Yes, but the other poster is correct with the other half of the argument. Right now at this very moment in history, appliances are the cheapest adjusted for the median household income than they’ve ever been. Why? Because that’s what consumers demand. The manufacturer knows full well they can’t make a durable machine at the price point consumers are willing to pay, but it’s okay for them because they also know consumers will happily buy another one in 5 years.
Don’t like it? Buy a Speed Queen washer or dryer.
“But there’s no way in hell I’m paying $1449 just for a damn for a washing machine!!!”
Yeah, my point exactly. And theirs, too.
Guess what, my dudes and dudettes: That oldschool classic Kenmore or whatever-the-hell washer your parents had when you were growing up that’s still trucking? Adjusted for inflation, that’s about what it would cost in today’s money, give or take a couple of percent.
(I sourced that Sears pricing by stealing it from here, by the way. The management apologizes deeply in advance if you wind up pissing away your entire afternoon going all nostalgic over the contents of that link.)
onslaught545@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
That’s just not true. It’s not so much planned obsolescence as it’s companies making appliances to fit a price point and using lower quality parts to do so.
You can absolutely still buy appliances that will last decades, but they are expensive. 50 years ago you could absolutely buy a cheap washer that would need to be fixed frequently.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
Are you suggesting that planned obsolescence doesn’t exist?
FishFace@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
How about this (not OP): most things people attribute to planned obsolescence are not planned obsolescence.
onslaught545@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
I am suggesting that companies specifically designing products to fail at a specific point isn’t as prolific as people like to claim.
frongt@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
Yeah. It’s not “how evilly can we design this to only last three years”, it’s “how cheaply can we design this to last only at least as long as it has to”. There’s a difference between making it fail and just not caring if it continues.
Like how the mars rovers had a design lifetime of like three years or whatever, and anything past that was just a bonus. NASA didn’t design them to fail after three years, they designed them to last at least three years at minimum.