this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2025
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[–] GalacticTaterTot@lemmy.world 3 points 41 minutes ago

Requires wifi. Sends gigs of data back to the manufacturer everyday. But it has pretty chime.

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 2 points 1 hour ago

My apartment expects me to pay to use their machines, but they don't fucking clean them. Most of the time, my clothes come out looking and smelling worse than when they went in!

[–] silentbob@literature.cafe 4 points 1 hour ago

Why are appliances shit nowadays >:( i bought a house with 20-30 year old appliances that work fine, but decided to start upgrading so I bought a new washer and dryer. The new machines dont work nearly as well and I know they're not going to last even 10 years. We're already having issues with them 4 months later.

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 hour ago

If it's a side-loading washer, you're not supposed to close the door all the way when it isn't in use. That's why it smelled.

[–] Distropia@endlesstalk.org 5 points 2 hours ago

At least it's Wi-Fi connected.

[–] JamesTBagg@lemmy.world 16 points 3 hours ago

You can go buy those old washing machines. They're still out there. I got my washer and dryer used for 100 dollars each.

Nothing digital on them, all analog. Fixed a washer overflowing issue by replacing the $20 pressure level switch. Twice I've had to replace the heating element for the dryer, $20 bucks for those. Everything is replaceable with a flat head screwdriver and a youtube video.

Go buy those old washers and dryers.

[–] markovs_gun@lemmy.world 14 points 4 hours ago (3 children)

Your parents washing machine also cost more because it was made better. The best price I could find for a standard washing machine in 1980 was $289. To put that into perspective, according to CPI inflation that is the equivalent of about $1,100 today. As a proportion of median individual income, that's like $1,550 today. You can still buy a Speed Queen washer for consumers that costs $1,500 and will last a long time, but people largely don't because the shitty one costs less than half of that.

[–] psud@aussie.zone 1 points 1 hour ago

I spent a thousand dollars replacing the cheap compressor in my fridge because I asked the repair guy to replace it with better quality than it originally came with, and he used a commercial (as opposed to residential) grade compressor that was three times the price

But aside from a short lifetime, the big problem with cheap AC motors is they're imprecisely built and often waste more electricity as heat and noise than they put into their output shaft

Of course even with the better stuff there still "cot death" where a new product fails almost immediately (because noone tests their products), but at least those failures are under warranty, the cheap motors typically last at least a few years

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 7 points 3 hours ago

This the argument I have with clients on a daily basis, in regards to all kinds of manufactured goods. People are astoundingly awful at understanding and visualizing inflation and the value of a dollar over time, even people who are specifically educated on this point and even work with it as part of their jobs. Everyone has some threshold beyond which they absolutely won't countenance paying more than $X for Y, but this is always arbitrary and whenever the course of events drives the median price of whatever-it-is past that line they lose their minds.

Durable goods manufacturing is a race to the bottom because it has to be in order to overcome everyone's moronic preconceptions about what a product "ought" to cost. This isn't just a capitalist greed thing, although it's certainly that, too -- corners have to be cut, panels have to be made thinner, it has to contain more plastic and less metal, because otherwise it'll never be cheap enough for 99% of the population to agree to buy it and even then they'll all still bitch about how shoddily made it is. Year over year every manufacturer has to figure out how to make it cheaper to slide under MSRP. The manufacturers who take the opposite strategy inevitably wind up as niche players, because as much as people spout that they'd happily pay more for a better built thing, the flat out truth is they're all full of shit and to the nearest decimal point, none of them actually will if given the opportunity.

[–] slaneesh_is_right@lemmy.org 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

You can also buy really good machines that last forever, you just have to pay a lot more. To me it seems the guy complaining just buys the cheapest washing machine build and delivered by slave workes from Amazon

[–] kiagam@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Problem is you can't trust anything. The fancy $2k machine might just be fancy in name. You don't know if stuff is good before it starts not being. And reviews don't help, because they won't test a product for 5 years to check durability before posting

[–] markovs_gun@lemmy.world 1 points 2 minutes ago

The speed queen I mentioned comes with a 7 year warranty and they're the brand used by laundromats who need them to be reliable to make money. That said, the consumer grade ones are not as solidly built as the commercial units, but that's because nobody is going to put laundromat levels of abuse on their home washing machine.

