Everyone I've talked to agrees that Netfix is full of crap with some things worth watching. Some of that is because people have different taste, but even within their preferred "thing" they say the same.
I think the author is right, but it presents a great opportunity for people that appreciate quality over newness. Old stuff that is good- from media to cars to clothing is practically free, and the new stuff that is garbage quite expensive. There are so many excellent old movies and music you can never have time to explore it all in a lifetime.
It’s not just that people don’t care about quality- it seems to me that they cannot tell at all, but insist on newness instead for some reason- perhaps hoping that it will make them appear discerning to others? Is there some other explanation I am unaware of?
Facebook marketplace or craigslist. $5k will net you something running with a solid motor and transmission. $500 will get you a project that'll eat a year or two of nights and weekends.
I’ve regularly bought and sold good running 70s/80s/early 90s Volvos and Mercedes for under $1000 (and sometimes under $100) on Craigslist and at auto auctions- close to their scrap metal value, yet these are vehicles that will last a million miles with regular maintenance.
Ironically, supply and demand can make something more reliable cheaper- these cars just don’t die, so there is too much supply and little demand.
For $8k you can get a ~20 year old Porsche or Audi with low mileage, that has been meticulously maintained, always stored indoors, and looks and drives like it did when new.
Getting a good deal on a used car requires some mechanical knowledge to identify a car that is going to be reliable. I look for cars previously owned by mechanically savvy people that have already spent the money to mitigate any known design flaws or potential issues on that particular model.
One point I wanted to add- an older car like this is fully depreciated, and will often increase in value if you manage to keep it in the same condition. Buying older cars- especially models with rarer desirable traits like a Turbo or manual transmission, I've often been able to drive them for years, and ultimately sell them with enough profit to recoup all of my purchase and parts costs.
There's a somewhat tongue in cheek book "Porsche Boxster: The Practically Free Sportscar" that makes a pretty solid case that if you but the right model of car right at the age where the price is lowest, it can appreciate enough to virtually cancel out the full ownership costs. Although for the math to work out you need basically not consider the cost of a garage to keep it looking nice, or your time to maintain it yourself. Which is, I think a fair point if you consider the car a hobby, and get joy from taking care of it.
Some truth here, and you do see this in home construction. My parents horrific Formica & linoleum 80s kitchen and hardwood floors still looks the same as they did when I was a child.
My new construction “luxury” condo had serious wear damage within 5 years. I’ll have to gut the kitchen and replace my faux wood floors while my parents place remains indestructible.
I hate fake wood floors with a passion… they are so slippery they are fatal- I had a dog become paralyzed by slipping and breaking his neck, and an Ex break a foot falling on these. They are so hard they hurt your feet, look disgusting even when brand new, wear out quickly, and disintegrate if they get wet. They are a safety hazard and should be illegal.
Dryness is also an issue - we had a lot of people in the building who weren't keeping their units humid enough in winter end up with the planks warping significantly.
The other day my wife spilled, MAYBE 2-4oz of water MAX and took 1 minute to wipe it up.. next thing you know we had a plank warp a full half inch upwards. We had to place barbells on it for days while it dried out to remediate.
Oh and these idiotic faux wood plank floors are also what they put in the kitchen & laundry closet so water damage is basically guaranteed.
I have noticed traveling that in many other countries it is the norm to have some type of totally waterproof flooring in bathrooms, kitchens, etc. so that it can be simply hosed down, and the inevitable leaks don't destroy everything... but in the USA it is the norm to put flooring that cannot handle getting wet, right near or under appliances and fixtures that will inevitable frequently leak.
This is basically the difference between creating art and creating commoditized product. The distinction and the unwillingness to acknowledge the distinction (even though it’s made regardless) creates a lot of friction.
The masses don’t give a damn, and if all you’re trying to do is extract maximum revenue as efficiently as possible, there is no reason to expend the additional resources (and incur the additional risks) of doing more than the necessary minimum.
The artists/craftspeople have a vision and they care. Then the money arrives and none of that matters to the money.
Examples are everywhere. Video game studios discover that they can make a billion with crap story so stop investing resources in story, only the people who care even notice, and there aren’t enough of them to matter: they aren’t the audience anymore. Etc.
More important, even people who _do_ give a damn, don't give a damn about everything. And even the things they do give a damn about, they don't give a damn about every time they "do that thing".
I give a damn about music. I have a collection of about 3,000 LPs, a few hundred 12" singles, and over 5,000 CDs. I love to draw the curtains and sit in my dark lounge room, power up my 80's vintage all analogue hifi, and critically listen to albums on vinyl - no distractions, focusing on the music and performance.
But that's only maybe 1% of my music listening time. I spend a lot more time listening to music with my earbuds in while exercising or grocery shopping, or in the car. I spend way more time streaming music around the house while doing chores or cooking or reading. I have playlists of music without vocals that I listen to while doing work I need to be able to concentrate doing. Hell, I have Apple Music streaming right now while reading (and posting to HN.
I _do_ care about music, but you'd need a decent private investigator to find out, it sure as hell isnt obvious to anyone that's not close to me. And even if you tracked my credit card bills you'd see way more streaming subscription spend than vinyl/cd purchases (which are mostly bought for cash at show merch desks these days).
I find most people are passionate about _something_ in the "care about" sense here. I love it when I meet someone new or who I don't know well, and can get into a conversation about "their thing" - whether it's knitting, or building traditional Inuit canoes, or stage lighting for amateur theatre, or ultra light carbon and titanium bicycles, or building a plane, or sailing the north west passage, or setting a land speed record in some very specific class. All things I'm unlikely to ever even consider wanting to do, but which are fascinating to hear about from someone deeply involved in it.
I think (or at least optimistically hope) that "the masses" do give a damn. About _something_. You just need to steer the conversation around a bit to find out what their thing is, and be curious and enthusiastic enough to get them talking about it. Its a wonderful thing when that happens, even if what you end up talking about is the drama in purchasing hand dyed yarn from that one woman in Germany on knitting forums, or the history and current land speed record in the 50cc streamlined motorcycle with gasoline fuel class, or what the recommended shotgun shells are for protection against polar bear attack.
> This is basically the difference between creating art and creating commoditized product
I came to say the same in essence.
The author is using too many generalizations. I think his internal pendulum is swinging from extremes, missing the nuance in reality.
Many people care about quality, and often they are sophisticated buyers and tastemakers. Those people, when they find quality, praise it to whomever will listen. Others, often not as discerning hear the praise and jump aboard due to the hype.
Sure, there are people that can't really tell the difference, but they still have the year's hottest DSLR or whatever, and the experts are often the people that communicate what those are.
I don't think that reality makes for a great blog post, however.
Ask any Japanese mechanical pencil manufacturer: it is possible commoditize excellence via mastery through refinement and then uniformity by making zillions the same way.
People seem to choose quality when they have an option. The rise of Apple is not because people are “sheep”, it’s because there is a quality level that apple products never go beneath- even if the design is stupid.
People can forgive poor quality with innovation, or in the pursuit of pure art- but the more crappy things get the more you notice people gravitating towards higher quality items/content.
The “issue” is when there’s a total monopoly or an oligopoly that is racing to the bottom, which seems to happen quite often, because building high margin things tends to be more risky, and MBAs are risk averse.
I think given enough time and experience where people can discover rock bottom dollars isn’t working, they will gravitate towards higher perceived value per dollar.
Apple won only after windows gave average home users a horrific bsod/virus/reboot hell of an existence for about 20 years.
Even so, the more Windows machines I had back in the day, the less real work I got done. Something was always not working, with no obvious pattern. Most problems took work to fix.
I learned not to install and uninstall things. Even if I needed to.
The more Mac’s I had, the more likely I ran into a problem as well. But it was usually just some glitch.
Some of us remember the 90s-00s era of debugging non-tech family & friends windows machines for various critical ailments with great frequency until they all switched to Macs.
>Some of us remember the 90s-00s era of debugging non-tech family & friends windows machines for various critical ailments with great frequency until they all switched to Macs.
I second this. My mom switched to a iMac G4 and never needed me again, except that time she plugged the power strip into itself.
It got to the point where I didn't want to tell people I worked with computers.
Mostly windows machines of comparable spec could be had for 10% less, but most importantly there were many OEMs willing to sell objectively bad underspecced machines that were 50-75% cheaper than the cheapest Mac. Remember the era when people had overheating laptops etc.
Price comparing Macs and PCs has rarely been accurate. The experts I remember would hammer the price difference and say Apple was dying so the investment isn’t worth it.
This is happening again now, with a new addition (well, resurgent) of insidious price cutting strategy: adware.
Ed Zitron goes into it in a recent article rant here[1] (skip to the "direct example" section if you're not interested in the rest of the read) where he reviews the best selling laptop on Amazon, which is ridiculously cheap... at a devil's bargain.
