Except they're terribly inefficient and use shit like freon
this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2026
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Also, a number of them will still fail quickly. Survivorship bias.
Or you'll create something that is genuinely better with good longevity and then discover you'll have next to no sales growth since once somebody buys it, they never need to replace it.
You know if I created a buisness myself and had no shareholders demanding quarterly profit increases, that would be okay.
If it made 1 million in profit after 10 years and then needed to be shuttered that's fine by me.
I imagine this would make an individual quite wealthy for their lifetime. We just think it's unviable because we've been tricked into believing that a buisness must grow forever to be successful
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And they'll cost $3500
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just a reminder that survivorship bias is a huge thing. There have been shitty products from back then too. Many. We just don't see them now, because only the few good products have survived. The same happens today.
Its not all planned obsolescence and not all obsolescence is bad. Imagine having a 40 year old fridge that doesn't cool shit and burn 3 times the energy.
2 tips for good quality products now: end capitalism and spend money on the right products (not just convenience) and the right people to repair them.
and the right people to repair them.
Also, the right to repair them.
There have been shitty products from back then too. Many. We just don't see them now, because only the few good products have survived.
So we built on that knowledge and kept making the good ones as they were and didn't see how cheap we could make them right? ..right?
It's more complicated than that. It's literally that sometimes two of the exact same item last for radically different times. It's not a different design or manufacturing process, just an amorphous series of random factors lining up we call luck.
Mean time between failures is something they do actually measure in manufacturing, and you see interesting results like what hard drive manufacturers do to increase reliability: stress test the drives until the ones destined to fail early fail, and then sell the others.
There are things that can increase reliability, but a lot of the things that make the extreme outliers are just random, and no one documents what they were because they didn't know it was going not have an effect, good or bad.
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I always say this when a question like this comes up:
Find a repair person for what you're looking to buy and ask them which brands and models last the longest and are easiest to get parts for and repair in your country. They are the people that actually know the answer.
Good quality shit still exists, you just need to pay for it, and if you remember the Terry Pratchett boots story, you'll know paying more up front is going to save you money in the long run
GNU Terry Pratchett
A man is not dead while his name is still spoken
😭
Yeah people don't realize that appliances were a LOT more expensive back then too, especially as a proportion of income. A washer dryer set in 1959 cost $380, at a time when the median household income was only $5,400. That means to buy a washer dryer set, they would have to spend 7% of their pre-tax income. Currently, the cheapest washer dryer set will set you back $1300, and the median household income is $83,000, so it's about 1.5% of the annual household income. If you're willing to pay what people were proportionally willing to pay in 1959, you can still buy a washer dryer set that will last a lifetime. Most people just aren't.
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Reliable appliances already exist. They cost 10x what the cheap stuff costs and very, very few people buy them because “why would I get this washing machine for $5000 when I can get this other one with more features for $500?”.
TBF, there are lot of the “10x as expensive” appliances that are absolute garbage, have awful reliability and are very expensive to repair. The “best” would be to buy commercial kitchen gear, but it isn’t pretty enamel colors or designer chic. Of course there are still a few reliable standouts like the typical Kitchen Aid stand mixer, but like you said, a hand mixer can be had for $50, and Kitchen Aids can cost $500+.
FYI: today's Kitchen Aids are not the beasts of durability of years gone by
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And WiFi.
And AI.
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Ya... That just won't work, at least here in the states. Those old appliances were great and lasted forever but they consumed a massive amount of energy, they would never pass federal regulations now a days.
Also fridges from the 50s had a tiny tendency to explode from time to time.
Little bit of this, little bit of that.
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Yes and no. Yes they should build those old patents in a general sense. No they should not follow those patents exactly because they contained things like asbestos and lead.
Something that most people fail to do on their tools and appliances is maintenance. My house is full of cheap appliances that are pushing 15 or so years of life and running great, but they require work. Filters need to be changed on dishwashers and laundry machines, people never check these often enough. For example, most people I know don't own an air compressor, which means they never fully clean out all the motor killing dust. Computers, vacuum filters, air purifiers, fridge compressors, all these items need to be blasted with air, way more than you can get from a little can of air like IT people love to use.
Get the proper tools to maintain your things, and even the cheap stuff will last a while.
I got a manscaped electric face razor to replace another cheap one that was dying. It was the first electric razor I got that didn't come with a tiny bottle of mineral oil for lube and even said in the manual that it didn't need lube.
I bet if I had listened to that BS, it would be dead already, especially because I have had it fail to start with full battery just from the friction of the blades (giving it a tap can get it going, adding lube makes it run noticeably better).
Fucking liars. Let's see if it lasts any longer than the other ones even with lube.
