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by antisceptic
1848 days ago
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I don't think the "military" grade stuff is meant to last considerably longer. It's mostly geared at extreme duty cycles. How often will you use a mixer if you're not a baker, once a week? An industrial piece of equipment is intended to be used nearly all the time, and there's impressive engineering that goes into handling that use case. Which I think was the point of TFA: he wants to show everyone he appreciates overengineered stuff. |
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Large organizations like the military would probably be happier with an item that needs intensive inspection, servicing, and repairs on a very consistent schedule, but is absolutely guaranteed to work within that operational window than they they would be with an item which is low-maintenance but has an unreliable service lifetime. A maintenance schedule can be planned around and budgeted around so that it doesn't affect operations. A random outage or failure is expensive, and can only be planned around in a probabilistic sense.
As individuals, we don't have the time or knowledge to do all of the inspections and repairs to maintain an "industrial grade" system at a level that makes it worthwhile. We need stuff that "just works" for some unspecified amount of time, and we accept the cost of random failure and replacement as a tradeoff, since most failures in our lives don't involve the loss of human life or millions of dollars. The exceptions, like cars, tend to be engineered more like the former category, and can only really function reliably in the context of a larger organization (regular maintenance at a specialized repair shop).
So it's not really a spectrum of quality from cheap and unreliable to expensive and indestructible. It's actually a spectrum of logistical overhead from individual use and low upkeep to multinational organization and high upkeep.