[onewhippedpuppy]

Originally Posted by Grimm

hah, this cracks me up. I can just picture you back at the turn of the century . . "Gosh durn, those horseless carriages . . screw 'em. Ford and those other bastards are just trying to take my hard earned money."

Despite the fact you don't get it, in a few years you'll look back and realize you were in a minority.

Over 60% of the people that buy high end appliances also have a vacation home that are equip with similar appliances. As an example, in those homes having the ability for their fridge to send an alert when the freezer is about to fail and spoil hundreds of dollars of food would be immensely helpful, as well as having a dish washer that can send an alert when it develops a leak and poses the danger of destroying a homeowner's floor.

And to correct your misunderstanding, very few high end appliance manufactures own the service companies that service their appliances. There is a very large industry of independent companies that do that. The manufacturers have to cover the warranty work so instead of it being a revenue source, it represents the single biggest cost item to a manufacturer. Effectively using technology to reduce service calls benefits both the manufacturer as well as the appliance owner.

And lastly, I find it amusing that you think appliances should be so bulletproof that they should be immune from failure. I think it's impossible to come up with even a single example of a product that doesn't face that risk. Even iphones break from time to time. Just pop into a Genius Bar to see how many fail.

So appliance manufactures don't make money from out of warranty repairs? Appliance parts don't get marked up? Designed obsolescence doesn't exist? Because most don't break within the meager 6-12 mo warranty period. When the ice maker agitator motor broke on my 2-ish year old Kenmore, the cost for overall assembly from Sears was about $250. I took apart the assembly, found a part number on just the motor, found the generic motor on the internet, and fixed it myself for about $60. So that part wasn't being marked up from Sears? The total assembly, by the way, was the motor and agitator arm. I installed the arm on the motor and saved about $200.

I'm not expecting an appliance that never fails. But I am expecting one that lasts a reasonable amount of time, commensurate with the timeframe that appliances were able to last 30 years ago.

As for your "innovative" ideas, do you really believe that you can detect every way in which your dishwasher will leak? Or add these various monitoring systems without impacting reliability? The only thing worse than a leaking dishwasher is one that is supposed to detect the leak, but doesn't. Or a freezer that will detect a failure detecting a failure when there isn't one. Your industry cannot design a reliable ice maker for God's sake. You are adding systems on top of your unreliable systems, why not fix the unreliable system that are at the root of the problem?