Worked great for 12 months 9 days !! & broke. The repair man wants £50
before he'll get in his van & come & look at it.


Unfortunately, obsolescence is built into most electrical goods nowadays. In
the past if a company made a product that lasted 5 or 10 years (or more)
they got a good reputation but no more sales to the same customer for
several years. While the cheaper goods that failed after twelve months had a
faster turn around, more sales, more profit for the manufacturers. Many
don't care if they get a bad name as they are effectively "sock puppet"
companies anyway. Many have the same factories and owners whatever brand
badge is stuck on the front. This is especially true of white goods.

A design engineer once told me that all the components within a machine are
designed to have the same lifetime, typically just longer than the length of
the warranty. One of the reasons for this was: If you expect the most
expensive or major component in a machine to last twelve months then why use
more expensive components for other parts of the machine that would have say
2 or 5 years lifetime? The lifetime of the machine is decided at the outset
and the components sourced to fit that lifetime. So typically when one thing
starts to go wrong, expect others to follow.

Not good for the environment or the customers pocket, but an unfortunate
consequence of a competitive industry.

David.

"Martin" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 8 Sep 2007 11:54:05 +0200, "David \(Normandy\)"
wrote:

Worked great for 12 months 9 days !! & broke. The repair man wants £50
before he'll get in his van & come & look at it.


Unfortunately, obsolescence is built into most electrical goods nowadays.
In
the past if a company made a product that lasted 5 or 10 years (or more)
they got a good reputation but no more sales to the same customer for
several years.

German electrical goods almost last most forever.
Anything from Bosch, Miele or AEG has a life of decades.

We've allways had reasonably good life out of Bosh appliances.