In article ,
Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
Don't be silly. Products with an unacceptable failure rate simply won't
sell. Especially components where there are alternative suppliers.

If only that were true. People often buy based soley upon price. Rarely
do you see the same product sold for more than a month or two, often
the replacement product has a different brand name.

But those buying components for a manufacturer ain't 'people'. They will
expect only a tiny number of failures from that component - anything else
would be a nonsense. Given the number of different components in the
average piece of consumer electronics. Which means the component makers
must have decent quality control.

Since you are in the UK look at the 10 quid DVD players ASDA sold a few
years ago. How many of them are still around? When they fail, how many
people go as far as buying a "cleaning disk" and using it instead of
just throwing it out?

Dunno. Cheap electronics from the major UK supermarkets ain't worth
having. Go to Lidl or Aldi for such things - they are miles better. The
Germans obviously expect more.

I know we have different experience with cleaning disks, but it's a
positive action by a consumer to resolve the problem themselves instead
of just dumping it in the bin, no matter if it works or not, or does more
harm than good.

Here they go for between 100-150 NIS (16-24 UKP) due to taxes and
overhead. Now that we have entered the "digital age", people are
replacing them with "full HD" players that do image upscaling (aka
faking it) which sell for around 60 UKP.

With those prices it does not pay to make the trip to a repair shop and
certainly not to pay for a repair.

Labour rates mean repairing many consumer goods ain't worth it,
commerically. And, of course SM components. ;-)

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*No sentence fragments *

Dave Plowman London SW
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