At this point it’s like the old story about boots - too poor to afford cheap ones.
Most people would be better served with a $600 Mac mini that will literally still be working & better in 5 years than in buying a $300 Amazon deal with 4GB ram which will run awful and die right outside warranty period. Maybe in a couple years apple will have prior year minis a little cheaper / refurbs available at $450-500ish too.
I just bought a $280 Acer laptop, still limited storage but better class, twice the ram, and with a CPU that actually has performance cores so it runs 2.5x-5x faster.
It came with chromeOS, which is a limiting factor, but in this particular comparison it sounds like it's more of an upside than a downside.
How did Apple "win"? They have always been a fraction of the market share of desktop/laptop computers, and they are only popular on mobile in the US, worldwide Android is dominant with 72% of the market. If you mean money===success, then sure, they have money, but do you compare their money to all the companies making PCs and all the companies making Android phones in the world combined? Apple fans have 1 single company to choose from, but PC/Android fans have hundreds of options - I can get a PC or Android in hundreds of form factors, whatever I need but Apple only sells what Apple makes. Sounds to me like PC/Android fans are the real "winners".
>Apple won only after windows gave average home users a horrific bsod/virus/reboot hell of an existence for about 20 years.
This hasn't been a thing for a very long time. I hear about as much about the spinning beach ball of death as I do BSOD. Apple is by no means perfect, or did you forget "you're holding it wrong".
That's a silly comparison: by that metric, Apple "won" against Saudi Aramco and Berkshire Hathaway, and Microsoft also "won" against them.
Except that they aren't in the same business.
On the desktop, Microsoft is still kicking Apple's ass. Even moreso for servers. The only place Apple "won" is on mobile, where Microsoft lost to _everybody_.
I can't find the exact stat right now with some light google, but I recall there was a stat that while Apple doesn't have majority of user base, they essentially have an outsized share of the profit due to the average sales price & associated profit margins.
In Windows space, MSFT gets their license money, and then its a commodity race to the bottom by the hardware makers who need to pay AMD/Intel for chips, MSFT for a license, and compete with 100 no-names OEMs for every penny.
Sure I guess if you're still living in 2010. Nobody uses an "mp3 player" anymore. Get with the times grampa. Everyone has a cellphone that plays MP3s today.
> They won on music stores.
Spotify is at 36% market share compared to Apple's 30% of the music streaming market.
>They won on mobile.
And Apple did not "win on mobile" - only in the US are they popular, but globally Android has 72% market share. Apple lost the mobile market to Android a long time ago.
>They won on laptops.
No, Apple did not "win on laptops", they are still at about 9% market share.
"As of the third quarter of 2020, HP was cited as the leading vendor for notebook computers closely followed by Lenovo, both with a share of 23.6% each. They were followed by Dell (13.7%), Apple (9.7%) and Acer (7.9%)."
Nothing has really changed since 2020. Apple will always be a tiny portion of the personal computer and laptop market.
>They won on headphones.
huh? There are far better headphones than anything Apple makes. Are you talking about earbuds? There's a difference.
No, Apple has not "won" on anything but having overpriced hardware. $3600 for a VR headset? Yeah, I guess they "won" most ridiculously overpriced hardware ever.
Arguably in the long run, Amazon is winning enterprise in ways Google never did. MSFT owns enterprise desktop / desktop collab use cases (and any virtualization / server side stuff to support it) only.
Apple has won for people who can afford quality. If a student has $400 for a laptop, it doesn’t matter how much they appreciate quality, they can’t afford the MacBook and will buy something cheaper.
Anecdotally, I work in a coworking space with lots of businesses in Australia, and I’d say about 85% of people in the office space have MacBooks.
What quality? We had to sue Apple in a class action because the motherboard in our MBP (and many other people's) died 7 times and the 8th time it happened Apple wanted to charge us $1200 to replace it again. We had to sue them, but we won.
> I’d say about 85% of people in the office space have MacBooks.
That doesn't prove quality. All it proves is you are in an echo chamber. I've worked in lots of corporate environments that were all PC and some that were all Apple, and a few that were mixed. All it really depends on is if the company values appearances or functionality, and appearances are one of Apple's main value propositions.
The iPhone especially in America is a unique case.
Sure the average selling price of an iPhone is $500 more than an Android. But all of the major and even minor carriers either subsidize the phone or have no interest payment plans between 24-36 months. The price difference is negligible over 3 years.
No other product is like that. Even today in the US, the Mac only has around 15% market share.
> The iPhone especially in America is a unique case.
iPhones have a >50% market share in Japan, Canada, and in a few European countries (Danmark, Sweden). The common point I see between all those is that they are high-income countries.
While I agree with your larger point, I just wanted to point out some inaccuracies
> Sure the average selling price of an iPhone is $500 more than an Android
FWIW this is only true if you’re not comparing within market segments.
If you stick to the same market segment, then they’re about on par with equivalent Android phones for price. They just don’t have anything in the real budget categories.
> The iPhone especially in America is a unique case
The iPhone market share is relative to the premium phone market share of most locations. Which in turn is relative to the spending power of the populations.
iPhones dominate the premium market share compared to Android. I’m actually curious what the Mac market share is when framed to just “premium devices, and non-gaming”.
I suspect, but cannot backup, that Macs do relatively well if constrained to that market. But most people who have premium computers do so for gaming, and the ones who want budget don’t have a Mac to cater to them.
> They just don’t have anything in the real budget categories
Not sure what you define as budget categories, but apple sell the iphone se for $429 new on their site now. And you can get one through eg Tmobile for $250 or $50 + $10 a month for 24 months. Or the 64gb version for just that $10 a month. So I think they do compete in the budget category?
A lot of the world doesn’t have subsidized phones so I exclude carrier deals.
The SE is considered a mid range device imho in a lot of classifications. Budget is usually <300, mid range goes from 300-600 and premium is upwards from there. Of course with some deviation, but it’s how a lot of sales figures tend to split it up.
The phones also last a long time, being very durable and getting updates for a quite a while, so you can buy an older refurbished iPhone and save quite a bit of money.
I only just upgraded a year ago from an iPhone 7 I had owned for about 4 years and bought refurbished for under $300 (that still worked fine, I just wanted to start developing mobile apps again and needed something with the newest iOS) to a refurbished iPhone 12 for $250, and it feels plenty modern to me. It still has the latest iOS version on it as well.
It feels like a cheap shot to bring up the mechanical keyboard situation that is close to the hearts of most techies - but sometimes "value" can mean... quality.
Sometimes it's not just about longevity, it's about how the product feels. This is especially true when it comes to our online content and- as adults- we have less time as we have children. Meaning quality is more important than quantity.
Quality is almost always a component of "value", but competing with other priorities, e.g. cost.
I think mechanical keyboards are a good example here, but maybe not in the way you were expecting. You may note that most PC sales are laptops these days, and nearly all of them eschew mechanical keyboards in favor of other priorities. And also, most desktops still ship with membrane keyboards, and only a tiny fraction of users replace them with a mechanical keyboard -- as you say, "techies". It's a niche preference that "most people" (from the title) do not find value in.
> Meaning quality is more important than quantity.
It's not a binary choice.
Price is a non-linear factor here: "quality" may be prohibitively expensive as a single purchase, even if it is less expensive over X years than re-buying a cheaper item every year.
In the US, shopping trends are clear that many people (perhaps most) value quantity very highly, to the point that they will sacrifice "quality" which is loosely defined and more subjective. IME this also ties into Americans being very price conscious.
I've tried mechanical keyboards a few times. Wasn't a fan. Didn't like how they felt or the noise they made
The idea that they're automatically better seems very odd to me.
They cost a lot, and the main reason is the quality of the components.
They definitely are "better", as in they're a pure luxury good that serves no purpose outside of being a higher quality product.
There's really no value that a mechanical keyboard that can give you that a standard chiclet keyboard doesn't give you, yet, it's a quite large industry with many disparate manufacturers and standards and so-forth.
> There's really no value that a mechanical keyboard that can give you that a standard chiclet keyboard doesn't give you
There absolutely is, if you spend all day typing. Chiclet keyboards give poor tactile feedback that for many, leads to more typing mistakes. There is also value in the "pleasantness" of the experience - it's hard to quantify, but if it feels better to use something then you are certainly getting value from it (for another example, a cheap and uncomfortable vs expensive and comfortable chair).
I don't know what percentage of mechanical keyboard users this is, since there are certainly many that view it as a hobby or collector's interest, but I am one of the other side that use them exclusively because they make typing easier and more comfortable.
