[ssl-3]

The problem with kerchunk-a-wheels and real pushbuttons (and the not-smarts they imply) is that they're expensive.

They're more expensive (and more failure-prone) than the rotary encoders, mush-buttons, and brain-boxes that replaced them.

But one cool part about things like motorized kerchunk-a-wheels is that, upon failure, a motivated person on Gilligan's Island can often mend them back into service with a screwdriver and a sharp rock.

[oliwarner]

But these are [often] thousand dollar appliances. "Capacitive buttons are cheaper" shouldn't be a factor.

It's hard to understand why companies can't build things to last, use real buttons, provide parts for servicing at cost, add local APIs for anything "smart", forgo any secondary income streams (eg screens showing ads), and still make a profit.

[ssl-3]

It's not just the buttons themselves (in a capacitive-vs-mechanical sense) -- it's also warranty services.

When the electronicals are bottled up behind a sheet of glass or Perspex or whatever, then: They tend to last longer because their operating environment becomes less hazardous to them.

Exact hourly rates vary too much to write about specifics, but whatever they are: Sending a tech out to look at a thing costs real money (in the ballpark of hundreds of dollars, not dozens) that really bites into profit margin of any individual unit sale.

It bites into the margin even if the root problem is that the owner's roommate's friend pissed into the control panel with a head full of acid. They'll still be paying someone to physically go out and make that determination.

So if mush-buttons generate fewer service calls than push-buttons do, then: It's a big advantage to a manufacturer.

So... I think it's quite easy to understand how we got to where we are: Fewer moving parts + better environmental isolation for those parts = less after-sale risk.

(I don't necessarily like it, but there's lots of other things in the world that make good financial sense at the manufacturing level that I'm also not fond of. I can accept this reality without also pretending that it can't make sense for someone, somewhere.

Good answers? Speed Queen, for one, still makes good washers with real knobs and real buttons, for the consumer who favors these features.

Just add a smart plug or current monitoring and an iteration of Home Assistant or whatever running on a sleepy little Raspberry Pi or a VM/container or something to detect and notify soon after the wash is done. End-of-cycle detection is really all that is ever needed for smarts anyway. And that may sound convoluted, but these are smarts that you control yourself and are about as open-source as anyone may wish them to be.

(I don't want an appliance that I hope to last for 20 years or more to be connected to any networks at all: "Wake up, babe; new rootkit just dropped and our clothes washer is fucked" isn't a meme that I want to live through, even if it does have a nice API running on a stack that was last updated in [checks calendar] 2005.))

[s1mplicissimus]

> End-of-cycle detection is really all that is ever needed for smarts anyway

To me that would be the least interesting part about a smart washing machine. Like when I start it, I can already see when it's going to be done. The part I'm really interested in is preloading and autostart it at a given time. Guess it's usecase related what one considers "needed for smarts"

[ssl-3]

So put a smart plug on a dumb Speed Queen, preset the knob and the buttons, and have it turn on at the time you wish.

Are there any other automation scenarios that you wish to address?

[s1mplicissimus]

That would be quiet enough for me. Unfortunately my current model requires turning the temp wheel to "wake up" after power was off. Others require pressing a "Start" button twice within a very specific interval or that kind of shenanigans. Guess I'll look into the speed queen brand.

[array_key_first]

Because the goal isn't to turn a profit, it's to turn the most profit.

Your user experience does not matter a bit to them. If you don't buy again, they don't care. That's invisible cost.

Everyone is doing data analytics and metric-driven product development. Opportunity cannot be measured, so it's as if it doesn't exist.

Yes, in the long run, this is self destructive.

[hulitu]

> "Capacitive buttons are cheaper" shouldn't be a factor.

"Capacitive buttons" are implemented and tested together with the software. Real buttons need a PCB and maybe some wires and connectors which must be assembled, tested, reliability tested (aging, vibrations). It _is_ more expensive.

