> And then proves it by giving contradictory examples like "people don't care about quality, they will just listen to ABBA or go to the Louvre".

True. IMO what is in the Louvre is of higher quality than anything you are likely to find in "some little art gallery showcasing new artists". Is the article seriously arguing that it is probable that some little gallery will have works better than the Mona Lisa?

I read this anecdote somewhere:

A visitor to the Louvre in Paris viewed the renowned Mona Lisa and stated loudly: "That painting is nothing special. I am unimpressed." A curator who was standing nearby said: "Sir, the painting is not on trial. You are."

Could have said the same thing about "Starry Night".

But yeah, defining "quality" may be difficult for art. Maybe rather for contemporary art, though. I think we tend to have some kind of consensus for older art?

Then for instance in cinema, I think it's pretty objective. It doesn't have to be related to how popular the movie is, though.

Though it seems that eventually, remarkable work does find its way up, even if the authors might not be around to enjoy the belated appraisal.

And in that case, what more can one do but do the work and hope for the best?

I wonder, is the quote trying to say something about pretentious audiences, or about pretentious curators?

The Mona Lisa is famous in no small part because it was stolen. Its fame gave it appeal, as did its out-of-copyright status that allowed so many derivatives. Now, I'm not saying "it's terrible", just "it's overrated" and "standards have risen".

People speak of Lisa del Giocondo's "enigmatic expression": I see simply a neutral, resting face, there is no enigma for me.

The composition? No, the background has some of the flaws used today to identify AI generated images: Look at the waterline on the right, just below her eye-line, that's at an angle, and contradicts the elements on the other side of her head.

This isn't to diss Leonardo, he and his peers had to invent a lot from first principles, and that's much more difficult than learning the same techniques from others; but at the same time, the fact that we don't need to invent it all from scratch and we can learn from others, means that it's much easier to get to a higher quality standard today — and the corollary, if you want to be seen as a genius on the level of Leonardo, the bar is much higher than "do what Leonardo did with the Mona Lisa".

I prefer the version in Prado, Madrid: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gioconda_(copia_del_...

(Now one I will say "it's terrible", to the horror of those that love it, is Der Kuss by Klimt: the woman's head is at such an angle it seems to have been disconnected from her body, rotated 90°, and reattached at the ear).

This particular painting (Mona Lisa) is indeed famous because it got stolen, and that's also why people wait in line to take a selfie with it and completely ignore "The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne" that is in the next room. But still, its quality is undeniable. As is the quality of the other paintings around. Then of course, you may like the painting or not, that's orthogonal.

Da Vinci started a painting technique called "Sfumato", which is used there. Many other painters used and developed that technique, of course, but it means that Da Vinci created something meaningful there. Famous painters usually had an impact in their time.

I would put Starry Night in that place if it were my decision to make. But it's not.

that's exactly what everyone else thinks, and so they just take it for granted

About tourists pretending to be a museum audience.

>The Mona Lisa is famous in no small part because it was stolen. Its fame gave it appeal, as did its out-of-copyright status that allowed so many derivatives.

That's a myth, only applicable to mass audiences who wouldn't have the education to recognize, much less understand, the majority of what they saw in the museum in the first place. Da Vinci's work was in high esteem for centuries by the point the painting was stolen, which is also why Mona Lisa was displayed in the Louvre to begin with. That's regardless whether Joe and Jane Q. Public knew about it or read about it on magazine "must see" lists.

>just "it's overrated" and "standards have risen".

LOL

> LOL

If it were simply the art itself, and not the name attached to it, nobody would care if a piece in the style of Leonardo was forgery or an original, they would only care if it was good.

There wouldn't even be a word for forgery, in the context of art, if it was really about the art itself.

That is not the proposition. A Motorola Moto G Play is $110 no contract. The cheapest iPhone is $429. It's is not 20% more, it's 4x more. My sister got a Moto G Play this summer. She's perfectly happy with it. She's got a family of 5 so $550 for 5 phones is quite a deal compared to $2145 for 5 phones.

The Moto G Play also has a micro-SD slot so she can take it to 512gb for $40.

I made an example to explain what would happen if consumers had a way to know, for sure, the quality of a product.

I didn't mean for you to take my example, try to find smartphone models that may match and then come back to me saying "your example is wrong because I can't find those models in real life". The whole point of my example was to share an idea, not to sell a smartphone.

A BMW/Mercedes might be a more quality car than a Kia but someone that only has a budget for a Kia isn't going to even consider a BMW/Mercedes for 2x to 8x more.

