We can make appliances that last for 20 years or more, sure, but then when 20 years pass you have an appliance that is 20 years old and doesn't have any of that new stuff that came out in the last 20 years.
Sure it could be slightly more efficient but even 20 years old ones are pretty efficient, and I'd rather just slap an extra solar panel or two on the roof rather than replace whole fridge and junk the old one.
The entire premise of TFA is essentially that you're wrong.
There isn’t really that much of this. Let’s consider an oven:
Good temperature control: accurate, precise and reliable temperature sensors (e.g. thermocouples) have been around for a long time, as have switching devices that are plenty high speed to make an excellent oven. PID control would be easy with 1980 technology or current technology. Ovens with good temperature control are nonetheless rare.
Forced convection (aka a fan): no new technology required. And they’ve been around for years.
Direct outdoor exhaust: this was available in the 80s and 90s. Not sure where it went.
Good insulation: nothing fancy here. Mineral wool and fiberglass have been around for a long time. Even silicone rubber gaskets that tolerate oven temperature are not particularly new.
Touch screens: most of them are still worse than the old analogue controls.
Steam with good controls: this is pretty new and very rare.
I suspect most of what’s going on is that fancy appliance makers try to keep BOM cost very low and that helps and whistles sell appliances. (Compare a $1500 induction cooktop to a $7k fancy brand gas cooktop. I suspect the BOM cost on the induction unit is rather higher. The gas unit has some cheap brass or bronze castings (I think I read somewhere that those burners cost under $20), a potentially shiny piece of stainless steel sheet, and really cheap controls. The obvious safety mechanism to turn off the gas if the burner isn’t lit? Nonexistent. The only thing $7k buys you is a nice brand name and maybe slightly more solid construction than a much cheaper unit.)
> The obvious safety mechanism to turn off the gas if the burner isn’t lit? Nonexistent.
... Wait, surely these are mandatory ~everywhere by now?
EDIT: Huh. Apparently they are _not_ required in the US (except maybe in apartment buildings) and are not common there. Weird; they're not very expensive.
Maybe it's an American Rugged Individualism thing. While I find the flame failure devices in my gas stove extremely irritating (they're particularly conservative, and won't reliably acknowledge that there's a flame until about 5 seconds after it's lit) I recognise that they are for my own good; this is probably very European thinking, though :)
I’ve seen them on gas fired ovens with pilot lights. (Don’t get a gas fired oven with a pilot light. As far as I can tell, they have no redeeming features unless you like the broiler hidden under some of them. They make for pretty bad ovens, and they suck for indoor air quality.)
Over a long enough period of time, a sufficiently sensitive raw temperature sensor is probably good enough, but that's not likely to be cheap nor reliable/long-lasting.
Typically you also get: more BTUs, better simmer control, easier repairability (due to construction design).
I'm not arguing it's worth the money (which is why I got my $15k stove from craigslist for $2k :)
better simmer control: even a lot of expensive gas stoves have fairly bad simmer
repairability: I regrettably own a fancy Thermador stove that is hard to repair — extracting the crappy ignition units requires a special tool that has been discontinued.
If you want excellent temperature control, get a Breville Control Freak. It outperforms everything else (generally by far), it’s offensively expensive at $1500, and it’s also cheap at $1500 if you think of it as the best stove that just happens to have only one burner.
You’ll also discover that 1800W (~6100 BTU/hr) is about right for most purposes with pans up to 12-14" at near 100% efficiency. You do not want 15000 BTU/hr delivered to your pan for any purpose other than boiling water or maybe reducing a big stock if you are stirring actively.
For an oven and hob, the basics haven't changed, but my previous flat had a $600 oven that was silent, leaked practically no heat, preheated in a couple of minutes and came with nest features like an auto switch off. My new home has a range from about 15 years ago that cost 3x that, takes 20 minutes to preheat, has massive cool spots in the oven, and is noisier than my dishwasher.
For TV's, 20 years ago we were using CRT's to drive 480 vertical lines for the most part. Nowadays, you can get a 1080p HDR led TV for $200 that used 1/3 of the power of the CRT.
I'm sure my 35 y.o. Freon refrigerator is pretty much identically efficient to a modern one. The biggest difference is that mine is still running beautifully halfway through its 4th decade, while all the latest Chinese-sht-tech refrigerators will be unfixably dead in about five years at the outside. People should consider that* environmental and efficiency advantage!
15-20 year old fridges are about 35% less energy efficient than the best modern fridges, not 100x. We just haven't made that much progress in refrigerants, compressors, nor insulation.
It looks like very efficient fridges today use about 400kWh per year. Those are the best (not the average).
In the late 90s, the overall average (not best) figure was ~850 kWh/yr and from the early 2000s (20 years ago), it was ~550kWh/yr.
A 15-20 year old average fridge is about 35% less energy efficient (550/400 - 1) than the best modern fridges.
You watch network TV ??? In 2023 ???