Apple doesn't have 100% market share and the title is "most people"
The fact that Android has a larger market share, and Apple has a larger share of revenue and profit actually goes to show that the larger mass market doesn't care about quality as much as price
It still kind of low-key boggles my mind that so many developers choose iPhones and buy into that ecosystem. Not criticizing them... everybody makes their own choices and gets to decide what's good for themselves. But I just don't get it.
(And it's not because I haven't heard the stated reasons. They just don't resonate with me.)
This is a pretty mainstream behavior that is maybe particularly prevalent in America. Though I think it’s abated elsewhere more by regulation than consumer preferences.
People will generally pick the cheapest/worst version of things if it’s more accessible/convenient or if the ability to discern value per dollar is difficult. In those situations people generally decide less dollars / fast is best.
I think this is why the “middle” is hallowing out for most product segments. The masses want bad/easy/cheap and the 1% want exclusivity/highbrow.
For some product segments, the economics of software development and mass production have completely eliminated the high end. The classic example is in smartphones: you can spend around $1000 for an Apple iPhone 16 or Samsung Galaxy S24 but there's literally nothing else more exclusive or higher quality available. I can't get a better phone at any price.
Completely true in some segments and you can see apple even tried the 1%er watch thing with the ceramic editions. They did keep the Hermes straps around, so it’s really just veblen good accessorizing now.
On the other hand there’s the old line about how America is great because the minimum wage worker and CEO both drink the same Coke.
Nowadays food has stratified far more and you’re more likely to have the bottom end drinking discount label house brand soda while the 1% doesn’t even drink Coke but instead some artisanal small batch thing you’ve never heard of for $5/can.
I'm not sure what you'd be looking for in a better phone. They're bounded by current CPU, battery, and screen technology, and flagship phones are pretty close to the best that's possible. Unless you literally want a gold bezel.
I guess one could also argue that actually Apple has diversified into so many SKUs that there is indeed a high end. HN/techie crowd is always buying the latest and greatest version Pro/Pro Max or whatever every year or two,.. but look at the phones your parents/in-laws are using.
Apple will happily sell you current year - 1, current year - 2, or the infrequently updated SE model. Mass market is the people buying those and holding them for 3..4..5+ years. We often go out with friends who are teachers and one had the iPhone 11 she apologized takes bad photos so please take group photos with ours, while the other had the 13ish with error messages popping up about his free iCloud being full. My FIL uses a hand-me-down iPhone Xs for banking because he doesn't trust his Android security, etc.
It's easy to imagine better - you would get the contruction worker phone features - extreme durability, quick swappable batteries, standard charging dock - with the high-end camera and other specs of the iphone. You could even imagine hot-swappable batteries, perhaps.
No, they're really not high end (at least not in developed countries). Any upper-middle class person can afford the best smartphone on the market. There is no meaningful exclusivity. It's not like with luxury cars where there are real high end products available that are completely out of reach.
I think electronics stand out as an area where veblen goods don’t really exist. Partially this is due to scale vs bespoke artisanal works.
That is the differentiation between a 50k vs 200k vs 1M car is often the hand crafted mechanical and luxury touches. Often the core platform of these vehicles is even shared in the case of the VW group and its various halo brands. The things that make a luxury car better are not mass produced.
One cannot hand craft an artisanal CPU better than Apple/Arm designs in a TSMC fab, nor a screen better than Sharp/Samsung, nor a cellular modem better than Apple/Qualcomm, etc. The things that make electronics better are the result of billions worth of R&D/infra with the intention of producing tens of millions to billions of devices.
I think you only start caring about quality once you have sufficient depth of experience in the subject that you actually care about.
Example would be audiophiles - most people can't hear the differences that they trained themselves to hear. Also an illustration that training yourself to prefer quality is an expensive choice. :)
My personal thing is high CRI LED lights - most people don’t notice the difference but the flat-looking 80% CRI lights that are installed everywhere really bug me.
Everything can be taken to extremes but up to a point you can definitely hear the difference - e.g. MP3 vs FLAC, quality vs budget headphones etc. I never wanted to go any deeper than that for fear of escalating costs!
i would not call myself an audiophile, per se, but i can hear the difference between a 128kbps MP3 and Opus 96kbps. same with $10 ear buds vs $150 iems, or my laptop's shitty 3.5mm stereo jack and a $30 usb dac.
once you get into stuff like $1K iems or dacs it's mostly bullshit (aside from brand/aesthetics, and things unrelated to audio fidelity). same with anyone claiming they can hear a difference between FLAC and Opus 160; trust me, you can't.
With all products there are diminishing returns and there are connoisseurs who thrive on pushing past those and straight into veblen land.
Wine is similar. Most can tell a $5 bottle from a $20 bottle but $100 or $1000 is unlikely to be as discernible. Even the alleged experts fail blind tests. Some can even confuse some reds & whites in true blind tests.
Are there $150 pairs which are better than every $10 or $20 pair? Sure.
But there are plenty of $150 headphones which have the same quality as a $10 pair of earbuds. People overpay for brand names, for trendy styles, for good marketing/ branding, etc. Price _alone_ is not an indicator of quality.
> i would not call myself an audiophile, per se, but i can hear the difference between a 128kbps MP3 and Opus 96kbps.
That's not the question, everyone can. The question is whether you can tell the difference between a 320kb/s, or even a 192kb/s mp3 and a flac. People might say they can, but they'll fail when you test them.
> same with $10 ear buds vs $150 iems
When luxury earbuds became a fad, every major company pulled their high quality cheap ones off the market, and marked everything up. It caused me to panic because I loved a cheap ($15) Sony line that I would usually have to replace yearly, and when I went to replace them, they were gone. Every cheap good earbud was gone. I managed to find a case of the Sonys on Ebay shipped from Mexico, and have only gone through half the case since. I can compare, so I know how good (not $1K good, but good) they were. Most people can't.
> That's not the question, everyone can. The question is whether you can tell the difference between a 320kb/s, or even a 192kb/s mp3 and a flac. People might say they can, but they'll fail when you test them.
you'll be hard pressed to find anyone who can tell a 320 apart from flac, except on some specially-crafted killer samples. a well-encoded 192 is often near transparent, but much more dependent on the genre / sample. pre-opus, 256 VBR was my go-to.
> that I would usually have to replace yearly
this is a foreign concept to me; i usually buy stuff that's designed to last, and dont mind paying for it.
I put some effort to choose high-CRI light sources at home, but I have to say the difference is not very notable in many everyday situations, only when doing specific things (e.g. playing a board game where colors matter). What irritates me more are badly dimmed LEDs, i.e. too low frequency, causing a visual "stuttering" effect on moving things, espcially reflective objects.
I’m in charge of the laundry at home and I tell you it for sure helps me tell apart my wife’s dark blue tights from her black ones when I’m sorting things into piles. :)
The problem isn't that people don't want quality. The problem is that people can't find quality a priori.
Sure, I can tell the quality once the thing is in my hand. However, that's far, far too late.
I was willing to pay more for my Chevy Volt, but GM discontinued it anyway. I'm willing to pay more for soap without perfume and chemicals, but Proctor and Gamble discontinued their scentless, antibioticless Ivory Hand Soap and then changed the formula on Ivory Bar soap. etc.
I'm willing to pay double for a better plumber, but I can't find him. I'm willing to pay someone double ot triple the amount of money for some bespoke clothing, but I can't find him. etc.
If I can find the thing I want, I buy it. A lot of it. But I can't find it.
I often buy things I suspect are low quality. Why? I can't really figure out what is or isn't low quality, so I am basically purchasing the cheapest raffle ticket so the cost of being wrong is minimal.
Same with a lot of services. I often cheap out and DIY. Might I screw up? Absolutely. But family experience with trades has shown that they are also a crapshoot outside a few certifications. Breaking a few locks or light fixtures is cheaper than screwing up once on a locksmith or handyman.
People want to maximize the value they receive in exchange for the money _and time_ they've spent. Quality is one metric which often fully captures this ideal.
You're willing to spend more time and effort to get a product that you perceive as being a higher quality provided you can find it. You're willing to pay more for a better plumber but you realize it takes quite a bit of time and experience to identify that plumber.
Life is filled with these compromises. Attempting to understand the notion of "quality" through Netflix's offering is unlikely to reveal anything pertinent. For precisely the same reasons that bad plumbers exist and still get enough custom to support themselves.
This only discusses the difference between professional and non-professional users, but forgets the amateur side : it will not take long before an amateur becomes picky about their hobby.
Also, picking the "crappy" choice because it's the safe choice in a social context is yet another matter... (the quality there is one of helping socialization !)
Title is patently false. The first part of the article boils down to "most people aren't pedants". The second part is mostly irrelevant because the Netflix pivot to "casual viewing" is a bid to enter a new market. Their viewership (and stock) would immediately tank if they switched exclusively to "casual viewing". TFA acknowledges this when elevating ABBA against something "no one has ever heard of". The insinuation is that popularity equates to quality whereas the opposite is true.
