Depending on the particular consumer group, this could also backfire in the long term. With consumer warranty being ridiculously short. They will increasingly notice the pattern, that devices from brand X always brick shortly after warranty is over. And maybe moving to more trusting, but pricey brands.
Unfortunately, there are almost no "pricey brands" left that serve the middle range of price/quality. Most of them sold out to or just became replaced by bottom-of-the-barrel shit sellers, that are happy to continuously cycle through dozens of fly-by-night brands. It's still possible to get quality work done, but that's one of the few very premium brands and/or bespoke work; if you have to ask, you can't afford it.
(Just look at Amazon marketplace if you think I’m exaggerating.)
Customers have been "noticing" this pattern for couple decades now; it's not just in tech, but everywhere across the board - from foodstuffs, through appliances, sports equipment, clothing, hygiene, all the way to computing. Unfortunately, this is a pattern in the same sense a tsunami is - you notice the wave is growing and about to flood everything around you, but there's fuck all you can do about it.
> you notice the wave is growing and about to flood everything around you, but there's fuck all you can do about it.
Depends. For some product lines there's the "commercial grade" stuff available - for TVs, look into Digital Signage product lines and add some sort of TV stick (or an rpi) to them for the brains, for power tools look at what the tradespeople use (it's probably Bosch blue series, Makita or DeWalt), for kitchen equipment ask your nearest restaurant. For computing, I'd go to Apple (if your ecosystem supports it), Lenovo/Dell/HPs business line stuff (you don't need to buy the next day on-site package, but you want the models that do have that as an option because that's the ones that are both made for easy repair and have better components in the first place) or Framework. You pay quite the hefty premium over Chinesium stuff, but it's worth it.
Only thing I'd stay far away from if you're not trained on how to use them is cleaning supplies of all kinds, hair and body shampoo as the commercial ones are way stronger concentrated and you can do serious damage to your (or your loved ones) bodies if you, say, leave them on too long.
> you notice the wave is growing and about to flood everything around you, but there's fuck all you can do about it.
In terms of online shopping, if the distributor cooperates with the consumer then there is something to do about it.
One of the largest Swiss online shop started to share warranty statistics of all products. That information is quite useful to avoid the cheap and soon to break stuff. Of course it's not perfect, since it only tracks faults within the 2 year warranty period. But it provides a proxy signal for quality. But maybe that only works in smaller markets with less incentives to game the statistics.
