s far more true than it used to be. It used to be a joke, because it happened rarely, now it’s not a joke because it happens often.
Twenty years from now, there won’t be any appliances built today, still running.
This isn’t survivorship bias. The internet taught us that term specifically to excuse enshittification.
Thing is, they don’t have to be designed to die, or not directly anyway. As in enginees don’t usually sit around figuring out how to make a rubber seal break down at a particular speed. The product is just pushed to the absolute limits of the materials - thinnest, cheapest, fastest, and only rolled back if it widely fails and costs the manufacturer more to replace.
I guess the method doesn’t really matter when the end result is the same.