Golden age revisionism is a comforting illusion that edits out the past’s flaws and distorts reality; it becomes dangerous when it shapes decisions based on nostalgia instead of truth.
Those 1980s fridges for ex lacked ice makers and water filtration, used far more energy due to inefficient design, struggled with consistent temperatures that spoiled food faster, often required manual defrosting, and had poor seals that let cold air escape and raised costs.
Golden age revisionism is the chief tactic of blow hard Republicans. Ever hear, make America great…again?
I’ve never used a fridge that has an ice maker or water filtration. They are still premium options, or some people just don’t have any use for the features.
I hypothesize that youve been out of the consumer fridge market for at least 10 years. Water filter and ice maker ia the basic bitch options these days.
Premiums option today are things like climate zones, adjustable shelving, ai, inventory tracking and digital screen/computer that you can write notes on or ask ur fridge what meals you can make from the fridge contents.
But don’t take my word for it, google it yo.
They are really trying to invent new needs to sell you more stuff. I wouldn’t use any of this if I had it.
Yeah, these must be American things. Never encountered them in Europe in a non-professional setting.
Do you y’all just not drink ice?
The lowest budget fridges have ice makers here.
Your fridge is already cold enough for ice, and it’s in the kitchen which has running water. It feels like a no-brainer idea compared to flipping ice out of a plastic mold every time you want a drink.
My wife just got a ~20k hospital bill but hey at least our fridge filters the drinking water automatically
You forgot about the locking doors so children had to be taught not to play inside of them if you saw one outside because you would suffocate and die.
I remember watching an episode of Punky Brewster on TV about that.
I mean you ain’t wrong or nothing, but I’m pretty sure they’re mostly focusing on enshitification.
I’m 40 and the only memory I have of an old appliance that stands out was the time I took soaked clothes and put them in the dryer and ran it. I broke that sum-bitch gud
Except in this case its true. They have over stuffed modern appliances with useless features that shorten the life of the appliance. As to how they didn’t comes with ice makers. Of course they did. Most had a place where it could be added if you didn’t buy one with that feature. Water filtration wasn’t there true enough but no one thought of that then. Only older early 70’s fridges came without defrosting. As to the poor seals you get that from damage which applies to modern fridges as well. The fridge I have is from the early 90’s and it rocks. No problems with ice buildup No leaks and a consistent temperature. I dread having to buy some modern POS built to fail so you can get sold another one.
Not everything is a republican plot to get you to purchase a forty year appliance.
“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.” — Henri Bergson
misquoting someone doesn’t work with me. I mean I see just fine. I see that people are buying applliances and they last just past the warrenty. I don’t care if they are super effiecnet. You lose that money saved when you have to keep buying another one.
I have a mini fridge purchased new early 00s that I recently left unplugged for a day or so to melt the ice buildup on the freezer.
Not that I’m happy with the overall state of appliances these days, but the reality is that technology is still improving, but some of those “improvements” aren’t for the buyer’s benefit (while others are). And there’s plenty of plain old cheap shit in a nice brushed stainless steel package to make it look high end.
Like induction stoves and convection ovens weren’t really a thing in the 80s but imo are way better than what came before. But, despite being a convection oven, the cheap one the developers picked for my place is the worst oven I’ve ever used. And I’m hesitant to “upgrade” because, despite knowing they can be better, there’s a good chance whatever I end up getting won’t, or make will be at first but will start degrading rapidly from day 1 such that it’s shitty by the time the warranty runs out.
That is the big difference between modern and older appliances. The older ones were made in good faith, the newer ones are a gamble because we have an economic system based on greed and it has progressed a lot since the 50s.
I remember when I was in uni, living on-campus in a student dorm. Living conditions were not great, the rooms were small and they stuffed 3 or 4 guys in each room. We each had a bed, a chair, a tiny wardrobe, a shelf and half a desk. No fridge. Each fall, when we got back to school, there was an effervescent market for old used refrigerators. Everybody was buying and selling fridges for the first 1 or 2 weeks. One year we bought a 50 year old Zil fridge made in the USSR in the 60’s. We paid like €10 for it. It was heavy as hell and we had to carry it up the stairs to the 4th floor. The thing made a loud, continuous buzzing which helped drown out one of our colleague’s thunderous snoring. We loved it. I don’t remember what happened to it or who got to keep it after we disbanded, but I’m sure it still works.
