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Some of these products already exist. They are expensive. If you go back and look at the long-lasting appliances of the past, they were also expensive.
One example is Speed Queen washers/dryers. Also Bosch dishwashers.
Many of these become enshittified. Bosh is an example. My sister kitted out her kitchen with many Bosch appliances when she renovated, like 10 years ago. All have had issues.
The fridge has peeling faux chrome handles, the microwave button/wheel/control had to be replaced, the washer had the drum bearing fail, and the drum housing is sealed, so you have to replace the whole drum assembly, which costs as much as an entire budget washer…
And I will sell it in a store called “in stock” because we have these things called “computers” that can reorder a product once one sells so the shelves aren’t empty. Because American companies have never heard of that concept.
The problem is that you think that would make the ‘just’ products cheaper. The reality is that the data and advertising subsidize the costs of the existing options and make them cheaper then what ‘just’ could sell for.
Case in point: Smeg already does this, and all their products are considered upmarket. They’re just really solid normal appliances.
That isn’t true anymore nowadays. You pay the full un-subsidized price AND get your data sold and ads displayed
Only if there’s a lack of competition in that market. For most devices, you’re just flat out wrong.
Damn that $2_000 fridge must be super awesome for it to have no competition. That explains the ads on it.
No, you’re wrong. You pay more and still get shafted. I’m not saying that all products are like that, but the number of products that still show you ads and gobble your data while also becoming prohibitively expensive is ever increasing.
We’re in that nice transition phase where you can spend $200 or $3000 on a TV but your privacy is gone either way.
Noone said it would be cheaper
I’m never going to buy a fridge with a tablet embedded in it, but I don’t really think they are making that much money from that. You can buy cheaper equivalent versions of appliances that don’t have the ability to display ads or collect/send data anywhere.
Not for TVs you can’t. And other appliances are following suit.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, how I just want a basic bitch electric car. No centre console, no futuristic screens, no sensors, no cameras. Give me a normal fucking car with dials, a speedo, some padles on the steering wheel to adjust power output to replace gears and no driver assist. Sell it to me for cheap and let me drive my car. That’s all I want.
I haven’t seen speedometer shortened to speedo before. I was wondering why you wanted to get a speedo (like swimwear) along with the rest of your normal car accessories.
Little from column A, little from column B
You can join me with outsized expectations for the Slate pickup that will inevitably be dashed.
some padles on the steering wheel to adjust power output to replace gears
What? The foot pedal adjusts power. You don’t need a replacement for gears.
I would very much like a manner to manually adjust how hard the regenerative coasting works, which would sort of be a replacement for gears. If I’m going down a steep hill I’d like to be able to adjust the regen to maximize energy recovery while also managing vehicle speed.
I recently bought an ebike that has peddle assist settings of 1-5. With 1 being lowest and 5 being maximum. These settings essentially act like gears setting the maximum motor power.
In crowded areas I set the speed to 1 so the bike can’t exceed 15kph, on open roads I set the speed to 5 which is unlimited. I would definitely want this in a car.
The Sims did it first, except the brand was called “Justa”. Justa dishwasher. Justa fridge.
Ahead of their time.
It would be more feasible to de-fang modern appliances.
That’s a legit great idea. Create a new firmware for smart TVs too.
People always call me crazy but I buy commercial displays. You can get them cheaper if you do it the right way. So speakers, no tuner, no smart functions, usually only 1 or 2 inputs, and basically no bells or whistles.
But that’s how I like it, so I don’t care if it makes me 🤣😧🤣😧
There might be some liability concerns if you run a open source firmware on your washing machine and it decides to never shut off the water inlet…
Yes, the new company would be providing a new warranty based on that. Same as usual.
He’ll be out of business in a years time!
Seriously a great idea though. I’d buy all their stuff.
If you want this today, SpeedQueen has decent models that last forever and are very simple.
The reason is that they will be so durable that you buy one and it’ll be an heirloom for multiple generations.
Since it would make small quantities (at least at the start) and with better materials, I bet it would be also more expensive so maybe it evens out.
I would also buy it, I’m tired of household items that randomly break and the manufacturer doesn’t care.
Probably better than my idea of just starting to wash my clothes in a bucket
Id buy their stuff, some of it at least
I would buy just enough.
Deshittification
Like No Name does for groceries.
Does ordinary skincare count too?
That’s like Ali G saying he invented the PlayStation 2 because he thought about it when the playstation came out.
I was annoyed as a kid when I independently came up with the idea of a flying car then found out that the world beat me to it.
Someone didn’t have a childhood where they only watched the Jetsons and the Flintstones
That happened to me a few years back, a friend just had his clutch fail in his car. I started thinking how to make a better way to transfer power from motor to wheels.