It just takes time.
Contrary to popular rhetoric, people are neither as dumb nor as smart as you might think.
> Fashionistas decry the homogeneity of modern dress. Most of us think jeans and a t-shirt are basically fine.
Again, most people are neither pedants nor purists.
I think that's the actual point TFA makes, but they chose an inflammatory title.
Agreed, article is totally wrong. Read any Amazon review for a cheap household product and you'd conclude that people have outrageously high expectations of quality.
I would be interested in knowing if any of those people change their behaviour though. What people say is irrelevant. Do they actually buy differently?
Regardless of whether or not your point is right -- I don't think Amazon reviews are a good yardstick for this. Product reviews are a tiny but noisy minority, who may or may not even act in line with their grievances. (i.e. some people just like to complain) A better metric would be return rates and/or sales figures.
That’s not people having a high bar for quality. That’s Amazon being absolutely flooded with low quality products to the point you can’t find anything of even decent quality.
If by outrageously high you mean standard expectations from a generation ago I'd be more inclined to agree. I expect to get a minimum of 15 years of service out of a major appliance and really they should last indefinitely with repair and maintenance being a viable option. I expect tools to be made well from the correct materials, properly heat treated where applicable, and for them to withstand at least a decade of borderline abuse, generations under nominal household workloads. I expect any item of furniture I purchase to permanently resolve whatever issue that item of furniture resolves. I shouldn't have to replace a bookshelf in my lifetime.
The thing is all of these expectations have been casually met with retail goods within living memory. Dude says nobody cares about quality, I'd counter with there are a few generations rattling around that haven't encountered it often enough in life to come to expect it.
> all of these expectations have been casually met with retail goods within living memory .. there are a few generations rattling around that haven't encountered it
often enough in life to come to expect it.
It's worse than that, because even for those who are old enough memory can be short and it's hard to viscerally understand that things were different some 10 or 15 years ago. It would be interesting to see a stress-test for a contemporary low end bookshelf from Walmart vs an older one, and to see a "hours of labor required for purchase" breakdown, but I'm pretty sure I know what it would look like.
People are aware that things like planned obsolescence happen, but underestimate how common it is, and are less aware that premium offerings where you pay extra for extra quality are also just a scam. I buy commercial products for everything I can hoping that classic capitalism is still working as intended, because maybe in more B2B transactions which are often high volume, companies are still somewhat afraid of losing a customer while they run their race to the bottom. But the relationship between consumers and corporations has drastically changed to be almost ridiculously adversarial, and increasingly you can't opt out by doing your research, or buying once-trusted brands, or spending extra money.
From coffee-makers to mouse traps, almost everything sucks, even after you give up on Amazon. And since we're here, the old saying "build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door" also seems hilariously naive and dated. Today you'd start with a marketing department and a few bribes to setup exclusive government and municipal distribution contracts if you were serious, and then make the worst possible trap you could get away with. With 8 billion people and a world-wide market, what kind of idiot would care about customers returning? A startup would invent the perfect thing in a day, then sell it to Big MouseTrap who would squash it, increase ad budgets, and push substandard mouse technology even harder.
While we're all getting used to the treadmill of buy, break, and buy again as if this were just normal, let's take a moment to contemplate the old man yelling at the clouds. It's not always for his benefit only, but sometimes truly an effort to educate the public about something they are missing.
It does make me wonder why we aren't really seeing "guaranteed quality" brands pop up. There's an increasingly large market of consumers who are tired of getting screwed over by literally every single product they buy. Surely there must be a way to run a viable business which is 10-20% more expensive than its competition, but which isn't complete crap and willing to back that up with things like extended warranty?
Baseless speculation on my part: investment is going to be tricky to acquire when you're talking about what amounts to a lifestyle business with monster capital requirements to get off the ground. Tooling up for manufacturing isn't cheap, and making shit doesn't offer the kinds of returns that investors find attractive?
Because consumers have been conditioned to expect that extended warranties are just another layer of scam, maybe to extract consumer data, maybe just to get a slightly higher price. I think if you see these then you have to assume they are unenforceable anyway due to some fine print, and you risk finding this out after spending way too much time navigating terrible robot phone systems and similar harassment.
In a lot of contexts, consumers will never be able to trust products/manufacturers again. What can work though is if stores/distributors provide the warranty though, because unlike consumers, they may still have some power.
There are plenty of these: Toyota, Honda, Apple, Maglite, Duracell, Energizer, Gilette, Tide, Pampers, Visa, Lay's, Coca Cola. Before you laugh at the last ones, consider how amazing it is that you can go into a grocery store and buy a bag of chips and it will always taste exactly like the last one, or that you can walk into a store with a piece of plastic and in less than a second pay for things with it.
Isn't this what Anker has largely done. In a world of might be good/might be crap cables, chargers, batteries, etc. You can always select the Anker variety on Amazon. It'll cost you a bit more than whatever random product, but you know they are reliable. It's priced much cheaper than an OEM (Apple, Google, Samsung, etc.) accessory but is more reliable (quality wise) than no-name accessories.
> When storing our unit, we noticed that the yokes didn't allow the ear cups to lay flat on the table. It also seems like pressing them down puts pressure on the yokes, which can mean that this part may get damaged over time if you're constantly folding and unfolding them to store in their carrying case. While our unit hasn't had issues, there are reports (for example, here and here) that the hinges and headband can crack.
You will find countless reports of hinges breaking after a few months of light use about every model that came out in the last 5-10 years, yet nothing has been done to fix it.
I would assume Anker chargers and cables are high quality, and simultaneously assume anything else of theirs is low quality and just a way to disproportionately profit off of the brand’s reputation.
> There's an increasingly large market of consumers who are tired of getting screwed over by literally every single product they buy.
That number isn't increasing, it is constantly dropping, which is how we got where we are. Boiled frogs, and Overton Windows, etc.
And once you've kept the quality of something low for about 20 years, you start having people enter the market who have never known the quality to be high.
The perception that the number of dissatisfied people is rising comes from a bunch of people getting old and comparing new stuff to 30 year old stuff, and being loud about it. And when we were young, old people were yelling about the quality of dishes, furniture, books, buildings etc. And we just accepted the crappy stuff because it was all that was available.
We buy the crappy stuff now, too, because the people who make the good stuff mark it up like crazy; the good stuff takes tooling and expertise that is now hard to locate and even recognize if you aren't familiar with it. Good stuff ends up being low competition in small markets of knowledgeable people who probably already own the best stuff that they rarely have to replace, and who are more likely to be brand loyal (although not blindly.) When we have to buy the crappy stuff, we complain about it online.
> Surely there must be a way to run a viable business which is 10-20% more expensive than its competition, but which isn't complete crap and willing to back that up with things like extended warranty?
So I say that there's no reason for those people not to mark it up 100-200%, because they're not going to sell any more than if they only mark it up 10-20%. They're not going to throw money away, at least not forever. Somebody smart is going to get in there and mark it up and/or lower the quality and drain the value of the brand (a brand that they can hedge with smart marketing.)
For many people, that's Apple. You pay a premium, but the product will not shitty in many ways that the competition can be. Sure, they drop the ball from time to time (see the MBP keyboard fiasco c.a. 7 years ago), but at least they try.
> Surely there must be a way to run a viable business which is 10-20% more expensive than its competition
I think the bottom feeders have driven the cost of garbage down so far that it's no longer a 10-20% price premium to get trustworthy things.
eg grinders. You could (I have a 15+ year old one that has been repaired multiple times as gears have worn out, that withstands 3-6x daily uses) sell a very long-lived coffee grinder (Baratza) for $200. You can buy a piece of crap for $40. Unsurprisingly, that piece of crap is completely unrepairable and doesn't even do a good job of grinding... but it's cheap.
People care a lot about this sort of quality. Nobody want a refrigerator that dies in five years.
But what can you do about it? It’s not like these things are labeled with a honest assessment of their realistic lifespan. Reviews? That only gives you an early snapshot. That might catch the worst of the trash but it won’t distinguish between a lifespan of 5 years or 50 years. Reputation? Everyone knows how often companies go for short-term thinking and chasing next quarter’s profits. Just because they made stuff to last ten years ago doesn’t mean they don’t make crap today.
So what do you do? Buy the cheapest one and it might be crap? Or spend more and it might still be crap?
If the article was wrong, those reviews wouldn't even exist because people would never assume that the HOODOOVOODOO-brand product that's 1/4th the price of something that's not named by a passphrase generator is any good due to a basic understanding of how the world works.
And Darn Tough would have a monopoly on socks.
People only care about cost. The #1 irrefutable indicator of this is airline ticket prices: if Airline A charges $117 for a ticket and Airline B charges $110 but will also kick you in the nuts and nickel-and-dime you for everything to the point that it actually costs more in the end than Airline A...
