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The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

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Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#751

Post by immibis »

ericmay wrote: post #417
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Government failure and cultural malaise are what "late stage capitalism" predicts. It then predicts a collapse of the whole thing under its own weight. > If capitalism gives what the market demands, then you are suggesting that The People want government failure and malaise You are both correct here. Obviously people don't want malaise directly, but some directly seek government failure, and the rest vote for thin…

> Oh, I didn't realize till the end that you were treating this as a team thing, and capitalism is "your team", so you must attack "the other team". Do you think that attitude affected the rest of your response, too? It’s just empirical. Both Communism and Socialism are failed ideologies. Millions dead. Millions more starved. It’s like when Libertarians want to bring about their ideology and people tell them to move…

I guess capitalism is a failed ideology too then. Billions dead, with a B. For that matter, I guess all ideologies are failed, so maybe ideological failure is completely meaningless.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#752

Post by microtonal »

creer wrote: post #722
microtonal wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dyson only has the appearance of quality. Both Dysons that we had had broken accessories (though they happily replaced them). The first Dyson broke down in three years or so. We also have a Miele vacuum cleaner. It's less glamorous, but it is, as Germans say, unkaputtbar (and also a very pleasant device to work with).

Miele is one brand that seems to show that it's still possible (to build lasting and repairable). But it's expensive, very expensive, and repairs themselves are not cheap. I would say, too expensive overall to become a default choice.

Our Miele was less expensive than Dyson. Though I guess Miele might be much more expensive outside Europe.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#753

Post by baq »

ungreased0675 wrote: post #530
baq wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IKEA has some of the best quality cheap furniture. To get something noticeably better you need to spend at least 2x for any given item; 3-5x is common for not at all fancy stuff.

Do you have suggestions on where to buy high quality furniture? My local furniture stores seems to sell 20% better pieces at 100% more cost.

I don't. My house is 95% IKEA. (I'm in the 'kids will destroy everything, so it doesn't make sense to pay extra' customer cohort.)

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#754

Post by js8 »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #172

Two things: 1. Quality has been dieing mainly because people are addicted to cheap shit. The cheaper things are, the more they can buy. The amount of personal possessions people have nowadays is totally insane and unsurprisingly lots of cheap stuff. 2. Planned obsolescence is not a thing. Maybe it's happened a few times with a few products. But it certainly doesn't deserve a name. I have been on the engineering side…

Regarding planned obsolescence, what do you think of Veritasium's video on the topic?

Anyway, I think nobody in the industry needs to be aware of that term, and it can still be in play. Nobody in media really talks about Chomsky media filters, yet they arguably exist. As you mention, all that is needed for planned obsolence is if engineers only consider parts with expected percentile failure after the warranty, and then go by other criteria, e.g. cheapness. This will easily result in a situation where a product that would otherwise last relies on a cheap part that prematurely failed.

For example, I had a monitor where the "on" button failed after couple years. I replaced the failed plastic hinge with a piece of cardboard and the monitor still works, good 15 years later.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#755

Post by gilfoy »

forgotusername6 wrote: post #648
gilfoy wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> virtually indestructible Owned a Nokia in 2003 as well and it was destructed by some water. It had no Nokia Care and my grandma refused to buy me a new one. > text without looking at the screen I do it all the time by dictating.

Try doing that in class. I could message my friends without a teacher spotting it.

It’s 2025, kids just pull out their phone now

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#756

Post by hinkley »

klik99 wrote: post #537
hinkley wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not the only one it’s just the easier one. When people tear down new models of gaming systems they find fewer chips on the boards because they’ve found some chip that does two things for less than the price of both - below a certain point it’s financially infeasible to make simple parts because the capacity they consume makes a chip that does half as much only 15% cheaper. See also when people started putting…

Parent comment explicitly says this happens when a sector runs out of things to innovate on. Chips are still innovating like crazy which is why we're seeing some amazing processing/CPU/GPU/DSP chips/etc. If we ever hit on the limits of moores law, watch those CPUs become shittier and shittier over a 10 year period. I think this point is the key and kind of subtle point - "growth at any cost" does actually rise the ti…

> runs out of things to innovate on.