[oliwarner]

I'm not questioning whether or not capacitive buttons are cheaper, I just don't believe they make the difference between profit and loss.

How many more sacrifices must consumers make to increase margins?

[ssl-3]

But tt's not just the buttons -- it's also the motorized knob, sensors, and control logic.

A board with model-specific software and some garden-variety relays is cheaper to copy than model-specific motorized knobs are.

And it's not the singular key to profit, and I don't think that anyone ever said that it is. It's just a part that we can see, and touch.

There's other things that modernization helps with, too.

For instance: Variable-speed motor drives, with a computer brain to drive them (which we already have in the BOM once we abandon the motorized knob).

These can improve electrical efficiency (reducing motor size and cost), and deliver power more smoothly (reducing transmission size and cost).

That's real copper and real iron that is saved by using electronic controls.

(I can do washing machines all week.)

[goku12]

> It's hard to understand why companies can't build things to last, use real buttons, provide parts for servicing at cost, add local APIs for anything "smart", forgo any secondary income streams (eg screens showing ads), and still make a profit.

It isn't that hard to understand. They can. They just choose not to, because success isn't defined by profits anymore. It's now defined by profit growth. The only ethical way to achieve that is to capture more market through relentless innovation and diversification. But that's impractical in a large corporation due to creeping inefficiency - it's a negative feedback loop. So they try the alternatives like:

a. seek rent on products they've already sold, even if there's no reason for it to be under a subscription (eg: heated car seats),

b. deliberately shortening the life of products (planned obsolescence), so that the consumer is forced to upgrade frequently

c. kill the concept of repair and reuse, forcing the consumer to spend even more frequently

d. sell your attention or data to interested third parties (ads)

e. gatekeep advanced or sometimes even basic access to your devices behind a paywall

f. and more.

Remember how HP's CEO said that those customers who don't take their subscription services are 'bad investments'? That's their attitude towards consumers now. We're no longer their esteemed customers. We're just cash cows for them to squeeze ever more tightly for our every last penny and drops of blood.

To summarize all the above in two words - 'insatiable greed'. But what worries me is how far they'll take it. What next? Washing machines that will hold your clothes hostage until you wire them a service fee? Lock you out of your home amenities like AC and power supply if they think yourey a racist? (This has happened already.) Robotic vacuum cleaners that follow you around and record you to recommend the number of contraceptives you should stock at home? Or mandatory heated toilet seats that will test your body wastes so that medical insurance companies can decide your premium?

[southernplaces7]

An even bigger underlying problem is that people keep buying into and buying all this garbage, instead of rejecting it en masse through purchases of older, second-hand products or new products among the brands (admittedly less and less out there) that don't do these kinds of things.

Neither choice is exceptionally hard, but a vast percentage of the consumer market just keeps subjecting itself to being treated like this even when alternatives exist.

I've managed to live more than 20 years as an adult in his own home without ever buying a brain-fuckingly hostile consumer product for my home. It's truly not hard to do, or even expensive.

Companies may not care about individual consumers who don't buy again, but only as long as there aren't enough of them to harm your bottom line. Once that changes, they do start giving a shit, because you can't simply forever extract rent from a shrinking pool of people who still tolerate your shit and still grow, no matter how much you squeeze.

[oliwarner]

> It isn't that hard to understand. They can.

What's hard to to understand is how we allow them. How the market hasn't seen an opening; why someone else hasn't started making machines to fill these niches.

There are so many pro-consumer ideas (I've only listed a few) that a company could seize upon to market themselves. And unlike pocket consumer-electronics, there's little barrier to entry. You don't need to reinvent anything (quite the opposite).

[amenhotep]

There's the dampening effect of private equity and reputation arbitrage to consider. If you build a company around steadfast refusal to profitmaxx, potential acquirers who are willing to apply these techniques can financially engineer their way to offering you a very, very, very tempting price for it. Your personal convictions will need to be proof against extremely strong financial motivation; and if you have partners or creditors, they'll need to share the same tenacity.

