They have legendary reliability on par with something made in the Eastern Bloc. If you treat Henry right he will last you eons unlike the more modern Hoovers.
Because shops can order them in bulk for crazy cheap and their design is relatively flexible, more suited to the type of vac you do in a big working environment than the type of vac you do when you actually want to clean anything.
O remember my old work had the most battered Henry in existence. Both his front casters had come off, so at first we gave him a cardboard peg leg and a felt-tip eye patch. Then the second one came off so I screwed on a caster from a cabinet and covered him in yellow tape. I never got around to writing Trotters Independent Traders on the side because I quit the job first.
Also the dust bags are huge and cheap, the cable is long enough for big rooms and replacement parts are always available. They're incredibly well suited to heavy commercial use. They've been in production for over 30 years, and I'd bet that most of those early models are still in daily use. They're the AK47 of hoovers - the lack of sophistication is a deliberate design tradeoff.
Apparently the smiley face was intended to make cleaners feel bad about mistreating poor old Henry.
>>21482 >They're the AK47 of hoovers - the lack of sophistication is a deliberate design tradeoff.
Ah, here we go. Henry, the very best there is. When you absolutely, positively got to clean every motherfucking room, accept no substitutes.
Dysons are pretty fucking reliable, and powerful, and you don't need to fuck around with bags. If the Henry is a six-shooter, the Dyson would be that little blaster you have in Quake 2 that never runs out of ammo. Plus, the Dyson has more and more useful attachments.
I think everybody secretly wants a Henry, but they'd never buy one for themself. People in purchasing buy them because they like them, but know they won't be the ones actually using them.
I remember in my old flat deliberately pronouncing its name like the footballer and referring to it as "monsieur 'oovér" and getting my old house mate to say au reiour when I put it back in the supply cupboard.
It is amazing how much difference that smiley face makes to how you treat the object. The fact that I had to stop myself 3 times from writing 'him/his' instead of 'it' during that anecdote is testament to that.
I've used both for work, Industrial valeting of buses and coaches, and Dyson vacuums made the job longer. It's like this, Henry is a grafter, doesn't care if he gets wet or dirty. Dyson is too high maintenance and is over compensating for his tiny hose and high centre of gravity. Also, Henry can be used bagless too.
I have a Dyson at home, though. Henry is a cheap, efficient and versatile workhorse, not a piece of high end machinery.
>>21484 You're complete arse-backwards about the whole thing.
Henrys are used in in times where not only does the person using the vacuum not want to fuck around with bags, they don't want to fuck around with emptying it at all. Back when I worked in a shop, we emptied the bag in the henry once a month, and replaced it with a new one once a year. Despite that it still did the job perfectly, which was simply sucking up fag ends and leaves blown in off the street at the end of every day.
Likewise, only a complete imbecile would think it's a good idea to buy a £400 Dyson then use it to suck up sawdust in the middle of a building site.
Dysons are in my opinion the very best vacuum there is for cleaning a house, but most of the things that make them good for this purpose make them inherently bad for most commercial/industrial environments.
>>21489 I don't think it is an Asperger's think it is a human thing, if anything most autistics I've met have been better with this concept because they have been less blind sided by whistles and bells.
Most people don't comprehend or appreciate elegance in design. People will almost always buy the product with shiny new features over the old product over the one that is a striped down version of the old product that will last a 1000 years, it is why nokia failed.
>>21501 Phone companies create updates that intentionally make older products sluggish. Then they force you to buy their newest model. Go read up anecdotal forum posts about this, some people have kept their old iphones working perfectly fine just because they didn't update iOS
>>21503 >intentionally make older products sluggish
Is there any evidence for this or is it just that each new software/firmware update is more powerful and therefore puts a higher demand on the same hardware?
>>22367 It could well be the case that both are true - that's missing the point. I am yet to see any evidence that Apple are deliberately slowing down older devices, but people continually assert this as though it were unquestionably true.
>>22368 The point is that there is an overwhelming incentive for these firms to release 'updates' that incentivise consumers purchasing the newly released hardware. Many owners of these 'updated(!)' devices have since turned to third party software to put on their devices, as the supposedly 'improved' firmware in fact cripples performance. If Apple is ignoring this, they are straight out playing 'willfully blind'.
I would think it certainly wouldn't be the case for Android devices, not least because any code like that would have to find its way into a source bundle. Apple also probably wouldn't want to do it, because while they want you to buy new devices, they also want you to use the latest software, and putting things in the code that serve no purpose other than to slow down older devices hinders that. I'd say this modern idea that manufacturers are deliberately gimping older devices sounds like the sort of thing certain people might want to spread in order to discourage users from updating to software that makes their job harder. BOO!
It's worth remembering that mobile is the only place where we're really genuinely getting more power. We're hitting a plateau on the desktop, and increasingly in the server market the solution is to really throw more hardware at the problem. Historically, when people said this, what they really meant was not more hardware but better hardware.
>It's worth remembering that mobile is the only place where we're really genuinely getting more power.
This. The iPhone 6s is 20 times faster than the iPhone 4. Apple have made vast performance gains by designing their own silicon from scratch, throwing billions of dollars at the problem. The 6s is faster than most laptops.
Apple aren't actively conspiring to gimp the performance of old devices, but keeping the OS lean isn't a high priority either. Adding features to software invariably degrades performance. It's inescapable - bigger binaries take longer to load from memory, bigger config files take longer to parse. With that said, Apple are clearly working on performance, if only because saving CPU cycles improves battery life. iOS 9.2 has significant performance improvements in many areas.
Devices also unavoidably get slower with age. This is partly because users tend to install more software (meaning more background tasks) but also because of flash ageing. Flash memory performance plays a large role in responsiveness, but flash does wear out with repeated writes. As flash cells start to fail, the memory controller has to work harder to correct errors and reallocate data, reducing performance. It's roughly analogous to a magnetic hard drive becoming fragmented, only permanent.
Discosure of interests: I'm predominantly an Android user, but I do own an iPad.
>>22372 There's also the dreaded nostalgia filter. People complain about how long their Windows machines take to boot, forgetting that they've always taken that long. It was only when talking to my dad about our old computer that I realised that it wasn't just me being a young child that distorted it - our old 486 on Windows 95 really did take long enough to start that he could boil the kettle for his coffee. (If he wanted tea, he could always use the dial-up.) Last year I moved my desktop from a spinner to solid state, and the increase in speed was very noticeable. We have become so accustomed to things happening near-instantly that waiting even a few seconds for a device to start seems like too long.
>>22370 Well, in the server market the focus now is less on hardware and more on virtualisation/cloud computing. Rather than running a traditional HA pair to get your 5 9s reliability you can spawn as many virtual machines as you like in the cloud - this is something Amazon have been doing for a while now, and more companies are looking to copy them.
Server hardware is still hugely important, it's just now the main goal is performance-per-watt rather than raw performance. DCs are using all sorts of clever tricks to deal with their gargantuan power and cooling requirements. Google have been working on high-temperature DCs that run at >40°C ambient. Intel are developing distributed UPS systems with a small battery in each server to reduce distribution losses. Several companies are working on ARM server chips with massive core counts.
