Start-up idea
Submitted 2 weeks ago by GreenDust@lemmings.world to [deleted]
https://lemmings.world/pictrs/image/6cc10452-d8d7-42aa-a70a-6e6f299c6f02.jpeg
Comments
PLS_HELP@fedia.io 2 weeks ago
Mr_Fish@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Counter point: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
CIA_chatbot@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Counter-counter point: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpoint
GreenDust@lemmings.world 2 weeks ago
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.
chaogomu@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
There are good appliances being made now. They’re just much more expensive than the cheap and “midrange” which is usually the cheap stuff with a coat of paint.
tazeycrazy@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
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.
DagwoodIII@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
It’s like any other luxury.
Back in 1960, minimum wage was $1.00/hour. You could get a meal at a diner for under $1.00 or go to a really swanky place and spend $4.00 or $5.00.
Today, minimum wage is $7.50, a diner meal is $20.00, and a luxury meal is $100.00
You can go out a find a really well build product that will last, but it will cost ten times as much as the one you can afford.
rockerface@lemmy.cafe 2 weeks ago
Ah yes, the Sam Vimes’ boots theory
DagwoodIII@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Nope, totally different.
Look at the price of Super Bowl tickets.
First Bowl tickets were $10.00. This year they were going for $6,000.00
Top luxury car in 1960 was $7,500.00 for a sports car and $35,000.00 for a Rolls or Bentley. Most expensive car today is $30 million.
The rich have gotten much, much richer and ’need’ to spend more so people will notice.
fishy@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
This is true for some products but absolutely the opposite for many others. You can go buy a $500 jacket that will outlive you but good luck finding a car or fridge that won’t break, especially the high end models with all the bells and whistles. Samsung will happily sell you a $5k fridge that has dozens of features that will break and require servicing far more frequently than the $500 white apartment fridge.
Zwiebel@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
Err no, minimum wage is 13,90€
FlexibleToast@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The only thing I know close to this is Maytag has a “commercial” washer and dryer line. It’s no frills, made in America, and has a 10 year warranty. That’s the line I chose.
realitista@lemmus.org 2 weeks ago
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.
darkevilmac@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Speed Queen is also quite good, and honestly LG does pretty well in my experience. A big problem I think is people really wanting matching appliance sets.
You should look at the most reliable brand for each category and go that way, because just because Electrolux makes good washers for example doesn’t mean their ranges or dishwashers are going to be any good.
Embrace the mismatched scratch and dent appliances and you will achieve happiness
FlexibleToast@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
People match their washer to their dishwasher? I think if you’re going to do that, the Miele recommendation is probably the way to go.
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
People have mentioned energy use and safety, but adjusting for inflation they were also way more expensive, a washing machine in the 50s was over $1000 in today’s dollars. If you’re willing to spend that much, you can find great reliable appliances with long lives.
tempest@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
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.
BorgDrone@feddit.nl 2 weeks ago
My Miele was €1500, and they are known to be super reliable. They engineer for at least a 20 year life span.
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I think I paid around $1200 for my Maytag commercial, not one single problem in the last 5ish years.
sahin@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
enumerator4829@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
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.
kameecoding@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You are paying more for materials and labor though especially RnD
JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 2 weeks ago
That’s literally how much they cost now and they last 10 years or maybe 15
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
There are tons of models out there that cost half that much. Sure, there are fancy ones with wifi and touch screens you can spend $1000+ on, but a basic washer is like $4-600.
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
You could get something like this
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
I paid 1K for a Whirlpool 6620.
socsa@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
You can buy appliances which will last that long, but they cost a lot of money. The reality isn’t that people forgot how to make things durable, it’s that consumer demand is so conditioned by price, most people “prefer” to spend less on appliances they will replace more often.
The average appliance these days is actually significantly cheaper when adjusted for inflation compared to the 60s and 70s.
Croquette@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
One caveat I would note: lots of people can’t afford expensive, durable appliances.
It’s expensive to be poor.
zikzak025@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
drdalek@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
THIS.
jdr@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
This sounds great, I’d love to see an example if anyone has one handy for e.g. kitchen appliances.
socsa@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Basically commercial grade equipment. A $10k oven/range which is designed to work 15 hours per day non-stop in a restaurant will last forever in your home. All the commercial manufacturers make “consumer sized” versions of their restaurant stuff for high end home kitchens.