Survivorship bias. All the ones that broke aren’t around anymore.
The ‘modern’ stuff breaks down faster due to 1) the fact that engineering has improved so much that obfuscation can be planned without compromising functionality. 2) ‘Modern’ stuff tries to cram in multiple features which are not necessary for its basic function. For this I blame the lack of diligence from buyers. The increased complexity means more parts that can fail. I bring up the example of SystemD (no offense to anyone, user’s choice).
Right but none of the ones made these days last. Some > none.
They were way more repairable though. We had a gas dryer that lasted 40 years and was only replaced because we moved somewhere without gas.
It was basically a big egg timer with an electric mover and a gas burner. You could fix anything on it with a crescent wrench, screwdriver, and off-the-shelf components from the hardware store for about 9 bucks.
The replacement dryer has had to have $1000+ circuit boards replaced more than once.
The WTF here is not necessarily that some component on the circuit board failed, but that the manufacturer charges $400-$1000 for it with a straight face and gets away with it when they undoubtedly have that board made in China for about $4 per unit.
The big thing you and a lot of posters are missing is what happens when those parts aren’t made anymore. With a standard motor that uses a start capacitor, you can get that cap or motor as a generic part or from another manufacturer, if your modern appliance eats its vfd board now, you can replace it for $$$. If it dies in 8 years, its probably already been discontinued and you are sol even if you wanted to pay for it.
But there’s WAY more surviving devices from 1960 in 2020 than there will be from 2020 in 2080.
I’m assuming CFC might have been a better coolant, that’s why those old fridges are so good
Another issue is we’ve been trained to treat major appliances as disposable. Back in the day you called a repairman.
For example, my mom’s washer stopped doing the spin cycle. She immediately hopped on Consumer Reports to shop for a new one.
I hopped on an appliance parts website and ordered her a new lid switch for $15. One YouTube video later and her washer worked like new.
You were lucky it wasn’t the $250 circuit board that failed, which charged $50 for shipping.
Still cheaper than a new washer.
Also, appliances were way more expensive – both to purchase and (thanks to wasteful energy etc. usage) to operate. Bens Appliances and Junk has a good video on this that I imagine a lot of people are drawing on in this thread.
Back in the day you called a repairman.
That guy’s time is worth probably $30/hour, so if you want to use up his 8 hour day you’d better be willing to pay $240, plus parts, plus the gas money of driving his truck to your home, plus the cost of keeping those parts on hand and the truck available.
Or if it’s something he knows is only a half day job, then he can book something else so that he only really needs to charge you $120.
Now that a lot of these appliances are like $500, it’s pretty hard to justify the cost of professional repair.
50 years ago, when the price of an appliance was something like 50 hours of a repairman’s hourly wage, it made a lot of sense for most issues to be fixed by a professional. Now that these appliances are worth like 15-20 worker hours, it’s much harder to justify.
They only cost 15-20h of work because they’re built like a pile of leafs in the wind. Look at it wrong and it’ll break.
I hopped on an appliance parts website and ordered her a new lid switch for $15. One YouTube video later and her washer worked like new.
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many youtube videos are scams/clickbait though and/or present un-true or outdated information
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even if i have the spare part and the replacement part (i probably ordered the wrong one, how the heck am i supposed to know whether Knita CX-2035 is compatible with my Radover DishWasher i13s, the manual says i need Knita CX-2034 but they don’t produce them anymore, but the Knita website says that CX-2035 is the “successor part”), i assume i either lack a screwdriver or a voltage meter or a fucking welding machine to weld the oven open and shut again. And if i manage to weld it shut correctly, i will forever live in anxiety about accidentally having used toxic chemicals inside the oven which now continue to evaporate each time that i heat it up, slowly poisoning my food and me which will only become clear decades later when i start developing mysterious diseases which might have their origin in me using aluminum wires when i should have used stainless chromated copper wires.
Dude, you can find replacement videos for pretty much any part in any appliance that are just some dude walking you through it because they just did it. I’m not sure where you’re seeing scam appliance repair guide videos.
