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The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

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Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#201

Post by csomar »

simianparrot wrote: post #149

Airplane tickets used to cost a lot more for economy class, even adjusted for inflation and fees. To get the equivalent service and quality today you simply have to pay more, you just have the choice of paying very little for very low quality because there’s more flights and more planes. https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/even-with-fees-the-miracle-of... Same can be said for most electronics and even clothes. I’m not say…

This is true but flawed. Think about the iPhone. If you wanted the model of today but 5 years ago, it would have cost you millions? If that’s even possible.

What you are saying will be correct if we had no technological advancement whatsoever. But we had significant advancement. Everything should, must, be better if we applied the same cost. But while that’s the case in some things, lots of things have degraded in different ways.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#202

Post by ath3nd »

brucehoult wrote: post #104
ath3nd wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered that it's not that we are spending money on cheap stuff, it's that even expensive stuff is built to not last with the incentive you come back for more? You do realize there are whole R&D departments working on planned obsolescence. - Apple's planned obsolescence on batteries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate - Window's 10 to 11 garbage hardware requirements: https://www.euroconsumers.org/…

[flagged]

> Apple's slowing down the clock speed allows people to use a phone with an old and dying battery for longer before they need to replace either the device or the battery.

That's laughable. Apple before 2023 didn't even allow you to replace yourself unless you had their crappy plan.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8306588?sortBy=rank

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253345955?sortBy=rank

https://www.wired.com/story/iphone-16-battery-is-easier-to-r...

And their lightning adapters were a deliberate strategy so they keep you on their system and sell you commodity hardware at a premium pricing.

Until the EU forced them to use standard chargers to reduce the mountain of e-waste that's directly tied to Apple's shady practices.

> Lightning cables are superior to the "standard" USB-C. It's a travesty against freedom of choice that the EU has legislated against them.

You have the freedom of choice to use an old IPhone with an old Lightning cable, since they are "superior" to USB-C, and old IPhones are apparently of such high quality.

OR you can go with the far worse (according to you) USB-c standard which allows charging, video and data transfer and internet connectivity.

> 2018 and 2021 and still I think look the same as new. Colours haven't faded

Wow, a shirt lasting 4 years, impressive!

> I don't find the complaints valid about anything else either. The tshirts in my weekly rotation were bought -- I just checked my emails ....In short: yes, there is plenty of cheap crap around -- I actually think this is a good thing for people who will not be using it heavily.

"who will not be using it heavily" is a reference to the fact that sometimes cheap nowadays crap is poisonous and you might not live to see another day?

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jul/20/eu-commissi...

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#203

Post by layer8 »

moffkalast wrote: post #191
layer8 wrote: post #176

Many comments here are arguing that quality has actually gone up over the past decades. However, a common experience for me is that I own something of good quality from 5/10/15 years ago and now buy the successor model from the same brand, but the product has gotten worse, being cheaper made. And I have a hard time finding a replacement that matches the quality of the old version. It’s a regularly reoccurring frustra…

It's possible for that to be true while also there being competitors that are just making a name or themselves and aren't cutting corners. Incumbents in areas of low competition always get complacent and attempt to maximize profits without any further investment. Quality really only depends on the competition, since it removes those who lack it.

True, but as I said I often fail to find a good replacement when surveying the market for alternatives. Sometimes everyone copied the product but didn’t copy the original quality.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#204

Post by bamboozled »

layer8 wrote: post #176

Many comments here are arguing that quality has actually gone up over the past decades. However, a common experience for me is that I own something of good quality from 5/10/15 years ago and now buy the successor model from the same brand, but the product has gotten worse, being cheaper made. And I have a hard time finding a replacement that matches the quality of the old version. It’s a regularly reoccurring frustra…

It's also interesting, as you said, that everyone seems to want to defend crap. It's like corporations keep spreading the idea that you're always getting more for your money and everyone just seems to parrot that verbatim.

My life is a constant struggle when it comes to finding nice things.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#205

Post by kkfx »

It's a scale problem and a targets one: we are damn many, if we all want a fillet a day we haven't enough cows to satisfy such demand, and that's valid for essentially anything. So far we prove to be very skilled in doing identical stuff on scale, which enable industry hyper-growth but we can't feed production lines with enough raw materials, we can't produce most things in circular manner and even some production naturally renewable can't be completely renewable due to the scale of the demand. In an ideal world we cultivate and farm in proportions where the guano and manure from the species we raise provide enough fertiliser for what we grow. But there are many of us, and to feed everyone, this balance is impossible, so we must crush rocks to nourish plants sufficiently, which is obviously not renewable... We know how to makes wood-frame homes and trees grow up again, but again the demand much surpass the capacity of trees to grow up again and so on.

