Quality consumer goods are better in two key areas. First, they are replaceable. I don’t want a military grade mixer in my kitchen if getting a broken whisk or motor on it is going to require me hunting all over eBay for the specific part hoping it’s available. I was very excited at one point about the idea of getting a commercial dishwasher that can run a load of dishes in like 90 seconds. Problem with those is that you can’t go to Lowe’s and get a replacement part when it acts up. You have to call a restaurant equipment servicing company and pay them what a restaurant with a broken dishwasher would pay. Or more because you aren’t a frequent customer. Sure, maybe it’ll break less but here’s the thing: my modern LG dishwasher will be more convenient to use and if I get 10 years out of it rather than 20 I still spent only $1000 on the top of the line one rather than the $4k on a 10 year old used commercial unit that I will struggle with the entire time.
Second, consumer goods are replaceable. I am used to my Kershaw knife. I broke it yesterday. I can get it serviced by the manufacturer or get a brand new one, or both. If I buy some special forces surplus knife and chip the blade I am either done with that knife or I’m taking it to a specialist or I’m buying a new one. Knowing that I can replace an item I’m used to when a one-for-one replacement is a comfort. Obviously that doesn’t work for everything but it works for items that are made by high quality manufacturers.
Bonus: a military grade mixer is going to suck to make high end pastries because it’s geared towards making mashed potatoes for the troops. I feel like the author is romanticizing ma class of products that in reality aren’t all that amazing except in a couple of key areas that to most consumers aren’t as big of a deal. So while it’s possible that, as the author states, the average consumer is an idiot, I don’t see much evidence that the author is much ahead of the pack here.
About 8 years ago I bought the cheapest catering/professional microwave/combioven I could get my hands on. I did this because I got tired of consumer units with overcomplicated UIs designed (apparently) by unregenerate misanthropes, rotating dishes that are a pain in the ass to clean, overzealous bleeps that go off every 30 - 60 seconds after a cycle is finished, peeling enamel, corrosion issues, and that are too small on the inside.
Consumer grade microwave ovens all, as far as I can tell, universally suck in one way or another that my commercial grade microwave doesn't. The thing is bomb proof. The only thing that's gone wrong in 8 years is the internal bulb. Everything else is rock solid.
This is, however, a rather different proposition to buying a food mixer that was manufactured in 1948. I can get spares for my microwave or, at this point, buy a new one and recycle the old without feeling I haven't got my money's worth. I'm going to struggle with the 1948 mixer and, like you, I don't want that.
Others have highlighted that commercial grade dishwashers and fans are also probably bad ideas. I've run into similar issues with UPSs: none of these things seem designed to run in an environment where fan noise is going to cause a serious problem (nobody seems to sell a completely silent UPS - it's really daft).
Likewise, if you buy a rackmount server instead of a desktop computer you may be surprised to find that the fan noise is extraordinary.
Honestly, the main thing is to do your research before making a purchase so that you buy something that's really going to suit your requirements, whether that's a consumer grade or "professional grade" piece of equipment.
Film equipment is just like that. People ask where the autofocus is on that 50k$ Arri-Zeiss combination and you point at your focus puller loafing around with a coffee in her hand.
Just made for a different kind of gig than your usual consumer grade camera
> About 8 years ago I bought the cheapest catering/professional microwave/combioven I could get my hands on. I did this because I got tired of consumer units with overcomplicated UIs designed (apparently) by unregenerate misanthropes, rotating dishes that are a pain in the ass to clean, overzealous bleeps that go off every 30 - 60 seconds after a cycle is finished, peeling enamel, corrosion issues, and that are too small on the inside.
See, this is weird. The cheapest microwaves you can get have two dials, one for temp, one for time. Why not buy one of those??
> The cheapest microwaves you can get have two dials, one for temp, one for time. Why not buy one of those??
I imagine two reasons: first, the market seems to have decided that simple microwaves must be small microwaves. If you want to heat anything larger than a bowl of soup you’re gonna forfeit the dials.
Second, most of the time the dials also suck. Want to heat something for 2 minutes 30 seconds? Good luck with that on a cheap microwave that shows minutes in 5mm increments with 2.5mm of play in the dial.
I didn't think of looking at commercial microwaves so I ended up getting the Breville Smooth Wave [1] with its power and time dials. It's ridiculous that the only consumer microwave I could find locally with dials instead of touch controls was also the most expensive one with the exception of the ultra-sleek high end cabinet mounted units.
It's 1.2 cu ft which is on the bigger end and much quieter than the microwaves I'm used to with some sort of ventilation system that keeps going until you've retrieved the food. It's definitely more precise than the cheaper commercial microwaves I've seen without losing any of the "smart sensing" features, if you care for those.
I was thinking about the cheap microwaves that use a mechanical countdown dial (like a kitchen timer) rather than just dials as a digital control surface.
I have a Moulinex 800 W microwave with a turntable. It has a non-linear timer dial so that short times are easy to set. Five minutes on that dial is 180 degrees but from then on an extra five minutes is only 20 degrees up to a total of 30 minutes. The power knob is continuous and spans 270 degrees (but the actual power regulation is a simple on off duty cycle control).
I inherited it from my mother thirty years ago and apart from the internal lamp failing it works perfectly.
Moulinex still make microwave ovens with similarly easy controls.
> the market seems to have decided that simple microwaves must be small microwaves.
Maybe I'm living in the wrong area of the world, I've never seen a differently sized microwave no matter the price category. They all are about large enough to fit a decently sized dish. Sure, the pizza from the local place won't fit, but that's not a microwave problem then.
> Want to heat something for 2 minutes 30 seconds?
Not really. In the 15 years I've had my ~$35 microwave (without a single issue I might add) I was never in a situation where I'd need much precision. Not to mention with every microwave, no matter the model, you need to have a feeling for how long to heat what in the first place. A lot of precision comes from that rather than beeping second counters.
> I've never seen a differently sized microwave no matter the price category
A quick look at the Amazon search filters for 'microwave' will tell this story - there are some that would fit the whole pizza and others that wouldn't even take your dinner plate.
> Want to heat something for 2 minutes 30 seconds? Good luck with that on a cheap microwave that shows minutes in 5mm increments with 2.5mm of play in the dial.
No cooking really works like this. Set the microwave timer for 30 minutes and set a timer on your phone for 2 minutes. After two minutes, pull the microwave timer to zero to stop the microwave and check the food. Decide whether or not it needs more time and chuck it back in, pulling the timer to 30 minutes again. After you count off 30-40 seconds in your head, pull the timer to zero and check the food. Rinse/repeat as necessary.
The timer isn't there for anything more than a safety to make sure that the microwave doesn't stay on forever if you forget about it.
You're drastically underestimating the most convenient feature of a microwave: repeatability.
Once you know how long something needs to be cooked and at what level - say, a mug of your favorite soup - you can just throw it in, put in your usual settings, and have something that's ready to eat when it dings[1]. A few seconds either way can be the difference between "needs more time" and "oh dear god my mouth is on fire."
There's a reason one of the first "smart" features microwaves added was customizable presets.
1. This is, incidentally, how microwaves are used in restaurants too. Nobody's guessing.
Traditionally, it's been duty cycle to control power output. But there are now also "Inverter Microwave Ovens" available, which can vary the output power continuously.
'designed (apparently) by unregenerate misanthropes'
haha! I try to keep myself to one complaint or less per day, and ten cuss-words or less per day. The days I break my cuss-word quota are the days I use the microwave.
It takes quite some research to find single-purpose devices, that are tailored for a specific use case - and are not overburdened with often unused features. There‘s not enough metadata out there on ecommerce sites to filter for that.
Take the microwave example:
I‘m happy with the Samsung MWF300G microwave which does just one thing (heating stuff) really well in a very straightforward way:
One haptic dial for duration. One for Watt. And a simple display for time.
Just use the duration dial to set the time. That‘s it. You‘re done by turning your hand just once.
It starts automatically. No start button needed. No program selection. No stop button - just dial it back to zero if needed.
I believe that’s the one I got, too, after looking at basically all the options available. It’s still, I regret to tell you, a terrible product.
First of all, the sound design is criminally bad. Whenever you touch the controls it lets off an obnoxious beep that is way too loud for a home environment. It should of course be completely silent, except a pleasant sound to let you know it is done, and of course, like other reasonably designed home electronics, it should allow you to adjust the volume or turn the sound off completely. (Imagine, for sake of argument, that your iPhone beeped whenever you touched it. It would be bizarre. Why would you want that in a microwave oven?)
Second, the controls are flimsy and glitchy. If I try to increase the time slowly or by a small amount, the value tends to jump erratically up or down by some random amount. I need to firmly push the dial inwards while turning to avoid this.
Third, except for the noise pollution of those beeps, it also brings in more light pollution in my home, through a blue blinking seven-segment display that insists on always showing the current time. This is a bad feature that is irrelevant to the purpose of the microwave, and I would prefer to turn it off.
Finally, I hate the way it looks. Silver-coated plastic, reflective blacks and blue LEDs looks good in a cheap sci-fi flick, not in a home. What’s funny is that the inside actually looks pretty nice, a navy-blue metal with an organic white splatter pattern.
After suffering through the APC and TrippLite crap, I bought a Falcon SSG1.5K UPS a few years ago for my animation workstation and network stuff. It has been fantastic. It does have a fan but it isn't noticeably loud.
$50 consumer-grade products are almost always "crap," but you're making a sweeping generalization across dozens of product lines in 2 brands without offering any evidence or proof that you used appropriate products for the task. Fans on most UPSes only kick-in when their inverters run during an outage or a test for cooling.
I happen to have an SMX1500RM2UNC with humidity and dual temperature logging. It's floor or rack mountable, uses commodity batteries in a repairable pack, expandable, remotely manageable, logs details, works like a champ with under-voltage and other edge-case transfer conditions.
A writer is extremely unlikely to be an expert on backup power supplies anymore that I am an expert on coronary cannulas. Appeal to authority or an anecdotal testimonial is flimsy support, at best.
Sorry for your loss, but you might be wandering into the weeds on this one.
Even if either one or both were also a principle engineer for Intel, that'd still be a spurious, appeal-to-authority because they weren't a modern enterprise sysadmin, IT manager, or equivalent with visibility into what works and what doesn't in the real-world at scale.
Lionization in one or two domains for a limited time doesn't breed domain expertise across other areas for longer times. For anyone to be called, or call themselves, a polymath within the past 100 years is absolutely absurd. There are too many bifurcating domains splitting and branching too quickly for anyone of integrity to claim to "master" and stay in mastery of them.
I don't really care who they are: if they don't have sufficiently-current experience with enterprise-class gear, then random people have absolutely no place making claims about UPSes with supposed endorsements from dead dudes.
What claims have been made? I have owned, and dealt with, dozens of UPSs in both personal and commercial settings (animation studios, mostly) and Pournelle's article led me to research, and eventually buy, a Falcon. I have been much happier with it than any other.
I have 3 smx3000rmhv2unc's and 2 of them give an error "battery bus soft start fault", according to the expert:
"I suspect that the metering of the capacitor voltage is slightly wrong on this model of UPS. We've seen this error a few times and the units have performed fine both before and after. Its to do with checking the voltage rise on the cap on power on / battery supply. I think it meters out of tolerance and throws the fault when perhaps either the centerpoint is skewed or the tolerance is too fine."
APC makes multiple lines of devices. The lower-end devices are not so great. But the SmartUPS line is solid. No fans or noise of any sort, unless the power is off and you’re draining the battery.
And if you’re draining the battery, then you should pay attention to all that noise and be in the process of shutting everything down safely, so that you can survive whatever caused the power outage in the first place.
The point of a UPS isn’t that you keep running for days regardless of the fact you’ve lost power, it’s that when the power does go out you don’t lose all your work, and you’ve got a few precious minutes to shut everything down safely.
If you don’t use a piece of equipment the way it was designed to be used, then that is all on you, and not the equipment that you are failing to use correctly.
Note that APC is owned by Schneider, a company that specializes in making the really big UPSes of the sort they go into data centers and are used to provide short term power for entire buildings. They know what they’re doing.
You're spot on. I've dated several chefs, and the reality is that "professional grade" in consumer kitchen devices is basically all a fantasy/farce. Real commercial equipment is generally a huge PITA. It's quite capable stuff, but you don't need those capabilities at home, and everything else about them makes them a net negative, in nearly every case.
The other obnoxious thing is most of what's marketed as "professional grade" to consumers is junk that no commercial kitchen would use. It's just marketing.
You can get some interesting specific stuff on say webrestaraunt store, but you gotta be mindful of the above aspects imo.
Not sure where you are, but I've been getting ads throughout the pandemic for a Sysco@Home service. Seems that with all of the restaurants shut down, they got back into the business of selling direct to consumers.
Unfortunately it doesn't look like they're selling much equipment-wise in my local store anyway. Just paper towel, plates, masks, and garbage bags.
> I was very excited at one point about the idea of getting a commercial dishwasher that can run a load of dishes in like 90 seconds.
The reason commercial dishwashers run so fast is that they sanitize dishes, but do not remove food from them. That is done by a restaurant employee. Home dishwashers include soaking and scrubbing to remove food, which takes longer.
Dishwashers also save water by only drawing in enough to run half the jets at once. They then switch between which half is active which works just as well for washing but takes twice as long. I don't think many people sit there waiting on the dishwasher so it really doesn't matter that much if it takes 3 hours instead of 1.5h if it means less cost.
Moreover, consumer items beyond a price point are both very well made and backed by long term warranties anyway.
Paying a bit more for a better item which can be repaired or serviced for a very long time makes it cheaper in the long run in my experience, because you buy it once and for life.
I love "overkill items for everyday life" point of view, but it comes with trade-offs for noise, ergonomics, size, replaceability and such. You can get a very good blade from Victorinox or Leatherman. If you fancy good steel, you can get a high end, forged German steel Victorinox chef knife and use something frighteningly sharp and handsome at the same time.
If you want a good heater, you can pay twice the price and can get a Fakir Hobby premium space heater and can use for 30+ years (we have two).
> Moreover, consumer items beyond a price point are both very well made and backed by long term warranties anyway.
Except that there isn't a good way to distinguish between something that is expensive because it has quality construction and something that is expensive because it is a brand name.
Searching for information online is nigh-useless due to aggressive SEO on the part of advertisers. Sometimes I can get lucky and find an enthusiast forum, but those are harder and harder to find.
Online reviews in general are effectively anonymous. Amazon reviews might not even be the same manufacturer, let alone the same product. Newegg lists different firmware versions under the same product ID, so compatibility reviews are useless.
The best thing I've found is to reach out to a group of friends and hope that one of them did the research previously, or can at least steer you towards/away a brand. This doesn't scale, and any approach that does scale is at risk of being overwhelmed by advertisers and other bad actors.
Research is also hampered by non-obvious changes in the product. Even when a good, reliable product is released, it can be modified to be cheaper to make/more expensive to maintain with no external indication. This isn't even necessarily about cost-cutting, a component may no longer be available and is swapped for something that claims to be identical but is not as reliable.
He's a private dude, but I think his wife is french-canadian and he's at least bilingual. And from what I've gathered he has to have done some kind of mechanical engineering for a LONG time. Dude knows his stuff about anything mechanical.
They can be notoriously bad at their job however - an example can be found in toilet testing, as they do weird substitutes that don’t match actually plugging the thing with toilet paper. Who cares how many golf balls it flushes?
reddit.com/r/buyitforlife is a pretty good source for long-lasting goods, as are the hyper-specialized subreddits for (e.g.) safety razors, vacuum cleaners or telescopes.
The best consumer goods are generally the ones where the design has persisted unmodified for decades. It works, everyone uses it, nobody's improved on it, serviceability is reasonable relative to the essential complexity, and it hasn't been cost-reduced into garbage. "New model" always comes with the worry: What did they fuck up this time?
Anything "professional", "military", etc. comes with the potential downside of it being someone's job to maintain and service it. Qualitative differences usually come with trade-offs - and if it's not your job, it might not be better to try.
I wish there was more of a culture of long lived product lines. IKEA is shockingly good at this. I had a draw from the Malm product line from 15 years ago, then 5 years ago I got the bed frame in the same set and just now I got another one of the draws and they all fit together and look uniform because their product lines have been mostly the same for decades.
If I break something or need more bits, I can always go back years later and get a matching piece.
I would've agreed with you on this until recently. Tried to get an extra piece for something but they no longer make that 'color'. Then had the same issue trying to buy another malm piece to match the rest of the bed room. No dice, no longer making that fake wood facing and replaced it with a slightly different one. Different enough to look out of place.
I mean I love Victorinoxes, but 35 euro kitchen knife is far from high end. Although theirs and Morakniv Frost have surprisingly good steel and HT for the price and they can get sharp - they are the cheapest real knives in the kitchen (kiwi and some chinesse cleavers excluded), not high end stuff.
I wasn't talking about the €35 "Classic" knives from Victorinox (e.g.: [0]). They're serially produced stamped steel blades.
I'm talking about Grand Maitre series [1], which are "Made in Germany under supervision of Victorinox" and are forged steel. They're nowhere near €35. I have a 15cm Grand Maitre Carving/Utility knife, and that thing's sharpness is scaring me sometimes. It's virtually equal with another handmade, hand forged set I have, and both blades hold their edges extraordinarily well.
OTOH, America's test kitchen has found that these €35 Classic knives has some extraordinary steel for their price, under an electron microscope. I was unable to find the exact video, sorry for that.
In some product categories, I've found out that price increase doesn't increase the quality proportionally all the time. Similarly, there are some companies which produce items for a substantially lower price, but their items punch way above their weight.
HiFi gear is one of them. My CD player (from Yamaha) and speakers (from Heco) were cheaper when compared to other brands, but they're at least equal with their qualities, and they proved themselves over the years.
Similarly, if I can get 90% quality of a Wusthof by getting a Victorinox Grand Maitre, I'm OK with that.
I've also found out that technology has improved dramatically in certain categories. I've bought an entry level Sony BT headphones (Sony WH-CH510), and the sound quality for that price is unbeatable. I have much better headphones, but for something which I can grab and go, it's unbelievable. I had to pay thrice the price for that sound quality 10 years ago.
If you chip your knife you just put it to the stones to repair.
And hobarts are industry standard mixers for the food industry that vary in size from 5L to volcanic caldera. But they are built like a tank and easy to repair with plenty of easy to find spare parts. A lot of bakeries that make really high end stuff probably have the exact same hobart inside. Probably not that ancient as the one on the pic, but those things barely changed from their inception.
And with interest of cooking increasing a lot of restaurant gear is finding its way into home kitchens. Nothing sears a steak indoors better 3500W induction hob with big cast iron skillet on top.
And if cooking on a wok - having 120k BTU burner makes it much more pleasant and smooth experience.
Interestingly with gas burner efficiency - 120k BTU in gas are just a tad more powerful than the 3.5kw induction.
There is good reason why Alton Brown always says to obtain things from hardware and restaurant supply store.
And let's say in consumer ovens that are not built to gastronorm or hotel pan specs finding additional trays, sheets, grills etc that fit is PITA.
Have you tried going to Lowes to buy a part for your broken dishwasher? AFAICT, you can’t.
I’ve done a dishwasher repair, 1 dryer repair and 2 fridge repairs here, and a washer repair at my in-laws. Every case was a consumer-brand unit and every case the local home center was not capable to supply the parts from stock, so it became and “order online and wait” anyway. (For the washer repair, a local appliance parts store had the parts on-hand at ~$215 vs $55 online, which I politely declined.)
I don't think the "military" grade stuff is meant to last considerably longer. It's mostly geared at extreme duty cycles. How often will you use a mixer if you're not a baker, once a week? An industrial piece of equipment is intended to be used nearly all the time, and there's impressive engineering that goes into handling that use case.
Which I think was the point of TFA: he wants to show everyone he appreciates overengineered stuff.
I think you have a good point. The trick is to consider the device or object not on its own, but in the context of the organization.
Large organizations like the military would probably be happier with an item that needs intensive inspection, servicing, and repairs on a very consistent schedule, but is absolutely guaranteed to work within that operational window than they they would be with an item which is low-maintenance but has an unreliable service lifetime. A maintenance schedule can be planned around and budgeted around so that it doesn't affect operations. A random outage or failure is expensive, and can only be planned around in a probabilistic sense.
As individuals, we don't have the time or knowledge to do all of the inspections and repairs to maintain an "industrial grade" system at a level that makes it worthwhile. We need stuff that "just works" for some unspecified amount of time, and we accept the cost of random failure and replacement as a tradeoff, since most failures in our lives don't involve the loss of human life or millions of dollars. The exceptions, like cars, tend to be engineered more like the former category, and can only really function reliably in the context of a larger organization (regular maintenance at a specialized repair shop).
So it's not really a spectrum of quality from cheap and unreliable to expensive and indestructible. It's actually a spectrum of logistical overhead from individual use and low upkeep to multinational organization and high upkeep.
This is the important distinction - and the key is finding heavy duty equipment that has maintenance schedules based on usage not on clock-hours. Having to oil and maintain something that is used once a week will quickly become annoying.
I think one good strategy is to buy the highest volume product -- the more of a widget someone makes, the better they are at it.
For example, a Ford Focus or Chevy Malibu is a lot more reliable and cheaper to maintain than a fancier and more fun car. Loads of third party parts, etc.
Regarding the mixer, I understand they changed the gears to plastic so they would strip without damaging the motor. Easier to replace a cheap set of seats than an expensive motor.
Actually Hobart and Kitchen aid always had a plastic gear with the purpose of being a fuse if some brainiac decided to make a rocky road icecream with real gravel. What kitchen aid did to decrease their quality was hosting the gear assembly in non metal housing - so you could fuck up your mixer body which makes it harder to repair.
