alt Hacker NewsSuch badly designed products are easy to spot by visual inspection.
Unfortunately, if you go shopping in a supermarket or online, you can find a huge amount of bad products that look like they were well designed, but in reality some of their parts are made from wrong materials, and you discover this only at home, after using them for a few months, or for a few days, or even after a few minutes.
For instance, I have seen devices where pressure-regulating springs were not made of spring steel, but of ordinary steel and they lost their elasticity after a very short time, making the device unusable, water buckets supposedly made of stainless steel that were actually made of chromated steel, which rusted at joints after a few months and a lot of diverse devices where parts that suffer cyclical stresses are not make of a fatigue-resistant material, so they break after a short time of use.
There are countless examples of this kind and all have this problem that you cannot detect visually if the correct materials are used, or not, like you can recognize an inappropriate shape.
It reminds me of "bazaar" shops I lived next to at some point.
They had all sorts of cheap objects shaped like simple household items. Obviously, you don't expect premium quality when you buy these things, but you expect it to at least have some function, but they manage to fail at the most simple things. Examples:
- Sewing needles with the eye too small to fit a thread into, they also bend as easily as a piece of wire
- Tubes of "super glue" that are mostly empty, also when you press on it, it all goes on your finger instead of out of the nozzle
- Screwdriver bits with tolerances so loose they don't even fit the screw, some even had bubbles inside, like swiss cheese
- Packing tape that doesn't stick to carboard, at all
- Steak knives that break at the handle as soon as you start cutting steak with them
- "squares" that are off by more than 1 degree