Michael Black wrote
Rick Brandt ) wrote

This raises an apparent contradiction. Most people believe that
appliances were built much better in the past than they are now and
yet in the past a whole industry survived on doing appliance
repairs. Perhaps they only seemed to be built better in the past
because we kept them longer and the only reason we kept them longer
is because we repaired them instead of replacing them. The flipside
of that same coin is that perhaps today's appliances only seem to be
inferior because we replace them more often and the only reason we
replace them more often is because we don't repair them.

But what you had was a relative handful of items, that
people took great care in deciding about before purchasing,

Most didnt.

and cost quite a bit,

Readily affordable.

and of course when they needed repair the parts were generally generic,

You clearly aint ever been involved in the repair industry.

because the items were generic.

No they werent.

No, the whole household is loaded with things. INstead of
buying a few things that you expected to last pretty much
forever, and you'd want to get the most out of, you buy
something cheap because it might be nice to have that
sandwich maker or that $15 rotary tool. The things have
become cheap in part because demand has lowered costs
(design costs and profit can be spread over far more units),

Nope, because they are churned out in low labor cost countrys.

but also by cutting out the expensive stuff.

Nope, in fact they have more expensive stuff than they used to, most
obviously with digital timers and clocks etc that are almost universal now.

So a tv set forty years ago was handwired

No it wasnt, that had stopped well before that.

(I have no clue whether that was a good or bad thing,

The use of tubes was the bad thing with those designs.

but it was costly) on a heavy metal chassis, and was a significant
purchase for most households. But when something broke, the
cost of repair was low compare to the cost of replacement, to
that tv set would be taken to the local repair shop.

Yes.

But, pretty much all the parts in that tv set were generic, so
that repair shop did not have to be in some relationship with the
manufacturer, and the parts could be had at the local electronics
store (and since those stores were selling to all kinds of people,
the same general parts to repair that tv set were also used by they
hobbyist and even the professional, the stores could survive with a
relatively small stock that was bought by many), so the repair shop often
didn't need to keep a lot of stock, especially not a lot of specialized stock.

But in order to increase the market, manufacturers had
to lower prices so those who couldn't afford before
could now. So they shifted to printed circuit boards,

That had happened well before that.

And the shift wasnt due to cost, it was due to the move to semiconductors.

and when ICs came along they started using them,
which allowed for higher integration (ie fewer overall parts).
The smaller parts meant no heavy chassis, which would have
gone anyway because that cost money, not just to buy the
metal but you had to ship it to the store near the consumer.

The shipping cost was a tiny part of the total retail price.

The price goes down. But the cost of repair stays the same,
or goes up, because tracking down the problem is labor intensive.

Wrong. The repair cost dropped dramatically because the fault rate
dropped dramatically with the change to semiconductors. ICs in spades.

Manufacturers often switch to replacing boards,
which keeps labor costs down but means you aren't
paying for a fifty cent part but the whole board.

You can always change the fifty cent part on the board.

The real reason for the change is because it was much
cheaper to stamp out a new board than to diagnose a
fault using expensive first world skilled labor.

Much cheaper to pay a much cheaper board stuffing monkey
even when that was still not automated and done in the first world.

So if you paid a thousand dollars for that color tv set in
1966 (just a figure I pulled out of the air), the repair cost
was a small percentage of the cost of buying a new one.

In fact by then they didnt need much repair.

Plus, it was easier to pay out a little here and a little there
than to come up with another thousand to buy a new tv set.

But if you paid a hundred dollars for that tv set
today, you'd be paying a good percentage of that
cost in having a repairman try to find the problem.

Yep, because it costs a lot less to pay a low wage asian
to make you a new one than to pay a skilled first world
tech to find what would mostly be a hard to find fault with
an adequately designed modern TV which hardly ever fails.

That tips things in favor of buying new. Plus, in order
to get that tv set price so low, the parts aren't generic,

The bulk of them still are.

and the repairman has to deal with the
manufacturer to get the replacement parts.

Hardly ever.

That ends up being problematic, or requires some
sort of contract with the manufactuer (and added cost).

Nope.

The tv sets are no longer as generic as they were forty years ago,

They also fail at a vastly lower rate too.

so the repairman finds it harder to figure out what is wrong,

Because a properly design modern TV doesnt fail due to routine faults anymore.

often requiring service material from the manufacturer,

That was always the case.

again an extra cost.

The cheaper something is to manufacture, the less sturdy
it will be mechanically, since that is one way to cut cost.

Wrong again, most obviously with modern
plug packs and molded power cords.

In spades with modern switch mode plug packs.

Hence things are less likely to last as long, even if people were
willing to spend the money to repair them rather than buy new.

Thats just plain wrong, most obviously with TVs.

And I want to add something about "planned obsolescence" because
it is often misused. If people are choosing to buy cheap, it's hardly
that the manufacturers are making things so they will break. The
consumer often wants that cheaper tv set or VCR.

Sure, but thats not planned obsolescence which isnt even possible.

And there is the issue of just plain obsolescence. Forty years
ago, there'd hardly be any electronic items around the house.

Thats overstating it.

A tv set or two, some radios, maybe a stereo.

Hardly maybe on the stereo.

But look around now, and everything is electronic.

Not quite everything. And when the electronic stuff is much
more reliable than the mechanical stuff ever was, there
clearly aint any planned obsolescence involved.

While there is certainly some stuff that is guaranteed to fail first,
most obviously with rechargable batterys, those are used for the
convenience of those, not for any 'planned obsolescence' reason.

It's either been invented in the past forty years (not even that long in many
cases), or at the very least could not have been a consumer item until recently.
Once you have consumers buying the latest thing, things are bound to go obsolete.
Buy early, and things still have to develop, which means the things really may
become obsolete in a few years. It's not the manufacturer doing this to "screw
the consumer", it's a combination of new developments and consumer demand.

If my computer from 1979 had been intended to last forever,
it would have been way out of range in terms of price.

In practice most of them still work fine.

Because they'd have to anticipate how much things would
change, and build in enough so upgrading would be doable.

Upgrade was doable, just not sensible.

So you'd spend money on potential, rather than
spending money later on a new computer that
would beat out what they could imagine in 1979.

And they did that anyway, most obviously with socketed
cpus that hardly ever got changed. They're still doing that.

And in recent years, it is the consumer who is deciding to buy a new
computer every few years (whether a deliberate decision or they
simply let the manufacturer lead, must vary from person to person.)

And they're so cheap that is a perfectly sensible thing to do. In spades with laptops.