Turns out I just reinvented the fluid coupling used in automatic transmissions…needless to say my idea wasn’t that impressive after that.
Before electric skateboards were a thing, and electric motors and batteries became better and better, i thought I had a great idea for an electric skateboard. I cut some holes into my longboard, attached an upside down truck on top and an electric motor, made a lot of mistakes and then someone launched an electric skateboard that was pretty slick and i just saw that and thought: that’s way better.
Haha, you ran into the mechanically inclined adult version!
It’s called the adult version because it involves fluids.
Oh god damn it. Here, lol. 🥇
Even your user name sounds like a youtuber I’d watch about my adult tinker toys (think carpentry).
My million dollar idea is a teleporter.
You walk in and get teleported.
Gibe moneeis nao plz
My million dollar idea is an add-on for your device that kicks every billionaire on the planet in the nut sack every time someone teleports.
OKAY YOU HAB MANIES SO YOU GIBE IMMDITLEE
Find identical twins, dress em the same, have one walk into a cardboard box with “teleporter” written on it by a child, and have the other twin come out another similar cardboard box.
NO TALK YES MONEE GIBE NAO ME
I can teleport you some crypto quantumcoins?
YOU GOBE YOU GEEVING NAO
Five Dogecoins for 25% valuation?
What you have made there, sir, is a horrific copy and kill device!
Eh. You are a piece of software running on meat. Every night, there are long periods where ‘you’, the conscious entity of your awareness, ceases to exist. You only dream for a small portion of the night. There are times when you are simply gone.
Yet we have no problem accepting this fact. We’ve just collectively accepted that there is some continuity of consciousness between each day. But it couldn’t be further from the truth. You have the memories of yesterday, but ‘you’ have not been in continued conscious existence since yesterday. In a very real sense, we are a series of single-day lifetimes stitched together across time.
If you’ve ever gone under anesthesia, it’s even more jarring. When you’re under, you’re not asleep. You’re not dreaming. You’re just gone. The time passes in an instant.
If my consciousness can be discontinuous through time, why can’t it be discontinuous through space? If I can believe that I am the same me as the mes of yesterday and tomorrow, why can I not believe that a remotely assembled copy of me is also me? I used to run on that meat, now I run on this meat. It’s all me in the end.
Yeah and to take what you were describing further, we can’t ever really be sure our lives existed at all. If the universe was created in its current state 5 minutes ago, we would have no way to know.
But anyway, the ease of accepting one’s own continuity from day to day is part of the teleporter problem. It’s at the heart of it, honestly. I think it’s a given that the copy of you that comes out the other side will believe that they are the original you and will assume your identity and life without skipping a beat.
The concern is the likelihood that you experience a quick death by being vaporized while the copy of you experiences the “created 5 minutes ago in current state with memories intact and can’t prove otherwise” phenomenon.
I’ll also add that as far as we can tell, our conscious minds are emergent properties of our physical brains. Losing consciousness while verifiably keeping your brain in a specific spot is quite a bit different than disassembling your physical brain and reassembling it somewhere else.
If we instead had evidence that our souls/identities existed on some other plane and our brains were more like antennas, I might think differently.
NO MOR TOK YOU GIBE MONIE NAO
He’d get unalivened within a month.
Murdered. Killed. Assassinated. Victim of criminal homicide. Flayed alive. Burned at the stake. Killed, raped, boiled alive, his house and family burned down in arson and pedophilic murder.
We do not need to use the word “unalived.”
But also, you can use it if you want.
There’s a huge demand from consumers for that. Just not from investors.
There’s a huge one-time demand from consumers. But, if it’s an amazing device that never needs repairs (or that can easily be repaired by the consumer) and it has no bells and whistles, that’s a problem: there’s no repeat business.
Who cares?
The people running the business, presumably. Generally people don’t want to go out of business because they can’t find any customers.
Once you’ve supplied everyone with it, figure out how to keep a buffer stock and move onto the next product. By the time you’ve sold every viable customer a washing machine, vacuum cleaner, fridge, freezer, mixer, cooker, dryer (whatever) they’d be fine, new stock still needs to be sold eventually so keep a trickle coming. Replacement parts etc.
Biggest issue is it’s going to be expensive - will people pay?
That sounds like a difficult way to run a business.
It’s how businesses were run for literally hundreds of years.
Not true at all. Businesses didn’t move onto the next product, they specialized, making the exact same thing year after year. Because manufacturing tolerances weren’t great, things would need repairs and replacement, so there was repeat business. Nobody kept a buffer stock and moved onto the next product.