Delphia@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Especially when it comes to things like Tvs.
“Would you like the extended warranty out to 5 years for an extra $200”
No because that would have made my $600 tv an $800 tv which will be made to look like a piece of crap by a $400 tv in 5 years.
jaschen306@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
in 2005ish, I went to Sears and picked up the most expensive bag vacuum. I think it was an elite something. 20 years later, I had to change out the hose once because I dropped it down the stairs and its been amazing.
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.
dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
BussyCat@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
There are also different standards when you care about the environment. Old school fridges used incredibly bad greenhouse gasses (R22 and R142B) and were significantly less efficient using approximately $250 MORE energy per year than a modern fridge (1750 kWh vs 450kwh) so only factoring in your electricity bill you could buy a $2500 fridge every 10 years and break even and if you got a cheaper fridge like a whirlpool you could get a new one every 5 years for 50 years
Don’t get me wrong there is still planned obsolescence but a lot of the older designs aren’t as perfect as people like to remember them being
jaschen306@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I love buy nice or buy twice. I think Harbor freight gets a pass though.
TheDoozer@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
captcha_incorrect@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
As the saying goes, it is expensive to be poor.
kboos1@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I do think they are onto something. I just want a dishwasher that washes dishes, a dryer that just dries, a refrigerator that refrigerates. I don’t need another camera and tablet or more “smart” crap in my home, it’s just one more thing to break or need updating. I just need things that work reliablely when I need them to work.
Also, less plastic in the manufacturing material would be great. Just me thinking out loud but it also seems like it would be easier to control the life span by using plastic because you can play with the chemistry to start breaking down at a certain amount of usage and temperature and age.
Emi@ani.social 2 weeks ago
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.
FluxUniversity@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
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. This is straight up the culture of repair. We don’t have one.
lemming@feddit.online 2 weeks ago
You might be interested in this.
TLDW: Reverse engineering projects for firmware and communication on Miele/Bosch/Siemens appliances allowing local smart home integration of dumb (or smart) appliances.
The projects are FreeMDU and bsh-home-appliances.
OriginEnergySux@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Great idea! Horrible for sales though. Plus no shareholder would wanna touch it with a 10-foot pole when they hear “customers first”
ballgoat@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
This is why you don’t do shareholders!
OriginEnergySux@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
And stay small lol. I hate the corporate world (i work in it) but it is what it is
Lioffproxy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
We need a buyitforlife… Sublemmy? I forget the term
phoenix@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
i think it’s just called a community but someone correct me if i’m wrong
RedditRefugee69@lemmynsfw.com 2 weeks ago
That’s correct.
Zwiebel@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
Brother there are five
smuuthbrane@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
There is an open source hardware movement underway already, I’m hoping they get to large appliances soon.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That’s a horrible plan for a start-up.
How do your investors cash out?
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Here’s a lovely british fridge from the 50’s: c7.alamy.com/…/original-1950s-vintage-old-print-a…
the larger, budget model (250 liters, so about 2/3rd of my current basic fridge) is 152 guineas. For those of you not usally paying in pre-decimal british currency, that’s 152 pounds and 152 shillings or 159,60 decimal pounds. Inflation from 1955 makes that about 2000 pounds/dollar/euros today.
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Planned obsolescence is a cornerstone of the business model of every large corporation. They’re never going to make a product that could challenge that. And no startup will achieve the volume needed to sell these at a price that’s even remotely realistic.
rumba@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
So, this is TOTALLY doable with two caveats:
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For most things, you’re going to need a variance on high-efficiency and pollution laws. Those old appliances weren’t sipping water and electricity, and their refrigeration cycles threw out tons of waste heat and used refrigerants that were super rough on the atmosphere.
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They’re going to cost 3 times as much as a current appliance. Those heavy metal fridges were expensive back in the day, they were equialent to thousands of dollars today with shitty freezers and manual defrosting. Cast metal and shipping are disproportionately more expensive than the used to be.
captcha_incorrect@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Optimize builds and manufacture after a order is made could work. Would be even more expensive.
rumba@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Sell them uncharged. Up to the user to find the freeon.
or… art?
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cheesybuddha@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I have an old Radio from the 50s - big wooden piece of furniture with a turntable and everything. The plug on that thing is absolutely terrifying, super flimsy and so small you have to almost touch the prongs to plug it in.