Is this a joke or are you missing the point? The guy doesn't actually think that a fighter jet seat is better than a normal office chair in any practical sense. He just thinks these things are cool. Often, part of the charm is how incredibly impractical they are.
I heard something interesting about ejection seats on tv.
The canopy cost up to a million dollars.
There are personnel who main job is making sure the ejection seat is working properly.
If a pilot needs to use the ejection seat, he, or she, has a 9 out if 10 chance of survival.
The spine will compress 1/2" after that emergency handle is pulled, and they said the shortening of the spine is permanent.
If I had the room, and was offered a small commercial Hobart mixer at a rock bottom price, I would buy it.
I worked at Marin Bagel factory in college, and that mixer was the only thing I liked about the job. The owner didn't like me, so when he was in a bad mood, my job was rotating the freezer. Imagine 5:30 am. Cold outside. A bakery where talking was discouraged. Climbing into a packed 10 x 20 foot packed to the door with frozen food. 1 foot of clearance on top of the food. Then rotating everything. Worst job ever. It wasn't the job, it was the owner.
> The guy doesn't actually think that a fighter jet seat is better than a normal office chair in any practical sense.
Now that people are discussing it, I do want to find out if there are former air force pilots reading this who can corroborate or refute my hypothesis: I suspect long-duration mission bombers like the US B-52 and B-2 have pilot seats especially tuned for extended operational comfort, even more so than commercial airliners (passenger or cargo), and it would be interesting to test my hypothesis that those would make excellent office chairs for coders. Someone makes these from old pilot seats [1], but I'm specifically interested in pilot seats from airframes that routinely perform round-trip trans-Pacific routes.
I personally wouldn't routinely use such a seat for more than say 10-12 hours at a time, but if it is proven to still be comfortable after someone uses it for that long, naps for a couple hours in it, and uses it for another long session, then it is likely going to feel very comfortable to me. And maybe the safety harness will help me maintain my posture instead of having to remind myself every half hour to check it.
I don't think you need to go to bombers to find good seats. Or even airplanes at all, though I've heard that airliners do tend to have pretty good seats for the pilots. Just start with buses and long haul trucks.
Though honestly, I think it's actually a solved problem. I just buy aftermarket Recaro seats. They know what they're doing.
I've seen bus- and truck drivers sit down and watched their seat just sink down a few inches, thinking that those must be so comfortable and absorb so much of the stuff that the passengers who sit on a bit of cloth stretched over vandalism-proof plastic chairs have to endure.
Having worked at Martin-Baker for quite a few years, I can confirm that most ejection seats are pretty uncomfortable. The main issue is that adding too much cushioning means that during the ejection, the g forces compress the padding, moving your centre of gravity, and causing the rocket motor forces to rotate you more than it should do (as the thrust is now offset). So yeah, most office chairs are better!
I like this line of speculation, though what to make of the fact that the average military pilot and average coder probably differ...substantially...in physique? Not to mention ongoing training active pilots likely engage in that may help with posture.
>>I don’t want a military grade mixer in my kitchen if getting a broken whisk or motor on it is going to require me hunting all over
This is extremely unlikely - military/industrial-grade stuff is designed for heavy duty cycles and decades of use. It is extremely unlikely that you'd see it even hiccup in decades of consumer use.
If you did need a part, the mfgr will have it, because, unlike consumer crap, these products have lifetimes measured in decades, not quarters.
>> is going to suck to make high end pastries because it’s geared towards making mashed potatoes for the troops
not unless you have some specialty unit. And if that is the case, get the industrial version designed for chefs to make industrial quantities of high-grade pastries
I'll disagree. A right to repair law would make most products equally servicable and it will naturally displace the replace-when-broken type of products because this is an enormous waste of resources.
> A right to repair law would make most products equally servicable
How is that possible to enforce?
If a company comes up with a design that is less serviceable than its competitors, but has other advantages, is it forbidden from selling its new design?
If a company comes up with a design that is more serviceable than its competitors, are all the competitors now forbidden from selling their old design?
Just banning all the zany things manufacturers come up with to thwart repair should be fine. No security screws, no tamper seals, no plastic clips that you must break, no cryptographic verification of components, cartridges, or firmware.
I'm probably missing a load of other tricks, but just doing the above would go a long way to ensuring products can be repaired reasonably.
> ... no cryptographic verification of components, cartridges, or firmware
No, I definitely think that the verification on the parts to make sure that they are original should stay, but it should not disallow non official parts to be installed. Because, if I want to replace a part with an original, there should be a way to verify the part is not counterfeit, and I think it would be super beneficial for consumer if the part was able to verify itself as genuine. But, I should also be able to install non genuine parts as well.
I'd be fine with doing verification of parts like that if and only if it doesn't lead to nonsense such as scary popups warning of damage or reduced functionality or what have you.
Obviously this also implies that to create a replacement part you don't need to ask the original manufacturer for permission. A "third party signing" key should be publicly available.
They usually call it the "invisible hand". If servicibility is not a feature, then it is an implementation detail. The other positive sides of a design will be picked by competitors while servicibility will be an additional feature. The first generation of bad products will be displaced after a few years by a new generation of products that will be cheaper to own and will be as good as the unservicible ones.
It's a combination of not restricting parts and not encumbering replacement parts with chips that can only be 'unlocked' by an approved servicer. Things like tractors are now sold that you literally can't repair yourself unless you hack the DRM, which is absurd.
If you can repair your stuff, then you start to buy stuff that is easier and cheaper to repair. Most commodity stuff is not all that differentiable and lower cost of ownership will be a factor.
Does that mean all consumer grade stuff is bad? No. Leatherman tools and 3M consumer grade stuff is usually great. Nalgene bottles. Does that mean all pro quality stuff is great? No. I’ve bought restaurant quality containers, made in California, no less, but are not BPA-free.
My philosophy is quite tangential to the points you’re making:
- Search for stuff in auxiliary / parallel industries.
- Used surplus stuff is usually below consumer grade prices even if it was slightly worse, you're still equal. 9/10 times it is actually the opposite - 10x the quality, performance and durability of consumer grade crap on Amazon.
- Some cheap crap is actually good. Victorinox $30 knife is excellent value and used by professional chefs. The same cannot be said for an outdoors knife, you want it to be overbuilt. Cheap $30 outdoor knives would not stand a chance. Always buy generic drugs, they're exactly the same.
There are atleast 100 more examples I can write about that were a net positive buys. Just last week I bought U-Line tape dispenser. Same price as consumer grade ones, so why not?
- Orthogonal search usually yields frugal jackpots. No one would ever find any use for the life raft bag in the marine parts store.
Average consumers want stuff that is objectively worse for them. Touchscreens were an excellent idea for a phone, now they want it everywhere in their cars. Overall, with the throw-away culture consumers are addicted to, it’s hard to not blame them. Have you ever dealt with customer service? You might be surprised. We are soooo addicted to wasteful culture. You’re just promoting this and doubling down on it.
Let’s see in last 20 years: Quality went downhill, durability is an after thought, repairability is non existent and consumers want bigger box - literally larger than the item because they choose it based on how good the box looks. If it were any other reason, it’s a waste of packaging and businesses know this. Businesses are not looking to waste money on extra packaging unless it led to better sales. This is a direct evidence of the utter shitshow consumer culture embodies.
Anyways, I fancy things that are engineered with deliberation and specification. Tested and qualified against requirements. Usually military, aviation, marine or medical grade goods are designed and engineered in such a way.
There are definitely nice finds out there. That doesn’t mean that the military equivalent of a consumer good is better. Duct tape is duct tape. A Humvee is a shit grocery hauler. Military boots aren’t going to be as nice or comfortable as a pair of Italian hand made boots.
I remember looking at ToughBooks because their shells are amazing. But what does that do for me if inside it has a 10 year old computer?
Meant in jest: I find your lack of faith [1]...disturbing [2].
That said, I have found marked differences even in "consumer" duct/duck tape offerings at big box stores. Adhesive properties, abrasion resistance, UV resistance, backing laminate strength, vibration tolerance, and so on, have converged my choices these days to Gorilla and 3M brands, and only give other manufacturers that show up in the big box store shelves one chance with one sample roll.
Agreed, there is a bit of selectivity and careful consideration. These are misuses and illfits. Wearing military boots to a wedding is an impedence mismatch so to speak, not really a fault of military boots.
Love this article and agree completely. I always go for the functional, reliable and sturdy industrial versions if possible. I also like the design and engineering that go into these products instead of the typical polished plastic consumer junk.
Lots of comments are talking about the extremes but most reasonable people can figure it out. Obviously don't use an industrial appliance that operates at 90db, requires high voltage electrical, and needs 2 hours of daily maintenance to make your coffee; but that liferaft bag is brilliant. Also nice industrial design on the site!
Average consumers want stuff that is objectively worse for them. Touchscreens were an excellent idea for a phone, now they want it everywhere in their cars.
The commercial version of the electric Ford F-150 has a reasonably sized touchscreen in the center of the dashboard. The consumer version has a huge 18 inch touchscreen which sticks up above the top of the dashboard, and looks silly. This replaces the large number of single-purpose knobs and buttons in the commercial version.
>>Always buy generic drugs, they're exactly the same.
I'm sorry to say. This is false.
This will be a bit technical but often, generic drugs are a racemic mix (both L and D conformations in some mixture) where as a branded drug may be a specific conformation or specific racemic mix (e.g. 75% L, 25% D.)
The issue comes from the fact that L-conformations may have different (better, worse, otherwise) effects than the D-conformations.
TL;DR Not all generics are the same as their branded counterparts and they might effect you differently. Caveat emptor.
I'll do my best to explain. So in chemistry, there is a thing called 'chirality' essentially this has to do with how a molecule is shaped. It's assessed by how a beam of polarized light that is passed through a molecule rotates.
There are a few different types:
Achiral, no change
Levorotary (L), Rotates anticlockwise
Dextrorotary(D), Rotates clockwise
The reason that it matters and what I was talking about above is that the sites in your body that a drug interacts with aren't universal. So if you have a (L) version of a drug that might have different effects and interactions than a (D) version.
A 1:1 mix of both (L) and (D) is called a racemic mix.
When you are talking about Brand name drugs, you're typically discussing a particular mix (e.g. Adderall XR is a 3:1 (D):(L) mix) or a particular conformation. That is not necessarily true with generics which may have a different ratio of (D):(L).
To give an example of how different the effects can be: Penicillamine (L) is used in the treatment of primary chronic arthritis.
Penicillamine (D) not only has no therapeutic effect, it is highly toxic.
If generic drugs have a different L:D ratio and L molecules have a different effect than D molecules, then surely the generic has a different effect and result than the brand name which would make or the other work better. Wouldn’t that come up and be an issue leading to either reformulating the generic to better match the brand name, or pulling the generic altogether?
> To give an example of how different the effects can be: Penicillamine (L) is used in the treatment of primary chronic arthritis. Penicillamine (D) not only has no therapeutic effect, it is highly toxic.
I think, as a layman, Thalidomide is probably a good striking example.
One chirality does what it says on the tin. The other causes babies to be born missing limbs and with other birth defects.
In theory, if we could produce Thalidomide with only the correct isomer, it would not only be effective but 100% safe for pregnant women.
Fwiw, I have a degree in chemistry and it never occurred to me that generics would potentially have a different chiral mixture to the original.
Given that we know (like you point out) that different enantiomers can have very different effects, it seems particularly dangerous for generics to be marketed as alternatives to the branded drug when, in some cases, they really are not.
Commercial-grade dishwashers (or at least the ones we foolishly installed at an office I worked at) are also more about sanitizing than removing caked on food or whatever. You can probably get away with putting unrinsed glasses but plates are pretty questionable if they'll get clean.
I wouldn't spend a million dollars on a fancy-branded knife when you can get a good one for $20. Ka-bars are a dime a dozen. They're probably in every army surplus store in America.
ProTip: Odds are there are 10k bars named ka-bar or k-bar founded or operated by current or former Marines.
One specific area where that USMC blade falls down for me is travel.
This won’t bother anyone in the US I guess but a fixed blade military knife like that could get you into legal hot water fast elsewhere.
In the UK, you could take it camping or fishing but if you divert to the shops on your way and get caught with it you you could get a mandatory prison sentence.
Even if you leave it in your car the whole time.
Where as a simple Victorinox Swiss Army Knife with a friction folding blade can be taken almost anywhere without a reason. That makes them a much better bet for an international backpacker IMHO.
I love to use professional-grade items where i can, but sometimes "overkill" means a worse product. like the professional-grade fan - it's not just designed for a high duty cycle, it's also probably designed to be operated in an environment where people regularly use hearing protection, so quiet operation is not a consideration.
Dishwashers are another example. You could buy a commercial one but it will come with no roll-out trays (you load up different plastic racks for different things and you can load a rack while the dishwasher is running) and it’s designed for an environment with lots of ventilation (you just open it when it is done and let the steam get ventilated away) which people are unlikely to have in their own kitchens.
Other items tend to be designed for people who can put more work in regular cleaning and maintenance. You could buy a commercial espresso machine and coffee grinder to make yourself coffee every morning but the machine is designed to warm up at the start of the day, pull a lot of shots, and get thoroughly cleaned later. You will still need to warm it up and make sure it is behaving well before your coffee and you’ll still need to properly clean it afterwards.
A lot of products even in the supposedly "disposable" everyday category people buy for lower prices have maintenance instructions that would significantly increase their lifespan if actually followed. Misuse resistance means consumer products generally still work if you skip maintenance the manufacturer told you was necessary (which industrial products might not), but it may shorten the product's lifespan, increase operating costs or reduce performance.
My friend owns a dishwasher. Recently little specks of dirt were left on plates sometimes after the wash completed. Guess what, there's no salt in the softener re-charge. So that dishwasher is soldiering on with hard water instead of soft, and it no longer gets things clean. Fill the salt back up, and sure enough the machine's performance quickly improves. I'm sure lots of people are shouting "That's not maintenance". Well, it probably depends how you look at the problem. From his point of view he purchased "all in one" dishwasher tablets which said he didn't need salt. If he'd examined them very carefully they admit that actually you might still need to add salt periodically, but that wouldn't be very "all in one" so it's not emphasised.
The salt compartment is usually on the floor of the dishwasher. The salt is used to soften the water. Not directly, but as the source of sodium ions for an ion-exchange resin. [1]
It’s not the same as the rinse-aid, which reduces the surface tension of the water so droplets won’t stay on the dishes (i.e. a surfactant).
In one sense, "Yes". A water softener using this principle just needs a source of Sodium ions, and Sodium Chloride aka salt is exactly what's called for in this application. They do literally just need salt.
But in another sense, "No". The people selling you table salt know it's for cooking and eating not to run a water softener, so they may tweak the product for these purposes. The product should be labelled, but we saw earlier that people don't read the fine print.
For example isn't it annoying when the little grains of salt stick together in a salt shaker? In some environments it's difficult to prevent plain salt from doing that, especially if it sits in the shaker for a few weeks because you (sensibly) don't use extra salt in most food. But an anti-caking agent reduces this problem while not making any difference (in a tiny quantity) to the taste or dietary effects of the salt. A water softener does not need anti-caking agents, so the manufacturer recommends using dishwasher salt.
Another example: Humans are supposed to have the element iodine in their diet. Some countries historically had a big problem with insufficient iodine, and so the "ordinary" table salt in those countries is laced with (a tiny amount of) iodine. Result: Fewer children with mental development problems. A water softener has no need for iodine, maybe it makes no difference, it clearly can't help, hence, the recommendation specifically for dishwasher salt.
Yeah, I grew up in a house with well water and we had a water softener for the whole house. I've just never seen a place to add salt in a dishwasher, unless it's the rinse aid.
Commercial dishwashers, esp. the fast cycle ones beat the living light of any mugs/plates/etc. unless they're plain white.
They use way more pressure and heat, and resulting clean is much more aggressive, shortening life of everything inside them. Only plain glass and plain porcelain came out relatively unaffected. All decorations doesn't stand a chance.
This is why some mugs denote "Safe for normal dishwasher use".
I stayed at an art school that was housed in an old military barracks. They had a massive steel dishwasher that used hot water and pressurized air to just blast the dirt off. It was extremely loud, and only needed about 10 seconds.
Presuming you have enough workspace to place one of the plastic racks down beside your prewash sink, loading the trays is way more ergonomic than loading+unloading a regular dishwasher. They don't just do it for throughput. Personally, I'd love to have a residential-class dishwasher that has that kind of modular load system. Would be wonderful on my back.
> and it’s designed for an environment with lots of ventilation
Speaking of, you know what the #1 thing I would design into a residential kitchen if I were building one from the ground up? A fume hood. Just a literal chemistry-lab fume hood box, but where the shroud folds away and the base of it is an induction cooktop. (In other words, it's just a really fancy above-the-range ventilation system.)
Imagine what you could do with that:
• No fear of burning your food setting off your smoke alarm — just drop/shut the shroud around the cooktop, and all the smoke would definitely be going out the vent, not into your house.
* You can grill indoors (with e.g. a Hibachi) with no fear of CO / CO2 poisoning. (Just shut the shroud while the food cooks, and only open it at the end. As a bonus, the extra airflow will make the grill into a convection grill!)
* You can vent your kitchen (and through it, the rest of your house) really quickly, if you're e.g. clearing something rotten out of your fridge.
* You can do real chemistry to make stuff, if you like. For example, given a fume hood, it'd be safe to make a CO2 generator to refill your soda-carbonator gas canister.
* Landlords would no longer have to worry about their tenants turning a house into a meth lab, because even if they did, the house would in some sense be safe to use as a meth lab, with much lower risk of volatile chemical explosions.
There is a lot I want to appropriate from chemistry labs for my kitchen besides fume hoods, which kind of makes sense because they both overlap in many similar activities for my use case (meal prep once a week to once a month when I have sufficient freezer space). I'm willing to pay the premium for repairability, maintainability and time efficiency to optimize that use case.
Laboratory-grade flooring: epoxy resin. Durable protection, withstand frequent pedestrian traffic. Slip resistance. Impermeable, non-absorbent surface, resists chemical exposure. Low maintenance, easy and economical cleaning and sanitizing properties.
Floor drains and gullies with oil/water separator.
Compressed air supply.
Chilled water supply.
Overhead service carriers for power, chilled water, hot water, natural gas, and air.
Lab-grade furniture, especially countertops.
All packaged in a proven layout taken from modern submarine galley designs.
This isn't from a lab (but from a sushi restaurant), to indicate I don't have a "kitchen as lab" fetish: circulating water Teflon-lined raceway behind all counter runs catches debris that is diverted to a auto-turned compost pile, and the excess moisture of the pile drained off to crops, which in turn drain off to an aquaculture pond.
I could go on, but my ideal dream kitchen would at first glance would probably look like a very cramped lab. "Modern" residential kitchens cause me all kinds of unnecessary movement and labor for my specific use case.
This can't be overstated. There's a lot of overlap between safety in labs, and safety in (especially professional) kitchens. Heck, there's more danger in kitchens with how familiar people are with processes, causing them to lower their guard.
The biggest parallels are probably the slip resistance, and the protective clothing. If you weren't aware, most chefwear is super easy to remove, has a hydrophobic coating, is not tight-fitting, usually layers over itself where it fastens, and often uses fasteners that are completely separate from the garment. (all of these examples are a result of me thinking about the dangers of scalding-hot fryer oil as in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOk2Akqb3CI)
I think lab coats and chef jackets are similar, but one targets corrosive liquids, and the other targets dangerously hot liquids.
TL;DR: get some labcoats, teflon pants, protective shoes, and eye protection for your kitchen.
This is the same for laptops, but most of the people (I assume?) buy Macbooks for programming which is... kinda weird, since it's difficult to repair. Than business laptops like the Z-book, ThinkPad or insert Dell business laptop eg; Latitude 7000 series (Dell XPS isn't a business laptop from my perspective.)
Macs are not generally repairable, but some models are incredibly reliable.
I’ve been using a 2012 MBPr that still works great/is pristine, other than losing some rubber feet.
Having a user friendly OS with *nix-ish tooling in a high build quality package is (debatably) only available from Apple. I will happily upgrade to an M1 MBP once the next gen is released.
Emphasis on some though. My previous Macbook (2013 or 2014?) had a screen delamination issue. My current one (2016) had an issue with the speakers that required the whole top to be replaced - known issue, recall program, etc but still, and currently has another known issue with the ribbon cable to the screen being broken so the colors go all weird. It's impractical and too expensive to fix, but it's the kinda thing that shouldn't need to be fixed. And of course there's the issue some models have with the cruddy keyboard, etc.
I mean I want to believe Macs are skookum devices but they're really not the best.
Yeah, there was a bad spell in the mid/late 2010s with the butterfly keyboard failures and the "stage light" display issues. I skipped these on my 2012 personal mac, and somehow work issued devices never ran into them.
Assuming Apple has figured out recent design issues, I'll be interested to see the longevity of the current generation. It seems like the thermals on the M1 are fantastic, which should minimize non-mechanical failures. Time will tell I guess.
Because it's annoying and will interrupt your work much longer, especially if it's something that could have been easily fixed in e.g. a Thinkpad. Even more so, if it's your own device.
I have to disagree. One of the reasons I've used Macbooks for work for ages now is if something goes wrong, I can just pop over to the apple store and have a replacement within about 30 minutes. Don't even have to restore, can just target boot my backup and be back working immediately, and can save the restore until the evening. I've had one instance where this saved me 5 figures easily (wasn't even the macbook's fault, I fell on my bike going over rail road tracks).
Yeah, you pay a premium in terms of price for that, but it's a no brainer imo.
