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Has the Quality of Consumer Electronics Declined?
NewtonsLaw asks: "With Christmas coming up I dare say that lots of people are going to spend big bucks on consumer electronics in the next few weeks. This column asks an interesting question -- are consumer electronics manufacturers sacrificing quality and reliability for an endless list of features? If you're like me, you've probably got a TV, VCR or other appliance you bought over 5 years ago which is still going strong -- but much of the stuff you've bought in the past 2-3 years is already giving trouble. What's more, it seems to be the big-name manufacturers such as Sony who are most affected by this decline in standards. I'd love to hear the experiences of other Slashdot readers in an effort to get as many data-points as possible. Are you better off buying a $49 DVD player on the expectation that it will only last a year or so -- or do lay out two or three times that amount something made by a big-name manufacturer in the (possibly vain) hope it will provide superior performance and last longer?"
All of our goods are being based on selling them as cheaply as possible.
Do YOU think their quality might decline as a result?
In America at least, I think the struggling economy is mostly to blame. Manufacturers are just trying to cut costs to bring their profit margins up, and one of the easiest ways of cutting costs is cutting quality.
This seems to be a disturbing and all to common trend, but hopefully they (manufacturers) will get bit in the ass by customer support and replacement costs, causing them to rethink their strategy!
I find that most often I end up learning from necessity, rather than for enjoyment.
The quality has declined across the board, but high quality parts are still available. As demand from retailers like M$, Wal-Mart, Best Buy and others increases for discounted electronics, the supply likewise increases.
However, as more and more people become "Tech Savvy" there are more manufacturers willing to produce the high quality, awesome electronics that modern geeks will shell out the cash to buy.
So has overall quality declined, maybe...but the good stuff is still there to be had. Just don't go cheap on everything you buy.
For some reason most of my home electronic equipment comes from Sony. I have a stereo, a surround receiver and stuff like that. And, oh yeah, a Sony Ericsson phone. They've never caused me any problems ever. Just plain works. Not the best gear out there, but good value for money. Perhaps other brands are worse, I don't know.
Ciryon
I would say that overall, Sony equipment is made to last. It's not the most feature-rich for the dollar, but it tends to work for a long time. I had a Sony boombox during the entire 80s. Never missed a note. Their car audio is ugly and underpowered, but also works forever. Samsung is on the opposite end of the spectrum. Sure I can play Nuon games on my DVD player, but what good is that if it freezes right before the $$$-shot in my favorite pr0n?
If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
Example two Useless, gimmicky 'features' that are software defined. Not very durable. No clicky feel, due to cheapness of rubber dome caps. Will most likely last until you spill Coke all over it.
Actually, I'm a big fan of 20 year old hardware, where it can be used. I find solid state electronics from the 1970's to be absoutely reliable. But I tend to agree, consumer level electronics, by and large, are garbage unless you're willing to shop somewhere other than Circuit Shitty or Worst Buy.
As far as computer components go, they've been garbage for years. Everything past the old IBM XT's have been plastic disposable junk, btu for good reason. Most people upgrade so quickly, there's no reason to make good, lasting components. As far as computer stuff, I buy the cheapest I can find, and just throw it out every so often.
I have found again and again that you get what you pay for...both in terms of functionality and life-expectancy.
Feed the Fury
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
We, as consumers, by buying the cheapest, lowest-quality stuff out there, are responsible for this. The old adage is true: You get what you pay for. As more and more companies keep cutting costs to satisfy out demands for cheap products by using low-cost parts and low-cost labor(China), this is just going to get worse and worse.
I swear the quality of these has declined over the past 10 years. There used to be a time when I could reliably transfer a file between machines on these. Now I open a new packet and 4/10 won't work.
--
0x00
I've noticed the same thing. It seems like most of the stuff I bought 10 years ago still works, but stuff I've bought in the past few years hasn't lasted. (I have noticed two exceptions to this: high end computer monitors and the DVD player I purchased wayyyyy back in mid-1998).
I wonder what role, if any, those play into this? Would manufacturers, as a whole, be more inclined to produce lower quality goods with the justification that consumer protection plans are out there? Or would retailers balk at this... or push up the price on those... or use quality as a major selling point for these plans?
I think though, in almost all goods, there is the perception that older is more reliable. This isn't anything new, but is it really becoming true right now?
Long, long ago, there used to be umbrella repair shops. Eventually umbrellas became so cheap that you just throw them away when they break (which happens pretty fast) and just buy new ones.
It's much the same with consumer electronics. For example, VCR/TV repair places in my town are either struggling or have already gone out of business. Things are so cheap these days that you might as well buy a new one when the old one breaks.
So, basically quality has indeed gone down, but prices have dropped accordingly.
We live in a disposable society. Disposable cell phones seem like a huge waste to me, but they're cheap.
Hrm... seems like /. answered its own question.
"The more they complicate the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."
-Scotty
It holds true for wear as well. The more features and extras they add, the higher the liklihood that something will go wrong with one of those features sometime down the road. In my opinion, you should buy the device that gives you what you want and very little beyond that. That way you can buy the highest quality brands at a reasonable price with a reasonable degree of certainity that it will still be working two or three years down the road. You buy soemthing thats got all the extras and your just asking for trouble.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
I can honestly say that from personal experience you cannot assume that by paying more or relying on a brand name that you are getting a better quality product. The more complex products are the bigger the chance that more companies are involved in manufacturing the various parts that make the end product. Which means that the final assembly relies on other companies QC (Quality Control) and not just the company carrying the brand name.
I have noticed a lot of friends having huge problems with Sony equipment, especially TV's and CamCorders. However, I personally prefer Panasonic brand products. They cost a little less and are very long lasting. In fact, I have a Panasonic: TV, VCR, 2 DVD players, Camcorder, Receiver, CD Changer, and Fax Machine and *every* one of them is working great...no complaints at all. They have my lifetime business.
Quality of new items seems to be lower than it used to be. I own tons of consumer electronics devices, way more than the average person, I'm sure. The things I buy now don't last as long. I've been through 3 dvd players in 4 years, and they were all over $150. Yet I have a set of speakers that are 12 years old (!) and still work perfectly.
There's also no point in fixing any of these items, everything is soldered onto one PCB board. If one trace comes loose... Time for a new unit.
Check out a Technics turntable...
Technics SL-1200 MK2
You'll find a pair of these in pretty much any club in the entire world. The design hasn't changed at all in over 20 years. It's a beautiful piece to behold, it's built like a tank. It weighs 26 pounds. And every single component, motors, tonearm, etc -- can all be replaced. These things are built to last.
This is how things used to be built. I can't think of anything new that I own that has the build quality of my turntables. And that's sad.
We've turned into a disposable society.
While many vendors (and most of the OSS community) writes software to be error free, stable and secure, MS focuses on features they can market to get you to upgrade. Consumer devices are no different.
The endless lightbulb - the myth of the bulb that would never go out and stay strong forever.
Can this be done? I do not know, but I do know that nobody would make them because of being predisposed to a declining market.
The same is about electronics.
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
The "good" stuff is still good. We just got more "cheap" stuff that does the basic stuff only the "good" stuff used to do.
The best example is the stand-alone $49 DVD player. To somebody that is not a total video freak, the $49 does the same job as a $200 unit. My first DVD player cost me $300, a Toshiba that worked for over 2 yrs without any problem. My second DVD player was for my PC and cost me $80. My third one was a stand alone that came as part of a Teac receiver combo and cost $150 with 5.1 speakers plus FM radio (no, they don't sound like Bose, but dammit, that's $150 for a 5.1 home theater). I bought another combo like that one for $130. My wife buys $49 DVD players for my little kid so if they break out of warranty we are out of just $50 (a cheap VCR costs more).
Each and every DVD player I have bought looks exactly the same on my piece of crap TV. Every one. The original Toshiba was the only one with a decent remote, that is the only thing I have to say on its defense. Each of the $49 DVD players we have bought can read VCD and MP3 CDRs and CDRWs. The last one she got is smaller than our digital cable box, and weights maybe 1/3rd of what my xbox does.
Notice I said this only applies if you are not a video freak. To us normal Joes, a DVD plays the same regardless, and the only thing you can do to make it better is to get a better TV.
There are many more examples like this, but to me the most obvious is the cheapo DVD players.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
What difference does it make if quality is less? This has always been part of our capitalist economy: high-end, mid-grade and low-end. Cars, clothes, appliances, furniture, etc. all fall into this statement.
Is a $50 DVD player lower quality than a $300 unit? Who knows. Read Consumer Reports (or epinions, Consumer Reviews, etc.) and decide for yourself.
No one can make a blanket statement that says less expensive electronics mean less quality!
Look at / Ask about the product's warranty before you buy. If it isn't at least 2 years, you'll likely have to replace it soon. Do some research and see what other people say about the product and their experiences before rushing off to buy that gadget. Don't get sucked into paying extra for extended warranties from the reseller either.
Alot of the electronics in a $75 DVD player is just as reliable as the components found in a $250, shiny silver deal with a great big animated LCD on it and a million buttons. The same goes for most electronics, be it the controller for a laser printer or some random PCB in a VCR.
And they had amazing ones like the Budokahn with a real headphone? I'm talking the mid 80's here. Remember the Kenwood Chef all made of metal too? the Tonka Toys? Quality in most appliances and good has been killed as of the early 90s in fact. This "discovery" is 10 years behind the times.
My DVD drive just died, some else's Hard Drive croaked, no one knows what I'm saying when I ask for a time base corrector for my VCR or an equaliser for my old Denon or Revox gear...
Yep these are signs of the times.
But the fault has always been the one of the consumers. They are the ones who should have started saying "Wow, $200 for that thing? It looks like a cheap taiwanese knock-off sold at $10" But nope. In Circuit City it was always the cheapest looking one that was a best seller. People don;t even know how to buy (heck they don;t even know how to cook).
Time for that Alien invasion and a return to a life in the underground shelters. Yeah, we need an other war. That's what I tell them kids today.
Manufacturers of new high priced equipment can't afford not to give high quality components, and good build quality. For example, the leads that came with my Tivo have gold plated plugs. My early soundblaster card has very little noise compared with the cracklyness of the alegedly better chip on my motherboard. But when something costs a lot, adding little extras to the price doesn't really increase the overal cost by more than about $20. For an expensive piece of equipment, not having this sort of attention to detail can actually cost sales. Early adopters are fussy purchasers. They'll care about picture degradation in cables, and noise from nearby components. Once you get down to the $150 range, that $20 is a lot to add to the price of the unit. Prices have to be kept as low as possible, but we're aiming at a different market segment, who generally don't care too much about anything apart from whether it will work adequately for a year. They aren't going to spot that picture quality is 5% more grainy, or the signal to noise ratio from their soundcard has dropped by half a decibel. The only solution is to buy a DVD recorder or a PVR instead. Not a lot of good for playing tapes back, but the onl;y way you can get good components.
IN SOVIET RUSSIA, Consumer Electronics fail you.
Oh my, somehow you actually managed to screw up a Yakovism...
-dameron
I refuse to buy most big brand names now. I've been burnt by just about everyone, mostly recently Microsoft and my xbox that died 3 weeks after the warranty was up.
My dad has a Mitsubishi 36 inch TV that he bought close to 14 years ago. It still works like a champ, no problems at all. I've got a 3 year old 36 inch Sony that I'm already seeing problems with.
I can't say exactly why this is happening, but I can venture some guesses. The quick buck is killing our economy. Everyone wants that easy money. No one takes pride in their products and builds them to last.
I recently looked at the feature lists of some home stereo equipment and was shocked. Most of the stuff on your average home stereo will never be used but you can't find simpler equipment. Additionally we are still using some pretty ugly wiring schemes for home audio. The back of my home theatre setup is insane! I have wires everywhere and while I'm usually good at labeling them, it's still a nightmare to work with.
No one is making these things better. They are making them cheaper and more complex. This goes against what people actually want. Features are nice, yes, but not at the expense of quality and ease of use.
A lotta times, you can find out who actually does manufacturing-- and this means you can get the same product under a different name at less cost. I dig sony, but they mass produce a lot of electronics, and a lot of the time you're just buying the name... They outsource manufacturing for business reasons. I think this is especially true in say, computer monitors- a lot of manufacturing is done by manufacturers, and the same hardware gets released under a whole host of names. Sometimes the packaging is different tho- so if you're buying the sony for the sleek look, this might not work out. When I go to buy something like a DVD player or TV or monitor, I find out who manufactures the one I want if if there are any hardware clones out there... or I take my EE degree and build my own ;-)
I'm not really sure how to answer that question. What I've seen lately is bolder, riskier products coming out.
You all remember that voice activated R2D2 toy that Slashdot reported a month or two ago? I bought one of those. I have to say, I'm rather impressed with what it can do. It's voice recognition is pretty good, and it's a fun little toy to play with. Is it going to survive a drop off the bed? Probably not. I'm not terribly concerned with that, though. Thing is, I like when products are released that do stranger and stranger things. It seems to me that if they were to ruggedize Mr. D2, it'd cost me some of the things I really like about it.
Sometimes you get what you pay for, but consider that we live in a digital world. You'd be hard pressed to buy a gadget that doesn't have a microchip in it. As long as that keeps happening, products will advance every year to the point that you develop interest in replacing it. I am wiling to bet that in a year or two, they'll release a new R2D2 toy with a USB 2.0 port and flash memory. Chances are good that I'd buy one too because it's a significant upgrade over the original which has no upgradability options.
These products don't need to survive very long because the companies pushing them are going to find new ingenius ways for you to buy the latest one. And you wanna know what? That's good for the economy. Nobody's interested in building a fridge that'll last 25 years anymore. Your business dries up real fast.
I think quality has declined, and it's not just electronics. My mom has a fourty-year-old Frigidaire refrigerator in the garage that still works fine, but she's had to replace two newer units that were purchased more recently. The most recently-replaced one failed after only 6 years of service.
Companies know this, so making products that either aren't as good as they could be, or fall apart quickly (or both) makes good business sense. It's more profitable for two big reasons: cheaper R&D and production, and you force consumers to replace units more often. Duh?
Last January I purchased a Mitsubishi Platinum HDTV unit from a big-name electronics store. Just a few weeks ago (less than 11 months after purchase) the TV went out. Ugh, what a bummer!
The television repair person came out to diagnose the problem but couldn't figure it out - of course. So he took the guts out of the TV for diagnosing back at the shop. On his way out he mentioned that Mitisubishi has been having problems recently with the reliablilty of their picutre tubes so he thought that may be the problem. (hint #1 that these can be unreliable)
Come to find out that it was not the picture tube but the power supply of all things - my goodness, how hard is it to put a good quality power supply into a piece of electronic equipment that cost over $3k. (hint #2 that these can be unreliable)
Well at least I will be getting my TV put back together tomorrow and all it really cost me was time away from the big screen and my Tivo - which isn't really a bad thing. Luckily the extended service warranty paid off for once, didn't pay a cent.
Just as an aside I don't usually buy those extended warranties but it was less than %10 of the cost of the item and I don't consider this type of item a throw-away item - the author of the article considers his DVD player tossable after a year - this TV is a little different I think.
Just my $.02 - I had heard that Mitsubishi was pretty good in the realiability department on their TVs but personal experience has proven otherwise for me. We'll see how long until the next issue arises - hopefully long into the future.
Are you bovilexic? Moo!
"... i know a genuine panaphonic when i see it! ..."
Are you better off buying a $49 DVD player on the expectation that it will only last a year or so?
I wouldn't knock the cheap equitpment. Personally, I think that $69 is a really good deal for
this, especially when combined with this feature.
Lets see a $500 dollar Sony player do that!
Do you have Linux and a DotPal? Click here now!
This thing was a tank, it lasted 20 years. It still worked in fact, I just got tired of using a VCR without a remote control. It was an all-metal toploader, and when you ejected a tape it blew it out like a gourmand spitting out corked wine. It was huge and indestructible.
demi
I have found with Sony if you buy the bargain model made on the asian mainland then yes you get what you pay for. If you get one of the top of the line models made in Japan then it's likely to last.
Basically the premise is larger coporations eating smaller corporations, drive for profit leading to lack of quality standards and appreciation, more features to keep selling (who can survive if your product is only bought every 10-20 years)... There's more, but that's what the book is for, including giving a possible explanation as to why this came about in the first place, and why we let it continue to get worse.
FYI: Marvin Harris is not only probably one of the most influential Anthropologists of our time, but also writes many books (including this one) in a very easy to follow and understandable way.
Buy it cheap... You will be tossing it in a few if it is working or not.
HDTV is coming.
DVD do not contain enought info - better than what current can do but not enough for future.
TV is going to be tossed since you need a decoder to see new on old with even less quality.
VCR... well they are tape and locked into the old standard and... (see TV)
I explained this to buyer of DVD player looking at two dvd players and the store deeb standing there... He reached out an grabbed the cheap one.
Sony used to have a very good mid-range VCR line. For $300-$400 we got a solid workhorse of a VCR, lots of features, plenty of displays, excellent remote, fast rewrind, good video quality, all that other fun stuff. It lasted for 5-6 years of solid, heavy use. That was in the early 90s. We'd have bought another when it died if they still made them.
Now, Sony has two types of VCR. $1000 video toasters with more features than God that no one has any use for, and $50-$100 "um, it plays tapes?" models that break after a year.
What's a mindless, stupid consumer-drone to do? Well, we stopped buying Sony VCRs.
It's not feature glut that is driving the fall in quality. It's knowledge that return buyers are an important market. A $300 VCR that lasts 5 years averages out to $60/year for 5 years. A $100 VCR that last 1 year averages out to $100/year, or $500 over the course of 5 years. That's almost a 50% increase in profits for Sony (or RCA, or Phillips, or whoever, they all do it) over the course of five years, because the consumer is, on average, too stupid to figure out that he's being fleeced.
Executives pocket the difference, and you get a new model of VCR/DVD player/stereo/TV/CLIE handheld every year, feeding your gadget lust. Somehow I don't see that as an even trade, but that's just me.
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
Oh yes, how they have declined. Or at least I think so... they suck now and for some reason I assume that wasn't always the case.
I used to sell computers at Future Shop (a shitty Canadian retailer ala Best Buy in the US) and we would get shipments where head office would tell us to expect 1 in 10 to 1 in 6 be be defective right out of the box. At least twice, we got shipments where every other machine was defective. I started tracking returns and warrantee issues that would come back to the store and I would honestly estimate that some manufacturers (who rhyme with Bompaq and Baych-pee and eBachines) would hit over 25% defective units in the first year on some models.
Manufactures need to cut costs everywhere they can and quality just doesn't seem to matter. When I would get a serious geek (who was some how clueless enough to be in a Future Shop) I would quietly refer them to a local clone dealer with a rep for quality work and using good components
Samsung. I've never had bad luck with ANYTHING made under the Samsung name, from hard drives to TVs.
here come the hordes to say I'm just lucky....
Why have hard drives gone from $100 per megabyte to $1 per gigabyte? Why have VCRs gone from $500 to $50? Increasing technology can only explain part of this. Musc of the cost reduction comes from cutting corners and reducing quality (third world slave labor doesn't hurt, either).
Unquestionably, everything is crap. My VCR took a dump recently...it was a semi-pro machine and was bought by a major cartoon studio in 1993. My husband and I wound up with it in 1996 or so. It had served us well up until a few weeks ago, when it ate a tape, belched, and wouldn't play anything anymore.
Trouble is, you can't really replace something like that anymore. Most VCRs are made in China, Malaysia, Indonesia or Korea, and are trash quality. I didn't have the heart to buy a piece of crap VCR and possibly risk the demise of more irreplaceable tapes.
I'm waiting for reasonable DVD recorders. Then I will get on the stick and dub all my tapes to DVD-R. (or +R if that shakes out as being the winner) Right now they are way too expensive.
BTW you can't guarantee getting something good if you buy Sony. Sony gets things made for them in China like everyone else does. And worst of all: they belong to the RIAA and MPAA.
I still can control quality on my computers by home-building, but I wonder how long that will last. Everything else...you roll the dice, you take the chance.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I bought a 27" Sony WEGA in Sep. 2001, and it had to have the tube replaced in Feb. 2002. Luckily I caved and bought the service plan from the retailer, otherwise I would have been stuck with the bill. I have two friends that have had problems with their WEGA TVs.
Stay away!
I think there is a lot of validity to this statement. I've been loyal to Sony for while and I've now had problems with their CD players, PS2, and TVs.
Sony, if you are listening, shape up! Panasonic seems to be doing a better job than most others presently.
Korean brands are catching up big time.
Peace
YES!
you fucked up that fyfi like a car crash
Built-in obsolescence.
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
Quality consumes YOU!
Yeah, most today's consumer electronics you can get is very unreliable, for a example a logitech optical mouse i bought a little more than year ago, around year and two months ago. It worked fine until the warranty time is coming to get close, it few times gave me double clicks instead of one or ghost clicks, well this started to be really a problem, giving them all time when the warranty was closed... 3 days before!!! i have cleaned the button & inside of the mouse, tried many tricks but it just keeps giving way too often double clicks & ghost clicks.
Second example is my LG dvd drive i bought same time as that mouse, it's giving a lot of problems now also =(
Also i've seen many brand-new mobos been shipped broken =(
Another example is a Philips Mp3 cd player, expandium 200 or something which my mom bought, was broken also, it wasted batteries very fast =( warranty gave new one on which the batteries last a lot longer and sound volume is a lot higher.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
Remember, when Sony sells you a TV that lasts forever, you don't buy another one. It's in their best interest for it to break so that you'll keep spending.
(Consumer electronics manufacturers would love to have something like what Microsoft and other software companies are after, where you pay them a subscription rather than buying it outright. Planned obsolescence is similar to this in its aim.
... as my old Sony VCR.
I wouldn't say that the quality of all consumer electronics has faded, so much as some of the major name brands have gotten noticeably worse. There is still some very high-quality stuff out there. You just have to do research now. You can't just look at the name brand when deciding what to buy.
Albuquerque PC
Shopping at Best Buy for a new television, the sales monkey tells me that the expected life of a television is about four years. I'm not too sure what he meant by that, or what kind of research Best Buy corporate goons do to reach that conclusion (and then train the monkeys to quote it), but the TV sitting in my living room that I eventually decided NOT to replace was made in 1982.
Funny thin is they're still pushing you to upgrade to a digital-ready TV because analog will no longer be broadcasted in about .... four years.
Moral of the story: don't listen to sales monkeys.
Beer wants to be free
I find it also really interesting that we are willing to exchange a good warranty for quality. Who the hell cares if it sucks, will they replace it if it breaks?
Yes? Great, send me two...cheap!
I've got a couple of RCA VCR's that have lasted for seven years. On the other hand, we've had three RCA TV sets die and the display on my RCA stereo burn out within two years of purchase.
Look at the back of most current 25" TVs. Today you are lucky to see even an audio out on them. Of course, they are a fraction of the price at introduction.
Ultimately, the mfg has to optimize (reduce) everything to keep in the market place. That includes the features, mfg fall-out and even quality.
If you want quality, don't expect to get it at bargin basement prices. And don't expect to see a selection of quality at Wackmart. They care about price, not quality.
Planned Obsolesce.. that pretty much sums up the general decline in ALL products, not just consumer electronics.
They have realized that if people are happy with what they have, they are less inclined to buy the same product every year *just* beacuse its new and shiny..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I did some research at VCDhelp.com before I bought a DVD player and found the Apex AD1500. This DVD player plays everything. PAL, NTSC, SVCD, VCD, and all non standard stuff. It even has region hacks to play any region DVD. I read alot of forum comments before making my purchase and found that their is one flaw with the AD1500. It turns out that when the item is shipped sometimes the dvd tray becomes unattached but can easily be attached by pushing the tray in till you here it click.
... I am greatly disapointed by them. Ttheir customer support on anything is horrible. They would not honor a warrenty I had because I did not keep the receipt (Although I did have the SONY Warrenty Card and a Letter from SONY telling me That my Warrenty was good for another Month). I also read some other ppls comments on one of Sony's DVD models that broke right after the first years warrenty. Sony told the person that they could repair the player for $120. The person could not beleive it and told them they can buy a new one for cheeper. Sony said yeah, and then told them to not complain because you got a years worth out of it.
.... I am saying this and am only 24.
