Survivorship bias
Far from it. As a technician there are way more service calls on newer appliances and much shorter life cycles for them. Certain fairly universal parts are clearly being made at a lower standard now as well. For instance, a very common repair is gas oven ignitors. Many different manufacturers use the exact same style of hot surface ignitors. The ones i see these days burn out in ½ the time or less than they ever used to, even though the design of them hasn’t changed one iota.
There is a clear and obvious lack of quality in today’s appliances. An old Maytag washer could last 25 years with minimal repairs/maintenance. A newer Maytag doing the same work over the same duration would be lucky to get ½ that mileage before it got shit-canned, though it’s likely it would happen even sooner than that. The comparison in design is night and day. The old one was simple, field-tested design made for reliability and relative ease of service…the other is a hodgepodge of electronics and sensors connected by Angel-Hair spaghetti-thin wiring that will have something break in less than 10 years with regular use, and likely less than 5 with heavy use. Sure, a few of the old Maytag’s didn’t go the distance and a few of the newer ones managed to squeak out more mileage than expected…but anyone with real experience with those 2 machines would take the old one over the new one every single time. It’s almost unfair to compare an old Maytag washer to a new one because the most important metric is reliability and there’s simply no comparison there.
Do people genuinely think modern tech is that durable/reliable?
You’d pick a maytag washer from the 40s or 50s?
The 70s/80s is the sweet spot
Tell your friends to stop buying from Samsung
It doesn’t matter how old it is - any fridge needs refilling
Nah. My dad has like 50y old russian fridge bought by the grandpa in the Soviet union times and it still works.
Mine’s ~25 years old. It’s second hand, so I’m not sure how old. It has worked perfectly from day one. I hate to talk about it, don’t want to jinx it.
If it dies, I’ll try to repair it. If I can’t repair it, I’ll look to buy an older used one somewhere.
Really though, I don’t like when this sort of thing is publicized, because people who might decide to get rid of an old, perfectly usable fridge to buy a new one will learn that they shouldn’t so there won’t be as many used ones to choose from, and they’ll be more expensive.
It’s a sad fact of society that there are no great rock ballads about refrigerators.
My mom bought a new house and is moving in, in a couple weeks. I went over to get internet installed a couple weeks ago and noticed the new fridge was making an awful buzzing sound.
AI memes?
Remember that white goods typically have longer warranties, so don’t forget to use it if needed! After I convinced my parents to do it, the tech said it was a design issue and ended up replacing the heater with a larger one (I didn’t even know they had them.)
With their phased out refrigerants that you can’t find anymore and when you call someone to recharge it, they can’t and youre stuck with a fridge that no longer works.
The fridge was designed to survive the third world war.
