There’s a confirmation bias aspect to this. There were a lot of things made in the 70s that did not keep working for fifty years. You don’t think of them because they’re already broken down for parts, recycled or buried in a landfill. There are some things that have kept working only because someone put regular care and maintenance into them.
There are a lot things made today that won’t make it fifty years from now. There are some things that will.
If disposable culture concerns you, learn how to repair things (clothes, kitchen appliances, furniture, electronics, etc) and buy things that can be repaired (like the Framework laptop).
Being built to be maintainable and parts shops being common also helped a lot of those things be maintained as well. They didn’t even need to be as robust when replacing a part or two was cheap and easy. Now the issue is hard to identify due to complexity and finding replacement parts is so expensive or time consuming that just replacing it is less of a hassle.
Like I did basic maintenance for bearings and belts on a knob and switch only washer we bought in 2004. It lasted for almost 20 years with one service call to replace water seals because I didn’t trust myself to get it right. Now we have a 3 year old front loading washer with a bunch of bells and whistles that have already stopped working shortly after the warranty expired that makes horrible noises which I won’t work on because everything is a pain to get to and they are just way too complex.
I remember when one of our local publications asked their readers “what kind of old appliances you still have around at home that you use regularly?” and the article was flooded with photos of 1970s kitchen appliances. Well duh, of course those still work, if you take them out of the cupboard once a year to bake a cake or whatever.
Back in the day there wasn’t 56 versions of $product for cheap. There were maybe 3, and people talked. Products cost real money and we were concerned about quality and lasting power.
So yeah, we had better shit because reputation was a big deal.
Survivorship bias.
We didn’t experience the numerous appliances and other detritus from the 70’s that crapped out and died. The ones whose safety policy began and ended with the power of prayer.
I have no idea what 2024 will bring us. It feels like the entire world is shaking itself apart. But I can promise you with 100% certainty that in 2064 they’ll be lamenting that their appliances aren’t built as good as they used to.
Yeah nah…
Take fridges for example. Producers added features like automatic defrosting, freezer on the bottom, ice maker, etc. All of those add complexity, and require parts that break down.
40 years ago a fridge was basically just a pump and a condenser in a box. There’s not a lot of things to break down with that setup, and that’s why they’re still working perfectly fine. You don’t need a whole system to pump cold air from the bottom of the fridge to the top, you just stick the condenser at the top and let physics do the rest.
There seems to be more to it than that.
Planned obsolescence is a very real thing, and appliances can be designed to die sooner than they have to.
Aside from that, a lot of tech got unnecessarily complex, thereby raising chances of something breaking naturally, without even PO in mind.
On average, tech from 70’s actually was more reliable, even though it’s not AS reliable as some peoppe think exactly due to survivorship bias.