That said, I have a lot of Dell hardware I like too. I still use two 2407wfp wide gamut monitors on my gaming PC and don't see any reason to change them until there's a 4k monitor I really want. They're bulletproof, and I even bought them used off Dell's outlet site.
This didn't work out for me in spite of going to the apple store: I was told to drop off my laptop. They then proceeded to 'lose track' of the machine and I eventually got it back after nearly 5 weeks and multiple escalations with 'customer support'. This is a 6 month old mbp pro 16" from work with applecare.
Exactly this. You make yourself and your ability to work depend on applecare. If everything works fine, lucky for you, if not well that is when the problem starts.
When you repair the device yourself you are independent from such a service. You could get hardware parts from any store you like and you might have some replacement parts at home.
Don't get me wrong I don't think that applecare is bad, but I do think it is better to have more options. Therefore I think it is best to have something like applecare plus the ability to repair the device yourself if necessary.
That's you, but a lot of people don't live next to the Apple store and with business laptops, people come to you, to replace the device , repair or anything else.
With Apple Business leasing-program laptops, Apple Store employees come to you to replace/repair the device. Of course, that only exists in the places that Apple Stores do.
Yup. I have coworkers in central America where getting a new apple is both a huge PITA and far more expensive than in the US.
One of my other friends had a Dell service business for a couple years, so I'm definitely familiar with how it all works. He uses macbooks these days too.
Working with smaller / early stage startups I've never had an IT dept that I could pass it off onto.
Yes - have a backup of your dev machine to restore from. Apple’s TimeMachine is a godsend. I’ve never had a windows backup program work w/o a lot of fuss.
An extra $150 external backup HDD is worth any crash at work, get your company to get it for every dev.
Migration Assistant on a Mac has pretty painless for me for years. If you attach a thunderbolt cable between the two computers, it can migrate a 2TB SSD in usually under a couple hours.
Because when it breaks, your company won't want to use 3rd party repair, so they will send it straight to Apple. That means that it will take at least a month to get back and all your data getting erased is pretty much a guarantee, even if all that was broken was one resistor in the power supply circuit.
Even if they buy a new one, how long will it take you to set it up from scratch?
Meanwhile, any other vendor will have competent technicians available almost anywhere (with a support package maybe even 24/7/365), who will be able to at worst transplant your storage media into a working machine while they refurb your old one. The downtime can be shorter than a big Windows update.
A modern Mac laptop uses a motherboard where everything is soldered on, everything is tiny, and it's basically impossible to repair. Leaving aside whether that's good or bad, it's just a fact that you should know up front.
Consequently, most failures are "repaired" by swapping the motherboard, and so your flash drive contents are gone.
Happily, you are using Time Machine (right?) and so you plug your backup drive into a spare machine, do the restore, and you're back to where you were an hour before the disaster. You do the same again when your newly repaired machine comes back from the store.
Yeah, it sucks more than swapping an SSD. But hey, you knew that before you bought a shiny, thin, light Macbook.
While Louis Rossmann [1] is well-known in the US for basing an entire, profitable small business around boards' component-level repair in one of the most unforgiving retail service markets in the US (NYC midtown Manhattan) [2], there are hundreds of shanzhai and tens of thousands of more generalized repair shops in China [3] who also demonstrate that with sufficient specifications and parts availability, what appears "basically impossible to repair" becomes the start of a journey towards a cradle-to-cradle ecosystem.
Apple has led the industry in the past, and is hopefully leading the way towards such a cradle-to-cradle future. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that their recent designs that are perceived by Rossmann and others as anti-RTR (Right To Repair) are more unintentional side effects of their rapid vertical integration design strategy (the A* and M1 processors being only the most visible part of the strategy).
Board-Level repair isn't that difficult with the right tools. Plenty of 3rd party repair, as well as Apple's refurbishment do it just fine. The only real reason it's impossible to repair is an artificial lack of parts/documentation.
Ok, sure -- I was lazy. It's sometimes possible, but it doesn't make economic sense.
Paying for people and equipment to can safely swap a motherboard and reassemble the laptop is not cheap, but it's not expensive.
Paying people who can diagnose a fault in a modern motherboard, do the board-level repair, test it, and turn it around to the customer doesn't make sense. Do a quick board swap and be done with it. Maybe forward the faulty board to some central facility for refurb or at least analysis to find out what's breaking in the field.
This isn't unique to Apple -- very little consumer electronics is repaired because it isn't worth the cost.
Now Apple makes the choice to solder everything on the motherboard (both for size & weight, and likely reliability reasons too). That means even peripheral failures junk the whole motherboard. But that's a trade-off they, and their customers, make.
I agree that the Dell XPS line does not reaaly fit the "business" look-and-feel like a Latitude or Thinkpad. But after several years of doing heavy sofware dev on one, it is has earned my respect. It is nice to have a machine with a non-brick-like form that still does not compromise in performance (and you can bring to a businesses meeting and not look too RBG....). IMHO the XPS line is designed to compete with MBPs as high-end work-capable machines and it does a darn good job of it...
Except my $3500 XPS 9500 (64GB RAM 2TB, 8 core CPU, Nvidia 1650Ti, 4K Touch Display) that thermal throttles so much that a 3 years older MBP gives much much better performance and I continued using that machine for work. Fortunately by switching teams at work I was then able to get a new Mac and I'm thrilled with my M1!
I spoke with a very nice person from Dell via Twitter who out of personal interest went above and beyond to help me calibrate that XPS, but no luck. Booting Windows is enough for fans to reach max speeds and thermal throttling to begin.
Yeah, I will concede that one to you. I have heard that the thermal paste on some of those XPS models was complete trash. Know some folks that had some luck re-applying new paste, but that does not really absolve Dell....
My friend had a Toshiba Satellite that was running the fans at 100% all the time. The fins on the radiator we’re blocked with dust. Easy to fix - unscrew the bottom plate and unscrew the fan and make the airflow path clean again. Low risk fix as they were about to throw it out it was so annoying. Sometimes it is unobvious how to remove the bottom plate - usually there will be a video on YouTube for the model.
Yeah, the Dell is not that problem, but just saying for others that other brand/model laptops with the same symptom might be easy to fix.
Mine, this goes away if I restore windows factory image or boot to linux.
The windows refresh joy typically lasts about two weeks and then the jet engine starts again, laggy, some long waits - something in some windows apps/drivers it really does not seem to like and I havent tracked it down yet.
I had an XPS M1330 about 10 years ago, and if I could figure out the apparent thermal issue I might still use it sometimes. At the time I found it incredibly portable (compared to my iBook and ThinkPad) without being slow, and the design was striking yet professional. Dell still isn't my favorite brand, but they've come a long way from the crappy Dimensions I had in the early 2000s.
Dell ca. 2000 had some great stuff. Optiplex desktops were good, Latitude laptops were good. Anything that they sold out of an insert in the Sunday paper was junk.
See, there's my problem. I had a handful of Dells in the mid-2000s that all came out of the cheap end of the catalog, and I skimped on some of the specs to fit them in the budget. I did definitely get my $20 worth out of the optional floppy drive, though.
> This is the same for laptops, but most of the people (I assume?) buy Macbooks for programming which is... kinda weird, since it's difficult to repair.
Personally, I don't think I've found anything that beats Apple's laptop trackpads, and I think that my UX matters more than repairability.
Then again, I'm still using a 2013 MacBook Pro with an upgraded NVMe SSD.
> Personally, I don't think I've found anything that beats Apple's laptop trackpads,
Trackoads are one of those items that I don't know of a good way to compare them, because most differences become unnoticeable habits over time. Sure, there's an obvious difference between a 20-year old copier whose buttons require a small hammer to activate and modern capacitative touchscreens, but beyond that I can't tell much difference.
Definitely if I use the trackpad on a new computer or on somebody else's computer, it feels wrong. The mouse moves to quickly or too slowly. The mouse continues moving after I thought I lifted my finger up, or stops slightly too soon. But those feel more like acclimatizing to a particular set of device parameters, rather than there being anything actually better or worse with the device.
…and all the time you’re not having your MacBook in for repair, its trackpad is still night & day better than its competitors. This was true in 2009 and somehow remains true in 2021 (though it would be a very pleasant surprise to be proven wrong)
I've heard the latest Surface lineup and the XPS 13 have trackpads that seriously rival Apple's. Up until a few years ago, however, it was true that nothing came close to Apple.
Although personally, the lack of a touchscreen on any of Apple's laptops is much more of a dealbreaker for me and despite working remotely, I really don't use a trackpad for work all that often. I imagine RSI would be unavoidable if you used it constantly, wouldn't it?
I’ll have to test those out the next time I’m in a store with an electronics department. I don’t have any desire to re-learn Windows as my main OS, but having some hand-on demo would still be more than the approximately zero Windows usage I’ve had in the past 5 years.
I never considered the RSI angle about the attraction of touch screens. I still have exactly zero desire to do serious work on a touchscreen where I’d have my fingerprints overlapping the display. Plus, I imagine touchscreens would be less ergonomic than a trackpad in a normal laptop form factor.
Regarding RSI, I was thinking more trackpad vs mouse, not trackpad vs touchscreen - I want a touchscreen (with a stylus) for other reasons like photo editing and taking notes. In theory, a trackpad looks to me like a device perfectly designed to cause RSI, so I always carry a mouse with me, but I know many people use them a lot without any issues.
And yeah, I totally get not wanting to use Windows on a daily basis - win10 is a mess and I really only keep it installed for Adobe software and a few games. But the hardware of "Windows" laptops is quite competitive with Apple's these days.
If you don’t have a (preferably bootable) backup that you can use any time your machine explodes / gets dropped / gets soaked in coffee / gets a random hardware failure / gets hit by a ransomware / is stolen - then you have a serious redundancy problem no matter what OS you are running.
On any OS you use it’s possible to have both a long-term backup and a bootable drive clone that is synced from your internal drive and updated on a schedule. I haven’t needed to use it often, but when I did it was priceless to be back up and running 30 minutes later without having to waste two days setting up a new machine or losing any data.
Of yeah, definitely, and Apple makes it far easier than other OS vendors. But I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of people don't actually do that - even programmers, sysadmins, etc.
> Of yeah, definitely, and Apple makes it far easier than other OS vendors.
Unfortunately, it seems like the Apple Fabric storage system on the M1 laptops broke bootable backups, and it's possible that Apple has no plans to fix this:
Repairability is a red herring. As a professional, I care about “time in service” and “maintenance cost”.
A completely unrepairable tool that is in service a lot longer for way less maintenance? I take that any day of the week.
And here’s the thing, I don’t really care that you can repair your Dell. I wouldn’t be able to do so without putting in a lot of time and it would be a little stressful. Reducing that time requires a significant investment.
Presuming a centralized corporate IT department that has 100+ of the same laptop in service, one advantage of repairability over time-in-service is that two half-broken laptops can be made into one working laptop. Very-repairable products are essentially just bags of parts that happen to come assembled; you can buy a few extra, take them apart, and now you have a couple of full sets of parts to use to repair any problem that comes up in the rest of the "fleet."
If you have a centralized corporate IT department you probably also have a maintenance contract with eg Dell. It's much faster and easier to just keep a stock of ready-to-go spare machines so you can immediately swap out any broken ones, then send those broken ones back to Dell to be repaired or replaced and returned to you to replenish your ready-to-go stock.
This is how it works on most industrial job sites - your drill breaks, you go to the locker and check out another one. When the Hilti guy comes around, he collects the broken ones and they get serviced or replaced.
The failure mode I've seen most often is that one bit of each byte will fail to store or retrieve correctly. Memtest86 will store an FF and read back an EF, for example. Computers with this problem may boot, but crash often.
The other failure mode I've seen is that a RAM module will fail to be recognized or cause a POST error, and the computer will not boot until it is replaced.
Neither happens often, but I've seen each of these more than I'd like. I could imagine both issues might possibly be less likely with a solid soldered connection vs. a port which can become damaged or dusty, but I don't have enough experience with soldered RAM modules to be able to say anything about its reliability.
RAM is just an example. In my Thinkpad (T430) I'm able to swap out the CPU, mainboard, keyboard or screen if necessary, like in an ordinary PC. The question is, how likely is it that some component will break. From my experience it's not very unlikely over a lifespan of a few years. I mean sure you can have luck with all your computers and you never have any hardware failures, but I wouldn't count on that.
Interesting. I've been buying thinkpads throughout most of my career. However, my latest laptop is a XPS 13. I really enjoy it, I use it to develop and it works very well both in docked mode as well as on the go. It's lightweight and super powerful yet quiet.
Meanwhile, my business laptop, the one the company provides me, has been macbooks for the most part, recently I've got a dell latitude. The latitude is one of the worst laptops I've had, bulky, heavy, noise. Yet, in terms of performance, I can't say I really see any differences in my day to day usage. On top of it all, the bluetooth is constantly causing issues, which I've never had with any of my previous laptops.
My work laptop is a dell 7420, my personal one is a dell xps 13. I can't come up with one thing that's better in the latitude laptop. Maybe it has a usb port? But that's irrelevant while docking and on the go, everything is either bluetooth or usb-c these days.
I agree, the Z-book are really amazing, but HP still has a bad reputation so it is hard to make people realize how far they went with this serie (from the old modela to the recent ones).
> You could buy a commercial espresso machine and coffee grinder to make yourself coffee every morning but the machine is designed to warm up at the start of the day, pull a lot of shots, and get thoroughly cleaned later.
It is. But with home use you don’t pull 300+ shots, it can be cleaned less.
I have a 20 something year old Cimbali and it’s just great. It’s on a smart plug to turn on early and warm up.
It had a load of leaks and I decided to upgrade, but first talked to the local agent. He gave 4 washers and said try them.
20 mins later it’s completely fixed at a cost of $0. That’s the only repair it’s had in the years I have owned it. I thoroughly clean it every few weeks.
Tangentially related: if you do want an amazing electric coffee grinder, feel free to piggy back on my countless hours of research and go with this: Baratza Virtuoso+
Yes Baratzas are great grinders but they are not one-size-fits-all depending on what kind of coffee you make. For example Baratza Encore is everyone’s darling with good reason (I have one and I use it for espresso every day!) but it’s not a great espresso grinder because fundamentally speaking its tiny motor just doesn’t have enough torque to drive big burrs, so it has small ones. Which means when you grind at espresso sizes it’s going to lose its tight spread and it’ll output some grains that are too big for espresso, some are too small and some are just right. Since espresso is very dense coffee, this is something that is very clearly tastable even to a skeptical non-expert like me.
This spread of grain sizes is something to some degree any grinder does, but grinders designed for espresso have tighter spreads, so they provide much more of the size you want (so your water can actually pass through) and much less of what you don’t want.
Incidentally this is something I like about specialty coffee industry compared to other connoisseur stuff like wine. Wine experts walk around talking about the earthy aromas, if some coffee ‘expert’ tries to do the same, someone in the audience busts out a refractometer and says ‘aight, let’s see’.
It’s still a money pit, but it’s at least on a much more scientifically solid ground.
How much static electricity does it generate? That is my biggest complaint on burr grinders, they act like Van de Graaff generators and then the grounds get stuck all over the machine.
In my two days of usage so far…. not much. I read about other grinders having issues with grounds being stuck in the container but this one doesn’t appear to have that problem.
I think I read that the + model has a redesigned ground container to tackle the static issue - had seen some mention that static was more of an issue with the older “non +” model
What's the main difference between Virtuoso+ and Encore? From just a quick glance, Virtuoso+ has a number of features that aren't very useful (like a timer, or LEDs/display) while having seemingly identical burr system?
I have a Macap M5D. This has a timer with three presets. It’s perfect and while expensive, even second hand, I wouldn’t say it’s overkill for home use. The timer means I don’t get the grind wrong. I’m not sure why you wouldn’t want one. I suppose I’m quite good at ‘eyeballing’ the quantity now, but the timer means consistency.
On the other hand: if you drink 1-2 cups of coffee a day, and don't mind putting in some elbow grease — a manual grinder like a Comandante or Kinu often produces much better grinds for the same price, since money can be allocated towards a better burr set instead of a motor.
I've had a few friends whose only experience with a manual grinder was a Hario Skerton or its clones, and get turned off manual grinding because of how bad the experience is. The pricier hand grinders have much better UX.
Absolutely. Much prefer a small hand-operated device that I can easily store in a cupboard to a big heavy device with a cord that needs to be near an outlet and takes up counter space all the time.
I have come to really, really resist buying plug-in kitchen gadgets. I have a few, such as a toaster and a kettle, that I actually use. For anything else I've found that they just end up living in the back of a base cabinet and I forget that I have them.
Life hack: link your manual grinder to a drill. Now you have a automatic grinder that’s reasonably priced and have a superb burr.
Have not tried this myself but I was told by a professional this is way cheaper and better than any automatic grinder below USD$1000, if you’re spending around $200 for a top end hand grinder
The main issue with doing this is the potential to damage your grinder. Your arm has a built in torque limiter, has a feedback loop and only operates at a low speed. If you want to do this with a drill I would recommend one with a torque limiter and a variable speed so you can use it at a low speed.
There are also other niceties that proper electric grinders give you.
I was ready to go all-in on manual grinders. But their supply chain completely evaporated in the pandemic, and I could not find one I wanted anywhere. For months. That ended that.
I have a Vario, that has struggled with a fine espresso grind. The burrs are ceramic but the carriage is plastic and it affects the tolerance. I gave up repairing/troubleshooting it and bought a beat to hell SuperJolly off EBay for $170.
Dropped in a new set of burrs and have an unstoppable overkill grinder with a huge motor and all metal parts
If you want espresso you probably want steel burrs mounted in steel with good bearings.
If you are on a budget and don't want to spend £500 ($700 + tax and shipping) on a niche then you can usually find used smaller commercial machines. Research the burrs they use and see if you can find new burrs, this way you can spend probably somewhere around $200 on what would function like a brand new high quality burr grinder.
The key is to buy them when they are described as broken, then they are very cheap. As far as I can tell they are almost never broken as such. Either something inside needs plugging back in, or the on/off switch needs replacing (it’s got spades on it, so just plug a new one in).
They are nearly entirely metal, with the few plastic components readily available.
The are quite easy to sand and repaint too, so you can match them to other bits of equipment or decor. The correct colour choice is a 1970s orange.
I bought an encore after much research myself and had to return it after just a few weeks. It started grinding my beans to an ultra fine espresso type consistency no matter what setting I used. After much troubleshooting, they sent me a new unit (in transit now), but not a great experience from the device perspective (customer service was great).
You are right, but there are some exceptions. For example, I own a commercial Miele dishwasher and it's exactly like their consumer version but even more robust and simple. Furthermore, it's equipped with gigantic blades to destroy food leftovers.
Other examples of overkill objects I like are some commercial vacuums for clean room environments with spectacularly good filtration and seals, therefore no itching if you are allergic to dust (e.g. some Nilfisk made in Denmark). Or industrial fanless PCs which are sealed and have fantastic copper coolers (e.g. Compulab, Tranquil and many others).
A commercial dishwasher is like an entirely different appliance. It is designed to be fast. It achieves this by requiring rinsing, being hotter (and staying hot) and more aggressive, and by not having a dry cycle (you just open the door and let the steam out).
Time is important in cleaning, and home dishwashers take advantage of that by running for several hours at low power, it is not like you are going to need these plates immediately after you have finished eating.
About commercial espresso machines, another thing to consider is that these machines usually require plumbing. There are high end home espresso machines that are also built like tanks and will serve you better unless you are planning to pull hundreds of shots a day. Commercial machines have an advantage when it comes to temperature stability because they are so big and heavy but smaller machines are still able to do an impressive job.
You need to spend at least £600 to get a decent home espresso set up but it will get you something pretty close to good cafe grade coffee.
The reason those big £3000+ machines are impractical for the home is not the cleaning or even the warm-up time (as both of those factors are the same for any espresso machine even the home ones) but rather with the fact that the bar grade espresso machines expect to be plumbed into a reverse osmosis filter and take up a shitload of space.
Commercial machines may need a little bit more time to warm up but I still let my gaggia warm up for around 15 minutes before I use it otherwise I find consistency falls and I just get frustration.
Regarding cleaning, the process is the same for home machines and just needs to be performed less often (I do this around once every week depending on use. I pour 1-4 shots a day every day). There are powdered detergents which are used to backflush the group head and solenoid valve to clear out coffee oils, this process takes about 5 minutes to perform and doesn't require much manual effort except for clearing out the drip tray and wiping things down a bit.
When it comes to cleaning the boiler, this isn't done by disassembling the machine or anything crazy like that. An acidic solution of usually some combination of primarily citric acid and/or potassium bitartrate is added to the water reservoir, the boiler is then flushed to get the solution in the boiler, I will then usually leave it in for 15 minutes with the boiler turned off to prevent water from boiling (to make sure all areas of the boiler are in contact with water at all times). Then this gets flushed with clean filtered water to get rid of the acid.
This process takes longer but also doesn't require much work.
Anything under £600 will give you mediocre espresso (due to grind inconsistency and temperature stability problems) or fauxpresso (any pod machine or bean to cup machine basically maxes fauxpresso, there are very expensive commercial grade true-espresso bean to cup machines but these, even when dialled in correctly, still usually make a mediocre espresso).
Any machine (even the fauxpresso ones) will likely require almost as much cleaning effort. Any manufacturer which claims otherwise (especially for bean-to-cup machines) is just trying to reduce the lifetime of your machine so it fails out of warranty and you buy another one.
I am a big fan of my first espresso machine - the Rancilio Silvia. It’s got many commercial components in a small form factor. It’s easily repairable too, but probably doesn’t need it.
Mine did approximately 15,000 coffees in the 20 years of use it had, and had one service for about $US75. It’s still around as an emergency backup.
