Wait - just wait - for Obama to send a US-market DVD player . . . which probably won't work well with British 50 Hz power and the PAL (or is it SECAM?) system used over there.
Some countries over in Europe ruled DVD region coding illegal, thus region-free players are readily available in the European market. So it'd be better to buy one from one of those countries. Obama should have technically inclined people available to get a player that would work.
It's big, ugly, has no internal turntable, delivers only 1000w of power, and looks very dated in the general scheme of things.
However, it's built like the proverbial brick outhouse, and has outlasted several other retail microwaves.
Personally, I want something in the middle - I'm willing to pay more, but it's like those resolable shoes for $200, vs the chinese $20 ones. I'd have to go through 10 sets of the cheap ones before it'd even start to make sense, and with the cost of capital, any repairs, etc I'd have to seriously question whether I'd ever save money with the expensive ones.
As for cheapness and lack of quality, well, I've seen 'expensive' stuff that turns out to have cheap innards - the price point was to fool you into thinking it was well built, but only the shell actually was.
For durable goods, how do you
tell the difference between an appliance that's likely to last a decade of heavy use, and one that will fail within a year with only moderate use? Price can't be the sole indicator, and it's difficult to tell between brands/product lines.
Many appliances are required to put energy star ratings on their stuff. How about MTBF rate as well?
Expected life on decent HVAC equipment is 20-25 years, if it's properly maintained.
Some of the stuff Dad was encountering was that name brand systems were going bad after far less than that, primarily due to cheapness to make a bigger profit and difficulties getting them into the higher efficiency categories.
The extra cost for the higher efficiency would also require them to operate for 20-25 years in order to break even.
I'm not saying that higher efficiency isn't good, but that there's more factors involved, and many of them are hidden, often more or less deliberately.