I have an old Radio from the 50s - big wooden piece of furniture with a turntable and everything. The plug on that thing is absolutely terrifying, super flimsy and so small you have to almost touch the prongs to plug it in.

Not every old design was better but some were.

My wife absolutely refuses to give up her early 1970's GE range. It's impossible to get parts for it so eventually it's going to have to be replaced. One of the actually nice features it has is is that all the push button controls are on the range hood. Don't have to worry about them getting greasy while cooking or little kids turning the burners on.

They would cost $5000 each and burn your house down

Porteus mills made such a good product they went out of business.

This is the approach galanz did I think except the shitiest patents modernized.

Would a company like that go out of business from not selling the same shit to people over and over?

Was gonna say, I do like th modern efficiencies. I'm waiting for a start up to make a heat pump oven

Me when I have no idea how capitalism works lmao

Planned obsolescence is a cornerstone of the business model of every large corporation. They're never going to make a product that could challenge that. And no startup will achieve the volume needed to sell these at a price that's even remotely realistic.

Mostly survivorship bias

This is basically the context of “Dune”

Y'all are going to hate this, but IMO a more viable solution is a subscription model. The more reliable an appliance is, the less you spend on it in the long run, so less profit for the manufacturer. With a subscription, the more reliable they make it, the more profit they get. Then you just need sufficient competition to keep the subscription prices low.