> You need to spend at least £600 to get a decent home espresso set up but it will get you something pretty close to good cafe grade coffee.
There are also the lever espresso makers like the Flair or Cafelat Robot, which are cheaper, more robust (no fancy heating elements), but also a bit more troublesome.
Certainly london water would kill any espreso machine in no time flat but would also kill the flavour of any espresso it makes. Most people who lived in areas with terrible water would be filtering it somehow at least through a brita filter.
I distill brita filtered water and then re-mineralise it by adding solutions of various minerals in specific quantities. Although not everyone has the time for that. I think brita filtered water and a good regular descaling cycle should be more than enough to make any machine last a very long time.
You’re totally correct about the noise, however I actually use a commercial all-metal box fan to ventilate my apartment and it’s really awesome.
I only run it at night, and I put it in a window in another room, facing out with some material around it to make a snug fit. The result is a steady breeze coming in the bedroom windows at night and a muted hum from the other room. It makes regular plastic box fans look like a joke. It easily moves 10x the air on low as a plastic one on high.
This approach greatly reduces the number of nights we need to use the AC in early summer/early fall in NYC, when it’s warm but not so humid as in July and August. I’ve tried the same thing with a plastic fan and it’s way less effective...we can come home to a hot stuffy apartment on a Sunday night after a weekend away and have it totally comfortable inside in a matter of minutes.
yeah, i don't mean to say that no commercial-grade products are suitable for home use, just that you need to be a lot more careful if you're buying products for a use they aren't intended for. if you buy a product designed for home use, you can be reasonably sure that it will work in a home setting if you buy a commercial-grade product, you just need to pay close attention to what trade-offs have been made that might be a poor fit for home usage.
it's almost always a good idea to buy the professional-grade items you've used at work and know are awesome, it's almost never a good idea to buy a professional-grade item sight-unseen unless you know there's a local used market for it.
I have been, over-time, retro-fitting my home with pro/commercial-grade infrastructure items such as: quarter-turn marine-grade ball valves for the water-main; toilets, clothes washer, fridge and dishwasher; recessed sillcock valves; outdoor hose reels and hoses; sprinklers (this is a biggie as so many sprinklers are one-season junk); heavy-duty light switches; ceiling fans (the wonderful Big-Ass fans stuff); locks and latches, fencing hardware; outdoor lighting, and so on. Stuff that is fairly invisible but which offer high utility and, especially, durability and trust without being inconvenient or weird.
At one point, years ago, my brother and I considered creating a web site that explored these kinds of high-integrity options, and acted as a directory and maybe a review site as well. A site that evangelizes high-quality, well-engineered items that are easily integrated into a home and provide much greater longevity without costing a fortune. "Overkill" is probably too strong a term for the idea.
Awesome idea! How do you distinguish professional vs overpriced normal stuff?
For example, Festool, Makita, and DeWalt offer awesome products but are very pricy. All the tools from the DIY shops are rubbish. Things from Bosch are slightly better. But these are all expensive. Meanwhile, the tools from Lidl around €30-50 price point are quite cool.
Or resale value, which is also a great proxy for longevity. Festool stuff, for example, has been damn near impossible to get for several months of the pandemic and I've seen used Dominos going for more than new MSRP.
Sounds kind of like what thewirecutter.com used to be, or a higher end consumer reports?
Nowadays youtube channels like Project Farm have kind of replaced that niche, I could see a channel dedicated to hands-on reviews, funded by affiliate links. I'd watch long videos on several of the topics you mention above...
I'd be interested in a site like that, as I have a similar appreciation for high-quality stuff that's built to last. What kind of dishwasher/fridge/laundry appliances did you end up getting?
I apologize as I wasn't clear enough: I was not focused on the appliances themselves but, rather, the water valves, and hoses, used to supply the water. The small but really important stuff.
Crummy valves break. Most builders use the cheapest crap they can get. They save a couple thousand dollars building a house but replacing the $2 crap can sometimes cost a fortune. One of the worst offenses I have had to deal with is the use of C-PVC pipe which is brittle and will eventually crack or burst.
Ideally, the site I thought about would be to educate folks about the kinds of things, components, they should specify when building or remodeling.
These are the ones that are really annoying because the cost difference is so minimal between the cheap junk and the good quality stuff, and most of the cost is the installation.
I’d really appreciate a site like that. Light switches in particular piss me off. Every single switch sold at Lowes or Home Depot are crap and I’ve yet to figure out where to buy something that’s actually decent with proper tactility.
The $5 Levitons rather than the $1 Levitons. They have an ever so slightly larger handle and a significantly heavier "throw." They are built way better. They are available at Home Depot. Lutron builds the best outlets, they're just better made but they are pricey.
For the specific case of light switches, ironically, sometimes all you have to do is not shop at big box stores. If you buy the exact same 5262 receptacle from Home Depot or from Zoro, you'll see they're completely different beasts! This is pretty brazen -- usually HD has the decency to add a suffix to the cheap-out version.
Longer form: there are three major manufacturers of switches and receptacles: Hubbell (Bryant), Leviton, and Pass&Seymour-Legrand. Hubbell is generally the highest price and quality. Leviton switches just feel "right" to me. I don't care for P&S much even though there's nothing wrong with them. All are completely interchangeable except for small visual details. This is really only noticable on wallplates (Hubbell stainless wallplates look the best -- and they're 302/304 SS so they don't rust in bathrooms like the 400 series trash at HD) and, if you mix them too nearby, switch rockers.
Pick your brand, then get their PDF catalog and find some part numbers. (There are plenty of other ways to do this, I just find catalogs effective.) You want "frameless" switches if you're going down this path: "framed" switches are the consumer junk you're running away from. (I dislike Decora -- I think it's harder to operate in the dark, and that's kind of a thing for light switches, but if it's your thing, go for it.) You'll find many possible part numbers to pick from. You want ONLY things marked as "Fed Spec" (more formally W-C-596). A lot of lesser stuff is "Spec Grade", which is a cop-out for "we think this is up to spec but we didn't actually list it". "Fed Spec" means "yeah, this one's good". (I will accept "spec grade" for oddballs like weird configurations -- it's not like they sell a ton of those -- since it really is decent, but don't settle for that on your main switch or receptacle, because you don't have to.) You can buy the cheapest things that are actually Fed Spec and you'll be golden.
You don't need the high-end Extra Heavy Duty stuff unless you're outfitting a shop or something. And you probably don't want Hospital Grade with those annoying pull-out forces, ugly green dots, and hospital prices. But none of those will hurt anything but your pocketbook, if you are so inclined. You'll just never appreciate them.
You should, for receptacles, get the ones that are Back And Side Wired. That means the side screws and the holes on the back, with the screw needed to grab the holes (i.e. not those horrid stabby-only holes on the super cheap receptacles). I made this mistake (Leviton BR15 vs CR15) and regretted it during install. Oh well.
If in doubt, look for the part number with the most color choices. It's probably popular for a reason. And don't forget that neon ("pilot") switches exist. They make understanding 3-ways and finding the staircase light in the dark way easier. Especially if the staircase lights are 3-way. Worth every penny!
Now that you have some part numbers, you just have to buy them from a trade supplier or industrial supplier and you're done! One place that's reliable is Zoro. They even used to have great pricing when they still offered coupons; seems those are rare now. But anywhere that's not big-box can sort you out.
Oh, and if this is your first time doing this, get a #1 square or Robertson screwdriver. No, not just a bit, you'll use it more than that and it's slimmer this way. The recesses on these things accept multiple bit shapes and I find that one by far the easiest to work with in that recess (due to the multiple-shape thing it's not great at holding any of them...).
Thank you very much for this comment. I've installed hospital-grade power outlets and been using hospital grade power cords in my home office for some time now. I don't agree that folks won't appreciate it, it makes a big difference in my opinion as to preventing accidental unplugging when moving things, and reduces arcing.
I'm going to go get some catalogs and start shopping, I might just be replacing all the light switches in my house in a few weekends from now :)
For stuff you are not moving often that does make sense. But if you truly have hospital-grade outlets and cordsets (cordsets should have the transparent circular molding and a U-shaped ground pin), I'm impressed that you can tolerate them, I hate moving those things :)
You probably wouldn't want those on frequently-swapped outlets, though.
I would add, if you can afford it, install AFCI outlets as the first outlet in the circuit, or an AFCI breaker in the circuit panel. These are required for residential (non-commercial) bedrooms for new construction in the latest revision of the NEC fire code recommendations, but they are way more expensive than you'd expect to pay for the he dead-simple outlets.
I've got that in our attic with a nice little light switch in our bedroom to turn it on. Crack open the window, turn on the attic fan and the whole house cools down nicely.
The only problem is that I forget to turn it off in the morning. Out if sight out of mind. Switching it to a timer is on my list.
Yeah I was inspired by an amazingly effective attic fan in an airbnb I stayed in a few years ago...definitely will be installing one in any future attics I own.
Agreed 1000x. There is rarely a single best in all categories good for something. Instead, you have to pay attention to what you’re optimizing for. The industrial/commercial cookware he lists is definitely durable but also it’s huge, may consume a ton of energy and will not match the decor of the rest of your kitchen.
> The industrial/commercial cookware he lists is definitely durable
No, it is plain wrong. He recommends borosilicate beakers for beer. I think he never worked in a lab: borosilicate beakers break. Their thermal expansion tolerance is a non feature for cold beer: when did one of your beer mug broke because you served yourself boiling beer?
> Does your glassware meet ASTM Specification E960, Type II requirements? Is it manufactured from 33 expansion, low extractable borosilicate glass conforming to USP Type I and ASTM E438, Type I, Class A requirements? I didn't think so.
I call that hacker syndrome, when the typical hacker thinks a long line of impressive specs and numbers matter, because he has no idea of the customer requirements.
> Used to contain a life raft. Now, my groceries.
How easy it is to clean when there is a spill? How easy it is to replace? I have carried BRICKS inside the nylon woven bags some supermarket sell for $1.99. Rinced with water, ready in 5 minutes.
> For less than $100, I can buy a short USMC Short KA-BAR or a real M9 from Ontario for $150. This is the real thing, used by the US military.
Show off!!
If you want something to bring in a fight, get a Mark 1 trench knife: has brass knuckles for punching (and limit the risk of dropping your knife), a long thin blade for more lethality (easier puncture wound regardless of angle than with a wider blade). And in the kitchen it is ideal to break walnuts :)
Of course it does not look "nice" - like carrying bricks in a nylon supermarket bag. It is about knowing the needs you optimize for.
The beaker example is the worst one, because the shape of the beaker is meant for controlled pouring out one point and no spills anywhere else around the perimeter. A drinking glass is designed for sipping which is completely different. If you tried drinking out of a beaker the flanged opening would tend to make the beverage pour down either side of your mouth.
It's also sort of a bad idea to normalize drinking out of laboratory glassware. Granted your home is different from a real lab, but lab workers have died drinking something they thought was water.
In my dad's lab in the 1970s, they used to make coffee in a large Erlenmeyer flask and filter it under vaccuum with a Buchner funnel. The safety director eventually banned it and made them buy a Mr. Coffee.
I wonder how many undergrads will disassemble their bongs made from spare bits of chemistry glassware after reading your warning about drinking from lab equipment.
I think you're missing the point. Nobody cares what ASTM Specification E960 is, it just sounds cool. Some people like industrial/military stuff for its own sake.
Yup. First thought on the shopping bag was "how heavy is that empty?". Designers were not worried about over burdening whatever carried it, necessarily.
That mixer likely won't handle a small load (as in, a single family sized loaf).
Spot on though about some of the stuff. That knife is nice, although being edged on both sides is a liability.
I agree. “Worse” considering the scenarios where your needs are not exactly the ones that guided project development.
A simple example would be gloves. What would be the pro version of a glove? The ones used in steel mills? If you want a glove for riding a bike, you’re better of with regular biker gloves. If it’s a glove for winter, maybe skier gloves and so on.
Work/utility gloves are a good example where the commercial-grade options are awesome compared to what is at Home Depot.
For example, Ansell HyFlex gloves are standard issue in Amazon warehouses and they’re awesome for chores around the house too. They fit really well (and come in more sizes), they’re durable, and they are comfortable to wear for extended periods of time.
Interesting, had no idea that work gloves not designed for use by NASA could cost almost $300/pair. What kind of work are these used for? Safecracking?
In the 90's wearing road construction worker gloves while skateboarding was the cool thing in Sweden, works pretty well. And now I use insulated carpenter gloves while bicycling in the mild Danish winters.
Winter "pro" gloves are not ski gloves, even if they are used for skiing. In the French Alps, wearing gloves [1] that identify you as not a tourist is quite common.
The main reason to wear these is abrasion resistance for working with ropes and tools. They are not needed for everyday skiing and a goretex glove is going to be a better and easier choice. Unless you really need that snowgun maintenance crew chic.
In the US, a pair of 20 dollar kinco full leather gloves + snoseal will immediately give you "local" cred and save you from overpriced name brand junk that doesnt hold up.
Another obvious example here given the people on this website is servers: if you're going to have a home server, unless you can go put it in a soundproofed room in the basement, you're going to want to use consumer-grade fans that aren't inherently screamingly loud.
Your home server can be a RasPi or a NUC or similar. Or it's possible to make/convert rackmount server to be quiet.
Right now, I have a silent 4U rackmount GPU server running 24/7 in my living room, cooled just fine by a 120mm Noctua fan (plus a silent consumer ATX PSU fan).
I also have a commercial 1U Atom server that I've adapted for living room. The Atom and mirrored HDDs are passively-cooled (though you can also get Xeons in the same chassis). The Flex-ATX PSU was loud, but I opened it up and soldered in an effectively silent Noctua.
The noise-no-object jet engine servers are a problem, especially full-depth 1U ones with a phalanx of jet engine fans. But people have had some luck removing fans and replacing some of them with quieter fans, or liquid cooling.
I found this out the hard way. Picked up a cheap surplus ProLiant to mess around with, and quickly realized it would be far better for my use case to use a business-class desktop or laptop and avoid the unnecessary noise, space, and power draw of pro server hardware. It sure looked cool, though.
I went for a tower server for those exact reasons - sensible idle power draw and quiet even under full load (I've got an x265 encode running at the moment, and it's not quite silent but there's just a very gentle hum) without losing ECC.
Some of the older dual Xeon servers on eBay were tempting, but the noise/power draw made it a non-starter.
Another example is weight. The average consumer Rogue or Titan power rack or machine will outlive the one or two people using it. It is completely sufficient even for light-commercial use while still being light enough to move around with only a couple people.
Commercial gym equipment, on the other hand is more expensive, much heavier, and doesn't bring many advantages over a high quality consumer product.
If you're running a gym where thousands of people use it every year the extra weight and cost makes sense but for a single person it's just a pain.
Hmm, there's a lesson hidden somewhere here about junior developers itching to implement everything in multi-region distributed services, because Google does it that way.
I used to love browsing McMaster-Carr but pretty quickly realized there is nothing worth buying as a consumer. Anything remotely practical for personal use is cheaper on Amazon.
McMaster is pretty good as a consumer for fastener hardware, a good assortment of various geometries of various metals, and mixing supplies in sense of both availability, exotics (such as aluminum flake 12.9 screws), and absolute zero bullshit with regards to knowing what you're actually getting, the fact it's always there, and that it's same day-next morning delivery in most parts of the US.
I've had my fair share of actual 12.9 steel screws from Amazon that are actually 12.9 steel, and my fair share of 12.9 steel screws that were actually made of cheese.
Plus... this is something maybe only a CAD user can understand - McMaster Carr provides an outright sex bible of importable 3D CAD objects.
Like, I really thought my CAD instructor in University was joking when they said McMaster would be your Bible if you're ever designing in CAD for hobby/industry. Then I got a job, and holy shit were they right. So I like to think whenever I pay slightly more on McMaster for what I could get on Amazon or eBay, I'm supporting the bible for all of the goodness it's given me for my hobby designing and in making actual work less stressful as well.
> Plus... this is something maybe only a CAD user can understand - McMaster Carr provides an outright sex bible of importable 3D CAD objects.
Luckily many suppliers are doing this. Misumi for example has plugins for CAD packages like Solidworks that even generate CAD parts for parts with custom configurations (like aluminum extrusion cut to size) so going from assembly to BOM to purchase order is a few clicks.
Oh yeah, I got turned on to McMaster while doing some fabrication projects with industrial designers. We needed bags of machine screws, cable carriers, aluminum extrusions, lubricant, random brackets, rubber tubing and such it was truly miraculous.
Great industrial shelving for the garage, that hard-to-find bolt with the specific threads, or rock salt for icy driveways. The second time you call them they greet you by name. You can say a part number, a quantity, thanks, and hang up, and you're getting a box of awesome really soon. McMaster-Carr is an amazing company for people who do things.
There's a few problems with that review. It's confusing air speed at a point with volume of air displaced, and assuming that volume at all frequencies is perceptually the same, which it isn't. Psychoacoustically, something with a sound profile at ~80Hz sounds quieter than the same dB noise at 250Hz, which is quieter than at 1000 Hz.
The Dyson fans tend to have a particularly quiet sounding noise profile compared to their volume of air displaced at low to mid power in particular, and also are far quieter and low powers than traditional fans.
They're not worth the money they cost, but there's a lot more nuance than this presents.
I purchased a 30-in steel barrel fan from home Depot 3 years ago and I maintain it is the best fan I've ever owned. I put it in a different part of my house entirely pointing out a window and I open a window in my bedroom and it sucks that air right in.
Also, that stand mixer isn't going to fit in my kitchen cabinet. Compare that to my consumer-grade Sunbeam. It's smaller, and the top part (motor, etc.) separates from the stand part via a quick-release button, so it fits on a shelf which isn't very tall at all.
We made the mistake of ordering a Sunbeam set of chef knives w/wood storage block off Amazon for the kitchen at my last startup.
Every knife was dull and identically serrated like a budget steak knife, despite presenting as a comprehensive set of chef knives. The whole set was almost completely useless.
Sunbeam is not the reasonable quality brand it once was back in the Sears days, stay away.
Neither is Sears/Craftsman. The stuff they're selling now under that name really doesn't live up to the historic quality of that brand in its heyday, and a lot of old-timers I've talked to don't seem to have caught on yet.
I have some older Craftsman tools that seem indestructible, and I really hope they are, because you can't get replacement parts or support for pretty much any Craftsman tool any more (even the newer ones).
Those Hobarts are usually rated for 1 kg of water. So this gives around 2.5 kg doughball. But they are rated for it so you can do it reliably. Without worry. But this is like 3 loaves of challah or 4 artisan breads.
For dedicated dough makers - spiral, fork or diving arm mixers are the standard. But planetary mixers are good if your dough is side affair or you need to whip some eggwhites from time to time.
eh. the 5 quart hobart is the same capacity as the 5 qt plastic gear break the first time you knead machine. and it really is a joy to use and break down.
it does stand a bit taller and weight about twice as much.
Also there is question of scale. Like the mixer, the capacity is just too big for regular use. It would be massive waste for me to make much anything with it. As I don't think it scales to small enough amounts.
> The average consumer is an idiot, so the bean counters keep milking them... They want pizzaz over functionality and durability. They want shiny stuff in a bigger box... The industrial, military and commercial market doesn't mess around. They want to purchase equipment that works reliably and performs to a specification. It's professional and their livelihood depends on it. It sort of self filters the entire market. Shitty things drop off the radar due to poor sales.
This sounds like a cool hobby and conversation starter. But it's hard to take the author seriously when he proselytizes on the practical virtues of buying ejector seats over retail chairs. Industrial goods are often built for very specific use-cases. If those use-cases don't align with your own needs, you're just paying a lot of money for something you don't need. And often, something that fails to deliver on your actual needs.
> The entire consumer market is rotten. TV? It's going to come with smart apps. Get one from NEC that's meant for commercial use.
A TV has the potential to be a lifetime purchase, but the software on it can render it obsolete. I can always plug my streaming device of choice into the back of a "dumb TV."
I thought buying a TV was bad, but today I wanted to find a good digital picture frame. What a shit show, it seems that search term has even more fake review sites and SEO spam than other electronics, Amazon is full of Chinese brands with random names selling the same few models, and with even the apparently good ones it's hard to find out what they actually do and what not. And then in the fine print you find you they want to sell you a subscription, too, and presumably the thing will be worthless if the company decides to pull their app or shut down their servers.
I just want a frame that I can send pics to, or that pulls from google/dropbox/whatever shares, and maybe turn off when it's dark.
as someone that has worked with tvs for a few years I disagree strongly. Speakers are a lifetime purchase. A TV is not. Professional displays are super expensive (and often dont come with speakers). The pricing will also change a lot depending on the size. They are made to run 24/7 on airports etc. Today there aren't many display manufacturers anyways.
I would never spend 4k-20k on a professional display to use it as a TV.
you can still buy 30year old speakers for 200-400 and consider it as a buy it for life purchase.
I would highly recommend a 787 cockpit seat instead. Much more comfortable and adjustable than an ejection seat and also kind of futuristic looking from behind.
If you mind the gap between your knees for the controls too much, look for an Airbus seat. They also have nice armrests because the stick is on the side.
A friend of mine is a chief pilot for an (astonishingly) wealthy family. One day he toured me through their 2-year-old Bombardier Global Express jet. I asked how much one of the somewhat flimsy-looking passenger-cabin seats cost and he said, "About $40,000."
He pointed out that virtually every single element in the $60+ million aircraft is engineered for flight and occupant safety, and to be as light as possible.
I have a couple of seats I pulled from a VW GTI that seemed very comfortable when they were in the car, but when I've sat in them outside of the car I feel like I need to be going faster. I imagine an ejector seat might have a similar effect in the absence of the G-forces it was designed to handle.
