Why is the build quality on everything so crap these days?
When my mother married, she got an electric mixer as a present, it lasted her from the mid-60s through to the mid-2000s, around 40 years. The same for the fridge, washing machine and furniture... You bought products for "a lifetime".
The furniture I bought in the mid 90s lasterd about 7 years. I bought a cheap sofa in Germany in 2009, it broke in 2012 and we replaced it with a high end sofa set (2 mechanical sofas, with recliner function), those broke towards the end of last year, so we have ordered a new sofa. We have decided this time to go for a cheap-to-midrange sofa, because, although the more expensive one had more functionality, it hasn't lasted 5 times longer than the cheap one, in fact, for 5 times the prices, it has lasted 1 year longer! So what is the point in getting a high-end product? Value for money will therefore, probably, be in the midrange, where there is enough comfort, but no luxury, but the product will last just as long as the high-end product.
There are some exceptions, I tend to buy high-end keyboards and they tend to last fairly well. But most products these days seem to be built to fail in a couple of years.
Some things, like TVs, fridge, freezer, washing machine etc. I expect to last at least 10 years, when not 20 or more, but reports on many washing machines, for example, seem to point to them failing just outside of the 2 year guarantee! My daughter bought a Benko when she moved out, 3 years later, it failed and the repair costs were high enough, that she bought a new machine (from another company)...
Now we are moving towards IoT and people are talking about security updates in months! Months! These are often on devices that are replacing something that has been in place for decades! Smart light switch, replacing a 50 year old mechanical switch? 2 year guarantee and security updates for a year, if you are lucky! What sort of state is that going to be in in 50 years time? I bet the control servers will be offline in 3 years at the outside, forcing people to replace them!
This is an item that has gone from surviing, generally, at least half a cenutry, if not more to something that fails after a couple of years! How is that a step forward? Good, if it cost a tenth of the price of a mechanical switch, you could at least perform an ROI calculation that would make it look sane, but they cost much more and last a fraction so long. That is more electrical waste, more money thrown down the tubes and more effort required to continually replace the damned things!
Where is the benefit from IoT?
I can turn on the washing machine, when I am not a home... Great, but who is going to fill it up, or hang up the clothes when it has finished? I still have to be there for that (and our last 3 washing machines have had timers anyway, so we can "program" them to start at lunch time and be finished when we plan to be home). The same with lighting, why do I need to turn it on when I am not there? Because I am on holiday and want to give the impression that the house is not empty? I have 20 year old timer plugs that do that already...
As far as I can see, IoT doesn't currently offer anything sensible for the consumer, apart from being lazy and not having to stand up to turn on the light, just more expense and more junk polluting our environment, because it no longer lasts...
And I am a tech junkie, I always looked forward to advances in technology. But we seem to have reached a pinnacle in computing, for the moment, and manufacturers are just looking at ways to keep the gravy train going, instead of actually innovating and providing something new and wonderful. Computers are commodity items, whether we are talking about PCs or smartphones. That means lower volumes and lower margins, because the devices aren't improving as much each year that the consumer "needs" a new device after a year or two. A 10 year old PC is still "fast enough", if it is given an SSD, for most every-day tasks. This years smartphone is a little faster than last years, but only in benchmarks and unless the manufacturer starts to throttle them, for example the Apple fiasco earlier this year, where the devices were throttled to "protect the longevity of the battery charge", whether the battery was charging poorly or not, or the Android "bit rot" that causes them to slow down, like the old registry problems on Windows PCs.
Google also only supports 2 generations of hardware with updates, for example. Older devices will get security patches for 3 years, but only the current 2 generations will get OS upgrades. Their IoT initiative is only promising updates for 3 years. Only Microsoft seems to be thinking mid-term, with a 10 year guarantee for security updates on their IoT platform.
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