241–250 of 343 posts
Upvoted, and the English prose is pretty good in spelling and grammar, but the metric units in the writing need improvement. > 10 microns "Micron(s)" is a deprecated word since 1967 and "micrometre(s)" must be used instead. The reason is that it is a non-standard word; if "micron" is accepted, then we should also accept the nonsensical words "millin", "nanon", "kilon", etc. The metric system is supposed to be easy to…
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Call me names, but I'll go to bat for stickers. Even when I was a kid, I wasn't keen on graphic designs on the pieces. I liked the uniformity of consistently-colored pieces. Most graphics only make sense in the context of the set they were packaged in. Stickers give the customer flexibility. Use them when you build the set, and remove them later if you take the set apart and don't want them anymore. Killing Mindstorm…
You can argue this for their sets targeting children and I don't think anyone minds stickers on those. On display sets for multiple hundred Euros however it just looks cheap due to different surfaces and colors - especially as no one is ever going to disassemble these sets.
It just feels to me like AFOLs poopoo on any set for having stickers, without considering the advantages stickers have from the POV from the POV of a child with few LEGOs and fewer dollars.
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Nostalgia... Lego was amazing decades ago so we want it to remain so. It's not anymore though. The whole raison d'etre, namely infinitely recomposable bricks to be creative, was lost the moment they realized they were a LOT more money in custom sets. Sets become collectible, perishable, trends can form, secondary markets exists, etc. It's simply about the baseline, not the principle. Sorry.
The existence of specialty sets doesn’t subtract from creating building. My kids get some of the specialty sets, build them, then hours later they’re either taken apart or heavily modified. The specialty sets can provide some interesting unique pieces too. My kids have a photographic memory of each of those special pieces and which set they came from. They’ll remember them and search until they find that exact piece.…
I had the same skill (still do). Imagine following the instructions the first time. A part you're encountering for the first time stimulates the memory. I knew my collection like a dragon's hoard. For instance, I owned twelve white 1x2 tiles, all from Coast Guard Station, so that was the limiting piece when building tiny space-fighters...
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> the push towards smartphone-dependent toys feels weird I haven't seen this push? The new Lego Smart stuff is explicitly "screen free play". There is an app but it's just for firmware update and configuration and you can't even connect it unless the brick is on the charger.
Lego has been testing modern sets without instructions and instead tell you to download an app for your phone. The ones I know of are the Mario ones, but they apparently need a phone anyway to setup the little characters.
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Nostalgia... Lego was amazing decades ago so we want it to remain so. It's not anymore though. The whole raison d'etre, namely infinitely recomposable bricks to be creative, was lost the moment they realized they were a LOT more money in custom sets. Sets become collectible, perishable, trends can form, secondary markets exists, etc. It's simply about the baseline, not the principle. Sorry.
These collectible (read: branded) sets are what saved them from bankruptcy, though.
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> completely uncharted water Good thing with analogue toys like legos is you know your kid is playing with legos that is wiring X brain cells for Y skills, even if Y skills are deprecated in digital world. It's hard to say with current gen, there's screen time to try to shape behavior, there are occasional kids who are tech literate maestros which every generation has, but plenty of kids who rely on LLMs, can only fi…
Without a tangible feedback you won't get any digital skills for spatial memory and coordination, peiod. And the kids you mention can barely understand files, filesystems and don't even mention them about O(n) notation. If any, these kids doing the jobs of 1000s of engineers are proportionally worse than the average secretary skills in the 80's.
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You can still buy LEGO Classic which is just a bunch of bricks.
From experience there's a motivation, almost a compulsion, to follow the instructions to build the cool thing. Then... they sit there, those bricks never taken apart. That compulsion doesn't seem present in freeform building, and there's been zero interest in it in our household. I know that's not true for all, but it seems like a lost art. Maybe it's because the IP sets show how but not the why it's constructed in a…
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I got my first Lego set in the early 70’s through a Velveeta cheese mail in promotion. The company almost went out of business in the early 90’s before they discovered movie tie-ins. I believe the quality of play was lost in this transition because the sets became more literal and less open ended. My first big set was a fire station which certainly literal but somehow seems more open ended then the movie tie/in sets.
The fire stations et al still exist, its just that they don't sell nearly as well as the tie-ins do, at least based on shelf space allocations. This year's isn't huge: https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/fire-station-with-fire-tr... But the police station is pretty big: https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/police-station-60316 (To me this looks more fun, but I'm a pirate guy: https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/police-pr…
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Without a tangible feedback you won't get any digital skills for spatial memory and coordination, peiod. And the kids you mention can barely understand files, filesystems and don't even mention them about O(n) notation. If any, these kids doing the jobs of 1000s of engineers are proportionally worse than the average secretary skills in the 80's.
Plenty of tangible feedback on screen, just not tactile. I'm bucketing 2 types, the maestros who have deep understanding and the ones who don't bother. The former are the otherwise top 1% talent who are better off playing with with LLMs/comptuers where ceiling is high vs lego. The latter are being distracted that yeah their personal skills worse than past, but fake floor is also raised so much that functionally they…
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Yes, they have kept up with inflation, and that is the problem. Manufactured goods like Lego bricks should fall in price through innovation in processes, scale, etc. What does raise higher than the average inflation should be be labor-intensive products/services. In other words, it feels much stranger today how expensive Legos are compared to 47 years ago.
Prices are constrained by demand moreso than by cost of production. Lego pieces are expensive because they can be, they still sell, and this is largely due to the quality. As long as the quality moat persists, they can charge as much as people will pay, and--good for them! That you personally would prefer lower prices does not mean they "should" be lower. Those lower costs of production, to Lego company, "should" mea…
The risk Lego faces is that they don't actually have a quality moat any longer. You can get non-lego sets with no stickers, plenty of prints, LED lighting, at a cheaper price, and with the exact same piece quality. I purchased this set: https://www.lumibricks.com/collections/steampunk-world/produ... over Christmas, and I paid $105 because it was on sale. The pieces were indistinguishable from Lego in quality, and the lights and lack of stickers was a quality increase from what Lego offers.
What moat Lego has is: brand recognition and licenses. Which aren't nothing, but don't offer much protection.