I am a huge fan of highly durable equipment, but one thing to watch out for is that comfort/ergonimics are often sacrificed for the sake of simplicity and duribility. Ask anyone who has spent time in a military vehicle. Those things can take a beating and are made to be repaired quickly and sent back out for more. But a quite comfortable ride they are not.... Sometimes that no-compromise toughness is exactly what you want. In other situations there is real value in creature comforts.
For example, I have an old '97 F250 that is as basic of a model as you can possibly get. Regular cab, bench seat, manual everything from the windows to the transmission. It is a beast and will take whatever you give it. It is simple and easy to fix when something breaks, but it is also crazy loud, rough, and uncomfortable to be in. Perfect for getting work done, but for a cross-country trip with my wife and kids I would opt for the minivan any day.
That's one of those things that sounds super fun when you're opting into it on a weekend.
Much less so on a Tuesday night after a stressful day and your goddamn window won't close even though it's raining and you can't play music because the stereo only takes cassettes and you're not gonna listen to that one fucking Hall and Oates tape again and there's no heat and your neck is sore because the headrest is made of plastic and....
Creature comforts are most important when you're not thinking about them. I don't ever want to get in my car and think, "ah, this is what it means to be human! this is REAL!"
Well, I lived my entire 20s like that. Moved to Russia, lived in a Soviet era dorm, travelled to Vladivostok in a 4th class carriage etc. So it’s not theoretical…
For a while... until it isn't. I've been very poor, and I've experienced very similar things. Traveling everywhere by bike in the freezing cold.
I think there is a romaniticization of suffering. I also wanted to show my merit, my worth in some way. I had grown up in a very cushy environment, and I was trying to prove something.
Going back in time I would advise anyone against your belief. Anyone who reads this, please don't make the mistake of living a rough life for whatever inane purpose you can think of. It will not make you a better person. It is as stupid as it sounds.
Biking everywhere in the rain is what you do if you live in Copenhagen, and it does make you a better person.
It always warms my heart to see my fellow citizens in one of the wealthiest societies in the world, walking and biking to work in the rain and wind that is Danish winter. Or when you go to the beach when the water is 12 degrees and there are already families there, splashing around. That fills me with hope.
Driving a climate controlled car 3 blocks to the shop is not the pinnacle of civilisation.
Sigh, this sounds like a weird spiritual extrapolation from the often used specious aphorism "that which does not kill you makes you stronger", try telling that to someone who's just had a heart attack.
In what way scientifically speaking does biking specifically in the rain make you a "better person"? Biking can definitely help with your health and is certainly a good way to get around, but the rain can obstruct your vision and could cause your breaks to lock up if you had to stop suddenly.
I don’t think I’ve actually met anyone in real life that doesn’t believe that it’s better to challenge yourself and not always take the most comfortable option.
That’s why people brag about waking up at five and hiking up a mountain before breakfast, and that’s why we have all those sayings, which obviously don’t apply to heart attacks.
But maybe it’s a cultural thing, it seems a lot of Americans aren’t ashamed of driving 3 blocks to the store to get milk.
As you wish. I will then just suggest you don’t prescribe your beliefs to unwitting followers without heavy disclaimer. I think your philosophy is both harmful and unsubstantiated.
For the most part I totally agree with you. That is why I enjoy leaving the comfort if my home to go backpacking in the mountains or something. Sometimes challenging yourself can make you feel more alive!
It is just that from personal experience, a road trip with small children has enough rough edges that road/engine noise so loud that the kids can't sleep does not have to be one of them...
The way I describe it to people is like this: some folks like to feel a nicely sanded handle, and other folks like to sand down a handle so that it feels nicely sanded.
"I don't think corporations/businesses are to blame... The average consumer is extremely ill-informed."
This is very unfair - the average cobsumer is purposefully mislead on a daily basis, for example applle forbids apps from informing consumer that 30% of their donation to a charity is taken.
With industrial goods, there is a whole department who's job is proqurement and to know what they are buying. And lets not pretent no funny business ever happens there either.
But lastly, some consumer good are better - DSLR's beat any industrial cameras, and commercial dishwashers are a toally different beast, unsuitable and dangerous to a naive user.
I was surprised that the App Store would take a cut of charity donations, so I looked it up and pretty much every forum post I found says that you’re actually forbidden from collecting donations using in app purchases, and have to do so through out of band methods to get through App Review? [1]
Kind of difficult to take a cut of payments you explicitly don’t allow on your platform, isn’t it?
I don't use Facebook so I don't know if that page is misleading, but it certainly looks like you can donate money (in the legal meaning!) through Facebook's iOS app.
I think most of the recent takes were about Twitter's tip jar that would potentially let you send money to nonprofits. But, Twitter so far has avoided using the word "donate" and its legal implications.
> from informing consumer that 30% of their donation to a charity is taken
For me the biggest concern is that people want this to happen and even would go as far as say that people get a perverse sense of satisfaction from Apple's unfair behavior. Because it validates the widespread pessimism and 'everything is broken' mentality that is normalized nowadays
I agree consumers are misled but Apple is a poor example here. I know the App Store fee is a popular topic right now but they are one of the few companies making a consumer product that is bounds ahead of military or industrial versions.
They are a perfect example of a company that purposefully misleads, and forces other companies they work with to mislead, for example on the subject of repairs - to be authorised repair shop for apple, you have to lie to a customer that recovering their data is impossible, and is my view that shoupd be illegal.
They products might be good, but their methods are ruthless - they are wanna-be like mexican cartels.
This started off as a fun article about "what's the most overkill way I can get this?" and then looking for second-hand fighter jet seats just for the shits and giggles.
I like that.
But then it goes south from there, the author seems to believe that anything that isn't from the USA military must be crap:
> Made in the USA from military grade [...] preferably a military supplier [...] This is the real thing, used by the US military. [...]
> Consumer goods suck. You keep buying them. [emphasis theirs]
> The average consumer is an idiot, so the bean counters keep milking them.
So we're idiots for buying a regular knife instead of some military variant that makes you look like, well, someone who would carry a gun as well? Or regular napkins rather than some special cleanroom rated upgrade? I think I'm good, thanks.
Author here. I need to push back on this. This whole post is tongue in cheek, totally over-the-top and my way of doing things. I thought that was obvious including a lofty claim of an average consumer. People seem to be hung up on that. No one is calling you an idiot - and no, I have no romance for US military. Bought plenty of things from Swedish, Canadian and Swiss military and other industries. You’re unnecessarily painting a character picture that’s going with your biases, borderline politicizing it with gun ownership - I’d like you to think about this and reconsider how you judge people.
For what it’s worth - I’ve also bought overkill items and they’ve turned out to be a disaster. For instance, for the TPI fan in the example - I had to get an industrial fan controller because it was too damn loud and restaurant grade containers that are not BPA-free.
After working on a farm, I updated my scale of measurement for tough/functional equipment. Used to think mil-surplus was the way to go, but quickly learned that what you say is absolutely true (at least for US gear). My new gold-standard is "farmer-proof". Was struck by the absolute beating that farm equipment had to take. Often it was being used in unexpexted/improper ways with minimum maintenance by operators with little or no training... (These all apply to military equipment too, but the farm acquisition process is purely utilitarian, as opposed to the nonsense that goes into specing and purchasing military gear). Equipment purchased on a farm is rarely the best available, but is always optimized to get the job done with the maximum possible usible lifespan.
Indeed, this concept that "military grade" quality is superior to consumer grade is mythological in many cases. It is all about the relative worthiness of the specification(s) to which the product is built, meaning that crappy specs yield crappy results, whether military or commercial. Also the amount of rework sometimes required on "military grade" gear to make it actually do its job is seldom publicized except in occasional oversight proceedings in some countries. So, "military grade" is a mysterious, mythological, misused quality.
Totally disagree. I’ve bought all kinds of items from surplus stores and Swiss military gear. Usually, better by a large margin. The only thing it suffers is aesthetics if you care about such things.
I use a Swiss "weapons bag" made in the 40s out of 8mm thick leather for my laptop, I love the aesthetics! Any links to places where I can get more Swiss military gear?
At least in the area of outdoor gear (clothes, packs, tents, sleeping bags, etc) I know serious military dudes buy the high end commercial stuff, sometimes with their own money, rather than get stuck with “military grade” stuff.
I’m really into camping and outdoors stuff, but have never heard of this. What do commercial packs / sleeping bags look like? Are they heavier? What commercial use even is there for this sort of thing? I’m so interested!
I’m a huge fan of buying high quality gear that’ll last forever - do you have any ideas where to shop for these?
That is what I meant. The stuff you can buy at REI or specialty outdoor stores, or direct online these days.
The demand became so great after September 11 that several outdoor gear manufacturers pivoted entirely to military products—Dana Gleason and Wild Things, among others.
My assault pack (army backpack) feels like it can survive reentry from space. Military gear has gotten so much better since I joined the military 24 years ago, but it’s so much more expensive.
Cleanroom wipes are actually great. I use them all the time in lab, no lint, often woven and super durable, chemical resistant fibers. Totally overkill for some, although I have taken some home when we had odd sized samples we didn't need and they make nice cleaning wipes.
Being made in the USA is absolutely a pretty good quality indicator. It’s not the only country that makes good stuff (most EU countries + Japan are good as well), but in the absence of domain expertise it’s a great heuristic.
I'm talking about proper brand name construction knifes like Mora... Using the wrong tool for wrong job will break them, but used properly they aren't easy to break.
I am not really disagreeing with you. However, with knives, not any product will even work decently.
You need good enough steel to take and then hold an edge. So it can not be super cheap steel with big particles, as you will never manage to get that knife sharp enough to use.
On the other hand, super hard hrc+++ cheapo knives will also not do much for you. First, because they are rarely sharp and second, because in a kitchen environment where not every cut is going to be perfect and nice to the blade, the blade is going to be effed. It's gonna be sharp for lunch and a disaster by dinner.
However, you are right that good knives for very little money are available. I have been using several Victorinox knives that are plyable and robust. They can be made very sharp without much effort, and stay that way for reasonable amounts of time.
And that's the point. I don't really need to throw them away. They don't really look fancy, true. But they are in daily use since... six years? Eight?
And the price difference to supermarket knives was probably 10-20 euros/dollars.
Edit: And I say this as someone who has a random assortment of sharpening/honing utensils and really only barely knows what he is doing with them.
Good midrange, perhaps not necessarily Wüsthof (aka the macrobrew of European knives), but other proven knive brands, is a very good option for people who don't do Sashimi every day.
I've found that Moras need a sharpen before they're really fit for duty.
And at that point, may as well keep sharpening them. What's the point of having a Scandi grind carbon steel blade if you don't sharpen it? There is literally no easier geometry or grind, and who cares if you scratch it a little?
I don't feel bad losing it (haven't) or breaking it (haven't) either. But taking a dull knife, letting it get duller, then tossing it, really doesn't sit right with me.
No, they just talk to each other and take turns being the lowest one.
I mean how many military equipment companies can you sustain with a country the size of California? Whatever your answer, above a certain pay grade, all employees come from a single engineering school anyways.
If you’ve ever looked into military procurement, there are a number of MIL standards and a specific list of requirements. If the product meets specifications and testing results, picking anyone but the lowest bidder accounting for other “soft” commercial aspects such as company stability, leadership, and book health; would be foolish and irresponsible.
I’ve seen several comments here that “military” grade means lowest bidder. That’s optimal.
Look at it this way - consumer market is completely unregulated, no specifications and lots misleading terminology. Any Military would crucify you for fraud.
Is it perfect? No. Is it close to perfection? Yes. Also look into medical grade things such as scissors.
Sometimes the lowest bidder is the lowest because they purposely underbid knowing they will have cost/schedule overruns later and the customer would rather throw good money after bad than start the process over with nothing to show. I like the second lowest bidder process mentioned elsewhere.
I’ve worked in procurement and let me tell you - there is a lot more than looking at a ranked list of bidders and going “oh look, lowest bidder. Job done, let’s go with these folks.” The caricature on HN is so incredibly misleading. Supplier selection is quite involved.
"Military grade" has very different connotations if you have been in the service. So yeah, great conversation starter, interesting worldview; can't say I share it though.
Problem with the spec is often that the military "needs a car". But the specification process forces them to design all the parameters, and they end up with a very rigorous spec for "Toyota Camry, no A/C, coyote brown, steel wheels" which adds up to 800 pages and a product that even Toyota can't produce for less than $250k/unit. Meanwhile, by the time they've written the spec, the CyberTruck has been designed, marketed, produced, and iterated, and exceeds the spec in every meaningful dimension. The military has required an entirely US-based supply chain that will sustain their vehicle for the next 30 years, but accepts that it's entirely reasonable, in that circumstance, that each washer (Type 304 stainless, O.D. +/- 0.00001 inch) is $47.82/unit.
That's a really interesting point that explains the $600 hammer urban myths - the military has a ton of constraints in their specs that are defendable, but result in much higher costs than equivalent consumer spec.
The cybertruck won't meet milspec because it runs solely on battery power. A military vehicle needs to be able to run in expeditionary environments with the ability to store and carry extra fuel for long range operations and refuel quickly. Neither one of those requirements can be met by a battery vehicle.
It's just a couple of made-up examples to illustrate a possible scenario; I'm sure the military didn't really ask for a Toyota Camry either.
This does bring up a different issue though, which is that any time someone uses a hypothetical example to illustrate a point on the Internet, responses end up picking apart the example instead of the point itself.
This is my periodic comment reminding everyone who has to support more than one computer to not buy the consumer versions from Dell, HP, whatever. They're built from whatever was in the parts bin today. No two of them will be the same.
Just buy a toy tested according to European Union standards, and labelled with the "CE" mark.
> Drop the toy, or the relevant toy component, five times through a height of (850 ± 50) mm on to a 4 mm thick steel plate with a 2 mm thick coating of Shore A hardness (75 ± 5) as measured according to EN ISO 868 or ISO 7619-2 and which is placed on a non-flexible horizontal surface.
> Prior to release, orientate the toy in a position that allows the most onerous impact onto the coated surface of the steel plate.
(850mm is 2¾ ft.)
More seriously, I think some of these regulations do prevent the lowest-quality stuff you might find in the USA being legally sold in the EU.
Are you teasing us: do you actually use a compass camping? I've never met someone (who wasn't a Boy Scout) that camps so hard they need a compass! (Said in a joking yet genuinely curious voice.)
and the first thing to know when bringing a map and compass into the backcountry is that if you didn't use them (properly!) to get in, it'll be hard-to-impossible to use them to get you back out. There's more to it than you think!
Orienteering is a deep enough subject to be a tool, hobby and sport. Recommended skill, just for the entertainment value
Side note: Oriente(e)ring is still, AFAICT, part of phys. ed. in Nordic schools just like it was decades ago when I went. Conscription also helps, of course.
On the whole, I'm pretty damn satisfied with the overweening cradle-to-grave nanny state, making sure you get at least the rudiments of basic life skillz and all.
If you are going into the wilderness, you should really check a map beforehand. At very least, figure out which cardinal direction you can go to get back to civilization. Even just knowing "walk west and eventually you'll hit a highway" greatly improves your odds if you get very lost.
Funny you mention that. Last year in Oregon a man stepped off the trail near a place called the Gorge while hiking too close to sunset, its is a huge wilderness north of the 26. People kept saying: dude, if you just went south you'd hit the freeway, but apparently he tried that and there were unscalable hills/cliff faces/vegetation for dozens of miles that when he followed them for a place to descend got him even more lost! Beyond me why someone would go off trail, or even start hike that late in the day!
Yep, I do! I camp deep in the woods, sometimes alone, and I have a tremendous respect for the danger of getting lost and have several layers of plans to prevent, and react to, that outcome. A good reliable compass is a part of that.
Trijicon scopes were top dog for a very long time and to this day are still fantastic hardware. They're just one of many examples where the supplier cares about the product and it's reflected in the quality.
"Military grade" Is an entirely useless marketing buzzword. We are at the point where products are being marketed with "Military grade PCI-E slots" and "Aerospace grade aluminum spoon"
I appreciate the link and summary for McMaster-Carr[1].
It is so pleasing to use this site and it is simultaneously full of utility as they stock a wide array of fixtures and hardware that are difficult to search for elsewhere.
If you place an order before noon (typically) the box of goods will be in your hands the next day.
The user interface is a wonder. It's too good to be true. In fact, using the UI actually saddens me because you know some kid who thinks they are a design genius is going to get hired there and "improve things". It's almost a physical law.
The results are indeed good. Makes you wonder how much we're really getting from the newer technology -- people have much better tools available, but use them to make a much worse user experience. (The data point we're missing is what McMaster would look like if they used newer tools, however. It might be even better, if such a thing is even possible.)
My curiosity would not let me pass this up. I had to find out what requirements specifically made it nuclear grade, and apparently it is certified to lack chlorides so it won't chloride-corrode (no word on galvanic corrosion) whatever it is slapped onto [1].
I’m not surprised to see you evangelizing McMaster - mentally, I bin you and them in the same category of “no bullshit” suppliers. Products for competent people, by competent people, when most suppliers seem to be targeting the lowest common denominator of consumer.
100%. I've been thinking about writing an article about McMaster-Carr's design and user experience. I've been using it for 10+ years. It's so much deeper than the web design - the moment you place an order, their return process, obtaining technical specs, datasheets and alternate unit system measurement, the entire experience of shopping on McMaster-Carr. Furthermore, their physical catalog design is also exceptional - from typography to layout, it's the pinnacle of what good design is and exemplifies what's wrong with everything today.
I just fear one day some new intern, engineer, designer or manager is going to join and ruin it. It will be a sad day.
I've kind of noticed this in general with MRO (Maintenance, Repair, and Operations/Overahaul) organization suppliers in general, and any site that caters to procurement organizations or frequent repeat direct buyers. They tend to be very no-nonsense and streamlined, and very pleasant to work with. This might just be a cultural bias on my part, thought.
Interestingly, Far Eastern sites I've seen, even MRO and procurement-oriented sites, but especially consumer-facing sites, tend to be extremely information-dense. To my Western site-accustomed sensibilities, they feel "too busy", but after awhile I understood the aesthetic (calligraphic script languages tend to have a higher information throughput per unit area than alphabet-script languages, and this seems to bleed over into aesthetics as well).
Like the Hobart mixer from this article, I always find it interesting that many of the best "overkill" objects are simply ones from the early/mid 20th century before manufacturers figured out it makes more economic sense to pump out low quality shit that will break just after the warranty expires.
I'm into old school espresso machines, and there is a robust market (and some fascinating refurb videos) for older, lever espresso machines - the quality and design is just much better than any consumer-grade equipment that is sold today.
I've been considering the economics around a startup company that exclusively produces home appliances & tools that are purely electro-mechanical in design.
I know I am not alone in saying that I would happily pay a 2-3x premium for any appliance if it were engineered properly and actually left out all the ridiculous technological bullshit it never needed in the first place. To this day, no one at Best Buy can explain to me how WiFi helps me clean my clothes better or faster.
Also consider the current economics around the chip shortage... Relays, A/C induction motors, electromagnets, switches and all other essential macro-scale components required for building a washing machine or clothes dryer can still be built by human hands in any factory on earth. Not only are all of these things available now, they are arguably the superior engineering choice when making something intended to deliver value to the end user.
The technological bullshit often makes the device much better.
Let's take an object I'm quite familiar with: an espresso machine. Some like the classic Rancilio Silvia are 100% electromechanical. It's nice and simple, but there are downsides:
* Temperature regulation is very coarse, because it's done with thermal relays.
* There's no timing. All manual.
* There's no water sensor.
* There are potential failure modes.
It's a machine that'll be happy to try to keep pumping nothing until the pump burns out, and that produces variable results depending on the user's timing and precision. Popular add-ons include a PID controller to fix the temperature regulation, a pressure gauge (analog is fine there, but digital could also be used for safety), and a stopwatch.
Once you look into coffee forums frequented by the fans of well made coffee, you see that one really sought after thing is control and precision. Precisely controlling the grind, the amount of coffee, the amount of water, the temperature and the timing. Notice something? It's all stuff that electronics excel at, and humans suck at. Controlling timing, weight and water flow is a perfect task for a machine, which it can do with impeccable precision.
And along with that stuff, it can improve safety eg, by noticing things like "The heater has been on for a minute yet temperature doesn't seem rising -- maybe the sensor is broken". Plus quality of life thing like warming up on a timer, and automatically turning off afterwards.
The issue isn't with electronics but with electronics being applied in the wrong direction.
> The issue isn't with electronics but with electronics being applied in the wrong direction.
This is also an issue with IoT in general. The internet functionality replaces basic functionality instead of being built on top. No, I don't want to wash my clothes with an app! But I would not mind the fscking machine to shut the fuck up at night and remind me in the morning to empty it. Not a hard thing to do. Same with e.g. light switches, if there's no internet it should still work, some don't, awful.
Take my idea. Produce the same children's toys which make noises and make the same thing with maximum volume a lot less. That's it. Your marketing is taken care of right there.
To be fair... there was _a lot_ of heavy-duty crap back that was badly designed, poisonous/polluting or novely. It's just that you don't see it now because it's all rusted away or lives in junkyards.
At the same time, there is other stuff that is good quality but that could never be produced today because of liability concerns, but if you're in a home without small children running around you're probably good.
I'm the proud owner of a La Peppina espresso machine (image: https://www.home-barista.com/levers/my-first-lever-la-peppin...). It makes great espresso, but it also keeps a kettle of boiling water suspended on a relatively small pedestal where you push down on the lever next to it. I'm glad I own one because something like it will never be produced again.
I'm not really seeing the point here. Lever espresso machines exist and continue to be manufactured. La Pavoni and Olympia continue to make lever espresso machines that work just fine.
