[solvegas]

About 30 minutes ago, my monitor died. Actually, it was a 32" TV I've been using as a monitor. Slim LED bought in 2013 at Fry's Electronics for $200.00. At first I panicked because I had no idea what was going on. Being electronically challenged, I froze. But then I started to troubleshoot my machine and I found out it was the monitor. I'm now using a analog machine ( thank God I don't throw much away ) that was the bomb back in 2008, a Samsung 17".  What a size difference. My peepers are straining to see what I'm typing right now.  The tits just don't look so great anymore.  Anyways, recently I've had CFL bulbs that do not last as long as the old incandencent bulbs, TVs that are crapping out much, much sooner than the old CRTs and cellphones that fail a lot, not just mine but other friends who complain of the same phenomena. What they all, every single one, regardless of brand, have in common is .... Made in China. Are any more of you suffering the same way ? I have an old alarm / radio from Sony I bought in 1979 which still works fine. Made in Japan. I've got a 26 " color TV from 1982 made by RCA in the good ol' USA in the back room that still works. And a 1948, 35mm Mercury II camera bought by my father while attending Texas A & M. Made in America. Still works !  Next digital monitor I get will be made in Korea, Japan, wherever, but I'm not buying or I'll minimize at the most possible anything made in China. Enough is enough. 

[Nimrod]

See, the new crappy crap is more crappy than your old crap which happened to be correspondingly less crappy than the crap at the time. So, current crappy crap can cause continual consternation 'cause comparatively contemporary crap constitutes commercially compounded concentrated crap.

We have an old RCA TV from sometime in the early 90's that works perfectly! The thing is pushing 25 years. Kithara has a digital clock radio from when she was in middle school.

[TheZookie007]

Enforced obsolescence.

I remember when stuff that was made in Korea was much crappier than the stuff that was made in Japan or in China. (Lucky Goldstar and Daewoo: remember them?) Things have changed a bit.

[rtpoe]

I wonder if the manufacturers figure that people are going to be buying new models every few years when new technology happens, so they don't bother making stuff to last any longer than that.....

[BacE]

In the early years of electronics, engineers disigned with components that were above spec. Now a days they have to use cheaper shitty components, because some guys from financial management tell them to. If they could, they let them disign stuff that would break down 1 day after the extended warranty. But with every electronic device getting automatic software updates over the internet, we soon might have.

This sometimes makes me ashamed that I've studied electronics.

[Cutter]

I have a functioning AM/FM vacume tube radio made in Japan in 1958, and a Panasonic reel to reel tape player, also fully operational.

I have a wireless router that seems to overheat and lock up after 5 minutes and it's not a year old.

[solvegas]

Electronics have been advancing very quickly since the first integrated circuits were developed at Texas Instruments, Intel and Fairchild electronics in the late 60's. Electronics  hardware has doubled in computing power every 18 - 24 months which is why the capabilities of a I - Phone 6 and I - Phone 3 are so different. So you have natural obsolescence occurring. Nevertheless, the point I was making was that the products made in China are of poor quality. CFL light bulbs made in China I bought in order to cut my power bills lasted less time than the energy hogs incandescent bulbs made in Schenectady, New York by GE originally installed in my present home. They are Phillips brand the CFLs. And they were supposed to last much longer but they don't.  China has shipped contaminated food such as shrimp which is why you should avoid their food products. The companies are owned by Communist party members and the food safety inspection protocols are very corrupt. Look, I'm old enough to remember when " Made in Japan " was synonymous with cheap and badly built shit. But the Japanese learned and improved and their products, mostly, have a deserved stellar reputation. But the Chinese are not improving if you believe much of the press such as Consumer Reports. Like I said in my above post, I'll no longer buy Chinese products even if they are the cheapest. My patience is done. 