[–] M137@lemmy.world 3 points 3 hours ago

I just had to get the fridge-freezer in my apartment replaced because the freezer started growing ice everywhere like that was its job, nothing I did helped. When the landlord came to take a look he was surprised by how old the one I had was, he looked it up and it's been here since 1993. I've lived here since 2016, and it worked perfectly until a couple of months ago. While the new fridge-freezer combo (one of those that's half fridge, half freezer on top of each other, same as the old one) is much better in many ways, it's obvious it won't survive for even 1/3rd of the time that the old one did. The one thing that annoys me is that my fridge magnets can't hold themselves up on the new doors because the metal is too thin, they just slide down to the bottom edges.

[–] Bosht@lemmy.world 3 points 4 hours ago

This has literally been me over the last 3 years. Started making decent money so figured we would replace our old faithful washer and dryer, mostly due to growing family and needing bigger capacity. Fuck Samsung. Washer shit out 2 months outside warranty, and would have cost the price of the washer to fix it. The 'auto balancing system' is fucking bullshit. I don't care if my washer bounces around because the load is unbalanced. My parents' washer could be as unbalanced as shit and didn't matter because the whole bin had supports to the frame of the washer. Was it loud if it was an unbalanced load? Fuck yeah. But you could simply rebalance yourself, and continue if you really wanted to. Not necessary though. It would finish washing if it had power, and no force could stop it.

[–] MrEff@lemmy.world 20 points 7 hours ago (4 children)

I want to start an appliance company that offers 10 year warranties with an additional 5 year replaceable parts availability promise. The designs will be simple, functionality simple with minimal quality of life improvements, and all repair manuals will be published on the website along with tutorial videos, while also banking on building a product that simply lasts longer.

I'm willing to bet that if that is what you advertise on, the longevity of the product at a minimal price, then the company should do fine.

[–] psud@aussie.zone 1 points 1 hour ago

Your product would be about three times the price of the cheap shit.

It might work in the current world with good advertising - Smarter Every Day (on YouTube) is part of a project to make a better, made in America, barbeque ~brush~ cleaner

There are a few companies now selling better quality stuff successfully, but I have seen no one doing so in whitegoods

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 6 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

You won't. You'll get annihilated by the next Chinese competitor who produces a piece of shit machine that breaks in 13 months like clockwork (and has a 12 month warranty), but sells for 1/2 or 2/3 of the price of your machine.

The average consumer is dogshit at conceptualizing the actual value of a product over its lifetime in proportion to its cost. They'll just see that the next machine on display at Best Buy or whatever looks modern and costs less to buy up front, and then they'll buy that one. When it breaks they'll bitch and moan on Facebook and Nextdoor and write ranty one star reviews everywhere, and then wheel right back to Best Buy and buy another machine just like it.

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 hour ago

At the end of the day these are commodity items. It's reasonable for consumers to buy whatever's cheapest from a reputable physical store and expect at least decent reliability.

The solution can't come from a manufacturer making a better product, because of the information asymmetry; the average consumer just can't be expected to spend hours researching every commodity item.

The solution has to be targeted legislative action with a clear goal of measurably improving the overall reliability of those commodities. Unfortunately lobbyists hate that because more reliability = less margin and fewer sales, and consumers don't often love it either because this kind of legislation directly translates to inflated prices (at least in the short term). There are still people bitching that you can't buy incandescent lightbulbs anymore... So regulators would rather play dead and hope nobody notices they are doing fuck-all.

[–] AWistfulNihilist@lemmy.world 14 points 7 hours ago

This was unironically Maytag, they enshitified with the rest. The Maytag man was a real thing.

