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The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

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Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#691

Post by bsder »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #617
swiftcoder wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lighter doesn't mean worse quality For a number of product categories it means replacing solid metal parts with inferior materials, and that pretty explicitly does mean worse quality. Have you used a 1960s KitchenAid mixer? They look almost identical to models that followed - but in the 1970s KitchenAid replaced the metal drive gear with one made of nylon on the consumer-focussed models, and now if you use one heav…

The question is, does that prevent something worse from breaking? It's not inherently bad to have wear parts in a device, after all. Shear pins are a great example where you need to replace them, but something more important would break if it wasn't the shear pin, so it's worth it. IDK the design of the mixers well enough to know if that's true for them, but I do wonder if that is the case.

> The question is, does that prevent something worse from breaking?

That doesn't matter if it means, for example, that my new mixer can't actually mix bread dough on a higher speed anymore (citing this as it's actually a failure mode on newer (like 1970s forward) KitchenAid mixers to the point that the manual mentions it).

That is an objective decrease in quality and fitness for purpose.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#692

Post by derbOac »

wwfn wrote: post #292
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…

I think that's a good take. Market pressure for durability decreases with brand awareness. Though I think the article argues there's little market pressure regardless. I'm also worried it's all survivorship bias. If you acquired 100 items in 2010 and 5 of them lasted until 2025, it's hard to say if the 5 surviving would be the same 5 from another household or if the items you still have were all on the hardier end of…

Survivorship bias is an important thing to consider, but the weird thing about it is that although sometimes (usually?) people have a blind spot for it, other times I think it gets used as a kind of "just so" explanation for degradation in quality because it's hard to refute.

My experience with clothing kind of suggests it's not just survivorship bias. I once had a pair of pants that lasted maybe 10 years or so with regular washing, each use (yes I know, not ideal, I don't do that anymore), and I had to replace them. When I ordered a new pair, from the same company, same model, I noticed the new ones didn't last nearly as long, maybe 2 years, and seemed thinner. I emailed the company about this, and they acknowledged that they had made the fabric thinner, and even gave me the old and new fabric densities. I think clothing is one area where new brands have come in to partially move the needle back toward quality a teeny weeny bit, but experiences like that, tracking the actual material quality of the same products over time, leads me to conclude it's not always just random survivorship bias.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#693

Post by x0x0 »

beaugunderson wrote: post #583
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…

> 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. My most recent experience with this was a Fjällräven 30L backpack. I'd had it for years, loved it to death but it was getting a bit ripped up. Went into the store, bought the exact same model, went out to the RV…

And that's not exactly a bargain brand, either. Wild.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#694

Post by klik99 »

comfysocks wrote: post #664
klik99 wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what I came to say - growth as the primary goal DOES create innovation, until innovation in that field yields diminishing returns or bottoms out completely, then it creates shittier and shittier product. The entire American version of capitalism is built around growth as the primary goal, which did great things, but now (unequally, some sectors are still innovating) is creating more and more shitty th…

I agree with a lot of what you are bringing up, but I don’t think of these things as synonymous with American capitalism as a whole. I think of them more as a failure mode.

I think it’s very human to keep doing what once helped us when even when it starts harming us. Like an alcoholic who started to help get over social anxiety and saw positive results early on but then starts seeing drink as what makes them happy rather than the social connection it helped facilitate. Yes I’m saying America is addicted to growth.

(I agree it’s more nuanced than that and it’s both succeeded and failed in other ways, and US isn’t the only one - but this a major feature of American capitalism)

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#695

Post by zzo38computer »

atoav wrote: post #639
torginus wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What you want is a digital video standard that simply pushes an A/V stream over the wire HDMI is just that - it's the direct evolution of VGA signaling, with each color channel pushing pixels left-to-right top-to-bottom, it even has blanking periods (periods where there's no pixel info transmitted, used to steer back the electron beam on CRTs to the start of the row/column), same EDID format negotiation over I2C, t…

Yeah I get that in theory, but then my 10x more expensive pro stuff works worse than the cheap stuff. Sure, because they follow the spec etc. But then it turns out that even name brand laptops (or their GPUs) do it wrong. My point was that the standard is crap. It is way too complicated, wants to be too many things to too many people (most of which are trying to sell stuff to consumers). HDMI tries to be a video link…

I also thought that HDMI has many problems, like you have, too. My idea is: video and audio and other stuff are separate cables. The video cable will only be sending the digital RGB video data, with the wires for the pixel data and pixel clock, as well as power and ground and vsync. I think it is helpful for the video signal to be digital, but it does not need to be as complicated as HDMI. (The audio cable can be balanced analog audio signal.)

It is not only HDMI; many other common things are too complicated (than they should be) and often have other problems too (you mention some of them, such as HDCP, but there is many more problem than that).

(Someone else wrote: "The sad fact of the matter is that people play politics with standards to gain commercial advantage, and the result is that end users suffer the consequences. This is the case with character encoding for computer systems, and it is even more the case with HDTV.")

