It used to be possible to pay somewhat more to buy good quality products that would last for years or decades (obviously not for electronics) but today the manufacturers of these goods charge the same prices but their products are no better than Amazon/Walmart-grade junk available for half the price.
The contemporary marketplace is littered with companies that used to produce high quality goods but are now selling away their former reputation to move overpriced garbage. See everything from Cole Haan (shoes) to Sears.
And frankly, I do blame Americans for this. American refusal to enforce anti-monopoly laws, combined with the American legal concept of management fiduciary duty belonging exclusively to shareholders, provides no market incentive for manufacturers to produce quality goods and indeed obligates companies to rip off their customers by selling low-quality goods at inflated prices.
As an example, I'll use flash memory devices (USB thumb drives). I used to consult for a firm that assembled these things as part of their business for use by corporate customers. They would buy flash memory chips from various chip vendors. You can, if you wish, purchase flash memory chips that have passed stringent tests. Or chips that have been rejected by other OEM's. Guess which ones cost more? Some of my client's customers demanded the absolute cheapest possible chips. So my client provided them (with warnings). The failure rates for the cheapest of the cheap could reach as high as 20% in a batch in our testing. The clients didn't care. Sadly, ALL the clients that didn't care were American companies. Not even mainland Chinese companies would use them.
There's a few interesting channels on youtube that deconstruct various products (from shoes to toasters) to see how high quality they are. It's quite instructive at how much different price points can differ (sometimes from the same company).
Buying quality is a tedious task and requires to invest your time. Buying expensive is by no means a guarantee for quality, think of the many re-labelers.
Deregulation was great because it opened up the market to more competition, and that led to lower prices. A true race to the bottom. Turns out, most people don't want to pay for more leg room, better service, more on time flights. They want the cheapest flight they can get (unless their company is footing the bill).
So whenever I hear someone complain about leg room on a flight, or not enough overhead stowage, or crappy food, I think about the choices ticket buyers have made over the last 40 years.
Price is almost always the first and most influential factor in a sale. Quality (whether actual quality or the illusion of quality) is usually way down the list of factors.
[0]https://gizmodo.com/traveling-in-a-boeing-747-in-the-1970s-w...
Right now, I can book BOS->SAN->BOS for $945 in first class. Granted, COVID is happening, but I've bought that ticket in the past, pre-COVID for that same $1000 +/- a small margin.
I call this the Decontenting of America.
I totally disagree with your assessment. 20 years ago it was harder to find quality products than it is today. I am a person that buys "quality", I support local & US companies whenever I can. There are so many excellent boutique companies for just about everything outside of shitty mass produced electronics. I just do not see your world at all, but then again, I don't mistake garbage retailers and company branding for quality.
In general I find the degree of belligerent defensiveness in your post inexplicable given the topic at hand.
Modern metallurgy is soooo much more consistent for equivalent or better outputs though. Thanks to modern electronic process control the dumbest dolts on 3rd shift in some factory in China can hit the spec they were told to hit and they can hit it for pennies.
Plastics, electronics, mechanical assemblies, hydraulics, everything, same story. Modern automation and process control has made the "high quality" of decades past something attainable on a budget.
So your Harbor Freight junk will generally hold its own against grandpa's Craftsman and Snap-On but it won't look good or feel good doing it and you white box wheel bearing will roll your tractor along just as well as the one it replaces.
I'm curious what Sears tools you considered high quality.
My computer's from 2000s still work as does various 20+ year old CRTs. What products are you talking about? The nylon clothes that last forever, the food that doesn't go bad and has higher nutrition, the cheap micro USB that came with the thing that broke but the cable still works 9 years later?
What are these same price low quality goods you are plagued with?
A poster said we should buy quality and another answered its no longer possible unless custom-manufactured. I fear thats true: to few bought quality to be a sustainable living for the producers.
But... as you point out, it doesn’t have to be. You can buy quality items that are 2 to four times the cost of crappy ones, they last longer, are usually made with better materials and are designed and constructed better —be they designed locally or abroad and manufactured locally or abroad. You have a choice. Many people choose the cheapest crap that make used car salesman’s leisure suits look like they are of unequaled quality.
But not everyone buys the crap option.
If you buy too much crap it’s because people aren’t discriminating and aren’t in control of their discretionary spending.
UPDATE: "Essentially useless" is (obviously, I hope) rhetorical hyperbole. See subsequent discussion for clarification.
You’re right in criticizing Apple on certain things. But the alternatives are far worse, and to use the topic appropriate term here, “crappier”. For all its faults, I still prefer some Apple products and wouldn’t touch the competition even if they paid me to.
Yes, I agree. That's why some day someone will have to pry my mid-2013 MBP from my cold dead hands.
