Mmm asbestos

...and burns people's homes down due to lack of safety features.

...and children choke to death from easily removable small parts.

...and people get electrocuted because of a lack of warning label telling them not to use it in the bath.

And require regular matinence and still fail

Counter point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

I don't think that's relevant to this post. They aren't saying that they want to recreate every old patented appliance. I am sure they would be cherry picking just the best ones from that era.

That would be relevant if we had no idea why the device broke down. In a plane shot down we can assume it was hit in a place that is critical to flight. We don't know what took it down. We know the 5 year old fridge is not working because a $3 thermostat has stopped working but the part is not available and the computer onboard will not accept a generic one off the shelf.

I've gotten 15 years out of a Miele washer. Dryers are hard once they went condensing, though. Best you can get is just one where you can at least clean the lint out.

I am ready to give that money, if the device will last for 50 years. But it is really hard to rely on the machines. Even the best ones may break after a few years.

Lol 1000 doesn't even get you half way to a speed Queen. You just get the same low end shit except it's got app or screen that with show you add eventually.

I wonder how much that high cost could be reduced by modern manufacturing. Same/similar designs, but modern tooling and logistics.

I mean, they did not have CNC mills back then.

One caveat I would note: lots of people can't afford expensive, durable appliances.

It's expensive to be poor.

Also just use bimetal temperature instead of making everything be digital, in lot's of cases you don't need that much and it is much cheaper to replace single simple cheap component than whole electronic board that costs half the price of new machine. Got dad that works on gastro repairs and this is quite common.

I want a dishwasher that washes dishes, that I have the schematics to so that I can hook up my own arduino and have it broadcast on MY network when its done. Same for everything else. The internet of things wasn't a bad idea PER SE, its just that people were dis-invited to owning their technology. We don't have a culture of repair.

If you take inflation into consideration, high quality products still exist at about the same price.

There's another side to all this. We used to have appliance and, specifically, vacuum repair shops. Sometimes, the latter were franchise operations by manufacturer/brand. Electrolux and Oreck had stores that also did repairs, to name two. The business model had a lot in common with the auto industry at the time. To me, that stands as a cautionary tale of how things can get twisted around to cost the consumer more money in the long run, not less. I think it's an important consideration, as old designs/patents were from and for a market serviced on all sides by this business model. But we can do better. If such products were designed to be user-servicable, there wouldn't be a strong need/want to capture breakage as another revenue center.

So, we can absolutely bootstrap a new "buy for life" economy, but I think the downstream user hassle, repair, and secondary costs are crucial to consider.

Its just that there are now MUCH cheaper options now.

This is the part people keep ignoring. I keep calling it "realizing the actual cost of things." Nowadays, you can buy cheap, but you're going to get something fragile and packed-to-the-gills with surveillance and advertising. To get what grandma had (e.g. a refrigerator that runs for 50 years and just keeps food cold), anything cheaper than the inflation-adjusted equivalent costs you in other ways.

Meanwhile, over in the hobbyist and professional tool world, we've been saying "buy nice or buy twice" for a long time now.

If you take inflation into consideration, high quality products still exist at about the same price. Its just that there are now MUCH cheaper options now.

I think the Sam Vimes Boots Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness plays a part as well:

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness.

I think there's two parts to modern electronics that make them hard to repair.

One is indeed planned obsolescence, companies like apple deliberately making things harder to repair. This is easy to solve, but what's in it for businesses that only exist to make money when the average consumer is happy to suck this crap up?

But there is a non deliberate side. So many things that used to be modules built with discrete components have been moved to a single chip. Radio parts is an example, they used to requir a lot more external discrete parts and you can now get a single chip doing Bluetooth, WiFi etc with minimal external components.

As more goes to a single chip, it's single expensive parts that can fail rather than what might have been a single capacitor or resistor failing in a larger circuit.

Of course the planned obsolescence uses this by making custom chips that you literally cannot buy if you wanted to. But there is still a legitimate side to this.