A lot of the reliability concerns from tools of the past are frankly quite well justified, and to this date we continue to sell and produce tools that are dangerous if not properly operated.
Older machines, like La Peppina and Caravel, are open boiler machines, meaning the boiler is not pressurized. The way the water flows means they have excellent temperature stability for espresso (the boiler is of course at 100C, so the brew temp is right around 95C).
Of course, an open boiler means there are a lot more potential safety issues.
The lines of the one in your picture are a bit softer, rounder, where those of the one in the GP's link are a bit more squared off. I'm guessing same basic model, but yours a few years older and theirs younger; yours before and theirs after the mid-model-life facelift.
The recommendation for a commercial panel which avoids built smart TV functions is one I'm taking seriously. We have an Apple TV connected and use nothing else. Does anyone have experience or recommendations?
Find the hospitality version of whatever you want from CDW (Samsung and LG do a lot of them, idk about Sony). They are designed for hotels and hospitals, and have the same picture quality but no smart stuff.
Yeah....BUT those panels are designed for, more or less, static images in well lit rooms.
Things like contrast ratio, how well it does dark colors in a dark room or fast intesity refreshing (like 60Hz "fast") may be questionable. It probably also expects super consistent and clean power...some houses dont have that.
Sure you could make it a giant Dakboard with a giant static image and not really worry about burn in for years.
Ultimately. I went with a cheap panel from say costco and a roku on a separate vlan (so my overkill is a network that can do vlan segmentation). Ultimately the roku TV's can scan themselves to death and report that they are on a network with other roku TV's all they want. Or you could just get a cheap-o smart TV and hook up the appleTV (cost came into play for me). I do have some LG smart TV's, one died within 3 years already...Meanwhile my Samsung 55" Plasma from 2008 had taking a direct lightning strike that took out the others and keeps on ticking. (and resulted in the TCL roku and LG tvs being installed).
So all of that is to say. I just go cheap panel that i dont mind replacing. And just keep them isolated entirely.
I bet we bought the exact same panel, since I bought mine based on the same HN discussion. The Sceptre 65" something something? Very happy with it so far.
I have an LG 'smart' TV but I just don't use any of the smart functionality. I don't have any problem with it, it just defaults to the HDMI my GoogleTV is on. Sometimes the dog will bump the TV controller (which sits untouched on the coffee table) and it will pop up a menu for a second, but it goes away by itself. I haven't interacted with the TV itself other than to change the picture mode to nighttime in about a year.
So why go to the trouble of not having the smart menu stuff rather than just not using it?
A nag every 5 minutes to do so, lags and slow startup time due to all the stuff running in the background and, to top it off, horrible settings menus as the actual picture is not the main focus.
My Vizio M55-E0 has a noticeably (much, much) slower UI if it's not connected to the internet, though it's probably just poor design rather than an intentional thing. Definitely never buying another Vizio, though.
Using a ka-bar for hiking is a terrible idea. At 0.7lbs it weighs as much as a quality sleeping bag/tent/pack. Also, you likely don’t need a knife. Scissors are much more useful, and micro scissors weigh less than an ounce.
Ultralight hiking adds an interesting forcing function to gear - correctly “built” (as in not overbuilt or under built). Bring the gear which matches the need. In essence, the complete opposite sentiment of this post.
I bring a fixed blade knife hiking. Can split wood in a pinch. Not nearly as heavy as a ka-bar, though.
Your point still stands, though. I had a military pack and couldn’t believe how heavy it was even when empty. Ultralight hiking gear is pretty amazing and optimized for an entirely different goal. That said, I still feel like specialty gear like this is a different class than the average consumer stuff.. closer to industrial or military in design than Amazon junk.
A lot depends on the wildlife you could expect to encounter - a pair of micro scissors weighing less than a ounce won't be useful against even a smallish dog went feral. (Lots of stray dogs around the places I live, not all of them good boys)
Having a rugged piece of metal that you could use for defense, prying stuff apart, lever, axe is a must for me. Especially one that is easy to re-sharpen with a simple rough whetstone.
I go hiking with esee 6 - it is comforting to know it is there if the going gets rough since it is nigh indestructible
> You don't need a knife backpacking either. I did 200 miles on the PCT without even bringing a knife.
I don't generally need a knife in my daily life either, but I still carry one at all times. In the same sense that I often wear a seatbelt, despite hopefully never needing one, and having driven many hundreds of thousands of miles without one ever proving useful.
It's just when it comes to hiking vs. backpacking, the calculus of what to carry changes significantly because when backpacking you implicitly are carrying much more junk than on a hike.
For me hiking is much closer to a long walk in civilization than backpacking; I encounter more people, and carry my knife just like I do around town. Hiking is actually especially unique since it tends to be done civilization adjacent, and for some idiots that's the most accessible source of cover for criminal fuckery or desperate homeless living.
It’s double edged so maybe not. I think if I needed to split wood I’d want a hatchet.
With the hiking I like to do, I hike all day, boil water for food with a canister stove, and pass out. So I optimize for weight - less weight = more miles (and is much more comfortable).
Yeah I really like that style too. Sometimes we hike to a nice spot and just stay there a couple of days. I'll pack differently for that. It's so much fun with little kids that don't have as much range. You could still baton through wood with the k bar but there are better options.
Which is - obviously - very different than backcountry winter camping in which you’re already pulling a sled behind skis. Bring that axe, fresh food and bottle of wine.
I use a knife all the time while hiking - good luck cutting a salami with scissors. That said, the ka-bar is not worth the weight. I really like my benchmade hidden canyon.
I’ve always got by with a simple folding spyderco knife. Small. Lasts forever. Does 90% of jobs when backpacking or around the house, etc. a ka-bar is a fine car camping knife though. Meant to take abuse and be a multi purpose heavy duty tool. We mostly overland and car camp these days. Different tools for different purposes and all that.
I use a $4 folding "outdoor" pocket knife from Wal-Mart. I have used it for cooking, digging holes, cutting branches, rope, plastic, fabric, tightening screws, fixing zippers, opening cans of food, hammering random things... I honestly can't remember the last time I sharpened it, it doesn't seem to be dull yet.
I could get behind some of these. Like that Hobart mixer. Granted, I don't use a mixer 24/7 in a bakery, but my first Kitchen Aid overheated and broke after ~5 years.
I'd prefer if commodity things, like computer mice, were made to last, and not $5 pieces of cheap plastic that end up in landfills. But I'm the person who complains about the tons of cheap plastic trash sold in 0.99 stores while able to afford $500 mixers.
I wish there was a happy medium, where society didn't demand China produce plastic stuff that turns into trash within a month, destroying the environment exponentially.
At least things things like Kitchenaid mixers are easily fixable if you still have it. Ours recently died after about 8 years, and it was a pretty quick turn around from model number > spec sheet > motor number > $80 replacement. The actual swap took less than 15 minutes with nothing more than a phillips screwdriver.
I did the same with our microwave when the door close sensors failed. The internet has made fixing things infinitely easier, as spec sheets and part suppliers are available to everyone.
Both the KitchenAid and the Hobart use a planetary action which is not the best for kneading bread. A better idea is to find a small spiral mixer where the bowl rotates and the mixer blade spins in place. I have a Haussler Alpha and it's great for tough doughs, and seems appropriately overbuilt.
> If you really want to rewire your house to mix 20 gallons of dough at a time...go for it I suppose. But do the homework first.
You could get a 3 phase commercial standby genset installed and have the remote annunciator for it mounted next to whatever monster 3 phase stand mixer in your kitchen. All in all this would run you ~50K USD.
Every day people spend far more money on way stupider bullshit than what I just proposed.
Restaurant supply stores are a great place to get kitchenware. Some of it doesn’t work in a home kitchen (for instance, you probably don’t want your smallest Tupperware to be a quart). Some of it, though, is perfect. My favorite purchase has been a huge cutting board with rubber grip material on one side and rulers printed on the other. It’s thick plastic so it’s never warped despite repeatedly putting it in the dishwasher.
If you’re lucky enough to live near one that lets consumers buy food, too, that’s great. 20 pounds of very high quality pasta for like $8 or $10.
stainless steel serving pans and steam table trays are great roasting pans; abusable, scrub clean easily, stackable, etc. "consumers" get enameled oval pans that served our grandmothers as poorly as they do now.
Also caught some lovely cheap "disposable" paring knives that have served in our kitchen for several years and still going strong.
As an espresso enthusiast with a rather robust prosumer setup, I considered 'overkill' commercial options, which are widely available and roughly the same price (sometimes less, with work).
The overkill options...well, they're not made for home, which actually makes them worse for home use cases. Sure, a La Marzocco Linea can pull a thousand shots a day with extreme consistency and temperature stability.
My Lelit Bianca can't keep up on volume, but it is smaller, reaches operating temperature more quickly, and is temp stable for the number of shots I pull even with a dozen people over for a party. It uses a standard electrical plug, it has a consumer-grade warranty, and it's relatively easy to maintain for a regular Joe like me.
So sure, a commercial version of a thing might be more robust, longer-lasting, etc., but what tradeoffs are you making to achieve those characteristics?
Fyi, I have an industrial fan in my home similar to the one listed at the end of the article [1]. Beware, they're loud as hell and not really suited for indoors use. It sits dormant now.
I replaced it with a smaller Vornado [2]. Powerful, nearly silent (can't hear the motor, only the blades), with a durable sealed-bearing motor. Much better.
If it's cold my HVAC would cycle and would get temperature swings. I installed a vornado space heater and it worked wonderfully. It had a continuous air flow and would keep the temperature in the room very stable.
And then it wore out and I got a new model with electronic controls, which didn't work so well. The original had mechanical controls and were set and forget. I believe the electronic model would reset after a power failure, and would have a timer that would turn it off after using it for a while, both non-features.
Interesting. The Vornado fan I linked is pure mechanical. I have three that have been running without problem for years, the oldest since 2017, fwiw (during the warm half of the years).
In one job, I used to support just about every size of networkable color and b&w printer from 2 manufacturers. In the cost analysis to operate these things, it became clear: the larger and more expensive printers were not just faster, more reliable, and easier to repair, their supplies were cheaper per page. Their acquisition costs were higher.
For anyone needing to churn out flat dead trees more than once a week: I recommend getting a used flagship color laser printer with a low page count and in good condition instead of an inkjet printer. No more running ink, no more calibration pages, no more dried-out ink cartridges, and no more overpriced supplies.
You don't even have to get them used, if you watch for large color laser printers to come up on clearance when they are a generation or two old you can get a steal. I got my huge dell color laser for about $150 with free shipping. I have two kids who print stuff all day and in 3 years I have replaced the toner maybe one or two times (each color + black is a different cartridge). I haven't had to replace whatever you call the discard toner collector yet. Replacement toner is available in many brands of generic, costs $12 on amazon (less if you buy multipacks, which I don't because I would have to store them for years), and you can print many hundreds of pages before having to replace it. It's a huge monster that has never had a single issue other than a paper jam once or twice. Print quality is as good as you can expect from a laser printer. (It goes without saying I guess that it has a built in duplexer)
We're clearly not talking about the same class of printer. I was talking about flagship, departmental printers that typically do not sit on a table but have their own wheels and 3+ paper trays. I also avoid rebadged brands because they are less likely to have the breadth of repair parts that top-tier enterprise printers do (advice from the printer repair guy).
Sure, you can get smaller enterprise laser printers of many brands for cheap, but the smaller you go, the less repairable they are and the more expensive they are to operate.
Some of the cartridges I use go to multiple tens of thousands of pages. I never have had a paper jam on anything other than a printer with bad grabber rollers or cheap desktop models. Some of my printers have auto-stapling and collating. Basically, I never need a FedEx Office store unless I'm out-of-the-area.
A sentence I never thought I'd say: Gee, that ejector seat doesn't look very comfortable.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it feels fine even if you sit in it long periods of time. However, I'm sure that it only comes in one size, that size being the right size to pilot a plane with an ejector seat. Anyone too big or small wasn't considered in its design because they'd never make it into the relevant flight program to begin with.
My point is, consumer objects have to be designed a bit more inclusively than that, to be able to sell to a wider range of buyers. That big Hobart mixer is in the same boat: It's designed for people who wouldn't have gotten that bakery job if they couldn't work with a large, heavy piece of kitchen equipment.
Positively uncomfortable for long periods. Having sat in a number of MB seats in aircraft museums for short intervals, this is exactly the wrong seat to choose for comfort. They are quite adjustable though, interesting provenance:
> The average consumer wants this stuff. It sells. They want pizzaz over functionality and durability.
What is functionality though? What is pizzaz? When are they the same and when are they different?
E.g. the famous Emeco 1006 chair, which won a contract to supply the US Navy by being thrown out a window and not breaking. It became a design classic, and now sells for $600 each. It gained a kind of following, which is in part based on this history. But is that durability especially functional for your home or restaurant environment which isn't on a warship? Do you think you're going to use your chair as a hammer some days? Or is fetishizing something used by the military and extreme durability its own form of pizzaz?
> But is that durability especially functional for your home or restaurant environment which isn't on a warship?
If I knew it would be handed down for generations of my descendants, then I absolutely want that durability. A tremendous amount of economic and environmental harm comes from unnecessary product acquisition churn over generations at the scales of populations we're currently dealing with. If I can equip my descendants (who are likely to at best propagate at barely replacement rate with current socioeconomic trends that seem resource and energy-bound and unlikely to change until fusion or similar energy breakthrough is made) with 50-80% of their material goods throughout the stages of their lives and eliminate their capex, that is a hell of an advantage of confer compared to previous generations' patterns.
Wanting to buy goods that last a lifetime or four seems like a good motivation, and I agree that it's harmful that we build crap that we fully expect to be thrown away in 5 years.
However ... there's plenty of solid hardwood furniture which can survive multiple generations of regular use, but which would not survive being pitched from an upper floor window. And arguably, depending on sourcing, wood has a better environmental footprint of aluminum, which involves open pit mines and energy-intensive refining.
> I want a Martin Baker ejection seat as a chair in my living room
I get the draw, but comfort in these seats is mixed. You should be able to sit in them for a few hours, but remember that the foam is dense enough to handle 7Gs.
Love my infrared thermometer for steeping tea at exact temperatures. These things are terrible for medical purposes since they only measure surface temperature, but they're perfect for diagnosing industrial machinery and tea. Also more versatile than those expensive programmable tea-brewing contraptions!
I do this but for everything in my kitchen. I bought a very expensive HVAC-grade Fluke IR thermometer which can handle temperature ranges from -40C to 550C.
Being able to instantly & remotely measure the temperature of anything (with reasonable emissivity characteristics) is like a super power. There is nothing in my kitchen or grill area that can exceed the range of the IR sensor on this unit. There are only a few things that have problems with direct sampling. I cook almost exclusively with cast iron, so IR readings are always dead accurate.
The unit runs on a single AA battery, has a backlight, and somehow still hasn't needed a new battery since I bought it 4 years ago (used almost every day).
I had to cook in someone else's kitchen not too long ago, and found myself going insane at not being able to tell exactly how hot the oil was in a pot used for frying.
The problem is the emissivity calibration, as different materials have different IR characteristics. For food, the best by far is the fast contact Thermapen (get the original British version rather than the heavily marked-up US licensee's).
One thing I've always wished I had space for was using a seat from a Mercedes or BMW as my desk chair. I saw someone post about it decades ago. You can pick them up from the junkyard for less than a fancy desk chair.
You screw it to a piece of plywood and get a car battery to power it, and you've got a 26 way adjustable seat with lumbar support, seat heaters and seat coolers, and all the other fancy features of a car seat. And it's usually made of super durable easy to clean materials. You get a swingarm to hold your keyboard and monitor and you're all set with the ultimate chair.
digikey and mcmaster are wonderful things to know about.
at least in 2012 or so, digikey still had call centers in minnesota and the upper peninsula, and still taught all their call center reps the nato alphabet. There is nothing more crisply charming than a call operator who sounds like Bobby’s mom from Bobby’s World reading you back your resistor SKUs in flawless and rapid phonetic alphabet.
RS doesn't deign to even talk to people who don't have VAT IDs here :-(
It's a shame; as far as I can tell, the only reasonably-priced source for bulk machine screws that I've been able to find was Aliexpress/Alibaba (depending on quantities), and even that has gone to shit with the new import tax rules. (I'm not opposed to paying import taxes. I am opposed to paying a €20 processing fee in addition to €0.30 tax for €1.50 worth of stuff)
In France, they have a different website for the general public ( https://www.rs-particuliers.com ). Its search function is terrible: you basically have to look up the RS ID of whatever your are looking for on the pro site first. But you even have free shipping when ordering during the week-end.
Don't they have similar sites for other EU countries?
Thanks to your comment I just found https://www.rsonline-privat.de but the site doesn't seem to have free shipping during the weekend (at least now 1h before the end of Sunday).
Everyone should shop at restaurant supply stores. You can get identical metal mixing bowls for a fraction of the price of the heavy bowls most people have. Plus they clean easily and stack, so you can have a dozen at the ready easily.
Need trays to alternately shelve while working on different hobbies or projects? Consider rolled-edge baking sheets and a baking rack. Restaurant supply has solved the problem of trays that do not warp and have no sharp edges or corners, at sheet-metal prices.
It used to be like that many years ago. Then it got flooded with posts like "I found this unused tool in my garage, it has been sitting there for 40 years in original packaging, it still works". Has it gone back to its root recently?
+1 for restaurant supply stores. You can find at least one in any reasonably sized city and they have just about everything you could possibly need, from tableware to cookware to appliances to bulk dry goods to cleaning and safety equipment. No frills and competitively priced.
I've ordered from [0] several times and can recommend them as an online option.
Only major downside is that shipping is expensive (unless you join their Amazon Prime equivalent, which is $99/month and doesn't really make sense for a household). I think my last order was around $30 s&h on a ~$200 order.
My workaround is that I save up a big wishlist and then order from them about once a year, and get friends & family to tack on any items they want as well.
I work in semi heavy industry. The industrial grade consumer items are great, but usually heavy. The latest example I have is buying bookcases from Uline. Not cheap, not light. But full steel and can hold binders easily. Getting more shelves and another matching one down the road is also easy.
Flea markets are also another great source for well built items. Have had great luck buying industrial grade tooling and electrical test/measurement equipment there.
Unfortunately this style can be a hard sell for the people you live with. Some people don't want their home to look like a restaurant / workshop / office / warehouse / etc.
I'm all for this type of thinking, but like the others point out, you still need to keep yourself in check and put active effort into figuring out when it makes sense. 'Spartan' isn't the only relevant quality. The Hobart mixer is cool, but might it consume too much energy, or is it too heavy to move around when needed? The beakers are sweet, but am I yet wealthy enough to pretend money isn't real?
All things considered, I would love to see more people put together their own lists of ways you can do better than the consumer default. I'm sure there's plenty of opportunities of this kind.
For skiing, if you want to do it for life, always buy decent boots and ask pros where they get them fitted. Most people ski in boots a size or two too big or with poor cuff alignment (even people at a high level). It is much harder to improve and enjoy your time on snow with these things not addressed.
The consumer approach would dismiss getting a professional fitting as overkill and unnecessary but they really limit their enjoyment.
Not sure about some of the other things, but if you're looking for binoculars outside of work, it's probably for hunting, birding, or sailing. Having done those things, generally a decent 8x42 is all you need. And remember, you're taking them into the field, so some exotic Swarovski 10x50 or Steiner 8x32 laser range finder with compass at $9k is going to make you really sad when it fails. But a 8x42 Nikon Monarch is fine. Absolutely fine. And you won't hate yourself when you drop them out of a blind, or in the water, or swing them into a ladder as you shuffle down in the dark.
That said, smaller binos are fine in most circumstances. I often carry pocket 8x23s around, or even a small monocular, just in case.
You know that guy in movies who weirdly knows waaay too much about the history of every random piece of military screwdriver and seatbelt buckle, and you're always like "that guy doesn't actually exist"? Well, you were wrong. This is that guy.
Is that picture the 20-quart Hobart mixer, or just the 12 quart? Both are good for making a few hundred cookies at a time, and very convenient if you also have a commercial oven.
Now, that's the countertop model, so it only weights 189 pounds, and it's a steal at $6000. Sounds expensive, but it'll last forever, unlike my shitty Kitchenaid mixer that's only worked flawlessly for 30 years, and that I can store in a cupboard and put on the counter without a forklift.
My advice: save a few bucks by learning small appliance repair and buying a banged up mixer from a defunct restaurant a couple towns over! Bring a couple friends and some tie-down straps.
To the general point, I once had a long conversation with an ex-engineer who was selling select European furniture in the US. He was adamant that most American consumers pay no attention to build qualities, and are sold shoddy "night-shift" versions of pieces that have e.g. metal channel reinforcements in Europe, with the shoddy versions certain to show sag etc in a few years.
One specific option is to buy a sofa in a showroom in the US, then immediately go in and reinforce it with metal brackets and/or channels. A higher-end version of Ikea-hacking.
Came to the same realization recently when shopping for kitchen appliances. I couldn't find any blender that wasn't breaking or acting dodgy after a few months. These of course don't come up when you search for them as a consumer but there are for sure industrial blenders used at bars and such. I realized that going forward if I don't want ot have to buy a new one every year or so pretty much for anything I'd have to research and go this route. The beaker glasses is a good example because you sometimes have to get creative to find the industrial version of something.
To make my own recommendation along these lines, Bluffworks pants: https://shop.bluffworks.com/pages/technical-pants I've found them excellent for travel because they remain wrinkle-resistant and looking like I've just stepped out of an office no matter what conditions I put them through, up to and including a month backpacking with constant wear on hikes and irregular sink-washing.
