I'm fairly confident that in some cases the old ones do still win.Hobie-wan wrote: I think taking durability into consideration, the older ones still win. My grandparents had an old International Harvester (the tractor people) refrigerator in her garage when I was little that had been made in the 50s I believe. It had a latch closing mechanism and a lot of the handle was busted off, but it still worked great otherwise. When we sold our old house around 1990, we put in a new fridge and the old one (itself over 20 years old at that point) went into her garage to swap out, but only because the old handle was so messed up. Now that fridge is still ticking away in the garage there and I'm pretty sure it has never needed a repair of any kind.
As I noted, the fridge my parents have now that is 4 or 5 years old, it has had on different occasions, the ice maker, outside display, and some major portion of the cooling system replaced. Last time I visited, the display was messed up again but they were just living with it.
There is even a funny joke in one of the Discworld books about this: "Only the rich can afford being poor" or something like that
The example in the book uses boots (the rich buys a solid pair of boots that last a lifetime, the poor buys a cheap crappy one and needs to replace them after 2 years).I think there are probably some select brands making high durability appliances. I'm sure that for electronics it is possible to make some extremely durable ones, even for very harsh operating conditions (this would be the stuff that gets used e.g. for some scientific purposes like Space missions etc.) - to what extent you can only get that stuff to specifications I don't know. The stuff regular consumers typically get is for consumption and being replaced a few years after.
For your example of the fridge, which is on all the time, efficiency matters a lot and I it is very likely that power consumption of the old fridge is higher.
Ivo.
