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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 $49 DVD player on the expectation that it will only last a year or so -- or do lay out two or three times that amount something made by a big-name manufacturer in the (possibly vain) hope it will provide superior performance and last longer?"
In America at least, I think the struggling economy is mostly to blame. Manufacturers are just trying to cut costs to bring their profit margins up, and one of the easiest ways of cutting costs is cutting quality.
This seems to be a disturbing and all to common trend, but hopefully they (manufacturers) will get bit in the ass by customer support and replacement costs, causing them to rethink their strategy!
I find that most often I end up learning from necessity, rather than for enjoyment.
The quality has declined across the board, but high quality parts are still available. As demand from retailers like M$, 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
As an avionics technician I can attest that consumer electronics is not the only field suffering. I work for a company that prides itself on quality, and most of the new units see my bench
less than a year after manufacture, however there is a slow flow of instruments built 10 years ago that are just now seeing the shop for the first time. Kind of a horrifying thought for you while riding on that airplane
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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 have never had a Samsung product fail on me. I have two HDDs (they are one of the few companies with a 3 year warranty), two CRT monitors, an LCD, a 32" HDTV, and a DVD player. None have ever given me trouble.
To be fair, neither has my Sony reciever, Discman, or CD changer.
YMMV, but I have found Samsung products to be of excellent quality and durability.
Please do provide some evidence before bad-mouthing a manufacturer. At least say what products you have and what has happened to them - one vague reference to a DVD player is not exactly evidence (BTW: Samsung didn't even program your DVD player; )
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.
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
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 ----
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
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
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.
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.
Planned obsolescence nearly destroyed the big 3 automakers in the 70s. Now the computer and home electronics industries are manufacturing garbage, so we will have to replace it frequently. I am a computer repair technician, and people ask me what brand of PC is good. I have to tell them that they all suck, unless you are willing to spend what Alienware charges. The most disturbing thing is that all this garbage is non-biodegradable, contains toxic chemicals and is bound for landfills.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
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.