...people will choose Airline B every time.
The vast majority of people will search for a flight, sort by price, and buy the cheapest ticket no matter what.
The fact that people choose the cheapest of something does not mean they don't care about quality. It just means that, in that specific market, the pain of a lower quality product is not enough to affect their purchasing decisions much.
To prove this, imagine if airline A & B had similar very cheap prices (and the attendant poor service that comes with it), but airline B has slightly (and noticeably) better service than airline A. Most people will choose airline B.
>It just means that, in that specific market, the pain of a lower quality product is not enough to affect their purchasing decisions much.
That, what you just wrote, your own words, not my, but your, assertion, literally and explicitly means that people don't care about quality.
>but airline B has slightly (and noticeably) better service than airline A. Most people will choose airline B.
This is demonstrably false and every airline that has tried has either failed or been subsidized by their national government. (Signed, a former Continental Airlines devotee.)
Plenty of people will never, ever, fly RyanAir. And plenty of people choose an airline based on the airline's loyalty rewards program which gives them a higher-quality product (earlier boarding, more leg room, easier changes to flights). It's quite routine among people who travel a lot.
If no one ever cared about airline quality, there would be no first-class or even economy plus class. And yet basically every airline has them.
Yes, airplane travellers are incredibly price conscious--that's the nature of a near-commodity market. But nearly every single flight has a significant fraction of travelers who have paid more for a higher-quality product.
>If no one ever cared about airline quality, there would be no first-class or even economy plus class. And yet basically every airline has them.
I consider 95% of all people in a population to be the "close enough please shut the fuck up about it and be reasonable for once in your god damned life" threshold where "everybody" becomes an acceptable descriptor.
What percentage of people will ever, in their entire lives, fly first class?
Start an airline that offers $1 cheaper tickets but they kick you in the groin, you’ll make bank.
Start an airline that offers $1 cheaper tickets but they crash once a month, you’ll go out of business before you can say “but FAA regulations make that impossible anyway.”
People care deeply about airline quality on the axis of how good they are at keeping you alive. They don’t care so much about amenities. That’s not “don’t care about quality,” that’s “don’t care about a specific notion of quality that you believe everyone should care about.”
This post is really funny to see written by an engineer, an entire profession dedicated to the art of measuring precisely the lowest quality we can use while still accomplishing the task.
Having discerning taste is a vice not a virtue. I actively try to limit the number of areas where my taste is ruined by high quality because it makes me noticeably worse off. My life isn't better for experiencing better quality, it's worse for the other 99% of the time.
Now I have to buy the name brand which is more expensive, now I'm focused on all the schlock-y writing of the latest Marvel movie I'm at with my friends instead of enjoying it, now I can't unsee the damn keming or blurry fonts on everyone's computer but mine. Don't be the hi-fi nerd whose ears will
be put through a cheese grater any time you hear music through cheap speakers for the rest of your life. Ignorance really is bliss.
Does knowledge of good things necessarily make bad things painful? I have cheap earbuds for listening to podcasts or walking around and listening to music, and then some ok HIFIMAN headphones on some midrange dac/amp. Maybe I’ve been too mobile lately, but I find that I get enough time on the earbuds to provide a frame of reference that lets me really enjoy the headphones. It is a nice little experience once in a while; to put the headphones on and really notice the difference.
It is possible I haven’t gotten far enough into the audiophile “hobby” to achieve miserableness. But, I wonder if it is enough to save yourself by staying grounded in a more reasonable frame of reference.
> My life isn't better for experiencing better quality, it's worse for the other 99% of the time.
IMO it is possible (and I believe I have done it with effort) to achieve a high level of appreciation for popular, common, basic, what have you things, while also having a high level of appreciation for high quality things.
I completely agree that being unable to enjoy things is a negative, and if lots of people can enjoy a thing you might be better off working out how to also enjoy it. But you can do both.
The problem being that if you truly enjoy something, you will end up becoming better at noticing quality.
Learning to understand music so that you can show off in society is (IMHO) stupid because you ruin your ability to enjoy "average" music. But if you really enjoy music, you're doomed to improve your understanding of it and start becoming more critical regarding "poor" music, however popular it is.
I think it's both. I never switched on 120hz refresh rate on my phone because 60hz never bothered me. I also know, if I switch to 120hz I won't be able to view 60hz phones anymore without it bothering me!
But there's some things where buying higher quality definitely offers a much better experience. Everything from soap dispensers to vacuum machines - higher quality ones will save time, look better, last longer, be easier to maintain, etc. Cheap ones will break, be a hassle to use, etc. As I'm writing this though, maybe this is actually in agreement with your post. Those quality issues are frustrating "for me". And one might assume needing to replace 5 out of 6 soap dispensers after 3mo-2yrs would be universally frustrating for all people. But perhaps that's not the case and people simply aren't bothered by these things.
What is the motivation of emulating an ascetic lifestyle by consuming low quality goods? It sounds like you're doing it to save money rather than reduce total consumption, but for what greater purpose?
I remember an article posted here that showed that wine aficionados enjoyed drinking wine less than the average person does.
I have a feeling that the best strategy is to avoid the bottom 10% of any market because that is guaranteed to be garbage. Beyond that it doesn't really matter.
>> Most of us think jeans and a t-shirt are basically fine
They are, but with one caveat: you need to have the right figure to pull it off. An important role of the suit is to hide loss of physique. That is why in general the youth can wear jeans and t-shirts, and older people often cannot.
No one is hiding their loss of physique with a suit. You can see it in most people’s faces, and the 1990s era suits where one could have hid abdominal fat have long been out of style.
TFA is HN parlance to refer to the article. It’s not really profane, some people expand it to “the fine article”, but in my usage it has meaning independent of its expansion, akin to how lol does not actually refer to laughing out loud.
I think quality and art are two different things, quality is craftsmanship employed in solving a problem and art is a form of creative expression.
Even for Netflix, sure the content on Netflix may be for casual watching but from a product design perspective I feel it is far superior to prime, max and disney. I strongly believe that I keep paying for netflix because of this, it is the easiest place for me to watch and reduces all friction in the entertainment experience.
Quality matters but it needs to be more holistic - the world doesn't care for your pixel perfection but solving the need - in this case casual entertainment.
Great article in how it enrages the reader. Im not even kidding. Not caring is irrelevant, not noticing the difference is irrelevant too. You notice how their photos are stunning then argue your crappy shots are some how equal. lol
A big test in the 90s showed that if pages load instantly visitors click around. For each tiny fraction of delay beyond the limit the clicking very gradually declines. Non of the visitors has a concious experience where they click only 3 in stead of 4 over 75ms extra delay.
The article describes what is wrong with capitalism most poetically. The only measure of success is consuming. I wish we could think of a hotswapable replacement but it wouldnt be as proffitable so it cant work.
By this article’s own standards, I can’t really fault it for jumping to half-assed conclusions, as long as a casual reader might not notice or care. I’m not being glib. Devaluing quality is a choice, and if it’s fashionable to say it’s fine that everything’s being enshittified (because then we can feel smart, rather than disappointed), I’d rather it wasn’t.
The flaw is in extrapolating from the fact that different situations require different levels of craftsmanship or attention to aesthetics, standards, etc—and something fancier or more meticulously or expertly made, like a meal from a Michelin star restaurant, might not even be more enjoyed by the particular person who experiences it—to make the point that the things only professionals and those versed in their field know to do, which a layperson might not even notice, don’t really matter.
The reality is, whether we enjoy the products and services and experiences that come our way or not is largely due to design decisions beyond what we can consciously attend to and appreciate. It’s all those little details.
There is a limit to how low-quality content can be, and it’s actively being explored with the help of AI.
One of the effects of capitalism in the US used to be that companies were trying to make higher-quality things for less, because of competition. The strategy now, by the big players, is to just sort of swallow everything up, and then as quality gets lower and prices get higher, consumers feel compelled to just roll with it, because the shift is happening everywhere all at once. In corporations’ ideal world, there is no social contract, no real market forces, the consumer has no leverage, the corporation puts in as little effort as possible, and the consumer pays as much as possible, and still buys the thing, because what else are they going to do.
You can put ice cream in front of someone and they’ll eat it, so let’s just all eat ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
"Most people" is not something easy to grasp: can we even know if we belong to this group?
Beside, i'm not sure if this idea of necessarily mediocre majority is actually relevant. Take competitive businesses, sports, or even arts: any edge over the rest can make a big difference.
"Quality" is what we call the difference between what we like and what's objectively successful, not a property of any object. It's the name we give to one of many ways we confuse "is" and "ought."
There's nothing we can say about a thing with "quality" we couldn't also say by tediously listing every single property it has. The only thing that only "quality" can add is information about what the speaker thinks is good.
