The Daily Ping

Is it just me or are consumer electronics built more and more cheaply as time goes on?

A few PITA electronic components I’ve had to deal with recently:

• A brand new 2.4 GHz phone — within a week it would randomly get hit with lots of static, to the point I had switch phones
• When my old CD player broke, I decided to get a new one of the same brand since my original one was refurbished and had lasted me 10 years. After less than a month, it would only play the first few tracks off a disc before crapping out.
• Our smoke detector randomly goes on beeping spurts. Once every few weeks in the morning, it’ll beep every 30 seconds or so even though the battery is a 10-year battery.
• In four years I went through three cassette decks.
• My first VCR gave me so many problems (I had it repaired five times to no avail) I ended up just going out and buying another, which has performed wonderfully from the day I bought it.

At the inexpensive consumer level, it doesn’t really matter which brand — pretty much every major brand has both performed well and poorly for me with different pieces of equipment (my Magnavox TV has worked fine for a number of years, but the aforementioned VCR had problems from the get-go). It’s really aggrivating not knowing what brand is safe to buy. -ram

Posted in Technology