• GenderIsOpSec [she/her]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Funny thing, I used to work in a bakery and all the larger machinery and ovens were like 50 years old. I asked about that once and was told that the newer stuff isnt that much easier to use, breaks down after five years and is like three times more expensive than buying some used half a century old machinery.

    Can confirm too, the old workhorse oven just kept on trucking, while the newer ones constantly had issues and were a massive head-ache to fix.

    • discontinuuity [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Could be survivorship bias: all the cheap old shit broke down and got scrapped long ago, only the good stuff survives. Like how you never see a 1993 Plymouth Voyager anymore but there's plenty of 1993 Toyota Camrys still on the road.

        • BookOfTheBread [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          Companies know that most people will buy their shit over the competitors if it's cheaper so they will work out how long something needs to last to be considered an acceptable performance and weigh that against the savings and so increased profit they can get by making it out of cheaper materials.

          Though to be fair the constant added complexity that new machines need to have to justify buying new also gives them more stuff that can break.

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
        ·
        edit-2
        4 years ago

        Like how you never see a 1993 Plymouth Voyager anymore but there’s plenty of 1993 Toyota Camrys still on the road.

        I never see a 1993 Plymouth Voyager, but I'm hard pressed to find a 2003 Toyota Camry, either. Like, don't get me wrong, I loved my 2004 Toyota Camry, but it definitely started to fall apart quick after the 10-year warrantee elapsed. Same with my 1992 Nissan. Sterling car, early on. Hard as a rock. Then it hit 100,000 miles and everything just started to fall apart.

        I don't think that was an accident.

        • discontinuuity [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          All cars are definitely designed to last a certain finite time, but the 2nd generation Chrysler minivan had especially unreliable engines, transmissions, and electrical systems

    • MichoganGayFrog [they/them]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Old kitchen equipment is amazing. The trouble now is getting parts for them when bits and pieces fuck up. Had a mixed that a wand god stripped. No replacements existed cause it screwed onto a wider post than normal. We solved this by bashing the wand on and off with a paint hammer.