It still does seem like it should be more visible, though. I'm not sure how many good examples there are, if any, of new companies growing to an appreciable size from explicit repudiation of these practices only to then eventually be acquired and gutted. Maybe people who think like this just don't start companies.

[goku12]

You're quite right there. I've wondered those myself. Here are some theories.

> What's hard to to understand is how we allow them.

I think that this has to do with two factors - motivation and organization. Ordinary people are not motivated enough to seek long term affordability and market health. They are easily tempted by anything convenient and cheap (in the short term). That's how big chains and big online shops were able to out-compete brick and mortar and mom and pop shops. Once the competition is gone, the big shops show their true colors and hold the market hostage to extract as much revenue as possible. BigCos can do this because they're motivated strongly by the promise of great profits to seek long term strategies like this (as delayed gratification). Meanwhile the consumers make short term gains and accumulate massive long term losses!

The second factor is organization. Consumers hardly ever organize to make a concerted effort to force the hand of big companies. For example, let's assume that someone is marketing a simple, good quality and long-lasting washing machine. The only catch is that it's pricier than the other 'smart washing machines' because of the lower scale of production. Assume that the people organized together and decided to buy only that washing machine or any other that competes with it on merits (but not the price). The new washing machine will eventually become cheaper and better because they can now increase the production capacity as profits roll in. Meanwhile, the other companies will be forced to make their offerings cheaper and remove any offending 'features' if they want to sell any of it. And when they do, it will restore the market competition and drive the market further in favor of the consumers. This is what we want.

However, what happens is exactly the opposite of the above. Someone introduces a smart washing machine into a market full of regular dumb washing machines. They make it cheaper by collaborating with other companies - like recording and selling user data to third parties. Since the consumers are not organized, a sizable portion of the population will start choosing it. That population doesn't have to be the majority. It needs to be just big enough for other manufacturers to notice the slump in their sales. Even if malpractice in the product is obvious, they'll choose to sacrifice their privacy for the short term savings with some justification like 'I don't have anything to hide'. What happens next is well known. Other companies notice the loss of sales and are forced to follow suite. At some point, even the consumers who were never willing to compromise will be left without any choice. This is a repeating story with a lot of products. But one where this is very egregiously obvious is the smart TV market.

Meanwhile, the big companies actually organize to drive the market in that direction - again motivated by profits. One well known example of this is the 'Geneva Cartel' where manufactures banded together to mandate planned obsolescence of electric bulbs. Another example is the US telecom industry. Those companies would have preferred to create a monopoly first and then do this. However due to the anti-monopoly laws, they're motivated to organize together as co-monopolies instead. To this end, even the billionaires that own these rival multinational giants maintain an exclusive and secretive social club where they conduct all these scheming. They behave exactly like those old royal families and modern crime syndicate families to protect their privileged position in society.

> How the market hasn't seen an opening; why someone else hasn't started making machines to fill these niches.

> There are so many pro-consumer ideas (I've only listed a few) that a company could seize upon to market themselves. And unlike pocket consumer-electronics, there's little barrier to entry. You don't need to reinvent anything (quite the opposite).

I think the above explanation answers these questions too. The final point is that the larger consumer community lacks the long-term strategic planning that involves sacrificing short term savings, and the ability to unite for a common cause. The much smaller business community uses these same skills effectively against the consumers to consolidate wealth as much as possible. This weakness of the consumer community is clearly evident even on HN. Despite being a technical community, a few here would rather argue that privacy is not important to them, than unite with everyone and use their weight to push the market in the opposite direction.

The above situation is not a lost cause though. People have united together to achieve much harder goals. What's needed is a solid motivation. And in this situation, that motivation can come from the awareness of the class war and the exploitation they're subjected to under it. That needs a lot of public campaigns. It needn't start big outright. It can start with token signs of protest and gradually build up mass and momentum from there as the people take notice. We already have such a campaign in progress right now - the clippy propic campaign that Louis Rossmann kicked off. We need more people to take similar initiatives.