There’s a huge demand from consumers for that.
Is that actually true, though?
Very likely. Why not?
Because consumers have shown to prefer features over reliability:
French Door refrigerators are the most popular and most complex design.
Built in ice makers are popular but also complex and prone to failure due to physics.
They still sell very basic refrigerators and washer/dryers. But these don’t sell as well as more feature rich models.
In my albeit anecdotal experience, these ‘very basic’ appliances suffer their own variant of faults. They take no modern design cues; they are more prone to reliability issues from bargain bin components; or they somehow cost only slightly less than their fancy feature rich counterparts.
Just because I don’t want off-white equipment in my kitchen, I shouldn’t have to buy an ‘AI’ oven. But the companies want to know when and what I’m cooking so when I go to the grocery in the middle of dinner prep, the AI price labels can adjust a bit higher because they know I need an ingredient right now for a meal I’ve already started making.
The variant of fault these normal appliances have aren’t truly a fault. It’s intentionally made to be less appealing, less reliable, and more expensive than it should be, so when we’re looking at a white oven in the store for $800, we’ll opt instead for the $1,000 Alexa powered stainless steel double range that’s sitting right next to it.
Oh and if you’re in a spot and need to finance your new appliance, sorry but our financing isn’t available for the budget tier.
This comment kind of went off the rails, didn’t it.
People would likely want products with new features and reliability.
But what we actually have on the market is products with new features that are mostly unreliable, and slightly cheaper products with less features that are similarly or more unreliable. Our products are clearly regressing in quality even if the existence of luxury features or designs are rising.
We are in a hostile relationship economically where almost every manufacturer is engaging in planned obsolescence (instead of using resources appropriately and making the products we want which also last).
Corporations want us to keep buying - they are hyper-focused on perpetuating that reality.
My recent experience buying such is that it is very very hard to find basic but quality models. If you’ve had a water dispenser or ice maker once, you realize how awful they are. They take up massive amounts of fridge and freezer space and need expensive filters every 3 months and break as soon as the short warranty is over. But if you want double door and bottom freezer you pretty much have to buy the crap extras as well.
I don’t think complex design is the opposite of “just” it’s more that the refrigerator is just a kitchen refrigerator that doesn’t have weird proprietary temperature management system, and easily accessible replacement parts. It’s not also a built in tablet for example
But are there simple fridges that don’t look like rental apt fridges? If there was a nice simple fridge with a big bottom freezer, in stainless, I bet it’d sell. Tho water dispensers and ice makers are damn convenient when they do work.
“all the companies are dumb and refuse to earn money this simple way that I discovered in a showerthought”
Half of people on lemmy, facebook, reddit, twitter…
Ok, how about I would have bought one for a couple houses I’ve renovated?
Yes. Cars especially right now.
I’m just going to run my car until it no longer functions because I can’t be doing with all of these crappy infotainment systems. My car has a non-functional radio and that’s it, it’s so old it has headlights that don’t even blind people, and buttons to control the AC.
Investors need not be shareholders, to be fair.
But does it have AI?
My washing machine and dryer likes to throw about AI. The model came out around or just before the current LLM craze started, and I’m guessing they wanted to capitalise on the buzzword.
AI in the case of my washing machine means that it keeps track of the time and day of week, and what washing programmes I tend to run within a certain timeframe. It then suggests that programme when you turn it on. For the dryer, AI means “suggest the programme matching what the washer just washed.”
Lately the washer has taken to flash “AI Cycle Complete” on its stupid little screen whenever it completes a wash, even if I keyed in every single setting myself. Such AI.
Lately the washer has taken to flash “AI Cycle Complete”
Lately? Does that mean your washer is getting some kind of regular firmware updates? Why? In case “laundry” changes?
Nothing has Ai. Everything that does refuses to explain what their use of that term means. It’s like buying the name brand cereal over the generic because someone slapped an “asbestos free” sticker on it.
Similar to my idea called to make a clothing brand called “brandless”
No logo, no graphics, no distinguished designs
Just plain basic clothes in basic colors, using fabrics that last.
No itchy washing label either. All product information in detail available on site. At most a product number printed or sown on the inside.
Muji does this. The name basically means no brand in Japanese. Check them out
There already was a company called Brandless that tried to do the same thing with basic groceries like ketchup and paper towels. Looks like they’re in the process of getting back to market, but seems like they had the same mindset.
Would be really nice to have something similar for clothes.
I mean Uniqlo is kinda like this. No brand (at least in most of their basic stuff, I‘m not counting their new shit), long lasting and not expensive
Their new shit isn’t long lasting either.
There’s the unbrandedbrand.com that does this for denim.
