Are products made to be used up or fall apart quicker these days?

Tefal said:
Are you comparing equally priced (and more importantly equal performance ) products?
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Somewhat, yes and no. You're never going to get an equal performance because electronic products evolve no? :p

I meant in general, and the phone thing especially has stuck in my mind. Most phones these days don't appear to have that good build quality, or will not last as long as the older 'bricks' that used to be owned a good few years ago. It's more common these days for people to damage their phones and need a replacement, years ago you only needed to do that if you lost it or somehow unleashed hell. True - of course the specs are nowhere near the same, but I wasn't talking about that, build quality only.

Another type would be flatscreen televisions - again, even by looks alone these appear flimsier and poorly built compared to the rock solid boxes of CRTs.

My parents spent £200 in the early 80s for their Hitachi microwave, and that lasted without issue until 2009. They spent the same amount on a new one, and by looks, feel, weight etc. it still doesn't give the impression it will last as long.

I had a Ricoh (?) MP3 player that I put through sheer hell. My iPod, Sony NWZ A818 player have all been mollycoddled in protective cases etc., just because they're that much thinner and 'breakable'.

It's true that later products look better (sometimes), and there is deffo a market for attractive goods. Whenever I go to an electronics store the impression I'm left with is how flimsy they are; build quality's probably been sacrificed a little bit.

Who knows, maybe it is a clever ploy to get us to replace our goods quicker. ;)
 
They made Heinz tomato sauce a lot runnier. I didn't use it for years, then bought a bottle one day, went to squeeze the bottle onto my plate only for 1/3 of the contents to come splashing out almost instantly.

They've reduced the size/weight of McCoys crisps, yet the price is still the same. They timed the size change along with a huge 2 week promotion which reduced the price to stop people noticing.
 
It's the only thing that I could come up with! I was eating a shortbread biscuit at the time though,.
 
but most things are cheap and crap these days, i bought a can opener from tesco and i could bend the metal with my hands. cheap piece of ****. Then i had it under the hot water tap and the cutting blade is all bent, but my mom has had hers for 30 years still opening cans.
 
Greenlizard0 said:
Somewhat, yes and no. You're never going to get an equal performance because electronic products evolve no? :p
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What i mean is for the same money you're likely getting superior sound performance at the cost of build quality, as people want cheaper stereos that sound better instead of worse sounding stereos that are more solidly built.
 
Seraph said:
everything now a days is almost disposable, things really aren't made like they used to be, my mother has a food mixer she got in 1975 for her wedding, it still works today, you couldn't expect that with anything you buy today
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If you went into Tesco and picked a Pyong Sumo Super Food Blender Deluxe off the shelf for £6.99, you'd indeed expect it to break shortly after the guarantee expired, or within 2 days of you losing your receipt. However, if you buy quality, you can still expect things to last.

There are always exceptions to the rule of course, but these days there're so many cheap brands across the whole spectrum of consumer goods that it's easy to think that they should be great quality, when in fact they're built to a price. It's good that there's so much choice, but don't think that a properly well-made product today is going to be anything other than better than a well-made product from years ago.
 
Well people almost expect to replace their electrical stuff every few years... plus people go for CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP, and get *****... meanwhile the companies that actually make good quality stuff, but charge a bit more go out of biniz

brb crap cheap meat from tesco
brb butchers closes
brb stuck with crap cheap meat
 
Greenlizard0 said:
I've always thought that electronic products are made flimsier these days. I have a hifi setup from my pc, with an amp, speakers, tuner and cd player that are from the 70s or 80s and cd player from the late 90s. You can tell by build quality etc., that these will more than likely last at least another 10 years or so. I haven't bought an electronics product in the last 5 years at least that I have confidence will last me that long.

To be fair with e.g. phones they're cramming a lot more into them and a touch screen doesn't help.
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My brother used to work in an electrical goods retailers, one of the sales reps from a large electronics firm basically told him that products arent designed to last nowadays, tellys are a great example, i still have a few old sets from the early 90's in the loft that still work, yet ive been through three different sets in the last seven or eight years.
 
setter said:
tellys are a great example, i still have a few old sets from the early 90's in the loft that still work, yet ive been through three different sets in the last seven or eight years.
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It's because now days people want large screen TVs for rock bottom prices. So you end up getting what you pay for, which isn't quality but just size.
 
setter said:
Two of the ones i had that died were sony's, the other was a samsung.
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:o



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:p



That and there was a lot less stuff to go wrong in crt screens the fact that in an lcd there are much more components pressed into a small space with much more heat around them.
 
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