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This often actually exists still, but those companies dont do big marketing and their products will cost 3x that of a "normal" one.

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.

There’s a huge demand from consumers for that. Just not from investors.

"No enshitification" is the new top tier marketing strategy.

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

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!"

Until private equity gets their grubby paws on the company.

It's the Linux philosophy in appliances. I'm down.

I want to produce boxed recipes under a product line named "Jamaican"

• Jamaican a pie
• Jamaican mac and cheese
• Jamaican chicken with mushroom gravy

I also wanna make a perfume line named "Eureka," following the same general idea but with awfully generic scent names

• Eureka flowers
• Eureka citrus
• Eureka chicken with mushroom gravy

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.

A total absense of tech would be bad for a washing machine. With a really simple conductivity sensor (basically just two electrodes on the sides of a plastic pipe) and an opacity sensor (an IR LED and an LDR on opposite sides of a clear pipe), you can measure how much stuff is dissolved in water and how much insoluable stuff is suspended. That then means that you can keep circulating the soapy water until it stops getting dirtier, then keep rinsing it out until it stops getting cleaner, which then means you can have the cycle times adjust themselves to how soiled the load is, instead of just making them as long as the worst case scenario might require and wasting energy, water, and time on an average load.

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.

There's tradeoffs - simplicity, repairability, efficiency.

Take washers, for example. I was looking at Speed Queen washers to replace mine. On paper they are great, more durable. But it turns out that while they have physical knobs and switches, newer models still hide a circuit board inside, so the gap between commercial and consumer models is shrinking (and not in the direction we want.)

The Speed Queen washers also have nearly half the capacity of off the shelf consumer washers, and use twice the amount of water and electricity. I did the math, and at the current utility and washer prices I'd break even replacing the washer every 5 years.

Furthermore, the local appliance repair shop that I trust told me it could take them weeks to get replacement parts for Speed Queen. For a laundromat that's not a huge deal when it's one washer out of twenty, for a single machine home it's a problem.

Yes, I do wish that consumer appliances were more reliable. But barring that, the next best thing is easily and quickly repairable, and on that matter there's brands that are qualitatively and quantitatively better in that regard than others.

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.

Maybe not only just work for 15+ years. But allow parts to be purchased and easy manuals to read for at home repairs.

Where do I sign up?

Great idea for a quick cash grab but then you will lose growth. You will run into insta pot problems where the product was too good and lacked room for innovation. But someone should do it anyways.

Just Uncomplicated Socialist Tech

My refrigerator is still going strong at 22 years

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.

IANAL but somehow I get the feeling that entering those industries as a new guy would be a real pain in the ass at the patent office.

I thought about this too. People are sick of this shit.

I'm not against it having an open API to allow it to be controlled by some computer system, though don't even bring up the word "cloud".

Gonna have to rebrand all that to Just A Dream, unless you have a plan to secure the capital to start that all up, and also somehow not be beholden to short term profit crazed investors who will change that business model.

Hooray! Hypercapitalist Realism!

No technology huh?

So a bucket, washboard, mangle, and piece of string for laundry.

An ice box or cellar for refrigeration

And an open fire for cooking.

I'll invest in this guy today.