Osram recently spun off a large portion of its lighting business.  As you may or may not know, Philips Lighting also became independent a few months ago.  GE Lighting remains with General Electric, though last year a portion of it was split into a new commercial LED division called Current.  General Electric had nearly sold their appliances division to Electrolux a couple years ago, but it turns out it has been sold to Haier.

Grrrrr.  No more GE appliances for me. 

Haier used to be all built in Japan, but not anymore!
GE appliances have always sucked, and even though I have a GE stove and oven, they were built before the buyout, and they really don't work well!
I had a BRAND NEW GE fridge, that was always making very loud noises, replaced it, and same thing!

I remember (and currently know of) some GE appliances that are pretty old, but still working.
Does this include water heaters? There's one from around the late 2000's working, but that's really not much. I do know of an old water heater (80's at the latest, likely in the 70's) that still makes water hot enough to give you burns if you're not careful. Maybe new ones have "safer" thermostats?

GE water heaters are Rheem manufactured.

GE water heaters are Rheem manufactured.

Almost forgot that. Rheem seems to make good water heaters.

I for, one, subscribe to the theory that older appliances are generally longer lasting.  There should be a way to adjust the thermostat on your '70s water heater, is it gas or electric?  If it's electric, there should be two cover plates on the side of the tank (assuming a regular 50 gallon water heater) and the thermostat should be in there.  I would think the tank might eventually corrode out and if electric the elements could eventually burn out though.  Mine, electric, which I wanna say is a Richmond??? bought in 2010 had a 6 year tank warranty. 

I had/might still have in storage a 1970s GE flip-digit clock-radio.  I found it in 2013 at a garage sale.  It's clock and neon backlight work(ed anyway) flawlessly, it kept accurate time, and the radio was excellent, at leas the FM half of it.  From a location with well over 50 FM signals (pretty crowded FM dial, borderline overcrowded) it performed well where cheap radios just get overloaded and make it hard to tune in weak/distant stations clearly.  This one was extremely selective while not discounting anything either, even on weak or distant stations the audio was just noticeably quieter, not full of static.  Of course it was mono only so I can't vouch for how well it did with weaker stations switching in out of stereo.  On a side note, good radios usually have a way to disable FM stereo to prevent that sometimes annoying transition between noisy/hissy stereo and quieter mono on a weak station.   As a little kid, I used to think the "stereo" or "ST" indicator light on a lot of car radios or home stereo tuners was failing or broken when it would intermittently blink on and off like that, especially in the car while, say, driving under an overpass or on some road trip out of range of a given station. 

It's not my water heater, I saw it in a storage closet at a church, but I actually don't know if it is that old.

i recently found a trashed water heater from the 70s. No wonder those things lasted so long

 - 3ft long sacrificial anode stick !!! And some of the Zinc is still there

 - The heater is not the modern immersed U-tube type. Its just a spiral of NiCr wire on some rough clay blocks, in free air, stuck from outside into a closed sleeve that stands in the water. The water would have to corrode through all that few mm thick wall of the sleeve to reach the heater

 - Thermostat with massive contacts. No safety cutout though in case the thermostaat fails