[–] finitebanjo@lemmy.world 7 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

Good luck getting affordable steel or aluminum for manufacturing in this economy. If you do have some investors/capital, though, I would love to apply as an engineer. I think a good selling point would be displaying them in-store with the panel open, or training distributors to open them as demonstration, showing how reliable it is and how easy they are to service.

[–] mavu@discuss.tchncs.de 42 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

You know the funny thing?

You can still buy appliances that last and have good service.

But you don't earn enough to afford them, like your parents did.

[–] decipher_jeanne@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Meh. Buy them second hand. Not even joking. As you said, good one last forever. while there's a bit of a logistics difficulty with second hand large appliances, you can also just rent a van for the day and ask a friend for help.

[–] BrowseMan@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Problem is you don't know how well it was maintained /cared for by its former owner.

[–] cenzorrll@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 hour ago

You should be able to get parts, though. It's better to replace a part on a machine that will last 20 years than a part on one that will last 5 years.

[–] finitebanjo@lemmy.world 10 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

I've repaired a few dryers, the new ones have the same aluminium drum like you would expect but for some godforsaken reason they're allowed to mount that drum in place on a plastic ring. The dial components and thermostats used to safely operate the heating elements are also much smaller, which is problematic given that gives them less capacitance for high voltage and heat causing them to fail easier.

But worst of all is that when they fail, not if but when, you can't just take the dial off and file the corrosion off the metal contacts, you have to order an entirely new board completely if they offer it at all. You can't just open the top and front panel with a few screws to take the drum out and do repairs, you have to unscrew every panel in order and detatch them from the additional internal chassis, and you're gonna need like 7 fucking arms to put the damn thing back together.

If I were in charge, these sort of blatant obsolences would be punishable with extradition and federal prison.

[–] prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works 11 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

Spend a little more and get yourself a speed queen top loader and never replace it again.

But also … my Maytag (same brand as my parents that came with the house that was built in 82) high efficiency front loader has been reliable af too.

Just don’t get a washer from a brand that is just a tech brand that now makes washers.

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[–] state_electrician@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

We have a Miele we bought 13 years ago and which has far outlived the projected amount of washing cycles. I had to replace the water splitter, but apart from that it's still running fine. I heard that more recent Miele machines don't last as long, though.

[–] Frostbeard@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago

Got a "entry point" Miele about 9 years ago. Same experience as you. If they have started compromising on quality I don't know where to go.. Asko is now Gorenje and produced in China, and have not pulled out of Russia.

[–] IceFoxX@lemmy.world 2 points 4 hours ago

Lol sadly. The long life is a loss business. People only buy a new one as soon as the old one is scrap. Once the market is served, the problem of longevity arises and therefore no revenue. That's why a lot of money has been invested in predetermined breaking points, which are usually designed for shortly after the warranty. (A lot of money, because it has to be achieved by material weakness or something else that cannot be proven. ) This means that there are always customers and therefore revenue. It's stupid but unfortunately it has to be that way. In many other areas too.

[–] duckCityComplex@lemmy.world 38 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

Similar story for clothes dryers:

My parents' dryer had 2 knobs for temperature and run time, and a start button. Ran forever and dried clothes.

My dryer has like a dozen programmed cycles that rely on a moisture sensor that doesn't work and leaves clothes damp unless you use the manual time & temp settings, which takes several capacitive button presses on a circuit board that is likely to die before any of the actual mechanical components of the dryer. Also for some reason it has Wi-Fi.

[–] rustyricotta@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 hours ago

I can confirm, I only use the manual time on my dryer because it's the only way to reliably get it dry.

[–] Idontevenknowanymore@mander.xyz 27 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

"And for some reason it has Wi-Fi ." will be the last line in humanity's epitaph.

[–] exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 5 hours ago

The latest xkcd has one of my favorite hover texts of all time:

It's important for devices to have internet connectivity so the manufacturer can patch remote exploits.

[–] Ileftreddit@lemmy.world 9 points 9 hours ago (3 children)

If your clothing washer stinks, run it on hot with just bleach inside it, like put in a bit too much bleach, no clothing

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