As far as sony
In the end i feel consumers are constanly being ripped off. Things are not built the way they used to be,
Late
While not recent experience, I was helping someone with a high-end TV purchase. The buyer was interested in Sorny, er, Sony specifically until the salesman mentioned that Sony had been having a lot more QA issues after they moved manufacturing to Malaysia.
Perhaps Sony (and the other big names) are trading on their past reputation and perceived value while exporting jobs to lowpaying locales in order to make larger profits?
At home, we have a Zenith TV that has easily lasted us about 15 years, ya, it's due for an upgrade, but its still going strong. Recently (in the past 2 or 3 years) I have purchased a receiver, dvd player, and vcr (all JVC). The receiver gave me a little trouble early this year and I had an extended warranty on it, and Circuit City took care of it for me, no problems. The DVD player has not given me a single problem! The VCR however has recently begun eating tapes and not recording. Unfortunately, I didn't get the warranty on that, so I'm out $150! So much for buying a good one...
Don't give in to corporate greed!! I NEVER buy anything from Sony or any of the brand names, let alone electronics! (translation: I'm broke)
And if *you* do, you are just giving in to their commercialistic capatilist desires!(translation: If I had the money, I would too, and I hate you for having the money.)
Such an absurdity! Children are starving in our *own* countries, let alone the third world! (translation: Man, I'm starving! I think I'll go eat a big mac now)
=)
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
I've had several of 3com's $70 'server grade' nics go whacko on me, yet I've never had a $15 linksys give me any trouble at all.
About the only way to make the call is through personal experience. In the case of electronics, which people's lives generally dont depend upon, it ends up being cheaper to try the cheap stuff first.
Tires and brakes are entirely another matter...
A year ago order 12 machines, they still work. WTF apple???
I am going to hell and I am going to take all of you with me.
But this is a good thing. I get other peoples out of warranty junk, then strip it for parts.
I have an almost free hobby thanks to cheap consumer electronics.
It is interesting this topic should come up. I have been following the trend with digital watches for a number of years (about 20) and have come to the conlusions that they are much more flashy, but certainly less function filled than those of old. I think most notably this is true of the Casio line (which I believe had the best product-line about 15 years ago). What happened to innovation? How many ways can you repackage the tired ol' "G Shock"? How many watches have touch sensitive screens now?, or multi-depth displays (which show actual useful information?)
It just does get better than this!
See, this is that missing step...
1. Have idea
2. ???
3. PROFIT
Manufacturing costs of making "disposable" stuff decrease faster then prices. This is where profit comes from.
"Disposable" makes great sense for sustainable business models. If you could go out and buy the last $WIDGET you'll ever own (cheaply), the $WIDGET manufacturer would soon run out of customers, no? This way, you need a new $WIDGET every few months.
1. Whatever, it doesn't really matter
2. Planned Obsolescence
3. Profit
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
I came to this conclusion when in my parent's cottage house I discovered that all the switches that never needed fixing/replacing were Siemens-made during the 1930's. I noticed that the quality of electrical products has been steadily declining since then. Note, for another example, that today you just can't find lighbulb sockets made of ceramics, only plastic.
I also noticed a visible decline in the quality of fans. Nowadays, you can't trust a fan to last longer than 2 years, while almost all the fans in the power supplies in the IBM AT computers I used to service, were all working 3 years ago, after 7 or 8 years of horrible conditions (lots of dust, movings, etc.).
It's the little things like these that convinced me to try to keep some of my older HI-FI equipment, like my old Philips CD player, or my (relatively) very old Philips DVD player DVD730 - the first DVD player Philips made. All my older equiplemnt still works perfectly, except for scratches and some unsupported formats (like MP3 or VCD 2.0), but I can put up with those.
Sigged!
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
I think in the Consumer Electronics market, one can generally rely on the idea that more expensive is better. Of course I could come up with countless examples where this is not true - but *in general* I think it holds pretty well. I own a DVD Audio player (DVD-A10) made by Technics that was selling for about USD$800 at one point. It's an extremely solid unit, with nearly no plastic, a huge 1-inch thick vibration-heat resitant type of honycomb thing on the bottom, very nice display, incredible sound and video quality. One of the best purchases I've made in a while. But they had to drop the price significantly since it wasn't selling very well. Dare I say it's because of the Technics name? Not exactly a name known for high-quality. In reality it's the top-of-the-line from the Panasonic brand.
;) Never ever ever buy a brand new model especially if the price sounds too good to be true - it probably is.
What I'm trying to say is that brand name doesn't mean very much anymore. Sony has built of this reputation of producing high-end equipment. I personally wouldn't buy any sony products. After a significant amount of research and comparisons, I know that my Technics player can blow nearly every Sony player out of the water (SACD players excluded of course) in just about every category - especially build quality. People just seem to get sucked into the Sony image (and don't even get me started on Bose). It's sad.
Unfortunately, unless you have a fair amount of cash to burn, I don't see very many ways out of this problem. Many inexpensive/low-end consumer electronics products are built quite cheaply.
I can offer a few words of advice though... Don't believe the hype - don't buy based on brand name. Spend some time researching before a purchase, you'd be amazed what you can find online.
I also want to make sure people are aware that for around the same price as a Sony (or whatever) you can usually pick up a much higher-quality (in terms of both build and performance) Denon, Marantz, or Toshiba (which I personally think has been getting better as time goes on).
Anyhow, my 2 cents...
There's an ethical component to this that I don't think we should ignore. Take an oversimplified example. If you buy something like a DVD player and get one that is 1/3 the cost but only lasts 1/3 the times as a higher quality player, then you are at wash when it come to time and money.
While you do have the advantage that you will likely get new features with each new cheaper player, in the meantime, you tripled the waste that has to go somewhere. You have also tripled the impact from transporting those goods.
You have also helped tip the market even more to lower quality, cheaper merchandise - not just once, but 3 times - encouraging both manufacturers and retailers to embrace this more wasteful business model.
You have to ask yourself if it's really worth it.
...we have 286s/Mac IIs that still work fine today. ...we have Pentium based boards that began dying about three years ago. ...we have PII boards that started dying about two years after going into service.
Plus, my $50 DVD player "smells like burning," to use today's popular Ralph-Wiggum speak.
My $230 DVD player smells just fine...
I had a student come in who had WinXP on his machine and had just bought a nice new Sony Camera. The box said it contained drivers for XP. It did not, it had Win2000 drivers. He had installed them and hosed his machine. He got it working again and went up to the Sony site. No mention of the drivers.
Called them. They said "oh, that camera is too old, we aren't going to make any XP drivers for that one, why did you think the 2000 drivers would work?" it was less than a year old (sorry, can't remember the model).
Since then, I have heard the same story from a few other people who bought Sony Digital cameras at the beggining of this year. They built in obsolesence before it was even obsolete.
Granted it isn't really a 'consumer item', but it is a great example of how something with simple construction (all analog circuits!), can have almost too many features and capabillities, and can probably fall down a flight of stairs and live to create the soundtrack for TRON.
It will be making an appearance on eBay, BTW.
It might just be me, but it seems the author feels that all products generate similar performance. I find this to be completely ignorant. If you can't see the difference in quality between a Sony Trinitron and an RCA television, you don't have the right to discuss the topic.
I buy higher quality products (at a higher price) because they will out perform the cheap stuff, and additionally last longer. In the long run I find myself spending less money replacing old busted cheap products because my stuff is still kicking. I even have a six year old CD changer that's humming along like it was fresh out of the box.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Consumer electronics are what they've always been: for consumers. Reliability has always been the domain of professional products. There was never a time when Sony walkmans lasted more than a few months but no-one expected that reliability from a consumer product in the first place back in 1992. Consumer electronics are degraded in quality to reach the price point that consumers can attain. Recently, there has been such a demand for consumer electronics that people have begun to notice all the quality traits that differentiate consumer electronics from professional electronics. The price to get professional quality isn't 2 - 3 times but 10 times. If you want a reliable DVD player, consider a professional $1000 DVD player.
Yakovism 101
yeah, here let me critique you there. We are commenting on how Con Elec stuff fails on you, right?
In Soviet Russia "noun2" "verb" "noun1"
So, try this you fail on consumer electronics!
Some years ago, consumer electronics was a niche market, for people that really understood what they wanted, and valued quality.
Now the consumer electronics market is a mass market, full of people attracted by shiny surfaces, cool shapes, but who don't understand anything about the product itself.
Customer doesn't care about quality -> quality sinks.
At least four persons that I personally know have had troubles with their camera less than two months after purchase. And since I'm deciding whether to buy one or not, I have been reading a lot of review sites (amazon, epinions, etc) and almost all of the cameras include one reviewers who had to return their camera back soon after buying them, something that doesnt seem as common as with other electronics, like a playstation or a dvd player.
This paid my last vacation, it mi
I totally agree that the quality of electronics has declined in recent years. I learned my lesson years ago when I purchased an expensive CD-R drive (HP 4020i). It just died almost a year later (within a few weeks of warranty), so they sent me a new one (the 6020). That one lasted about a month, and then died too. I've gone through 3 more drives since then, but instead of spending $350-$400 on one, I got the cheapest drive pricewatch could offer. Counter-argument, I bought/assembled a dual pentium 2 "the mother of all computers" back when 266 mhz was good. Spent a fortune on it. It lasted for 2 years, then the motherboard committed suicide (power-supply melted the motherboard). So much for quality. For certain things, price equals quality. For others, it's just a perception issue ($200 jeans are just the same as $20 ones). That's my $0.02.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
Cheap, often-replaced units wouldn't be quite so bad if you could at least be able to count on the same models being available for a few years. As it stands now, the market moves so quickly that the model you bought last year is almost certainly discontinued - so not only do you have to have to spend money buying a replacement, you have to spend precious time how the new one works and what its features are.
This isn't to say innovation is bad, but it would be a lot nicer if it were possible to get replacements that were more direct drop-ins.
Every Sony product I have ever purchased over the last 10 years has gone to shit: from countless cordless phones to TV's.
:)
In retrospect, the only make that stood the test of time is all of my (still going strong and still using quite often) Panasonic equipment.
My pride and joy is my 9 year old Panasonic boombox. A very powerful system, 20+ pounds and despite tons of moving parts (top portion flips to a console for control, CD player with a slide out tray and dual cassettes) it has been my one CD player connected to my 20 year old Sansui Integrated Amp. The kickass remote fell victim to my 9 month old son in his quest to study the laws of physics. Oh well.
I was quite please to hear that the Panasonic SC-HT75 (Home Theatre in a Box) received favorable reviews. Hopefully, this will be in my living room for the Christmas holidays (Santa, are you listening?!
ChozSun
ChozSun.com
I have a 16 year old small JVC television and an equally old Panasonic VCR. Both are still going strong. Last month I bought a 27" Panasonic TV, took it home (100 lbs. - heavy bastard!) and it died 30 seconds after I turned it on. I lugged it back to store and got another one. The next day I bought a DVD player from a different store. When I got that home I found one of the composite video outputs was defective. I swapped it for a different model.
I think that instead of this being a problem with the quality of goods, (because honestly, silicon ise basically just as good as the next) This is the result of marketing driven manufacturing processes.
Deadlines have to be held, or else the cursed "slip date." And in order to make those deadlines, where is the one area where you can cut a few corners? Quality testing.
Why spend 72-hours straight in a burn-in for every device, when you can make 1 72-hour burn in for 1 device out of the batch (maybe 2) and hope for the best.
Doesn't work, and my 3 week old, and supposedly "burned-in" monitor can attest.
I work for a large chemical company that's been in business for a very long time. Although there were always competitors with lower prices, we survived and did quite well by offering higher quality products. Many customers would stop buying from us because someone offered them a lower price, but they always returned to us a few months later because of low quality and/or poor performance.
But now that's changing. More and more customers are buying based on price alone and are willing to accept lower quality products -- in many cases because they've reduced the quality of their own products.
Lower quality products for the same price = higher profits = bigger raises for top executives.
I don't think the qualities got worse, I think instead it's more likely a case of the more gadgets you've got, the more there are to go wrong, giving that impression.
Years ago in the early 90s SONY VCRs - even the consumer level models were built like tanks - sure they cost a couple hundred, but they lasted well, and had a great feature set.
Nowadays, $69 at Target gets you a SONY VCR that's no better than any of the other brands!
Scan Ebay, and you'll actually see people bidding big $$$ for older Sony VHS VCRs, while new ones aren't really that popular.
Check out
epinions. They review a sony video recorder and come up with this list:
Brands are listed starting from the most reliable (best) to least reliable (worst):
1. Panasonic - produced by Matsushita Electric
2. Quasar - also produced by Matsushita Electric
3. Samsung
4. Sanyo
5. Toshiba
6. Sharp
7. ProScan
8. GE
9. Hitachi
10. Philips
11. RCA
12. JVC
13. Symphonic
14. Emerson
15. SONY - isn't it too low for a "leader"?
16. Optimus (Radio Shack)
17. Mitsubishi
18. Zenith
19. Series LXI (Sears)
20. Fisher
IANAL, but imagine a beowulf cluster of in Soviet Russia all your belong are base to us welcoming the new SCO overlords.
I bought a TV at Wal-Mart (hey, I know.. but at the time, there wasn't an electronics store for 100 miles in any direction).. It was a 27" RCA TV with Guide+ GOLD blah blah.. I paid ~$325US (kinda pricy for a 27" TV).. In the 2 years since I made that purchase, I've had to return the TV 3 times (that's right, I'm on my 4th TV in 2 years), and I don't think it's Wal-Mart's fault.
Now, I'm on Wal-Mart's "You've returned too many higher priced items in X months, so we think you're stealing them" list, and I cannot return the TV even though this one just recently broke too. I've finally decided to quit beating the dead horse and just buy one from Best Buy and the ~$50USD 4 year service agreement..
I've joined a few TV repair forums since this started happening, and I've seen a lot of the exact same TV break multiple times.. When shopping for my new TV on best buy's site, I saw the model of mine that was constantly breaking.. They are now selling it for $229USD and not offering any sort of service agreement on it..
Of course products aren't built to last. I assume an MTBF of 2 years on all consumer products, and budget for replacement, because repair will be impossible or uneconomic. Yes, they're disposable. There is no money in making things that last.
If things last too long the manufacturers will come up with some new "standard" that renders the present installed base obsolete, thus forcing people to spend money. I have heard suggestions that this was part of the push for both CD audio and DVD video.
I have been pleasantly surprised, but only a few times. One particularly good result was a cheap piece of crap VCR from Zellers that I finally retired, still going strong, when it proved to have 4 Y2K bugs.
...laura, wondering how they would handle VCRs with Y2K bugs in Soviet Russia
I've got a 19" Quasar TV from the late 70's that's still going strong. Takes about 30 seconds from when to you turn it on till the picture actually comes in. Needs some time to warm up :)
But hey, that thing sure has lasted!
Bling!
Oh, and one last thing:
We are talking more now (thanks to the Internet).
If a company produces 50,000 items and 100 fail, that's not bad. But if all of those 100 come onto slashdot to bitch (pretend it was sold at ThinkGeek) then the perception of lower quality will be stronger among their target audience because of the ability for a few people to communicate directly with a larger number of others.
Just a thought.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
I spent more on my Panasonic DVD player and it was well worth it. I bought it 2 years ago and I've played a ton of DVDs on it with no problems. The most important thing to me was that the DVD player actually PLAY DVDs. This may sound like a joke, but I'm serious. The vast majority of the DVDs that I watch are either from the library or from www.netflix.com or are DVDs that I've purchased used. Many of these DVDs have a lot of scratches and my Panasonic player plays everything I've put in it, no matter how many scratches the disc had on it. There are some players that won't play scratched discs well, if at all, and some players that won't even play scuffed DVDs. A player that won't play scratched DVDs is worthless to me.
Also, many cheap players get very hot during play and many of them are very loud while playing a DVD. My Panasonic never gets very hot, even in the middle of summer and it is pretty quiet when playing a disc.
However, my player doesn't have many features, which is probably why it's still working. My player(Panasonic RV20) can't play MP3s or CDRs or VCDs, but I don't want to play any of those things on my player anyway, so it doesn't affect me.
The only reason to buy a cheap player like Apex is if you want to hack it to disable region coding and macrovision(some of them come with a PAL to NTSC converter, so you can play PAL DVDs on them and watch them on a NTSC TV)as far as I'm concerned.
I'm probably going to buy an Apex just so I can watch some region 2 DVDs that are not released in the US, but that is all I'm going to use it for. I'll still use the Panasonic as my main player until it dies.
Since ancient times, things have always been better in the past. Even the world's oldest fairytale by Homer, circa 850BC, speak of a Golden Age when the trees were taller and men were giants... If I would think of 6 transistor radios and tape recorders of the recent past, then things are a lot better now. However, my Sony DVD player annoys me like hell. Whereas I can pop a tape into my VCR and it will play immediately, the friggen DVD player forces me to navigate an impossible menu, with a stupid remote control device and have to press the play button hundreds of times before it will start...
Remington Arms has been around sometime. I own a Remington 11-87 Special Purpose Shotgun. I call it a working gun. It's routinely my duck-hunting gun, so naturally, it's been covered in salt-spray, mud, dirt, I've used the butt to pound in stakes, it's been thrown around, dropped, and never, ever misses.
The problem with all this technology today is there is no tradition. No one in today's market place is proud to have started from a little shop in the East End of London where we "took pride in making the finest quality harddrives, by hand, with pride." I look into the slashdot headers and see the old atari-style joystick, even that thing the plastic inserts that held up the stick and pushed the contacts routinely failed under heavy gameplay. I would order 6 at a time, we used to go threw those things like butter.
Has quality improved? I'm not sure if it's up or down, but I do know that every gadget I buy now seems to have a certain decaying-before-my-very-eyes feel about it as soon as I open it.
By the way, Nike PSAPlay, 6 months, 3 days, could be a record.
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
DVD player breaks Sony
Back in the late 80's, I bought an inexpensive (corded) phone at Radio Shack. I was going to gut it to make my own lineman's handset. I pried the thing open with a pair of pliers and discovered, much to my surprise, a sizeable peice of metal attached to the inside of this phone. The was put in there to add weight to this peice of crap. Apparently, people would never buy the phone if it felt like the cheap peice of 3"x2" circuit board that really was!
It seems that this is quite common. Open up most any cheap handheld electronic gadget and you're likely to find a weight inside.
The reason why expectations are up: the internet. People know what to expect based on what they read on dv.com about professional products or what their google searches turn up in Sony's professional division without looking at the price. They expect the same thing out of Best Buy, and they wind up dissapointed.
For what it's worth:
In the past 5 years i've bought 4 portable CD players, 2 of which were Sony branded. The first one failed within the first few months. I promptly returned it, went to a different store and got another sony brand, damn thing died in 7 months, Being extra careful to handle it like it was made of glass.
So 2 sony portables down the drain, then I found a lesser known brand by the name of Lenoxx Sound--a total change of pace. These babies are pretty tough to break. Granted, the included headphones turned to shit after a few months (i've noticed this on Lenoxx Sound CD Portables, no biggie though)But the actual players themselves are fantastic. Can't say how much i dropped and banged it up. Eventualy I got a newer one with more anti-skip. However both Lenoxx Sound cd players still work flawlessly today.
I've been finding out that alot of name brand items just go to shit a lot lately, so i've been putting my trust in lesser brands of similar/exact features. I had a Dell 19inch go out on me after 2 years, yet this old (1994 VGA) KLH 15in monitor is like a workhorse, which i use as a second display.
Don't get me started on IBM's older products, their simply rocks when it comes to longativity. I have a pretty damn old Mono VGA PS2 montior that is brighter then my Gateway 19inch, and that thing has to be at least 11 years old. My IBM 760E laptop has been dropped about 3 times already, from about 31/2-4 feet. Cracked the case, the memory cover slid off with the ram flying out of the socket, and the SOB STILL WORKED. Did a thorough scan of the hdd, no errors. LCD was fine. I nearly crapped my pants.
All of this is purely antidotal, but take it for what it's worth.
Case in point, it is getting harder and harder to associate brands with quality products now-a-days. Your best bet is to research the product in question by checking verious web-boards with consumer feedback. Often times enough, you can gauge the quality of a product by doing so. www.pricegrabber.com has a pretty decent feedback system which usally gives buyers (like me)the heads-up of faulty or crappy quality products. Also check out www.consumerreports.com, which sometimes offers good reviews on verious things not just PCs.
In the past, i wasn't very careful with my warrenty cards and the like, but now i'm holding on to my reciepts and mailin' out those cards religously, and i suggest anyone to do the same.
Good luck!
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
CE goods have definitely declined in quality over the last few years. Take Tivo's warranty for example. My Tivo's hard drive failed and they wanted me to spend $100 so that I could send them my broken unit and they would send me a refurbished unit in exchange for the bad one. The refurbished unit would contain a hard drive that is no longer manufactured and has most likely come from another "broken" Tivo sent in for warranty service. It should be noted that my Tivo unit was still under full warranty for parts and labor. I declined to send it in and have repaired it myself. Not only has the quality of CE goods declined, but so has the quality of service that backs up these goods.
"You know Myra, some people might think you're cute. But me, I think you're one very large baked potato."
i have seen similar discussions here on /. As stated before, if consumers were interested in quality, we would have no Windows, no VHS, and no Brittney Spears
I don't know why people are assuming big-name companies like Sony and Bose always make good products. (Big name? Dunno. Nobody around here would say Microsoft makes good products just because they're a big name.)
The hi-fi store I buy from doesn't stock any Bose, and I don't think they stock much Sony, either -- probably only some high-end TVs. Get a DVD player from a company like NAD that builds good hardware, and it'll have great quality and it'll last. (Sure, it'll set you back $400-500, but that's less than the top-o-the-line VCR from 1991 did.)
Quality is still out there, you just have to know where to find it, and be willing to pay for it.
I used to believe the axiom "You get what you pay for" but the equally true Caviat Emptor should be remembered at all times because some companies will just gouge you, and my experience is that Sony is one of the worst.
Case Study #1
About 7 years ago my dad and I bought a Sony 5 disk cd player for my mom which cost about $300.
The same year I bought myself an RCA 5 disk player for less than half the price ($140). The RCA has comparable features, and if there is a differnce in sound quality then I can't hear it.
The LED display on the expensive Sony failed about a year ago and is now a pain in the ass to use, my cheap RCA has endured much heavier usage and is still going strong.
I have no idea why people think sony is so hot. Some of my electronic purchases have lasted for years (and decades even) but others fail within a couple years. Virtually every electronic failure I have experienced has been a Sony including a Car Stereo, a "Ghetto Blaster", and the above mentioned cd player.
He was buddies with Andrew Fastow in high school, where the two ran a small-time pondzi scheme that defrauded 31 of their former classmates and teachers of over $9200 in cash, valuables, and illegal drugs.
Afer nearly seven months of operation, and only six weeks until their graduation, the law began to close in on the duo. To escape justice, Fastow convinced Hemos to perform fellatio on their high school principal, Steve Bucholtz.
In college, Hemos and Fastow founded Enron, and used the same tactics to expand their energy-trading business to a well-respected multi-national enterprise that operated in 38 states, 7 countries, and in Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda's anus.
I've never been a big fan of doing this, but after getting burned on quite a few products that I've bought over the years, it's become the only option. True, you can buy higher-quality goods. Guess what? They break too, sometimes at least as often as your lower-grade shit ( not always, of course). First thing I did when I bought my cheap-ass Western Digital 40 GB a few weeks ago was pay the extra 10 bucks on an extended warantee. Why? Because I know it WILL go bad eventually, and most likely within the next two years.
For all those stubborn folks who claim that their Krell amp or their Martin Logan speakers won't go bad, remember...shit happens. My best friend is a salesman at a high-end audio retailer here in the midwest, and you'd be suprised at the kind of shit people bring back that's defective.
Now, off to watch the Simpsons...
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for SEGA. ..."
Have none of you read Brave New World? Cheap mass produced disposable items keeps people buying and employed.
To mend old consumables is just uncivilized.
Do your part... Buy shitty products and toss them BEFORE they expire.
has the quality of high end consumer electronics declined?
cheap crap has always been available within a few months or at most a year of the wide availability of any new technology (the first year CD players costed an arm and a leg, but they probably are still working fine now, my first generation cheap CD player stopped reading CDs within a year and a half) but I find that some years back, if you bought the top of the line (or close to) model of a decent brand, odds were it would go strong for years and years and years.
