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Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)

thewave.engineer

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Re: Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)

#321

Post by AdamN »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #299
pibaker wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a prevalent view of economy that insists businesses sell their products at the minimum price they can still make a profit at (but not lower or you are dumping.) A Marxist view of economy, if I must. Whenever I meet one of these people, I ask if they are willing to negotiate a wage reduction with his HR. My logic is simple. If you think it is wrong for a business to sell a product at the maximum price they ca…

> There is a prevalent view of economy that insists businesses sell their products at the minimum price they can still make a profit at [...] A Marxist view of economy, if I must. That's actually how competition is supposed to work in capitalism . If you sell your products at much higher than the minimum price, someone else can make a profit by selling slightly cheaper and taking over your market share.

Interestingly that's one of the Marxist critiques. The market simply is not efficient enough to work fully. The effort to get Lego2 off the ground is simply too high and Lego gets an effective monopoly in their market segment (premium blocks).

If Lego was nationalized then the excess earnings that go into the owners' pockets as dividends or asset value would be realized by the people. But that of course leads to different inefficiencies (investors don't invest, etc...).

Re: Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)

#322

Post by stefantalpalaru »

scatbot wrote: post #12

Lego is one of those companies that is simultaneously amazing and kind of sucks. On one hand the core product is incredible. The tolerances on the bricks are micrometer-level precision and the fact that pieces from the 70s snap perfectly into ones made today is mind blowing. On the other hand, a lot what the company does today just sucks. Set prices are outrageous. Printed bricks get replaced with stickers and many s…

[dead]

Re: Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)

#323

Post by iso1631 »

bombcar wrote: post #191
wongarsu wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe my perception of 00s models is colored by nostalgia, hard to know. But I haven't been alive in the 80s, so my perception of them during the 00s should be pretty uncolored

My recall was that the 90s was pretty awesome, and the 00s fell into BURPS and large pieces and tie-in sets. But I think most people either agree there was a dark ages where they went almost bankrupt and did some really questionable themes, or the best time was when they were a kid. The 90s catalogs rocked in a way that no website ever can, though.

People have complained about things getting worse literally for millennia

Either 2000 years ago life was great, or people saying "things were better" tend to be wrong

https://historyhustle.com/2500-years-of-people-complaining-a...

Things are different, people want different things today then they did in the 80s. The top lego sets of the 80s were bought by rich parents for their kids. Adults didn't buy lego for themselves.

Today they're bought by rich adults for themselves, who want different things

Meanwhile kids aren't as bored. In the early 90s as a 10 year old I used to watch soap operas with my parents, because there wasn't much more to do at 8pm on a wet december evening. That was evidenced by Coronation street getting 17 million viewers, well over 1 in 4 people in the country.

Today the same program gets 2 million viewers, nearer to 1 in 40.

That's not because it's materially worse, but because there's more things to do.

Lego has the same issue. In the 80s as a kid there was little to do at home, so things like lego, meccano, spirograph took up the time. Today there's a lot more to do.

There's a reason 80s lego sets aren't as popular as they were in the 80s - the actual sets - and it's clearly not the quality (as a lego 80s set is the same today as it was 40 years ago).

Re: Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)

#324

Post by mcphage »

sixo wrote: post #267
mcphage wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As long as the quality moat persists 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 indistin…

A reputation moat is still a moat. It seems to me that Lego prices will drop as soon as they are forced to by competition, and not before, and this is fine.

> A reputation moat is still a moat.

It is, absolutely, but it’s a lot more shallow a moat than having a product quality moat.

> Lego prices will drop as soon as they are forced to by competition, and not before, and this is fine.

I agree, they’ll survive quite well. But the large profit margin they’ve grown accustomed to might disappear, and that probably doesn’t bode well for their management.

And heck, maybe they’ll stop shipping stickers on expensive sets, too. That would be nice.

Re: Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)

#325

Post by dudul »

scatbot wrote: post #12

Lego is one of those companies that is simultaneously amazing and kind of sucks. On one hand the core product is incredible. The tolerances on the bricks are micrometer-level precision and the fact that pieces from the 70s snap perfectly into ones made today is mind blowing. On the other hand, a lot what the company does today just sucks. Set prices are outrageous. Printed bricks get replaced with stickers and many s…

Lego were always expensive toys.