They may not be 'military grade', but I'd say that clothes designed to look like freshly-pressed office wear after a month spent backpacking broadly count.
"Military grade" is not an especially meaningful term. I served in the military, and generally equipment is required to stand up to water and sand and stuff, but it isn't necessarily higher quality or more durable UNLESS that was part of the specification. Lots of the times the military grade equipment was in every way inferior to what you could buy off the shelf for 1/100th of the cost. In other cases a lack of manufacturing scale and building to the spec whether it made sense or not led to things that failed routinely due to poor design or lack of adapting designs based on learning after a first generation.
A good example of being locked into a bogus design is old Humvee turn signals. I have never once had a turn signal on a car fill up with water like a little fishtank, but when PMCSing Humvees I would run into this from time to time. IIRC you had to drill a hole in the bottom to let the water out.
Another case is SINCGARS radios. I don't know if they still use them, but god help them if they do. You had to load crypto on them using arcane magic that almost nobody knew how to do, including me, and I took the 2 week class. If you didn't have the crypto set up properly you couldn't talk to people except on the emergency channel in the clear. I can't count how many times we weren't able to talk to each other because the radios were all screwed up, there was a lot of resorting to cell phones when they were available. You would think something as fundamental as radios would be figured out and fool proof, but in my experience off the shelf walkee talkees would have been far more effective, although not as secure in theory. In practice the mujahideen aren't intercepting and exploiting US communications, but they certainly benefited from the radios being dicked up half the time.
>"Dough maker... It was built in Ohio when we used to make things in the US"
Whenever I see a chance to buy old industrial grade stuff I use it. Nearly everything they used to do lasts forever. If you want to find the same quality now it either not available or you pay through the nose. Granted for many things we probably do not care all that much if they last 3 years or 30.
I briefly lived in a studio apartment. The kitchen was spacious and had tile flooring, so that's where the bandsaw went. I didn't cut food with it, but food packets were fair game.
Though -- I'd argue that using a bandsaw for blisterpacks isn't overkill; it's the safest way to get them open.
I mean, I love the idea of finding more uses for tin snips, but I use a standard utility knife on a cutting board and it works great. The key is to cut all the way around, and press hard through the plastic. Don't force yourself to lever up the plastic, because that's how you slice open your hand.
That sounds incredibly slow in comparison to a bandsaw (also cheap crap from harbor freight -- but I got mine 20 years ago and it's still ticking along fine)
I'm pretty sure that I established that a bandsaw is a kitchen implement (and, it's not even a stretch -- they're common in butcher shops). Is it Alton Brown who says that single-use kitchen appliances are verboten? I tend to agree.
You can also use a bandsaw to cut a sliver off a sheet of 16ga steel and use that to light a cigarette. It's truly all-purpose
A note about the 'Ka-Bar' knife, since I've both been in the Marine Corps and am into knives: the military doesn't use it. In the real world, if you want a knife in the service, you typically buy it yourself.
Does the USMC still use 'bayonets'? Yes, in certain circumstances they're issued--but it's not common, and it's not the Ka-Bar, it's another brand (I forget which one).
TL;DR: Ka-Bar 'USMC knives' are a marketing gimmick.
A brand new Leatherman multitool costs less than 100$. For that price you get a knife, a serrated blade, a pair of pliers/wire cutters and some other stuff that absolutely comes in handy in the real world. It's not as good for fixing to the end of a rifle and stabbing someone, but for every other real world situation it's better.
Trench warfare and massed charges really aren't much of a thing any more. And if you really end up in close quarter combat it's much better to retreat and do something else.
As a weapon, the bayonett is absolutely not obsolete. It may be the only weapon available to a soldier after they run out of ammo. There are infinitely many conceivable situations where retreat is not an option.
Non-professional customers know this, to an approximation. And marketers know that those customers know that. Hence the both the “prosumer” market and the conflation of premium and luxury product lines: “We Are Professional Grade” for expensive trucks, “AirPods Pro” for a luxury product, the upcoming “Nintendo Switch Pro”, etc.
I do this with clothes. You can buy a good pair of hiking shoes or a lightweight waterproof jacket for the same price as design-oriented goods. Why pay Nike for a logo when I can pay Salomon for durability and tread? Same thing with luggage: I buy cycling oriented backpacks and duffle bags because they’re strong and waterproof.
Also, a used Oshkosh M983 as a soccer mom grocery getter. Whenever anyone cuts her off and gives her the finger, she simply shifts into 8x8 mode and drives over them. crunch crunch-crunch /s
The mixer is hipster ridiculous but hilarious. In practice, you can get a Kitchen Aid for $200.
I have my grandparent's Kirby G3 and found the older real HEPA replacement bags (not the new crap ones that dropped the certifications and may not perform as well). It's not an industrial movie theater vacuum or an ice rink zamboni, but it's more of a tank than a Bose, I mean, Dyson or a Samsung piece of plastic.
Speaking of which: if you live in a climate where it snows and freezes, a Zamboni in the garage is essential to making the local kids street ice hockey tournaments happen.
I have a ruggedized phone with Caterpillar Tractor branding. There are other waterproof and rugged phones now, but a few years ago, they were the first to have a smartphone with reasonable toughness. (Of course, before smartphones, there was Nokia.) I have it so that if I get dumped off the horse, I can call for help.
It may not suit you for other reasons, but a cellular Apple Watch will call for help for you if you get dumped off the horse.
I think they're a no brainer for riders, be it motorcycle, bicycle, or horses. If it's not a bad spill, you can cancel, but opt-out is far superior to opt-in for this scenario.
I really like the sentiment, if not some of the specific examples given. An example of my own: I went through several grocery-store-bought hair clippers before getting some "pro" clippers: Oster Classic 76. They work better, they are more repairable and serviceable, and they've lasted me for years.
Commercial products are generally better made and more focused. It's because the world of business is more logical and people are not tempted buy garbage just because they like the actor in a TV commercial. It's about the bottom line, if the product sucks in any shape or form the business would not be a savvy one if it did not buy a better product and would go out of business soon. Not the case when you have disposable income and are not responsible to your shareholders. You're also in the same club as shoppers as Home Shopping Network channel. Products all of a sudden don't need to actually be good, they just need to convince enough of its targeted consumers that it is, be it because they're old and confused and watching TV at 3am or because they saw an ad that was pretty convincing.
My rule of thumb for tools is to always first buy the cheapo Harbor Freight special (I'll get something a little better for precision tools) and if that tool breaks then that means I use the tool enough to justify getting something better.
Spoiler alert: most of my tools are the cheapest I could find.
I like the idea of this, and I'm sure you save a lot of money, but the downside is this: I want to do some one-off job I haven't done before. It'll be difficult, because I will be trying it for the first time. Do I really want to make it even _more_ difficult by cheaping out on tools? I've done this several times, and I've ended up doing several jobs over again with better tools after I've screwed up the first time.
Edit: In other words, cheap tools aren't just less durable, they often do a worse job (or at least make it harder to do a good job).
You would want to start with cheapest thing cause usually you don't know how good things you actually need.
Using cheep tools gives you a freedom to experiment and know the limitations of the domain area and then invest in things that you exactly need without the risk of overpaying or underpaying, all for a minimum investment.
I initially wanted to do the same (needed a drill and a jigsaw for my project, never used them before), but then decided to go with the cheapest Makita which was ~2.5 times more expensive than the cheapest brand, for one reason: safety. For example, the Makita jigsaw had an electric brake (which stops the saw immediately as you release the trigger), while the cheapest tool didn't. Since I didn't have any experience with it, I'd rather not cut my fingers than save some money.
One of my buddies is a construction guy. He just buys consumer grade with warranty and has two sets of everything. He says pro is too expensive given how often they still break and get stolen on the job site.
At the same time I accidentally bought Bosch Professional cordless drill long time ago.
It's biggest problem is that sometimes I forget I have it, then fix what I was doing in few minutes. Also I sometimes forget to charge it, as it holds a charge for years in my practice.
Yeah, but you have to be careful with literally any product available at a big box store. My first foray into the Milwaukee brand was their M12 rotary tool and the speed controller broke after about 2-3 total hours of use. Meanwhile my Grandpa's Dremel from the 70s is still chooching along.
A local company, Varusteleka has been extremely successful and grown rapidly from selling military surplus equipment bought from here and there as well as "tactical" looking stuff made cheaply somewhere.
I've bought for example some Swiss army surplus towels for a bike trip. They were really good (small, durable, functional, beautiful) but a bit too small so you couldn't wrap one around yourself.
They probably get the surplus stuff almost for free, from all around the world. I think it's great, making something desirable out of waste.
Having served, I think a lot of military equipment is really bad, especially clothing. It's bought not by the users but by the organization.
Definitely doing this, if I need something I will look for the industrial option first, we don't have a big military industrial complex in Denmark, so I can't go milspec. Vacuum cleaners is a great place to start,
except louder does not _MATTER_ at all, all vacuums are too loud for comfort, I just put on headphones and over-ear hearing protection, like I also do when mowing the lawn or doing anything else boring and noisy..
Sure, they are 3x as expensive, mine is more like 10x more expensive than a cheapo crap one from the store, but it will outlast 10 of them easily, be servicable, and be 100x nicer to use all of that time.
IDK about that one in the article, but I had an M9 knife in SERE school with a wooden handle and I thought it was absolute crap. Just because it gets issued by the military doesn't mean it's good lol
Military stuff is garbage in general (except the heavy duty weapons) because they are provided to millions of soldiers. They have to make them as cheap as possible.
I'd have thought putting a linux kernel, web server, web client all in a power switch just to turn said power on/off is overkill, but hey, people are different.
When I looked for respiratory masks on a medical supply site, I realized 70°-90° alcohol, single use gloves, liquid soap, tweezers, etc were much cheaper here than on any other website, and especially Amazon which is filled with crap and scams. I now buy from it about twice a year, both for medical stuff and DIY stuff. Delivery is not free (but still fair) and can take about a week since they serve professionals first.
I bought an industrial microwave without the rotating plate many years ago and it still works perfectly to this day and heats evenly enough. :) I would never buy a cheap, retail microwave. Not always but sometimes "I am not wealthy enough to buy cheap things" holds and sometimes industrial-grade equipment designed to be running almost 24/7 is obviously more durable than a retail imitation.
Imagined this would be about people buying construction-grade tools from Home Depot for the house.
I also had a brief recall of the generally med to low quality of home goods my great grandparents would buy from Sears or Montgomery Wards for the kitchen. 1950s 60s 70s. Compared to what my parents bought in the 80s, 90s— over the top quality you would get at Macy’s or, if you had one nearby, a restaurant supply store.
I can comment about the things mentioned at the end. I don't like touch screens, and I don't like "smart" TV sets either (the functions other than the display can be done by the VCR instead; I do have a VCR that can decode captions). (Although, I would want to be able to adjust the picture settings on the TV.)
When I was a kid I had a winter tanker helmet form soviet army. It was super cool thing and my dad I used to put it on every now and then to have some fun. Now at some point I'm hoping to have enough money to buy that ejector seat- It'd be an ultimate item at home or in a office!
I taught myself how to repair stuff so now I can get a lot of stuff for nearly free and repair what I already own. You can buy spare parts for almost anything online today, or even find an alternative part that is cheaper. People throw out things that are barely broken.
Basically, 99% of everyone reading this, their laptop is this but wrapped up.
Nobody "needs" a solid aluminium billet NMC ground down to high tolerance shape mac). The ThinkPad experience, is defined as a sell-job on "you need this"
I don't agree with the punchline. This is a nice thing to flex, and I don't have anything bad to say about buying military/professional/etc stuff when you actually need, but taken literally this is just straight-up a terrible advice. In fact, as someone who is way over-meticulous and tends to overthink when buying stuff, I'm advicing myself (and anyone who is like me in that regard) the polar opposite: if you don't 100% know what you need, just buy (reasonably) cheap simple stuff. Both OP and I just love that feeling of "owning the best stuff", but this is sickness. I just need a toaster, for God's sake, I shouldn't spend 2 evening looking for and $200 buying "the best stuff". "$5 Chinese crap" will do just fine, and, no, it won't break. And if it won't do just fine, I can just throw it away and buy a better thing, now knowing what exactly do I need and why the cheapest option wasn't enough. Similarly like if you've just gotten into climbing, it would be stupid of you to buy the most expensive La Sportiva shoes: you don't know how to use them anyway, and it will be horrible experience. You can buy La Sportiva if you want, but just get a fucking model for beginners. But, really, if you buy half as expensive "meh" brand shoes, you'll be just fine for the first 6 months too. And, yeah, having a beaker as your glassware is cool, but many people would appreciate it more if you'd serve them beer in an actual glass or cup, which is way cheaper and easier to get.
But, anyway, the punchline isn't why I'm writing this: I'd just ignore that if there would be nothing interesting here. What actually strikes me is "I don't think corporations/businesses are to blame" part. I mean, I don't care whom to blame, this is counter-productive. But I've been thinking about that lately, and I cannot let go of the idea that customers being that horribly misinformed is a real problem. This isn't something given. Customer disinformation is an active pursuit of corporations. And, you know what, if I spend a few weeks on the problem, I think I can get an idea of what do I need from a microwave. But everyday I am "choosing" countless stuff just by selecting the "most trustworthy" package. I have no idea what toilet cleaning products should contain, what actually makes them effective and if there is any difference besides the price. I know that 80% of everything written on toothpaste or shampoo package is a lie, but I have no idea what isn't. And this really shouldn't be that hard, people should have at least somewhat clear idea of what is essential, and what is just their preference. Whole markets exist simply by virtue making it a customers' habit to buy their stuff, without knowing why they do so.
This isn't anything new, of course, even though every generation tends to think that nowadays ads are especially horrible and misleading. But given how much some jurisdictions appear to care about fair treatment of customers, I think more money could be spent by governments on countering corporate activity in this area, not helping them. Not necessarily by forbidding stuff, just by sponsoring studies and keeping folks informed.
If you're older, like really old, you can actually remember a time where products were of a much much higher durability before the industry figured out that low durability products were more profitable.
So in actuality some of the suggestions on that site aren't necessarily overkill as industrial products aren't deliberately engineered to fail.
“Engineered to fail” and “planned obsolescence” are both pejorative rephrasings of “consumers prioritize price”
Engineering is an exercise in prioritization. If 90% of consumers buy the cheapest blender on the shelf, the blender made with the cheapest materials wins. Hobart still exists, and still makes good blenders. Consumers just started buying new designs that were more cost efficient.
If you look at the prices of mid twentieth century appliances in some old periodicals, and adjust for inflation, they’re about the price of commercial appliances today.
Before value-engineering, people didn’t have a kitchen full of appliances, they went without.
Value engineering is often criticized, but the plain truth is that it is primarily responsible for the high standards of living we enjoy today.
Something "engineered to fail" may be cheaper because materials that don't last so long are cheaper.
But it's also possible that the material isn't cheaper at all, but the manufaturer gains because if the part wears out sooner they can sell a replacement sooner. That isn't a case of "consumers prioritize price".
For instance, manufacturers have tried to sell printers which refuse to print when there is still quite a bit of ink left in the cartridge. Printers which refuse to let you use all the ink are engineered to fail, but they aren't cheaper than printers that do let you use all the ink. The manufacturer is relying on the fact that obtaining good information is costly; testing printers to rigorously prove this takes resources, and even when it gets discovered, many consumers won't know that the printer is doing this, so they won't use that information in comparing otherwise similar-looking printers.
The “razors and blades model” you’re referring to isn’t really the same thing as obsolescence. People know these items have consumables when they purchase them, and the original item doesn’t “break”, it just inherently requires another product.
The ink cartridge isn't actually consumed. The printer falsely reports that the cartridge is consumed so that the consumer has to purchase another one.
Does the following scenario often happen with value engineering or is it just my mind playing tricks on me?
A product category exists at around $450–500 and there are plenty of household who do without. It gets value engineered down to a $100 product and sees mass adoption. However, 90% of the market for the original $500 product also chooses the half-broken $100 version, leading to the $500 quality moving upmarket (such that it now costs $1000) or disappearing altogether (or moving to a commercial appliance that is unfit for household use).
I think that scenario may be why so many people have a hatred for value engineering: once cheaper becomes available, the market bifurcates into value-engineered wares for people who don’t care and the high-quality end becomes higher quality and three times the price it used to be. The choices of other customers deny you the continued availability of the optimal price+feature set for your needs & budget.
Yes, we hate value engineering because of this bifurcation (it's real, and I've been whining about it for a while too). But I see it somewhat differently than you described:
> value-engineered wares for people who don’t care
You say it like there is a choice involved here. There isn't. This is something that needs repeating - customers choose out of what's available on the market, not out of the space of all possible products. So all products that are hard to make and sell yourself are primarily vendor-driven.
If a market bifurcates like this, I can't announce my preference for the missing middle at all. The split may have happened against my preferences, or it may have happened before I cared, or it may have happened before I was even in the market for that product category. But once it happened, people who'd prefer something better than barely-fit-for-purpose can't get it.
> high-quality end becomes higher quality and three times the price it used to be
If it becomes higher quality. As you mentioned higher up, it frequently becomes different, as it's no longer targeting a large audience.
> The choices of other customers deny you the continued availability
Yes, but again, what choices? These things stick in a feedback loop, a self-fulfilling prophecy. And it doesn't take people choosing the lower-tier option. It takes a company choosing a somewhat lower quality this year than they did the last year, because if done gradually people won't be able to quickly tell (the very job of marketing is to confuse customers about this).
I hate "revealed preferences", I consider them mostly bullshit given the lack of actual choice - but if we want to frame the situation like this: the bifurcation doesn't require that most of the middle-tier consumers "actually prefer" the cheaper option over the middle one. A company will attempt this even if it meant losing middle-tier customers altogether, as long as they believe the expanding lower-tier customer base will make up for it.
What's even more maddening is the interplay with economies of scale - the middle-tier product could've gotten better and cheaper over time, if its broad customer base wasn't stolen by the low-quality option. So the households that couldn't afford the quality option yesterday, would be able to afford it tomorrow - and today would be making use of used ones, because there is such a thing as a market for used goods, which works best when items are durable. But companies often do try to sabotage it, too.
Also: the downwards quality spiral doesn't stop at a reasonable point, it stops at the lowest point where the customers can be duped en-masse, unless stopped by regulatory means either. I'll happily argue that, for most products, the lowest-priced options shouldn't exist in the first place, because they deliver negative value (after accounting for total use costs, with possible future replacement, which most people don't) and endless frustration. I see them as an environmental disaster.
If the missing-middle is, in fact, a real consumer desire, then you’re identified a market failure that might be a good startup idea.
And I’m not saying this sarcastically, many wildly successful businesses have been built on finding untapped markets that established players have missed. There is always room for improvement. The question is whether that improvement is strong enough to change people’s buying decisions.
Even if the missing middle is a real consumer demand, it may not be enough of a real demand to achieve the economics of scale to be profitable (or it is profitable but with 15% margin instead of 30% and the bean counters can’t stand that).
The ironic part of that is that often people will end up spending more on crappy stuff, as they end up buying several {thing} over the time period one more expensive one would have lasted. This is also an example of why it's expensive to be poor.
I did this with office chairs. I was buying a new mediocre chair every few years before finally buying a Herman Miller several years ago. It was expensive compared to anything else I'd owned, but (1) it's an order-of-magnitude better chair, and (2) I had probably spent about the same money on several crappier chairs over the prior decade. I am still sitting in this chair now, and it's still just as good as the day I bought it.
If you’re often using a computer chair (as many of us do use in a commercial setting), you probably legitimately need a chair with a high duty cycle.
Meanwhile, I have a $7 toaster that’s 10 years old. I don’t make toast very often. Even if my toaster fails today, a low-end commercial toaster wouldn’t pay itself off over my lifetime.
Poor people also have alternatives. Much of the world doesn’t worry about the repair bills for their clothes dryer or their dishwasher, because they hang their clothes on a line and wash their dishes in a basin.
> “Engineered to fail” and “planned obsolescence” are both pejorative rephrasings of “consumers prioritize price”
No. Of course, a part of potential lifetime loss is due to price. Manufacturing a case in plastic instead of carbon fiber is simply far cheaper and most consumer will go for that. However, we see cheaped out components even in high-priced or prosumer gear, while the existence of this market already pretty much proves that price is not everything to every consumer. Additionally, there are many examples of behaviors that save no money or are actually more expensive, but help the bottom line by forcing people to buy new (see the Phoebus cartell [0] or the slowing down of older iPhones by Apple).
Yes, true planned obsolescence has happened. But it’s a lot less common than people think, and often prohibited by law.
Even the “slowing down of old iPhones” is an example of that. This was a bug fix for crashing due to current demand that exceeded the battery’s capability.
Most people aren't even aware of planned obsolescence. There's also very little data on how much of this actually happening as no company will admit to this practice. So really no one can make a statement on whether it's common or uncommon without a big data gathering effort.
The statement we can make that is very realistic is that companies are incentivised to do do "planned obsolescence" and because of this "planned obsolescence" has happened, is happening and will continue to happen in the future.
Value engineering is not a idea known only to kitchen appliances engineers. This was just the example at hand.
Many of the products and services that people buy to support their health, education, security, etc have been made more accessible by value engineering either directly, or in their supply chain.
Sure, but when is having lots of cheap stuff related to standard of living? I still maintain that access to healthy food, good education, healthcare and security are what determines standard of living, not the amount of stuff you have.
The human activities that enable someone to have access to healthy food, good education, healthcare and security make use of value-engineered products.
Really? It’s definitely not true for education, good education is essentially completely independent of technology, and it seems to me that healthy food at reasonable prices is more a question of mechanized agriculture and supply chains.