In other words, it's purely an opinion. If most people don't have strong opinions on most products, which seems true, then quality is null for most pairs of person and product—so "most people don't care about quality."
Nah. Borrow your grandfather's 50 year old screwdriver after having been afflicted by a set from <insert big box hardware store here> and tell me more about how quality isn't an intrinsic property.
"Doesn't break" and "actually turns screws" are obviously properties of certain screwdrivers, which maybe you don't get with modern ones. I didn't need to say the screwdriver is "quality" to say that. I just had to say what's true.
The only thing I'd add by saying "quality" is that I think a screwdriver that "doesn't break" and "actually turns screws" is good, which only tells you something about me. If I'd be happy with a different one that breaks and won't turn screws, I simply wouldn't call the old one "quality" and nothing about either one would change.
You might think it's weird if I don't care about a basic thing like whether it turns screws, but maybe I just want a cheap, simple prop for a movie. Maybe it's about a guy whose tools don't work. Maybe I just want the crappy plastic part because it's perfect for some art I'm making. Maybe I bet someone I could break it with a hammer.
All that information about me could change what's fit for me to buy, but none of it would change what's true about the product.
> "Doesn't break" and "actually turns screws" are obviously properties of certain screwdrivers, which maybe you don't get with modern ones. I didn't need to say the screwdriver is "quality" to say that. I just had to say what's true.
When talking about the "quality" of an items intrinsic properties, it's not about what the person feels, some may wrongly use it in that way, but when using "quality" to describe a screwdriver, then that conveys that it is a device that "Doesn't break" and "actually turns screws". That is not my opinion, it is a fact; it continues to do the exact thing it is suppose to do without issue. I shouldn't have to specify that this device drives screws and doesn't break after one use to someone who knows what a screwdriver is. And who would probably find it condescending or patronizing. Saying it's "quality" is a short hand for all the things. If you had no idea what this device is for, then the extra explanation would probably be welcomed and saying "quality" would mean next to nothing to that person. Same for other tangible items; but for things like "quality" of life that is very much opinionated. If you want to avoid the short hand that's fine too, but that doesn't mean everyone who says something is "quality" is coming from a place of emotion.
And if you only want a prop, then you are not buying a driver of screws, you are specifically buying a prop--that's a different item, even if it is the same device.
> There's nothing we can say about a thing with "quality" we couldn't also say by tediously listing every single property it has. The only thing that only "quality" can add is information about what the speaker thinks is good.
In most fields (film, painting, music, etc), there are standards -- agreed upon to varying degrees, sometimes almost unanimously, sometimes with only a plurality -- based on objective or almost-objective criteria. In other words, there are "measurable" criteria that expert or even merely good practitioners can agree on. In these cases the word "quality" is often used as a shorthand for possessing these kinds of properties. In this sense, ascribing quality is functionally different from a mere opinion, linguistically and technically.
Of course, you can argue that all those experts have no priority over anyone else's opinion -- nevertheless, the usage distinction remains. In addition, I think that point of view is either trivially true (because sure, no we can't ask God to tell us who's right) or meaningless (because there are many differences between experts and non-experts, even if you have contempt for expertise).
Absolutely, "quality" can often be descriptive shorthand for a set of traits. It's also, independently, always a normative judgement. I think mixing them is where the disagreement up and down this thread is coming from.
Someone says, "Good cars are fast" and someone says, "Good cars have heated seats," and then the second person says "That car you like must not be fast because it isn't good because the seats aren't heated."
Mixing "is" and "ought" like that can be convenient, and separating them is usually pedantic, but the shorthand only makes a mess as soon as anybody starts debating.
> In most fields (film, painting, music, etc), there are standards -- agreed upon to varying degrees, sometimes almost unanimously, sometimes with only a plurality -- based on objective or almost-objective criteria. In other words, there are "measurable" criteria that expert or even merely good practitioners can agree on. In these cases the word "quality" is often used as a shorthand for possessing these kinds of properties. In this sense, ascribing quality is functionally different from a mere opinion, linguistically and technically.
Could that be selection bias, where people who think X is "quality" promote other people who agree and push down those who disagree?
At that point, it may be true Agree X has found something objective and measurable, but they're using circular reasoning: these metrics are important because they show "quality", and we know it is "quality" because of those metrics.
It's true as I noted there is no final god-like arbiter. But that is not really an interesting observation imo. Taking that perspective to its logical conclusion we end up in a world where values are utterly flat and relativist, and the only thing we can say is that we can't say anything about anything.
It's also true the selection-bias you described exists, in some cases to the point of collective delusion. But note how I can say that and you can immediately think of cases that fit and cases that don't...
On balance there is something real and (despite my first sentence) I want to say "objective" in most cases of expertise. In practice everyone lives as if that were true, even if they are arguing otherwise.
Regardless, even if you want to make the most contrarian, relativist case possible, the phenomenon of expertise (simply viewed as a social pattern) does exist and governs nearly every domain where people talk about "quality".
Most people can't afford quality. Regardless of outcomes of pixel perfect or loudness wars, often we don't have a choice. We just have to deal with it.
I am glad to read this article which poke around the idea of "Pixel Perfection", for me that is indeed time-wasted, and I don't know why there are lots of company keeps saying they want this kind of "Perfection".
But I do believe people care quality, what they did is comparing the quality with price, Netflix is a bad example since it's so cheap (compared to seeing movie or a show in theater). The viewer saw a bad movie they will just think, oh well, I don't care.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 412 ms ] threadIt’s not just that people don’t care about quality- it seems to me that they cannot tell at all, but insist on newness instead for some reason- perhaps hoping that it will make them appear discerning to others? Is there some other explanation I am unaware of?
Ironically, supply and demand can make something more reliable cheaper- these cars just don’t die, so there is too much supply and little demand.
For $8k you can get a ~20 year old Porsche or Audi with low mileage, that has been meticulously maintained, always stored indoors, and looks and drives like it did when new.
Getting a good deal on a used car requires some mechanical knowledge to identify a car that is going to be reliable. I look for cars previously owned by mechanically savvy people that have already spent the money to mitigate any known design flaws or potential issues on that particular model.
There's a somewhat tongue in cheek book "Porsche Boxster: The Practically Free Sportscar" that makes a pretty solid case that if you but the right model of car right at the age where the price is lowest, it can appreciate enough to virtually cancel out the full ownership costs. Although for the math to work out you need basically not consider the cost of a garage to keep it looking nice, or your time to maintain it yourself. Which is, I think a fair point if you consider the car a hobby, and get joy from taking care of it.
My new construction “luxury” condo had serious wear damage within 5 years. I’ll have to gut the kitchen and replace my faux wood floors while my parents place remains indestructible.
I learned the hard way that if luxury is in the name, it’s not actually luxury.
Dryness is also an issue - we had a lot of people in the building who weren't keeping their units humid enough in winter end up with the planks warping significantly.
The other day my wife spilled, MAYBE 2-4oz of water MAX and took 1 minute to wipe it up.. next thing you know we had a plank warp a full half inch upwards. We had to place barbells on it for days while it dried out to remediate.
Oh and these idiotic faux wood plank floors are also what they put in the kitchen & laundry closet so water damage is basically guaranteed.
The masses don’t give a damn, and if all you’re trying to do is extract maximum revenue as efficiently as possible, there is no reason to expend the additional resources (and incur the additional risks) of doing more than the necessary minimum.
The artists/craftspeople have a vision and they care. Then the money arrives and none of that matters to the money.
Examples are everywhere. Video game studios discover that they can make a billion with crap story so stop investing resources in story, only the people who care even notice, and there aren’t enough of them to matter: they aren’t the audience anymore. Etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42405999
More important, even people who _do_ give a damn, don't give a damn about everything. And even the things they do give a damn about, they don't give a damn about every time they "do that thing".
I give a damn about music. I have a collection of about 3,000 LPs, a few hundred 12" singles, and over 5,000 CDs. I love to draw the curtains and sit in my dark lounge room, power up my 80's vintage all analogue hifi, and critically listen to albums on vinyl - no distractions, focusing on the music and performance.
But that's only maybe 1% of my music listening time. I spend a lot more time listening to music with my earbuds in while exercising or grocery shopping, or in the car. I spend way more time streaming music around the house while doing chores or cooking or reading. I have playlists of music without vocals that I listen to while doing work I need to be able to concentrate doing. Hell, I have Apple Music streaming right now while reading (and posting to HN.
I _do_ care about music, but you'd need a decent private investigator to find out, it sure as hell isnt obvious to anyone that's not close to me. And even if you tracked my credit card bills you'd see way more streaming subscription spend than vinyl/cd purchases (which are mostly bought for cash at show merch desks these days).