On top of that "quality" is subjective. I might agree that a Macbook Air ($999) is better than a $300 window laptop (there's tons of them) but both the Kia and the $300 Windows laptop will serve people's needs. a Kia will get them to/from work. Let them transport their kids. Etc.. A window laptop will let them browse the net, view youtube, write a resume. It's not like the Kia and windows laptop are useless. Plus, for the laptop, they can get 3 of them for the price of 1 mac. So everyone in the family gets one. It's like buying a Vizio TV for every room instead of one Sony TV for one room.

Right, we agree then. People do care about quality. That was my point.

For a start, it's not a given that the Moto G Play has a lower quality than the iPhone. If the market was competitive, there would be comparable alternatives on every dimension, but it isn't, and those can't be compared.

Phones have outsized influence on our lives. A phone costs 1/10 as much as a car per month, but we spend more time with them, and most younger people today would rather give up their car than their phone.

Better screen quality will more than pay itself in optics prescriptions later in life. Batter quality photos you take today will stay with you for the remainder of our life, and past it. Longer battery life would mean avoiding a lot of unpleasant situations.

FWIW I have teenage kids, and nothing like this has ever happened in their lives.

This is ignoring that many people “afford” these purchases on credit.

But this is the market failure.

If you ask a normal person why they should care about having a phone with drivers in the mainline kernel tree, they don't even know what you're asking. But the answer is, because then it can keep running the latest version of stock Android indefinitely, instead of being forced to buy a new phone over and over.

At which point a 20% difference in the hardware price will be relevant, because if you want to keep the phone a long time you'll want the one with 16GB of RAM instead of 4GB -- which is fine because RAM is under $1/GB.

But since the average phone customer doesn't know this, the phone they want isn't even available and their choices are the cheap phone which will be out of support in less than a year or the one that costs four times as much up front and will still be out of support before they otherwise actually need a new phone.

That person doesn't spend 3 days' wages for "mainline kernel drivers" -- either they buy the iPhone because it's a status symbol, or they use the Android OS that shipped with the device for three years until the screen is cracked and the battery stops charging. To them security patches are just an inconvenience.

I don't think "if only people had the right information they'd spend money on the right things" is the right thesis -- I think it's more "why is everyone so poor? how do we make it so that more people can afford our wares?"

My impression (citation needed) is that globally folks have been worse off the last few years and so the median Android device spec was actually going down.

That's also exactly the point. Why is it hard or expensive to repair the device? Would they have purposely chosen a phone they have to throw away like trash and then pay more than a hundred dollars for a new one if they could get one where a new battery is $15 and can be replaced like they do the batteries in their TV remote?

> My impression (citation needed) is that globally folks have been worse off the last few years and so the median Android device spec was actually going down.

Or people have realized that they only use their phone for maps and texting and they don't need a flagship if they're just going to throw it in the trash in two years anyway.

What is so great about the top end phone that I should get one? They all have cameras (plural) with more pixels than I can see. They all have a fair amount of storage.... Sure the top end models have more of everything, but is there anything that I as a user would notice?

I was one of the first to have an Android back when the G1 came out - the hardware was lacking, but any phone from 4 years later was good enough (except none had a slide out keyboard that was so much nicer than touch screens)

If you think the problem is information, the sales of iPhones is about $200 billion per year. I am pretty sure that whatever is the information you are thinking about, it is possible to deliver it to the vast majority of the customer base for the small fraction of this sum. Which would allow to capture if not the whole market, than the significant portion of it - billions-sized portion. Why do you think nobody thought about doing it before you?

The problem is this: What people want is existing phones with some minor alterations that make them last longer and be easier to repair, which wouldn't significantly affect the manufacturing cost but would reduce future sales across the industry, because many people could buy a phone and be good for ten years. So the large incumbents like Apple and Samsung don't even offer this, because they have such high market share that losing industry-wide future sales costs them more than making more current sales, and also they have such high market share that they were already the ones getting the current sales.

Then we would expect some smaller company to come by and eat their lunch, right? And you get ones like Fairphone and Librem that make the attempt, but those aren't just "Samsung Galaxy with a removable battery and open source drivers" because Samsung also won't sell you 95% of their existing phone wholesale and let you make those couple of changes people want. So they're stuck designing an entire phone instead of making a couple of changes to an existing phone, which is a heavy lift for a small company, and then the other aspects of the phone aren't competitive, or the price isn't. It's possible that someone will eventually get this right, but that doesn't mean that it's easy, and in the meantime the large incumbents are screwing everyone because the market is insufficiently competitive.

