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| Electrical Appliance Brands You Would Never Buy Again |
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| james_s:
The concept of a brand is all but irrelevant these days, they are just a name slapped on something built by whatever company owns the IP or was contracted by the company that does. The item you buy today may have no relation to the one someone buys next year beyond having the same name on it. It's not really useful to think in terms of brand anymore. |
| Veteran68:
Just goes to show how different our experiences can be. :) GE and Kenmore (yes I know they were rebadged from a variety of manufacturers) appliances used to be king in my youth, but in recent years most American brands have gone to crap. We love our Samsung front-load washer/dryer and TV's. And our LG refrigerator and dishwasher too. We do have a Frigidaire oven that's been pretty good though. Aside from my MacBooks, probably the best Windows laptop I've owned was a 17" Sony VAIO (which I still have and still works fine, I keep it out in the garage on the workbench for when I need to look up something or watch a YouTube video out there). It was one sexy beast of a laptop back in its day. 1920x1200 native resolution too. But Sony got out of the VAIO business in 2014, they don't sell them anymore. I've also had good Sony TV's and audio gear. The XAV-AV1000 head unit (with Apple CarPlay) I recently bought for my old truck is amazing for the price, I love it. Beats the crap out of the 10-year old Clarion I had in there which cost $100 more and didn't have half the features. And we love Dyson vacuums. While I won't go so far as to pay $350 for a hair dryer or desk fan, with Golden Retrievers their Animal upright vacs and their rechargeable stick vacs for sweeping hard surface floors have been great. We've owned 2 of their uprights and abuse the hell out of them (again, Golden Retrievers). Between our 1st and 2nd upright I decided to save a few bucks and went with a high-end Hoover Windtunnel -- not cheap mind you, probably within $100 of a Dyson. It was the worst vacuum I'd ever used, and I sent it back and bought another Dyson. Their quality and support is outstanding. When I accidently broke the brush head on our rechargeable vac, I contacted them to buy a new head. The vac had about a month left on the 3-year warranty but I wasn't asking for warranty service (I broke the thing, after all). Instead they sent me a box with a prepaid shipping label and told me to ship it to their service center, where they would not only repair it but service/clean it and send it back, at no cost. Well, that was nice enough, but then they had some sort of logistics issue where they lost(?) it in their service center, so they apologized just shipped me out a brand new one. With a new 3-year warranty. They will have my vacuum business for life now. |
| rrinker:
Very true. The names just get passed around, a company milks it for all its worth, cheapening quality and relying on the name, until finally enough people badmouth it, then they sell it on to the net manufacturer, who may make short term improvements to get at least some of the reputation back, then proceeds to milk it once again. So you have a never ending cycle. 10 Print "Never buy xxx, they are shite, this happened to mine.." and then a couple of years later, the reviews are all saying 20 Print "brand xxx is the best <whatever> I ever owned, guess they solved those problems from a couple of years ago". 30 Goto 10. On the electronics side, Weller is a good example. They certainly sell some top notch gear with the Weller name. They also sell absolute cheap crap. That's one that sort of gets to me, I grew up in the same town as Carl Weller, who invented the soldering gun. His last plant before selling and retiring was within walking distance of my house, still there, used for something else now. He used his fortune to sponsor many good projects in our area. And now you can go to WalMart and get an absolutely piece of junk soldering gun, but by golly, it's a Weller! As for vacs - the cheap as Shark I have has no problem sucking up the hair from 2 Pugs (they shed a LOT) and random mutt, who also has a coat similar to the pugs. And the cat. I forget what the one I had before that was, also a bagless type, it too worked quite well, lasted about 10 years (sub $200 price, too) and would have lasted longer had someone (not me) actually cleaned it out completely - it did have a problem with pet hair bypassing the dirt cup, which is not an issue with the Shark. |
| Red Squirrel:
Most of the ones from electronic companies that decided to get into appliances. Ex: LG, Samsung etc. They are nothing but trouble and too many complicated parts that can fail. Best to stick with the traditional brands like Inglis, Frigidaire etc. Though now days it's hard to tell, so much re-badging going on and most companies don't even make stuff anymore they just put their name on it. In grand scheme of things I think you need to look at the features. A mechanical washer/dryer combo for example is going to be better than ones that have a front that looks like the control panel of the death star. |
| MrMobodies:
Hoover... Put the Queens Royal logo on it. The one I had had an air powered brush with exposed the cogs in the suction part of the head. Something broke the fins and sounded noisy. Unpowered time wasting like all the other Hoover's before. After that I brought a German hoover 14 years ago with a proper electric powerhead and still works. In 2008, I was looking for a new laptop and lot of the laptops selling in the shops, Toshiba, Acer, Hp, Dell had these tiny little fan vents and most of them were painted. 7 years later I received boxes load of parts and broken laptops of the same typw for scrap that someone stored up for years but didn't want anymore. Most of the heat pipes and solder points on the board were nearly black obviously from overheating. The palmrests look terrible with the paint worn off them and I am pleased I made the right decision not to buy them like that. There was Sony VCR in 2001, I think it was a lot of money and boasted about some features such as "tri picture filtering" etc. The picture didn't look good compared to the old Panasonic recorder and it had a fault where when you set a recording time it use to change or not record. When I tore it to bits it didn't have much on the circuit board and I think it was a Hitachi chip. I found a datasheet and it did quite a lot of things, video inputs/outputs, tracking but didn't do any tri picture filtering or much filtering at all... or maybe I got the wrong datasheet. Also the Sony television had no stereo out, horrible sounding speakers and the aspect ratio was in such a way that a 16:9 was either stretched or look too small and with a 4:3 picture. It was very disappointing. I am also pleased I didn't buy anything from Sonos as I would be having any regrets as of now from meddling with the equipment that would have been in my possession and do things like turn the software against me just to speakers all because I didn't want to accept features I may not want and update that may either change, interfere and break things (according to some recent reviews) or offer to remove/ features or even brick my things for free... Not free for me if paid for it and I had plans and it bricked if let unchecked. |
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