291–300 of 403 posts
> So what happened to the Swiss watch industry is not merely an interesting outlier. It's very much a story of our times. I am not saying it is, but it sounds like the first paragraph of every Gemini deep research.
It's like watching a hyper-rational alien species trying to understand humans.
> "Wait...So you purchased this at 5X the price of another product because of how it makes you feel about yourself, and not for its utility? Fascinating!"
We've been in the brand age for 200 years. This is nothing new. Technology products have just been so uniquely useful due to fast innovation that silicon valley has largely been able to ignore the centuries old techniques of Madison Avenue.
Every single market as it matures ultimately turns into a marketing competition, not a product competition. It has always been this way. Silicon Valley is the new Detroit.
I watched the Macbook Neo launch video yesterday and while the product is not very exciting, the video has great production value and it showed this: People want to pay for marketing. Not that Apple's only appeal is marketing, Mac laptops certainly have pros over the bottom and mid tier Windows laptops. But having seen that video, and knowing that other have seen it, are aware of Apple and its positioning, makes peop…
I was wondering how long it'd take for someone to bring Apple up. I'm clearly behind. The MacBook Neo is the opposite of pg's "Brand Age". It's very subtly branded, the Apple is no longer shiny and "MacBook" isn't written anywhere in it. There are no identifiably-Apple design quirks, no notch. It's just the platonic ideal of a laptop. Screen, keyboard, trackpad. Nothing extra. The cutesy intro video will be the main…
Except for the gigantic Apple logo plastered all over the lid?
Don't get me wrong, I like Apple design (and I adore early Braun), but subtly branded it is not. You're supposed to recognize it instantly at any distance. Apple knows their brand value.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, so these products are useful to me after all!
Genuinely. All fashion, all accessories, whatever you put on your body is a signal, even if you don’t intend it to be. Your outfit is a costume, and so is everyone else’s.
> Of course they don't call them golden ages as they're happening. "Golden age" is a term people use later, after they're over. That doesn't mean that golden ages aren't real, but rather that their participants take them for granted at the time. They don't know how good they have it. But while it's usually a mistake to take one's good fortune for granted, it's not in this case. What a golden age feels like, at the ti…
i love the analogy. the golden age of the web was before javascript, when only people who knew how to code html were able to make websites. however things come in cycles, so who knows maybe the next will come by
So they’re the same thing but from two frames of reference?
I’m not sure this metaphor holds.
I kept thinking that he'd eventually compare it to writing software by hand, and how we're at the end of one golden age. But he never did. So I wonder what the impetus for the essay was.
There was even a post on HN yesterday making a similar comparison of LLMs and the impact of quartz in watchmaking. I think the comparison is warranted, and human-crafted code will perhaps become a brand differentiator in the future too.
> Of course they don't call them golden ages as they're happening. "Golden age" is a term people use later, after they're over. That doesn't mean that golden ages aren't real, but rather that their participants take them for granted at the time. They don't know how good they have it. But while it's usually a mistake to take one's good fortune for granted, it's not in this case. What a golden age feels like, at the ti…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does this have to do with the article?
From the friendly article: > One obvious lesson is to stay away from brand. Indeed it's probably a good idea not just to avoid buying brand, but to avoid selling it too.
It's perfectly healthy to use brand as a heuristic to help yourself more easily buy products that work well.