People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
Its very hard to sell a product based on it being "reliable" and "good quality". This is because everyone fucking lies in their marketing about those exact qualities and its inevitable that you will get breakdowns and your customers will complain about those breakdowns and destroy your reputation.
Everything is fake now. Its just a matter of using marketing to tell the customer your product is exactly what they want.
The Sims did it first, except the brand was called "Justa". Justa dishwasher. Justa fridge.
Ahead of their time.
This often actually exists still, but those companies dont do big marketing and their products will cost 3x that of a "normal" one.
As I've heard it:
And yes, they are all very expensive. But I want to get me a Speed Queen so bad.
There is a nonprofit org called Open Source Ecology that is aiming to create what they call the "Global Village Construction Set", a collection of basic industrial machines required for modern living, designed in a way where everything can be built DIY by a single community (Including modular generators). I imagine that they have a plans for home appliances, I think as of now they're still working on construction equipment.
I've been thinking about this for a while now, how I just want a basic bitch electric car. No centre console, no futuristic screens, no sensors, no cameras. Give me a normal fucking car with dials, a speedo, some padles on the steering wheel to adjust power output to replace gears and no driver assist. Sell it to me for cheap and let me drive my car. That's all I want.
I haven't seen speedometer shortened to speedo before. I was wondering why you wanted to get a speedo (like swimwear) along with the rest of your normal car accessories.
Little from column A, little from column B
There’s a huge demand from consumers for that. Just not from investors.
The problem is that you think that would make the 'just' products cheaper. The reality is that the data and advertising subsidize the costs of the existing options and make them cheaper then what 'just' could sell for.
Case in point: Smeg already does this, and all their products are considered upmarket. They're just really solid normal appliances.
That isn’t true anymore nowadays. You pay the full un-subsidized price AND get your data sold and ads displayed
Some of these products already exist. They are expensive. If you go back and look at the long-lasting appliances of the past, they were also expensive.
One example is Speed Queen washers/dryers. Also Bosch dishwashers.
Many of these become enshittified. Bosh is an example. My sister kitted out her kitchen with many Bosch appliances when she renovated, like 10 years ago. All have had issues.
The fridge has peeling faux chrome handles, the microwave button/wheel/control had to be replaced, the washer had the drum bearing fail, and the drum housing is sealed, so you have to replace the whole drum assembly, which costs as much as an entire budget washer...
He'll be out of business in a years time!
Seriously a great idea though. I'd buy all their stuff.
The reason is that they will be so durable that you buy one and it'll be an heirloom for multiple generations.
If you want this today, SpeedQueen has decent models that last forever and are very simple.
Deshittification
And I will sell it in a store called "in stock" because we have these things called "computers" that can reorder a product once one sells so the shelves aren't empty. Because American companies have never heard of that concept.
these exist, see speed queen
the cost is going to be higher, though, because "smart" widgets can offset their initial costs through the projeted sale of the data harvested over the life of the widget
most people being ignorant to this and to the inevitable issues with corporate-built "smart" widget infrastructure, the cheapest option will generally be the most popular
my inner doctorow says that the twiddlers did this on purpose to undermine competition, especially considering the attempts to keep those widgets from being liberated
It's the Linux philosophy in appliances. I'm down.
50/50 chance it sells at a premium compared to other models, making the entire idea useless
Source: Like every project that pretended to do this with their respective market
Why the hell is a light phone more expensive than a mid to high range model smartphone. I'd rather just buy that and swap the ROM if I want to remove google.
Economies of scale and not capturing data as part of your profit model
This kind of anti-enshittification marketing is starting to gain traction I think.
A big part of Valve's launch was saying stuff like "of course you can run whatever you want on it, it's yours!"
That's like Ali G saying he invented the PlayStation 2 because he thought about it when the playstation came out.
I want to produce boxed recipes under a product line named "Jamaican"
I also wanna make a perfume line named "Eureka," following the same general idea but with awfully generic scent names
And easier to repair, too.
A GE washing or drying machine from 30 years ago has easily removable panels, about 4 to 6 screws each and large easily identifiable parts, but one from a couple of years ago requires the top to be propped up or secured and the panels removed in a specific order such that you can them remove the internal plastic panels through which wires need to be dismounted around the drum with like 8 or more screws each of varying sizes and when it comes time to put it back together I hope you've got more than three arms because fuck you thats why.
I just want everything with a heating element to use a heat pump instead. Electric heating elements are so horribly inefficient and wasteful in comparison.
I have a ventless heat pump combo washer/dryer. It takes up half the space that two machines would, plugs into a regular 110V outlet, gets HOT (way hotter than I expected a heat pump has any right to achieve), drains all its drying water into the drain, vents none of my indoor air outside, doesn't require changing laundry from one machine to the other. Practically and mechanically it seems brilliant and I can't imagine why I would ever buy a traditional machine ever again. Except...
It's chock full of horrible apps and shit that I'll never use. It's way too "smart", and those "smarts" are not there for my benefit. After a month or two it finally gave up trying to pester me to connect it to a network and install the app, which I'll never, ever do. It's never going to see an update or new firmware if I can help it, but I'm afraid that if/when it ever breaks, I'll have no choice. I know it's going to do things like eventually refuse to work until the computer has been "updated" to be "compatible" with new parts. And it's not even just that it's going to be expensive. It's that I don't trust it, and I don't trust it to remain functional in the future, even if there are parts, that they won't let me install the parts, or will require me to agree to play by their "rules" before I can.
Right to repair needs to be a thing, and people need to be able to break the ridiculous amount of both legal and practical control these manufacturers have over their devices after they've left the factory. We cannot and should not trust the manufacturers to support it. We need to allow independent repair.
Maybe not only just work for 15+ years. But allow parts to be purchased and easy manuals to read for at home repairs.
There's a supermarket in Canada, that has a brand like that. It's bright yellow and black and only has the product name in bold writing on it.
Probably better than my idea of just starting to wash my clothes in a bucket