I haven't watched this video, but based on your comment I don't think I'll bother.

It is my sincere understanding that the degradation of quality is from the companies trying to leverage extended warranties as the true profit center of appliances.

edit: I should add in more detail. Sorry Avid, not trying to converse "around" you, it's just meant to inform other's on how I come to think this way.

The shit really hit the fan for quality when Maytag/Whirlpool bought Amana and restructured. They closed most of their manufacturing and consolidated. Really this meant that for all the "banners" or "brands" that various machines were sold under in the various stores, now for the most part they were all the exact same machines, literally made in the same plants, same pumps, elements, controllers, you get the picture. The drop in quality was precipitous from this point.

Oh, and Haier was trying to purchase either Amana or Whirlpool, can't remember which. But at any rate Haier was in the game walking the dog on consumers as well. Samsung, who had absolutely no fucking business making appliances, then jumped hard into the game because they're a major competitor. Businesses playing shell games and strategically competing.

All of this dovetailed with the larger industry-wide push to embrace the "extended warranty" profit stream. Companies everywhere were figuring out that the money was flowing like water with this scam. This slowly evolved into a quasi-subscription type business model where they are now designed and expected to fail in a specific time frame. Circuit boards by steam vents, changing key components to aluminum which corrodes. That type of obvious bullshit.

I think now they've got us by the nut sack. Buying an EW is almost automatic at this point. Nobody thinks for a second that their device is going to hit 18 months without a major malfunction.

They've managed to turn buying a washing machine into a Vegas Hotel type situation where the up front price is $47 but in the forensic accounting you're paying $160.

He has other videos where he has explained that you can't trust any brand any longer and you should not buy based on previous brand experiences alone but investigate individual models (and even revisions to them since it was a known trick to change them after the initial release to make them cheaper). Not sure if he mentioned it on this video since at the moment I'm not in the market for an appliance, but his takes seemed reasonable.

I don't keep up on the appliance world very much, but for many years I have been under the impression that when replacing one it's always a good call to NOT get the Samsung.

I have literally never seen reason to doubt that rule.

I'm actually pretty happy with my current appliances, but I don't stick all to one brand and I stick with the simpler cheaper designs. If paying for the next higher tier brings higher build quality or upgrades the core function's power/capacity, then I'll probably go for it.

Add feature creep, so there's more things to go wrong and there's higher chances of something breaking.

Enshittification, just like with online services.

That was also the conclusion of this video on the Speed channel for older version of things vs new one (included tools, shoes/undershirts, etc - I would ignore consumables that expire but they were there for s&g it seems):

https://youtu.be/I4C62HC1HSo

The problem is it’s not really people’s choice. Companies have gotten very good at disguising quality tradoffs and marketing has got very good at muddying the waters.

Since this is about tools, I’ll bring up Craftsman as an example. For many years, it was a quality brand accessible to homeowners. But as they changed to be cheaper they still marketed themselves as a quality brand and they seemed like the same price. It was only after the brand value was destroyed, that it became clear how “cheap” the tools had become and people were able to make a legitimate decision to move on