Lately it seems, like others have said, that the discriminator between high and low price of a specific product is not reliability anymore, but just features, and the reliability is the same (usually not that great) all across the board.
Things are starting to get to the point that buying an extended 3 yrs 'no questions asked' replacement warranty is not the waste of money that it was some years ago.
In my personal experience good products are still obtainable, but getting fewer and fewer, off the top of my head: high-end HP printers (4xxx series), denon CD players, toshiba DVD players, toyota cars, bosh/whirlpool appliances, philips razors, you get the idea.
I really couldn't pick a TV, though, as I keep hearing horror stories about pretty much every projection TV out there, and direct view plasma HDTVs are way out of the reach of us common mortals pricewise...
-- the cake is a lie
Sony products in the 80s were top notch in quality. I still have a walkman I bought then. It is the most solid and best sounding walkman I've ever had. I got a new one in the 90s that was plastic and sucked ass. Right now Sony is basically riding on the reputation they built in the past a reputation that is evident from the replies to your post. But yeah, they suck
My 1982 HP33c lasted just over a year, enough to get over the warranty period, In spite of HP's reputation for quality, TLC, etc. And that was a replacement model after the first failed after 6 months. Less than impressive.
My 1999 Palm is still going strong despite being handled carelessly every day.
Manufacturers still know how to make things well, but you have to research the good products these days.
well there far too much for me to say here but i have worked in a shop that dealt entirely with sony products in the uk for over 2 years tho i am no longer there and all i can say is
:( u may also noticeed that alot of features are dissappearing as well this is to usually aid in the phasing of of products and make u spend more money on a newer alternative and the cutting of costs
the entire indusrty is a s*** state these days
i would definately say that most stuff isn't as good as it used to be, and you don't have to look its all around you if anyone owns a older minidisc then they will see that the older ones are built to a much higher standard (except the mzr55 that was a nightmare u wouldent believe how many were faulty they only just passed the a times b = c call back equation) the same with vcrs, tape walkmans (tho to be phased out soon) and other stuff. it seems there is no way as much pride in their products as there used to be
anyway me drifting also alot of people don't realise how much money sony make on you taking back your faulty sony product and getting it repaired if u goto them then wam they make alot but even if u take it somewhere else they have still have just made the money on parts, the market and few others are all shifting towards controled repair system where they control it so the money stays within the company
now the thing is that sony is generally better than most in terms of quality with a few exceptions i thought some things were really bad for when i was working there but man u should see some of the other companys, but i do believe that big companys like sony are abusing the customers in terms of denial of such & such product has a known fault etc and this is what is mainly contributing to the bad economy, people r saying why so i buy this crap when the last one broke after a year and sony didn't s*** but give me a expensive quote
anyway a few tips of advice
-if u want a proper quality product then look on the professional market not consumer, sony professional department sells quality stuff to companys who cannot afford for things to brake in critical scenarios
-keep the receipt always
-take care of your purchase (i have seen hifis that must have been used in the business of clearing minefields and they wonder y they brake)
-you do get what u pay for however there are always bad apples about
depending on the interest i may post more scary stuff
The plural of 'anecdote is not:
'data'
In 1988 (or so), I bought a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 2P. I sold it seven years later, still functioning perfectly.
In 1994 (or so), I bought a HP LaserJet 5P. It still works perfectly.
If you want to buy something that just works and just keeps working, I'd still trust Hewlett-Packard. Frankly, it's the only brand I associate with that kind of longevity. Not even IBM reaches that far on my confidence scale.
The PC industry mentality of cheap replaceable stuff has rubbed off on the electronics business. Long ago computer companies used to make heavy duty, durable cases, power supplies, fans that lasted 10 years, and keyboards you could use as a sledgehammer (and not break).
Ahhh, those were the days. I've still got some IBM keyboards and AT power supplies (with big honking red switch on side) well over 10 years old that still work.
PC manufacturers realized that no one was keeping these products for 10 years, so why go to the extra expense of building it for that long a life? Average consumers and businesses usually keep computers 3-5 years...so why make it last longer?
Electronics companies realized this about 3-5 years ago. I used to work for a national electronics chain, and a small specialty high-end shop. Both types of stores had declining prices and declining quality. The feature-itis of the past few years only made things worse.
I have a Sony ES home CD player that I bought 10 years ago (Burr-Brown converters...etc) and it still works...it's built like a tank. But it sits in its box....why? Because I replaced it with a $199.99 pioneer DVD player that plays DVDs, MP3s, VCDs, CDs...etc...and it sounds great! Will it last 10 years? No way, but who cares...for $200 i'll buy the latest thing when this one tanks.
-ted
point to anything manufactured that has increased in quality in the last 10 years beyond american cars, and that is only because there was no way for the US car manufacturers to actually get any worse.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Executive Summary: I don't buy Sony anymore.
For a while Sony was my first choice. I bought a Sony SDR 2010 receiver in 1990, that lasted close to ten years. Two channel stereo, 165 watts per channel, digital inputs, Dolby surround. In the end the unit started acting erratically, sound levels varying randomly, the display exhibiting interesting if unintelligible optical effects. (Since replaced by a Denon 3801). I was very pleased with this unit and thus with Sony.
I then bought a Sony TC-WR565 cassette deck, which still provides good, if infrequent, service.
I also have a Sony answering machine which works fine.
But ...
I have a Sony CDP-C265 five disk CD player. It is the third unit because I had to return the first two. Both DOA. Even the third unit didn't always recognize all five CDs in the tray. And the shuffle feature would only work with four CDs, ignoring the fifth after playing one song. After a few years the audio out started to go with one or both channels dropping out. (Since replaced with a formerly beige now black PowerMac G3 as a dedicated MP3 player.)
Next I bought a Sony DVP-S550D DVD player. I wasn't sure about going with Sony, but the unit was getting very good reviews. This too had to be returned twice because of audio problems. Once for DVD playback and once for CD playback. My original unit was replaced with a refurbished one when the orginal was lost by either Sony or FedEx. Since getting the second unit I've had no problems.
I have a Sony cordless phone. After about a year the buttons started failing intermittently.
I'm on my second Sony portable CD player. The first just stopped recognizing CDs. (Since replaced by an iPod.)
I also have a pair of Sony noice cancelling head phones, purchased because they were $100+ cheaper than the overpriced Bose set. Most of the time they work fine but on some flights there is a continuous clicking that renders them unusable.
The only Sony product I've purchased in the past three years was an open box STR-DE525 receiver for less than $50. So they may have gotten their quality control problems fixed. But I doubt it.
Steve M
It's not:
Lay down $49 for a player that lasts a year, or 3x as much for a player that lasts longer...
It's:
Lay down $49 for a player that lasts a year (in terms of features) or attempt to pay 3x more something that will stay current for longer...
2-3 years ago a DVD player would play CD's and DVDs... SOME of them had the ability to play burned disks...
Now, most DVD players can do all that, plus support CD-R/RW, DVD-RAM, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW and they play MP3's...
My first DVD player for $200 was nice... my most recent for $120 adds extra zoom, MP3 playback, dual audio out jacks (I suppose it might be useful if I didn't have SPDIF input on my stereo)...
What's better...
A brand new DVD player with all the features you could ever want for $99 that lasts 2 years... at which point you get an even better DVD player that also writes DVD's and has even more features and only costs $79 and also lasts 2 years... at which point you buy an even nicer SuperDVD player that levitates and does the dishes and mows the lawn for $39...
OR
You buy a really nice, really high quality audiophile grade super duper DVD player for $1800 that lasts 10 years... meanwhile, after the third year, best buy is selling a much better, albeit "cheaper" DVD player with more options and a new sound format, etc., for only $299. So of course, after 3 years, you sell your really nice DVD player and again go out and buy the top of the line DVD player this time for $2400 because its oh so nice!
Hmm.. let's see...
Yeah, I think I'll stick with choice number 1.
for those who can't type, i've done it for you
I bet you can even find some token ring stuff!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I've got a couple of these....and even a few without the number pad on the side (great for slide out 19" rack trays). I found a guy at a computer show that was selling them for $5.00 ea!
-ted
My sony bigscreen TV shoots up a big black
box on the screen every once and a while,
esecially if I'm playing with the DVD buttons
or I'm watching a station with bad reception.
I have to change the volume or channel
to make it go away. For $1000 I expected
Sony quality, esecially after the rave for
the particular model in Consumer Reports.
It weighs like 400 pounds so I can just
throw it in the trunk of my Honda and take it over
to the TV repair. I don't even know where TV repair shops are anymore. They had 'em when I was a kid.
my parents bought their first VCR two years before I was born, 1983. Thing still works perfectly. Sure, it's slow at rewinding and adjusting the balance sucks, but it's outlived our new ones by an order of magnitude or two.
OUr 1989 GE branded Thompson (RCA) TV still has excellent picture quality, dual composite stereo inputs, hi-fi outs, viewed out, and s-video in.
Now mind you this TV is nearly 13 years old. That means I was SEVEN when we got it.
The image quality is still excellent, in fact it beats out 90% of what I see on display at the electronics stores. Other than the high end stuff at least. For about $500 back then, it wasn't a bad deal. Considering the thing lasted 13 years so far, and shows NO signs of going downhill anytime soon, I doubt you could buy ANY TV today that would be in this good of condition 13 years later.
And yes, it actually gets used about 5 hours a day. Show me any current Sony that has done that!
Model M! WOOOOT!
I have an industrial model M (grey), and a black one that I don't even recall where it came from, and a few other standard off-white ones.
My current keyboard (an M) is about fifteen years old and still going strong. These things kick.
I work in Television. I can tell you, Sony has been designing their Commercial Electronics to die in a certain amount of time.
One Sony BETA deck had a separation down all of the boards along the same line. They then had thin tracers connecting the boards across this separation. To make sure these would break, they held the boards together with a special kind of glue, one that dried out and spread apart after 3 years. This is not a joke, the boards would break all of those fine tracers that would be almost impossible to field repair. You HAD to go to SONY to get it fixed. If not, you had to buy a new one.
Fun, isn't it?
Cause you can't get a tan from an amber monitor. If you do, there is something horribly wrong.
Well, when a Sony *doesn't* 'just plain work', you'll have a problem. I just bought a brand new digicamcorder a few months ago for a special event. Right out of the box, it was broken. Never worked.
Sony has an agreement with their retailers that keeps retailers from exchanging faulty items. You must contact Sony "service."
Sony didn't care what kind of crap they were selling, and didn't care if they lost a single customer. When I asked if they'd be happy about paying $700 for a camera, then having to pay an additional $50 in shipping and insurance costs to ship it back for repairs, then waiting for a few weeks while it's repaired and shipped back, all when the unit should never have been shipped in the first place. The entire drive unit was faulty. They basically said, "You pay for shipping and insurance on your camera, or let it remain broken while the warranty expires, and end up with nothing." So I got to pay for their screw-up.
When I tried to talk to anyone other than the teledroid, I hit dead ends each time with sentences that began with, "The Sony corporation would like me to tell you that...." -- quoting procedures.
Sony wasn't always like that. Now they really suck. From now on, the only Sony product I'd buy is one I thought of as "disposable."
100 units that fail out of 50,000 built is 2000 PPM failure rate. I work in the automotive industry, and the best-in-class suppliers have to run below 25 PPMs--thats only 1 failure in 50,000 parts (roughly.) My plant ships out almost 1,000,000 parts PER MONTH and we are under 25 PPM, so I feel no sympathy (especially considering that I am the Quality supervisor for the plant) when I find 1 bad VCR out of 100. That's WAY too many bad products.
The higher, the fewer.
Why not engineer your stuff to last only 5 years or less. Number one, it costs less than to engineer it to last for more time, two is it will increase the overall amount of units bought (ie buying three $50 DVD player that lasts 3-5 years vs one $150 DVD player that lasts 10 years). And if units moved is your metric, then you do better to make the units with a shorter life. As long as its not obscenely short (ie less that two years), consumers arent going to care after about three years is something craps out on them (assuming it didnt cost a lot of money).
To me it comes down to this, Americans have an average of $5000+ in debt. They are willing to buy buy buy and deal with the consequences later. In this case, the consequences are the unit having a shorter lifespan for being so cheap.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
The automotive industry is producing cars more reliable than ever, with diminishing maintenance obligations from their owners.
I found a similar thing is the cottage my parents recently bought. It was a house, built in the 1940s in Sterling Heights, MI then was transported to a rather remote waterfront lot. We recently did some renovations, and found a 45W light bulb in the master suite of the cottage--with Detroit Edison stamped on the bulb! I found out that "back in the day", you bought light bulbs from the power company (Det Edison) and returned them--for free--when they burnt out for a replacement. They stopped doing this over 50 years ago! That is quality.
The higher, the fewer.
The Almighty Buck. That's what cheapened construction in computers & consumer electronics is all about.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
I believe that digital is a cause of some of the degradation of quality that we have seen. Not necessarily with respect to reliability or length of life, but just little things.
Take my car sterio for example. Let's say I'm listening to a song while parking somewhere. I decide that I want listen to the rest of it before I get out. But the car doesn't need to be running for that time, so I turn the key back a few notches so that the engine is off but the sterio is on. As I do that the sterio stops playing for a good 3-5 seconds while my digital sterio "boots up". Car radios never did that when they were analog. When you turned the key back a few notches, you barely noticed, because if power was running to it, it was playing.
Digital sucks.
Of course this probably doesn't happen with all modern car sterio systems, but it does with mine. And what about the preset stations? There's a pause in the sound when I hit one of those buttons. Why? Old analog sterios never did that, especially the really old ones with the mechnical "radio buttons".
I notice these little things in other devices; where digital is worse than the old analog versions for certain features.
...because their PCs will leave you sorely disappointed.
You dare say? Who the hell says that anymore? Look Mr. Fancy Pants dare-saying mo fo, don't spend your money on jap crap or made in china...um...crap. Spend it on the poor. Spend time with your loved ones. You are the only gift they desire, not some $59 DVD player.
Quality comes from someone who takes pride in their work. Those that think quantity have bad quality, those that think quality have numbers and success cause their work speaks for itself. This is not to say pay more for better quality, this is to say find someone who prides themself in their work and buy from them. Companies can fit that description as well when they pride themselves in their work honestly.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Don't forget that modern America is a throw away economy.
/.ers who also value quality over newness.
By that I mean consumers value newness over excellence. People would rather buy item "X" every year, or every 2 years for some new whiz-bang feature - and then throw it away. People dont want something that lasts for ever.
If a company designs product "X" so well that it will last for 50 years, it will be sold or thrown out after just a few years - even if it working flawlessly! People just like new stuff - too much.
When I say "people", I'm refering to the general populous. I'm sure there are other
As an example, I have a 1984 Audi 4000 quattro. Even by today's standards it is an advanced car. It has all wheel drive, 4 wheel disc brakes, and 4 wheel independant suspension. Most new cars don't have a suspension and drivetrain this advanced. Anyways, this car has 238k miles on it - and it runs perfectly: doesn't burn or leak a drop of oil, starts on the first try, revvs silky smooth. The point is, people don't look at this car and realize that is an amazing feat of quality engineering. They just see a yucky old car. They think to themselves, "Why the hell would anyone want to drive such an old car???"
Newness over excellence. It's sad but true.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Anecdotes people, these are all anecdotes. Don't you pay attention to Robert Park? Anecdotes are good for telling stories, not for determining whether a phenomenon is occuring.
And for all those 'My TV is 15 years old and still works great!' there's a whole lot more that have gone in the dumpster that everyone has forgotten about. Working Hypothesis: You remember the stuff that still works, and forget the crap that broke.
Oh, wait. Reason? Science? This is Slashdot... The geek-bitchfest of the internet...
Just take this simple rule heavier is better. It has never failed me.
When we got a 55" Widescreen HDTV ready, we bought a progressive scan player, in this case a JVC. This was a $1000.00 player originally (we got it dirt cheap as part of a promotion to sell the TV).
The newer unit has a horrible remote, and no jog dial. Worse, it can't play any VCD's I make. The 'cheap' 2nd Generation Sony player beats it in every way, except it lacks Progressive Scan and can't do DTS.
I needed a 2nd VHS deck, so I decided to get a S-VHS deck since I could pick up a JVC for a little more than a Sony VHS deck. Unfortunatly Sony doesn't seem to sell SVHS decks, as I'd have prefered to get Sony. The JVC deck sucks, sure the picture quality on stuff we record is better, but programming it is a nightmare, the remote sucks, and it's almost impossible to fast-forward the tape to where you want.
We're now looking at replacing the old Sony DVD player with a new Sony 5-disk player. The features on the players (both the progressive Scan and the non-progressive scan players) rock, but they lack jog dials. I've been debating which model to get (Progressive or Non), as we're getting it for the bedroom so we can have multiple TV and Anime disks in the player at once. I'd thought about getting the Progressive for $50 more, so that if anything happens to the crappy JVC unit in the living room I could just swap it out. But then I realized that I might as well just get the cheaper, and when the time comes get an even better unit for the Living room.
Word to mother on that one! I just tossed half of a new box because I don't tolerate bad sectors. Most folks just use their floppy when the format shows bad sectors, I toss it and find a new one because I think my data is important. I used to use the same disks for months on end in high school, in smoky rooms and dragging my backpack to parties all the time, now I sit here nice and gentle and floppies are failing left and right. Who decided to open the doors in the cleanroom at KAO?
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
The consumer decides how much quality is in a product. The manufacterer simply tries to supply what the consumer is willing to pay for.
I have watched the stereo market since 1980 and you can see that when brands get a bad reputation, the manufacterer either ups the quality or lower the price to sell. When a brand has a good reputation it will slowly decline over time as it tries to get as much profit as possible.
There has always been good stuff and bad. When I bought a Canon VCR for $550 in 1986 that lasted 8 years, but I could have bought a crap one for $300. I just bought a JVC VCR last summer and I couldn't find one at Best Buy or Circuit City that was more than $150. I had to go to a specialty shop and bought one for $299. They had another one there that went for $499. All JVC models with different features and tape handling capabilities. You decide which price point to buy at.
I'd rather have to wade through user reviews on the Internet to find the rare high-quality stuff, than have no means of real-time research as it was back in the early 1990s - even if the average quality was higher back then. High-quality stuff still exists, you just have to find it and at least you now have the means to do so.
I agree, the parent must be one of those poor saps that's been sucked into the marketing hype behind the pieces of crap otherwise known as Bose.
"Interestingly enough, consumer interest has risen dramatically in doorstops and metal litterboxes" States marketing VP Sloane, "and we intend to deliver!"
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
Most of the stereo equipment I own (including my car radio/cd/mp3 player, 4ch power amp, speakers, STR-DE835 surround processor, MiniDisc recorder, and powered sub-woofer) I bought at my local outlet store. 100% of it is refurbished and 100% of it still works falwlessly after several years of daily use.
You can't take the sky from me
That sums it up
My Apex DVD/CDR/CDRW/MP3 player has yet to skip, yet to run into anything it wont play. $59
Buddy's Sony? Won't play CDRs, CDRWs, MP3s and skips like a school girl. $279
27" Sanyo tv was bought in 1996 to watch the Olympics in Atlanta. Still clear as the day I bought it.
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
This sort of problem has been around for quite some time. Originally, solid state electronics were designed to last for anywhere up to a decade with minimal maintenance. Old timers here (eg; anyone 30 and older) can remember buying replacement vacuum tubes for old clunker TVs that, despite being older than they were, were still going strong. Similarly, older VCRs have a surprisingly long lifespan, where a bit of belt reconditioning, the occasional head cleaning, and minute bias adjustments were all that was needed to keep them operational. In fact, you can often get an old VHS toploader to run good as new with that small amount of maintenance.
However, the industries that build these devices have learned that making a device durable and expensive is not only counterproductive, but unprofitable. Why sell a TV that lasts 20 years, and sell it for $300, when you can make a TV that lasts 5 years, sell it for $200 a pop, and make $800 from consumers who consider it a bargain? Same goes for VCRs, which aren't made for durability anymore, in fact, being priced very close to walkmans and portable CD players, they're more geared towards disposability.
Unfortunately though, there's the electronic waste issue again, which I brought up regarding HDTV. Where will all the waste go? Once again, probably to 3rd world countries that consider a fast buck more important than turning it's towns into toxic waste dumps.
We seriously need to review this process, and find ways of cheaply and safely disposing of these materials, or instead, go for equipment that's rated for a lengthy operational period, putting the concept of responsible consumerism to practical use.
From personal experience, the most durable goods I've owned have been made by Sony, Hitachi, Pioneer, JVC and Toshiba. What's needed is a long term write up on equipment, rated by durability. Perhaps when some of these companies find themselves on the list for most durable (or subsequently, those least durable), then they'll focus on either building hardware that lasts longer, or improving their manufacturing techniques to improve on their records.
Unfortunately, Consumer Reports only does this with cars, while electronics recieve a meager 6 month long term rating.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
It's no longer funny.
I was looking at a new tv a few years ago (Sony 32inch XBR) to replace my 20 year old Zenith that was still going strong. The salesman said I should get a in-store warranty "because they don't make 'em like they used to!" This goes along with the 25 year old fridge in the garage that still works, dryer that only just recently the belt started slipping, 15 year old VCR that I had (power surge killed it) And a 2 year old GE washer that started leaking like a sieve! Oh and don't get me started on hard drives!
...I bought a Sony Hi8 camcorder (sans LCD screen) in 1999. Only a little over a year later, I bought a Canon ZR10 miniDV camcorder. I've since been through 2 ZR10 replacements and a free upgrade to an Optura Pi (because I continued to complain, pester and threaten until I got my way -- yay PMS!). Said Optura Pi has now broken down once (no longer under warranty) and is also exhibiting the same quality issues (mosaic noise, tape eating, etc) that the ZR10's did.
I'm tempted to blame this on the shoddy workmanship in general that seems to have plagued consumer electronics lately, like NewtonsLaw suggested. However, I offer this nugget of truth as well -- the smaller a piece of electronic equipment is, the smaller its interal components (chips and the like) must be. I strongly believe that it is the primary cause of the problems of today's devices. These smaller components can't take the heat that the device generates and then craps out much earlier than a larger, older device.
Just something to think about.. Canon basically told me to take a flying leap when I suggested that heat/miniaturization was an inherent problem with the ZR10 (every single other colleague of mine who purchased a ZR10 had the same problems, ending with a $800 paperweight, like me).
--=Maj
One useless man is called a disgrace; two are called a law firm; and three or more become a Congress. -John Adams, 1776
I love how they sell a product with a built-in limit, then a year later they sell an upgrade without the limit and stick a pretty 'innovation' sticker on it. At the same time they start pushing other products that require little features that are only in the new stuff. There's no good reason DirectX, USB support, AGP, and several other technologies couldn't be included in NT4 Service Packs.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
I have just got my Minidisc recorder (MZR-900) back from repair. 6 weeks wait and 2 repairs later it is back now. ;)
I'd say that the quality of equipment has gone down. I did expect it to break one day, but not 14 months after I bought it...JUST out of manufacturers warranty. Good thing I have it covered by an extended warranty
There are only two successful strategies in business. The first is to offer the highest quality goods at a comparable (but possibly higher) price. The second is to offer the lowest priced goods at a comparable (but possibly lower) quality. Comprise (trying to offer medium quality goods at a medium price) will eventually fail because it is not possible to successfully structure a value chain which is focused on both quality and price. If what the post suggests is true, then the traditionally high quality manufacturers are trying to either a) move down market (switch to a low price strategy) -- a risky proposition, b) compromise on quality and price in the hope of reaching a larger market (this will eventually catch up with them), or c) following the leaders where by the highest level of quality is not what it used to be.
Personally, I think (c) is to blame. Remember, just a few years back you were an 'early adopter' if you bought a DVD player. Such consumers are able to demand more because the market is smaller and competitive forces have yet to drive price. Now everyone has a DVD player. Competition is driving price. High quality goods still exist. But the market for such goods has become smaller, raising their price. New competition means that the range of prices for equally low quality goods is larger. It is easy to mistake a high priced low quality good for a low priced high quality good.
Just my 2 cents.
