My experience, which is not anecdotical and is shared with friends, say the same. I just change a refrigerator bought less than 12 years ago and I am changing a washing machine with the same age. My family is using the same refrigerator for more than 30 years.

Or in 2002 when DRAM manufactures did the same thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing

And if I read your comment I'm led to believe there is a mass conspiracy by every single manufacturer on earth to deliberately make their products worse. If you make a product, you MUST be trying to make it worse so you can sell more, right? Isn't that exactly what you saying here. After all, if any single manufacturer does this, then all of them must, because they are all obviously in collusion.

The world isn't big enough for two things to be true at the same time.

The thing about the lightbulb collusion is that it's exceptional for being one of the only examples of such collusion that's verified.

I don't doubt it exists in some cases, but if it were as ubiquitous as many say, I'd suspect to find evidence of other conspiracies. Many other industries also lack a centralized organization (one ostensibly for standardization) to facilitate such a conspiracy. Overall I just find the argument very weak, especially in the face of normal market forces and cost-competition being sufficient to explain much of the observed changes.

I do agree that appliances likely represent a real decline in durability over the past couple decades.

>Technology is always getting better!

>The old timers who almost universally report this phenomenon just don't know enough arm chair statistics. Delusional, basically.

Most all the links that you've referenced do acknowledge the role of perceived obsolescence, ie, replacement of an appliance before its useful life is up. That, along with selection bias and the absence of solid data from the 50s-70s, are important factors that are unaccounted for. Snark won't change that.

Exhaust Fans have gone from 20 years to 10 years. I wonder what caused this ;)