Strongly disagree, and I think this is part of the problem: Apple positioned itself as "The Good UI Company" so strongly that people cannot imagine a good UI which doesn't come from Apple. Therefore, they compare all UIs to what Apple's doing now and take points off for not being Apple, as opposed to evaluating based on usability and fitness for purpose. The ultimate expression of this is people deriding UIs like Window Maker, essentially the NeXT UI, because it isn't Apple, when it's from the same mind as the "Wonderful Apple UIs" everyone seems to love.
Sometimes I blame greedy computer repair people of the 90's and early 2000's for this mess. I remember my friend opened up a repair shop (I helped weekends as a side gig). There were companies in our town charging OUTRAGEOUS prices for very easy repairs, and doing a really bad job. Then we would end up fixing the "repair" and then the original problem, which of course was always more than the original problem. It was really sad.
Now I live in a town with NO computer repair shops, and the closest thing is the Best Buy which is the KING of overcharging for repairs and doing a crappy job.
It's no wonder people just started buying cheap computers after being ripped off.
/rant
As the Elton John song says, it's a sad, sad situation.
Desktops are luxury items that aren't needed anymore, laptops are quickly becoming those too. People don't need computers, their computing needs change too and the iPad is better at mobility so many people just get a tablet rather than a computer anyway. Even I question my need of using a full gnu Linux phone once I was able to get chrome desktop extensions in a browser on Android.
Is Apple overpriced? I dunno, the rest of the market is priced similarly. But the hardware is no better or worse than the competitors, and it can be argued Apple supports it a whole lot longer than the competitors.
Then Apple made a conscious decision to emphasize form over function. The result was products that fail often (e.g. the butterfly keyboard), cannot be easily repaired (if they can be repaired at all), and have a terrible UI/UX. Discoverability, configurability, and reliability are things of the past. Every software update (which are no longer optional, BTW) is a crap shoot (no pun intended) with regards to whether it will introduce more problems than it fixes.
> we get 5-6 years out of each one we buy
Then you're talking about products that were built before this trend really took hold. The butterfly keyboard was only introduced 5 years ago. The UI/UX horribleness began with Yosemite, which only came out 6 years ago, and didn't get really bad until Catalina, which is barely two years old.
I also think you're being too nostalgic about the Apple of yore. Apple has always had quality issues, both in hardware and software. Apple Cube cracked. Macbooks had screen delimitation. Titanium laptops discolored (as did the plastic iBooks). Video cards failed due to bad drivers. I had a 1st Gen Intel Mac Pro that burned through video cards every 3 months while I was on a World of Warcraft binge. Apple ended up replacing 3 for me while it was under warranty. Apple released OSX before it was ready for primetime, and the result was an OS that was markedly slower than OS9.
As for OSX/macOS UI/UX, people griped about bugs and poor design decisions from day one. Whether it was monochrome stripes in window elements, or too much candy colored buttons, to bugs so annoying that Apple released an OS that was basically just a hard reset of bug fixes.
I don't know, but my iPad updated itself without my approval a few days ago. That had never happened before, so I assumed it was a change that came in with the last update that I did approve.
As far as nostaligia, I have two mid-2013 MBPs that I use on a daily basis. One runs Mavericks, the other runs Catalina. The Mavericks machine does everything I need it to do. It is stable. It runs flawlessly for literally months at a time. The Catalina machine is buggy, has to be rebooted on a regular basis, and once needed the entire OS reinstalled from scratch because the disk filled up with crap and no one could figure out how to get rid of it. (The only reason I use it at all is that one of my clients requires me to use it for security reasons.)
And right now, there aren't really any better alternatives. I use MacOS, I use Windows, I use Linux. I have Android devices, and iPads. Apple's devices are every bit as good as any of the competition. They are ahead in a couple key areas like privacy and long-term support.
Catalina got released in October 2019, less than a year ago.
basically i agree with this sentiment, but if you take into account modern marketing and sales tactics, its a lot easier said than done... marketers really know how peoples brains work and the "buttons" to push to get more sales of "crap"
the other side is, when a vast majority of people are squeezed for money, they usually go for "cheap"... so especially i notice in the us, people are very price-sensitive; many times, but not always cheap == crap...
I think the article should have spoken more about how consumer culture is manufactured along with the goods that it consumes.
In essence, it helps build up a society because it allows everyone to participate in consuming, as long as they have some money to spend.
I'm doing my best here to make my point without flaming other cultures. We as Americans get blamed a whole lot when things go bad. I think this writer is engaging in lazy projection. Stop buying the crap and you'll stop seeing the crap. (I don't like this piece, if you can't tell.)
I'm a big believer in buying quality stuff and repairing it when it breaks. I try to do my part to NOT buy the junk. But this fake history lesson in how all this garbage is the fault of American's is just low-rate in my opinion.