I find most people are passionate about _something_ in the "care about" sense here. I love it when I meet someone new or who I don't know well, and can get into a conversation about "their thing" - whether it's knitting, or building traditional Inuit canoes, or stage lighting for amateur theatre, or ultra light carbon and titanium bicycles, or building a plane, or sailing the north west passage, or setting a land speed record in some very specific class. All things I'm unlikely to ever even consider wanting to do, but which are fascinating to hear about from someone deeply involved in it.
I think (or at least optimistically hope) that "the masses" do give a damn. About _something_. You just need to steer the conversation around a bit to find out what their thing is, and be curious and enthusiastic enough to get them talking about it. Its a wonderful thing when that happens, even if what you end up talking about is the drama in purchasing hand dyed yarn from that one woman in Germany on knitting forums, or the history and current land speed record in the 50cc streamlined motorcycle with gasoline fuel class, or what the recommended shotgun shells are for protection against polar bear attack.
I came to say the same in essence.
The author is using too many generalizations. I think his internal pendulum is swinging from extremes, missing the nuance in reality.
Many people care about quality, and often they are sophisticated buyers and tastemakers. Those people, when they find quality, praise it to whomever will listen. Others, often not as discerning hear the praise and jump aboard due to the hype.
Sure, there are people that can't really tell the difference, but they still have the year's hottest DSLR or whatever, and the experts are often the people that communicate what those are.
I don't think that reality makes for a great blog post, however.
People seem to choose quality when they have an option. The rise of Apple is not because people are “sheep”, it’s because there is a quality level that apple products never go beneath- even if the design is stupid.
People can forgive poor quality with innovation, or in the pursuit of pure art- but the more crappy things get the more you notice people gravitating towards higher quality items/content.
The “issue” is when there’s a total monopoly or an oligopoly that is racing to the bottom, which seems to happen quite often, because building high margin things tends to be more risky, and MBAs are risk averse.
Apple won only after windows gave average home users a horrific bsod/virus/reboot hell of an existence for about 20 years.
I learned not to install and uninstall things. Even if I needed to.
The more Mac’s I had, the more likely I ran into a problem as well. But it was usually just some glitch.
I second this. My mom switched to a iMac G4 and never needed me again, except that time she plugged the power strip into itself.
It got to the point where I didn't want to tell people I worked with computers.
Ed Zitron goes into it in a recent article rant here[1] (skip to the "direct example" section if you're not interested in the rest of the read) where he reviews the best selling laptop on Amazon, which is ridiculously cheap... at a devil's bargain.
1. https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/
Most people would be better served with a $600 Mac mini that will literally still be working & better in 5 years than in buying a $300 Amazon deal with 4GB ram which will run awful and die right outside warranty period. Maybe in a couple years apple will have prior year minis a little cheaper / refurbs available at $450-500ish too.
I just bought a $280 Acer laptop, still limited storage but better class, twice the ram, and with a CPU that actually has performance cores so it runs 2.5x-5x faster.
It came with chromeOS, which is a limiting factor, but in this particular comparison it sounds like it's more of an upside than a downside.
>Apple won only after windows gave average home users a horrific bsod/virus/reboot hell of an existence for about 20 years.
This hasn't been a thing for a very long time. I hear about as much about the spinning beach ball of death as I do BSOD. Apple is by no means perfect, or did you forget "you're holding it wrong".
Except that they aren't in the same business.
On the desktop, Microsoft is still kicking Apple's ass. Even moreso for servers. The only place Apple "won" is on mobile, where Microsoft lost to _everybody_.
In Windows space, MSFT gets their license money, and then its a commodity race to the bottom by the hardware makers who need to pay AMD/Intel for chips, MSFT for a license, and compete with 100 no-names OEMs for every penny.
They won on MP3 players.
They won on music stores.
They won on mobile.
They won on laptops.
They won on headphones.
Etc.
I'm not an Apple fanboy by any stretch of the imagination but it's immediately obvious that they've "won" more than just the mobile market.
Sure I guess if you're still living in 2010. Nobody uses an "mp3 player" anymore. Get with the times grampa. Everyone has a cellphone that plays MP3s today.
> They won on music stores.
Spotify is at 36% market share compared to Apple's 30% of the music streaming market.
>They won on mobile.
And Apple did not "win on mobile" - only in the US are they popular, but globally Android has 72% market share. Apple lost the mobile market to Android a long time ago.
>They won on laptops.
No, Apple did not "win on laptops", they are still at about 9% market share.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_compu...
"As of the third quarter of 2020, HP was cited as the leading vendor for notebook computers closely followed by Lenovo, both with a share of 23.6% each. They were followed by Dell (13.7%), Apple (9.7%) and Acer (7.9%)."
Nothing has really changed since 2020. Apple will always be a tiny portion of the personal computer and laptop market.
>They won on headphones.
huh? There are far better headphones than anything Apple makes. Are you talking about earbuds? There's a difference.
No, Apple has not "won" on anything but having overpriced hardware. $3600 for a VR headset? Yeah, I guess they "won" most ridiculously overpriced hardware ever.
Microsoft won in the enterprise. They are steadily loosing market share outside of it.
Anecdotally, I work in a coworking space with lots of businesses in Australia, and I’d say about 85% of people in the office space have MacBooks.
> I’d say about 85% of people in the office space have MacBooks.
That doesn't prove quality. All it proves is you are in an echo chamber. I've worked in lots of corporate environments that were all PC and some that were all Apple, and a few that were mixed. All it really depends on is if the company values appearances or functionality, and appearances are one of Apple's main value propositions.
Apple won after Sony dropped the ball on HDD Walkmans and Nokia, Motorola, Palm, and Blackberry failed to reject carrier bloatware.
Macs are a side hustle for Apple, and MS is still the dominant player for desktop computing.
Android also by far runs more phones than iOS.
Apple "won" the wealthy Western market, which is all that has ever mattered to them.
Sure the average selling price of an iPhone is $500 more than an Android. But all of the major and even minor carriers either subsidize the phone or have no interest payment plans between 24-36 months. The price difference is negligible over 3 years.
No other product is like that. Even today in the US, the Mac only has around 15% market share.
iPhones have a >50% market share in Japan, Canada, and in a few European countries (Danmark, Sweden). The common point I see between all those is that they are high-income countries.
The only honest way of comparing Android to iPhone pricing, in my opinion, is to compare flagships.
The S24 and the Pixel 9 are the exact same price as the iPhone 16. The S24+ is more expensive than the iPhone 16 Pro.
Google Pixel phones only make up 4% of the US market.
https://chromeunboxed.com/google-pixel-phone-sales-see-their...
And Samsung sells around 31 million S24 phones
https://www.phonearena.com/news/samsung-2024-goal-sell-more-...
Android users aren’t buying high end phones for the most part
> Sure the average selling price of an iPhone is $500 more than an Android
FWIW this is only true if you’re not comparing within market segments.
If you stick to the same market segment, then they’re about on par with equivalent Android phones for price. They just don’t have anything in the real budget categories.
> The iPhone especially in America is a unique case
The iPhone market share is relative to the premium phone market share of most locations. Which in turn is relative to the spending power of the populations.
iPhones dominate the premium market share compared to Android. I’m actually curious what the Mac market share is when framed to just “premium devices, and non-gaming”.
I suspect, but cannot backup, that Macs do relatively well if constrained to that market. But most people who have premium computers do so for gaming, and the ones who want budget don’t have a Mac to cater to them.
Not sure what you define as budget categories, but apple sell the iphone se for $429 new on their site now. And you can get one through eg Tmobile for $250 or $50 + $10 a month for 24 months. Or the 64gb version for just that $10 a month. So I think they do compete in the budget category?
The SE is considered a mid range device imho in a lot of classifications. Budget is usually <300, mid range goes from 300-600 and premium is upwards from there. Of course with some deviation, but it’s how a lot of sales figures tend to split it up.
I only just upgraded a year ago from an iPhone 7 I had owned for about 4 years and bought refurbished for under $300 (that still worked fine, I just wanted to start developing mobile apps again and needed something with the newest iOS) to a refurbished iPhone 12 for $250, and it feels plenty modern to me. It still has the latest iOS version on it as well.
Sometimes it's not just about longevity, it's about how the product feels. This is especially true when it comes to our online content and- as adults- we have less time as we have children. Meaning quality is more important than quantity.
I think mechanical keyboards are a good example here, but maybe not in the way you were expecting. You may note that most PC sales are laptops these days, and nearly all of them eschew mechanical keyboards in favor of other priorities. And also, most desktops still ship with membrane keyboards, and only a tiny fraction of users replace them with a mechanical keyboard -- as you say, "techies". It's a niche preference that "most people" (from the title) do not find value in.
It's not a binary choice.
