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Overkill objects for everyday life

neil.computer

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Re: Overkill objects for everyday life

#501

Post by kube-system »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #494
BeFlatXIII wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that scenario may be why so many people have a hatred for value engineering: once cheaper becomes available, the market bifurcates into value-engineered wares for people who don’t care and the high-quality end becomes higher quality and three times the price it used to be. The choices of other customers deny you the continued availability of the optimal price+feature set for your needs & budget.

Yes, we hate value engineering because of this bifurcation (it's real, and I've been whining about it for a while too). But I see it somewhat differently than you described: > value-engineered wares for people who don’t care You say it like there is a choice involved here. There isn't. This is something that needs repeating - customers choose out of what's available on the market, not out of the space of all possible…

If the missing-middle is, in fact, a real consumer desire, then you’re identified a market failure that might be a good startup idea.

And I’m not saying this sarcastically, many wildly successful businesses have been built on finding untapped markets that established players have missed. There is always room for improvement. The question is whether that improvement is strong enough to change people’s buying decisions.

Re: Overkill objects for everyday life

#502

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

neilpanchal wrote: post #442
IgorPartola wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are definitely nice finds out there. That doesn’t mean that the military equivalent of a consumer good is better. Duct tape is duct tape. A Humvee is a shit grocery hauler. Military boots aren’t going to be as nice or comfortable as a pair of Italian hand made boots. I remember looking at ToughBooks because their shells are amazing. But what does that do for me if inside it has a 10 year old computer?

Agreed, there is a bit of selectivity and careful consideration. These are misuses and illfits. Wearing military boots to a wedding is an impedence mismatch so to speak, not really a fault of military boots. You gotta compare apples to apples.

Under what conditions are military boots ever actually better than the best non-military alternatives?

Re: Overkill objects for everyday life

#503

Post by tootie »

s5300 wrote: post #96
tootie wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to love browsing McMaster-Carr but pretty quickly realized there is nothing worth buying as a consumer. Anything remotely practical for personal use is cheaper on Amazon.

McMaster is pretty good as a consumer for fastener hardware, a good assortment of various geometries of various metals, and mixing supplies in sense of both availability, exotics (such as aluminum flake 12.9 screws), and absolute zero bullshit with regards to knowing what you're actually getting, the fact it's always there, and that it's same day-next morning delivery in most parts of the US. I've had my fair share o…

Oh yeah, I got turned on to McMaster while doing some fabrication projects with industrial designers. We needed bags of machine screws, cable carriers, aluminum extrusions, lubricant, random brackets, rubber tubing and such it was truly miraculous.

Re: Overkill objects for everyday life

#504

Post by Arch-TK »

ValentineC wrote: post #332
Arch-TK wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to spend at least £600 to get a decent home espresso set up but it will get you something pretty close to good cafe grade coffee. The reason those big £3000+ machines are impractical for the home is not the cleaning or even the warm-up time (as both of those factors are the same for any espresso machine even the home ones) but rather with the fact that the bar grade espresso machines expect to be plumbed int…

> You need to spend at least £600 to get a decent home espresso set up but it will get you something pretty close to good cafe grade coffee. There are also the lever espresso makers like the Flair or Cafelat Robot, which are cheaper, more robust (no fancy heating elements), but also a bit more troublesome.

I was including the cost of a hand-grinder. I guess you could say with a manual machine you could get down to somewhere around £300.

Re: Overkill objects for everyday life

#505

Post by Arch-TK »

secabeen wrote: post #376
Arch-TK wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to spend at least £600 to get a decent home espresso set up but it will get you something pretty close to good cafe grade coffee. The reason those big £3000+ machines are impractical for the home is not the cleaning or even the warm-up time (as both of those factors are the same for any espresso machine even the home ones) but rather with the fact that the bar grade espresso machines expect to be plumbed int…

You can extend the lifetime of your espresso machine quite a lot by using calibrated water.

Certainly london water would kill any espreso machine in no time flat but would also kill the flavour of any espresso it makes. Most people who lived in areas with terrible water would be filtering it somehow at least through a brita filter.

I distill brita filtered water and then re-mineralise it by adding solutions of various minerals in specific quantities. Although not everyone has the time for that. I think brita filtered water and a good regular descaling cycle should be more than enough to make any machine last a very long time.