You're no Yakov.
So shut up.
Dude, am I missing something? I think VCR's have more than 1 part. Assuming they have 100 parts (which has to be correct to within an order of magnitude), 100 broken VCRs out of 50,000 would get you 20ppm.
Even if the math were worse, you have to admit there's a valid distinction to be drawn between the required quality of automotive parts and the buttons on my cd player. If your CD player falls apart no one dies. That and I think there are enough people who would rather not pay 2x what they pay now for identical sound quality and 2x reliability.
Sometimes cheap electronic devices being expected to fail is a good thing. I know that whenever I splash out on something and overclock it or plug it in to a voltage adapter with too much power or whatever that when I blow the unit I dont care cos I can simply take it back for a refund or replacement unit. Its pretty cool being able to 'borrow' something from a store, wreck it and get your money back. Try doing that to a someone you know.
Unfortunately, no one can be told what my sig is...
Some savvy consumers come to this conclusion. Why pay more than an absolute minimum for products in a category which are obsolete or half-price in a year's time?
It's the old adage: value given for value received. What value is a high end, 1993 cd player? or that souped up 486?
"Are you better off buying a $49 DVD player "
Only if you are a cheap bastard and aren't concerned with quality. Obviously, this poster doesn't have a HDTV.
Can you say progressive scan?
not for $49.
If you want a light bulb to last you forever, just run it at a lower voltage rating that it's been designed for. There is one light bulb somewhere in Cali that has been on continuously for 100 years, and I have a 280V light bulb that has been running (on and off) for 50 years at 220v.
Samsung has, until the last few years, been a company that competed on price alone. They made use of super-cheap local labor and parts to undercut the competition. However, with the standard of living improving in Korea, they have made a major shift recently into building quality goods. They understand that as it gets more expensive to pay their workers, they will not be able to undercut China, and are taking the initiative now to compete on quality with the likes of Sony (who seems to be cutting costs and quality for a change for their own reasons).
There was a large article about this in a recent Newsweek (i think-- i read a lot), but I can't seem to find a web link to it to show you.
We'll see if their efforts hold. But hey-- my VCR isn't broken yet, and my microwave is alive and kicking.
I think so, I haven't turned it on in over 10 years.
Seriously though, I bought a Sony CD-RW drive and it crapped out within about 6 months of very light use. I replaced it with an HP. It sounds like a Buick on rims when it spins up, but it's still working.
The main reason why electronics has declined in quality since the mid 1990s is China's entry into the production scene. When electronics were made in Taiwan, Japan and the US, the quality was good. When the ethically corrupt Chinese-owned businesses started churning out the cheap & dirty components to dump on the market, that's when things dived.
I thought I would add my anecdotal evidence to everyone elses.
I recently had to replace my 10 year old big screen Mitsubishi telivision because it was broken in the process of moving, but while I had it I never had a problem.
Afterwards I went and bought a high def. big screen Sony, and found that when I played movies or cable tv it looked great. But when I went to play my plasystation 2 on it (FFX if you care) I noticed that the picture on the screen had some severe warping on the sides (bows down on top, up on bottom, and in on both sides). This was most noticable in the game because of all the perfectly straight lines in menu boxes etc.
So I took it back and got another one, same problem, only this tv had color splotches as well.
So I took my PS2 to sears and started plugging it into every tv they had, and every tv with a picture tube (not projection) had the same problem to a varying degree, EXCEPT the Mitsubishi (and wouldn't you know it, it was the most expensive tv there).
So guess which TV I purchased, thats right the $300 Sylvania. Because it looked as bad as the rest, but was 1/3 the price.
Wait, I have a moral here. Ohh yeah, unless your willing to put out tons of money for only slight inprovement in quality, go with the cheapest crap because its hard to tell the difference between turds, they all stink.
Has the price of the quality products declined?
I think yes.
Are the pockets of the people filled with money?
No, i don't think so (at least not enough money). That makes useless the past one, so it dosen't matters that is medium or low quality, is cheap and i can afford it!
C-x C-c
I used to work in advertising...and one of the best stories I have is a fairly long one involving Sony. The short version of the story is a quote by a manager from Sony USA who when asked why they did not advertise/promote as much as the other electronics companies simply replied "because we're Sony. People will by Sony no matter what because we are Sony".
IMHO, the surface mount technology that most consumer electronics is made of today is not as reliable as the older "through-hole" technology from the 70s and 80s. The problem is thermal expansion of the printed circuit boards over and over again stresses the solder connections of the very tiny parts until the connection becomes intermittent or completely fails. Through-hole was much more robust because component leads were supported by the holes through the boards, although certainly more labor intensive and therefore more expensive.
Intermittent or open connections on surface mount boards are a real bitch to troubleshoot, too.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
I've been using cellphones since 1995, when they became popular with the GSM system. Since then I've had 5 cellphones, and the drop in quality is astounding. To illustrate this I'll tell the history of the phones.
The first "luggable" cellphones were sturdy bastards, made in steel and hard-ass PVC. My father has an old NMT450 phone, still going strong after almost twenty (!) years. It is big as a suitcase, but it works.
Ericsson "HotLine" was one of the first phones to really fit in your hand (Not like the Motorola "Dog bone". It too could go through hell, but not quite as though as the previous luggable phones. Fair enough, it was after all, made totally of plastic.
Then I bought my first phone, a Nokia 2110i. Huge by todays standards, sexy in 1995. The 2110 had a aluminium frame and plastic casing, and it was rather though. The plastics was durable but the design flaws started to appear as the phones became smaller. Two BIG flaws on the phone; tiny and flimsy antennae, always breaking off and huge display, cracking in two if you sat on the phone. I counted 5 friends with 2110, 4 had to get new displays and all had to get new antennaes.
Then I got a Bosch phone. This was my first 'cheap' phone. It was a nightmare to use, complex system, bad design, cheap keypad and bad display. Really a bad phone. But great value for the money.
Then I got the Nokia 3210, the first phone where you could switch the cover. Now what is the use of that. If that's not a kiddie-robbing marketing scheme, I don't know what is. The covers soon became wiggly, scratched and collected dust inside the phone. The keypad was nice to use, but the paint on the keys soon wore out. The software had to be upgraded, because of constant OS crashes. One day, I was tossing the phone on to the bed, but it hit the wall before the sheets. Display cracked, new phone.
Since I didn't have money for a new phone, I borrowed one from a friend. The Nokia 6110. It had huge memory, and a nice design. Nice menues and bad, bad keypad. The battery also fit badly and the battery poles rubbed on the contacts making the current less than optimal. Also, the display started dimming. This is an inherited design flaw, because the LCD is slightly movable. The rubs on the less-than-durable contacts on the PCB, wearing them out. I was amazed to see that the copper on the PCB was actually gone, therefore, zero contact.
My next phone was a Nokia 6210. Now this is a nice phone! To look at. I actually like the size, it fits in my hand. But why is the battery wiggly? Just like the 6110. And what the hell is wrong with the software? My 6210 crashed, crashed, froze, and crashed hundreds of times. It got better after a software upgrade, but it still crashed sometimes. It was stolen, and calls were place to Somalia for 10USD before I managed to block it. And, yeah, WAP sucks all ass.
Now I have a Sony Ericsson T68i. I'm greatly disappointed in theis phone. The case is the most flimsy I have ever seen. I'm afraid it will break at any time! The battery time is much less than the 6210. The OS is S-L-O-O-O-O-W. I was told that it has less software errors than Nokia, but after using it for two weeks, I doubt it. And it is the unuseful things that does this. It has been on the marked for half a year and there are four upgrades to the software. That's almost as much as Windows!
I want a phone that NEVER crashes. My 2110 went for two years without crashing. With a HUGE memory for SMS and phone numbers. I love games, on the PS2, not the phone. I dispise the bastard protocol WAP and GPRS makes me laugh.
Why can't I have a phone that works, not a wannabe PDA??
These products don't need to survive very long because the companies pushing them are going to find new ingenius ways for you to buy the latest one. And you wanna know what? That's good for the economy. Nobody's interested in building a fridge that'll last 25 years anymore. Your business dries up real fast.
Bad for the economy, good for society - what would youp be building if you weren't building all those 10 year fridges?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I just went to the supermarket. An old person who was in the checkout line with me noticed I was buying tissue paper.
... is there a vast tissue paper conspirancy? I always thought that I was just blowing my nose, but now I'm concerned. Am I just another stooge supporing The Man?
"Hey, have you noticed how much smaller tissue paper has become?"
"Well, no, not really. Maybe things have changed. I'm not as old as you. You look like you're ready to croak any day now. That must really suck."
But now that I'm home, I'm wondering
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
BTW, Golfs are built in Germany and sold in the US for about $2000 less than a Jetta built in Mexico, but are the same car (except the trunk)... tell me which one you would buy...
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
It doesn't matter how much you pay (within reason) for a DVD, as they ALL use a 1500 hour laser in them. That's right - watch 750 2 hour movies and that's pretty much the end of it.
Really. When Best Buy and Circuit City have nothing but cheap shit on the shelves in the consumer entertainment department it's because that's exactly what people are willing to pay for. There used to be a middle range of devices, usually retailing just a little above the cheap stuff.
:)
These mid range units could generally be relied upon to perform well, have extra useful features, and lasted longer. As an example I had a Sony Hi8 camcorder from circa 1990 - a fabulous machine : Great optics, great mechanics, great sound, manual controls for everything, audio overdub functions, nice damped zoom control, it had the works. (It got stolen after 4 years, but by then it still worked as new.)
Sure it cost a bit more than the discount units available at the time, but in use you could certainly feel where those extra dollars went. It was also a lot cheaper than the high end pro video gear. All in all it was a nice compromise.
Nowadays the mid range is mostly gone - how could it be any different? The consumers buy the cheapest shit they can find, with everything automatic. You can't find camcorders with manual controls unless you go to the 'prosumer level' which is a relatively new high-strata tier with prices ranging close to that of pro gear. (Sony VX2000, Canon GL-1, XL-1, etc.)
It's my impression that the mid range market shrank in America as quality-oblivious people decided the budget units performed 'well enough', and simply picked which-ever nice-looking unit had the lowest price tag with a comparable feature set. The incentive to improve quality became less significant than the incentive to reduce price.
A circuit board in a black box is not just a circuit board in a black box, but who's to know if the thing works okay for a couple of months before it starts to die little by little?
There have been digital radio tuners for almost twenty years. Why do you think they still sell clock radios and boomboxes with mechanical turn-knob tuners?
The Japanese in particular, but also Europeans have been more quality conscious than Americans, and the mid-range segment still exists there. For example, the Europeans have for many years had an affordable mid-range 16:9 widescreen TV option with digital framedobler and picture stabilization, which is available to Americans only if they go all the way and buy the high-priced High Def sets.
For twenty years(!) Europeans have had digital ceefax teletype color text overlays on their TVs which lets users lookup program listings, news and weather information and much more from their remote controls. It's virtually indispensable even if it's low tech and looks like early 80s console game graphics, but Americans have never had anything as functional or useful of the kind until the advent of the digital cable box, Tivo, etc.
Europeans have NICAM digital near-CD-quality stereo audio to go with the PAL (*) TV picture, which by the way has higher resolution and much better colors than the Japanese/American NTSC format. Most American mom&pop&joe sixpack consumers get their stereo audio in crap quality from an analog audio carrier in the NTSC format. The new digital cable boxes improve the situation; but many many households still use 1980s or even 1970s technology, upon which they base their quality and performance expectations.
European electronics consumers have preferred direct two-way audio/video cables (SCART) to connect their VCRs and TVs in order to obtain the better picture afforded by not having the picture components squished together and lose quality by being re-modulated and de-modulated for the aerial connection: In the six years I stayed in the U.S., in the many different homes I visited, I saw most American home consumers connect their VCRs and even DVD players to the TV through aerial jacks.
Where I lived (Fairfax, VA) I had a nice home entertainment system setup. 120 channels of crap on TV to choose from, but the cable system employed analog UHF multiplexing technology from the 1970s (two stiff coaxials snaking from the wall to a decoder box with, I shit you not, fake wooden sides!) - The picture always had ghosts and noise and looked awful. The colors were washed out and the effective horizontal picture resolution was maybe 200 pixels. One day the picture looked so bad that I called in a cable guy to fix it. He probably thought I was some kind of euronazi crank because he said it looked just like everyone else's signal and nobody's complaining. With performance expectations as low as these, it's no wonder American consumer electronics are all basically worth exactly what you pay for.
Americans: If you want good stuff, smuggle some stuff home from Japan. Suffer the premium rates. They use mostly the same standards as you do, but their shit is -much- better, has more features, lasts longer.
Also, come visit Europe sometime, check out the cool shit we got you ain't got: 100hz TV picture steady as a rock, broadcast TV over aerial looking close to DVD quality; RDS car radios which continously retunes your receiver to the closest carrier broadcasting the program you're listening to, and your CD player pausing automatically for urgent traffic announcements; Ubiquitous, standardized GSM cellphones with SMS and always-on GPRS data services...
(*) By the way, pay no attention to the French with regards to home electronics. They're weird and speak French and use SECAM which sucks.
I have a Sansui VCR that is 8 years old but still works like new. My wife has a 2 year old Magnavox VCR that just broke so I threw it away. The point is yes, it's true, they don't make 'em like they used to.
After all these years, I can't point you at documentation of the details, but the 20 MB hard drives that came with the original IBM PC/AT were utter junk. When IBM solicited bids for these drives, they offered so little per drive that the preeminent manufacturers couldn't even submit a bid.
The company I worked for at the time forced our IBM dealer to replace the drives in both machines that it bought -- because both of them failed noisily, taking with them all the data stored on them.
Which decks? The things are too durable. I have FINALLY gotten the ok to remove the last 3/4" machines - the damn things won't die, and the @#$# sales staff don't want to lose them, "just in case" they can sell some spot with half-assed old 3/4" quality.
.02
I've seen old BVW-10s are still running strong, and those are ancient. Aside from upper drums, and the odd scanner, I haven't seen problems with any of sony's commercial (professional) equipment. I work on some old sony cameras, which get so hot inside you can get blisters if you aren't careful - still going 20+ years later.
Haven't worked on any digi-beta yet, so don't know about the long term quality there.
Personally, I have NEVER regretted purchasing a Sony product, either consumer or professional.
just my
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, Act 4, Scene 2
My portable CD player was bought over 10 years ago (in Japan). It failed soon afterward. A non-geek would have had to throw it out, but I opened it up and found the problem was trivial (faulty diode in the power circuit, no idea why) and it has worked fine ever since.
... until I found out about SCMS and that the players don't allow access to the raw bits on disc. I bought my DVD player with full knowledge about region-coding and macrovision - but then I had
Our 10-year-old TV screen now shows colour distortion, but the rest works fine. Our 10-year-old VCR has had to be repaired (dead heads) and I have had to crack it open several times for minor repairs also. It is showing wear in its moving parts.
The reason I don't replace them, or otherwise buy much in the way of consumer electronics these days, is the DRM problem. It's necessary to investigate each product carefully before purchasing, because the manufacturers don't exactly do out of their way to put "this is crippled crap" on the brochure. I was considering buying an MD player
them disabled in the shop before taking delivery. In Australia it is now ILLEGAL for a shop to disable Macrovision (so it looks like I bought my DVD player at the right time!!)
The other reason I don't buy much consumer electronics is that the stuff is not well integrated yet. Behind the stereo looks like a
rat's nest, so my first requirement is something to improve the cabling. Maybe a bus architecture?!? The gear doesn't "talk" to each other - when I turn on the TV, the stereo should turn on too, and set its input to TV. My VCR has a clock which loses its setting every time we have a power outage, plus I have to manually reset it twice a year for Daylight Saving. Why can't it self-synchronise on a timestamp from the TV signal, for example?
I don't want to buy another lemon like the Sony combined TV/VCR we got a few years ago. Not only does it have mono sound only (my fault for not checking enough) but its internal clock loses time on power loss (as above) and it cannot be reset while there are recordings programmed! That's one stupid device.
As for computer equipment (which to me is quite a separate thing from consumer electronics) I have found the quality is steadily improving over time. When I buy a card these days generally it comes with adequate documentation, not like a few years ago. These days, motherboards usually fit into cases (I've bought some where I had to start doing metalwork on the case just to get the mobo in). Various cards are usually compatible with each other nowadays (not like the SCSI card I had which couldn't be used with the ethernet card). Sure, hard disk warranties have gone down, and maybe they are more prone to failure than before - but they have always been prone to failure, and it has always been important to keep regular backups. Paradoxically, a dead CPU or mobo doesn't matter much because your important data is on the disc, yet the CPU is ultimately more reliable due to no moving parts.
So in general I don't think quality has gone down, or not much. My expectations have gone up a lot. I feel that manufacturers aren't paying attention to integrating products, at least in Australia. In Japan you can buy watches which self-synchronise off a low frequency AM radio signal.
I've been looking, for several years, for a digital clock radio which has a _digital_ tuning mechanism, as opposed to the ones which tune a capacitor and use string to pull an indicator across a frequency indicator. I can't understand why such a simple requirement is completely ignored by the manufacturers. It must be cheaper to produce a digital tuner than one containing strings and pulleys, at least. Actually I found one about 18 months ago but the price was well out of my range, and I was in a specialty store for "geek toys" at the time; I have never seen one in any of the usual department stores where the bulk of the population buy their electronics.
You know what those three words are?
.. You expected quality? Cost to manufacture? $.93 Cost to consumer in US? $100 Yeah, I know why there are there too. Cost more to ship the damn thing than it cost to make.
...That can be misleading. If the components inside are made in Indonesia, or China... Odds are they will fail quickly.
...
...And thank you General Electric. I'm sure I'll hear from their lawyers soon.
Made In China
Made In Indonesia
Made In Malaysia
Look...I have a Samsung wireless phone. The first three units I got all semi-worked but had some defect. Made In Indonesia is stamped on the back. What should be there? Made In Indonesia By Children As Young As 5 Years Old Living 30 To A Room Smaller Than My Bedroom Making A Combined Daily Salary Less Than The Cost Of A Combo Meal.
Your (insert item here) is a piece of crap? Look at the POM. If it's junk, odds are it comes from one of the three above. But in the age of global parts
This is what you get when you mix poor wages, illiteracy, bad working conditions, and sweat shops.
Welcome to the global marketplace. Corporations will chase cheap labor to make cheap products while exporting the jobs of those who used to make them somewhere else. It's a nice race to the bottom. Forget quality. Forget quality of life. Japan is just doing the same thing we did. Chase cheaper labor and export jobs to where they can get it. Their economy is in the crapper now? Gee, I wonder why!
You see it very dramatically in the guitar market. As soon as a country acquires the skill to finally make a decent product, they move the operation to where people will work for a dollar less. They haven't even hit the bottom of the pool yet. There are still places with cheaper labor, less environmental laws, and lower education
Enter corporate solution
Make you buy it twice.
How we going to pay for that new plant? Got to drive demand somehow. Making it fail is a good way to do that.
This isn't to say that corporations don't love to sell you the same stuff twice. General Electric (one of the most crooked US companies in history) does it all the time with light bulbs. Goddess help those who fly on planes with their engines. They can't even make a good cordless phone or a toaster that wont burn your house down. Of course, even avionics parts are being made in China now. Fasteners that fail and kill several hundred people. Yep. Made in China. Thanks for dying on United.
Just start that mantra...
Business knows best.
Free markets.
Deregulation.
Business knows best.
Free markets.
Deregulation.
Of course, even General Electric isn't as bad as Hewlett Packard. When HP switched from being technology focused to being "consumer focused" that's when we got things like print heads and ink carts that are programmed to fail at a certain date. Still half full of ink? No matter.
Still plenty of geeks here who work with embedded applications. Go look into it. Call it what you will..I call it corporate crime.
It wouldn't suprise me at all to see automobile manufactures start to incorporate this into their cars computers. Encyrpted of course --.
Business Knows Best.
Free Markets.
Deregulation.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
If you want to buy, for example, hi-fi components, then buy them from real hi-fi company. My 15yr old NAD 3225PE integrated amp still sounds better than anything at circuit city. Today NAD's products may not last that long but it sure beats anything from Sony and friends.
You Get What You Pay For.
Early DVD players were built by people who had to make it work and work well. They were intended for people who had expensive A/V setups and the quality showed. My first DVD player was $250, two years ago (well after the uber expensive phase).
The $50 DVD players on the market today are built with the sole mandate to cut the cost as much as possible. 10 chips are redesigned into one. Thinner boards are used. Signal output specs are ignored. Lowest cost resistors and capacitors. Motors that barely meet spec. Plastic gears.
A relative of mine recently bought a top end projection HDTV. The model he wanted had been replaced with a new version, but he wanted the old one because the CRTs in the previous version were larger (thus sharper and brigher) and it had clearer lenses. The new replacement model had a few new features and debuted at a price that was half ($7k)of what the previous one started at. Nice for people who couldn't afford the old version. Bad for people who want the best picture possible.
If you want a piece of electronics that lasts as long as the one you bought 5 years ago, don't expect to pick it up for 20% of the cost of the older sturdy model. It's like bitching about how a Whopper tastes so bad next to a burger from TGIFriday's.
Notice that floppy disk quality/reliability began to sink about the same time the FDD-less iMac came out?
Hmmm... =)
I work at Tweeter in Newton, MA. If anyone needs assistance with home theatre hookups or would like advice or (better yet) to purchase any home electronics please give myself, or anyone else at Tweeter a call. We pride ourselves on selling only the good stuff. We have the more inexpensive stuff, but nothing we sell is crap.
Here is a list of good stuff that we sell, that I will personally vouch for:
DVD
Pioneer Elite DV47AI - $1000
Pioneer Elite DV45A - $500
Sony ES DVPNS999ES - $1200
Denon DVD9000 - $3500
Philips DVDQ50 - $400
Tube TV
Any Sony XBR
Any Philips MatchLine
PJTV
Mits Diamond Line
Pioneer Elite 530/630/730 (54"/58"/64")
Plasma
Pioneer Elite 43" - PRO800HD - $9000
Pioneer Elite 50" - PRO1000HD - $12000
Philips 50" - 50FD9954 - $11000
Philips 42" - 42FD9954 - Cant think off top of head
Philips 32" - 32FD9954 - $4500
Panasonic 50" - PT50PHD4P - $11000 i think
Panasonic 42" - PT42PHD4P - $7000 i think
Panasonic 37" - PT37PD4P - $4500
Sony 42" - KE42TS2
Sony 32" - KE32TS2
Yeah but I bet dollars to donuts that Ipod will last 5 years or longer. Apple products are quality and built to last.
it's the quality of workers that are declining.
it's like paying a HS graduate for a job that a PhD used to do. Not that degrees matter, but you get the picture.
This 'last just past the warrenty period' & 'cheaper to replace than repair' mentality is really pissing me off.
Mind you I understand it.
A genuinlly reliable electronic product will last for yonks, which means less market opportunities later
My first thought on seeing this article was "Hey, somebody's slashdotted the Aardvark!"
/., the Aardvark is one of my visit-every-day sites. Of course, non-New Zealanders will find the site less interesting.)
Then I looked again at who submitted it - the Aardvark slashdotted the Aardvark!
Are you stress testing your web server, Bruce?
(Along with a few comic strips and
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
"Ending is better than mending." --Hypnopaedic instruction from Huxley's Brave New World
I'm a big dork and intensely research any potential electronics purchase. Instead of impulse-buying, I wait until the unit I want--usually the expensive one--goes on sale.
As an example, I bought a Harman/Kardon receiver a few years ago as the model line was being end-of-lifed. The normally $400+ receiver cost me $199 at Circuit City. The damn thing is a tank. It sounds great and weighs 25 lbs due to its massive transformer...about 10 more than the average Sony. I cracked it open out of curiosity and was surprised at how well-built it is compared to my previous crap JVC receiver.
I've actually had good luck with other Sony stuff, especially their computer monitors. I just don't like their receivers and low-end audio stuff. The upper-end and ES-level components are quite good.
Just pay a little extra and buy something good--it will last. Instead of, say, a Pioneer or JVC receiver, get a H/K, NAD, Denon or Onkyo. This isn't high-end audiophile gear by any means, but it is considerably better than Bose and most of the other mass-market crap at Best Buy.
