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This is a perfect example of people absolutely not figuring out what the problem is, and coming up with kneejerk ideas that don’t actually fix problems.
The problems we all notice are not technology, they are business problems.
They are problems that relate to a lack of regulation and a lack of consumer care to ensure that companies are legally hand tied into not enshitifying the products they’ve already bought.
I love connected touchscreens on things. They’re simple, fast, allow for navigation of much more complex options much more simply, can be updated over time, and generally look better, with no components that wear over time.
What people hate about touch screens is all about the business decisions they enable. They hate that businesses can remove features, enable ads, or spy on them.
The ideal dishwasher/washingmachine/whatever has fancy features, but does not have the influence of these shitty business decisions.
The fancy touchscreen is not only cost effective, but more convenient and less liable to fail.
I’m sure some people will have a strong kneerjerk reaction to what I’ve said but I encourage them to actually think about what parts of the experiences of using appliances they actually hate.
They’re allowing their association of technology to awful business practices to cloud their judgment on the technology itself.
Counterpoint: maybe you’re also the problem and wrong about everything
Speed Queen
Yes! My cousin just bought a washer dryer set, it looks like it was built 30 years ago. All turn knobs, no bells and whistles, no “smart” technology. I’ll check back in in a few decades and tell y’all how it went.
Your boyfriend will have many customers for about 2 years. Then no customers for 15+ years.
People say this crap and point to things like Crock-Pots while ignoring the existence of things like Kitchen-Aid Mixers, the corporate raiding behind all the actual failures of the model and,
Most tellingly
Drumroll
The existence of children among so many other things (like the fact that selling everyone in the world a fridge is still a massive win)
In other words, the only people that believe this are suckers buying consumerist lies because anything else might make them realize plastic trash will never fill the hole inside.
Genius idea, first you need to destroy capitalism to make it work
And put real tech specs on the labels. Like the pulse width modulation for induction stoves and the water and energy used for different laundry/dishwasher cycles and the mean failure time for the fridge compressor.
None of this “innovative leak-resistant glass shelves” crap.
And a diagram with the actual object dimensions, with measurements all around. I’m shopping for a bed and there’s so much bullshit using the height of the headboard instead of where the mattress actually sits
Holy shit yes.
I had a house with very narrow basement stairs and needed a dryer. So I very diligently checked that the dryer I ordered would fit.
Turns out there was a 3” bulge on the back they neglected to measure. Since it took them six fucking hours to find my damn house I disassembled it, carried it downstairs in parts, and reassembled it in the basement.
Whoever tries to get that thing out will think I’m a magician.
Oh, and a full wiring diagram.
This model will never work. How do you keep selling garbage to continuously make money if your products aren’t garbage?
Top-freezer refrigerators are the most efficient and the vast majority of them don’t have any smart features. Also, they’re among the cheapest refrigerators you can buy. Costco sells four of them and they’re all under $800. Most top-load washers don’t have any smart features and should last 15 years without repair. This seems like a problem where solutions already exist, it’s just that people shun them for being the cheapest option available.
Having the freezer on top is just bad design though. People use the refrigerator way way more than the freezer, so having it on the bottom means you always have to crouch down to get anything into or out of the fridge.
Bottom-freezer refrigerators use about 100 kWh more per year than top-freezer refrigerators. That’s an 11,300 GWh difference if it were applied to the ~133 million households in the US. If that electricity were being provided by natural gas power plants, they would emit 13,273,400,000 pounds of CO2 to generate that electricity. The environmental cost of that added convenience is enormous.
I don’t think that is that enourmous. It’s more splitting hairs. For example, we can ballpark keeping a home 1°C warmer or cooler year round to be about 500kWh per year, conservatively. That is 5x as much carbon saved at the cost of a difference in comfort that most people wouldn’t notice at all.
Should people care about these savings versus the convenience of freezer position? Sure. But we can’t count on individuals to really consistently give any shits about the climate. And banning freezer-on-the-bottom fridges would be… a touch politically unpopular.
A far better solution than criticizing people’s fridge layout choices is just levying a carbon tax, since then any given person can decide if they want their carbon budget to go towards fridge orientation or heating and cooling or something else entirely. And better than that - there would be an economic incentive to stop buying electricity from the gas plant.
Put your fridge on top of a box
Then I have to stand on top of a box to get into the freezer! Won’t someone think of the convenience!?
Fine fine. Turn the fridge upside down! All the efficiency, and all the convenience! I’m brilliant!
Jeanyus! You deserve a raise.
Just put them on top of a box.
“All people are tall” ok buddy
All people are tall, except for the ones who aren’t.
The tall ones who don’t bend at the knees deserve their fate anyways
Yes please
All is good except the part, where products work for 15+ years: once enough people have bought your products your profits will drop.
Yeah, appliances are a really tough place to not just make money but stay afloat. What happens when you’ve saturated the market with good products that won’t need to be replaced for a long time? You’d end up having to charge an arm and a leg for them because you simply can’t sell enough to operate. You’d still get orders of course, but at a trickle.
Idk how to fix the problem either. Part of me says government subsidies for companies with proven manufacturing records, affordable prices, and customer satisfaction? Like an incentive to not enshittify and allow those companies to stay in business? Otherwise the consumer shoulders the cost, which defeats a lot of the purpose. The point is to improve lives, and being prohibitively expensive won’t work. But convincing any government to spend money like that for such intangible and long-term societal benefits instead of pure profit seems like an unrealistic proposition. Like, how do you sell peace of mind to people who already arent suffering and with no concept of true insecurity?
I’ve been wanting companies like the one described for a very long time, but fuck me does it seem unlikely and hard to pull off
How about: accept that we are, like as a society, able to just not work as much? We are able supply people with a reasonable level of comfort without everyone slaving away this many hours every day. Let’s just build what we need at minimum labour hours over the lifetime of the products and not worry about the products making a profit for anyone. The profit of not having to work but being able to pursue interests would be so worth it.
Oh, I mean the complete overhaul of the economic system is the goal to be sure, im just talking about the difficulties such a company would face right now. And im not talking about some shareholder value bullshit either. Employees need to and deserve to be paid for their time and labor. Materials cost money. Upkeeping current equipment costs money, and getting new or better equipment to improve the product or expanding to serve more people costs money. If you ever want to expand, and altruistically we’re talking expansion for the purpose of helping more people, not pulling a profit, you need a profit margin by definition, even a sliver of one. You could get by for a while by charging at-cost price plus a couple of pennies. But if that dries up, employees go home without getting paid. Equipment and properties get sold. Manufacturing licenses are lost. Eventually the company either dissolves or is sold off to pay its debts.
Operating a company like that means you need to be prepared for very long dry spells, and if you want to be able to hold out for those and be able to do things like pay employees and keep licenses, you need deep pockets to cover it.
All this to say the revolution would need to happen before practices like this can be a reality, at least for the long term.
Charge up front for appliance disposal if they aren’t independently rated for a certain amount of lifetime so you force people to pay what the actual cost is.
I recall they do this for something, forget what. I think it was like nuclear reactors to make sure you have money set aside to decommission it safely even if you go bankrupt.
Agree. I also want such manufacturers to exist, but life shows that anyone who tried such schemes either failed or reconfigured to a standard profit scheme. I have only seen mass produced items designed for long term usage in totalitarian countries like USSR.
