> Moreover, consumer items beyond a price point are both very well made and backed by long term warranties anyway.

Except that there isn't a good way to distinguish between something that is expensive because it has quality construction and something that is expensive because it is a brand name.

Searching for information online is nigh-useless due to aggressive SEO on the part of advertisers. Sometimes I can get lucky and find an enthusiast forum, but those are harder and harder to find.

Online reviews in general are effectively anonymous. Amazon reviews might not even be the same manufacturer, let alone the same product. Newegg lists different firmware versions under the same product ID, so compatibility reviews are useless.

The best thing I've found is to reach out to a group of friends and hope that one of them did the research previously, or can at least steer you towards/away a brand. This doesn't scale, and any approach that does scale is at risk of being overwhelmed by advertisers and other bad actors.

Research is also hampered by non-obvious changes in the product. Even when a good, reliable product is released, it can be modified to be cheaper to make/more expensive to maintain with no external indication. This isn't even necessarily about cost-cutting, a component may no longer be available and is swapped for something that claims to be identical but is not as reliable.

Case in point: AvE dissecting a Made in Japan Makita drill, made for the Japanese market: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2EpdRN2h6A

This thing is built like a fucking tank, it will never ever ever fail.

Compare that to the same model sold outside of Japan, and it's most likely made in Indonesia and the quality is nowhere near.

For some head to head testing, Project Farm has done a similar video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7hd4rKf2us

Except being built like a tank, Japan made one also vibrates less and more comfortable to use.

Holy Shit! Thanks for introducing me to his Channel. Lots of exciting stuff.

( And somehow he is Canadian but speaks a little Cantonese )

AvE is a jewel in the cesspool that is Youtube :)

He's a private dude, but I think his wife is french-canadian and he's at least bilingual. And from what I've gathered he has to have done some kind of mechanical engineering for a LONG time. Dude knows his stuff about anything mechanical.

His teardown of the Juicero is pure gold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ

It's an amazing insight into a startup with endless amounts of money, bunch of really smart people, but no real business model. =)

Andrew Camarata is another jewel in the cesspool. Love watching his heavy construction videos.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUujfNBK9uv3cIW-P5PX7vA

This is what consumers' associations do all day. You usually have to pay to read their research, which helps them maintain their independence.

They can be notoriously bad at their job however - an example can be found in toilet testing, as they do weird substitutes that don’t match actually plugging the thing with toilet paper. Who cares how many golf balls it flushes?

reddit.com/r/buyitforlife is a pretty good source for long-lasting goods, as are the hyper-specialized subreddits for (e.g.) safety razors, vacuum cleaners or telescopes.

The best consumer goods are generally the ones where the design has persisted unmodified for decades. It works, everyone uses it, nobody's improved on it, serviceability is reasonable relative to the essential complexity, and it hasn't been cost-reduced into garbage. "New model" always comes with the worry: What did they fuck up this time?

Anything "professional", "military", etc. comes with the potential downside of it being someone's job to maintain and service it. Qualitative differences usually come with trade-offs - and if it's not your job, it might not be better to try.

I wish there was more of a culture of long lived product lines. IKEA is shockingly good at this. I had a draw from the Malm product line from 15 years ago, then 5 years ago I got the bed frame in the same set and just now I got another one of the draws and they all fit together and look uniform because their product lines have been mostly the same for decades.

If I break something or need more bits, I can always go back years later and get a matching piece.

I would've agreed with you on this until recently. Tried to get an extra piece for something but they no longer make that 'color'. Then had the same issue trying to buy another malm piece to match the rest of the bed room. No dice, no longer making that fake wood facing and replaced it with a slightly different one. Different enough to look out of place.

Yeah fair enough. I just have the white one which seems to have carried on.

I mean I love Victorinoxes, but 35 euro kitchen knife is far from high end. Although theirs and Morakniv Frost have surprisingly good steel and HT for the price and they can get sharp - they are the cheapest real knives in the kitchen (kiwi and some chinesse cleavers excluded), not high end stuff.

I wasn't talking about the €35 "Classic" knives from Victorinox (e.g.: [0]). They're serially produced stamped steel blades.

I'm talking about Grand Maitre series [1], which are "Made in Germany under supervision of Victorinox" and are forged steel. They're nowhere near €35. I have a 15cm Grand Maitre Carving/Utility knife, and that thing's sharpness is scaring me sometimes. It's virtually equal with another handmade, hand forged set I have, and both blades hold their edges extraordinarily well.

OTOH, America's test kitchen has found that these €35 Classic knives has some extraordinary steel for their price, under an electron microscope. I was unable to find the exact video, sorry for that.

[0]: https://www.victorinox.com/global/en/Products/Cutlery/Chef%2... [1]: https://www.victorinox.com/global/en/Products/Cutlery/Chef%2...

Found the video [0]. Watch from 05:17.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e50gujs4l-I

Thank you, I was confused by that. If a $40 Victorinox is high end, what does that make stuff like Wusthof, let alone Takeda?

In some product categories, I've found out that price increase doesn't increase the quality proportionally all the time. Similarly, there are some companies which produce items for a substantially lower price, but their items punch way above their weight.

HiFi gear is one of them. My CD player (from Yamaha) and speakers (from Heco) were cheaper when compared to other brands, but they're at least equal with their qualities, and they proved themselves over the years.

Similarly, if I can get 90% quality of a Wusthof by getting a Victorinox Grand Maitre, I'm OK with that.

I've also found out that technology has improved dramatically in certain categories. I've bought an entry level Sony BT headphones (Sony WH-CH510), and the sound quality for that price is unbeatable. I have much better headphones, but for something which I can grab and go, it's unbelievable. I had to pay thrice the price for that sound quality 10 years ago.