41–50 of 112 posts
Well, of course there is the "buy cheap, get trash, duh!" talking point. But if I pay more, who's to say I'll get a better product? The OEM or some middleman or whoever might just pocket the difference and push crap anyway. Well-known brands have done this as well, either intentionally or because they got shafted by their supplier as well.
There's a lot of "USB 3.0 hubs" on the market that have only one 3.0 port, I went back and forth buying/returning a lot on Amazon before giving up on getting one that had all 3.0 ports.
Well, of course there is the "buy cheap, get trash, duh!" talking point. But if I pay more, who's to say I'll get a better product? The OEM or some middleman or whoever might just pocket the difference and push crap anyway. Well-known brands have done this as well, either intentionally or because they got shafted by their supplier as well.
This has been a problem for a while. It's Akerloff "market for lemons" applied to technology. Sometimes however you gamble and win, discovering that the Chinese device actually is really good for the price. Occasionally even better, when you discover that some anti-feature like DRM is either not implemented or trivially turned off.
My first thought whenever I come across such a badly-engineered no-name device is "oh great, another bad reference design which will poison the pool of all the available devices out there" It helps a bit to spot and avoid that exact exterior design, but often those devices are designed to reuse the same mold as more-expensive ones and/or keep changing the design based on the purchasing customer. So you end up on AliE…
$5 USD. What did you expect? Always surprises me when people pay essentially nothing for a product and then complain about quality.
Well, of course there is the "buy cheap, get trash, duh!" talking point. But if I pay more, who's to say I'll get a better product? The OEM or some middleman or whoever might just pocket the difference and push crap anyway. Well-known brands have done this as well, either intentionally or because they got shafted by their supplier as well.
This has been a problem for a while. It's Akerloff "market for lemons" applied to technology. Sometimes however you gamble and win, discovering that the Chinese device actually is really good for the price. Occasionally even better, when you discover that some anti-feature like DRM is either not implemented or trivially turned off.
Well, of course there is the "buy cheap, get trash, duh!" talking point. But if I pay more, who's to say I'll get a better product? The OEM or some middleman or whoever might just pocket the difference and push crap anyway. Well-known brands have done this as well, either intentionally or because they got shafted by their supplier as well.
I've definitely realized this in a couple of markets: Buy cheap, get trash. Buy expensive, get expensive trash with better marketing. Working with power tools from various brands has made me realize they all cheap out in the same ways. Plastic gears where there used to be metal, undersized motor drivers that fry themselves under sustained load, trigger switches that start misbehaving or die completely after a few mon…