The result it's finding new way to do more with less, and finding them quickly. Some do works well, some do works a bit, many gives only the illusion to work enough and people buy them anyway because an illusion it's still something more than nothing.

The target issue is the model, capitalism, issue, in the past we have used money as a means to barter things counter something we all accept. Nowadays we use money to makes more money, so goods are just a mean not a target, and the result is that we do not care about quality, being just a mean if we can sell them it's enough to milk money. To solve this we need to makes money public, creating by governments without fractionary reserves and public debt mechanism, taxed to keep the supply limited enough following the availability of any specific resources, so essentially like Swiss we need to tax just VAT with continuously variables rates following nature and tech, while taxing local properties just to assure local consumption does not exceed a sustainable threshold of resources usage.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#206

Post by bluedino »

Arn_Thor wrote: post #105
drdec wrote: post #98

Most of the people on this board are upper middle to lower upper class (thinking American, apologies to my non US friends). Such people can afford products outside the grasp of most Americans. What naturally happens to such products is that the manufacturers find a way to broaden their customer base. They find ways to bring the price point down so they can sell more. For most people this is a boon. They can afford a…

The parable of boots seems apt here. In the extreme, expensive pair can last for a decade while people who can only afford the cheap pair will have to keep buying a new one every year. Yes, the fact that any family can afford a new shelving unit is great! But the fact that it’ll last them just a few years is not good; they’ll spend more in the long run

$35 for the cheapest thinnest plastic shelving you can buy. The entire HDX line is the lowest quality stuff known to man.

https://www.homedepot.com/p/HDX-4-Tier-Easy-Assembly-Scratch...

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#207

Post by bamboozled »

xattt wrote: post #190
layer8 wrote: post #176

Many comments here are arguing that quality has actually gone up over the past decades. However, a common experience for me is that I own something of good quality from 5/10/15 years ago and now buy the successor model from the same brand, but the product has gotten worse, being cheaper made. And I have a hard time finding a replacement that matches the quality of the old version. It’s a regularly reoccurring frustra…

E.g. the race to the bottom of the Billy bookcase. In the last 5 years, IKEA has started using plastic fasteners to secure the backing.

I break this promise from time to time, but every time I buy an IKEA product lately, I vow never to do it again.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#208

Post by amelius »

myaccountonhn wrote: post #136
panick21_ wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of these philosophies that I hate more then almost any other. The idea that is bad that poor Indian and Chinese people now have access to anything from clean water to planes is absurd. You can sit there in your luxury house and cry about consumer culture but for millions of people its basic stuff that they have access to for the first time. And in Europe, despite increasing quality of live, both total ene…

The reason it's seen as bad is because there are not enough natural resources to sustain such a consumption, and many of these countries (esp India) will practically become unhabitable if global warming continues like it does. There are very few signs that technology will be able to fix this. No one is against clean access to water...

The real villain here is advertising, which pushes us to always want more than we need.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#209

Post by moffkalast »

layer8 wrote: post #203
moffkalast wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible for that to be true while also there being competitors that are just making a name or themselves and aren't cutting corners. Incumbents in areas of low competition always get complacent and attempt to maximize profits without any further investment. Quality really only depends on the competition, since it removes those who lack it.

True, but as I said I often fail to find a good replacement when surveying the market for alternatives. Sometimes everyone copied the product but didn’t copy the original quality.

In that case it might've been that the original product wasn't cost effective to produce in the first place, or that most people buying it don't really care much about quality but just about the price, so that's what each provider optimizes for instead?

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#210

Post by inglor_cz »

kovac wrote: post #123
forgotusername6 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I owned a Nokia in 2003. The battery lasted a week and they were virtually indestructible. The phone never crashed or reset, the keys were so reliable and well placed that I could text without looking at the screen. The phone did not get slower with age. None of these things can be said about my current smart phone. Granted it does a lot more, but the quality of the things it does do is much worse.

I bought my dad a Nokia phone in 2008. A dumb phone, with just texting and calling features. It continues to work to this day, so, 17 years (the markings on the buttons are fully erased now, other than that it works). It outlived him. I don't know how they managed to build stuff like that. I would expect some electronic part to fail sometime along the way.

I once supported an expensive application for Symbian OS and the customers had plenty of problems with Nokia smartphones. Not dumb phones, but smartphones. HW keyboards failed constantly, wi-fi quality fluctuated randomly from piece to piece, displays developed weird errors, loudspeakers developed tin sound etc.

Oh, and my favorite, problems with microUSB charging ports were eternal.

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