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Okay but my parents never maintained much and it all lasted a very long time. I think the point still stands. Things nowadays require much more maintenance. Of course maintaining them will make them last longer
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There was a startup that wanted to build exactly that, a washing machine that would last a lifetime.
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Your appliance will cost 4-10x more. There’s no magic to it. Appliances were like opera. Made for the rich
Do the appliances the rich currently buy follow this rule or do they just get fancier low durability goods
There's a whole world of super high-end appliances you've never even heard of because you're not worth marketing to.
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It depends. If you are a show off that only cares about aesthetics, then you're paying for looks, not quality.
In my experience, a great dishwasher is worth the money. I had a Miele that was absolutely silent. Not whisper quiet. Silent.
A good, high quality, refrigerator is also worth it. You don't know your fridge is shit until you have one that keeps your food fresh, and doesn't freeze or wilt your produce.
If you are not a baker, or someone who uses the oven on a regular basis, then in my opinion any low tech electric stove will do the trick. Induction top if you like precise temp controls. Getting an oven right is very difficult and normally where you see the well deserved price jump.
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I wonder if anyone has ever talked about how difficult it is to challenge capitalist imperatives while capitalists own all the factories and their supply chains.
These appliances would cost similar to 60 years ago? You’ll be spending 2-3 months salary on a washing machine or television. We got used to cheap and poor quality - poor repairability devices in the consumer economy.
Yeah, the bummer is that you can pay that much for appliances, but you are paying for extra features, NOT for extra durability and repairability. They simply don't make them like that anymore.
Linus and Luke from LTT were talking about this the other day, how you can spend like 20-30 grand on a sub-zero or some other fancy brand fridge, and it will last 50 years like appliances used to. But when you sell your house eventually it will add NO value, the buyer is just going to see "great, the house comes with a fridge like it's supposed to". So unless you plan to take the fridge with you from house to house and go through the trouble of replacing it with something normal when you do then the economics just don't work for most people anymore.
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You can already buy appliances like that.
These are the top rated brands by Consumer Reports. The top rated brand by reliability? Their site...doesn't seem to list prices. That's never a good sign..But a search of Google shopping indicates that their fridges start at $7000 and up. Quality brands exist. They just cost 3-10 times the cheaper brands.
I was a subscriber to Consumer Reports for years and trusted them implicitly because they seemed so thorough and rigorous. Then they did reviews on a subject with which I am intimately familiar (it was computer related), and I was shocked at how badly they fumbled just about everything. I've also seen some really dubious ratings on high ticket items like cars that I knew were not great, so I take their ratings with grain of salt anymore.
The fact that Whirlpool is even on this list makes it a joke to me. I will say I've had a Miele dishwasher in the past and it was fucking awesome, and have heard great things about a lot of Bosch appliances. But LG and Whirlpool frequently put out trash appliances.
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Oh, do I am reminded of those damned stacks of inkjet printers in some forgotten room in the office, or my cousin's small collection of cut-rate plastic washing machines in his backyard.
In any system -- capitalist or communist -- once mass manufacture became normal, a product is expected to last for a certain period of time until it breaks, and whether it could be repaired or not. But right now and in this age where most manufacture of consumer goods is now conducted by one country on this planet, any corporation will want to keep profits and business going, so by consequence with planned obsolescence they reduce the product's quality or lifetime which will of course force the consumer to replace the product with a new one anywhere from a few years to a few days. And why corporations are increasingly anti-repair by the day, by adding minute deliberate changes in their products in their attempts to defeat what they call "unauthorized" repair.
I still can't believe how normalized not repairing your own things became in just a period of decades. My grandparents, now deceased, were born in the thirties. Repairing things is just what you did all the way up until their fifth decade, when it started to change. Even they noticed how they just went along with it over time, since technology got past what two former farm kids who grew up without electricity could easily understand.
Intentionally over-complicating a device so that it must be repaired (additional revenue) by a 'professional' that they approve of (additional revenue) with their own parts (additional revenue).
You might expect a company that makes easier-to-repair things to retain more customers, but 'more customers' is an incentive because it means more profit, but if you can get several more profit more directly by doing these shenanigans, then why wouldn't unregulated capitalists go in that direction?
Indeed, I know someone who has an early 1980's Kenmore Microwave, Made in Japan, with a single dial control for the timer and the damn thing is still working in the kitchen.
My grandparents had a microwave so old it had mechanical buttons you push in that would pop out when it was done. It was freaking huge, and so old fashioned it had those red numbers like old clocks or calculators, it even had a turkey setting, as if people want microwaved turkey. Can you imagine someone trying to feed you microwaved turkey for thanksgiving? The thing weighed a ton and people were afraid to be near it while it was running. But it was still working in 2015 or so, after my uncle had inherited it and he finally said he lost interest in seeing how long it would last. The microwave won in the battle of wills, but still found itself in some landfill.
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