Re: Overkill objects for everyday life

#506

Post by fomine3 »

drewzero1 wrote: post #479
crooked-v wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another obvious example here given the people on this website is servers: if you're going to have a home server, unless you can go put it in a soundproofed room in the basement, you're going to want to use consumer-grade fans that aren't inherently screamingly loud.

I found this out the hard way. Picked up a cheap surplus ProLiant to mess around with, and quickly realized it would be far better for my use case to use a business-class desktop or laptop and avoid the unnecessary noise, space, and power draw of pro server hardware. It sure looked cool, though.

Then you miss ECC if you need reliability. Only workstations equip ECC RAM even for business.

Re: Overkill objects for everyday life

#507

Post by fomine3 »

joan_kode wrote: post #22

Love my infrared thermometer for steeping tea at exact temperatures. These things are terrible for medical purposes since they only measure surface temperature, but they're perfect for diagnosing industrial machinery and tea. Also more versatile than those expensive programmable tea-brewing contraptions!

To extend, I consider buying thermography device like FLIR. There are dedicated device, smartphone camera adapter, and FLIR integrated smartphone.

Re: Overkill objects for everyday life

#508

Post by alasdair_ »

MereInterest wrote: post #445
bayindirh wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moreover, consumer items beyond a price point are both very well made and backed by long term warranties anyway. Paying a bit more for a better item which can be repaired or serviced for a very long time makes it cheaper in the long run in my experience, because you buy it once and for life. I love "overkill items for everyday life" point of view, but it comes with trade-offs for noise, ergonomics, size, replaceabili…

> Moreover, consumer items beyond a price point are both very well made and backed by long term warranties anyway. Except that there isn't a good way to distinguish between something that is expensive because it has quality construction and something that is expensive because it is a brand name. Searching for information online is nigh-useless due to aggressive SEO on the part of advertisers. Sometimes I can get luck…

reddit.com/r/buyitforlife is a pretty good source for long-lasting goods, as are the hyper-specialized subreddits for (e.g.) safety razors, vacuum cleaners or telescopes.

Re: Overkill objects for everyday life

#509

Post by yourapostasy »

__d wrote: post #429
franga2000 wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because when it breaks, your company won't want to use 3rd party repair, so they will send it straight to Apple. That means that it will take at least a month to get back and all your data getting erased is pretty much a guarantee, even if all that was broken was one resistor in the power supply circuit. Even if they buy a new one, how long will it take you to set it up from scratch? Meanwhile, any other vendor will…

A modern Mac laptop uses a motherboard where everything is soldered on, everything is tiny, and it's basically impossible to repair. Leaving aside whether that's good or bad, it's just a fact that you should know up front. Consequently, most failures are "repaired" by swapping the motherboard, and so your flash drive contents are gone. Happily, you are using Time Machine (right?) and so you plug your backup drive int…

> ...and it's basically impossible to repair.

While Louis Rossmann [1] is well-known in the US for basing an entire, profitable small business around boards' component-level repair in one of the most unforgiving retail service markets in the US (NYC midtown Manhattan) [2], there are hundreds of shanzhai and tens of thousands of more generalized repair shops in China [3] who also demonstrate that with sufficient specifications and parts availability, what appears "basically impossible to repair" becomes the start of a journey towards a cradle-to-cradle ecosystem.

Apple has led the industry in the past, and is hopefully leading the way towards such a cradle-to-cradle future. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that their recent designs that are perceived by Rossmann and others as anti-RTR (Right To Repair) are more unintentional side effects of their rapid vertical integration design strategy (the A* and M1 processors being only the most visible part of the strategy).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Rossmann

[2] https://www.rossmanngroup.com/

[3] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-broke-my-phones-screen-awes...

Re: Overkill objects for everyday life

#510

Post by SilverRed »

arpa wrote: post #28

"Military grade" has very different connotations if you have been in the service. So yeah, great conversation starter, interesting worldview; can't say I share it though.

"Military grade" Is an entirely useless marketing buzzword. We are at the point where products are being marketed with "Military grade PCI-E slots" and "Aerospace grade aluminum spoon"
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