I’m stunned at the success of e-cigs of the refillable vaporizer type, just to charge the unit requires dissassembly and ditto for refilling it with the nicotine liquid. Now when you get into cleaning dirty atomizer coils or changing wicks, well I can’t imagine the headache of teaching your average consumer how to do that!
It really is a stunningly complex product just to use, keeping in mind the type of calls tech support for PCs get. (I’m not complaining mind you, I love how geeky and techy the whole thing is
Are there any similarly complex consumer products with a wide market?
Ikea furniture? Their stuff is supposed to be easy to assemble, but I know plenty of people who have gotten very confused and I believe professional Ikea assemblers (not employed by Ikea itself, but people who advertise themselves on Craigslist as such) exist.
Also cars probably seeing that most people have to go to a professional when the car needs to be fixed.
They might not be an overall winner but I think anything with a two-stroke engine, especially chainsaws, should get at least an honorable mention. You have to mix your own fuel, the starting procedure, especially for a cold start, often sounds more like black magic than something a sane person would have ever designed on purpose. They may start on the first try on some days and not at all on others for no apparent reason. Even when you do get them to start, they can fail suddenly and, in the case of chainsaws, they can injure or kill you in the blink of an eye even when they are working right.
I put together a round pine table that had no guide holes for where to put the base. I believe I came on here to try and figure out the geometry in identifying the center of a circle. It was also unfinished, so I had to sand it (using steel wool) and use a sealant, letting it dry and re-sanding it every hour for 6 hours. It was like one step above giving me a tree and saw.
Oh and in terms of danger, I’m going with cars. Last night, we were trying to figure out why the “check engine” light was on. I worked at a gas station, so I checked the major liquids. However, I also recognized that the engine was hot (and thus opening the radiator would have been very dangerous,) and when the car was started accidentally, ramming the oil dipstick back into the hole before oil shot out.
IMHO, much depends on how you define and measure complexity – in terms of discrete parts count, or in terms of total research and development that was necessary for the product to exist, or whatever other criteria one might choose.
For the most complex consumer product, I’d nominate either the personal computer (including all the software that’s running on it), or the modern automobile. Certainly the latter in terms of sheer parts count. A PC is “simple” from a parts standpoint, in the sense that it’s not that hard to build one, but the complexity is just staggering once you start drilling down into the design of the individual components. The fact that you can throw a working computer together from parts is an awesome testament to the power of modularization and interface standardization, one of the great accomplishments of modern engineering.
And we tend to overlook how incredibly complex cars are. A modern car is basically a computer network on wheels, an assortment of robotics, and an engine.
Absolutely. I just don’t consider those to be “products”.
Lego. There is hardly a limit to the complexity of its assembly.
In seriousness though, I can’t think of a better candidate than personal computers.
Thirty years ago, ‘computer operator’ was a job. Now, everyone is expected to be one, in addition to anything else.
We’ve put people who, frankly, should be supervised using scissors, in charge of devices more powerful and complex than the machines that, not so very long ago, ran entire organisations.
I’m not sure if by complexity you mean internal complexity or how complex it is to operate the product. I think cars are more complex than PCs, but a lot easier to operate reasonably well.
It turns out that getting pieces of a stereo system from different manufacturers to work together is very tough, though all the consumer does is plug in a cable. PCs with plug and play are more complex internally but a bit easier to use than back in the good old days where you had to updated drivers manually or even set dip switches.
In case you aren’t familiar with chain saw operation, below is an example. I have three of them including a Stihl which is one of the most reputable brands. The starting procedure is only slightly more complicated than starting jet fighter engine (I am not kidding). It takes 15 steps and that tells you nothing about mixing the fuel in the right way in the first place or about safe operation once you get it started. Chain maintenance and sharpening is another skill of its own and the whole saw can be rendered useless in less than 2 seconds if you hit an embedded spot of dirt in wood or if you are dumb enough to let it hit the ground while the chain is moving.
