There’s a confirmation bias aspect to this. There were a lot of things made in the 70s that did not keep working for fifty years. You don’t think of them because they’re already broken down for parts, recycled or buried in a landfill. There are some things that have kept working only because someone put regular care and maintenance into them.
There are a lot things made today that won’t make it fifty years from now. There are some things that will.
If disposable culture concerns you, learn how to repair things (clothes, kitchen appliances, furniture, electronics, etc) and buy things that can be repaired (like the Framework laptop).
But that’s something that I witnessed change since the 80’s and makes the electronic crappier, it’s the fact that appliances in the 70’s-90’s were incredibly easy to fix. It was not rare for the manufacturer to even give schematics in the user’s manual. There were shops to repair stuff everywhere and it was something approachable by anyone who could hold a soldering iron.
They also had a far higher price. This changed the effective disposability. E.g. you likely wouldn’t pay $500 to fix a $400 washing machine. If it were a $10,000 washing machine, it’s more reasonable.
This is why TV repair shops disappeared. TVs got cheap enough that the labour cost would outweigh the replacement cost. I recently fixed a TV with a dodgy backlight. The parts cost £12, but it took me a few hours. If my time was factored in, in a business manner (including accounting for downtime, profit ,and expenses) it would have been over 75% of the replacement cost.
Also, a lot of newer features add complexity and make for more difficult repairs.
FWIW I think this is technically survivorship bias, not confirmation bias (but maybe the latter is a form of the former?)
I do agree, there is probably a lot of shit from the 70s that stopped working early on. On the other hand, I do feel like planned obsolescence is a thing. Look at Instant Pot. They’re going bankrupt because everyone already owns an Instant Pot and they all still work.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/06/instant-pot-bankrupt-private-equity/674414/
The problem in my eyes the failure is in the private equity firm that bought them trying to draw blood from a stone, not the Instant Pot.
If you make a great product, you don’t go bankrupt. You just keep making that product. Many mature brands like Coke or Tide have low single digit growth rates because they only grow at the population growth rate. People do not “need more Tide”, despite what the latest commercial says.
I don’t know the details, but it sounds like the brand was mismanaged:
weighed down by more than $500 million in debt after years of supply-chain chaos and limited success expanding the Instant brand into other categories of household gadgetry
The title of the article sounds incorrect. You can’t fail because of a great product, but you can mismanage it. Especially if you are a private equity firm who tried to use debt to grow right before a pandemic.
Being built to be maintainable and parts shops being common also helped a lot of those things be maintained as well. They didn’t even need to be as robust when replacing a part or two was cheap and easy. Now the issue is hard to identify due to complexity and finding replacement parts is so expensive or time consuming that just replacing it is less of a hassle.
Like I did basic maintenance for bearings and belts on a knob and switch only washer we bought in 2004. It lasted for almost 20 years with one service call to replace water seals because I didn’t trust myself to get it right. Now we have a 3 year old front loading washer with a bunch of bells and whistles that have already stopped working shortly after the warranty expired that makes horrible noises which I won’t work on because everything is a pain to get to and they are just way too complex.
Now we have a 3 year old front loading washer with a bunch of bells and whistles that have already stopped working shortly after the warranty expired that makes horrible noises which I won’t work on because everything is a pain to get to and they are just way too complex.
Especially if it’s a Samsung, I bet it’s the “spider arm” and that the horrible noises are the fractured chunks of metal banging against each other when it tries to spin the drum.
Every fucking water-exposed part in those things is immaculate stainless steel, except for the spider arm which is blatantly designed to corrode to death just as the warranty ends.
I remember when one of our local publications asked their readers “what kind of old appliances you still have around at home that you use regularly?” and the article was flooded with photos of 1970s kitchen appliances. Well duh, of course those still work, if you take them out of the cupboard once a year to bake a cake or whatever.
learn how to repair things
Most appliances are not easy to fix because its just a circuit board connected to a machinary, unlike appliances of the past which had mechanical components.
Now, knobs and buttons are replaced by a touchscreen and good luck fixing that on your own.
This is just what people tell themselves to feel smart, when really, longevity of items has drastically declined. You can’t get away with telling this to people who were there. Take used refrigerators, if you’re looking, no problem finding ones from the 50s to the 90s still working. 2000, on, they go straight to the landfill.
Shoutout to !sewingrepairing@sh.itjust.works
there are companies whose whole ethos is “buy company with good reputation for quality then use that to sell less quality stuff but we get richer then drive it into the earth and sell off the bones of the reputation we ruined for our personal profit” which is similar to enshtification but not the same thing because it was happening without a web layer.
with the web layer added into the equation it is even easier.
Back in the day there wasn’t 56 versions of $product for cheap. There were maybe 3, and people talked. Products cost real money and we were concerned about quality and lasting power.
So yeah, we had better shit because reputation was a big deal.
This is the real answer to me. Often, the premium version is still out there but people go for the budget version anyway. That’s not necessarily a bad thing though. When we can furnish a whole room for what a couple pieces used to cost, that’s a win for a lot of people even if some of those items wear out prematurely. It also depends if we’re talking about a mostly mechanical and utilitarian item, vs something that relies on modern software ecosystems. Toasters haven’t changed much in 40 years, but a 10 year old cell phone is pretty much useless, possibly not working at all with current network technology. Durability is less important when an item becomes technologically obsolete anyway.
There may be premium versions that are high quality, but too often the premium version is made with planned obsolescence as well these days. There’s generally no way of knowing if you’re paying extra for quality of for the privilege of showing off the money you spent
Nowadays the main question is whether it’s open source or not. Anything closed source sucks, or will imminently suck. The more open source it is, the more modular, the more repairable, etc.
Yes this goes for hardware too.
Another point: Avoid ‘smart’ devices at all costs. They are hardware spyware, full stop, and will stop working whenever it is deemed you need to buy a new one.
What we’re avoiding is capitalist opportuism hidden in tech and the solution for that is not to find a good provider. The solution is to find a provider that has a ‘business model’ that protects against the brunt of this extractive BS.
Numerous examples: 1.Newer version of software mutating into buggy, crashy mess, while old versions worked perfectly. Forced upgrades and stealth upgrade that remove functionality(e.g. cloud-only/online-only service)
2.Newer versions of products dropped quality, even using cheaper materials. The subreddit /r/Chinesium has lots of these.
3.Websites redesigned to load much slower and waste tons of memory without any benefits, just because it fashionable to load 3-4MB of js framework code.
4.Websites breaking on older browsers and demanding latest Chrome/Firefox to run(Web Components,latest JS features), with functionality declining.
5.Companies intentionally crippling products and offering the older functionality as premium services.
6.Technology regressing towards simpler and more primitive forms because complexity requires quality(and its more expensive).
7.Software development regressing towards forms where its built by composing code copied from Stack Overflow and AI generation.
8.Environmental degradation increasing despite more stringent laws, regulation and enforcement. Microplastics, endocrine disruptors, even a regression in ozone layer due some Chinese factories.
