My vacuum stopped working. A nice robotic vacuum that did the lines perfectly on my floor. It was an amazing thing to come home to a clean house without the zigzagged lines that a Roomba leaves. I enjoyed coming home to a vacuumed floor with the Roomba, but this looked like I had a maid service.
I had to retire my old Roomba due to having a kid under 10 that was into Mario. He treated the device like a bad guy and jumped on it, shattering some internal part that I did not have time or patience to fix. So, a few years later I decided to upgrade to the Neato Connected. The warranty was for 1 year, and I expected any part that was going to fail to do so in that 1 year. Nope. Almost 1 month after the anniversary, the brush could no longer turn. So I cleaned the brush and tried to clean every other piece that I could.
I have a pretty long history of taking things apart and putting them back together. Most of the time upgraded, sometimes downgraded to garbage. I actually have the time, so I figured I would take this thing apart and see what is failing. Looking online at the parts, it might cost me less than a quarter of what I paid for it to fix it myself. There aren't really enough parts to justify the price, except most of them come as assemblies rather than individual pieces, which always costs a little more.
I have a simple observation for modern engineering that I call the toilet rule. Look at the toilet, it has a bowl, a seat, a lid, and a tank. Take it apart. In the tank you have some type of handle, flapper, chain, bobber, and gasket. In the handle assembly you probably have 4-5 parts that link together the other parts, like springs and chains with hooks, but they are probably relatively inseparable. I call it the toilet rule because there are compartmentalized pieces to a toilet. To fix it, you need to know the basics of how a toilet works, and then you can fix the part that has failed.
The nice thing about the handle assembly is that it is reasonably priced. You are rightfully spending much more money on the porcelain than the other parts. And this is where I have a major problem with smart devices. I am paying a premium for software. I am not happy when hardware fails, and the cost of repairs does not take into account that the software did not fail. My robot vacuum was expensive because I could set a schedule from my smart phone, not because they used rubber that was upcycled from the game ball at the superbowl for the tires.
You want to see what failed on my robot?
That piece of plastic did not have a set of bearings behind the geared wheel. So it melted to the shaft it was spinning on. I know they developed this before fidget spinners became a thing, so maybe production of bearings were at an all time low when they engineered it. Except they have kept this same garbage design for the future models. Since it is part of a motor assembly, you have to purchase the motor, opposing gear, and belt when you want to replace it. It also includes a sensor, but guess what doesn't come with the assembly.
So, I order the assembly, which now has a motor with lower voltage, and start taking it apart so I can replace the part of the plastic casing and the plastic gear that actually broke. I use the motor, belt, opposing gear, opposing casing, and sensor from the existing part. Put it all back together like Legos, put back the few screws that hold it together, and try to fire it up. Oops, the screws on one side went too deep and I had to back them out a couple millimeters (this shouldn't be possible, if they used quality material and appropriate parts). It's faithfully cleaning my house again.
Now, let's look at what this means for the average home user. That would have been sent in for 200$ of parts, shipping, and repair labor. It was about 4$ worth of poorly engineered parts that were actually broken. This applies to most devices that have some form of planned obsolescence. Let's look at what this means for smart devices as a whole. This means that you want to buy an extended warranty that has a very low deductible for your pricier devices. Because the development cycle is fast and there are annual releases of devices, you can't count on being able to resolve an issue with a device after a few years for the 200-5000$ price point devices without getting refurbished parts. A replacement with the latest equivalent version is a reasonable expectation out of an extended warranty.
On the flipside of this, let's look at something I have experienced with MyQ garage doors. Not sure if they resolved it, but what I have experienced was a price that covered the garage door and software. A reasonable amount of money for a great capability. Except they started charging for access to their API from your smart home hub. Want Alexa support? SmartThings? Pay up. Not a huge problem, since most people will see the huge security vulnerability of integrating an entryway into their house with a voice assistant, but that should be up to the end user. The device is solid, and the parts are easily replaced with existing and future device parts, so no complaints there. But the software was already paid for with the 2.5-3x cost of the garage door. They also allowed API access to a few hubs prior to announcing that they were closing it off to others. That's just bad business. Increase the price of all of the smart garage doors by 15$. Everyone will still buy them, and you don't have to worry about people not paying the monthly fee to use it the way they want to.
To put it plainly, manufacturers are all over the map with the way they value their products. This is a problem. They should be determining cost with traditional methods on parts, and with value on software. The warranty period should be 2-3 years from the manufacturer. This is pretty basic stuff, and somehow many companies are failing at it.
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