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.

Where does this leave you?

If you wanted to approach modern products with this same infinite repair ability mindset, you’re going to end up chasing your tail forever, as most consumer products are designed around minimizing component cost instead of product lifetime. A business’s dream would be sewing machine where all the parts fail at the same exact time, that way the company isn’t spending any extra money on higher quality parts that still are functional when another part fails, rendering the entire product broken. MAT

An example of this is computers in your sewing machine. Computers have a pretty short life when compared to metal objects, like the chassis of a 1950s sewing machine, so it doesn’t make sense for a product to be designed with expensive metal parts that will literally last forever when the computer components will last only a few years, so the casing is replaced with cheaper plastics, and the company saves manufacturing costs on unnecessary materials, which believe it or not will end up saving the customer a lot of money. TECH

Learning how to solder and work with circuit boards might help you fix some things but the components (especially plastic) are usually designed around a similar lifespan as the computer components so fixing the circuitboards won’t actually extend the product life by much. MAT vs TECH

Apple ran into this problem where their phones were too well made, so people would use them for too long and not buy another. The business then faltered because they had sold an iPhone to almost every potential customer on the planet. It’s hard to run a business when you run out of customers because you’ve already sold everyone a perfect product they’ll never need to replace. The solution then is to either make the product lifespan shorter, sell other products, or capitalize on our desire to be cool. Apple did all three. Why do you think the Apple Watch exists? Because everyone already has an iPhone. Additionally, plastic components are made with cheaper plastics, and the whole device is now glued together in a way to intentionally prevent repairs. Apple also alternates the chassis style every couple of years, from boxy to sleek and round, and also move the camera placement, so even though the different generations of iPhones rarely make big steps in terms of technology, they take advantage of our desire to look cool and new.
Finally, Apple devices are pretty fragile, because they will be replaced if dropped, and Apple can sell you a case for an extra profit. There’s very little business incentive in BIFL for mass market applications. For what it’s worth, I’m writing this on my iPhone 5. USER

I recognize your sentiment, but also would like to comment on the state of this subreddit in general.

TL;DR: at the top because this is way too long:

There’s very little incentive in BIFL. Businesses only have to design products to outlast their competitors, and most people couldn’t afford their current standard of living if all their products were BIFL. lastly, people frequently change their minds and habits, so most products will not be needed for a lifetime. BIFL relies on good product design, which can be broken down into the following three elements:

1. Materials have become cheaper to manufacture. I’m going to refer to history and effects of this one as MAT

2. Products have become more technologically complex. this one is TECH

3. The market (aka individual people) don’t actually need or want BIFL products. (Even most of us here) - this leads to companies not offering them. Issues around this one are referred to as USER

If you really want to get into the true BIFL space, buy equipment that is simple and analog / mechanical, and made of natural materials. Metal, glass, wool, cotton, and to some extent wood. (Mostly just avoid petroleum based products like plastics) You will lose out on some tech such as stitching patterns in your sewing machine example, but you will gain insane reliability. 1950s - 1960s singer sewing machines are perfect for this, or cars designed to be worked on in the field, like ww2 era jeeps / the ford Pygmy - everything can be fixed with like two tools. (MAT, TECH) These vehicles were also designed and built when plastics were prohibitory expensive, so less refined / more natural materials had to be used instead, (modern combat vehicles are an atrocious mess in this regard) An important note is that the tires on these early jeeps didn’t last nearly as long a modern tire because synthetic or synthetic hybrid wear items are universally better than their totally organic unrefined aka natural counterparts.

The isn’t without trade offs, as wear items like tires, shoes, motor oil, climbing ropes or anything that deals with gravity and requires flexibility or temperature resistance have a key advantage over natural materials at the cost of lifespan. These products are constrained by physics to be inherently not truly BIFL as the core their function is to be used up. Evolutionarily speaking, it is a waste to be any better than the base minimum to survive. Why should a tree be able to withstand 1,000 mph winds when the most that exists in nature is maybe 100? The consequence here is that lumber isn’t any stronger than nature needed it to be. MAT

This same evolution exists in modern capitalism, why should one product last 15 times as long as the competition for 350 times the price? Luxury items used to be luxury because they worked well, as opposed to their cheaper alternatives. (insert Reddit’s favorite economic theory about Sam Vime’s boots here) Today though, even the cheapest crap shoes are pretty good when compared to the cheap crap shoes of 100 years ago, as material science has improved by leaps and bounds. TECH

Due to the general improvement of synthetic materials, like plastic and rubber, many luxury items have pivoted, instead of focusing on function to focus on novelty, uniqueness, look, etc as the functionality requirements of any given product can be met by a much lower bar. When synthetic goods first started competing in functionality to luxury goods, (here meaning products composed of more natural materials) the functionality of luxury goods was equivalent to, if not worse than their cheaper alternatives. As the requirement of function could be met by essentially any product, the differentiator of luxury became the form, which explains the state of modern high fashion. MAT

So why are older (non wear) items BIFL?

1. Petroleum based product were expensive and also didn’t really exist, so my 113 year old ratchet wrench didn’t have the option to use a plastic gear. MAT

2. Technology was less advanced, and simple, so less domain knowledge was necessary to fix any specific item on the rare chance it broke, like a all metal hand crank candy press or a wood fired stove. As for the gear in my ratchet, the lifespan would have been a lot shorter, because lubricants at the time were not great. However, due to the fact this socket wrench cost my great grandfather about $375 dollars in todays money, when it inevitably wore out, he could take off the back and put a new gear it. The main reason he didn’t have to, is that he didn’t actually use it very much, and my father and I were judicious in applying modern synthetic lubricant that reduces friction 4-5 times better than the 1907 lubricant the socket was designed for. This point about lubricants is interesting because again, petroleum based lubricants are perhaps the biggest technological innovation that has allowed modern society to flourish besides computers. Also it is the only case in which petroleum based products lead to a longer product life for the products they are used on. Another element is that my ratchet has like 65 teeth or something, a modern BIFL ratchet will have more, 95- 135 or so, I’m not a ratchet expert. This means there is more precise machining, and less physical work is necessary to use the tool but honestly for my use cases (changing oil, occasional small engine repair) it’s not noticeably better or worse than it’s modern counterpart. There’s definitely something to be said about the precision with which my ratchet was made vs one with a Computer Aided Design, but it’s pretty much negligible in this case. TECH

3. Lastly though, and I would argue the most important is the survivability bias. There were lots of cheap products one hundred of years ago, but they’ve all literally disintegrated. For example, the Canadian armed forces in WW1 were issued boots with cardboard construction, which last time I checked doesn’t hold up well in a muddy trench. As mentioned before, my socket wrench didn’t actually get used that much, so it really hasn’t seen much wear, and it wasn’t lost or misplaced because my family has lived on the same farm since the 1820s. MAT & USER

I’d say get a huge monitor and blow up the screen size, that’s what I did and it turns out I have bad vision so I was leaning over really far. Now I cruise through the day leaning back with my monitor at 180% resolution and my back feels much better, but also regular and proper exercise helped a bunch too.