I will disagree slightly with Henrik on a couple of points.
First, most bearings favor only one direction of operation; top-loading machines require the bearing to both resist forces side-to-side (from spinning or rotating) and up-and-down (to support the basket and/or agitator/impeller). No bearing is excellent for that -- roller bearings would not do well with supporting the weight, ball bearings wear out faster in this mode than in other modes, and the bearings that set rollers at a 45 degree angle, which in theory would help in this mode, are not very good at hight speeds for spinning.
In contrast, a front loader has the vast majority of the load toward the floor, and, even though the weight is kept in cantilever, the forces that would tend to move the axis into-and-out of the bearing in a front-loading configuration are smaller (this is the same direction that the "weight" would show up to the bearing for a top loading machine).
People make a *big* deal of the cantilever situation, but a washing machine is a very light duty thing for such bearings, a *car*, or worse, bus or truck, is much harsher and no one even blinks when they see a car. At least here in USA, the "bearing supports a cantilevered load" is used against FLers as propaganda, no one ever mentions it in cars or machine-tools.
The second thing I've often seen is the "front-loaders are more complicated" and/or "have more wear parts".
I don't think so. Front-loaders were always very simple machines, particularly when compared to top-loaders, particularly 60 years ago.
Very few FLs had a transmission, for example. They were much more often than not just bunch of pulleys and belts, with a simple solenoid to activate the spin. A lot of them, particularly the ones built in the 60s and 70s didn't even use anything but one belt between two pulleys, and a motor that went from 2 to 16 poles or equivalent. Granted, they did not have the faster spin, but they were dead simple.
People get stuck on the door boot thing, but the truth is that plenty of the most popular toploaders *also* had a very similar boot, but it was "hidden" between the basket and the tub where regular people would never suspect it.
*Currently* FLs got very sophisticated, with lots of electronics, but from that point of view, it's no different, most TLs here are also filled with electronics and controller boards etc.
The *closest* thing to a modern FL as to simplicity of construction is the Fisher&Paykel TL that also doesn't have a transmission. Most of the other TLs are filled with complicated clutches, splutches, or full-fledged transmissions. Those used to be cheaper to make than electric motors way back then, but that had more to do with how much labor costs changed, making those parts (particularly the ones that needed to be machined as opposed to poured into a mold) was always more complex and work intensive.
People often look at external things like dispensers, but the original frontloaders did not have dispensers either, just like the toploaders, and currently a lot of machines, front- or top-loading have the same or very similar dispensers anyway.
