221–230 of 824 posts
I’ve noticed a significant drop even recently, having recently bought the single worst pair of shoes at a brand name store. They basically dissolved like tissue paper within a week. I’ve never seen anything like it. My working assumption right now is this two phenomena together. One, a sneakier kind of “shrinkflation”. You can make a can of coke smaller but you can’t do this with shoes. But you can swap out materials…
Shame the shoe brand!
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…
There are tradeoffs towards more complex devices being made, sure, but that’s not exactly what “quality” is, to me. There’s an extensive discussion about the iphone vs a snake-era nokia, which i feel like misses the point entirely
Care beat quality as a metric, because care is very inefficient to fake and very powerful when genuine.
How does the company providing the physical product or the service care ?
Most companies right now care about AI. Some integration are impressive. But where's real care about users ? It seems it's not the subject anymore. We may have tricked ourselves into beveling technology will resolve in itself all problems, and it's at its peak with AI. As engineers we can forget sometimes that technology is just a tool and its fine, but as a society it may leads us all in a bad direction.
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…
I don't disagree with your point, but I suppose my wish then is that there were not low-quality (low-cost) everything in the world right now. I'm not unsympathetic regarding the poor, I grew up poor myself. And my single working mother raising two kids got by on hand-me-down furniture from her mother (probably, as you and the article suggest, of decent quality though). Having the option for (new) inexpensive everythi…
In the long run, that could actually spur some development re cheap and safe energy etc.
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…
A subtle variant of this is incorrect metrics. In 2000s, full featured audio chipsets started to show up, all in one chip 24bit audio. Soon everything used these, the 24bit resolution wasn't enough to make a good audio interface... (I think it was noisier) But it was too late, most devices used this and old audio cards were priced out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm not saying that a high price label guarantees high quality, just that the spectrum of cost vs quality has broadened, even within big name brands. I think this needs to be repeated. People tend to think more expensive equals higher quality (I want this to be true!), and I think brands frequently take advantage of that to increase margins without significantly increasing quality. For example: I've been through th…
Along that line of thought I've noticed this recently: I can buy an expensive tool for say $200 that will last me 10 years. Or I can buy a cheap tool that costs $20 but will only last me two years. But if I want to use that tool for the duration of 10 years it then makes more sense to buy five of the cheap tool and save half in costs. Which one is really providing more quality over time? For some things this doesn't…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I very much doubt that such a product can’t be manufactured sustainably in robust quality.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a solid wood table that I bought at Ikea a few years ago. I think it’s made of bamboo. Isn’t that hardwood? Even if it’s compressed I don’t think it’s made of grain. It definitely doesn’t have stickers.
Bamboo is not solid wood, it's bamboo stems glued together.
"Following his reasoning, it cannot be stated in absolute terms that an iPhone 15 is of “better quality” than a 2003 Nokia." This statement suffers from either viewing the past through rose-tinted glasses or from total cultural relativism in the most pejorative sense. I'm not sure about 2003, but around 2009, I owned a Nokia N900, which was arguably the flagship Nokia phone at the time. I can confidently state that c…
If it wasn't for it no longer being supported by iOS I'd still be using a 2016 SE and the only things I'd seriously miss are an OLED screen (so good for using the phone in dark spaces) and wireless charging (basically for peace of mind if the charging port ever breaks)
> There’s one conclusion that comes up repeatedly throughout this report: the perception that everything is of lower quality is more pronounced among older people. The reasons are varied. One is that attributes like durability — which used to be a major factor in how people judged a product’s quality — have lost relevance.
Well, wouldn't older people have more perspective from a greater amount of lived experience? Then, in the next sentence, the article assumes away a reason to throw their conclusions out.
> José Francisco Rodríguez, president of the Spanish Association of Customer Relations Experts, admits that a lack of digital skills can be particularly frustrating for older adults, who perceive that the quality of customer service has deteriorated due to automation. However, Rodríguez argues that, generally speaking, automation does improve customer service.
When the automation on the other end can't understand my problem and I can't talk to a human, then I cannot solve my problem. This is definitively a regression and is occurring more than ever before. I have a problem with getting paid from a large company, and there is no reasonable way outside of hiring a lawyer for me to resolve the problem, and the dollar amount is so low the company knows full well that I will not hire a lawyer to resolve the problem, and it is automation that makes this possible, more than ever. But I'm sure the back-end metrics look great to management and the experts in this article.
> It’s difficult to prove that today’s products are worse than those of 20 years ago.
Why is "20 years ago" the baseline? And that word "prove" establishes an unattainable bar within such a subjective field of study.