[tim-tday]

Car manufacturing grinds to a halt. Remember what happened to auto prices in 2022? 10x that.

New appliances cannot be manufactured. What dos the absolute absence of new durable goods do to the economy?

There’s no new iPhone for five years. No new electronic hardware at all. What does Apple stock do?

Own any index funds? Those tank too.

Rinse and repeat

Thinking of it as “affordable pcs” is exactly wrong which is actually useful. Invert your totally wrong answer and now you have an actual thought.

[estimator7292]

A dishwasher with a WiFi chipset is not a durable good. Nor is a fridge with a touchscreen, an oven with Bluetooth.

You know what is durable? The simple and straightforward electromechanical mechanisms we used for three centuries before integrated circuits.

One can find plentiful examples of midcentury and older appliances still in service without major maintenance. It's tough to find a modern appliance in service for more than a decade.

The inability to sprinkle magic obsolescence silicon dust over everything will only lead to an increase in quality and durability.

The mechanical timer in a 1980s washing machine will never have a firmware update blocking you from using it. A 1950s fridge runs perfectly fine essentially forever without a cloud API and a goddamn app.

This hypothetical situation is only bad because you've accepted consumerism and forced obsolescence as the norm. These situations are much worse than not being able to buy a $1600 phone every year.

You should be indignant about the unimaginable amount of resources we throw into landfills because the manufacturer decided that you should buy a new one. You should absolutely not be indignant that you can no longer buy shit to throw away.

Do you repair your appliances or do you throw them away and have a new one shipped from the other side of the planet? Do you see the problem?

[AlotOfReading]

    A dishwasher with a WiFi chipset is not a durable good. Nor is a fridge with a touchscreen, an oven with Bluetooth.

You're completely misinformed. You can buy appliances without any of these and they will still have chips in them. Those buttons controlling the dishwasher? That's a circuit board. The motor driver running the compressor loop in the fridge? Silicon again (and possibly something more exotic for the IGBTs).

Digital logic is just how things are built now. Even if you don't believe in going all the way back to relay logic and analog computing, do you want to give up the switch mode power supplies everywhere in favor of linear regulators?

[naishoya]

>The simple and straightforward electromechanical mechanisms we used for three centuries before integrated circuits

Lets see, 2026 minus 300 is 1726. No electronics, analog or digital back then at all. Not even gas powered streetlights.

Did you mean, three decades ago? That was 1996... so no, it was pretty much digitally controlled, even at the 'washing machine and toaster oven' level.

By 1976 Motorola and Advanced Semiconductor Materials were both in full production. Intel and Microchip Technologies, which was where the 'chips controlling appliances' movement really began as a spin-off from General Instrument's microelectronics division, were online by 1986.

Yes, much more can and should be done to improve and refine the wasteful consumerism treadmill that is central to US industry, but it is not a fundamental need to drive this improvement via cheering the loss and destruction of modern semiconductor manufacturing global capacity. Perhaps you are just repeating some misinformed "it will be better after we finish breaking everything" rhetoric. The rest of us need to do whatever we can to keep this uninformed point of view from 'catching' in yet another corner.

You are more than welcome go back to washing your own laundry in a wringer bucket and storing winter ice in a shed for summertime cooling. So, kindly run along, log off and dream about the good old days in the shade of a waning empire.

[BobbyTables2]

I’m not quite sure we even have the know-how these days for fully analog control systems.

My dumb refrigerator has a circuit board controlling the compressor based on temperature sensors.

My dumb gas water heater has a digital control unit even though it doesn’t use AC or battery power.

Same thing for gas furnace - control board running fan and gas igniter+valves. This isn’t just relays…

It’d be a substantial effort to design analog drop-in replacement parts - if even possible. Installation probably wouldn’t be pretty.

At least I think my toaster and rice cooker are fully analog.

[faust201]

The people with power and money (incl. most in HN) don't care.

Most of the rest are in state of apathy if they have enough time to think about earth.

Others are barely surviving.

[potato3732842]

As others have stated, there's fabs all over the world. They're insufficient in quality and quantity to satisfy current demand at current prices but they're there and can do a lot of it, especially as demand and requirements get reduced to meet what's available.

Don't get me wrong, it would suck, but probably suck less than when everything shut down for covid.

>Car manufacturing grinds to a halt.

>New appliances cannot be manufactured

Until they figure out how to repeal the laws that mandate the features/specs that require the semiconductors in the types and volumes that would be a non-starter.

Maybe your washer doesn't need to detect how much stuff you put in and second guess your water setting?

What are the statistical odds a $15k Nissan Kix being sold in the desert will ever benefit from ABS?

>no new iPhone for five years. No new electronic hardware at all

It's not absolute like that. It's more like move the decimal one place on everything and that makes whole classes of products non-viable.

>New appliances cannot be manufactured. What does the [severe reduction in proportion to their semiconductor and irreplaceable foreign part contents] absence of new durable goods do to the economy?

Fixed for realism.

Demand is elastic to some extent. Prices go up. Industries shrink, alternatives grow.

In any case, it's a relative transfer of wealth and power from most of HN to their plumber and landscaper and those otherwise less affected.