Buy it for life: Durable, Quality, Practical • Hacker News Board

Re: Buy it for life: Durable, Quality, Practical

#101

Post by bombcar » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 5:22 PM UTC

steverb wrote: post #81

bombcar wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Milwaukee does offer a warranty and will repair out of warranty but any battery tool is by definition not a buy-it-for-life as the battery will wear out (and better tools will come). My rule is buy so that when it dies I’m not sad. That varies for different pieces of equipment.

The thing to remember with battery powered tools is that you are not just buying a tool. You are buying into a battery ecosystem. Plan accordingly. Fortunately, you can buy batteries for most popular tool brands long after the brand stops supporting them, and in a pinch you can buy adapters to make brand a batteries work on brand b tools

The proliferation of “buy tool get battery free” deals means it’s not as much of a pricing headache anymore - more of a convenience thing.

Milwaukee continues to sell batteries for their far outdated NiCAD.

Re: Buy it for life: Durable, Quality, Practical

#102

Post by fnord77 » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:41 PM UTC

steverb wrote: post #81

bombcar wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Milwaukee does offer a warranty and will repair out of warranty but any battery tool is by definition not a buy-it-for-life as the battery will wear out (and better tools will come). My rule is buy so that when it dies I’m not sad. That varies for different pieces of equipment.

The thing to remember with battery powered tools is that you are not just buying a tool. You are buying into a battery ecosystem. Plan accordingly. Fortunately, you can buy batteries for most popular tool brands long after the brand stops supporting them, and in a pinch you can buy adapters to make brand a batteries work on brand b tools

one brand (rigid) offers a lifetime warranty on batteries, but in practice from what I've seen on the 'net, they try to do everything possible to deny warranty claims.

Re: Buy it for life: Durable, Quality, Practical

#103

Post by joecool1029 » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 8:35 PM UTC

jack_pp wrote: post #32

lupinglade wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not always the price too, often enough the higher quality item can be cheaper, just less of a fancy package maybe. A lot of companies blow all their budget on advertising and packaging instead of product quality and research. Knowledge is key. Especially be careful in stores like TJ Maxx, Home-sense and such -- lots of lowest quality fancy packaged junk to be had there.

One example I'm aware of is headphones. A while back everyone thought Beats are the best because they were expensive and had good marketing but really they were shit and you could get much better quality for less price

Beats/Bose were always like this. Selling the branding I mean, at least Beats had lineage of Monster producing a few decent units before they nudged them out of the picture.

Better example in the headphone world were high-end IEM's (Shure/Westone/Etymotics). Most of them were in the many hundreds of dollar range for good multi-driver units. In the past few years though Chinese manufacturers (KZ is one I can think of off the top of my head) sell their own lines on aliexpress/taobab using the same drivers for 10% of the cost.

I can't justify recommending the old names now to people, the value just isn't there (and most of the old big names stopped producing in US/EU since China turned out to have better QC). Why pay $200 for a double-driver Westone when I can recommend a 5-driver KZ unit for $60? I just don't get it.