And don't buy those all-in-one home theatres. If one component fails, you'll be stuck with a whole bunch of useless (still good) equipment.
Sony's strategy is to build stylish electronics with lots of great features and sell it for a great price. In order to make this happen their quality is horrible, and their customer service is even worse. If you've ever tried to get a Sony product repaired you know what I'm talking about. I had a Vaio laptop and the 'L' key broke off. I called Sony, and despite the fact that I had registered the laptop and it was 6 months old, they were going to charge me $150 to repair it unless I had the original receipt (the fact that I bought it direct from Sony didn't make a difference)!!! And if they did repair it, I would have to back up my hard drive because they would have to format it! How bad can you get?
I went down to the local CompUSA and popped the L key off on of their display computers. About 1/4 of the keys were missing from that computer, I guess it was a common problem.
I had 5 other Sony products break within 2 months of this. I no longer buy Sony.
There are some very high quality consumer electronics out there though. If you've ever looked at high-end audio components (stuff that you can't buy at the local circuit city), you know what I mean. You certainly have to pay for it though.
If anything, electronics I have bought in the past 5 years seem to last a lot longer than the stuff I had in the 80's & 90's. Of course, I probably take a lot better care of my stuff now than when I was a teenager, since it's all bought with my own funds now... I noticed lots of comments about Sony; for the record, any Sony product I bought in the 80's-90's was GARBAGE. I went through 3 Discmans in a year (I finally bought a used RCA model off a friend for $20 that lasted for 5 years), 2 boomboxes, 1 "Sports" tape walkman, several sets of portable speakers, and a few sets of $200 MDR-series headphones (the "preferred" model for my audio engineering classes in college) that ALL failed on me. I avoided Sony products like the plague for the past ten years, until I recently bought a Sony DCR-TRV16 MiniDV camcorder, since it had all the features I wanted at the best price. I have been very pleased with it so far (knock wood). When I finally decide to upgrade my Palm VIIx in a year of two, I plan to go with a Clie.
I've been reading these posts and their all about brands like Sony, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, etc.. These are not high end brands. These are brands that sell to the masses. There is not quality, artistry, or elegance to the products they make. They're simply marketing to the lowest common denominator. If you want to purchase a quality product, you have to look off the beaten path. The best example I can come up with is the stereo market. You can buy a top of the line, but poor quality, Sony receiver for upwards of $4000. Or you could go buy separate components from a brand like Adcom. Adcom has a reputation of near audiophile quality at a reasonable price. There are many other much more expensive, but very high quality brands like Krell, Martin Logan, Linn, etc.. What that gets you is massive transformers and high quality construction. What you sacrifice is a bunch of redundant surround sound settings and other cheap, but flashy, sound processing features. Maybe you don't even get a remote control (god-forbid you actually have to get up to adjust the volume). But money wise, you probably end up saving by buying the Adcom components, plus you get the benefit that if one component actually does go out, you only have to fix or replace it, versus losing your entire system. There are plenty of great quality electronics companies. The funny thing is that a name brand has become a sign of quality, rather than the truth, that it's just average, probably poor quality.
My parents bought a Sony VVega KV36XBR400 HD-ready TV almost two years ago. Granted, it's a big-ticket item (and it's heavy as hell! 235 lbs!) but it hasn't given us a wink of trouble.
I think the problem is less in big electronics than it is in small, handheld devices. People drop cell phones and Palms more than they'd like to admit, but I've never seen a design that's of high enough quality to take such abuse.
With all the R&D money manufacturers spend on enhancing an already bloated feature set, can't they spend half as much to make the product durable and give it a high-quality feel? I would buy in a second (and at almost any price) a cell phone that's advertised as durable and able to withstand a fall from a pocket or backpack.
Quality is still quite important in consumer electronics, and I'd like to see more manufacturers take it in to serious consideration as a selling point for their products.
no body has yet figured out how to toast bread perfectly every time. Why don't they put in a light sensor of some sort and measure when the bread is brown enough. It's often too dark, too light, or passable for pencil lead.
it's a fun little toy to play with. Is it going to survive a drop off the bed?
What's R2D2 doing in your bed?
While the cheaper IBM laptops may have the same computing spec for less money, there are real differnces from the more expensive ones. The most glaring difference is the lid is plastic with a cheap hinge instead of metal with a solid hinge. The lid on an R-Series becomes floppy and is prone to cracking. OTOH, my 3 year old T-Series is still as solid as new, despite being pounded on 12 hours a day. Second, and this is the biggest difference, is that the cheaper ones come with a 1 year warranty vs. 3 years. So if you really depend on your computer, the more expensive one is probably a better buy. Basically, what you're paying for is that IBM will "keep you in computer" for 3 years instead of one.
Do what my friend and I did about 7 years ago. Buy a conair flip fone. It's just a tad bit bigger than a cell phone. My friend(quite a whiz with the soldering iron) and I had ours totally tricked out. In/out audio jacks, a mute switch, a polarity tester, an "off the hook" LED, a "someone picked up an extension" LED + muter(with override switch). I went a bit further and made a cable that included a standard RJ-11 plug, that light-blue plug linemans use, and standard alligator clips.
Oh those were the days.
I have a background of ten years in the consumer electronics industry (repair), 7 years sales experience, and nearly another ten in computers. I've been to many a consumer show, technical seminar, bull session and thinktank.
In electronics, I've worked for the following Warranty centres: Panasonic, Goldstar, Zenith, Sanyo, Toshiba, Electrohome.
In my experience, the short answer is: Yes, things are made to last less, and they are of "lesser quality". Having said that, I'd better flesh that statement out a bit.
The manufacturer wants fewer moving parts, to increase reliability and reduce development/production costs. Some examples:
One that comes to mind was when Panasonic reduced a Capstan motor in a VCR from six poles to three, saving weight and mechanical complexity at the expense of fine control; this was made up with faster acting electronics (At this time, warranty failures of camcorders was less than a percent, other items were 1.8%; obviously, the "quality" wasn't sacrificed in this company). Later they redesigned a chassis mechanism to remove almost 100 parts.
Another was when Goldstar issued a television set that dropped its working line voltage through a series of high power resistors, blackening the board in that area, but saving the cost of a STR based regulator in each unit. I'd say the "quality" in this case WAS damaged; overheated solder/cracks (see the class action suit against RCA Tuners) were this unit's bane.
Products are developed to market, work and be replaced within a certain time span.
No picture tube produced on the consumer market will last as long as ones produced 20 years ago, despite advances in phosper, design and manufacturing. I'd lay money on any other mass produced product being the same. There is no "advantage" (in the current and past climates that translates into profit) to producing something that someone pays one time for (See the stats on companies producing Vaccines: Four worldwide. See how many are producing drugs, hundreds)
Each year I was in the consumer electronics field, the manufacturers would squeeze us at both ends: cheaper selling price, less pay for warranty work, Replacement only devices, higher quality reports(forcing us to badger customers to fill out those pesky return forms), charging for technical support, limiting market share, I've already gone on too long:)
The consumer has been trained that someone will always beat the lowest price, the "newest/fastest/shiny(est)/loudest" is best.
Thus, it comes full circle. *shrug*
The open source movement is the closest thing I've seen yet to breaking the cycle, and one I support wholeheartedly:)
Planned Obsolescence. It's just a corperate plan to make shitty products, sell them at high prices, and then in a couple years, people have to come back and buy it again because the original broke!
Take audio electronics for instance... I have an awesome radio and tape system made by Technics from a long time ago. Sure, it's big and heavy, but it's made with real nice polished metal that has stood the test of time. It gets the best radio reception out of ANYTHING in my house... better than my car's too. The knobs are big and turn nice (with nice heavy momentum too so it feels like you're actually doing something), the LED's are bright and everything is perfect on it...
Sitting in my basement is a 2Disc CD system with 2 tape decks and a low-lit display. I feel like if i put a glass of water on top of the thing the plastic will give away and ruin it... The nobs are weightless and rough, the reception is like I'm in a cement tomb 500ft in the ground, and the CD/Tape players barely work... They spent so much time designing the thing with beveled edges and color contrasts everywhere that I can't even find any button to press to turn the damn thing on. I could barely see where to eject the CD... or even where the tray was because of the stupid "techno" and "futuristic" bull shit design they have...
Yes, consumer electronics has gone down over the years... mainly the fault of stupid consumers, but also the fault of the greedy corperate SOBs that are runnin the company and make the decisions to sell the crap...
Don't give me a hunk of cheap plastic crap that looks like a 3D ink blob test, just give me a simple, nice looking, reliable product and I'll be a loyal customer for the rest of my life...
I have not bought Bose so I am not speaking from first hand experience, just based on lots of research and reading. Just substitute any other manufacturer's name that you don't like if you like Bose.
Bose spends a great deal on their marketing and a lot of people believe that the quality is excellent. So they'll pay for the name and think they've got a great package. As long as it sounds close to what they thought it would, their happy. So another satisified customer.
Same goes for any major manufacturer. You set a pain threshold for how much someone is willing to pay based on features and brand name. Companies know they can sell based on their names to the majority of people. Flood the market with all sorts of different features just to have some differences, and you give consumers a wide range to stick with. Find a big box company like Best Buy to display as much of your line as possible, and you've got a good chance for a sale.
How much time does it take for you to do research so that you get the most for your buck? At what cost point is your minimum research. This boils down to cost benefit analysis. Who's willing to do that? If $50 for a specific item seems a lot of money to spend, you'll do some research before spending it. If $your pain threshold is much higher, then you won't do the research. If it breaks no big deal.
Anywho...
pain threshold = $0.02
Cost of opinion
I'm all for buying quality electronics, avoiding the cheap stuff altogether. Given recent market trends, long term use in consumer electronics is unfortunately probably a non-issue for most manufacturers as standards continuosly change. The CD player I bought five years ago will probably be out of date in 15 years. A newer, and supposedly better format will be out by then. I've invested a lot in CD's and I'll probably buy a really good quality player before the newer standards come out. Come to think of it, I probably sound like my parents holding onto the record players, 8-tracks... Of course w/ a new standard the cost of the older music will be inflated artificially.
Serveral companies make very high quality vacume cleaners. Look at Kerby and Electrolux. If you think about it, a vacume cleaner has one of the toughest jobs. Suck up dirt and still work after hundreds, even thousands of hours of use. My grand mother had an Electrolux that was the standard in the day (1960's). We had that vacume the whole time I was living in the house, about 14 years that I can remember. Since I married my wife in 1984 we have had to buy four vacume cleaners. You can still get an Electrolux but now they cost somewhere around $1000 (10+ year warranty). The cheap vacume cleaners cost about $200-$250. You can have quality if you want to pay for it.
Floppy drives. An old 5.25" drive cost about $50-$60 in 1989. I have lots of old 5.25" 1.2Meg disks I can still read/format most of them. 3.5" drives cost about $7. About half of my 3.5" disks will not format now.
I think electronics quality has dropped somewhat. However, more intregration has made some electronics more reliable. Electrical contacts can be a major source of trouble for electronic devices. My old Apple II has about 80 chips, all in sockets to make it easy to repair. It dosn't work now due to dirty socket contacts. The quality problem seems be worst when electronics have mechanical parts, VCRs, CD Players, Disk Drives.
I think I just split the adage! It can only be a matter of time before modern science has developed... the adage bomb!
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
It's been ten years since we (pretty much at random) bought an RCA 19" TV. My husband has finally decided he needs a TV that's larger than a monitor, and I thought I'd surprise him by buying a 27" or larger for Christmas.
Egad.
As near as I can figure, everybody seems to agree that Orion is get-what-you-pay-for (though the Orion I looked at in the store looked much nicer than the RCAs and Sanyos next to them, which is annoying), but otherwise as near as I can tell the rest are interchangeable, and I should just buy whatever has the right connectors.
This does not seem right to me, but darned if I can find any information that's more, well, informational.
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
As mentioned on ./
a month or so ago, poorly manufactured capactors seem to the the primary cause of modern failures. There have also been several other articles regarding this problem on several techie sites ie. NASA Tech Briefs.
Working for a tv station, we have seen this on damn near every DVCPro component we purchased 3 or 4 years ago.
Every machine has had hundreds of these small caps replaced, but the manufacturer will not admit the caps have an unusually high failure rate.
These same caps were/are also used in hundreds of consumer products, although I have heard the "bad batch" of these caps have since passed.....we'll see.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And you're still buying the things? That explains why they keep makng them to fail after a little while. If you keep getting more of them, then they know that the scam is working. Personally, I figure you're better off to buy a $500 PC and play it into the ground for the next couple of years.
At least, then, you're not rewarding Sony for making defective equipment.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
Unfortunately, in the late 90s Sony started to get hammered in their traditionally highly profitable consumer electronics divisions. I think at its worst they only had one profitable division: the Playstation guys.
So what did Sony do? They changed their strategy, and in almost all product lines cut prices, costs and quality to bring back the consumers. It apparently has worked, Sony's making money pretty much across the board, but the quality you get from them now is no different from any other manafacturer, i.e., 'good enough'.
What does this prove? Not that corporations are greedy and trying to rip consumers off, but people simply don't value high-quality consumer electronics anymore. Cheap credit and cheaper manafacturing costs across the board have brought the price of consumer electronics down into the 'impulse purchase' area, and in this price range people want cheap devices that work for a few years, and then get discarded when the latest and greatest comes out.
For those of us that like quality, it's too bad. Sony still has a few good product lines, but they tend to be the very-high end products, where buyers are still thinking long-term.
1. post "in Soviet Russia" comment
2. ???
3. profit!!!
Sorry...
A month or so ago my video started chewing up tapes. Time for a new one I thought, nothing too fancy, I have a DVD player for movies so for time-shifting TV all I wanted was something simple, 2 heads, easy to program.
Oh, and I wanted something black. I have a black TV, a black DVD player and black speakers. It would be nice if the video would at least vaguely fit in with the rest of my equipment.
But no one makes a black VCR, it's unbelievable, every single one is silver. All they need to do is offer the same VCR in two different coloured cases, there can't be much added expense there. I checked online and visited over 10 physical stores. Most of the staff at the stores said it was far from the first time they'd heard someone asking them if they had any black VCRs
In the end I got a "last years model" Sony which wasn't black, but was at least a dark grey matt.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I just happen to be a technician, and the problem with todays electronics is definately cheap components. I think one of the reasons for this problem is that noone takes pride in what they do, they just try to sell as many products as they can to meet shareholder expectations. as far as Sony is concerned I have not seen many products failing in the warranty period, reason being is that they are designed to last at least until the warranty lapses. this is why the extended service plans are starting to look really good. I see more units with an ESP than with a manufacturer warranty, that are less than a year old. its not just sony, but others as well... such as JVC, Phillips, Misubishi, GE, Sharp, ect. if you want a quality product, the only products that are made to last these days are units labeled for commercial use. these products typically use slightly better electrical parts, and some mechanical parts. an example of a good quality commercial line is the Panasonic one. they last, they keep parts in stock a long time, and they last. its not uncommon to see commercial cameras and VCRs over 10-15 years old getting their first servicing. and they are still in use. another decent line is the Sony commercial line. I dont hold much hopes for Sharp or JVC, they look too much like upgraded consumer units. a MAJOR problem with electronics nowadays is the massive failure of capacitors! I see capacitors failing in power supplies every day. from cameras to recievers to TVs this is a real problem. and its costing the consumer millions because a $.10 part fails and takes down an entire circuit. then, we get customers that look at this capacitor and say, "your charging me $75 to replace that thing?!" they dont understand that we dont just open the unit and 'see' this. a lot of the time you cant tell by looking at it. some of the time you have to remove the component to test it. impossible when your dealing with SMT caps. once its out, its out for good. you have to replace it. its not uncommon to have a customer come in with a camera 'acting weird' thats 10 years old with bad caps. open the tape door and take a smell, if you smell a repulsive fishy smell, kiss it goodbye. so, the quality is definately declining at an alarming rate. and what are we goind to do with the waste? send it to southeast asia, as usual. its a problem I think we as consumers and technicians need to address.
To address just one point of the article: extended warranties....
Have any of you ever actually tried to USE one of these warranties? I'm not talking about the "no questions asked replacement unit" ones, which are usually quite expensive and often unavailable, but the repair warranties.
The are most often serviced (the warranty) by GE or some other large unit, which may or may not depot repair you stuff. The may send it to a local shop. Either way, you bring it back to you reatiler and it disappear for some time between two weeks and god only knows how long. There is an obvious and fundamental disconnect in information....you call the reatiler and ask for a staus, and they have no idea. They have to make a couple phone calls, which in turn kick of a few more sometimes. A day or so later you get blown off again.
Then the device comes back and it's either not fixed or something else is wrong with it. And you go through the whole thing again.
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
I re-read Brave New World the other day, and I have to say this topic reminds me of the hypnopaedia-induced principal central to their society that encourages people to throw away, rather than repair consumer goods, and the good are made to last a suitably short time. In that, it was (I assume) used as a control mechanism, to keep people enslaved to the machine, working hard to buy the latest. Sometimes I think a similar thing is happening here, but I think it is more a case of companies looking out for their bottom line, and moving off-shore to sweat shops.
Incidentally, I have a very nice (but not terribly expensive) 1993 NAD CD player and 1970's solid-state NAD amp, and they are excellently made, they haven't failed me once. The amp is build like a brick shithouse, wood and metal faceplate.. Contrast that with my experiences with modern TVs and VCRs crapping out on a regular basis, and I think I can agree that the quality has declined. Mind you, NAD are a higher-quality brand than Sony or LG etc.
My parents have a television that is a couple years older than I am - placing it at least 21 years old. It is the only television they have ever owned. While it's not high tech, and they don't watch much TV, it has gotten (on average, I'd say) at least 3 hours of use a day, conservatively.
On the newer side of things, I've seen televisions, monitors, LCDs, and projection units fail within a year quite a few times in the last 5 years. I'm sure everyone has. I know of people that have 3 or 4 in their house, and one tends to die on them every year.
I still have a Nintendo Gameboy (what might be deemed the Classic now) that runs fine - even after being flung at the wall uncountable times in rage, and even being run over once by a truck by accident once. It's had fluids (not just water) spilled in it, and has been used in nearly every environment. (I'm also led to believe that my situation here isn't exactly rare.)
I've heard several friends' children complain about their GBAs not working, or actually seeing the result of one flying down a staircase onto a hardwood floor myself. (I find it plauseable that someone could take a GBC and use it as a hammer to destroy GBA units to dust.)
To say nothing of the plethora of old PC systems (as old as 10 years) still running strong, whereas there are many, many new systems that have a major problem within a year (mainly memory or hard drive problems, it seems). Or the items that just happen to fail just shortly after going out of warranty.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
But there are better, more convenient options that are becoming close to universal.
For small (ie floppy disk sized) bits of information e-mail is usually sufficient and easiest, you typically don't have to carry anything around to use email to store/transfer files.
For bigger things CD-R or CD-RW are usually quite convenient and accessible these days.
For their own use I guess a lot of people might have more proprietary technologies at their disposal. I use Memory Sticks for moving things up to 128meg back and forwards from work.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
All in all I'd say predictability of quality has disappeared. It used to be that you bought certain brands for the quality, now you have no idea from model to model whether it's going to perform very well or for very long.
Buy a top-end Sony monitor (G520), XBR TV, DVD player, etc. from their ES line, and you get decent quality and reliability. Why? Because those units require and receive a bit of testing and tweaking before shipping.
Buy their "consumer" level products, and you get untested slide-line manufactured junk, the same as everyone else in the cheap-as-possible-with-lots-of-buttons market.
I and my sisters gave the folks a 20" Sony TV for their anniversary over ten years ago, and it works fine. My 32" Trinitron (8 years old) still works fine. My first DVD player was a Sony, which lasted through almost six years of heavy use, and AFAIK is still working for the guy who bought it from me (I replaced it with a new Sony in the same price range that does SACD and progressive scan, which is working fine, but only six months old.) My ES20 CD player is still solid after six years, but no longer gets used because the DACs aren't upgradeable. An ancient Sony 17se still functions, though it can no longer do more than 72Hz without generating a squeal (it used to do 75-85.)
On the flip side, I've had to replace my portable Sony CD player about once a year. Failed motors. Failed CD clamps. Failed audio jack. Failed buttons/wiring. Yet the only moving these units have done is from desk drawer to desk top and back each day at work.
I never have and never would buy one of Sony's amps, because they have no current. Watts don't drive good sound, clean current does. A 75 watt high current amplifier from the audiophile manufacturers runs rings around a "250 watt" Sony.
The bigger problem I've had is companies like JVC, Viewsonic, and HP, who don't have the high build quality lines. They use the same parts throughout their manufacturing line, and it shows. I killed two HP DVD burners with less than 1500 hours of burning each. My JVC VCR has been flaky since day one, despite being their "top of the line" model. A 19" Viewsonic monitor died in less than two years, despite being their "professional" series.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I agree that a large number of consumers go to the store looking for the cheapest device with the features they've heard are "important" to have.
Take for example DVD players. For countless years consumers were happy with VHS rental tapes. When I asked friends if they would consider spending money on something else such as LaserDisc or some hypothetical new format the reaction was always the same, "what's wrong with VHS???" I would reply, "the picture looks terribly fuzzy". To which the response would often be, "The picture looks good enought to me!"
Now these same friends have become videophiles and are suddenly very concerned with video quality (sort of). One guy I know got it in his head that he had to have progressive scan. So he went around to every store in town, looking for the cheapest unit that had progressive scan. He finally found a unit at Sears for $70 that had progressive scan. When asked want brand he bought he replied, "Memorex"-- a brand known for consistantly making units with poor audio and video quality.
When asked if he knew what progressive scan was, he admitted he didn't know other than that it made the picture somehow look better, though he had never witnessed the difference himself.
I don't want to pay for quality in electronics. I want them to break just as I am ready to upgrade\replace them. There's a local computer store in my area that is on the radio constantly with advertisements about how they sell quality computers that last a long time. Who wants that? I only want my computer to last 3 years, then it can melt, and I'll get a new one. I don't want to pay an extra $500 for something that will last 5 years; it will be obsolete. Cordless phones are so cheap now that I usually just buy a new one when it stops working (usually the battery dies or the kids break it). Do I want to spend $50 on a phone that lasts 15 years? No, I want to buy cheap ones and get the new features (like built-in message taker or headphone jack).
This all has nothing to do with the economy or companies trying to cut corners. Electronic gizmos change very fast so no one (smart) wants to have their gizmos very long, and no one (smart) wants to pay extra to have their gizmos last a long time. I have a VGA monitor that is 8 years old and will probably never die. Great quality, it'll last forever. Do I hear $100?
A $150 DVD player is near bottom of the line, so when it breaks you should not be surprised. I wouldn't be surprised if at least one of those was also a multi-disk unit with even more points of failure.
You're right about turntables, and it also applies to (seperate component) cassette decks from most manufacturers. They have solid designs that work, have all the features needed, and haven't been changed with in several years, except the faceplate labels and sometimes the button layout or display color.
Other stuff like CD or DVD players are constantly having their designs tweaked each model year, and it seems that each time you're really taking a gamble as to whether it's really any better than last year's model (quality wise), or just retooled for cheaper manufacturing.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Do you remember these? They are the red circular toys that have a ring of animals or whatever around the front with an arrow that points to one of the sounds. When you pull the lever you get the sound of the animal (or whatever) the arrow is pointing to. They had little phonographs inside so they didn't require batteries and you could do slow down or speed up the recorded sound.
Well I wsa shopping for my young daughter the other day and was saddened to find that the phonograph had been replaced with a chip and the sounds were distorted to sound somewhat like the original. They still have levers but they serve no purpose other than spinning the arrow around and pressing the button inside that plays the sound.
Anyway, the point is that if you didn't press the handle down all the way, the internal button wouldn't get despressed and no sound would come out. I let my two year old daughter try it out and she couldn't get it to make a sound, only to spin.
Anyway, I know this is slightly offtopic, but it's related to the parent post.
-
NAFTA opened the borders and the flood gates worked one way, from the USA out. All the big name brand manufacturers fled from where I live (San Diego) south of the border to Tijuana, Mexico. Particularly, Sony Corporation. They had a huge TV manufacturing plant in San Diego and moved it to Tijuana after NAFTA.
