Are Tech Products Less Reliable Today?

A couple of years ago—say 2003 to 2005—you bought a piece of technology almost expecting that it wouldn't work right out of the box. Hardware vendors were getting squeezed out of business, the number of players in the consumer electronics field was shrinking. And price wars and margins made it tough for manufacturers to do the quality assurance testing they should have.

Experts say that product reliability has continued to improve. But I'm not so sure. My suspicion is that quality assurance may be getting sloppy again. And I'm naming names.

The last four products I bought (or tested) all came with problems on arrival. First there was a new Dell XPS laptop. The display screen was fine if you ran office applications; but if you displayed an image there were red halos and bands. (See photo that I sent to the tech guys.)

Next up was my Kindle book reader, which has intermittent bouts of being unable to connect to the Amazon bookstore. It requires a weekly reboot. Then it was my NeatReceipts. The scanner was wonderful for scanning business cards and receipts, but has problems with 8 x 11 documents and leaves a black stripe down the scan (usually indicative of bad sensors in one place on the scanner). Last, but not least, I was testing an InGrid home security system, and after I went to the trouble of placing sensors in doorways throughout my home, the base station couldn't communicate with them. Diagnostics proved that it was a defective unit. A replacement worked just fine.

So who's right about reliabilty? Me, who sees a new downward trend, or the analysts, who say that things are getting better? I picked 25 random folks from my address book and asked them how their tech lives were faring.

From San Francisco, a mom of three reported that her teenage daughter's Canon SD 600 ELPH died a sad display-death just past the warranty date. Her son's Paparazzi Swatch watch (a discontinued model) took a lot of technician time to set up properly and had extra service charges that were not well documented.

It actually did my heart good to note that Apple users live on Prozac, too. An executive in the entertainment business writes: "I bought my wife and I matching Macs last Xmas. My wife has had hers replaced once and it has been in the shop numerous times. Now mine is on the fritz. We have owned numerous iPods and they go down regularly. The design is beautiful but the quality is weak."

An analyst in Pennsylvania says he thinks I'm just seeing the effects of a mass market. He writes: "Other than the suction cups on my Garmin life has been fine." He adds, "I think I'm buying a lot more CE products than I did in the past, and they are more complex and perform more functions, so I'm thinking that there's a lot more opportunity for things to go wrong."

A New York writer just replaced an old eMachines with a brand new HP minitower. There was a mysterious clicking sound coming from the disk drive, though everything appeared to be working. He had it checked out and, sure ‘nuff, it turned out to be a bad drive. "At this stage of the game bad drives shouldn't be leaving the factory," he says.

Another New Yorker doesn't put much stock in my argument, though he hears more "bad product" stories than ever. He says, "the percentage of gadgets going gimpy is about the same, but there are a LOT more gadgets that bite off more than they can chew." And the only other Kindle user I know? He's having issues with how the unit powers up. Sometimes it goes off and can't be turned back on even after it's been charging all night.

Call me paranoid, but I smell a decline. The profit margins, the increasing demand for products, and the unpredictable nature of electronic components (worse than batches of cookies) all make it tough to make good products.

How can you find out more about which products have better street cred? Both PC Magazine and PC World report on service and reliability issues where they poll a lot more people than I just did.

And feel free to share your reliability experiences.