As another example, a good full set of mechanics hand tools is easily 50-70k, but if properly taken care of will last until the end of time. I still use my great grandfathers hand tools, wooden handles and all. Back to the ratchet wrench, machining gears is hard, time consuming, and expensive. On the other hand, molding a plastic gear ring is stupid easy, at scale something like 1/350th the cost, infinitely more scalable, and incredibly fast. It won’t be as strong, but when it cuts the final production cost in half or less, it’s a choice most manufactures will go with. Also most people don’t use their ratchets that much, a couple times per year at most so it doesn’t make sense market the more expensive ratchet they won’t use to it’s full potential, because it will fail in the consumer market against a cheaper plastic geared ratchet. Mechanics however will notice, because they use their ratchets more in a week than the average non mechanic ratchet used will in a year, so they buy the actual BIFL ratchet (at a BIFL price). MAT

As technology grows, it has become less realistic for individual people to understand all the complexities of any given system, washing machine, microwave, car, as their functionality is abstracted away by the work someone else has done. At some level this is the core of supply and demand. USER

How this subreddit fits into all this, and how we a USERs can have an impact and vote with our wallets:

The spirit of this subreddit is great, buy less crap, invest in higher quality items that you can use forever, but the materials used in most goods these days will literally disintegrate before you die.

The focus then needs to shift to companies making an honest effort to market products made with the best effort of lifespan as well as servicing their existing products for as long as possible. Conversely, we should be naming and shaming companies that don’t offer extend product lifetime support or fail honor their marketing promises. I propose a weekly name and shame thread for dishonest or disingenuous companies that won’t honor warranties, fail to deliver their promised product, or if a product breaks much sooner than expected. USER

The dilemma is cost vs lifespan, and put simply, most people would not be able to afford their current standard of living if all their products were designed in a BIFL way. The flashing on your house is only designed to last 30-40 years, so you will have redo it if you want to keep the water out, but more likely than that you house will be torn down before then, because houses (especially in the US with timber framing) are designed to last less than 50 years. Timber framing has its benefits, it’s faster, cheaper, and scalable but it was literally invented for quickly putting up barracks in the US revolutionary war by a general, not a consortium of BIFL product designers given free reign to design a house with zero cost or build time constraints (spoiler: they’d design a rock / brick / concrete composite house). MAT

In terms of newer tech products designed with a utilitarian approach, there aren’t many but this one stands out. Bollinger was founded on a the idea of lower tech consumer EVs but iirc their starting price is insane:, so I’d wager they won’t last based on that business model. I’d also argue their costs aren’t high due to them using higher quality materials, but they are one of very few companies selectively embracing technology. If they were to scale to the size of GM or Ford, their cars would be significantly cheaper. TECH

The fault doesn’t all lie on the businesses though, people get bored of their cars, phones, and bed frames, they start families and need more room, their bodies grow and change shapes, all this to say that most products should not be designed to last forever, imagine how many perfectly good cars would just be parked around if they didn’t have all the newest technologies. Product design shouldn’t live in a vacuum, and it’s ok that free will means we change our minds. USER

Things used to break less because there was less pieces to break, and people fixed them because it was too expensive to replace them. Now things are cheap to replace, and also very hard to fix. In an ideal world, things would be easy to fix, reliable and cheap to manufacture. If we all decided we wanted to live with 1920’s products, this could be a reality. The world has gotten really good at refining natural resources and precision manufacturing since then. However, there aren’t very many products that have survived more than 50 years without some technological improvement. My coffee maker for example, a Moka pot that was designed in the 1930s is made of aluminum and wood, I thrifted it for 4 dollars and it will probably outlive me (it does require one rubber gasket replacement every 2-3 years though). Modern coffee makers are made of all sorts of plastic and electrical components, with features I really don’t need or care about, and they only last a few years tops. The market though, meaning all of the people that make coffee have voted with their wallets, and continue to buy cheap plastic coffee makers. I don’t blame them, they are a heck of a lot more convenient and allow folks to spend time in other places of their lives, with friends and family, working. Technology grows in places it can save us time, gas powered cars, for example, and consequently the products we live with are made with shorter lifespans in order to let us afford more of them.

If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ve enjoyed this unabridged production of rambling.