Manufacturers either on purpose, or by accident, have made Consumer Reports reviews not super useful, at least from my experience.
The ability to match a product reviewed by Consumer Reports to something I can actual purchase has become pretty difficult over the years. This would be less a problem if brands followed some kind of trend in overall reliability, but it seems like individual models vary widely in quality even within a specific brand.
So when it comes down to trying to find the specific model of something being reviewed, it seems like that model was discontinued, replaced, or not available at the retailers I use.
> This would be less a problem if brands followed some kind of trend in overall reliability, but it seems like individual models vary widely in quality even within a specific brand.
This is, frustratingly, incredibly true. Even otherwise good products will tend to have some single component with a significantly lower lifespan than the rest of the device. This is compounded by the fact that everything is now manufactured to such exact specifications that it becomes effectively impossible to replace that piece with a higher quality one they should have used in the first place.
Then you have the insane number of SKUs a single base device can generate, and it becomes difficult to tell whether the thing you're holding in your hand has the shitty version of that component, or the better one. Sometimes it's even the same SKU and there's a range of bad serial numbers (typically because the manufacturer got a bad batch of something from one of their suppliers).
My guess is that the sheer number of parts in many modern products has drastically increased the chance that a device fails. My office has a water cooler with a purifier, and a spout for hot water. It broke and a guy came in to fix it. There are 2, 2 circuit boards in that thing! For a water cooler. How many parts are there that could fail and brick it? How many would a more primitive water cooler have? I just can't believe the simplest water cooler we could invent has 2 separate circuit boards in it
Different retailers get different model numbers, especially for white goods and other large purchases. The big retailers ask for this so that you can't use their fake "price match guarantees" because the model number is different between stores.
For example, the TV I bought at Fry's was the same as a model at Wal-Mart, but with one fewer HDMI input. Another TV I bought (again at Fry's) was the same as a model from another store, but with the built-in DVR disabled.
That leaves the burden on you to figure out which model was in Consumer Reports by matching up the features. It's annoying, but possible.
The ability to match a product reviewed by Consumer Reports to something I can actual purchase has become pretty difficult over the years. This would be less a problem if brands followed some kind of trend in overall reliability, but it seems like individual models vary widely in quality even within a specific brand.
So when it comes down to trying to find the specific model of something being reviewed, it seems like that model was discontinued, replaced, or not available at the retailers I use.