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Cars too!! Just a basic car, without too many bells and whistles. Electric windows and central locks are nice but unnecessary. Just more things that can break. Defo no screens or 'smart' stuff.

There's tradeoffs - simplicity, repairability, efficiency.

Take washers, for example. I was looking at Speed Queen washers to replace mine. On paper they are great, more durable. But it turns out that while they have physical knobs and switches, newer models still hide a circuit board inside, so the gap between commercial and consumer models is shrinking (and not in the direction we want.)

The Speed Queen washers also have nearly half the capacity of off the shelf consumer washers, and use twice the amount of water and electricity. I did the math, and at the current utility and washer prices I'd break even replacing the washer every 5 years.

Furthermore, the local appliance repair shop that I trust told me it could take them weeks to get replacement parts for Speed Queen. For a laundromat that's not a huge deal when it's one washer out of twenty, for a single machine home it's a problem.

Yes, I do wish that consumer appliances were more reliable. But barring that, the next best thing is easily and quickly repairable, and on that matter there's brands that are qualitatively and quantitatively better in that regard than others.

A total absense of tech would be bad for a washing machine. With a really simple conductivity sensor (basically just two electrodes on the sides of a plastic pipe) and an opacity sensor (an IR LED and an LDR on opposite sides of a clear pipe), you can measure how much stuff is dissolved in water and how much insoluable stuff is suspended. That then means that you can keep circulating the soapy water until it stops getting dirtier, then keep rinsing it out until it stops getting cleaner, which then means you can have the cycle times adjust themselves to how soiled the load is, instead of just making them as long as the worst case scenario might require and wasting energy, water, and time on an average load.

I thought about this too. People are sick of this shit.

Just Uncomplicated Socialist Tech

He’d get unalivened within a month.

I'd just build my own, like I did for my water purifier. It ain't that hard.

Where do I sign up?

My refrigerator is still going strong at 22 years

Shut up and take my money.

I thought multiple times about resurrecting this: https://www.lincrevable.com/en/

IANAL but somehow I get the feeling that entering those industries as a new guy would be a real pain in the ass at the patent office.

https://frame.work/ kinda does this for computers, it would be nice to more manufactures follow this lead.

Great idea for a quick cash grab but then you will lose growth. You will run into insta pot problems where the product was too good and lacked room for innovation. But someone should do it anyways.