I was a subscriber to Consumer Reports for years and trusted them implicitly because they seemed so thorough and rigorous. Then they did reviews on a subject with which I am intimately familiar (it was computer related), and I was shocked at how badly they fumbled just about everything. I’ve also seen some really dubious ratings on high ticket items like cars that I knew were not great, so I take their ratings with grain of salt anymore.
The fact that Whirlpool is even on this list makes it a joke to me. I will say I’ve had a Miele dishwasher in the past and it was fucking awesome, and have heard great things about a lot of Bosch appliances. But LG and Whirlpool frequently put out trash appliances.
The fact that they seem to fail to comprehend that LG and Signature Kitchen Suite are both made by LG in the same factory, and that Fisher & Paykel and “Cafe” (actually GE) are both owned and made by Haier, and that Thermador and Bosch are also the same company with several of their products being rebadges of each other does not fill me with confidence.
At the very least if they insist on breaking those sub-brands out separately they ought to make at least some mention at the bottom of the chart that they’re actually the same entity.
I rented a house for a while with Miele appliances in it (dishwasher, double oven, steam oven, microwave, and hob), they were amazing. They felt well built, never had an issue (I only lived there for five years though) and had features I would never dream of using, the oven had a sabbath mode or something that you could set up to turn on and cook your food for you a day in advance or something crazy like that.
After moving to my current house I looked into them, they are way too expensive for my blood.
Yeah, CR has been waving a red flag since the day I discovered them. Their testing methodology is meh and the fact that they (afaik, it’s been decades now) don’t purchase the items they test, but instead request them from the manufacturer, means they are not impartial, thus they cannot be trusted.
I’ve always regarded them as drawing parallel lines to things like the BBB. Sure they put on a decent public image and people put trust in them, but… why? What do they actually do? Specially, what do they do for you? You’re basically purchasing a magazine that is 100% ads. Even if you are already interested in an item in that edition, it’s still literally an ad that you will be reading. A biased ad. That you fucking paid to read. That is bonkers, and yet apparently there is still enough people who willingly buy ads for the company to continue existing.
Seems like there could be a crowdsourced version of Consumer Reports. A standardized battery of tests for each product category, and different youtubers could test products according to the test and produce (ideally reproducible) reports for each product. Not sure how the standardized tests would be created or maintained, or how the whole thing would be funded. But it would be cool to have some common, non-commercialized benchmarks that do what Consumer Reports does, but with better transparency and less opportunity to fudge.
I was a subscriber to Consumer Reports for years and trusted them implicitly because they seemed so thorough and rigorous. Then they did reviews on a subject with which I am intimately familiar (it was computer related), and I was shocked at how badly they fumbled just about everything. I’ve also seen some really dubious ratings on high ticket items like cars that I knew were not great, so I take their ratings with grain of salt anymore.
The fact that Whirlpool is even on this list makes it a joke to me. I will say I’ve had a Miele dishwasher in the past and it was fucking awesome, and have heard great things about a lot of Bosch appliances. But LG and Whirlpool frequently put out trash appliances.
The fact that they seem to fail to comprehend that LG and Signature Kitchen Suite are both made by LG in the same factory, and that Fisher & Paykel and “Cafe” (actually GE) are both owned and made by Haier, and that Thermador and Bosch are also the same company with several of their products being rebadges of each other does not fill me with confidence.
At the very least if they insist on breaking those sub-brands out separately they ought to make at least some mention at the bottom of the chart that they’re actually the same entity.
I rented a house for a while with Miele appliances in it (dishwasher, double oven, steam oven, microwave, and hob), they were amazing. They felt well built, never had an issue (I only lived there for five years though) and had features I would never dream of using, the oven had a sabbath mode or something that you could set up to turn on and cook your food for you a day in advance or something crazy like that.
After moving to my current house I looked into them, they are way too expensive for my blood.
Yeah, CR has been waving a red flag since the day I discovered them. Their testing methodology is meh and the fact that they (afaik, it’s been decades now) don’t purchase the items they test, but instead request them from the manufacturer, means they are not impartial, thus they cannot be trusted.
I’ve always regarded them as drawing parallel lines to things like the BBB. Sure they put on a decent public image and people put trust in them, but… why? What do they actually do? Specially, what do they do for you? You’re basically purchasing a magazine that is 100% ads. Even if you are already interested in an item in that edition, it’s still literally an ad that you will be reading. A biased ad. That you fucking paid to read. That is bonkers, and yet apparently there is still enough people who willingly buy ads for the company to continue existing.
Seems like there could be a crowdsourced version of Consumer Reports. A standardized battery of tests for each product category, and different youtubers could test products according to the test and produce (ideally reproducible) reports for each product. Not sure how the standardized tests would be created or maintained, or how the whole thing would be funded. But it would be cool to have some common, non-commercialized benchmarks that do what Consumer Reports does, but with better transparency and less opportunity to fudge.
Project Farm on YouTube is an alternative I’ve been happy to have discovered
https://www.rtings.com/
They’re trying to avoid the pitfalls of popularity.