Not only did they take all those jobs to Mexico, they took American standards with them too. Soon, the American standards could not possibly be kept up by the work force available in Mexico, so they switched to Mexico's standards... and the quality of the manufacturing went south as well. I happen to know a man who is an executive at that plant. He travels from the U.S. to Mexcico everyday to work. When he crosses the border, he makes a beeline for the plant because if he straggles or takes his time, he might get kidnapped and held for ransom. He gets a company car (rental) that he switches every few days to avoid being kidnapped by his car being known. He told me that the workers there are paid about 1/4 what U.S. workers were paid. Not to mention, in order for Sony to operate in Mexico, they have to purchase a vast amount of parts & supplies from "preferred" vendors, a list of suppliers given to them by Mexican Officials (Mmm, "kickbacks" ring a bell?)... sounds like the Mafia doesn't it? It basically is.
Sony is not the only big name who fled to Mexico from San Diego after NAFTA, but the result is the same. Cheap operating costs, cheap labor, cheap parts, cheap products. It's not the whole enchilada as far as why the products suck now, but it has a definite palpable impact.
"It is essential that justice be done
Here's what I like to do (well, often like to do) ... purchase the oldest possible unit that will get the job done and contains the necessary features (by saying necessary, I really mean it!). By buying older pieces of equipment, you not only save money (well, unless you buy severely antique equipment!), but you can rest assured that since it has been around X years, it will probably survive quite a few more. A fine example of this is my amplifier purchase decision. I bought an Onkyo Integrated Amplifier from the 70s. It is tiny (unlike the massive beasts that litter the shelves today), sounds spectacular (I am a music student here in NYC, and my ears are as sensitive as can be), and cost me $47 shipped. I figured that since it has worked for the past 30 years, it will last me the next few years (until I move into a larger space and need a more powerful amplifier). The unit exterior is metal including the faceplate (read=quality, not cheap plastic), and has only the things I need (power switch, a few inputs, headphone output, volume control). I have no need here for surround sound (that may change, and thus a new amplifier may become necessary unfortunately), so purchasing a huge new receiver with radio (all of the stations I need are available online) and Dolby Digital is completely unnecessary. When I consider purchasing a new product, I really take the time to decide if the features that product offers are really necessary (wouldn't everyone?), and if I can get all of the features I really need in a proven piece of equipment, then I will purchase the older model. I have done this with timepieces and telephones as well (my pocketwatch is a hundred years old, and my phone is 60 years old, and both work beautifully and flawlessly). I certainly do not use my little plan on everything. For example, I do not feel the urge to daintily transport a portable phonograph with me on the DC-3 airplane. I went ahead and purchased an iPod as soon as they came out (due to their size, speed, and storage capacity), because of simple practicality. Regarding computers, I like purchasing technology that is not absolutely cutting-edge, but just shy of cutting-edge. I'm into post-modern design, so I choose to purchase mainly new decor/furniture/etc. > Overall, it is this blend of old and new that I have found a nice balance of quality, cost, and features.
"I'm sorry sir, your floppy disk has been declined."
What's more, it seems to be the big-name manufacturers such as Sony who are most affected by this decline in standards.
I bought a high-end Sony VCR about 10 years ago. I had to take it to the shop 3 times for 2 different problems, and there was an intermittent problem that the repair guy couldn't recreate.
Although It did half-last about 9 years.
Table-ized A.I.
but it still functions perfectly. The outer case is scratched to buggery and a lot of the silver paint has gone. Countless times I've dropped it and had it go in five different directions at once (face plate, buttons, battery cover, battery, core) but it remains problem free.
I think in part it's because it is so small. Under the covers the internals are in such a tight little package there just isn't enough room for them to wiggle about. Also that internal package is held together by screws, rather than being held together by the plastic casing as appeared to be the case in earlier phones I've had.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
BTW you can't guarantee getting something good if you buy Sony.
To say the very least.
Sony equipment I've bought that crapped out on me: 5.25" floppy disk with no hub reinforcing ring (circa 1985), a Walkman that had a constant skip on the second half of every CD, headphones that leaned to the right, a 20-inch monitor (TV, not computer) that went green after only one year of use, EverQuest, and an Aibo site that would open fine in Opera if you saved it to disk first but was programmed to redirect you to a "MS or Netscape only" page otherwise.
Sony equipment that didn't crap out on me: none.
You heard me right: every last product I *ever* bought from Sony has crapped out on me.
Ellen
mods metamodded as "Unfair"
I bought a new Xbox in January of this year, and 4 months later the thing completely crapped out on me! The thing even has a error screen telling me to call 1800MYXBOX for service. Well, no problem right, it'll be covered by a warranty right? Wrong! The warranty is only 3 months. And Microsoft wants $150 to fix the POS. So let this be a warning to those of you considering putting a Xbox under the tree this year.
It's not the decline of quality, but the perfection of quality control.
There's a city legend called "Sony Timer": That there's a top-secret, invisible self-destruction timer built into their products, and so every model you buy will stop functioning day after the last day of quality assurance period.
Of course, this is only a joke, but it's true companies with advanced manufacturing process is much more capable of controlling lifespan of their product compared to decades ago. So, in another word,
- high-quality products works perfectly during expected period, and then fails shortly after.
- low-quality products just fails in short period, as it has been.
The end result is that you get generally shorter product lifespan (whatever you buy), and that seems to be what we're seeing now. If you want longer lifespan, go for product claiming "higher durability", not "higher quality".
Seems pretty obvious - we're paying $50 these days for something that cost $1,000 20 years ago (the VCR), and the cost of steel and plastic haven't come down *that* much (and you can bet there weren't a whole lot of microchips to drive up the cost in those early VCR's - the control was all mechanical, the processing completely analog).
Seems to me the people who complain about quality are the same people paying $50 for a machine that should rightly cost ten times that - if quality is what you're really after. It's like paying $200 for a round trip ticket from New York to London and complaining that you don't get a free headset or wine with your in-flight meal. You want quality? Pay for it. $500 VCR's still exist (I have one) and they still last - no way to say yet how long, but mine's been going strong for several years and I'm confident it'll be the last analog VCR I ever buy. The build quality (as expressed by fit & finish, and even the sounds it makes while doing various things) is excellent.
Same is true for all home electronics. There's a bare minimum a company needs to pay for the actual materials involved in producing any product. If you're paying a price that seems like it'd barely cover the cost of labor to put it together and shipping to get it here, much less the cost of parts and technology, then you're just not going to get the kind of construction quality you'd probably like. But you shouldn't expect it anyway.
You don't buy low-end stuff and expect high-end results. Build quality is a high-end feature and it always has been - the difference these days is that the low end exists at all in some of these product categories. Computers, VCR's, CD players, all these things used to be the realm of the elite - it's great that they've all slowly come down in price to where everybody can afford them, but please don't complain of the sacrifices made in order to achieve that. You can still get high-end results by paying high-end prices and buying high-end equipment, so nothing's *really* changed. If you've still got $1,000 to spend on a VCR, you'll get just as well-built a product as you would have 20 years ago, *and* with a lot more features (and most definitely vastly improved picture quality).
"There is no more comfortable keyboard, I hope someone makes a ps2 keyboard to usb adapter, so they dont become obsolete."
Like this PS/2 to USB adapter?
And yes it does work with the IBM "M" keyboards. One issue I did have, not certain if it was just this particular MB (Kt7a). But the system would occasionally forget about the keyboard, and a cold start would be needed to bring it back. This happened under both Linux and W2K.
Look around there are some more interesting accesories there as well.
It's like the old Usenet adage, "In any sufficiently long exchange of posts, the likelihood of one side comparing the other to the Nazis approaches unity." The Slashdot version of this might be, "Whatever the topic of the original story, there is zero probability that Microsoft will not be brought into the conversation."
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Sad, but true. Quality of today's products are just not where it should be. Companies are sacrificing quality so they can push out more for less money and turn a profit in this brutal market. Most of the stuff that I got 5, 10, 15 years ago are still going strong. Today I'd be luck if the thing lasted another year past its expired warranty. One of my motherboards from one of the top manufactures in the world started glitching a couple of months after the warranty wore out. I've noticed more and more these days that I'm getting an exchange on a product because it was defective. That time wasted getting the exchange is better spent elsewhere. I'm willing to spen a few extra bucks if it means getting a product at a higher quality. That investment could mean the difference between the product failing right after the warranty goes out or failing eight years after the warranty goes out. On some products, I'm starting to judge how long it will last. I've noticed some products are nortorious for crapping out right after the warranty expires. I still thing that it's BS for a consumer electronic to only last a year.
As an avionics technician I can attest that consumer electronics is not the only field suffering.
I agree. People here wonder why I rant about my great old cars, but it's the same thing with them. Sure, the assembly quality of a Honda Accord is better than my 1970 Dodge Dart, but the Dart is overbuilt and survives the abuse of daily life far better.
Consumer electronics are the same. Back when manufacturing quality of components was poorer, the standard resistor tolerance was +/-20%! If you were designing a circuit which called for a 1k resistor, you'd have to budget on getting anything from 800 ohms to 1.2k hitting the assembly line. As a result, you specified a better rated transistor or other part. It cost a little bit more, but the net effect was that it lasted better. 5V on the supply to the logic? Okay, we'll use 6.3V electrolytic capacitors to bypass the RF! Not to mention the plastic crap everywhere...
Compare a modern VCR with a 20-year-old top-loading VHS boat anchor. Mechanically, they have to do exactly the same things to the tape. And yet the old VCR was built with steel or cast components, plastic only where it was essential. Idler pucks were sintered bronze and rubber and could be changed in minutes by a competent technician. Now, idlers are little plastic gears on plastic bearings which get loose quickly. Improved sophistication of the electronics have added features but the mechanisms are utter garbage.
Yes, I would pay more for a VCR that would last longer. Yes, I would pay extra for a motherboard that I knew had 25V capacitors on the 5V rails, or where I knew that ICs weren't pushed to their rated maximums everywhere.
I collect 1950s TV sets. Funny thing about them: steel or copper chassis, and 1/2 watt resistors everywhere, even where I calculate 1/8 watt loads. Capacitors were even more fragile then than they are now, so 450V-rated capacitors being used to filter 170V rectified AC line were commonplace. Stuff was built to last. Interestingly, only one of my antique sets came to me frankly broken; the rest needed adjustments or replacements of old (not failed) components. (I don't think I'll count 50 years of ingress of ambient humidity into a paper capacitor as a design flaw.)
I blame CAD software and automated finite element analysis for starting a trend.
If you build 500,000 units (a fairly small production run) and can cut 1 lb off the weight of a vehicle by using thinner sheetmetal in the floor, you've just saved 500,000lbs of raw steel. That's a few bucks... about $30,000, depending on the alloy and stamping considerations. The owner is not going to go out and measure the thickness of the steel of the car's floor.
To protect it from rust, you use today's improved paints to protect the floor. Of course, the underside of the car gets scratched by stones, and rust sets in. Because of the thinner steel, the floor rusts through faster. Most people scrap the car at this point; a premature end. Fine, the dry-cleaning hooks might be beautifully placed, but it's all the same to the car crusher.
To allow engineers to be able to say, "22 gauge steel will do" when instinct calls for 20-gauge, CAD and finite element analysis provide a rigorous mathematical proof that corners can be cut.
Sliderules calculated to three or four significant figures. As you went from step to step in a design calculation, you'd round things up or down automatically, and the compounded error would be far greater than it is now. But through intelligent rounding (ie. "The driver weighs 184.34lbs - call it 185 lbs..."), the error always worked out on the favor of design strength. Now, you park 12 significant digits in a variable on your calculator as you work the problem.
Note that the final design is more accurate, but the rounded-up design from a sliderule is superior in real-world survivability. Unfortunately, as margins get smaller and smaller, manufacturers are forced to adopt this tactic to save raw material.
In 1970, GM tested the first prototype of the Chevrolet Vega, which was GM's first CAD-designed car. It suffered a structural failure after only 8 miles on the test track. They had to add over 8 pounds of steel structure to reinforce the car. (Read John DeLorean's "On A Clear Day, You Can See General Motors".)
Honda cars are built out of such thin sheetmetal that I can - and have - dented them with my thumb. They derive their strength from the shape of the material, not from the material itself - it's just a four-wheeled soft drink can. This cuts cost and raises gas mileage at the expense of long-term durability. If the passenger places his or her foot hard enough on the floor, relatively modern (~1996) Accords flex enough that the brake lights go on. I wouldn't want to know where a Honda would bend if I went to Home Depot and used the trunk to bring home a couple of bags of topsoil for my flower garden.
It's easy to tell if three fat people have ever gone over a bump in the back seat of a 1981-1989 Dodge Aries or Plymouth Reliant four-door. (During the life of a car, if you think about all the weird people you've had in the car, and all the conditions you can expect.) The design budget is typically 200lb per passenger, which means that the expected rear seat load is about 600 lbs. Let's say three people at 250lbs, the load on the car's structure is 150lbs more than rated. That's effectively another person in the back seat. Go over a bump the wrong way, and bingo! You've got those trademark little cracks on the roof, right where they meet the rear pillar.
Computers in design have allowed us great things - faster design cycles, greater sophistication. But they've also taught manufacturers how to cut corners.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I previously worked at a big consulting company where the help desk kept a stack of Lattitudes ready to swap out.
The point is not to bash Dell, but to ask, has anyone actaully seen the benefits of buying the more expensive business machines? How about on the desktop?
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
I work in the electronics repair industry, fixing both consumer electronics (TVs, VCRs, etc) and the electronic musical instrument repair biz (guitar amps, digital pianos, organs etc). I have an informed point of view on this. Yes, the products I repair (when feasible) have declined greatly in quality.
Excessive and ridiculous greed has caused these people to make all kinds of cheezy crap. Salespeople demand useless "features" that people don't want and don't know how to use, while manufacturers push down quality to meet a "price point".
I've seen new Fender guitar amplifiers need to be resoldered, Roland synthesizers with ridiculously cheezy power switches that fail within the warranty period, and two year-old Zenith TV sets that have weak CRTs already. Contrast that with my personal experience - two years ago I replaced my RCA tv set that was 20 years old.
Yet, I routinely repair 50 year-old (yes, that's 50) Hammond Organs.
Now here's a neat paradox - the newer stuff is infinitely easier to work on. Too bad you have to throw it away because it will usually cost more to fix it than replace it.
Great global economy we have - cheap shit made by slave laborers in the far east. What a world we live in!
I agree Alienware is better than most these days, but that isn't saying much at all! I'm a computer tech. also, and a good thing I am. My main computer is an Alienware that I bought just over a year ago. It isn't doing bad now, but had a rough start with it. The IBM drive it shipped with went tits-up in less than a month! Yeah, THAT's quality ;) Alienware is unfortunately going downhill in quality along with the rest.
You're right, they all suck these days. Everything is made to be "disposable" these days, and it's slowly killing the planet. Meanwhile, the corporations are killing the economies by hiring the cheapest illegal (usually) labor they can find. This snowball is leading us to hell.
I think there was a LOT more emphasis on stereo quality in the 70's and 80's than there is now for one basic reason - the music. That's not to say that there wasn't crap stereo equipment relative to the technology available. There was.
:)
I'll probably be Trolled for this but the fact is, most fans of Rap don't really demand much more than a good subwoofer. And just how many fans of 'O'Town will care enough about MP3 vs. the original CD quality to actually go out and buy it for that reason?
It's sad to see companies like Mobile Fidelity go under, but understandable given the current state of music and the technology that records it. Anyone who has listened to original releases like 'Days of Future Passed' by the Moody Blues, and then listened to one of MF's gold disc remasters knows what I'm talking about.
The recording and playback tech has improved to the point where there is now 'frivolous' levels of it. Given the popularity of MP3's, it's obvious that the general public's acceptable quality level of the medium has been sussed. It's somewhere above cassette tapes and 8-tracks, and below 96 KHz DVD Audio. Of course, that probably won't prevent ME from getting the Alan Parsons Project 'I, Robot' DVD Audio release. I'm a sucker that way.
However, ask yourself this question: If the Backstreet Boys put the Millennium album out on DVD Audio would ANYONE buy it?
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
If you have featuritis, and want all the features, you will also replace the product in 2-3 years. So they can use substandard quality to lower price.
If you pay twice the price (= price as it was 3-5 years ago) for less features, you get higher quality.
I have yet to find anything I bought as quality fail much faster. It gets outdated faster though.
Thank god that someone see's where I'm coming from, read my earlier posts and let me know what you think? It's always good to find another opinion. Any assistance you can grant me as a salesperson to get people to spend a little more for their own good? A lot of people don't believe the whole 'you get what you pay for' mantra in CE. Cars, food, it's true in these arena's, what about consumer electronics?
-jg
I bought a S*ny portable CD player 6 years ago for about $220. Yes, I still use it and it works. At that time I was paying for the new/cool factor. Financially, it makes no sense when you compare it to the price and features available now.
==>Factor 1: If you want to spend minimal money over time, then don't buy the 'latest and greatest' stuff.
Are you better off buying a $49 DVD player on the expectation that it will only last a year or so -- or do lay out two or three times that amount something made by a big-name manufacturer in the (possibly vain) hope it will provide superior performance and last longer?"
Well, my $220 may have seemed like a lot in todays terms (it is actually ~$183 in todays dollars assuming inflation rate of 3%). But over the course of 6 years, the equivalent annual rate is under $35 a year. So, in my case, I'm happy.
==>Factor 2: Paying more up front and keeping things longer does save money. The time value of money is the same thing that all your long term investments rely on. It works with purchases too.
Remember that next time you hear about 'new pricing models' for software being on an annual subscription basis.
Look, none of this is rocket science. You can set up a quick spreadsheet to work out how much longer you need to keep stuff vs cheaper stuff. Look at the warranty. Can you get an extended one for the more expensive model? Can you live without having the latest fad or feature which you can get the next year at a lower price?
And let's be realistic. If it's not my pacemaker and I don't rely on it to earn my money, I don't give a fsck about quality. I can work around it very easily - and doing some research on the net and googling around will stop you buying a lemon to start with.
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
It's cheaper to replace than it is to repair.
That in and of itself is quite telling. It's more productive to replace than understand the nature of a problem and solve it. And corporate america is on a quest to milk even more money after the fact from consumers.
To me, what's worse than "planned obsolesence" which is definitely a factor in product development, is deliberately crippling a well-designed product and reproducing lesser versions at different price points. This is the WORST. Sony deliberately cripples the still-image compression ability of their video cameras so you have to purchase a stand-alone digital camera to get the quality your video camera is capable or producing in many cases. It's despicable and I think consumers should boycott "crippled" products.
That is quality It surely is, and by the way, if it works, it's a collectible item of high value!
If you are toying with the idea of using it still, know that the lifespan of lightbulbs is very strongly determined by the voltage at which they operate. I'm not sure about the fiugres anymore (was long ago when I did my EE studies), but it's something like 100 times longer if the lightbulb operates at 20% under the nominal voltage. Ant the other thing is the switching: you better not switch it on and off too often, or do it through a low-resistant NTC element, which will basically slow down the slope of the current, effectively protecting the bulb from surges. The NTC component, as you probably know, will decrease resistance with the increase of temperature. Connected in series with the bulb if will have a hgher resistance when you turn the switch on, while gradually becoming less resistive as time passes, because it heats up.
Just some tips so you can hold on to that gem you got.
Sigged!
my parents VCR died a number of years ago, after 15 years of service. They bought a 50 dollar panasonic
and its worked for a good 5 years now. Yeah, lots of the cheep stuff is crap, but some of it works, its just that QC isnt worth it on really cheep stuff. And technology has made this stuff cheep, plus all the manufacturing done overseas.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
If you're like me, you've probably got a TV, VCR or other appliance you bought over 5 years ago which is still going strong -- but much of the stuff you've bought in the past 2-3 years is already giving trouble. ...well, no-one's likely to have a TV etc they bought five years ago which doesn't work anymore; the stuff they bought 2-3 years ago which is now giving them trouble will be replaced while the durable stuff will keep chugging along. I think perception and natural selection have a strong part to play here.
On the other hand, there is an argument that a lot of the Japanese / Korean companies are outsourcing to manufacturers in places like China where quality isn't always that good yet - the so-called "hollowing out of Japan", although I tend to think that the natural move from manufacturing to service industry is overlooked in discussion of the phenomenon. Hold on though; just as Japan used to be famous for cheap and shoddily made goods before the 70's/80's, the argument goes that as more manufacturing capability goes in to countries like China techniques will improve until there is a golden age of excellent, quality world-beating goods - up to the point where the economy improves, costs spiral and manufacturing once again chases low-cost labour elsewhere.
Is that all due to efficiencies in manufacturing? Have the electronic companies reduced their profits? Probably not - they've just realised that people want to pay less even if the goods are shoddy.
The trigger for this was probably the really cheap foreign brands and own-brand stuff that imitate the name of a Japanese firm. How many consumers know the difference between Alba and Aiwa, Hinari and Hitachi or Matsui and Marantz?
Small aside: my Philips CD player, purchased in 1990, is still going strong despite almost-daily use. I fully expect it to outlast my new Philips DVD recorder.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Why are repair manuals/circuit diagrams NOT on the NET?
Why are the most common repair tips not on the net
Why are the 1 2 3 repair by chimpwork instruction not printed?
Why does an incomplete manual cost $50 or more?
If more repair tips were published, vast volumes of TV's ?CRT's could be prevented from landfill by backyard repairmen at economic rates. That is sound environmental sense.
Hey, its not a typo its conserving letters :)
Grumble... Note to self: must proof read. must proof read.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Its not that it 'breaks down' so to speak, but 'wears out'..
Same idea but different perception by the consumer.
#1 is counter productive #2 gets return business.Even if they are the same in reality due to planning on the companies part... its all about perception.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Where in the world did that come from? Is there a whole course that spends vast amounts of time to teach the basic premise, buy low, sell high? Wow, and my MBA is useless too. I do run my own company, so Master of Business Administration might be accurate, but most MBA's are cranked out of places like Wharton, and most never actually start and RUN a company. Economics 101, is that anything like Accounting 101, the crap the Arthur Anderson, KPMG bozo's relied upon for their business model? It just goes to show, crap is crap no matter what it is called. Perhaps the accounting and economics being taught today is taught with planned obsolecence in mind?
Now to stray back to topic, HP has really gone downhill in quality. They were once THE place to get great electronics. Compaq made some great servers and desktops, now, since the merger, the quality levels have dropped dramatically. I sell hardware and the vast amount of returns I see are directly related to initial failures out-of-the-box. 9 years ago, things were different. Sony? I saw that, yes they suck and their customer service is a worldwide joke. The point of manufacture illustration is accurate. Some components may originate in the following countries and are the trademarks of their respective trademark holders.
"No one can make a blanket statement that says less expensive electronics mean less quality!"
We can and DO! Perhaps you have had your head up your ass for too long, or perhaps you are a complete idiot/youngster. Do you rush out to purchase the latest SounDesign gear, because it is cheap and of high quality? Emerson? Bullshit. If you have lived long enough, and have purchased comparable equipment over the YEARS, try 30 plus years, then you have no clue. Blanket statements can cover a lot of things, the passage of time is one of them.
The quality HAS declined, the features, mostly are not needed. The glitz is what makes some fools purchase things, but in the long run, older stuff of quality is still around. I own a Sansui stereo and 2 SP2000 speakers purchased in 1970 that are still working exceptionally well today. These were not top-of-the-line back then, but close. The stereo is Quadraphonic...bet you do not even know what that is, and it still works as advertised for over 30 years. I recently purchased an Onkyo for the back bedroom, and had a hell of a time finding decent speakers that were not some shitty little piece of plastic at a high price. Fortuntely we have Ebay, and I located a second pair of the Sansui SP2000 speakers for 100 bucks, they rock! Quality across the board has declined. I suspect you have no real life expierence with consumer goods.
All that being said, yes I know I started a sentence with a FANBOY letter, I would like to reitterate that statement. Less expensive electronics means less quality.
because i've been burnt once too often.
There is very little new technology yet Sony and others must bring out radical "innovations" every 6 months. Of course, it's all marketing drival.
Fortunately, every 6 months the warehouses have to be cleared for the next batch of tat. So you can buy last years kit at a fraction of the orginal cost if you visit the right shops or web sites.