> So they're stuck designing an entire phone instead of making a couple of changes to an existing phone, which is a heavy lift for a small company,

Why a big company doesn't do it then? I mean, there are a lot of big companies not having a phone, and a bunch of big companies that used to have a phone and now don't. You'd think they'd do the easy thing and just add the extra 5% and eat Apple's lunch - but somehow they don't. Maybe that lunch is not as easily eatable as you think it is.

Because the market failure is the size of the companies in the market. If you're big enough to sink the resources to make a competitive phone from scratch then you're expecting to capture a large chunk of the market, in which case you'll behave like a large incumbent with the incentive to sell disposable phones.

To avoid this you need to bust up the vertical integration that makes it hard for small companies to make a competitive phone so that it's possible for a small company to make a device which is overall competitive while they're still hungry enough for market share to give customers what they want.

If you arbitarily move the pricing bar then of course there may be more competitive small companies, relative to the new baseline.

There is no evidence of that. If anything more vertically integrated devices (e.g. iPhone, Samsung flagships) cost more, because a vertically integrated market increases barriers to entry and impairs competition.

A Samsung phone might very well have a Samsung CPU with Samsung RAM and Samsung flash made in Samsung fabs with a Samsung battery and a Samsung screen. Galaxy S24 Ultra, ~$1000.

Meanwhile, the $110 phone was the Moto G Play. That's a Qualcomm CPU with Samsung RAM, a "Motorola"-branded battery which is probably Sanyo or Panasonic, and a third party screen and flash because Motorola doesn't make those either. It's $110 because it's full of fungible commodity parts.

The issue is, some of them -- especially that CPU -- are poorly documented and full of tightly integrated but closed source firmware/drivers. Which has nothing to do with the manufacturing cost of the hardware. A fully-documented open-source RISC-V CPU is not going to cost more.

Based on what arguments that such evidence does not exist?

Another example: Microsoft owned the browser market with their Explorer. Then they fell asleep at the wheel and now Chrome owns the market. Sure, again, it took Google to do it, but it can be done. And it will be done again - when there is a substantial unsatisfied market need.

If this is not happening for a long time, then I think it's time to consider the possibility that it's not that the "market" "fails", but just your ideas about what people should want are not the same as what people actually want. If nobody buys the "ideal" phone somebody built - maybe it's not actually ideal for enough people.

Suppose you could capture a lot of the market in the sense that the installed base of people using your phones goes from 25% to 40%, but then your repeat customer interval goes from an average of 3 years to 9 years. Your future sales outlook would be down. You're not going to do it.

Now suppose that your existing installed base is below 1%, or you're a new company and it's zero, and by doing this you could capture even 3% of the market. Then you do have the incentive to do it, as long as that percentage of the market can recover your R&D for developing a competitive phone to begin with. But what happens if the existing market is vertically integrated, so you have to do a lot of unrelated work from scratch instead of starting with a competitive reference design? Then your R&D costs are much higher and you don't do it.

And then nobody is making the competitive phone that people want.

> If nobody buys the "ideal" phone somebody built - maybe it's not actually ideal for enough people.

Let's pick some random midrange device; Samsung A35. It's ~$265, has 8 cores at >2GHz, 8GB RAM, 128GB storage, 2k display, etc. All I want is that with a removable battery and the ability to run a mainline Linux kernel. These are similar specs to the Fairphone 5, which doesn't yet appear to run a mainline linux kernel (they're working on it), but that's $800. Even at that price they're selling them, but which phone is the open competitor in the A35's price range? Can you identify anyone offering this device?

You can't say the market doesn't want something the market isn't offered.

I disagree with this.

Just a small background: I was around in some of the cultures that value quality (e.g. Switzerland, Germany (in some aspects), Nordic countries, etc.), and the biggest issues that I have with the modern concept of quality are 1) quality is not property anymore but instead is something that "someone needs to tell you 'cause you're not capable to see for yourself" and it gives not only a lot of avenue for status signaling but as mechanism that I call "veil of sophistication and exclusivity," and 2) due to the economies of scale, lack of education in terms of taste (aesthetics), and due to the number 1) most of the quality industry became a pervasive mechanism to place huge premiums that does not match with the marginal utility.

One simple example that I can think of is about the car industry, specifically the German auto industry for luxury cars.

With the new competitors from China and the US, several people are perceiving that, in relative terms, those new competitors are bringing more perceived and felt quality in comparison with the European brands.

