It's not that people 'want' to buy cheap stuff.

That's the mistake PC laptop makers made for 20 years, collective racing to the bottom until they figured out ways to produce $300 laptop. But they eventually learned that a large consumer base had no problem paying $1200 for a MacBook. It turns out, people were willing to pay substantially more for a better product. Now, PC makers are dishing out laptops that are comparable to Apple's.

In my view, main problem is this; when you make washing machine ranging from $500-$2000, inevitably they will share significant number of parts. And the weakest link will most likely be the shared parts engineered to cost, so that they can be profitable in the $500 model.

So why use not bespoke, higher quality parts for the $2000 one? Because it will end up costing more like $4,000-$5,000.

Overall reliability of appliance would shoot up, if a company stopped making their cheapest model so dirt cheap.