Ask HN: Anyone else tired of brands discontinuing your favorite everyday items?

Take for example the Sony Walkman, even if you want one really badly the actual factories that make the specialized parts have gone, been repurposed. Or a specific color yellow that only came from overfeeding cows at the turn of the century in India. Things that utilize that incredibly bright yellow color are going to have to use a replacement, and will never be exactly the same.

Anyway, thinking of these ~fringe examples helps clarify my thinking on the matter: it sounds like we're basically targeting three different things:

1) The thing(s) you want. What is the finished product you're gunning after.

2) The raw materials that go into the thing(s) you want. What is the entire process ,, with , from an engineering perspective ,, all its "inputs" at different moments of the flow.

3) The actionable thing: Making a universal index of products that once were, so we can track what they are made of, and what their creation-cycle is from raw materials to assembly/assemblage. Additionally, here we can also track where you can still buy/procure/obtain them if versions/copies/prints exist today.

But realistically my friend, you are better off just buying ten or twenty pairs of your favorite shoes when they exist, because the rotating crushing automaton of production-reality that underpins all of consumerism is constantly consuming itself. How many times have I purchased a one-time-print of a hoodie or piece of merchandise that is no longer available, nor will it ever be available again? I won't go so far as to wax poetical and say that rarity is what makes things valuable, because it's not, however tightly coupled those traits might be; but cool things being one-offs and highly scenario-bound for obtaining them is actually useful information about how the universe works. Reproducibility and the urge for regularity is a logos-construct [logical, rational, reasoning intelligence] while dwelling in the felt-sense of the realm and leaning into intuition is an eros-abiding [intuition, connection, relation, significance].

So while I understand the urge for the clothing you like to never end or be discontinued, I think a more useful approach is not how do we keep the cool versions existing forever, but how do we keep more fresh, new cool versions coming unabatedly. Sources get exhausted in multiple senses of the term, I think we need to think more metaphysically about how to replenish sources on every level of the meaning of the word source.

The only viable solution is to reduce dependencies where possible and deal with it.

Nobody in the commercial space is going to follow step 4. It inhibits growth and innovation and increasing profit margins. LTS support would cost a lot of money and my guess is that would not gain enough traction to make it profitable for them. Otherwise, they'd already be doing all of this. I mean, it's talked about constantly in commercial circles.

I like that we moved from things to philosophy. That's exactly what the project I'm building is about. I see that the pain I described here is shared by all of us. It doesn't matter what the item is, where we live, or what language we speak. And at this point I understand that I can't solve the whole problem. But I can solve it using one specific item as an example. I want to make a T-shirt that won't change after 1, 5, or 20 years. And every time it wears out, you can buy a new one and it will be exactly the same. No "discontinued." No "we quietly changed the material."

How can this be done technically? I'll explain using color as an example. If I buy yellow paint today, it will be different from every manufacturer. A color passport, with a recorded spectral curve, allows the color to be fixed. The factory mixes the available color pigments to match the color passport. This is theory. Do we get that exact same T-shirt color after 1, 5, or 20 years? I think yes. Are we dependent on the weather, the country, or the manufacturer? I think not.

Does this engineering solution answer the philosophy I'm talking about? I think yes. And I'm looking for people who need a T-shirt like this. )

"Otherwise, they'd already be doing all of this. I mean, it's talked about constantly in commercial circles."

Do you have any links or examples where I can read about this? This is the first time I've heard about it.

Thank you.

It comes down to cost. A tailor could, for, say $4,000, replicate any piece of clothing you own, down to going to the fashion district and finding matching fabric and use the same process to transfer any pattern to the new garment. That's just a lot of money for a t-shirt that was originally on sale for $39.