Traditional timer
In my eyes, a PCB controlled washer is like a washer with serveral hundreds of timers working together.
Gates are opend according to a given patern, allowing current to flow in a certain path.
In the timer, these switches are physical, there are a few dozen if even, and are physicly moved by a actuator-cam type thing.
In a microcontroller, these switches are solid state, are hudnreds if not hundreds of thousands in one place and are switched via a eletronic current.
12 switches in one parallel cascade are FAR less likely to fail just by statistics. You, however, only have 24 outputpossibilities: 12 times on or off.
1000000 switches, interconected in several hundreds of layers: Statisticly, it is way more like that one switch breaks in there, but you have several thousand times the outputpossibilities.
That is why timers paired with standard 2 speed bi-directional motors in TLs as well as few operations (fill, wash quick, wash slow, spin quick, spin slow, maybe lock lid and a seperate drain pump) go together so well.
Running a modern FL with its infinite speed control, reaction to several not userselected inputparameters and few more operations it has to change way more frequently of of interconected timers is theoreticly possible. But you'd need hundreds of timers, all verry complicated and different from each other, that probably would fill entire rooms.
I dare to say switch per switch, times and microcontrollers fail about the same amount. In one you treat micromanging for the simplicity, in the other you get perfect mangement with a lot more complexity.
If people who sold applainces would bring that comaprison into the brains of consumers, there would have to be no tricking into thinking it is one when in reality its something else.
Just say the customer: Do you try to do your laundry particulary well, or a you just a set and forget person?
Number one makes PCBs more suited due to automatic micromanaging, the latter favors mechanicl timers.
That (still not perfect way of talking to a customer, in reality I wish before showing any machine, any sales person would take a minute or 2 and ask the customer some questions) would help a lot of people quite good already.
