81–90 of 144 posts
I don’t know if it’s by LLM generation or just contemporary style, but I find the style of omitting the subject from sentence after sentence after sentence unreadable. Once is fine. Six in a row is insufferable.
The big thing that happened to power tools was Lithium-Ion batteries. All of these companies competed when they were still corded electric tools. You could just make a really good drill or saw or router. Interchangeable batteries got really good and made every set of tools a platform. More importantly, there are only a handful of sources to get batteries from. For all these companies to differentiate and compete they…
I recently decided I will go for the cheap Chinese store brand power tools for most things. It's about 1/5 to 1/3 the price of Ryobi, gets really good reviews, have been sold for more than 10 years now with the same batteries, and comes with a 5 year warranty which is 2 years more than ryobi. It's maybe not going to last 10 years, but at 1/5 the price it does not have to.
I think the rule of thumb for non-professionals is: Buy cheap and if you use it enough that it breaks, buy expensive the second time.
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I feel the same, but I do wonder sometimes if that’s true. Are there PE firms out there quietly operating great businesses that they’ve acquired? If not, why not? Surely in the long run that’s a better ROI, and private capital should be able to take a longer view, right?
For every one public headline failure there are hundreds of profitable executions that never get mentioned.
> Ryobi handles DIY at Home Depot. Milwaukee handles pros. The two brands don't eat each other. They serve different people at different price points with different expectations So market fit is driving both worse and better products at the same time. Cheap DIYers like me are buying the cheapest stuff we can find, and complaining that it's as cheap as its price. My neighbor the contractor buys the expensive stuff and…
I don't think there's anything to apologize for. Buying a professional tool with tens of thousands of hours of potential runtime and 1000lb+ of torque is wasteful. A Ryobi tool will realistically last for the many decades you need it for and do everything you ask of it. Lower price points doesn't just mean something is junk. It can also be engineering efficiency.
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I think the rule of thumb for non-professionals is: Buy cheap and if you use it enough that it breaks, buy expensive the second time.
By following this rule you could easily end up with a tool that lasts forever but strips out all your screw heads.
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Ryobi make mostly good tools though. The results produced by most Ryobi users, myself included, are limited by user skill not tool quality.
If you are a DIY, you might use a tool once a week, or once a year. A pro might use a tool everyday, all day. A different durability requirement. A Ryobi is not bad, if it fills your needs, but might not be enough for heavy use.
This article is missing conversation about tools. It’s as if someone prompted ChatGPT to look up business deals for power tool companies and then write a summary with dollar amounts in bold. There are some exceptions in every product line, but the current crop of power tools are actually pretty good. If you know people in the trades they can tell you which specific products are best in each category because trades pe…
Yes it is. I think you're on to something here.
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What’s a good one to start with
If you can afford to pay that bit more for quality product, from the article plus a few comments here; seems that people really like Makita. - hasn’t enshitifed - makes quality tools that last - much more repairable (saving you even more in the long term) - single company, not a conglomerate, no weird vc influence. For most tools you won’t need upgrades, just build out your collection as you go.
I got the drill back a little while later entirely repaired, the bent drill bit included in the return package, and I was charged absolutely nothing for any of it because I guess I was still under warranty and I didn't realize it. It was a fantastic customer service interaction and absolutely increased my loyalty to the company.
...and that's leaving aside the quality of their tools. In my experience they are incredibly rugged--among other things, for a week-long landscaping project I used that same drill with a gigantic bit to dig holes in frozen dirt, and it powered through it without issues. Great tools and a solid company.
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If you are a DIY, you might use a tool once a week, or once a year. A pro might use a tool everyday, all day. A different durability requirement. A Ryobi is not bad, if it fills your needs, but might not be enough for heavy use.
If you buy their brushless line, you can add a few decent tools to your lineup while using the cheap stuff for everything else. Same battery platform generally. I have a lot of their cheap stuff, plus a few good ones that see more use.