Healthcare, maybe I can see it, but not really. The proliferation of single use stuff in hospitals for example seems like a different thing than cheap bicycles and shoddy clothes that last a single season.
Maybe I misunderstood what value engineering is, but I don’t really see how the philosophy behind cheap consumer goods is very related to those things.
> good education is essentially completely independent of technology
It can be, to a point, but most developed societies have schooling systems that use various types of supplies and equipment in the course of education. More affordable transportation, facilities, supplies, and equipment is generally good for students.
> Healthcare, maybe I can see it, but not really. The proliferation of single use stuff in hospitals for example seems like a different thing than cheap bicycles and shoddy clothes that last a single season.
Well, yes, those are very different things. But, cheap disposable medical supplies both lower barriers to access those things. Not only does this mean that someone who is low-income might be able to more easily access something like, say, an oral thermometer ... but it also means that things like equipment with a high infection risk can be disposed of instead of reused. Many hospitals, for instance, have started switching to disposable surgical tools, because that's now a possibility, and it decreases infection risk.
The bottom line is, cheap stuff enables more people to have more tools at hand to solve problems.
There's no doubt "value engineering" occurs. Your claim is that early obsolescence is not planned but rather a side effect of value engineering.
There's nothing in the universe that stops a feature that meets a design goal of lowering value from also meeting the design goal of planned obsolescence. So it's 100 percent possible that a company still has two design goals: making a cheaper product and obsolescescing that product.
So if you claim that it's basically not happening. Tell me in what way is a company not incentivised to plan the early obsolescence of a product and what evidence do you have that this is basically not happening as a deliberate design decision?
Your evidence is only an example that a company can both meet the goal of obsolescence and lower value with a singular feature of cheaper materials. I have stated that this is not evidence because a company can still have the design goal of obsolescence while meeting that goal with a singular design feature intended to make the product cheaper as well. You need to counter this reasoning because it invalidated your evidence.
The phrase "planned obsolescence" implies and is a claim of intent. The obsolescence wasn't "planned" if it was simply a side-effect of value engineering... it was simply consequential. There are some proven instances of obsolescence being planned, but this is by far an exception, not the norm.
The broad root claim above that "Consumer grade products are deliberately designed to fail." is the assertion with insufficient evidence. The video attached to that claim has a few valid examples, but a few examples over the past century is not indicative of the current state of the entire manufacturing industry... especially when there is a textbook engineering practice that does explain the same.
> The phrase "planned obsolescence" implies and is a claim of intent. The obsolescence wasn't "planned" if it was simply a side-effect of value engineering... it was simply consequential. There are some proven instances of obsolescence being planned, but this is by far an exception, not the norm.
You are missing the point. I am claiming that ONE feature can be built to meet TWO objectives. One for value engineering and the other for planned obsolescence. That would make NEITHER of the two objectives a side effect.
Example: Airplanes are painted with colored paint both to prevent the metal from degrading AND to give the plane a better aesthetic. ONE feature meeting TWO objectives.
>The broad root claim above that "Consumer grade products are deliberately designed to fail." is the assertion with insufficient evidence. The video attached to that claim has a few valid examples, but a few examples over the past century is not indicative of the current state of the entire manufacturing industry... especially when there is a textbook engineering practice that does explain the same.
My broad root claim is that the practice has happened, is happening and will happen.
My evidence for this is examples of this actually occurring. And real incentives for this practice to exist.
I made no claim about how widespread the practice is. That is more your claim. Your claim is basically saying that the amount of entities practicing planned obsolescence is so minuscule that it's basically negligible.
Your evidence for your claim is that value engineering exists in a text book. That's it. You know what else exists in certain text books? How crypto works. Does that make crypto frauds and scams negligible? No.
No doubt your claim is hard to prove, the burden of proof for you is astronomically harder than it is for my point. But then think about it... why do you hold strong opinions and stances on topics that are almost impossible to prove?
the shop vac pro i bought had a one-time current fuse soldered down (not replacable with a holder). over time all of these machines get a little friction in the fan assembly and blow this fuse.
yes, you could argue that making this fuse replaceable would add $0.05, but we all know that its not because 99% of the purchasers wont crack it open, figure out whats going on, and short the fuse.
you can argue that by keeping the volume up shop vac can lower prices. but i dont think you can argue that efficiency has been gained.
The 1% of people who try to fix their shop vac are probably the same 1% who are comfortable using a soldering iron. Reducing part count is value engineering 101.
The number of consumers who buy a shop vac based on whether it has a socketed fuse is negligible. It’s simply a feature with zero commercial value. It’s all cost with zero benefit.
Only because a good chunk of the true costs are externalized. If the vendor would have to pay for disposal of their product, suddenly that socketed fuse would become a cost-cutting measure.
For one item maybe, but every item on a BOM for a mass manufactured product is (hopefully) multiplied by many thousands or millions of units.
If these types of features mattered to consumers, then one would expect we’d see success from the companies who prioritize it. These companies and products do exist, but they are niche.
What consumer wouldn't want a vac that can be fixed easily by putting a new fuse in a socket? The issue is the consumer doesn't know about this possible fix. The Company Engineers this fact into the product AND into the marketing and into the warranty length. Common sense. A human is irrational and lacks knowledge, but a human made aware of his irrationality will usually choose the rational choice.
Companies are just taking advantage of a consumers lack of knowledge, awareness, and intelligence. If you were perfectly aware of two competing vacs and all the actual technical specifications of course the one with a replaceable fuse would be counted as a positive feature.
The problem is that companies that try to market the fuse as a feature will have a hard time communicating this fact to the consumer especially. Thus it is in the interest of every company to engineer shorter lifespans into their products as consumers can't see past 2 years at the point of sale.
Industrial products on the other hand are usually massed purchased and reliability is measured from an accounting perspective. This makes industrial owners more knowledgeable and able to make more rational choices as they have quantitative metrics that effect their profits during accounting time.
If that fuse blows, does swapping it help? Wouldn't the blown fuse typically mean the fan bearings are broken and a new fuse would just blow soon again?
So, the end result of having a soldered fuse was exactly the same as a socketed one: it was successfully repaired. I don’t see the justification for the extra BOM item.
For the 99% of people who don’t attempt electrical repairs on their vacuums, that fuse socket would be sitting inside of a vacuum in a landfill.
Drive around any US suburb on trash night and pick up a couple of appliances. Most of them either still work 100% or have trivially fixable issues. People (US consumers especially) don’t fix stuff.
Don’t get me wrong, I love fixing things myself. I’ve probably saved $10,000 over the past 5 years by fixing things people were throwing away instead of buying. The ease with which this is possible to do demonstrates how few people attempt repairs themselves.
>So, the end result of having a soldered fuse was exactly the same as a socketed one: it was successfully repaired. I don’t see the justification for the extra BOM item.
You joking? You realize houses and cars have socketed fuses that can be replaced almost turnkey. This is a simple solution to build into the product a UI that let's the user know a socket was blown and allow the user to replace a fuse like replacing a AA battery. FUSES are designed to fail and be replaced. Making those FUSES inaccessible is ALSO a design choice because it's contradictory.
There was a point in time where every phone had a replaceable battery. You think that replaceable batteries disappeared because companies wanted to save costs? Sockets for batteries have been part of the design philosophy for consumer products for decades, the fact that these sockets are removed from phones is not a cost saving measure.
My above point is was that cost is an example of an engineering tradeoff, not that it is the only engineering tradeoff.
Phone batteries are designed to be replaceable. They’re internal because of design considerations, not cost. In fact, nearly all cell phone batteries are secured with removable adhesive because they’re specifically intended to be replaceable.
Homes have circuit breakers (fuses haven’t been mainstream for a while) because the load is not predefined, and can be occasionally exceeded by the end user. This is not the case for a consumer appliance with a known load. An unexpectedly high load is an indication that another component has also failed. There’s some diagnosis that should be done when replacing a fuse on a system with an unexplained over current situation.
Your logic doesn't make sense for why socketed fuses even exist. So why do cars have socketed fuses then? Do cars have unexpected loads? Not nearly as much as houses. Cars have socketed fuses same as houses because fuses are designed to fail and be replaced. This is the logical intention of fuses.
Making something that is designed to fail and be replaced (fuses) inaccessible is a contradictory design philosophy... Unless this design philosophy is INTENDED to make the product fail. You place a component designed to fail inside a vac and make it inaccessible then that means you are designing the vac to fail.
Phone batteries are not designed to be replaceable this is a lie or pure stupidity. You realize that glue or adhesive is not designed to be removed right? It's designed to be permanent. Screws and socketed components are designed to be removed.
Additionally the iPhone isn't even designed to be opened. It's extremely hard to open that device and it's completely obvious the reason is because that device is designed to both fail in a certain time frame and only be serviceable by apple technicians. Here's how easy it is to "replace" a battery you claim was glued into the phone as a design decision to be "replaceable": https://youtu.be/gkCyl7kRGns
>My above point is was that cost is an example of an engineering tradeoff, not that it is the only engineering tradeoff
Who in the universe isn't aware that tradeoffs outside of cost don't exist? Kind of useless if the point is to obvious. How about you address my point in the fact that deliberate decisions were made to make products fail and that these failures are not design tradeoffs.
A thinner phone for an irreplaceable battery in the iPhone is not actually a tradeoff. In fact if you look inside the phone they very much could've screwed the battery in without increasing the thickness of the phone.
You realize that Steve Jobs once said the iPod was designed to only last a year?
> Your logic doesn't make sense for why socketed fuses even exist. So why do cars have socketed fuses then?
1. Cars cost 600x what a shop vac does, so more people attempt to fix them.
2. Some fuses in cars are, in fact, not socketed. Particularly for the higher-current and more dangerous circuits where unexpected overloads are of a greater safety concern and are less likely to be due to fluke events. For instance, fusible links[0]. It would certainly be possible for automotive designers to design a socketed fuse in place of a fusible link, but the cost to do it would be 'high' relative to the frequency of failure, the risk, and the likelihood of user-serviceability. Again, an engineering trade-off.
Yes, every car I've ever been in has accessory circuits that a user could easily overload. And I have done so myself many times. Also, there are a lot of electrical parts on a vehicle with limited lifetime that are prone to mechanical failure: relays, bulbs, accessory actuators, etc. When these items fail, they can stall/short and cause an overcurrent condition.
You wouldn't throw away a $30k car because a bent pin on a $1 tail light bulb shorted out. You'd replace the $0.10 fuse and get another $1 tail light bulb. But, you'd probably throw away a $25 blender when the $18 motor laminations short out, because the failure would cost more to fix than the entire product is worth, especially if you're paying labor to fix it.
Fuses exist to fail when some other failure condition happens. Many failures on a car are economical to fix. A blender is totaled if nearly anything happens to it.
> Phone batteries are not designed to be replaceable this is a lie or pure stupidity. You realize that glue or adhesive is not designed to be removed right?
Mainstream phones (iPhone, Samsung, etc) are typically designed with adhesive that has removal tabs which deactivate the adhesive and allow someone to remove it cleanly. They could simply leave this feature out if they didn't want it to be replaceable, but they didn't. Their intentional adding of this feature is evidence that they do intend for the battery to be replaced. Example: https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/yAxAcOuZkVKD1xAY.hug...
> Additionally the iPhone isn't even designed to be opened. It's extremely hard to open that device and it's completely obvious the reason is because that device is designed to both fail in a certain time frame and only be serviceable by apple technicians.
It's hard to open as a result of the design/engineering trade off. Just because it's hard to open doesn't automatically imply that someone must have plotted to make it hard to open. It just means that end-user serviceability wasn't a high-priority design feature. It's hard to open simply because glue is a cheap way to make something thin, waterproof, and cheap to manufacture. If Apple really wanted to waterproof their device while intentionally make it unserviceable, the electronics industry has way better ways to do that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potting_(electronics)
> Who in the universe isn't aware that tradeoffs outside of cost don't exist? Kind of useless if the point is to obvious. How about you address my point in the fact that deliberate decisions were made to make products fail and that these failures are not design tradeoffs.
Your point is valid for instances of proven malice, but one should not assume malice where a valid alternative explanation exists.
1. People would like to fix vacs too. Cheaper doesn't mean everybody just replaces a vac every year.
2. Fusible links are designed that way for safety. The hood of a car is designed to be opened so that even a fusible link can be fixed.
3. When I asked: Do care have unexpected loads? I answered that question right after I asked it. The question was rhetorical.
I'd rather replace a fuse in a 25$ blender then buy a new one. But either way, you wouldn't throw away a $100 dollar vac or a $500 dollar iPhone just because a $0.10 fuse shorted out.
>Mainstream phones (iPhone, Samsung, etc) are typically designed with adhesive that has removal tabs which deactivate the adhesive and allow someone to remove it cleanly.
True. BUT these batteries are still extremely hard to remove as they are locked into the case. They were designed to be hard to remove so that apple service people can repair the few phones that statistically beat the warranty.
We both know that the iphone is basically designed with a battery that is so hard to remove that it can be basically classified as not removable by the average layman. Very different from the way all phones use to have removable batteries.
>It's hard to open as a result of the design/engineering trade off. Just because it's hard to open doesn't automatically imply that someone must have plotted to make it hard to open. It just means that end-user serviceability wasn't a high-priority design feature.
That's my point. How do you know it's a tradeoff? How do you know it's not a design decision? Basically Apple is incentivized to make the phone hard to open. Additionally all apple policies of "repairing" a phone basically make "repairing" the phone cost as much as buying a new one. With every policy surrounding the phone is positioned, it's more than likely that the decisions are deliberate.
>Your point is valid for instances of proven malice, but one should not assume malice where a valid alternative explanation exists.
My point is valid for instances of suspected malice. The motive exists. Do you trust someone trying to sell you a new crypto just because there's no evidence of malice and that an alternative explanation exists? No. It's stupid to believe there is no malice.
It is far wiser to assume malice exists wherever profitable incentive exists, such is the nature of business.
eh. even if it takes you a few seconds to wonder why its not spinning up they usually dont burn out right away. and if they do there is a little puff of smoke, nary even a pop.
Did you watch the video? It's not just about cheap materials. It's literal design decisions made for the express reason so that the product will fail.
The iphone not having a replaceable battery is a design decision, it doesn't make the phone cheaper.
You are taking two independent phenomenons and trying to group them together as if they are the same phenomenon. Yes making a product cheaper has the side effect of reducing its' lifetime but the video and what I'm talking about is DIRECT engineering decisions for the purpose of shortening lifetimes NOT making things cheaper.
I did watch it. (And I have watched it once before years ago.) Design is also an engineering constraint. All of these constraints are interconnected. None are wholly independent.
The “fashion” argument is particularly silly. Fashion and style are concepts that have existed as a part of human nature longer than manufacturing, corporations, or even money itself have even existed.
Having the latest flashy accessories to show off to potential mates is something that was literally invented (at least) 75,000 years ago by Neanderthals, not GM or Apple.
> Design is also an engineering constraint. All of these constraints are interconnected. None are wholly independent.
Did I say they weren't interdependent? My response to you LITERALLY stated an interdependency.
Also when does "design" being an engineering constraint have to do with anything? Are you talking about aesthetic design choices made by an artist/product designer that an engineer has to take into account? You should be more specific because engineers "design" solutions around constraints as well, and the statement makes no sense when viewed from the engineering perspective.
>The “fashion” argument is particularly silly. Fashion and style are concepts that have existed as a part of human nature longer than manufacturing, corporations, or even money itself have even existed.
What fashion argument? You say the "fashion" argument is "silly" but I'm over here thinking, what "fashion" argument? I NEVER made such an argument. What's silly here is that you're talking about some weird imaginary tangent that I never even touched upon.
If you actually did watch that video or even read my posts I'm thinking you read it really quickly and you skimmed that video. I think you skipped some words and sentences and made a huge assumptions about what I'm talking about.
>
The part of my response that you didn't even address is that I'm saying FAILURE is engineered into the design DELIBERATELY. It's not a side effect of creating a cheaper product. It's a actual design choice making the consumer more likely to buy a new product.
You realize that the filament for those bulbs weren't picked because the filament was cheaper. A deliberate R&D effort was created to pick filaments that were roughly the same cost but failed quicker. That's counter to your entire argument. R&D costs money so costs are actually INCREASED to make the product fail quicker.
> Did I say they weren't interdependent? My response to you LITERALLY stated an interdependency.
I am referring to:
>> The iphone not having a replaceable battery is a design decision, it doesn't make the phone cheaper.
>> You are taking two independent phenomenons and trying to group them together as if they are the same phenomenon.
>What fashion argument?
14:25 in the video. :D
> The part of my response that you didn't even address is that I'm saying FAILURE is engineered into the design DELIBERATELY. It's not a side effect of creating a cheaper product.
Yes, there are examples of this deliberately happening. However, there are reasons why it happens as a side-effect of the engineering process, and this is an exponentially more common scenario (because it is common engineering process!).
I've learned through experience that people like kube-system are blinkered in this context [1], and best routed around. This is usually by conscious but not obtusely malicious choice. The shrugged-shoulders, learned-helplessness, "of course it's that way, what can anyone do about it" choice. This is the mass-market default, I wouldn't get too worked up over it; you won't convince them of a position until it benefits their personal scope of attention. You don't need kube-system's consent for change, they'll go along with pretty much any status quo, go ahead and find the levers of change you want to see created and yank them.
An aspect of planned obsolescence I don't see discussed much is the built-in incentives for factories (giant sinks of capex) and how we conceive manufacturing in general to lead the cart before the horse in our current dominant economic paradigm. They and their logistical tail including the staff are so expensive to re-tool and re-skill that it leads to many perverse incentives. There are vanishingly few US anvil and vise factories left because they made such a good product up to and into the 20th century that when industrialization's per capita saturation curve inevitably flattened, their market nosedived as their products were literally outliving their initial customer base. Entire manufacturing ecosystems are built around trying to avoid that outcome, and it is nearly impossible to a priori tell whether an industry in a nation is hidebound avoiding necessary technological change or undergoing another anvil and vise experience.
I have some hope in automation and cell-based flexible manufacturing though I strongly suspect the economic case for both is not nearly as straightforward as the narrative exposed to laypeople like us makes it out to be. I think we're missing quite a few pieces of the puzzle (design-to-floor-changes automation being one example) before we can tell the story that the flexible industry/factory narrative would like to tell.
[1] I'm carefully trying NOT to slight kube-system here. There is only so much attention any one individual can apply to any given context. The situation could easily be reversed between kube-system and you in a different context. We need cognitive density in all the wide-ranging human endeavors our species engages in, there is room enough for everyone.
>I'm carefully trying NOT to slight kube-system here. There is only so much attention any one individual can apply to any given context. The situation could easily be reversed between kube-system and you in a different context. We need cognitive density in all the wide-ranging human endeavors our species engages in, there is room enough for everyone.
In the arena of the internet I wouldn't worry too much about slighting people. It's all fair game, they can "slight" you too. This necessity to be overly polite over moderately polite so you can avoid hurting someones precious feelings is overblown on the internet. First of all the feeling will pass, second of all it's the internet, you're anonymous so the chances of permanent damage is basically zero.
Worrying about slighting someone hinders you from getting your point across, it also stops the other party from emotionally engaging with you. Conflict often fuels the fire of a debate giving the opponent incentive to try to expose every single logical flaw in your argument.
The internet is the perfect arena for this kind of heated discussion. It also goes both ways. If I have a wrong idea that I think is right, by god I will fight for that idea to be right until all possible logical alternatives are decimated and even then I'll only admit that I'm wrong 5 years later. Still my efforts allowed the other party to strengthen their arguments and expose flaws in my arguments and the discussion is open to public record. Even more important my attempts at vindicating myself could actually expose a real flaw in other parties argument, thereby maintaining a healthy dose of scientific doubt.
My philosophy is don't try to deny your own human bias. Be aware of it, and revel in it. You and others were naturally selected to have this bias because it helped you survive. Trying to deny it and be above this base emotion could hinder your competitiveness in the game of life.
>I did watch it. (And I have watched it once before years ago.)
This is a total and deliberate lie. The video came out march 2021. There is no way you watched this years ago. You didn't watch it at all. I recommend you actually watch it.
Quality consumer goods are better in two key areas. First, they are replaceable. I don’t want a military grade mixer in my kitchen if getting a broken whisk or motor on it is going to require me hunting all over eBay for the specific part hoping it’s available. I was very excited at one point about the idea of getting a commercial dishwasher that can run a load of dishes in like 90 seconds. Problem with those is that you can’t go to Lowe’s and get a replacement part when it acts up. You have to call a restaurant equipment servicing company and pay them what a restaurant with a broken dishwasher would pay. Or more because you aren’t a frequent customer. Sure, maybe it’ll break less but here’s the thing: my modern LG dishwasher will be more convenient to use and if I get 10 years out of it rather than 20 I still spent only $1000 on the top of the line one rather than the $4k on a 10 year old used commercial unit that I will struggle with the entire time.
Second, consumer goods are replaceable. I am used to my Kershaw knife. I broke it yesterday. I can get it serviced by the manufacturer or get a brand new one, or both. If I buy some special forces surplus knife and chip the blade I am either done with that knife or I’m taking it to a specialist or I’m buying a new one. Knowing that I can replace an item I’m used to when a one-for-one replacement is a comfort. Obviously that doesn’t work for everything but it works for items that are made by high quality manufacturers.
Bonus: a military grade mixer is going to suck to make high end pastries because it’s geared towards making mashed potatoes for the troops. I feel like the author is romanticizing ma class of products that in reality aren’t all that amazing except in a couple of key areas that to most consumers aren’t as big of a deal. So while it’s possible that, as the author states, the average consumer is an idiot, I don’t see much evidence that the author is much ahead of the pack here.