20+ year old farm equipment. They are easy to use, simple to maintain, often repairable by the farmer on-site (with perhaps a trip to the store to buy a small part). I often found myself marvelling at the complex things that could be achieved by an arrangement of gears, such as the contraption on a square baler that wraps the bale with two pieces of twine and ties two perfectly tensioned knots that will hold the hay together in that shape for years.
Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
331–340 of 994 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
#332This may be a normie response - but Apple Airpods Pro are one of the best products I've used. After years of using several bluetooth headsets that get finicky (with connections that is), having a set that just connects and works every single time is refreshing. They really changed my behavior - I went from not liking phone conversations at all (getting agitated after a few minutes)to comfortably having long phone cal…
I agree with this. I remember buying mine in a busy part of SF. I opened them on the street and my iPhone instantly recognized them and paired. I didn’t even need to open the Bluetooth settings menu. Then, as soon as I put them on, the street I was on, which was so busy and chaotic just prior, became dead silent. I hadn’t experienced magic like that in a long while.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
#333My Aeropress coffee maker. It feels more convenient than a french press, and much cheaper than an espresso machine. https://aeropress.com/ Also a bidet. Americans really need to start using it more.
Whoops I said this too before I saw your comment. It's so great!
Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
#334It kind of pains me to say this, but I'll say Sonos from about 5-6 years ago. When I first got a couple speakers, I touted it as the best consumer electronics experience I'd ever had to except maybe some Apple products. Unfortunately, it has been consistently downhill the past couple of years. What used to "just work" now constantly has issues and glitches, and speakers I got just a few years ago that work great are…
Sonos + Spotify have been so spotty. Playing music from Spotify consistently starts tracks halfway through a song. Sometimes no music plays at all even though it displays as playing in Spotify. Sometimes Spotify just cannot connect.
I have something like $3500 in Sonos speakers; it’s really disappointing how unreliable they are.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
#335Macromedia Fireworks. UI was better than any other graphics program I tried, ever.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
#336The first thing that came into my mind is the 4-colour pallpoint pen from Wedo: https://wedo.de/4_colour_ballpoint_pen_chrome It is very practical if you want to use different colours for note-taking away from your desk. I had my first one aprox. 40 years ago when I was a school boy. Its design hasn't changed since.
I've never seen the Wedo pen, but the Bic 4-Color is a classic.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
#337I bought a Breville Barista Express when everyone started working from home. It's one of the best product investments I've ever made. It's beautifully designed, reliable, and makes amazing coffee. Has a steamer and grinder included. And I probably paid it off in all the coffee I didn't buy from coffee shops.
Second would be the Tesla Model 3.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
#338If you split your own firewood by hand, a Fiskars splitting axe is insanely better than any standard splitting maul you'd find in a typical hardware store: https://www.fiskars.com/en-us/gardening-and-yard-care/produc... For mechanical pencils, the Rotring 600 is the best thing I've ever written with: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AZWYUA4/
I love Rotring pens and pencils - I used a Rapid Pro mechanical pencil throughout college. Nowadays I use a Rotring 600 or 800 with Ohto ballpoint refills. The knurled grip is great, the the overall weight of the pencil is much better than your average plastic pen.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
#339- HP products before Corina took over. Especially the HP-28s and HP-48GX
Hp basically put a lisp machine into your hands. The 28 is better than the 48 except for I/O, battery door, and screen and CPU speed. (What can I say. I love the clamshell)
- mechanically, anything by Honda
- Lada Niva. A relative has one in S. American. While out w/ him a cop pulled us over just to tell my uncle that he had better: “take good care of my little Russian!”
Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
#340BitTorrent is amazing. It just works. Anyone anywhere can create a torrent of their files, dump the magnet link somewhere, and everyone else can reliably retrieve it. It is self-reinforcing; the more people using a torrent, the better the robustness, redundancy and download speeds. You can often get better speeds from downloading something via torrent than from a web server. It's an open protocol that is relatively e…
Wish browsers had built in support for it. Imagine if by default most downloads were through BitTorrent, and your browser would then seed the file for 1.5x the download size and time.
Support in the browser would require the browser to stay on the whole time, along with the computer. Bittorrent clients are better run on small less power hungry boards (RPi, etc.) or on hardware that is meant to be running 24/7 anyway. For example, I run the Transmission daemon on my XigmaNAS home file server. The NAS is headless, but I can control the daemon through its remote GUI, so as soon as I click on a torrent or magnet link on the browser, it calls the local Transmission GUI which sends the info to the client on the NAS which starts the download freeing the browser and the PC of any further work.