Some editions of Mercedes you pay more than 100K in a car with a lot of plastic in its finishing, very dubious vehicle dynamics (if you're outside of the nice german/european roads) or if you need to operate in the 40% vehicle performance, awful spare parts coverage outside of Europe, and way inefficient (due to sandbagging and green washing) engines in terms of performance x value.

I can go on and on bringing several examples of this "Premium Scalping" in a lot of products: Beer, Wine, Fashion Industry, Watches, etc.

But I was talking about quality: how does one compare two laptops costing respectively 400$ and 800$? It regularly happens to me that friends ask help choosing a laptop. Sometimes they blindly trust me when I say "in your situation, I would buy that". Often though, they're more like "okay but you like computers so of course you would want a 'rolls-royce', but for me I think the cheaper one will be enough". Where actually my opinion was that both are not good enough for me, but the cheaper one is a piece of crap for everybody and the less cheap one is good enough for this particular friend.

The thing is, I can't blame them for not knowing how to compare two laptops. And the one thing they understand is price: they see two laptops that look similar, and one of them is half the price. The assume similar quality and therefore go for the cheaper.

Again, it's not that they don't care about quality, it's that they fail to estimate it.

When you look at the numbers (I presume you mean the number of CPUs, their frequency, the amount of RAM, etc), on the paper they all have something similar. How do you know if one has higher-quality RAM than the other?

There are lines of products (like macbooks or thinkpads) where you can check the quality of earlier models, but macbooks and thinkpads are on the higher end. My friends who want Windows don't go for thinkpads...

But that's not really the thing with the laptop recommendation question. It then comes down to how good of a hinge on the screen. How much flex does the body have when you actually hold it and use it. How janky are the ports. Does the trackpad and keyboard feel terrible to use? Do you feel like you risk cracking it in half tossing it in a backpack and carrying it across town? These are things where there aren't necessarily hard benchmarks and can be difficult to ascertain by just looking at listing photos.

Outside of some things like Thinkpads and Macbooks I often have a difficult time making real laptop recommendations without actually going to the store and holding the machine or hearing a trusted(ish) reviewer comment on the relative build qualities. It can be pretty easy to tell case rigidity when its in your hands. You can tell if a hinge feels like crap or not moving the screen a few times.

People buy overpriced cars that are not actually high quality.

or

You/marketing are telling me about how these chinese cars are higher quality and I should by them. While most people have no Idea whether "green engines" are good or bad. I could take your word for it and believe that they are inefficient. But that sounds bogus given that efficiency is a cornerstone of "green".

> With the new competitors from China and the US, several people are perceiving that, in relative terms, those new competitors are bringing more perceived and felt quality in comparison with the European brands.

So you agree that when people can actually perceive quality, they car about it, right

Some people would, some people wouldn't. Informing people is still important (and something that has been actively destroyed basically everywhere, for decades), so people can make the best choice for their situation.

Also, some people won't make the best choice for their situation. That's also ok for most choices.

I meant "if you could provably show them". Of course, if I tell you "this one is 20% more expensive but it will last twice as long", you have no reason to trust me. But that's a problem of trust, not a problem of how much you care about quality.

If quality provably means it's cheaper (because it will last twice as long), then it's completely irrational to buy the lower-quality, more expensive one. The whole idea is that people don't have a way to know about the quality for sure in advance, so they can't take the decision based on that.

No, it's not "completely irrational", and also not everybody acts rationally.

People exist in all kinds of contexts and situations. You won't be able to predict what the best option is for every single person.

You are right: we cannot know (that's the reason for the debate), but that's beside the point. The point is that in my opinion, if people could know for sure about the quality when they make their choice, then quality would matter to them.

But that's not my thought experiment at all. I fix the rule for my thought experiment that is meant to convey my point. One can't change my experiment and then say that the modified experiment doesn't work...

> Additionally, lots of people will choose to buy the worse option because they like it's branding or whatever other irrational reason.

I strongly believe that they resort to irrational reasons when they don't have convincing rational ones. Again: if they don't know which one is better, they may as well take the one that looks better or that is cheaper or that their friends have. But if they could know, for sure, which one was a better deal?

Yes, for your thought "product" that has a single quality of "how long it lasts" the "people" that all have the universal characteristics of wanting to reuse it indefinitely and absolutely no practical restrictions to cash-flow will pick the better quality one if they are acting rationally.

Your claim was "if one could prove that the item which costs 25% more will last twice as long, then any rational actor would buy that one". But this is not true: a rational actor which can't afford 25% more will not care about the increased quality, they will rationally choose the shoddier good, fully knowing that it's going to break twice as fast. So yes, this is exactly your thought experiment.