The way you buy parts is you go to a part seller webpage where you enter the model number they’ll have a parts diagram and you select the part you need.
There’s pretty much zero chance that welding would be required to change a part.
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The problem is that they’re not designed to be repairable
My fridge stopped working correctly, only the freezer part would actually cool. I called the local service company. Tech came when I wasn’t home, told my partner “compressor’s broken, though shit” , took 60€ and left.
My combination washer dryer has stopped drying. From what I gather it seems like a compressor gas leak, guess what? Too expensive to fix, so I would have to throw away several tens of kilos of machine just because of a fart’s worth of gas.
I have a Neato robot vacuum which I’ve kept clean and repaired for years, only for fucking Vorwerk, may they go bankrupt tomorrow, to shut down its servers, so now it’s dumb as a rock and next to useless.
It’s not your mother’s fault for assuming a malfunctioning appliance must be replaced.
That’s very much the plot to Cory Doctorow’s short story Unauthorized Bread. The toaster company turned off the servers and some people got real tech savvy real quick.
The enshittification of everything will eventually lead to some small companies making good quality long lasting appliances I hope, they will make a good name for themselves and have easily repairable parts, but since we live in the real world whirlpool or GE will buy them keep the branding and make it more “intelligent” and easily breakable by adding computer parts that aren’t needed and plastic parts that will fail and not be able to be repaired or replaced.
Some companies already started to make repairable products (eg: fairphone and framework) the problem is that they either cost a lot or have less quality than other products because they are new company with limited marketshare and that don’t make money by making you buy something every 2 years
I am aware of both companies and am a customer because i want to encourage repairability however i also know that once the market is saturated with long term easy to fix products that the manufacturer will then not be able to sell new stock for a while, and Framework and Fairphone both have a solution to that by selling individual components for replacement or upgrade, but how much would a dishwasher or washing machine manufacturer be able to make off of O rings, or timing belts or something else cheap and easy to make, when amazon will sell lower quality ones at 1/2 the price that will work temporarily for either the repairman or cheap customer to fix their own machine. The incentive structure sucks for anything but enshitification at the moment.
Don’t count on it. Instant Pot managed to sell so many units they’re in what seems like almost every kitchen. And then that was that, because everyone already had one, so their sales volume plummeted and they went bankrupt. I still use mine all the time, but the original company went away.
That’s fine, companies shouldn’t be forever
to shut down its servers, so now it’s dumb as a rock and next to useless.
I hate this so much. There’s no reason a robot vacuum should require internet access to function. Companies only do it for tighter control of their products, to track your usage, to have the ability to paywall features, and to have the ability to disable it so you have to buy a new one.
It’s doubly fucked in that I have a smart home where everything is controlled locally without the cloud, and this vacuum was the only thing that wasn’t.
Maybe someone’s developed an open-source firmware solution that you can port to it for self-hosting?
Maybe try giving it to AI to make a self-hosted server?
If nothing else, that can be a redeeming quality of that heap of bullshit, if it can manage it.
What?
If the vacuum needs a cloud connection to run, maybe AI could try to create a self-hosted replacement.
I doubt they do much security, so perhaps the vacuum doesn’t validate certificates or keys.
Which is fine. You’d think they’d just refine those further. Today we’d have ultra efficient tanks that take little water, little energy, and never break.
Everything breaks eventually. Entropy always increases.
Yeah also forever means from when you were 8 until you moved out, only 12 years… Appliances can still do that today.
Look at Mr Moneybags over here, with enough money to move out
Samsung has left the chat…
Also imprecise engineering tended to overbuild things.
Increase in precision (materially and economically) then leads to rebound effects; higher precision should lead to lower material flows, but the opposite happens because the technological progress broadens the market when possible
Thanks to better manufacturing techniques, engineering analysis, and the fine humans in management, we have gotten really good at barely building a machine that lasts just long enough to be out of warranty.
Not necessarily. Less parts, less complex mechanisms = lower probability of something breaking down.
Also there was a time where companies actually cared. They would send the engineers for the next model out with service techs servicing current models to help them find the common failure points and help make things more servicable.
Also there was a time where companies actually cared.
