@gdm I beg to pardon. Appliances TODAY are absolute garbage compared to what was sold 15-30 years ago. If you sold appliances for 27 years like I have you would know. It has gotten much worse, especially now that Samsung and LG are in the mix but EVERYBODY has gone downhill. Next time you see a repair guy from A&E, flag him down and ask his opinion, especially if he has been repairing appliances for a while.
In the past decade or so I can't recall how many times I had to deal with a customer that had a refrigerator that failed in less than a year, or a front load washer with a corroded spider assembly in less than two years, a top load HE washer that wouldn't wash worth a damn, same with the low-water use dishwashers, guck still on the dishes after a three hour cycle. And to add insult to injury, blown control boards are very common in everything. Control boards have been in use in a lot of appliances since the late '80s and there have never been any problems like there is today. My Jennair slide in range was manufactured in 1993 and its control board has never been touched. There are tons of older dishwashers, microwaves, ranges with digital touch pad controls and they still work. So much for progress.
@cal - I remember those old direct-drive washers. Those were made by Whirlpool. I honestly believe that those washers were the best ever made. They were built to take abuse and it was one of the few domestic appliances that could be considered to be good enough for commercial quality. 10 or 12 year lifespans were on the low end. A lot of the ones from the late '80s onwards are still running. The new-style belt drive washers, also made by Whirlpool, are garbage. They don't wash well (actually, any HE toploader is not able to wash well) and the drive trains in those strip themselves after about two or three years, sometimes sooner, because the gears and pulleys are made of nylon. The drive trains in the direct drives were built closer to the way car transmissions were, steel gears in a cast aluminum case.