Yes they are aggressively targeting "grown ups" with many sets, but they also have very playable sets. I don't see any problem with having different offerings.

There are enough sets for everyone to find something interesting if they are into Lego.

Re: Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)

#326

Post by mcphage »

abustamam wrote: post #303
mcphage wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As long as the quality moat persists 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 indistin…

Not disagreeing with you, but at least when I hear "lego knockoff" I think of the shitty ones, because I've never seen a Lego knockoff that wasn't shitty. Lumibricks seems like a promising brand, but I've never heard of them, possibly because they don't spend as much on marketing as lego. And if they did spend more in order to compete with Lego, they might need to increase price!

> but I've never heard of them, possibly because they don't spend as much on marketing as lego

It’s a newer brand—they changed their name to it some time last year. But they seemed to spend a lot on advertising last Christmas—at least on YouTube, it seemed like tons of reviewers were talking about their sets. That’s how I found out about them, at any rate. And I’ll say—the one I got came together nicely, and looks great. The tons of lights are just, really neat.

> when I hear "lego knockoff" I think of the shitty ones, because I've never seen a Lego knockoff that wasn't shitty.

The cheap-o ones you get like at the dollar store, absolutely. But Chinese manufacturers have been making good quality knockoffs for a while. A decade at least? I bought my first knock-off technic set around 10 years ago, and it was 90% the quality of Lego at 25% the price. But the quality has only gotten better since, and is now totally on par with Lego. Admittedly, the price has gone up, too.

Re: Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)

#327

Post by dudul »

lloeki wrote: post #315
tracker1 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same... I remember as a kid, being able to get kits of hundreds of just random blocks and variations and just being able to build/play... all the sets today are all custom blocks that just constrain you and often aren't significantly reusable while I'm not sure that I've even seen basic block kits anywhere in decades now. edit: I know you can get thousands piece brick sets from third parties or random bulk…

> all the sets today are all custom blocks that just constrain you and often aren't significantly reusable Given the crazy assembly that is happening in the adjacent room, my kid would vehemently disagree.

Having the same experience. My kids enjoy getting new sets, but most of them are quickly customized or just destroyed to build something completely new. Terrible take in the parent.

Re: Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)

#328

Post by mcphage »

mmustapic wrote: post #281
mcphage wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As long as the quality moat persists 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 indistin…

What you mention is true, but Lego sets are (almost always) very well designed, specially the ones for kids.

They are. I should have added that Lego’s designers are a bit better still. You can get botanical sets from a lot of manufacturers, but the Lego ones are just nicer.

Re: Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)

#329

Post by zeratax »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #161
potatototoo99 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lego is branding, curation and quality bar, though. They're the Apple of bricks (weird sentence). There's tons of lego-knockoffs and of not even such lesser quality that the difference can be perceived by casual inspection. The set-to-set quality bar is really where it is, especially among their set lines not targeted at children or low-end of market. But none of those sets have any kind of staying power. There's Exp…

imo it's not just that other brands are of similar quality but often of way higher quality than lego. you get so much more for less money from other brands, while lego sets are becoming kind of a joke. using stickers everywhere and randomly colored bricks on the internal sides of the set

Re: Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)

#330

Post by abustamam »

mcphage wrote: post #326
abustamam wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not disagreeing with you, but at least when I hear "lego knockoff" I think of the shitty ones, because I've never seen a Lego knockoff that wasn't shitty. Lumibricks seems like a promising brand, but I've never heard of them, possibly because they don't spend as much on marketing as lego. And if they did spend more in order to compete with Lego, they might need to increase price!

> but I've never heard of them, possibly because they don't spend as much on marketing as lego It’s a newer brand—they changed their name to it some time last year. But they seemed to spend a lot on advertising last Christmas—at least on YouTube, it seemed like tons of reviewers were talking about their sets. That’s how I found out about them, at any rate. And I’ll say—the one I got came together nicely, and looks gr…

Interesting. Gotta check those out! Not that my family needs more LEGO... The remains of our Millennium Falcon after my nieces came over glare at me everytime I look at a new LEGO set.
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