> I strongly believe that they resort to irrational reasons when they don't have convincing rational ones. Again: if they don't know which one is better, they may as well take the one that looks better or that is cheaper or that their friends have. But if they could know, for sure, which one was a better deal?

It's an extremely well studied phenomenon that people don't behave like rational market actors. Unless you define "a better deal" as "the one they would be happiest with", in which case by definition anyone would prefer the "better deal".

But consider this case: some people end up caring for and loving old beat up cars that they struggle with every time they use, and that they spend inordinate amounts of money and time keeping working just one more month. Those cars objectively cost far more to maintain and have worse performance and worse externalities (pollution) than other cars they could buy. Most other people would not even buy such a car. But, again, some people love them and would not in a million years sell them to buy a "better" car. So how do we handle those people? I would call them irrational market actors. You could also call them rational market actors with a highly unexpected value function; in that case if "know for sure which one is a better deal" was specifically tailored to their unusual tastes, then you would be right, and we're just quibbling over definitions.

Oooh, I misunderstood your "but will break in 50% of the time". I understood that you meant "knowing that they have a 50% chance of it breaking anyway". As in "you say it's better, but in reality it has a 50% chance of breaking anyway". Which was bending the rules :-).

So yeah, now that I understand it correctly, that's a valid point: if your finances are so bad that you can't afford to pay 25% now, even though you know for sure that this 25% will be compensated to the quadruple in 1-2 years, then it is rational to take the lower quality one. But I wouldn't think that this is the case for most of the western population, and importantly that wouldn't mean that people don't care about quality.

So yeah, valid extension of my thought experiment, I apologize :-).

> I would call them irrational market actors.

I agree, emotional value is irrational (doesn't mean it's a bad thing). And this is a valid and interesting point! However, I believe that it is not in the scope of what the feature article described. People do not only care about quality, and people are not always rational. But the article is arguing that people don't care about quality. I am not saying that the most important thing for people is quality; I am saying that people do care about quality. As in, "given the chance, quality is part of the decision-making process". Not having enough money to afford it or having an emotional attachment to something may both take over quality, but it doesn't mean that people do not care about quality.

What's your opinion on that?

No problem, I get how my language was confusing, sorry about that.

> Not having enough money to afford it or having an emotional attachment to something may both take over quality, but it doesn't mean that people do not care about quality.

I would agree with this, actually. People definitely do care for quality to some extent, at least for many categories of products.

Wrong. Most of the population is limited by cash flow so that extra 20% they get to spend on food today is worth more than the quality of the phone a year from now. That’s a problem for tomorrow, hunger is felt now.

That’s why most people choose the cheap option, not some inability to evaluate quality.

Exactly! It is actually hard to estimate the quality of a product. And when you can't, most of the time you go for the cheaper one (unless money doesn't matter much for you).

Not true. New entrants to markets often will price to undercut markets (see Uber and Airbnb in their early days). Also loss leaders are a very much a thing.

Over time markets do typically stabilize and this could be true.

As for Uber, I guess you're right in many regions. But there's a plethora of Uber competitors around the world, offering a worse experience for a cheaper price.

In 100% of cases, the cheapest product you can find will be of significantly worse quality than the second cheapest product, without bringing much savings. The rest is edge cases.

As you pointed out, I'm talking about reasonably mature markets.

I think it's an interesting heuristic, though.

Most of the population in the US has an iPhone. If you were right, they would most definitely have a cheaper phone.

Not sure I understand.

However, they do bother, so it's wrong to just assume baseline that most people just care about the cheapest option because that's all they can afford and that we shouldn't bother.

Many of us strive to get the best possible deal within a budget which satisfies our preferences and delivers a certain amount of quality. The fact that most of us don't have an unlimited budget makes it all the more important to us and this discussion that manufacturers can skimp on quality in a way that's unrecognisable to 99% of the market until a certain amount of time has passed. This has other consequences than just "it's cheaper but it's shitter and we don't know how much shittier". It allows utter bullshit like "I bought this $200 Xbox controller and the bumper broke after 3 months and I got it replaced twice and now the replacement is broken again after another 2 months". And all we can do is shrug because that's just what modern manufacturing is like. Skimping on everything while setting a price point as high as they can get away with using marketing.

