From clothes to tech, why is everything so poorly made.

Vox ^ | Jan 4, 2023 | Izzie Ramirez

[anthropocene_x]

The Great Depression changed the very nature of consumerism. The economy desperately needed stimulation — and consumer goods were one way to do it. It was around this period that advertising heavyweight Earnest Elmo Calkins laid out a selling strategy that came to define purchasing habits for the next century: “consumer engineering,” or how advertisers and designers could artificially create demand, often by making older objects seem undesirable.

Fast-forward a handful of decades, and now several generations of people are conditioned to buy the new thing and to keep replacing it. Companies, in turn, amp up production accordingly. It’s less so that objects are intended to break (functional planned obsolescence) but rather that consumer mindsets are oriented around finding the better object. But “better” doesn’t always mean long-lasting when companies are incentivized to produce faster and faster and faster.

For years, Apple opposed right-to-repair laws, claiming they would expose company secrets. Because their screws are proprietary, you need special equipment to open up a device. This meant swinging by the dreaded Genius Bar or an authorized third-party shop to fix a broken screen until 2021, when Apple announced it would finally sell the parts required to open (and therefore fix) a device following years of activism from folks like Gordon-Byrne and pressure from regulators. Apple’s products still remain some of the toughest to repair on your own, according to iFixit, but the company is not alone in opposing right-to-repair; Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Tesla, John Deere, and General Electric have all spent billions lobbying against right-to-repair laws.

[Valpal1]

Right to repair is especially important in agriculture.

[Brian Griffin]

Right to repair is important after a hurricane too.

[proxy_user]

” Because their screws are proprietary, you need special equipment to open up a device.”

The Apple screws are not proprietary. They are pentalobe screws, which were widely available before Apple started using them. Several makers offer pentalobe screwdrivers.

[Brian Griffin]

A do-it-yourself store with 30% of its top items out of stock makes life difficult for people like me.

If I need X, Y and Z and it only has Y and Z, I often can’t figure out I need X, only that I’m unsure how to proceed.

[bigbob]

BS - false premise. “Everything” is not poorly made, thanks to automation and improved materials and processes, the quality of most products is excellent and continually improving. Right to repair - yes, but within reason. The right to repair a device built with 2010 SMT devices and .01” lead spacing isn’t going to make it possible for the average user to fix his phone. (Which, by the way, does the job of a dozen previous poorly made devices). Iphones don’t fail because the software got scrambled, they fail because some dumbass sat on it and broke the screen.

[Paladin2]

My 2021 F150 is way better functionally than a 1990 F150.

[beaversmom]

I was telling my Ethiopian friend who is young and doesn’t know our history, that once upon a time, we were definitely more of a car-oriented culture. Not just having cars but loving them almost as much as we would love a living thing. She just bought a newer car but is keeping her older Toyota because it was the first car she ever owned here in the States. It has sentimental value to her. But young men and young women years ago felt even a closer connection to their cars. They were distinguishable from each other. You could baby and doctor them when they were sick. They offered freedom from the prying eyes of adults. I wish we could go back to those days even though I was born a bit too late to be in the heyday. American Graffiti, to me, symbolizes that era perfectly.

Back to my Ethiopian friend, one time she told me that she loves older Jeeps and four wheel drive vehicles of that era because she remembers the Americans and other Westerners, I’m assuming aid workers, tooling around with ease around her country.

[glorgau]

Things are poorly made because there are many landfills that need filling.

[central_va]

Because we import sh!t from China and elsewhere. Especially car parts. You pay a premium for labor or do it yourself to install lousy poorly made coolie part.

[Stone Creek]

It’s getting impossible to find quality clothes anymore. Eddie Bauer’s women’s tees were excellent, the cotton soft and plush. I ordered a replacement batch recently, and they’re running small with coarse thin fabric. Same for the Land’s End shirts my husband likes.

[D Rider]

But with my 1987 F150, I was able to do alot of work on it myself.

[Paladin2]

Yeah, you are correct.

I’m only leasing my 2021 up to the warranty mileage and then it goes back.