[red_rech]

> To summarize all the above in two words - 'insatiable greed'. But what worries me is how far they'll take it.

Neo feudalism. They’ve laid it out quite explicitly several times in the last few years

[M95D]

> [...] more failure-prone than the rotary encoders, mush-buttons, and brain-boxes that replaced them.

No, they're not. And even if they were, they're repairable. I can even drill a new hole, mount an industrial 5cm push-button and wire it where the original button was connected. Can't do that with a touchscreen.

[scrubs]

Gilligan's Island reference and analogy for competence ... well done! hilarious & original. I'm borrowing that.

[ponector]

>> The problem with kerchunk-a-wheels and real pushbuttons (and the not-smarts they imply) is that they're expensive

However, if you go to the store, you'll see washing machines with old knobs much cheaper than machines with new fancy screens.

[potato3732842]

They're not expensive, they're inefficient in terms of water use. Which means they are a non-starter for national retail in the US because there are a few desert states that have captured federal regulation which mandate ever decreasing water use because that's what those desert states want.

Some poor schmuck in "basically Vietnam" climate part of Arkanas has to go to work and fix waste plumbing that's full of deposits from low flow urinals, get home, throw his clothes in a washer that won't clean them because it's trying to sense the bare minimum water it can use (which is too little for anyone who does work outside an office) and then shower under a POS low flow shower head, all so some jerks in the desert can feel like they're saving the planet.

State water situations are diverse. This is a textbook example of something that should not be regulated federally.

[amluto]

I don’t buy the “more failure-prone” thing if “failure” is defined correctly. Here’s my comparison:

1. Assorted old appliances I have experience with. I have washer and dryer buttons (possibly the last LG model that had them, purchased quite deliberately) working flawlessly after quite a few years, and I have experience with some high-end old dishwashers that had absolutely perfect button performance for about 20 years.

I can compare this to new high end dishwashers where turning the thing on requires triggering a capacitive power button that is very very hard to trigger deliberately even with completely dry fingers. I’ve seen two different related models of this unit with the same problem - they are effectively “failed” almost immediately. Never mind that these dishwashers react to anyone leaning gently against them.

So my score is: near 0% failure rate for mechanical buttons and near 100% for capacitive sensors.

(Even the really nice capacitive sensors on nice phones and watches don’t work well under kitchen conditions, so I’m not sure this problem is fully solvable even with more expensive capacitive buttons.)

[palmotea]

>> I just want normal buttons and dials back. Not time-based capacitance buttons that take 5.02 seconds to activate, not 5.0 seconds; nor free-spinning encoder wheels that mandate you give it a jiggle before the washer does anything, even if it's already on the setting you want.

> The problem with kerchunk-a-wheels and real pushbuttons (and the not-smarts they imply) is that they're expensive.

> They're more expensive (and more failure-prone) than the rotary encoders, mush-buttons, and brain-boxes that replaced them.

Capacitance buttons also failure-prone because they literally don't work half the time. The GP was also describing other failures with the modern style controls.

I'm tired of this gaslighting: "kerchunk-a-wheels and real pushbuttons" work and are more reliable. I have literal first hand experience with them working reliably for decades. I also have literal first hand experience with capacitance buttons, etc. constantly not working from day one.

The only bit of truth to your argument is they may be more expensive. But I'll take [slightly] more expensive and working over not working any day.

And if you disagree with me, I'll sell you an empty box as a dishwasher. It won't work, but it'll be less expensive!

[ssl-3]

It is with immense displeasure that I find that my playful descriptions have been interpreted as "gaslighting" by someone on the internet who suffers from selection bias.

If your intent is to demonstrate that there is nothing here that can be discussed, then: Congratulations. You've accomplished that.