And a lock handle that kills your kid in an hour or your money back.

They were efficient because they weren't self-defrosting.

I had an old chest freezer from the 80s.

You had to manually defrost it for it to keep working. Modern ones have automatic defrosters and other such features.

Yes, the old one "kept working", but at worse-and-worse reliability as the frost built up, until you manually removed everything from the freezer and ran a proper defrost cycle (aka: turn it off, wait for everything to melt, sponge out the water).

I think I'll stick with my "less reliable" heater-inside-a-freezer with an escape hole to automatically siphon + pump the water out. More moving parts means less reliability, but these features are absolutely worth the loss in reliability.

My family had a bunch of 80's appliances. They were terrible feature-wise like the washer would eat my clothes, the dryer was practically either stupid hot or practically no heat, and the fridge didn't have any defrost functionality nor water features. They broke down or were otherwise replaced in the 90s. They were replaced with units with far more features and were good until the 2020s, surviving a few moves. A few even got sold in the end as needs changed.

My current kitchen has a microwave that's from the early 2000s, it works fine and has exceptional even heating and top notch auto sensor modes. The 1980s one we had was a total hunk of junk that constantly had failures, wasn't as powerful, didn't have any sensor cooking modes, and performed very poorly at cooking evenly. The other microwave from the 90s ate fuses for breakfast and had massively unreliable sensor cooking modes.

So for me, practically all my newer appliances are way better than the old ones and have still often lasted >10yrs. Anecdotes are anecdotes.

> ALL older appliances were way more reliable than any you can buy today.

Sure, if you only consider all the older appliances that have survived this long.

While old appliances have good features, LG and Samsung have earned a reputation of being bad. Whirlpool and GE still make some good stuff and they still sell parts. The reason you keep the old washer is the new versions legally cannot use as much water, and so they don't clean as well.