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#696

Post by makeitdouble »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #592
makeitdouble wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could have bought a Besta or Hemmes bookshelf, accounting for inflation it would be closer in price to the Billy you bought 25 years ago. Assuming a product introduced 25 years ago has exactly the same role in the lineup today sounds crazy to me TBH.

Isn't that the point though? Quality of the basic model Maytag washer I bought 25 years ago versus one today. Quality of a Reese's cup I bought 25 years ago versus one today. Quality of Levi's I bought 25 years ago versus a pair today. Quality of the Billy that I bought 25 years ago versus today. Quality of the Billy HAS declined.

That's fair if we only strictly care about the Billy line and it's history.

From there we can't generalize to any other product without acknowledging IKEA's internal decision process or their vision for Billy across the years.

To parent's point

> where the inflection point is where used items become more valuable than the new items being made at current quality levels, including degradation due to age.

Buying the actual modern equivalent of what Billy was 25 years ago answers that question.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#697

Post by zzo38computer »

atoav wrote: post #412
microflash wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been especially pronounced in medical equipments where there’s this unnecessary race to introduce “digital experiences”. An example is hearing aids. A few years ago, it was relatively easy to get an analog model with dedicated volume buttons and off switch. Now, most of the models come without off switch and need Bluetooth pairing with an app installed on your phone. What used to be plug and play is now a cl…

I run a media-lab at a art university and both HDMI and USB-C is flaming garbage. What you want is a digital video standard that simply pushes an A/V stream over the wire and negotiates the acceptable resolution on the fly. What you get is something that does too much, doesn't work half the time and does things nobody cares about. Last time I plugged in an HDMI source and the darn "smart" television showed the image…

> What you want is a digital video standard that simply pushes an A/V stream over the wire and negotiates the acceptable resolution on the fly.

I think even that is more than it should be. I had made up my own kind of video connection (which is not implemented yet), which only has video (the audio is a separate cable, with balanced analog audio, although the standard arrangement of the connectors is supposed to be defined so that you can clip them together when wanted and unclip them if you want to move them separately), and does not negotiate the resolution (for several reasons).

> Last time I plugged in an HDMI source and the darn "smart" television showed the image for 0.5 seconds before displaying a menu that asks me to press a button on the remote to show the image.

At least a part of that is a problem with the smart TV (which has many other problems, too) rather than with HDMI itself, although HDMI also has many problems.

SDI is better in some ways, but it is not good enough either, I think.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#698

Post by LorenPechtel »

carlosjobim wrote: post #688
LorenPechtel wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. Real wages are ahead of all market sectors except medical and rent. People are making a bad comparison--they look at what they have vs what their parents have and see their parents doing better. Yeah, 20 or 30 years later in their career, plus a lot of time building up assets, that's actually to be expected. The proper comparison is between cohorts, but that can only be done by digging into the data, not by…

But their parents didn't need 20 or 30 years to build up their assets, or did they? They could purchase a new car when they were in their prime at 20-30 years old. Real estate they already had before buying the car. People who are in their prime today have to wait to be 50+ to have real estate, and if they want to have a new car they have to forgo that.

Oh?

My parents, both PhD's. AFIAK first car (they had lived where they didn't have as much need of one) was in their 40s. First house in their 50s. We bought our first house (bigger and better than anything my parents ever owned) when I was still in my 20s. (She's older but did not come with any assets beyond her education.)

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#699

Post by zzo38computer »

Some people do want a good quality and do want to keep using the same one for many years, so what they say is not necessarily true of everyone. However, often the good quality things can be difficult to find (even if it is available, which in some cases it will be but often it isn't), or something has some advantages and some disadvantages over the other one which also makes it difficult to find an actually good one. Like they say sometimes people discard things for other reasons and buy new things too often, but some people don't want to do that, and shouldn't discard and keep buying new things too much. But, the quality is often bad too, with worse durabilty and worse quality in many other ways too. The other thing that is done is making it incompatible which can also make it difficult to actually have one which is of a good quality, especially if the specifications which may be required for such a thing are of a bad quality (which is also common). (It is true even with computer programs. FOSS can help a bit, although even programs that are made FOSS can be of a bad quality in many ways, it does at least allow people to try to improve them if they want to do. It is one part of one reason why I and some people might write some programs differently than others are commonly made.)

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#700

Post by pas »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #127
mayas_ wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite sure about the affordability part. Cars are becoming prohibitively expensive. Housing is becoming a luxury. Even consumer products are becoming increasingly expensive. Safety largely improved but not craftsmanship.

Cars are becoming prohibitively expensive because they get more and more stuff included. I owned cars in the 90's and cars from 2015, the newer one came in the basic trim with stuff that adds to complexity and cost, from AC and electric windows to dozen aibags, sensors and driving aids. For housing, there are 2 things that happened: regulations made houses more expensive to build (I personally built 3 houses in the p…

FYI (and for anyone who wants) to see data on this check out this blog

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/what-makes-housing-so...

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-homes-in-west...

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