[WJW]

The Porsche quote reflects a wider design philosophy that says "Ideally, all components of a system lasts as long as the design life of the entire system and there should be no component that lives significantly longer. If there is such a component, it has been overengineered and thus the system will be more expensive to the end consumer than it needs to be.". It kinda skips over maintenance, but overall most people find it unobjectionable when stated like this.

But plenty of people will find complaints when they try to drive their car beyond its design specs and more or less everything starts failing at once.

[creaturemachine]

Porsche was talking about racing, where the primary focus is reaching the finish line faster an anyone else, and over-engineering can easily get in the way of that goal. Back in the real world, no race team would agree that their cars should disintegrate after one race.

[AzN1337c0d3r]

> Back in the real world, no race team would agree that their cars should disintegrate after one race.

Wasn't F1 teams basically doing this by replacing their engines and transmissions until the rules introduced penalties for component swaps in 2014?

[jperras]

If you go back further than that, teams used to destroy entire engines for a single qualifying.

The BMW turbocharged M12/M13 that was used in the mid-eighties put out about 1,400 horsepower at 60 PSI of boost pressure, but it may have been even more than that because there was no dyno at the time capable of testing it.

They would literally weld the wastegate shut for qualifying, and it would last for about 2-3 laps: outlap, possibly warmup lap, qualifying time lap, inlap.

After which the engine was basically unusable, and so they'd put in a new one for the race.

[gnatolf]

Current examples would be drag racing cars that have motors that are designed and used in a way that they only survive for about 800 total revolutions.

[creaturemachine]

Yup, cigarette money enabled all kinds of shenanigans. Engine swaps for qualification, new engines every race, spare third cars, it goes on. 2004 was the first year that specified engines must last the entire race weekend and introduced penalties for swaps.

[lostlogin]

> cigarette money enabled all kinds of shenanigans.

It still does. New Zealand has a crop of tobacco funded politicians.

[lawlessone]

>New Zealand has a crop of tobacco funded politicians.

when they leave politics do they just rapidly age and dissolve like that guy in the Indiana Jones film?

[TylerE]

F1 income is way way higher than the 80s.

[kllrnohj]

Even today F1 teams are allowed 4 engine replacements before taking a grid place penalty, and those penalties still show up regularly enough. So nobody is making "reliable" F1 engines.

You can see this really on display with the AMG ONE. It's a "production" car using an F1 engine that requires a rebuild every 31,000 miles.

[pfdietz]

Don't highly optimized drag racers do this? I mean, a clutch that in normal operation gets heated until it glows can't be very durable.

[ortusdux]

Anyone can build a bridge, but it takes an engineer to barely build a bridge.

[mikepurvis]

Alan Weisman's lovely book World Without Us speculates a bit about this, basically saying that more recently built structures would be the first to collapse because they've all be engineered so close to the line. Meanwhile stuff that already been standing for 100+ years like the Brooklyn Bridge will probably still be there in another 100 years even without any maintenance just on account of how overbuilt it all had to be in an era before finite element analysis.

[ortusdux]

There was an aluminum extrusion company that falsified test records for years. They got away with it because what's a few % when your customer's safety factor is 2. Once they got into weight sensitive aerospace applications, where sometimes the factor is 1.2, rockets starting blowing up on the launch pad.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/aluminum-extrusion-m...

[aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA]

Should have resulted in jail time. A monetary fine is no deterrent.

[Scramblejams]

It did result in jail time. The linked document states that the testing lab supervisor was sentenced to 3 years. (Not sure how much of that time was actually served, apparently he was suffering from dementia.) More info: https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2018/08/company_supervis...

Also a correction to GP: They were payload deployment failures, they didn't blow up on the pad. More here: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/05/nasa-finally-conclud...

[The_Fox]

This is a great quote for the topic, but the quote is normally about a bridge that barely stands.

I'm chuckling at the thought of barely building something. (All in good fun, thank you.)

[woliveirajr]

In my county, a company asked the Mayor if it was possible to improve some bridge because they need to carry 40t and the bridge had a sign telling it would only allow up to 32t. Their proposal was to do the construction and get tax rebates.

After two weeks, the Infrastructure department changed the sign allowing up to 45t.

[signalToNose]

Consumer protection laws prevents businesses following this to it’s extreme. For many businesses the ideal would be to just sell stuff that immediately breaks down as soon as it’s sold. It has the fulfilled its purpose from their point of view

[delichon]

I run sous vide cookers 24*7, and they uniformly break within 90 days or less. But they don't like to admit their smaller duty cycle, so they don't, and keep sending me warranty replacements instead. I keep buying different brands looking for one with a longer life. I'll bet most people do that when their gadgets die, and purposely making products that die as soon as sold isn't often a successful business model.

[rlander]

That’s not a small cycle count for a normal household. 90 × 24 = 2,160 total hours.

I sous vide now and then, about twice a week for 6 hours each, so around 12 hours a week. That works out to roughly 15 years of usable machine time for the average person.

Not bad at all.