That is to say that in general,
You can pay lots of money and still get crud.
But if you get something really good, you're likely not going to get it cheap.
Of course there are exceptions. The "hole in the wall" restaraunt serving food that's orders of magnitude better than the "fancy" joing up the street.
JVC VCRs used to be like that. High end JVCs were made of METAL. They were HEAVY. Mine (about 5 years old) has lasted through years of abuse--many tapes, and a lot of FF / RW during play. My RCA TV is over 10 years old, and has not degraded in the least.
Sure, I paid more for those at first, but in the long run, I saved money/time/hassle.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I am not an economist, but from what I hear, consumer spending is a big deal at least in the United States. Hell, consumers are charged with turning the economy around by spending heavily during the christmas season especially.
Corporations will make goods with intentionally small lifetime, we (as consumers) will buy more of these goods to replace the broken ones, so that the corporations can make more goods, so that we (as consumer)..... and so forth. Seems to me that this is a pretty bad spiral to base an economy on.
Obviously consumer durables fail much faster these days. Case in point: My family owned the same television for 11 years but are now shopping around for a audio system 5 years after they bought the previous one.
Electronic items fail faster these days because modern assembly lines are optimised for speed. Ever looked at a 15 year old television or tape player. The first thing you'd notice is that the cover is screwed onto the main body. Now pick up your MP3 player and look for any screws on the body!
You'd think this is a trivial difference but the point I'm trying to make here is that product manufacturing cycles are reducing so theres bound to be a consequent decrease in quality.
Car production is another great example. Before the Ford T and its assembly lines each car coming out of the plant was a masterpiece in itself. Thats the reason you still see the Rolls Royce Silver Ghosts and the Bentleys rolling around. We have effectively sacrificed quality for greater speed and efficiency.
But customers haven't exactly lost out in the bargain. Assembly lines are the reason that product costs have dropped to an extent that replacing them say every 5 years or so is a viable option. Sure with modern electronics you end up buying a new item every now and then but you don't have to save for 10 years to buy that sexy DVD player you saw in that catalogue. I still remeber my folks skimping for 3 years before they finally bought that TV! Would anyone have the patience to wait that long now? Customers demand instant gratifaction and this way they get it.The minority who want (or can afford) top notch quality can always go in for the BOSEs or ONKYOs. So blaming the loss of quality on manufacturers and terming it a corporate conspiracy is unfair.
You get a savings in Product B, because cost over time is less than Product A, even though it needs to be replaced more often.
Cheap products are not necessarily a bad thing, if the reduce in price outweighs the frequency of replacement. Besides, you get the latest and greatest (or, at least, closer to it) this way.
The only way the typical /.er can pick up a chick is with a forklift. -- AC
Here is the thing. You can go into a store and buy any consumer electronics item you want to. If that TV has sony written on it, chances are half the parts in it are not sony, but philips, sanyo, rca, and numerous others.
.
The CE industry is so cross bred now that every item contains parts from various manufacturers. Those zenith tv used to be all zenith. Now I see them with sharp parts
Its gone to whoever can make it the cheapest that they can slap there name on it.
Example : Sears Kenmore
It used to be a quality brand. Now sears contracts out all Kenmore appliances to over 20 suppliers. Used to be you bought a kenmore refrigerator it was a whirlpool model. Now it can be anything from Ge to magic chef. I had a Kenmore refrigerator quit completely after less than 2 years. Sears tells me "You should have bought the extended warranty"
So I guess we either pay up for extra warranty for products that they now will break down anyway or just contribute more to the landfills.
Bought it for Christmas last year. It frequently hangs, requiring a power disconnect to reset it (must physically pull the plug, as it can't be turned off.
Bought a Sony DVD player 3ish years ago and got a 2 year extended warranty. 90 Days after the extended expired.....it broke.
I haven't had any trouble with the two pieces of Sony gear (a CD player and a DVD player, both 5-disc platters) in the last 3 years. My problems have been with an RCA DVD (died 18 months after purchase, non-reparable) and a Panasonic VHS VCR (piece of crap).
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
You get what you pay for.
:) Not scientific or realistic.
A $49 dvd player versus $199? I believe that the $49 unit will not last more than 49/199% of the life of the $199.
Yes with regards to my ReplayTV!!! Two years ago I bought a ReplayTV 3060 PVR. That product STILL exceedes my expectations for quality and durability.
My father bought a Pioneer A/V receiver system with dual tape deck, reverberator, amp, and a pair of Bose 901 speakers. Original cost was something like $2000, back in 1982 (!!)... It's still running beautifully today, and I just hooked up the new big-screen TV to it, and it works just as well as it did 20 years ago. It amazes me that technology from 1982 is still compatible with the technology of today.
"If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards."
Many people, have given many reasons for the decline in the quality of manyfactured goods.
I offer this one simply because I work for a company, that manufactures something, and get to see various practices first hand. They don't manufacture tech. products, but that doesn't really matter.
Slowly over the course of many years there has been a shift in how a company that manufactures something save money. At one point in time they did it by making sure things worked, and they saved on repair/replace costs.
Now the idea is to make the money up in volume sales, if you sell 100 million units and 10% com back that's not that many in the long run, especially since they will be refurbished and resold. The other place that companies are now trying to save money is in manufacturing process controls. The company I work for had at one point, a crew of carpenters, a fully staffed machine shop, and a legion of maintenance guys trained by the manufacturers of the equipment they used. They used to modify machines and then send the prints for the modification back to the equipment manufacturer so they could include the design.
Now everything is outsourced, and the quality level of the parts being used in the machines is going down hill. If a company is unwilling to drop the cash to keep their machines running in tight tolerances, why would they worry about much about the product rolling out the door?
I still have one of the original Sony Walkmans - with the big orange button thing on the side - and it still works. This is more than can be said for my Sony minidisk walkman, which I had to keep together using duct tape after just 6 months. Built in redundancy? Seems feasible to me...
Human logic: 1) I can't so you mustn't. 2) I can but you mustn't.
I have a lot of Sony A/V equipment. The last piece I bought -- a cheap VCR -- is definitely NOT of the same quality as my other Sony components. OTOH, it was REALLY CHEAP. It was made for Sony (via license) in China. The new VCR is pretty lightweight and flimsy, not the rock-solid feel of my 15-year-old Sony carosel CD player.
Sony componenets used to be all audiophile-quality. They built their brand on that reputation, but eventually decided that they'd like to own the lower-end market as well. No problems, there. In my experience, you get what you pay for. Sony still makes VCRs that cost several times what my cheap one cost and I'm sure they're great.
I've seen the same thing in other industries. When I was in high school (early 1980s), I really wanted a Fender Stratocaster. Fender was making high-end pro instruments then and the cheapest Strat cost $1500. Now, they still make the $1500 one, but have a whole line of Mexican-made $299 Stratocasters. They've taken their high-end brand to the low-end.
Why? Because it is adequate. Why do I want my DVD player/GBA/PS2/Xbox/PIV-2GHz last for 10 years? Something just doesn't mean to last long, for most people anyway.
... I will pay extrat if the CPU produce less heat, but not for more performance (do I really need 2GHz to run what?)
For example, car. Some peoples like to buy a new car every now and then, say 3 yrs, to stay 'ahead'. Some peoples like me, own 2 10+ yr old cars. They are still great and adequate.
I will paid for quality when I want that thing to last. Like house, like my leather sofa (very comfortable , and it worths 6x my computer worth), like the air conditioner (I like a nice and quite living space)
I will paid good money for a nice suits that last long, but I won't pay couple hundreds for a T-shirt even if it comes with life time replacement guarantee.
Conclusion: For something, it simply doesn't mean to last. Like the old flash upgradable palm, not many care about it when they buy Handspring.
I'll bet a lot of people here have grandparents who still have a refrigerator or freezer from the 50's. How many of us have a refrigerator that's still running after even 15 years? My parents still have their original washer and dryer, and I'm 33. *My* dryer's making really bad sounds after just 8 years. My point is that electronics are just following the same path as appliances.
And don't buy warranties. It would seem that it's much more likely that the company supposedly backing the product - appliance or electronics - will go out of business just before you need to avail yourself of that warranty. You want quality? You need to pay for it up front.
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
What? Struggling Economy??? Nooooo, those would only be problems with things in the last 1-2 years. If anything, I'd have expected BETTER products 3 years ago, since we were still in too-much-cashflow dotbomb land. I know most of that money went to buying rounds at the bar, plane tickets, new cars for various CEO's and such... but surely at least a little bit might have made it into the quality control budget (being that there was so much extra cash)?
I still have a 15 year old Mitsubishi hi-fi stereo vcr. The tuner is finally about shot, and the heads need realigning, so about 3 years ago I bought a new vcr for 1/3 the price ($179 vs. $379) thinking since they're so prevalent these days if I bought one of the slightly better models (average price was $129 then) it should be fairly decent right? Nope... piece of shite. Weighs about 3 ounces so I had to put something behind it so pushing a tape in didn't move the vcr back. Tuner works well, tracking system is marginal, and feature-set? My 15-year-old vcr had actual front-panal controls... yes... you could work the thing without the remote!
So yes, I think quality has gone right out the window, and because of the Economic downturn, it will probably get worse before it gets better.
Back in the 1960s ot 70s, Chrysler began designing a new engine, the Slant 6 - Originally, the engine was designed to be made of aluminum for weight reasons.
At some point, management decided that aluminum was too expensive, and moved to cast iron for the engine. But they used the aluminum-based design unmodified. Now, while aluminum is much lighter than iron, it's not nearly as strong, and as a result the Slant 6 was one of the most reliable engines ever made, because all of its parts were designed around a weaker material than what was used. Yes, fuel economy suffered, but reliability was amazing.
Same goes for their transmissions - Older Chrysler transmissions (And even recent 3-speed automatics, which have a heritage dating back to the old Torqueflites) were heavy, inefficient, but practically bulletproof. Their 4-speed electronically controlled automatic should theoretically be more reliable - Modern design, electronic monitoring and control, etc. Unfortunately, because it's lighter and more complex, the A604 is nicknamed the sick-oh-four. Actually, the sick-oh-four is probably a good example of your comment in action.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Okay, I'll show my ignorance, probably. Or maybe make a good point. Who knows, this can go either way!
Isn't that the only thing you can possibly base an economy on? Or, rather, economic growth on? Added value into natural resources? Be it growing food from the earth, or mining iron out of it to make a car, that's where an economy grows, not relentlessly passing those goods around.
Or, in this case, taking some oil and sand, turning it into plastic, glass, and electronics, and selling it as a DVD player... In my opinion, that's why a service economy is the death warrant that America has been pushing upon itself for ages - you rely on other people to make your economic growth for you, and then take the weath they create, and give it to you for services... While being industrial has other problems - think polution - at least you're *making* something.
Keep in mind I've never had an economics course. Ever. Be gentle! =p
I thought Packard Smell went out of business because their machines sucked so badly?
As to quality/reliability - Compaq has always been one of the worst. Was second worst in the Packard Smell days (with Packard Smell being the worst), worst now if PS is gone - I haven't seen them in ages.
Hmm... Packard Bell's site shows them as a division of NEC now. Interestingly enough, they do not appear to have any US presence, www.packardbell.com has no choice for North America. Probably because their name is so badly tarnished.
H-P before the Compaq merger was interesting - They had some excellent machines. But their "consumer-level" machines were Compaq-grade crap. Now after the merger... ugh.
eMachines used to actually be pretty good - I reccommended an eMachines box to a friend back in the PIII-500 days and it's still running wonderfully. Dunno about now.
If you want pre-built, go with the more well-known manufacturers. Dell and Gateway come to mind first. Dunno if Quantex is still in business - They were less-known, but had good prices on great systems. Alienware is excellent quality, but not worth the exorbitant price.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Without starting a war here, the high end includes Sennheisers and Grados. The Sennheiser 600s are fantastic, but they will set you back about $300.
If you're in the US or any other country that does CDMA, you should try getting a Kyocera. I know many people with Kyos and they're not only cheap phones but reliable. My old 2035a lasted through 2-3 years of rough use without a single problem. Only reason I replaced it was because I wanted a 6035 (Integrated PalmOS PDA and phone) - The 6035 also has a reputation for being very rugged. People have dropped them down stairs onto concrete witho no problems whatsoever. Except for StarTACs, I've heard good things about Motorola phones also. Their low end v120c is basic, all plastic, but it's tough plastic and the phone is pretty sturdy.
If you're stuck in Europe with GSM - Well, sorry, can't help you.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Paul
I've just recently returned a CD/MP3 player for my wife's Jeep. It was a xmas present last year and now that the warranty is most likely up, it won't play CDs anymore. I also have a Sharp 25" tv that i bought about 6 years ago that has some color washout near the bottom of the screen. My previous tv was an old Sony Trinitron from ~1980. That TV went from VA to NH to school in northern NY (where i used to leave it Headline News 24/7 when i wasn't watching anything else, even when i wasn't there!) then back to NH to start my professional career. Finally the tube went, but someone took it off the curb before the trash pickup, so hopefully it's still out there. I've also had 2 non-sony VCRs crap out in less time than the Sony that i've now had for 4 years. My experience with Sony has always been topnotch.
Yeah, I know. "Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics." But there are, believe it or not, good studies out there among the bad. Just once, for pure novelty's sake, I wish /.'ers would try looking at/pointing to one instead of the hacknied "I'm pulling this stat out of my ass. Or the mouth of my sister's friend's brother's cousin who once worked for X company."
The quality of consumer electronics may or may not have declined. Bob may have bought a TV in '93 that didn't last as long as the one his family had in '75. Joe loves his snazzy new radio that's much better than the piece of junk on the market in the 80's. How do we know who's right? How about numbers like average defective returns? How about the average rate consumers replace their items? I'm sure there has to be some kind of reliable government/industry data out there. How about checking Consumer Reports?
Perhaps the quality of consumer electronics has gone down. But prima facie it sounds like "why, when I was a boy..." Certainly the quality of American cars these days is much better than in the 70's. The quality of medical care is better too. Long distance service is the best it's ever been since the invention of that machine. The point is, economics is all about constraints & competition. If a manufacturer can improve his profit margin by using poorer quality components, he will. If he has to improve the quality of his components to improve his profit margin, he will. It all depends.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Got burned a couple of years ago when I purchased a Technics home theatre receiver from a mass volume consumer electronics store.
It failed partially at 97 days when all of the channels (VCR, DVD, Satellite, etc.) started playing at once.
It failed utterly a week later.
When I attempted to return it, the young lady at the "customer service" counter gleefully pointed out that I was beyond the 90 day warranty period and that I could seek and possibly receive restitution from the manufacturer. "Good luck," she said.
I've also been burned with poor quality on printers and scanners as well. I'm on my third scanner, all of which have failed under warranty, thankfully.
Personally, I think that the trend towards stores shilling the extended warranty is to blame. It is in the manufacturers best interests to find the place where they have to build the least quality and get by. It is in the retailers best interests to sell more extended warranties.
I say be prepared for the quality bar dropping further.
Yes.
I spend over $200 on a philips dvd player. Didn't figure out until I had it 5 months that it wasn't the dvd's that were bad.
Philips told me basically to go suck an egg, since the 90 day warrantee was up.
I will never buy a philips product again.
A significant portion of CE products are outsourced to be produced by the contract manufacturers.
This group of companies were producing profits + 20% growth rates + huge revenues during the boom years.
Now they are struggling.
Perhaps their financial difficulties have had an impact on their quality control?
OK, this is somewhat obtuse, but try to follow.
Investors in public corporations can make money two ways: dividend payments, and stock price inflation. At this point, outside sectors with special tax privileges, just about no corporations are paying dividends. Why? Double taxation, and higher rates. For a given chunk of profit, the corporations pay their taxes on the profit, then the dividend is payed to the investor, who has to pay taxes again on the same money, at his income tax rate. When a stock price goes up, the company does not pay taxes on it, and the investor can use the increase to sell the stock, with profits taxed at the lower capital gains rates. So it makes very little sense to pay dividends given our tax structure.
"So, what does this have to do with consumer electronics quality?" you're asking. In order to make the stock price go up, a company has to show earnings growth quarter-to-quarter. It makes sense to slash costs across the board, especially quality, throw in a bunch of half-implemented features, and market the thing to death because it will increase demand, increase orders, thus revenue. Increased revenue is what makes the stock go up. If they sell 10 CD players this quarter, but have to take 6 back next quarter, it's OK because the corporate model is to think quarter-on-quarter. Plus, with a high failure rate, they're guaranteed future revenues for out-of-warranty failures (new purchases), even if it's divided among the big manufacturers.
If we were to eliminate double-taxation of dividends, dividends would be the preferred form of investment, because as long as the company is profitable, it's a safer investment than stock market gains (see 2001,2002). Then, the companies could stop worrying about quarterly revenues and start worrying about real profitability, which comes from satisfied customers, reputation, and repeat purchases.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Are there any reliable statistics on the decline of quality?
> dare say that lots of people are going to spend big bucks on consumer electronics
/.
Seeing as how unemployment (and the figures *only* show who is collecting unemployment compensation) is at record highs, I suspect this is one of the stupidest things I've every read on
I think that every industry goes through this cycle of low quality at some point. In the 60's and 70's it was the automobile industry. The "big three" American automobile manufacturers decided during that period that what American consumers wanted was a cheap car that they could drive for a couple of years and then replace. So, they made crap and sold it cheap. I know what I'm talking about on this one. My father collects old cars, and I myself own a 1966 Ford Mustang. It's my baby, and I wouldn't sell it for anything, but I can also recognize that it's a piece of junk. I usually end up doing major repair work on it at least once a year in order to keep it on the road (and it only has 60,000 miles on it).
This isn't a permanent spiral away from quality, though. Eventually, technology will reach an equilibrium point where people start to want to buy quality products that will last again. It won't be today's major manufacturers that will offer that quality, though. It will be new upstarts who see a need and fill it, discovering (much to the surprise and chagrin of today's major manufacturers) that people really do like quality. In the automobile industry, it was the Japanese who came in and started selling an affordable quality car that lasted, and almost put the American auto manufacturers out of business in the 80's (one or more of the probably would have if the government hadn't saved them). So, although current quality probably is headed downward in consumer electronics, that doesn't mean that we're stuck with junk forever and ever. Just think what's going to happen when we rebuild the economies of Afghanistan and Iraq after the war, and they realize that they can start competing with us in the consumer electronics market.
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
When I buy groceries, I look for the cheapest brand. I buy the biggest size of the cheapest brand, so as to achieve the lowest possible unit cost. Most of the time, this works great. There isn't much you can do to screw up a jar of peanut butter without triggering FDA intervention and a very expensive recall. If it tastes lousy, I'll buy a different brand next time. Those who make lousy peanut butter are quickly squeezed off the store shelves because people stop buying.
When people apply the same evaluation to consumer electronics, they encourage manufacturers to cut corners. Make no mistake about it, the manufacturers do this because consumers want the end result -- a cheap product with lots of features. The problem that when people buy a piece of junk the ability to buy something better next time is not going to be anytime soon.
I own an $89 VCR. Since all the brands are crap these days, my selection criteria was entirely based on price. In ancient times, I owned a $600 top-loader that weighed about 40 lbs. By the time the heads wore out on that beast, it was uneconomical to fix because the new "junk" VCRs were available for less than the cost of repair. In fact, there wasn't much you could fix on the old VCR without spending $89. If the new one breaks, it's disposable. My $600 boat anchor from 1982 would cost maybe $1500 or so in 2002 dollars, and I don't see anyone willing to pay $1500 for a no-frills, non cable-ready VCR.
If consumers really wanted reliability, the VCR market would have evolved toward enormous cast iron VCRs, with whopper power supplies, titanium heads that spin with a washing machine motor, connected with stainless steel gears, all at a Pentagon price. You would buy it once, take a few years to pay for it, and ultimately pass it down to future generations as a family heirloom.
The consumer electronics industry is unique in that even poorly made products will usually become obsolete before they die. The never-ending parade of new features and reduced cost means we tolerate all kinds of shortcuts because we'll get tired of that PDA in a year or two, and the replacement will cost less than the current model (maybe even less than repairing the current model). Compare this to the power tool market, where professionals cheerfully pay a premium for brands that last. Even non-professionals want the "good" brands.
Unfortunately, the free market has not been kind to the electronics manufacturers who used to make things that last. We [consumers] have mostly ourselves to blame.
I bought a magnavox VCR 8 years ago, had it not been for my kids knocking it off of the tv, it would still be in use now.
Sony used the term "MegaBass" back in the late 80's and early 90's and it meant something. I bought a sony boom box in 1991 that had a full range speaker on it, but also had a tiny subwoofer on each speaker (CFD 750? I can't remember the model number now). That radio could shake things in my dorm room and could get complaints from down the hall, everyone on my floor wanted one. This from a $300 radio. Nowadays, "MegaBass" means an EQ bump. nothing more.
In the late 80's early 90's, Sony and a few other manufacturers began making bookshelf systems. They all had impeccable build quality, great sound and little in the way of "flashy" features. Yamaha had a bookshelf system that was unbelieveable, it was the first time I had seen Active Servo Technology, the thing had gorgeous bass from a tiny system. Bookshelf systems these days are full of garbage. Dancing lights, 200Wx2 I.L.S. rated power (If Lightning Strikes) that's about as gutless as it comes, a million speakers, but they still manage to sound awful, and terrible build quality.
These days, the manufacturers are interested in the bottom line, not quality. Move more units and make more money.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
I beg to differ. Sometimes, you pay disproportionally more since the manufacturer has decided that by making a great market reputation for exclusiveness, they can skimp on quality. Look at Bang & Olufssen. Great looking product, possibly good lifetime (don't know), but the performance you are getting for your money is terrible.
The fundamental problem is actually that it is unprofitable to create high-quality products. That way, you would only sell new hardware when a new standard arises. By creating a lower quality product, they've ensured that some consumers are on their fifth cd player since they bought their first one in the late 80s.
Really. In statistics class, there was a lot of focus on tuning quality so that the products would be _just_ reliable enough. Being pseudo-buddhist, I prefer to think that things come back at you.
Stop the brainwash
>you've probably got a TV, VCR or other appliance you bought over 5 years ago which is still going strong
What about evolution? The weak and bad VCR's of over 5 years ago have wound up on the rubish bin of history.
What you see are only the lean and strong VCR's of over 5 years ago.
I've been in and out of most of the electronic gadgets in my house since I was a kid. Without a doubt quality has declined and friendliness to repair attempts is deplorable. Try opening your average portable electronic device. If you somehow got it apart without snapping at least one cheap plastic clip/post, try getting it back together with the same goal in mind. It's virtually impossible these days, as things are made to be assembled quickly and thrown away when they break.
About a year ago I got a new hobby: Metalworking. Before you groan and mod me as OT, let me explain. One of the greatest things about this hobby is the equipment. Whether it's a lathe, mill, shaper, etc., it's designed to be tinkered with. Nothing is destroyed when you disassemble the thing, and it goes together without having little springy bits flying off like shrapnel when they break. There are many mods available for them and you can be confident that the thing will work once you get it back together unless you grossly butcher the job. And the best part is that you get this kind quality with cheaper Chinese-made equipment.
I'm not sure why it's different for this equipment, although I'm guessing it might have something to do with the relative popularity of the hobby vs. the number of people who purchase consumer electronics every day.
I can't remember the title of the Clarke novel, but in it a young man from one of the Jovian moons goes to Earth. While visiting there, in his room, he goes to access the communications network and find that there is a really old terminal. The young man is surprised to see an archaic piece of equipment, obviously kept in repair for many decades, and then it occurs to him that with the cost of raw materials on Earth the economics demand that products are built for long life.
What we see now in consumer electronics is similar to the profusion of really bad fabrics and ceramics in the early industrial revolution. This too shall pass. The bad drives out the good only when resources are cheap (labor, materials) and "features" are more important than product life.
There's only about thirty more years of petroleum and cheap labor worldwide (I just helped move a factory from India to China to cut labor costs - Africa is next, ten years at most).
With respect to features, Andy Grove (Intel) just said that they think Moore's Law may not hold out much longer. Hurray! Maybe we'll finally have time to figure out what in heck all this stuff is good for. Come one, folks, haven't we long since hit the point of diminishing gratification in consumer electronics?