[Palomine]

I understand your pain solve, and wish you luck. However, it's almost impossible to avoid buying items in certain categories that aren't made in China. LOTS of stuff that used to be manufactured in America stopped being cost-effective to make here decades ago, and has long since moved overseas... generally to where labor was cheapest and regulation lightest at the time. I'll also point out that the "country of origin" listed for a product doesn't tell the whole story: some kinds of items are filled with a parts from a variety of places... cars are the best example of this. There are some vehicles from U.S. manufacturers where large percentages of their content are sourced from overseas suppliers. Also, just because something's made in China doesn't automatically make it inferior to some other comparable product: a lot depends on the engineering that was put into the design and on the quality control: Apple surely doesn't design iPhones to last for a decade... if they did, they'd be even more expensive than they already are! Manufacturers design and build to a specific point... few if any intend/expect their products to last forever, regardless of whether they're made in China, Japan, the U.S. or anyplace else.

I tend to buy infrequently and keep and use what I buy as long as practical. I try to choose what I buy carefully, with that plan in mind, but I don't go overboard and spend two or three times as much for a better-made item if it's something I'll only use infrequently or might not live long enough to wear out. So, sometimes I do go with the cheap choice when it makes sense to do so... and often, that means buying something made in China.

With that said, for some things that I'll use often/hard/and hopefully for a long time, I do rationalize spending considerably more than I would for a competitive/cheap/often Chinese-made product. Thus, I can unreservedly recommend the following items/manufacturers, though I can't say for certain where all/some of their products are made:

Tivoli Audio (radios: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoli_Audio)
Bosch (power tools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bosch_GmbH)
Krups (coffee makers, appliances: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krups

...I'm sure there are other manufacturers I can recommend, but those are the first ones that come to mind, probably because I use their products at least a few times each week (daily, in the case of Tivoli).

[gOOber]

Am I correct in thinking that really good electronics are not German made?

[solvegas]

Point well taken Palomine. Just a thought off topic. I'm having a torturous time reading your response. The yellow color is hard for me to read on the grey / white background which the forum uses now. Anybody else having this problem also ?

[gonZo]

We had been asked to improve the contrast of all posts, so we had to lighten the backgrounds. That admittedly made Palomine's and my posts harder to read. We're still working on this, and we may make more adjustments to the display colors as we go along. (And Dr.Fashizzle is working on a project that will make many of you happy.)

[Palomine]

Point well taken Palomine. Just a thought off topic. I'm having a torturous time reading your response. The yellow color is hard for me to read on the grey / white background which the forum uses now. Anybody else having this problem also ?

Yes, you're the second person to comment that the yellow text on our new light-grey background is hard to read, and it's gotten a bit worse since the light grey was lightened even more the other day.

I'm looking forward to when the backgrounds are inexplicably changed to yellow, so my posts will become completely invisible.

In the meantime, if you just click and drag a cursor over my text (or any text) in your browser, it should change to your specified selection colors (white on orange on my PC atm) per the attached cap.

[SwitcherX]

I've read that the factories in China will do anything if they think they can get away with it.

Buy Direct USA

American Made

[KBTs]

I had the exact same CFL-crap experience as Sol many years ago, so switched over to LED bulbs years ago.  And had the beginnings of the same damn LED-crap experience again: crap bulbs sourced to the land of the plantation-factory with an apparent minimalist spec in one of the components (none of the LEDs ever burned out, but EVERY dinker rectifier failed in EVERY bulb that failed).  Market forces continue to sort out the quality-to-crap continuum, but there are many variables and it often takes years.

As with all you other mature adults, I remember when "Made in Japan" meant cheap and often poor quality (remember Allan Sherman's "12 Gifts of Christmas" = "Japanese transistor radio") then as Japan's industrial base developed it became "Made in Taiwan" was crap.  Then it became "Made in Korea" and now "Made in China".  Therefore, in the little-kid world of logic, eventually every country's economy will be developed enough that it will no longer be possible to make crap on Earth.

[Hiram]

The main failure in modern electronics is with capacitors.  IC’s rarely fail, neither do transistors, but capacitors dry out after a while.

I bet if you went to a dumpster and took all the electronics out, most of the faulty items would be caps. Not all, just most.