After looking at life I've concluded both are wrong ways to live. you should save 10% for retirement (that is a good number for discussion but I'm open to other numbers). Spend the rest on toys - but don't go into debt. You can't take it with you, and do not know for sure that you will be healthy enough to do whatever activity you are saving up for in retirement. (at 50 my body is already such that I don't think any amount of training could get me ready to climb Mt Everest - good thing that was never my dream because it is too late. I could have done that at 30 if I wanted and there are plenty of less extreme things I can still do)

So for instance, with that framework, if you choose the cheaper item instead of the inconvenience of understanding the tradeoffs between the items, you obviously care less about quality than price and convenience.

But it generally is mostly impossible. Of course you can read about the products, you can read reviews, and then you can build some kind of belief around that. "From what I read, and assuming that the company doesn't bankrupt suddenly, and assuming that they won't deploy an update that erases all my data, I believe that this one is better". But that's a belief: you don't know anything about the hardware that is inside (other than a list of a few high-level components you think you understand, maybe) or about the software that is running inside.

(Seriously, it's pretty difficult. Read reviews? They can give some idea, but it's rare that they do any rigourous testing, and they can be corrupted. Have a brand or specific model that you like and has a good reputation? How do you know they haven't started to cash in on that by cutting quality but still charging the same prices?)

But building trust in brands like Project Farm or Consumer Reports suffers from the same bootstrap problem.

If people would like to be informed of the tradeoffs but do not have the information the end result is not optimal.

> You may take pride in your craft, but the majority of people physically cannot notice the difference between good and bad design. Not even subconsciously.

Particularly the "not even subconsciously" part thrown in at the end. Because, if this were true, then YouTube creators would not pour an insane amount of effort into the THUMBNAILS of their videos. Marketing talent would not study human psychology and do A/B tests to figure out why certain ads sell products and others don't.

There is so much theory and study behind design, attraction, pattern recognition, contrast and standing out from the crowd that even though the average person doesn't necessarily notice how these strings are being tugged on, it doesn't mean that they aren't having an influence .

And I don't even mean to this to say "we're all sheep being brainwashed by corporations." That's actually far from my point. My point is that attention to quality affects the user experience regardless of whether the user can recognize or articulate WHY.

In a photograph, and think about YouTube thumbnails as a good working example, the "mise en scene" is critical for supporting the clarity of the message. There's a reason that the majority of thumbnails contain pictures of peoples' faces: the human brain is distracted by faces... so if you're trying to pull attention to your thumbnail, it's a good method. Why are these faces usually obnoxious? Because the facial expression also communicates the tone of the content and how the viewer is intended to feel about it. The ALL CAPS sections in titles and captions, while annoying, also has a purpose: to highlight key words that describe the promise of the video.

All of this speaks to the quality of design. And users might not know why they prefer certain designs over others. Why certain websites sell products and others don't. Why certain videos and articles get clicked on while others don't. That doesn't mean that, therefore, "most people don't care about quality." It means that, like you said, most people don't have the relevant domain expertise necessary to be able to judge why the quality of one design "feels" better than the quality of another.

>There is so much theory and study behind design, attraction, pattern recognition, contrast and standing out from the crowd that even though the average person doesn't necessarily notice how these strings are being tugged on, it doesn't mean that they aren't having an influence .

I think that is the point he was trying to make. Marketers have done all that study to completely destroy the ability of "the majority of people physically cannot notice the difference between good and bad design. Not even subconsciously." Having destroyed the ability to tell shit from shinola, they are now free to sell shit at shinola prices.

Yes, they abuse whatever mean we have of judging quality to sell us their product. But that's not the point the article is trying to make, I think. That's my point: people care about quality. It's just that it's generally very hard to estimate the quality. And on top of that marketers are paid to make it harder.

> Particularly the "not even subconsciously" part thrown in at the end.

It's a bit of a tautology: people don't notice things that are targeted to guide them subconsciously. I don't know if that's the point the author was making; either way, it was kind of weak.

This is completely orthogonal to whether the marketing campaign for said laptop is well made and hits certain conscious or unconscious buttons to make you want the laptop.

Now, I don't agree with the author, but the reasons are completely different. I would say that differences in design that end users don't notice are not relevant. Any design school that holds that one design is better and another is worse where the end users of those products wouldn't notice the difference is, by definition, a form of snobbery and a bad school of design.

Why did you read this confusion into my post? Was it because I'm using YouTube thumbnails as an example or referring to A/B tests that websites employ to measure engagement?

