Manufacturers don't openly design appliances to fail, but they use reliability data to keep products from lasting too long. A part from Thailand might shorten lifespan by five months; another could extend it by a year. Companies balance profit with durability because making something last a decade would hurt repeat sales.
There's this idea of like planned obsolescence that comes up, especially when you're talking about appliances. Do you think it's true that manufacturers like intentionally design products to fail so that they can sell you a new one?
I think it's a combination. If we're going to assume that all these major companies that, you know, make billions of dollars, if we're going to assume they're just super honest and morally correct, like that's a little bit like, you know, no, that's not the case, right? A little naive, right? I think that, you know, I imagine if it was me, right, I imagine you have to have enough data to be like, okay, if we use this component made in like whatever Thailand, this one kind of adds an extra 5 months to this appliance, right, based on the data. But if we use this component, it adds more like a year. So then overall, all right, competition-wise, where ours are, whatever, last 2 years more than the other competition, so that's good enough. But I don't want it to last 10 years though, okay? I'm not gonna be able to sell. So I think there's obviously— if the goal is to make money and to compete with everybody else, I think they're probably— there is obviously something like that.
