this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2026
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Survivorship bias. All the ones that broke aren't around anymore.
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.
many youtube videos are scams/clickbait though and/or present un-true or outdated information
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.
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.
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?
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.
Soke companies alresdy started to make repairable products (eg: fairphone and framework) the problem is that they either cost a lot or have less wuality 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.
I agree with you
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
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.
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.
The problem is that they're not designed to be repairable
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.
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).
Also imprecise engineering tended to overbuild things.
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.
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
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.
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.
:-/
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.
Yes, but that's Evil Communism. Didn't you see the movie "The Dryers of Others"?
But there's WAY more surviving devices from 1960 in 2020 than there will be from 2020 in 2080.
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...
Right but none of the ones made these days last. Some > none.
I'm assuming CFC might have been a better coolant, that's why those old fridges are so good