These were concrete examples used to describe abstract concepts relating to human behaviour. The quality of a design affects how a user engages with the product, how they feel about the product and how they enjoy using it. I never really considered "marketing" in my comment at all. I was talking about demonstrable design elements (composition, mise en scene, copy, typography) and how those elements combine to affect the quality of the finished product .. and how that quality impacts user experience. This applies whether the "product" is ad copy or a physical object bought from the store.

It's also a good example: you can have an excellent video, but if the thumbnail (marketing) is not spectacular enough, people won't watch it. Another example about how people care little for quality.

And if you could find one that's just plain stainless steel (with or without a nice wood handle), it was paper-thin steel, stamped into shape, that no one had ever bothered to grind/polish the burrs off the edge.

Then, just a few weeks ago, my wife and I were checking out this tiny little Korean grocery store. And the owner apparently orders everything from some Korean supplier. He had several different sizes of ladels. Stainless, in what must be 3/16ths, all the edges soft and beveled. The shape was nice too, not something rough and rushed, but looking like someone who cared about design actually spent time on that. And the small one was like $3.89 and the large was $7-something. This did not come from a Chinese factory.

Am I a world-renowned ladle expert? Do I have a PhD in ladelology? No. Hell, as a utensil, it's probably one that I only use twice a year. I couldn't design a die to make one of these, I couldn't tell you if the hydraulic press needed to be 50tons or 250tons, I'm not very knowledgeable at all about any detail that matters. I just care (some interesting psychology there... childhood trauma or something).

I don't think anyone needs to be especially qualified to judge the quality of products that they do or will use. Everyday experience should suffice, and the only people who might not manage that are kids who have just recently graduated and mama's not doing their laundry for them anymore.

> I don't think anyone needs to be especially qualified to judge the quality of products that they do or will use.

In your example, though, what you have done is try multiple models over multiple years, while the use-case hasn't changed one bit. So you have found an example where you could actually test multiple products yourself, and then decide which one you like better.

Many times it's not like that. If you buy a smartphone today, you can't test 4 different models for 2 months and then choose. So you will have to pick one. And in a couple years, when this one is not good enough, you will have to buy a new one. But everything will have evolved: websites will be even bulkier and slower to load, mobile apps will be more Javascript wrappers on top of cross-platform frameworks etc etc that made them faster to write, etc. So the new phone you will buy will not compare to the old one, because it won't live in the same world.

Therefore you end up in the same situation: you need to buy a smartphone, you can test 4 different models for 2 months, and you don't know if the ones that are more expensive are better.

Isn't it a bit puzzling that inferior ladles proliferate, though? You don't need to work in catering or have any particular training to recognise superior ladles, but it's more difficult to buy a ladle of reasonable quality than an inferior one. Why is that? I can think of a few possible reasons:

1) Because a sufficiently large proportion of buyers are too inexperienced to know better? Maybe they'll choose the high-quality option next time. This could explain buyers' behaviour - often including mine - but I don't think it explains the behaviour of retailers or manufacturers with brands to protect.

2) Because people pay so much more attention to big purchases than small ones? You might use a ladle quite frequently, and even an inferior one might last longer than a smartphone, so it might warrant some thought even though it's inexpensive.

3) Because too many buyers are poor? If I correctly understand the comment you're replying to, the inferior ladles were actually actually less expensive, but cost could contribute to other cases of buyers choosing worse value products.

4) Because people are suggestible, and the decision about which to buy is partly made for them? Maybe the inferior ladles are more expensive because of the resources put into putting them in front of so many buyers.

It's just that they won't spend 2 years finding a Korean store. And for manufacturers, it seems like they make more profit by just building worse quality in the first place.

And that's another point: people do care about quality. Manufacturers do not. Manufacturers care about profit. And economists believe that both align perfectly, for some reason I don't get.

I have a prefab solution: avoid shopping at Walmart and their ilk, get familiar with a wider range of stores. "Oh I'm about to go to the big city for the first time in 6 months, time to stock up on puerh tea, because i can't get it locally..."

For something that should last forever, $30 isn’t too bad.

It’s basically impossible to get a quality product at a Target or Walmart type store.

Because there is a difference between quality and preference. You can totally dislike the Mona Lisa, but in its style, it would be very hard to say that it is not high quality painting.

And that brings me to another point that I think goes against the philosophy of the featured article: music is acquired taste, if I can say. We generally don't like music we don't understand. Some styles are easier to get (maybe because the music is just easier, or because it's broadcasted everywhere you go), some are harder. I like a lot of different styles of music (from classical to metal through rap, pop and jazz, etc). But in each of those styles, I did not immediately like everything. Of course there is good and bad quality, that's one thing. But the other axis is what I could understand of the style.