I suspect you know better than this. Failure of imagination does not mean lack of options. People in our industry reach for next steps that cut off other options in the process, all the time. To assume manufacturing doesn’t have the same problem is questionable.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#757

Post by Forgeties79 »

sp0ck wrote: post #730
hedora wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Concretely, don’t buy anything made by Samsung. Here’s a $3000 washer / dryer with a 90 day [x] warranty: https://www.samsung.com/us/home-appliances/all-in-one-washer... [x] I got tired of following footnote disclaimers. Note the headline 20-year warranty and $2,200 price tags are blatant lies. The two year warranty below that claim has footnotes that references more off page disclaimers. When we had a samsung applia…

Why on earth you choose product so expensive where dryer is basically fan with heater ? With that price range you can buy Miele hardware with heat pump dryer that is basically non-breakable and an order of magnitude more energy efficient. Really - I would like to know how you came to purchase decision :)

With bigger appliance purchases like that the way often/should (clearly not always) work is they should be more robust and effective. A cheap drier needs to be babysat or it becomes a fire hazard. It also can just door a poor job of drying your stuff.

I have the cheapest Costco drier. It’s fine, but I do have to keep an eye on it.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#758

Post by xattt »

eps wrote: post #426
xattt wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BILLY quietly slid from mid-tier to cheap tier in order to keep the nostalgic momentum. The twist is that there are certain products that people use as benchmarks of quality (like Arizona iced tea). If the tier changes without some sort of inflection, you perceive it as degradation of quality.

> benchmarks of quality (like Arizona iced tea) Not a good example. Arizona tea is held in high esteem only because it never went up in price. The beverage itself has always been of a clearly dubious quality.

I guess I meant to say a benchmark of “constants”. A change in quality of product (even from meh to more meh) suggests something’s amiss.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#759

Post by xattt »

ungreased0675 wrote: post #530
baq wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IKEA has some of the best quality cheap furniture. To get something noticeably better you need to spend at least 2x for any given item; 3-5x is common for not at all fancy stuff.

Do you have suggestions on where to buy high quality furniture? My local furniture stores seems to sell 20% better pieces at 100% more cost.

Some of my non-IKEA furniture were just really lucky finds. I was looking for bookcases at a time when there was no nearby IKEA, and they did not deliver.

I ended up going to a local store, finding an unfinished bookshelf that was able to paint to my liking. It was absolutely a BIFL find. Another I bought at a close-out sale.

There is no one suggestion, but rather piece things together. This was about a decade and a half ago, and it seems that everyone is hustling so good deals are hard to find.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#760

Post by klik99 »

hinkley wrote: post #756
klik99 wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parent comment explicitly says this happens when a sector runs out of things to innovate on. Chips are still innovating like crazy which is why we're seeing some amazing processing/CPU/GPU/DSP chips/etc. If we ever hit on the limits of moores law, watch those CPUs become shittier and shittier over a 10 year period. I think this point is the key and kind of subtle point - "growth at any cost" does actually rise the ti…

> runs out of things to innovate on. I suspect you know better than this. Failure of imagination does not mean lack of options. People in our industry reach for next steps that cut off other options in the process, all the time. To assume manufacturing doesn’t have the same problem is questionable.

Sure, but it's a hacker news comment, not a book. To be more clear I mean functionally run out of things. To be even more clear, when ROI on innovation becomes less than ROI on simply making product cheaper. There's always innovations, and some may even be missed, but when the perception of the industry is that future innovations cost more than the loss of good will of making worse product then it's obvious what will be picked.

I think the solution is to make "loss of good will" valued higher, right now it's valued very low by investors since people want to hold investments a short time and exit quickly. CEOs elected by boards controlled by shareholders are the same way. Short term growth is incentivized and that undervalues long term retention of customers, which makes it more likely "manufacture a worse product" a better option than "innovate and make a better product that more people will want".

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