:-/
Planned Obselence was pioneered nearly a century ago. You might have individual service reps or salesman with a soul. But no company has ever carried about more than profits.
Longevity was supposedly a goal for manufacturers in the GDR.
in the GDR
Yes, but that’s Evil Communism. Didn’t you see the movie “The Dryers of Others”?
i have a new dumb washer and dryer set bought this year, and my previous dumb set bought in 2011 still working, the ex took them 😂
We also aren’t paying the same prices. The fridge from the 60s in your grandmas basement? She probably had a 10 year payment plan for it.
No, loans and credit were not common back then. You saved for them.
Yes, you might get credit from a local shop if they’d known you or your family, but people generally lived within their means. Layaway was also a thing. I just don’t recall if we ever used that with appliances.
Layaway was used for appliances in the 80’s, but it was very rare in the 90’s as credit was widely available by then. That is when stuff started going down in quality.
Ah, the good old days when your “dumb” refrigerator would kill children playing hide and seek because the latch wouldn’t open from the inside. When it was lined with asbestos because that’s literally the best insulation that exists excepting aerogel. When the mercury thermostat would fail—leaking mercury on to your food (and aerosolizing some which would be breathed in as soon as you opened it)—and it would freeze everything inside, complete with an interior wall of snow that could take days to defrost. It used old school freon, destroying the ozone layer. Or before then, fun highly toxic gasses like methyl chloride!
Those were the days! When a breeze through the house on a day with wonderful weather could blow out the pilot light in your oven, slowly leaking gas into your house, exploding and destroying the entire home late at night while everyone is asleep.
Then the wonders of electricity came along to produce ovens that were hooked up to 220V lines without a grounding wire, and wiring that would slowly fail over time, eventually making contact with the metal frame, electrocuting anyone who touched the device—or anyone that touched the person touching it.
Ovens were built different “back in the day”! They didn’t have anti-tip brackets, resulting in loads of children sitting on the oven door, spilling boiling liquids down upon them.
The best were those old washing machines, though! You could lift up the lid and look inside to see your laundry spinning at high speeds! Just don’t reach your hand in, or you could find out what the term “degloving” means.
Ah yes, the good old days of appliances.
Well, you obviously speak for the USA. And despite things like thermal cutoffs or automatic shutoffs, things were pretty safe here (Germany) in the 60-90s.
Also, there is a difference between general advancements in safety regulations and putting tons of unnecessary features in a device that will break soon. No Tesla of today will probably still be going in 50yrs or after 500.000km.
The higher the complexity, the higher the chance of failure.
And on top of it, there was no “planned obsolescence” or even suicides switches built in. Bad for capitalism, good for people.
But they had more fun colours for appliances
Oh so am I supposed to believe that there are Model Ts still running today?
There is.
No I don’t. And I’ve never had a smart appliance either
Sadly the old disc world Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness boot theory applies.
“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.”
Speed queen. We just got ours and I’m never getting rid of them.
Built to outlast the owner.
Smart features aren’t what make appliances break. Give me a fridge and a washer with Matter/Thread for local sensor readings from HomeAssistant and a compressor/motor that doesn’t die after 3 years and I’ll give you the $3k for a fridge that you demand
It won’t pass modern energy standards.
Adjusted for inflation, they also cost ~$3,000 each.
If you want a simple, basic, but very reliable appliance and are willing to pay $3,000 for it, there are brands existing today that will sell one to you.
(Or, you know, just buy some old used ones and make minor repairs if necessary.)
Just got rid of my fancy younger washer after spending $240 on repairs for the second time only to have it fail again.
Went and pulled my ancient Whirlpool direct drive out of storage, spent $15 on the replacement clutch and coupler it needed and threw them in there.
Thing turns 30 years old this year and it’s going like a champ.
You can buy appliances without smart features still?
Best Buy has dozens, if not hundreds, of fridges without smart features. I can buy a 18cu top freezer fridge for $450 right now.
That same type of fridge back in the 1970s cost $300-$400. Adjusted for inflation that’s $2,000
So I don’t get this post. You can buy cheap fridges still and it’ll probably last a long time if you take care of it. Read repair reports or Google random problems for a fridge you’re looking to buy to see the most common failure points and see what the repair cost would be to factor in future costs.
Stupid post.