In rap, I started with very melodic songs, and then I started to get the rhythm and flow, and then downright the culture and the meaning of what they would say. I still don't like everything, but vastly more than I used to.

In jazz, I liked big bands and "soft" stuff like this until I started studying jazz. I forced myself to listen to jazz styles I really did not enjoy, up to free jazz. I regularly listened to good quality songs (I had to trust my music professor about the quality, of course) in those styles for a few months. And after a while (and I can't say precisely when it happened), I started enjoying some of those, until I could enjoy songs in all of them. Again, I don't like everything, but by learning and getting used to new styles, I got to enjoy them as well.

Of course, in doing all that effort, I improved my musical expertise. So I am now more critical about quality, which I feel like I compensate by being more open to very different styles. By voluntarily staying ignorant, I doubt the author enjoys all styles of music. So maybe they don't ruin the low-quality music of the style they are used to, but on the other hand they miss the high quality music in all the styles they are not used to :-).

But again, you don't have to of course :-). But I agree that it feels more likely that you may end up enjoying quality music you don't like now than bad music you don't like now!

Conversely, if you said you don't know how you could possibly enjoy, say, the Plastic Ono band (Yoko Ono's band), then it would be harder to suggest it's even possible (not to say that enjoying them, for anyone who does, is in any way wrong!).

people who cannot afford to go for the better quality would, in fact where Smart phones are concerned I think it is commonly considered that for most metrics iPhone is better and people often buy Android because they cannot afford iPhone (of course except for specific subsets of HN who will not buy Apple for various social/cultural reasons)

I would debate that.

One thing is that iPhone is one, whereas Android is thousands. It's easier to trust an iPhone than a random Android phone. But there are certainly really good Android phones that are cheaper than iPhones. It's just hard to estimate the quality, again.

Really not an Android Fanboy, and had devices from both worlds but this one thing is bugging me out as it is just a blatant product of Apple's "our devices are better because our name is on it" marketing - and it's bugging me out.

> Audiophiles complain about MP3 compression and crappy headphones. Most of us just want to listen to our tunes, not listen to the equipment.

I won't even bother. It's not possible to discuss with people having such bogus opinions.

But that assumes if you pay more quality increases as well. But that is not always the case. Case in point my iphone which has display issues within 2 yrs and apple is expecting me to pay half the price of the device to fix it. Against my old android which is 4x cheaper and still working great after 2 yrs.

Quality should not be associated with price.

It's just a thought experiment. In this situation, people would probably go for the higher quality, because they would know it's higher quality.

In reality, it's very hard to assess the quality of a product, that's correct. And that's my point: people do care about quality, it's just often very hard to have a good idea about it.

I am not sure if we are living in the same world. No most people absolutely do not make rational choices like that. No matter how you tell them.

Most importantly what you think is best for people is stil a perspective. Especially in the context of tv.

Let me restart: the article says that "most people don't care about quality". I disagree, and offer a thought experiment. It is not real, it is just a way to share an idea. "Imagine a world where a person is offered a choice between two smartphones, where one is 20% more expensive but will last twice as long. Imagine that this person confidently knows this (it is impossible in real life, but let's imagine it for the sake of this argument). And obviously, imagine that the person does not have an irrational reason that will completely ruin the experiment, like someone putting a gun on their head and telling them which one to buy. Do you think that this person will say "I will take the one that is obviously worse, because I am completely irrational", or do you think that this person will say "well, the more expensive one is apparently a better deal due to the quality guarantees I know to be true"?

The point that I am trying to make being: quality matters to people. It's not the only thing that matters, and they don't always have a way to know about the actual quality of whatever they buy. But if they could know about the quality, then it would probably be part of the decision process. Therefore it feels wrong to say "most people don't care about quality".

In real life, people don't buy the better quality products, that's a fact. But it does not mean that people don't care about quality.

About once a year I do travel through those remote areas where my 4g phone never got service, but as soon as I got 5g I had service (there are still areas so remote I don't get 5g service either)

Also most people can't actually afford quality, even if they're aware in the long run it's more economical. Same reason pay day loans exist.

Yes buying one solid dining table that'll last a lifetime sounds great, but a poor person just doesn't have that dining table budget.

So I think many of these articles come down to middle class cluelessness, and sometimes narcissism. They either can't understand the situation of the poor, and so come to the conclusion they don't care about quality. Or they're fully capable of understanding but don't want to let this opportunity to subtle brag their superiority go to waste.