[josephg]

Photography is the same way. Most SLR / DSLR / mirrorless cameras have a mechanical shutter which is expected to last around 200k-1m activations. I've had a camera for a bit over a year. I've used it quite heavily, and my shutter count is at about 13k photos. At this rate, the shutter will probably last for 20+ years - which seems fine. If I'm still using the camera by then, spending a few hundred dollars to replace the shutter mechanism sounds totally reasonable.

[plywoodShadow]

2160/12 is 180 weeks, or roughly 3.5 years, not 15 years

[47282847]

Assuming linearity, which I doubt is the case.

[account42]

You think a measly 360 uses at your 6 hours typical operation is even remotely acceptable for a glorified heating element?

And yes, 15 years is bad. I don't want to replace my entire household every 15 years FFS.

[cestith]

A friend of mine gets new headphones/headsets every six to eighteen months, and hasn’t bought a pair entirely out of pocket in years. For him it’s all down to buying the Microcenter protection plan every time they’re replaced. They fail, he takes them back, he gets store credit for the purchase price, and he buys a new set and a new plan. He doesn’t even care about the manufacturer’s warranty anymore.

Personally, most of my headphones I look for metal mechanical connections instead of plastic and I buy refurbished when I can. I think I pay about as much as he does or less, but we haven’t really hashed out the numbers together. I’m typing this while wearing a HyperX gaming headset I bought refurbished that’s old enough that I’ve replaced the earpads while everything else continues to work.

Computers and computer parts often have, in my experience, a better reliability record competently refurbished than when they first leave the factory too. I wonder if sous vide cookers would.

[hnuser123456]

Are there not industrial ones meant to last longer? Maybe you can buy a used but good condition one of those.

[WJW]

There are, and if you really have the workload that you need to cook stuff 24/7 (what in gods name is OP cooking btw?) then you should definitely get one of those. Maybe not even secondhand but just a new one. The cheap consumer grade ones are meant for people who use them once or twice a year.

This is a fine example of what I meant about people complaining when they use products beyond their design parameters.

[tracker1]

I got one that seems to be kind of in the middle, it's better built than most of the consumer models but not quite as "industrial" feeling as some of the commercial models. I use it a few times a week for a few hours each.

I'm on a mostly carnivore, mostly ruminant meat diet and for costs tend to do a lot of ground beef... I sous vide a bunch of burgers in 1/2lb ring molds, refrigerate and sear off when hungry. This lets me have safer burgers that aren't overcooked. I do 133F for 2.5+ hours.

I also do steaks about once or twice a week. I have to say it's probably the best kitchen investment I could have made in terms of impact on the output quality.

[elzbardico]

It is easy to have to run a bunch of sous vide cooker 24/7 if you have a small restaurant or food delivery business.

[compiler-guy]

In which case one shouldn't be using consumer-grade kitchen equipment.

[lawlessone]

If the manufacturers keep replacing the machines because they're within warranty isn't this cheaper for OP?

[mattkrause]

Definitely -- get something meant for a lab. I worked in one that had a 150F water bath running day and night.

[account42]

Well from an evil business perspective their options are either

- the product doesn't break and you don't buy a replacement from them because you still have a working product

- the product breaks and there is a greater than 0% chance that you will buy a replacement product from them

Of course in practice it's more complicated but I wouldn't be so quick to declare that the math doesn't work out.

[FuriouslyAdrift]

Try a Breville PolyScience... https://www.breville.com/en-us/product/csv750

Or if you want something even beefier: https://sammic.com/en/smartvide-xl

[delichon]

It looks like the Breville is the most affordable at $600. Currently I'm paying optimistically $45/90 days or $0.50/day. For the Breville to match that it would need to survive for 3.29 years. Will it?

[FuriouslyAdrift]

Maybe... the Sammic is made for a high volume commercial kitchen

[muzani]

What do you sous vide 24*7? It sounds like it would be party grounds for bacteria. Also curious if the bags and other components break as well.

[delichon]

Beef, lamb, sometimes pork. I have a daily meal of a cheap, tough cut of meat cooked for 48 hours at 150F.

Sous vide is generally not a bacterial growth risk above 140F. At 150F throughout, you get decent pasteurization in under two minutes. Two days of that is such extreme overkill that I'm concerned about the nutritional effect of over cooking.

The Food Saver style vacuum sealers fail fast for me, so I bought a $400 chamber sealer, and I'm on year 5 with it.

[Nathanael_M]

I think I love you? This is great. Do you have them running in arrays of 3? What’s your favourite cut? What’s the best cost:deliciousness cut? What bags do you use to minimize plastic leeching?

[delichon]

It's just me, so I only need one running at a time. Every day I take one serving out and put another one in. I clean the tank about once per week, or if something breaks. My favorite is short ribs, my daily drivers are chuck roast or shank. The prices have skyrocketed in the last few years. I buy in bulk on sale and portion it into bags with a chamber style vacuum sealer. It goes straight from the freezer into the tank.

[doubled112]

When the design spec seems to be a 3 year long lease I can see why people get bothered.