I have spent literally hundreds of hours cutting with the three of mine and at least an equal amount of time trying to get them to run right even though I bought good ones. They are insanely finicky for a tool that only has to spin a chain and cut wood. You have to disassemble them several times a day to clean and sharpen them even if the engine is cooperating and that is an involved process of its own.
Kleenex tissue, or any other similar brand that comes in a pop-up format.
I vaguely recall that pop-up Kleenex was a new thing, maybe 45 or so years ago. Yet to this day, neither the Kleenex folks nor any competitor in the pop-up facial tissue market have gotten it right yet. Once the box is about half empty, the tissues cease to pop up most of the time. They’ve tried all kinds of tricks – making the slot in the box narrower so the tissue can’t easily pop up and fall back in (which is what was happening a lot), and adding a plastic sheet just under the opening (think of something like the cellophane window in a window envelope), with a slit in it. Nothing works.
We can put a man on the moon, but to this day, nobody has figured out how to make pop-up facial tissues that reliably pop up.
ETA: But wait, it gets even worse. Once the tissues fail to pop up, you have to reach your hand in to get a tissue, just like with the old-fashioned non-pop-up tissues. But they are harder to grab since they are folded differently. And with the narrower slot in the box or the plastic sheet behind the opening, you basically have to tear the box apart to get the tissues out.
Complex? Interms of sheer number of parts, the Automobile would have to be right up there. Complicated? - I vote for Home Automation systems. There’s a reason that there are companies that specialize it getting this stuff working.
I meant to operate or use, but badly got that across in my OP as usual
PCs are complex inside, but most consumers aren’t expected to change out RAM sticks or mess around in the BIOS just to operate them. On the flip side though even the most intuitive OS takes a massive amount of time to learn to use.
On that basis I would tend to agree that the most complicated thing that the average person has to do with machinery is driving a motor car, especially here where most have a manual gearshift.
A six-year-old can work a computer these days, and I suppose that they could, with suitable adjustments to the controls, drive a car. But while they can do quite complex things with a computer, look stuff up on a search engine, or post pictures on FB for example, they would not be capable of dealing with anything more than the simplest of maneuvers in a car.
I have flown a light aeroplane, and my feeling is that it was a simpler task than driving in traffic.
My comments about a 6yo are based on yesterday’s conversation with my neighbour’s daughter - she had found a hedgehog in the garden, looked up how to care for it on the internet, and posted pics to her FB.
A modern car easily. A home PC is trivial in comparison. The electronics and control system in a modern car are way beyond what most people realise. My car has about 50 separate processors in it. There are multiple communication busses. Most of the software is hard real time and safety critical, and developed to a level of reliability almost unheard of outside aerospace. The pathetic attempts at creating reliable software you see from the well known vendors is simply not even close. With drive-train control and body control mixing with stability control, and usually crash mitigation systems - which include firing pyrotechnics - and the whole shebang is created by the thousand and they all run reliably day in day out for years. This is seriously impressive stuff. The end to end design costs (if you include all the sub-systems from the various parts vendors) for almost any car runs to billions. Look at some of the high end cars (ie S class Mercedes, Lexus LS) and the complexity becomes mind blowing.
OTOH, when it comes to gratuitous complexity, I concur with Shagnasty. A two stroke chainsaw takes a heck of a lot of beating.
I was going to say these. Both of them possess decades of progressive refinement behind them (~50 years for computers, over 100 for automobiles) and have been improved and improved to a very high degree. A lot of the improvement is based on technology that the average person has only a vague understanding of. Both of these products require regular maintenance by the consumer and there are widespread networks of service personnel all across the world ready to help people with problems. When was the last time you saw a toaster repair shop, or saw an ad for toothbrush service technicians?
Eh, I’m not convinced. Try threading your basic sewing machine and most lumberjacks would go curl up in a fetal ball. At least chain saws are pretty obvious in their function – chain with teeth on it goes real fast and cuts wood. Sewing machines are * magic *.