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
A plug is probably the easiest thing to replace on an appliance.
cheesybuddha@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
True, but that may be indicative of other safety issues that are not as obvious.
Aganim@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The plug on that thing is absolutely terrifying, super flimsy and so small you have to almost touch the prongs to plug it in.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the secret of building appliances that outlast their owners.
LodeMike@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
They would cost $5000 each and burn your house down
Nioxic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Nah
Modern laws set power limitations (at least in EU)
jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Not every old design was better but some were.
My wife absolutely refuses to give up her early 1970’s GE range. It’s impossible to get parts for it so eventually it’s going to have to be replaced. One of the actually nice features it has is is that all the push button controls are on the range hood. Don’t have to worry about them getting greasy while cooking or little kids turning the burners on.
myfunnyaccountname@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Porteus mills in the uk made such a good product they went out of business in the 1970s. And their mills are still used in the vast majority of distilleries in Scotland.
CannedYeet@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Y’all are going to hate this, but IMO a more viable solution is a subscription model. The more reliable an appliance is, the less you spend on it in the long run, so less profit for the manufacturer. With a subscription, the more reliable they make it, the more profit they get. Then you just need sufficient competition to keep the subscription prices low.
Gates9@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
This is basically the context of “Dune”
myfunnyaccountname@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Porteus mills made such a good product they went out of business.
chocrates@piefed.world 2 weeks ago
Was gonna say, I do like th modern efficiencies. I’m waiting for a start up to make a heat pump oven
PsycyTuna@feddit.nl 2 weeks ago
Mostly survivorship bias
Lioffproxy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This is the approach galanz did I think except the shitiest patents modernized.
jenings@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Would a company like that go out of business from not selling the same shit to people over and over?
doingthestuff@lemy.lol 2 weeks ago
A lot of appliances could still be viable, but the best refrigerants are all banned. The modern ones supposedly are better for greenhouse effect, but they actively corrode parts of their closed systems, leading to consistent early part failures.
MoffKalast@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
People are just gonna keep reposting this one day after day huh.
Bluewing@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Most home appliances can be repaired even yet today. They all still work on the same principles that they did 60 years ago. Sure, the mechanical timers, switches and simple single phase motors have been replaced with solid state control boards, touch switches, and 3 phase motors, but those are also simpler to replace, if a bit harder to diagnose. The parts are a mere goggle away and for sale to even to the likes of me. About the only ‘impossible’ to repair at home appliance is your refrigerator. And that’s because of the sealed nature of the cooling system.
The biggest issue isn’t that they can’t be repaired, but rather you can’t be bothered to. You would rather spend $1000+ to get a new washing machine delivered to your house than spend $500 to fix the old one. You might consider fixing the old one if it would only cost $50 total and if the pump wasn’t $300+ labor and a $100 just to get a repairman to knock on your door. Plus the probable wait for a week or two to get the part. And you sure as hell ain’t going to get your fingers dirty or your knuckles skinned to do it yourself.
I’m still shaving with the same Gillette Slim Adjustable razor I learned to shave with as a youngster. It cost me about $10 in the early 1970s. The blades still only cost me about 15 cents per blade. I’ve had that razor for longer than I’ve been married to my wife of 40 years. I doubt few of you here would be able to make that kind of commitment to a simple razor, let alone a dishwasher.
AsyncTheYeen@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Me when I have no idea how capitalism works lmao
Carmakazi@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
CMDR_Horn@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Mmm asbestos
ElJefe@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Mmm ya and give me some lead to go with that asbestos please. Best combo
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Worry not, some of what’s perfectly fine nowadays will eventually be forbidden because how harmful it is for people, from micro-plastics that are being found even in men’s gonads to the excessive amounts of nitrous oxides emitted by diesel engine that kill over ten thousand people per year in Europe alone.
We probably still breathe and eat a lot of highly carcinogenic shit, just different shit from back in the days when asbestos was considered a great fire-proof substance.
riskable@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
…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.
Psionicsickness@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
You say this like it’s a bad thing.
You do see how many mother fuckers are around now a days?
Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
And killing americans because it doesn’t have enough warning labels.
“Does not grant you the ability to fly”
LodeMike@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
And require regular matinence and still fail