"Don't expel your beverage through your nostrils when the really rich demand the impossible. There's a fortune there for
Sorry but I find that LOTS of american products lack quality...
Whether you believe that or not, more recent (and utterly different) technology has bought a new option into the public eye: white bright LED's.
Apparantly white LED lightbulbs are coming out soon, and they'll have an insanely longer lifespan than current lightbulbs - and be as bright!
I would tend to agree with you... but... I have bought over the past couple of years two VCRs. One was a $800 Victor/JVC SVHS, the other was a $130 Sharp HI-FI VHS. The Victor/JVC bar fay is the better of the two with the quality and stunning features.... but... I have had to fix that thing four times and again it is not working. I gave up on it. The $130 Sharp is still working and working very well. I will never buy another Victor/JVC product again. I have had great luck with Sharp.... In fact.. I have never had anything made by sharp give me a spot of trouble. This is great if you consider they tend to be one of "the cheap brands" My point is dont judge by price too much. Yes, a $500 VCR will be better than a $50 VCR, but will it last any longer than a $150 - $200 VCR? I dont think so.
If only Bill Gates had a penny for every time Windows crashed... oh wait.. he does!
This place is are so a bunch of rich white people.
Good point. :) I agree with that, so I suppose my problem isn't with the fundamental idea, but how it seems to be working out in light of the question this article asks.
What seems wrong to me about increasing consumption based on goods with increasingly shorter lifetime is that it is terribly inefficient and artificial.
The inefficiency should be obvious. We are using up natural resources faster than needed generating more waste in the process.
The artificiality comes from companies (i.e. producers of goods) artificially increasing demand for their product by decreasing product lifetime.
What about enjoying that snazzy 5.1 surround sound. Isn't that impossible with headphones since there are only 2 speakers?
Yes, you have it exactly right, as near as I can figure. Unfortunately, there's a problem. Economic "growth" based on exploiting natural and human resources is necessrily finite -- there's only a finite amount of natural and human resources to go around.
We as a species are already getting into trouble because of the (unintentional) consequenses of unfettered growth, such as increasing water scarcity, desertification, and pollution. These suggest there ought to be another way of looking at an economy (maybe redefine it as a "monetary ecology"?)...
After all, in most cases, you don't call unrestricted growth "good," you call it "cancer."
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Because next year's version will have features undreamt of even now and what is released 2 years from now will hardly resemble what I buy tomorrow.
.....
That's just an inevitable consequence of the acceleration of technological advancement, and it's customer driven
I have seen that some manufacturers are changing the market that they're after. In the 1980s, Mitsubishi and JVC were the top names in VCRs, and they cost a lot of money. When I looked for a VCR four years ago, I was happy to find that a Mitsubishi VCR was now very inexpensive. When I played a tape in it, I understood why it was inexpensive. So I hopped over to the hi-fi shop, tried out the expensive Sony deck, and found that just like 15 years ago, the expensive deck was a lot nicer. The good news is that my nice new Sony deck, which had a better picture than my old but very good Mitsubishi, was still almost half the price of the old Mitsubishi from 15 years ago.
Easy Online Role Playing Campaign Management
All the features you need, with the greatest amount of warranty. Usually that $49 DVD player has the same 1 year warranty as the $500 Sony that won't last any longer and doesn't have all the same features. I'm not sure when we all got the impression that Sony was good hardware... it isn't (speaking from decades of experience). That way if it burns out just after a year... and it very probably will... you just buy another one. Score one for the landfills.
The Head Room website www.headphone.com. They have realy detailed descriptions and an excelent variety to choose from to match your needs.
I'm was a Sony devotee throughout the 90's. Still have a lot of their stuff. I've had way too many bad experiences lately to continue buying their crap.
My list:
* Sony Playstation 2 (I'm on my third one) $$$ -- Sony replace the first one at no charge, charged for the third one. They just stop playing CD media, DVD medita works fine.
* Sony MVC-CD300 Digital Camera (back to factory twice) $$$
* Sony Amp (7 years no problems)
* Sony Discman (4 years, no problms, durable!)
* Sony 5-disc changer (7 years no problems)
* Sony 200-disc changer (5 years no problems)
* Sony 900Mhz cordless phone (looses signal intermittently)
* Sony 27" TV (blew electronics, into shop) $$
Maybe it's just bad luck, but for now I'm moving on up to other manufacturers. I try to understand what I can about consumer electronics. I may have forgotten the cardinal rule: you get what you pay for.
Anyone had particular experience with Sony's ES line of products? Higher reliability and higher price tag, or just higher price tag?
-speedeep
So, if technology advances really fast, we have no motive to build things to last. Same thing for changing/evolving standards. Until we get a single set of DVD standards, no one will want to invest in a unit that lasts for 20 years but might be obsolete for 19 of them.
Another way quality is stalled is getting locked into standards. Having household electricity at 220 volts, 50Hz is probably better in many respects than the 125v, 60Hz that is the North American standard, but when large-scale electrification took place in the US, the latter was the standard & it would've been too much trouble to switch. Same thing with TV standards; PAL or SECAM is better than NTSC, but Europe (PAL, SECAM) got television post-WWII, while the US settled on NTSC in 1941 or so, & THAT had to be backwards-compatible to FCC standards for broadcast TV set forth in 1929. America gave up getting 100 extra scan lines in exchange for the ability to use 1930's equipment today.
This doesn't even get into the "features over quality" bias that we have in most consumer goods. A lot of you rail against it, but marketers will probably tell you that it's a lot easier to sell someone by bragging that it has more features in it than to say that it'll last 10 years longer. Especially if the latter will cost more than the former.
My wife has a old Sony Walkman (one of the orginals) which still works fine (she jogs 2-3 times a week with it), but her Sony Diskman she bought 3 years ago now skips unless held perfectly still and the sound has degraded considerably. All this to say is that I truly believe that overall quality of consumer electronics has definitely deteriorated in the past 15 years.
I can no longer read Dilbert. It's too depressing, because it is too real. -- Hyperhaplo
Most PCBs, especially large-volume consumer grade devices, use only surface-mount components (SMC). These things cannot be replaced by a human being. They are soldered through a vapor deposition process. Just the heat of an approaching soldering iron melts the solder film and the passives pop out of the board. Litteraly.
When a prototype has to be reworked, it takes extraordinary time and precaution to replace, say, ASIC # 5 with netlist v 19.6 because v 19.7 fixes a bug. The rework equipment alone costs a fortune. No way this can be done by regular repair shops. So the boards are always replaced, never repaired, when they fail. So much for the repair market.
Wave-soldered PCBs don't fare better. This type of soldering requires post-assembly cleaning to remove the corrosive resin that deposit around the solder pads. You use a warm solvent bath to do that. But in recent years (since the late 90s), new regulations have banned these solvents because of ozone holes or something. It means that you now have to use extremely aggressive, toxic, inflammable benzine-based solvent instead. And not in an open tank anymore, or you'd kill everyone in the building. Way too dangerous.
So in these production lines, PCB are not cleaned anymore. The resin remains on the pad and slowly corrodes the copper of the PCB. Sooner or later, within a few years (especially in humid climates), a connection will fail, and your whole assembly, if not the whole unit, will go to the trash dump.
So these well-meaning environmentalists that wanted to save the world ended up accelerating the production of trash! Sad, huh?
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
I bought a lasertjet 1100 on 1999. I had to return it last year...
Apparently, people would never buy the phone if it felt like the cheap peice of 3"x2" circuit board that really was!
Anyone else wish electronics were much heavier?
My 10 month old Sony VCR (that I got as a gift) is so light, every time I pop in a tape, it gets pushed a little further back into the console. Every couple of weeks I have to pull the VCR back to the front of the shelf.
My 14 year old Sharp VCR doesn't have that problem, it weighs at least four times as much and stays put. I would stack the heavy one on top of the light one, but it's practically twice the size. I'd epoxy the Sony to the shelf, but figure it's going to die soon anyway.
Corded phones- I still like corded phones, but they're so light nowadays when you walk away from the desk, you pull the base with you. The old bases were heavy enough that didn't happen, but now you pretty much have to screw the thing to a wall or your desk.
TVs- ok, it's nice that TVs are much lighter, easier to move, especially when you have kids who end up losing stuff behind the tv console.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
Having worked for a semiconductor company that supplies chips for consumer electronics, I have a little insight.
First, consumer electronics makers are cheap. They will do ANYTHING to save a buck on the bill of materials. If this means skimping on a power supply, or ommitting some protection circuits, they will do it. Their goals are 1) regulatory compliance (UL in the US) and 2) low RMA's.
Secondly, the consumer cannot distinguish "quality." They things that the consumer can see have no real relation to the quality of the design. How would you know if they power supply is very ripply? How would you know that they left out some filter capacitors. Price or brand is no indicator, that's all driven by marketting. For the consumer to determine the quality, they would have to take apart the device and then analyze it like an engineer. Doesn't happen. Reviews don't help-- the reviewer doesn't know anything either. Think of the quality test most consumers do of a stereo: they go to the store and turn up the volume. What does that tell them?
Also, the electronics that you buy today are considerably more complicated than that of yesteryear. Consider a stereo. Twenty years ago, it was just a collection of transistors and power supplies. Now they have micro controllers, DSP, codec's, etc. There is a lot more to go wrong. Pluse a lot more corner cutting that you can do. Besides, once you throw software into the mix, you get bugs.
Lastly, buy the $49 APEX DVD player. The part that will fail is going to be the DVD mechanism. Do you think there is a big difference between the one APEX buys and the one Sony buys? They're probably both made by TEAC.
People seem to suggest that CAD and FEA are responsible for weak designs. That's one way ro see it but it derives from a social phenomenon.
:)
Unfortunately, the economy in the US and most other developped countries is based on consuming: that is buying, using for a while and throwing away for a better, more advanced model of whatever was bought in the fist place. Companies have found that they can cut corners as they assume people will replace the product after a few years or months (cell phones, anyone?) of service. Therefore, the assumptions used in designing the product will be much lower: less usage cycle, less durability, etc. Parts that used to be designed for an infinite life are now known to fail after a determined number of cycles.
Here's an example:
I used to own a Dodge Colt. Shortly after the warranty expired, the wiper's mechanism failed and had to be replaced. I have talked about this to other friends who had the same car:
On of them was one year older and had the same problem at the same time in the car's life.
The other person's car was a year younger than mine but it experienced the same problem one year later, that is at the same time in it's life.
What can we conclude about this?
This mechanism was designed to fail after 5 years. Now, this was a "cheap, first car" type of vehicle. The manufacturer probably assumed that the original buyer would not keep it for more than 4-5 years before replacing it with something supposedly "better". The next buyer would simply replace the parts without asking too much question as small problems are commonplace on used cars.
This leads me to suppose that engineering and design were done in accordance with marketeers specifications which goal is simply to encourage consumerism.
A certain amount of this philosophy must be present when designing consumer oriented products. Goods which last too long simply won't be replaced, therefore effectively eliminating this specific market for a long time and increasing the chances that the company who made the product in the first place will go out of business before the demand for the product rises up again.
An interesting example which illustrates this is the Tamaguchi toy. It is designed to fail after 3 weeks, no matter what you do with it, therefore recreating the market by itself... Unless people get sick of it
But you will pay much more for it.
Just buy one of the current consumer level Sony VCRs as mentioned in
the original article. I did that. What a piece of junk. I have a 3
year old Sony VCR and it is great, but the 1992 model is junk beyond
belief, even the color. It went back and I had the original 8 year old
VCR repaired for 1/2 the price of the new Sony. I assume that people
buy it because it is cheap, and what the heck, in a few years they
expect to replace it with a tivo or a recordable DVD.
I remember when that was actually a joke.
IMHO
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Anybody here read the Foundation series by Asimov? This is on subject really. The series talks about the fall of civilization, and one of the key measurements is the quality of stuff made. At it's high point a civilization will produce its best quality products. As the civilization becomes stagnant it will still produce the same products, they will just break more, and nobody will know how to fix them. So one theory on our crappy products is that society is becoming stagnant.
Another theory is that the economic gap is growing. There are good quality products, but a shrinking part of the population can afford them. If you have $100 dollars you can't afford $200 in quality.
Of course the theory that consumers are all ignorant fools who buy more on marketing than quality does hold some water. Maybe companies have less scruples now, and will take their money without giving them a quality product.
My theory is quality is getting better. Cars definatly last longer now than they used to. At any given price point you will get a better quality product than you did 10 years ago in almost any product. Oh wait, you want to pay $50 instead of $500 and expect better quality. You are living in a dream world.
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.
I think you'll find you phone was made by a machine in a factory and probably wasn't even touched by human hands. The reason so many mobiles are being returned is that they're are rushed to market without the software being finished and the hardware being properly tested. Consumers are running the biggest beta testing program yet.
so long as people demand 'the lowest price is the law', Quality will tend in a worse direction.
john
Stuff like thick carpets and curtains, lotsa book shelves, soft furniture and generally covered hard surfaces. That does a lot and doesn't cost you anything, improves sound quality of all audio systems.
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
You guys are idiots, then. You DON'T remove the 'corrosive' resin, BECAUSE IT ISN'T. The resin TRAPS the corrosive salts, so you LEAVE IT ALONE. If you try to 'clean' the resin and use the wrong solvent, you leave behind the white film, THAT'S the corrosive part!
Anyways, why don't you use water soluble or no clean flux?
Here's my solution: Fire yourself, and get someone who knows what they're doing.
100 scan lines versus 25Hz flicker? I'd say WE won there, bub!
The quality of software has certainly declined. I remember when you bought a video game, it worked, and that was it. None of this "download patch 1.4.34 to fix bugs in the 3D engine".
Of course, it's still mostly the case that console games work when you buy them. You can hear video game authors complain all the time about the horrendous problems they have getting through Sony QA. These two things are related!
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I know this thread has died, but I have to speak up.
In college I sold bikes. Real bikes. I sold 200-2000 dollar solidly made bikes out of several stores in southern california. Countless people would go into the store, look at the cheapest bikes we had, and would leave to go to target to throw their money away on a $200 full - suspension garbage pile with the front fork on backwards, the brake levers sticking straight up, easily stripped everything, and no clause at all for maintenence. I'd say about %30 of our business was coming from people who had just thrown out a crumbled Costco / Target / KMart bike after 6 months of use. A large part of this problem is that consumers just don't have the attention span anymore. They want it, they want it now, and they don't need to know how it works. They buy from Target because it's easy, cheap, and safe... and nobody tries to explain anything to them. Who wants to know that unused cables have a breaking in period, and so to keep your bike in adjustment you have to bring it back after 3 months of use... or risk damaging it? Who cares that plastic brake handles bend instead transmitting the force of your arm? And we were in the lucky position that we could explain all of these things to the consumer, because it was all visible if you knew what was going on. The only thing you can judge DVD players on is the look of the box it comes in and the reported failure rates... the latter of which is very difficult to come by, even for employees.
Perhaps we should have mandatory lifespan markings like the FDA markings on soup? I could tell a customer (if they asked) that I have VistaLites that are over 15 years old and have been swimming, skiing, have had the case melted, and have been dropped from the third floor and still work, and that CatEyes generally crap out in a very short period of time... but wouldn't it be easier for people if that was just on the box?
If the Cue Cat was linked to epinions, it could have been a very empowering tool. In my case, many people learned their lesson. Sadly, a sucker is always born to replace them. And many people didn't, leading to the treadmil replacement cycle. I was nearly run over last year by someone on a brand new Target bike whose builder hadn't bothered to put the nuts on the front wheel.
This has got to have a cost to society.
-C
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
Input signal amplitude and volume control (which is usually just an input attenuator) combine to produce an excitation signal whose amplitude, or level, determines what the output level of the amp is.
But this one goes to 11.
I think there are several reasons for lowering quality. I've been lamenting about the ever-decreasing quality in consumer goods for some time.
I think there are several reasons for the decline:
1. Products are getting more complex and competition more intense. Most consumer electronic products are very sophisticated compared to what was sold even 10 years ago. A DVD player is basically a miniature and specialized computer and it has a large software component. In my experience, most have some issues. There always seems to be some DVD that will hang a player. The increased competition forces manufacturers to get products out quickly. As soon as something new is introduced, everyone has to have it available. This leads to short cuts in testing, and they miss stuff.
2. Software quality is decreasing. This has been discussed before about PC software, but I believe it applies to embedded software as well. As everything is software controlled and there is so much more of it, there are more opportunities for bugs. I bought a top of the line Toshiba DVD player, as I wanted quality and features. I found that most DVD players were different just based on features (software features, at that, which makes it even cheaper for them with one set of hardware and multiple software downloads.) At least one DVD (Monster's Inc's bonus disc) could lock up the machine. It has usability issues, some common items like getting the time remaining takes 6 button clicks. However, it has tons of modes, options, zooms, navi-guides, virtual remote, etc. My new JVC TV, JVC VCR, new receivers, etc. all have large amounts of software behind the scenes. As an aside, I'd love it if there was a consumer electronics software standard where I could buy something, download their software and make changes and I'd be happy to customized and make it work better and share it with the world.
3. As mentioned, people look at price first. However, they aren't too smart. Some prices are increasing (e.g. grocery stores, department stores) because it's much harder to compare prices. But it's easy for electronics and other consumer goods (fans, lights, furniture, cookware, small appliances, etc.) Indeed, people by what's cheap. Everything is plastic and engineered with no room for error. Small manufacturing defects cause complete product failure. Now my new DVD play sometimes can't retract the tray in all the way on the first try. This is after less than one year. Getting it repaired, even under warranty, is such a pain. My two-year-old JVC SVHS VCR sometimes won't take a tape. They are all plastic, of course. I bought a window fan that was like 90% plastic that was dropped in the packaging, and broke due to insufficient supports on the motor. No room for error. At least one can still get high-quality furniture! Is there any furniture you get at Walmart, target or Ikea that you'd honestly want to "pass down" to your children? (As anything other than firewood?)
4. Marketing is another problem. People used to research big purchases on specifications (at least all my friends did, or they'd ask someone more knowledgeable.) People are now more apt to make an impulsive purchase. Plus, now they look at which TV is brighter, or which one "looks better" or has catching buzz phrases, "new technology", etc. In fact, read Sound and Vision magazine, most TVs come set to bright they will burn themselves out! They do this so they look better on the showroom floor. Newer isn't always better. I bought a new Seimens 2.4 GHz because it looked interesting and my brother loved them. I sent 5 back under warranty. I even got the technician to admit that 2.4 GHz technology is inferior to 900 MHz DSS as it is more susceptible to interference and can't go through objects as good (walls, trees, etc.) Of course, everyone is now convinced that the higher the MHz, the better! They even advertise longer range, but then compared to old 900 MHz analog phones. I can't even get outside my garage with my 2.4 GHz phone, but can get to my neighbors with my 900 MHz DSS. Now we have 5.8 GHz, good luck!
5. Incompatibilities are growing (many as a result of the RIAA, MPAA). So you want that new HTDV set? Well, the tuner won't work on cable. The digital out from your new cable box is incompatible with your set's input. Gee, you can't run digital audio from your DVD-Audio player to your receiver. How many multi-channel audio formats to we need? DVD-Audio, Super Audio, DTD, Dolby Digital, etc. Can't connect your DVD player to your VCR if you run out of inputs (Macrovision), can't do proper bass management for multi-channel audio, some DVD player can't play CD-Rs, some can't play DVD-RW, some can't play DVD-RAM, some play MP3, but not VBR MP3. How many of us have a computer that's only a few years old that won't even run the latest Windows?
6. Buying habits are another coupled with planned obsolescence. People like getting new stuff, so why make it last 10 years? Why get a DVD player that will last 10 years, when we'll have super DVD or HD-DVD to make it all obsolete. Why make a PC last 4 years, when it will be a doorstop in 2? Sure you could get a nice new TV today, but after everything moves to digital, you'll need a box or a new TV. It's easier to get a new TV.
So, I buy much less stuff than I used to. At least there is some measure of quality remaining in amateur radio!
I don't know, but it works for me.
Thanks for the clarification. I was trying to remember the site I read the description of the /6 history at, and I think it was either yours or somewhere linked to from yours. :)
As to 604 derivatives and ATF+3 - Even with ATF+3 (And the successor ATF+4, reccomended for all 4-speed automatics) they're not too hot. I know quite a few people who have had 604s barf on them even though they always used ATF+3. If you change the transmission fluid every 15-30k miles you should be fine and it'll last forever, but most transmissions don't need fluid changes that often. Of course, I agree on the problem of people putting in the wrong fluids - Even a small amount of Dexron or Mercon will destroy a 604 in not too long. That's why my family's Chryslers only go to a Five-Star Dodge dealer with an excellent reputation whom we trust for transmission work, or we do it ourselves. (You can't even trust all Chrysler dealers to do it right... But we have a local dealer that is *excellent*)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
M&K is absolutely the best speaker you can get for the money. Hell, 80% of recording studios use them for production runs.
http://mksound.com/
No, no, you get fucked on the shipping if you use eBay. Go to your local computer chop shop, or (better yet) a computer show---Cogan Fairs in New England, for instance---and pick them up for one or two bucks each.
Though, a buck each, including shipping, ain't bad.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Amusingly enough I think DVD players are the absolute exception to th whole debate.
There isn't a huge difference between a $100C (75us?) DVD player and a $200C DVD player. The only feature I bought SPECIFICLY in my last DVD purchase was component outputs. If it weren't for that I would not have replaced my DVD player. (The one I had worked fine, I gave it to my parents, it cost about $200C when I bought it. Worked BETTER than any of the $400+ ones I had seen and used at the same time.
BUT, as a dyed-in-the-wool CAE developer, I have to defend the honor of my humble profession. CAD/CAM/CAE offers a HUGE advantage for design engineers/analysts even if you leave out the design 'shortcuts'. Remember that NASTRAN, the grand-pappy of all FEA solvers, is a product of NASA and is still used to help analyze the designs of probably every component on the shuttle, as well as every other extreme-tolerence aerospace device manufactured in the US and the other tech-heavy countries.
Again, your point's valid, but we musn't blame the technology for what the CEOs dictate. This is no different than blaming mp3 technology for rampant copyright violations, or the Internet for rampant porn. All technology will and can be abused.
That being said, CAE is very sexy, geek-heavy technology. When we grow out of this infancy that mankind is still caught up in, someday when company heads care about products and the people that use them more than their yachts, we'll see what these products can really do for us.
And what do you mean, 'automated FEA'? They're taint much automated about it! Not many vanilla-plain CAD operaters using CAE--FEA is still an _expensive_, time-consuming endeavor, and the engineering analysts who use products the like of hypermesh and i-deas (often PhD's) are simply the bestar-teests of geekdom. ;-)
My recent (2002) cell phone "crashes" once a week, in this case it's a software problem (not that new isn't it?). :-)}
:-(
I also have a digital watch that "crashes" sometimes, not that often, but at least once a year (software again).
{Douglas Adams said something about digital watches...
But in general I agree (with this "sense of degradation") also for non-software appliances,
manufacturers tend to make us buy new things over and over...
A well adjusted person is one who makes the same mistake twice without getting nervous.
My recollection of the Slant-6's genesis was that it derived/inspired from/by a Porsche design for a tank/armored vehicle engine. The goal was to get a very long stroke but have a low block height (undersquare bore/stroke ratio). I recall the aluminum version - didn't they put out a Sprint pack early on? Friend of mine had (might still have) a 65-6 Valiant convertible with a 225(might have been 200?) and a Hurst 4-spd. Neat car, 300K plus on it's 4th top & first engine.
What about enjoying that snazzy 5.1 surround sound. Isn't that impossible with headphones since there are only 2 speakers?
So certain are you, hmmmm? ; )
But we only have 2 ears!
Seriously, there are products that will take 5.1 channels and encode them into 2 channels with phase variations that our brain decodes as behind, below and above us, etc, for headphone usage.
I think the unit I listened to was a Sennheiser unit, which didn't really tickle my fancy.
I would limit my home theatre enjoyment to multiple speakers merely because the movies are made with that in mind and I doubt a "5.1 encoding into 2" box would ever give as good a surround effect.
In movies I would probably put surround effect slightly ahead of the extreme quality I would want for music listening sessions.
AC-3 and DTS don't sound that great to me anyway.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?