I need a new chair. The Herman Miller Aeron seems solid, though I haven't actually sat in one yet. At $400-500 on Craigslist, they're not exactly cheap and I want to make sure I'm not missing something.
Are they worth the $400-500?
Ask HN: Are Herman Miller Aerons worth the money?
1–10 of 22 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are Herman Miller Aerons worth the money?
#2Yes.
Re: Ask HN: Are Herman Miller Aerons worth the money?
#3No.
Re: Ask HN: Are Herman Miller Aerons worth the money?
#4One thing to be aware of when buying one used that I just had to go through is that you can't really get them serviced if anything breaks.
Herman Miller gives a 10 year warranty that they'll fix the chair if something happens to it.
I bought mine about 8 years ago from a co-worker who acquired twenty of them in a dot-bomb auction. It's been awesome, but a few days ago the piece holding the armrest to the back broke, so now I only have one arm-rest.
If I had bought it from a retailer, HM will fix it for free. Even so, 8 years of having it prop me up and this is the first issue I've ever had with it, so I still recommend it.
Re: Ask HN: Are Herman Miller Aerons worth the money?
#5If you amortize the cost over the next decade at least, it isn't that bad. I'm sitting in mine right now.
Re: Ask HN: Are Herman Miller Aerons worth the money?
#6It is a good chair but you really need to sit in it and its competitors before plunking down the cash.
I'm partial to the steelcase leap.
Re: Ask HN: Are Herman Miller Aerons worth the money?
#7I'm in one now. It's nice, but I've sat in other chairs that are $250 that are also quite nice -- not as nice, but decently close.
However, those $250 dollar chairs only seem to last me ~2 years.
A side note that does make a difference: The $250 chairs are at home and my children are _quite_ hard on them.
Re: Ask HN: Are Herman Miller Aerons worth the money?
#8If you sit at a desk all day, a good chair is absolutely worth the money. Desk workers are prone to get back problems from sitting all day long. Programmers more so, because we try to get "in the zone" -- and once we're there, we don't get up or move around much.
A high-end chair will probably last for ten years, so you're talking maybe $100 per year. Compare that to the cost of regular massage, or chiropractic, or back surgery, and it's clearly a good return-on-investment.
But the Aeron isn't the only good chair around. I learned this back in 2006 when I was planning on buying an Aeron too. I stopped by a brick-and-mortar HealthyBack store (http://www.healthyback.com) to try out the Aeron, but I tried out the competition too. I wound up buying a Nightingale CXO chair instead. It wasn't as trendy, but it fit my body frame a lot better than the ones people usually mention online. It's important to do this comparison shopping in person, because our bodies are each very different and you need a chair that feels right for you.
Re: Ask HN: Are Herman Miller Aerons worth the money?
#9I went a few months in my new company with a $100 Staples "executive" chair. It was fine for a few hours at a time. At 12 hours per day though it's horrible.
Yes, it's really worth it. No, there's no really good cheap alternative.
I also highly recommend the $50 lumbar support thingie (you can "install" it yourself in 5 seconds).
Re: Ask HN: Are Herman Miller Aerons worth the money?
#10Yes, but try out a few other chairs of similar quality first. They all have slightly different shapes and some feel better than others, depending on the person. Even in the office I use, we have several batches of Aerons with slightly different feels and features.
EDIT - Here are some other brands that usually don't carry such a price premium on CraigsList:
Steelcase: http://www.steelcase.com/en/products/category/seating/task/p...
HumanScale: http://humanscale.com/products/category_detail.cfm?category=...