It seems to be well made and is certainly more functional [twin turbos provide sea-level performance at altitude], but is more complicated than my interest to eventually repair.

[Dr. Sivana]

“A better iPhone would be one that I can use for 20 years and keep upgrading,” Bird says. “But that’s not how we define better, right? Nobody wants an iPhone 14 because it will last for 10 years. They want it because it has a fancier camera or whatever.”

A phone is a screen, a battery, a board, cameras, speaker(s), mic.

The most expensive parts (board and screen) get significantly better every few years, and so do the cameras.

Because the phone uses current cell phone towers, a 2G phone cannot be upgraded in a 5G world.

And yes, consumer preferences DO play a role. Before the iPhone, batteries were removeable. I prefer removable batteries. I had a charger and a pocket full of indentical batteries for a cheap flip phone, knowing I would not run out of juice. When the iPhone came out, Apple was one of the few with a non-consumer removeable battery. Reviews were critical. Apple stuck to its guns. Now the non-removeable battery is the standard. To make it otherwise would mean a thicker phone.

But here is the elephant in the room that the article ignores. Enviro mandates are making products worse without making them cheaper. Everything from the soy coated wires in your car that rats find tasty, to the lead-free solder joints that decay and fail faster and with less stress, to spidering on circuit boards causing failures in a fraction of the time of the old circuit boards, failing heat tiles on the space shuttle, to low water washers and dishwashers and toilets that take longer, fail faster, and do a poor job. These have little to do with the points on fast fashion or computer advances. It has to do with changes mandated that are either unrelated to the technology of today or the wants of the consumers.

LED lights would have taken over without a mandate, because they are a good value and they eventually were practical. We put up with years of mandated curlicue fluorescents that flickered, broke easily, and ultimately became quickly obsolete because of the anti-filament bulb mandates.

There were few mandates on computer monitors, but LCDs took over for CRTs in a gradual organic manner without rules requiring them.

Cars had almost become a commodity at the low end for ICE vehicles. It was really hard to find a real clunker compared to the Vegas, '56 Plymouths (rusted), and diesel Toronados of yesteryear.

Newer rounds of CAFE and safety standards first forced 4 banger turbos, lots of expensive safety features and electronics, emissions computers, and CVTs, meaning that the cars will have major component failures earlier than they would have. And the low end is gone.

Still not enough, EVs are going to have to dominate to meet fantasy CAFE standards designed to favor EVs. The $100K Tesla Roadstar might well be a fine car, but if someone has to buy a $25,000 car it will have serious limitations, and it won't hold up for 25 years like a Toyota Camry or Ford ICE Pickup will. The article ignored these aspects of the problem.

[John S Mosby]

Because most tech is CHEAP CRAP from China. Textiles from the turd world of semi to full slave labor sweat shops. That’s why it is another era of SHODDY workmanship and no quality control whatsoever.

[nutmeg]

bookmark

[gattaca]

bmp

[KarlInOhio]

Because their screws are proprietary, you need special equipment to open up a device.

Which you can get from a Chinese shop on Amazon about three months after the phone hits the market.

The one thing that bothers me is built in batteries. Even the best lithium-ion batteries have a shorter useful life that the device they power. On older phones you could just pop off the back and drop in a relatively standard sized battery. Now you either have to do major surgery or toss the phone and get a new one when it can only hold a few hours of charge.

As they hypno-trained the kids in Brave New World "Ending is better than mending,"

[GaryCrow]

Because the makers make them as cheaply as possible.

My grandparents had a hotpoint refrigerator they bought in 1946 right after WWII. It weighed about 600 lbs but was still working when my grandmother died in 1998. It's unfathomable that a refrigerator made today would last 52 years, they aren't designed to last like that now.

[KarlInOhio]

Also, I bought an Acer laptop when I was comparing it to an HP with similar specs and price. The Micro Center salesman asked if I ever wanted to do repairs and when I said yes, he said the Acer was much easer to open and swap parts and the battery was pretty easy to change even though it was built in.