People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
50/50 chance it sells at a premium compared to other models, making the entire idea useless
Source: Like every project that pretended to do this with their respective market
Why the hell is a light phone more expensive than a mid to high range model smartphone. I'd rather just buy that and swap the ROM if I want to remove google.
It's the Linux philosophy in appliances. I'm down.
"No enshitification" is the new top tier marketing strategy.
these exist, see speed queen
the cost is going to be higher, though, because "smart" widgets can offset their initial costs through the projeted sale of the data harvested over the life of the widget
most people being ignorant to this and to the inevitable issues with corporate-built "smart" widget infrastructure, the cheapest option will generally be the most popular
my inner doctorow says that the twiddlers did this on purpose to undermine competition, especially considering the attempts to keep those widgets from being liberated
I want to produce boxed recipes under a product line named "Jamaican"
I also wanna make a perfume line named "Eureka," following the same general idea but with awfully generic scent names
Similar to my idea called to make a clothing brand called “brandless”
No logo, no graphics, no distinguished designs
Just plain basic clothes in basic colors, using fabrics that last.
No itchy washing label either. All product information in detail available on site. At most a product number printed or sown on the inside.
There already was a company called Brandless that tried to do the same thing with basic groceries like ketchup and paper towels. Looks like they're in the process of getting back to market, but seems like they had the same mindset.
Would be really nice to have something similar for clothes.
I mean Uniqlo is kinda like this. No brand (at least in most of their basic stuff, I‘m not counting their new shit), long lasting and not expensive
And easier to repair, too.
A GE washing or drying machine from 30 years ago has easily removable panels, about 4 to 6 screws each and large easily identifiable parts, but one from a couple of years ago requires the top to be propped up or secured and the panels removed in a specific order such that you can them remove the internal plastic panels through which wires need to be dismounted around the drum with like 8 or more screws each of varying sizes and when it comes time to put it back together I hope you've got more than three arms because fuck you thats why.
I just want everything with a heating element to use a heat pump instead. Electric heating elements are so horribly inefficient and wasteful in comparison.
I have a ventless heat pump combo washer/dryer. It takes up half the space that two machines would, plugs into a regular 110V outlet, gets HOT (way hotter than I expected a heat pump has any right to achieve), drains all its drying water into the drain, vents none of my indoor air outside, doesn't require changing laundry from one machine to the other. Practically and mechanically it seems brilliant and I can't imagine why I would ever buy a traditional machine ever again. Except...
It's chock full of horrible apps and shit that I'll never use. It's way too "smart", and those "smarts" are not there for my benefit. After a month or two it finally gave up trying to pester me to connect it to a network and install the app, which I'll never, ever do. It's never going to see an update or new firmware if I can help it, but I'm afraid that if/when it ever breaks, I'll have no choice. I know it's going to do things like eventually refuse to work until the computer has been "updated" to be "compatible" with new parts. And it's not even just that it's going to be expensive. It's that I don't trust it, and I don't trust it to remain functional in the future, even if there are parts, that they won't let me install the parts, or will require me to agree to play by their "rules" before I can.
Right to repair needs to be a thing, and people need to be able to break the ridiculous amount of both legal and practical control these manufacturers have over their devices after they've left the factory. We cannot and should not trust the manufacturers to support it. We need to allow independent repair.
This kind of anti-enshittification marketing is starting to gain traction I think.
A big part of Valve's launch was saying stuff like "of course you can run whatever you want on it, it's yours!"
I've been pondering if one could make open source controllers to replace the "smarts" in these with something that actually just does the job, and even customizable. With different sensor addons/adapters for different makes and models.
"no tech"
Gonna have to rebrand all that to Just A Dream, unless you have a plan to secure the capital to start that all up, and also somehow not be beholden to short term profit crazed investors who will change that business model.
Hooray! Hypercapitalist Realism!
Maybe not only just work for 15+ years. But allow parts to be purchased and easy manuals to read for at home repairs.
There's a supermarket in Canada, that has a brand like that. It's bright yellow and black and only has the product name in bold writing on it.
I'm not against it having an open API to allow it to be controlled by some computer system, though don't even bring up the word "cloud".
There's tradeoffs - simplicity, repairability, efficiency.
Take washers, for example. I was looking at Speed Queen washers to replace mine. On paper they are great, more durable. But it turns out that while they have physical knobs and switches, newer models still hide a circuit board inside, so the gap between commercial and consumer models is shrinking (and not in the direction we want.)
The Speed Queen washers also have nearly half the capacity of off the shelf consumer washers, and use twice the amount of water and electricity. I did the math, and at the current utility and washer prices I'd break even replacing the washer every 5 years.
Furthermore, the local appliance repair shop that I trust told me it could take them weeks to get replacement parts for Speed Queen. For a laundromat that's not a huge deal when it's one washer out of twenty, for a single machine home it's a problem.
Yes, I do wish that consumer appliances were more reliable. But barring that, the next best thing is easily and quickly repairable, and on that matter there's brands that are qualitatively and quantitatively better in that regard than others.
