These days you don't buy snap on for the quality, but for their ability to quickly service a warranty issue. Their tools have the same problems as everyone else's these days, and long gone are the times when they handily outperformed everyone else on durability, tolerances to spec, etc.

Just another reason to cherish those old tools, they literally don't make them like they used to.

Do they not make them anymore at any price? Like inflation adjusted how much did the tools cost back in the day vs now?

The tools were significantly more expensive even as recently as the 90's, inflation adjusted, probably about 3x as much for hand tools on average. I couldn't say for power tools, as you are getting a lot of innovation that's hard to put a price on in that time frame, whereas with hand tools you are basically getting some decent alternatives in the realm of materials engineering with things like fiberglass, various coatigngs like cerakote, etc.

One other thing to mention is that there are companies that make hand tools that outperform snap-on handily these days, even if they struggle against some aged tools. If you are interested in an empirical look at this sort of analysis, side by side, Project Farm on Youtube has covered most hand tools by major brands at this point.

Also worth noting that while the ceiling on quality has lowered, the floor for most major manufacturers seems to have raised as well. A random modern hand tool is usually more likely to break the thing you are working against than to break itself, and I can't even remember the last time I've seen a hammer lose its head, a screwdriver tip get stripped out by a steel screw, a wrench snap at the neck, etc.

Probably a case of survivorship bias. Tools that already lasted this long are likely built better.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. Snap-On, like most other tool manufacturers, and manufacturers of all kinds, has worked on reducing costs considerably over time. Part of that means manufacturing under contract, rather than in-house, as well as using techniques which reduce materials required to meet specifications.

One of the things about mechanics hand tools where this is a challenge is that mechanics regularly use tools for purposes outside the specifications, because you need to get the job done, regardless of what happens to currently be in your toolbox. In the past, because tools were overbuilt, this wasn't an issue. For modern tools, they are much tighter in tolerance to their specifications, both in good and bad ways. A simple way to tell is simply weigh the tools, due to techniques like CAD modeling with FEA, you can reduce the materials needed to achieve the same targeted strength specification. Tool from 1960 and Tool from 2022 with the same SKU likely have the same specifications, but are built in /very/ different ways.

That’s not inconsistent with survivorship bias.

Intelligent people also tend to overrate their own knowledge, which seems to be what you are doing here.

That's great for mechanics, but what about software developers who need new hardware every year? What about graphic designers who need to pay subscriptions to Adobe? These are recurring costs that don't materially improve the workers ability to do their work, but are nonetheless required.

I'm confused. Why wouldn't an Adobe subscription materially improve the ability of a graphic designer to do their work? I've also never felt the need for new hardware every year as a software developer.

Before Creative Cloud became subscription only, you could budget the software as a one-time fee; $2500 for their entire suite of software, $600 or so for just Photoshop, iirc.

With the subscriptions, you're paying $600+ a year, every year, in perpetuity, and you're subjected to invasive DRM that'll do shit like delete fonts you haven't used recently.

Before subscriptions, upgrades were often cheaper than buying new, and you might only buy an upgrade every four or five years (the core requirements of a graphics app don't change majorly, so new versions are more about stability, optimizations, and the occasional niche feature).

... thankfully, there's enough competition in this space that I've managed to completely remove Adobe from my toolset, but it still sucks that I can't even activate my 2013 version of Adobe's Creative Suite (CS6) because the licensing servers no longer function.

Sounds like you're saying graphic designers no longer need Adobe and if they do need it then they probably gain a materially benefit from it. I never suggested Adobe products were cheap, or a good deal.