Price is a non-linear factor here: "quality" may be prohibitively expensive as a single purchase, even if it is less expensive over X years than re-buying a cheaper item every year.
In the US, shopping trends are clear that many people (perhaps most) value quantity very highly, to the point that they will sacrifice "quality" which is loosely defined and more subjective. IME this also ties into Americans being very price conscious.
They definitely are "better", as in they're a pure luxury good that serves no purpose outside of being a higher quality product.
There's really no value that a mechanical keyboard that can give you that a standard chiclet keyboard doesn't give you, yet, it's a quite large industry with many disparate manufacturers and standards and so-forth.
There absolutely is, if you spend all day typing. Chiclet keyboards give poor tactile feedback that for many, leads to more typing mistakes. There is also value in the "pleasantness" of the experience - it's hard to quantify, but if it feels better to use something then you are certainly getting value from it (for another example, a cheap and uncomfortable vs expensive and comfortable chair).
I don't know what percentage of mechanical keyboard users this is, since there are certainly many that view it as a hobby or collector's interest, but I am one of the other side that use them exclusively because they make typing easier and more comfortable.
The fact that Android has a larger market share, and Apple has a larger share of revenue and profit actually goes to show that the larger mass market doesn't care about quality as much as price
The fact that different people choose different qualities should surprise nobody.
(Some people are obviously price constrained out of the Apple price bracket, but there are also plenty of people who actively prefer Android)
(And it's not because I haven't heard the stated reasons. They just don't resonate with me.)
There’s a bunch of evidence that this is also not true.
People will generally pick the cheapest/worst version of things if it’s more accessible/convenient or if the ability to discern value per dollar is difficult. In those situations people generally decide less dollars / fast is best.
I think this is why the “middle” is hallowing out for most product segments. The masses want bad/easy/cheap and the 1% want exclusivity/highbrow.
On the other hand there’s the old line about how America is great because the minimum wage worker and CEO both drink the same Coke.
Nowadays food has stratified far more and you’re more likely to have the bottom end drinking discount label house brand soda while the 1% doesn’t even drink Coke but instead some artisanal small batch thing you’ve never heard of for $5/can.
Apple will happily sell you current year - 1, current year - 2, or the infrequently updated SE model. Mass market is the people buying those and holding them for 3..4..5+ years. We often go out with friends who are teachers and one had the iPhone 11 she apologized takes bad photos so please take group photos with ours, while the other had the 13ish with error messages popping up about his free iCloud being full. My FIL uses a hand-me-down iPhone Xs for banking because he doesn't trust his Android security, etc.
Whereas Apple is more vertically integrated and driving supplier component designs multiple years out.
Leading edge vs trailing edge basically.
That is the differentiation between a 50k vs 200k vs 1M car is often the hand crafted mechanical and luxury touches. Often the core platform of these vehicles is even shared in the case of the VW group and its various halo brands. The things that make a luxury car better are not mass produced.
One cannot hand craft an artisanal CPU better than Apple/Arm designs in a TSMC fab, nor a screen better than Sharp/Samsung, nor a cellular modem better than Apple/Qualcomm, etc. The things that make electronics better are the result of billions worth of R&D/infra with the intention of producing tens of millions to billions of devices.
Example would be audiophiles - most people can't hear the differences that they trained themselves to hear. Also an illustration that training yourself to prefer quality is an expensive choice. :)
My personal thing is high CRI LED lights - most people don’t notice the difference but the flat-looking 80% CRI lights that are installed everywhere really bug me.
i would not call myself an audiophile, per se, but i can hear the difference between a 128kbps MP3 and Opus 96kbps. same with $10 ear buds vs $150 iems, or my laptop's shitty 3.5mm stereo jack and a $30 usb dac.
once you get into stuff like $1K iems or dacs it's mostly bullshit (aside from brand/aesthetics, and things unrelated to audio fidelity). same with anyone claiming they can hear a difference between FLAC and Opus 160; trust me, you can't.
Wine is similar. Most can tell a $5 bottle from a $20 bottle but $100 or $1000 is unlikely to be as discernible. Even the alleged experts fail blind tests. Some can even confuse some reds & whites in true blind tests.
Are there $150 pairs which are better than every $10 or $20 pair? Sure.
But there are plenty of $150 headphones which have the same quality as a $10 pair of earbuds. People overpay for brand names, for trendy styles, for good marketing/ branding, etc. Price _alone_ is not an indicator of quality.
That's not the question, everyone can. The question is whether you can tell the difference between a 320kb/s, or even a 192kb/s mp3 and a flac. People might say they can, but they'll fail when you test them.
> same with $10 ear buds vs $150 iems
When luxury earbuds became a fad, every major company pulled their high quality cheap ones off the market, and marked everything up. It caused me to panic because I loved a cheap ($15) Sony line that I would usually have to replace yearly, and when I went to replace them, they were gone. Every cheap good earbud was gone. I managed to find a case of the Sonys on Ebay shipped from Mexico, and have only gone through half the case since. I can compare, so I know how good (not $1K good, but good) they were. Most people can't.
you'll be hard pressed to find anyone who can tell a 320 apart from flac, except on some specially-crafted killer samples. a well-encoded 192 is often near transparent, but much more dependent on the genre / sample. pre-opus, 256 VBR was my go-to.
> that I would usually have to replace yearly
this is a foreign concept to me; i usually buy stuff that's designed to last, and dont mind paying for it.
But generally, I agree.
Sure, I can tell the quality once the thing is in my hand. However, that's far, far too late.
I was willing to pay more for my Chevy Volt, but GM discontinued it anyway. I'm willing to pay more for soap without perfume and chemicals, but Proctor and Gamble discontinued their scentless, antibioticless Ivory Hand Soap and then changed the formula on Ivory Bar soap. etc.
I'm willing to pay double for a better plumber, but I can't find him. I'm willing to pay someone double ot triple the amount of money for some bespoke clothing, but I can't find him. etc.
If I can find the thing I want, I buy it. A lot of it. But I can't find it.
I often buy things I suspect are low quality. Why? I can't really figure out what is or isn't low quality, so I am basically purchasing the cheapest raffle ticket so the cost of being wrong is minimal.
Same with a lot of services. I often cheap out and DIY. Might I screw up? Absolutely. But family experience with trades has shown that they are also a crapshoot outside a few certifications. Breaking a few locks or light fixtures is cheaper than screwing up once on a locksmith or handyman.
You're willing to spend more time and effort to get a product that you perceive as being a higher quality provided you can find it. You're willing to pay more for a better plumber but you realize it takes quite a bit of time and experience to identify that plumber.
Life is filled with these compromises. Attempting to understand the notion of "quality" through Netflix's offering is unlikely to reveal anything pertinent. For precisely the same reasons that bad plumbers exist and still get enough custom to support themselves.
True, and I believe that at some point in the past products came with a relatively generous return window.
Also, picking the "crappy" choice because it's the safe choice in a social context is yet another matter... (the quality there is one of helping socialization !)
They are a _perception_ of quality.
Although the iMac was pretty good too. But let's go with 2001.
It just takes time.
Contrary to popular rhetoric, people are neither as dumb nor as smart as you might think.
> Fashionistas decry the homogeneity of modern dress. Most of us think jeans and a t-shirt are basically fine.
Again, most people are neither pedants nor purists.
I think that's the actual point TFA makes, but they chose an inflammatory title.
The thing is all of these expectations have been casually met with retail goods within living memory. Dude says nobody cares about quality, I'd counter with there are a few generations rattling around that haven't encountered it often enough in life to come to expect it.
It's worse than that, because even for those who are old enough memory can be short and it's hard to viscerally understand that things were different some 10 or 15 years ago. It would be interesting to see a stress-test for a contemporary low end bookshelf from Walmart vs an older one, and to see a "hours of labor required for purchase" breakdown, but I'm pretty sure I know what it would look like.
People are aware that things like planned obsolescence happen, but underestimate how common it is, and are less aware that premium offerings where you pay extra for extra quality are also just a scam. I buy commercial products for everything I can hoping that classic capitalism is still working as intended, because maybe in more B2B transactions which are often high volume, companies are still somewhat afraid of losing a customer while they run their race to the bottom. But the relationship between consumers and corporations has drastically changed to be almost ridiculously adversarial, and increasingly you can't opt out by doing your research, or buying once-trusted brands, or spending extra money.
From coffee-makers to mouse traps, almost everything sucks, even after you give up on Amazon. And since we're here, the old saying "build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door" also seems hilariously naive and dated. Today you'd start with a marketing department and a few bribes to setup exclusive government and municipal distribution contracts if you were serious, and then make the worst possible trap you could get away with. With 8 billion people and a world-wide market, what kind of idiot would care about customers returning? A startup would invent the perfect thing in a day, then sell it to Big MouseTrap who would squash it, increase ad budgets, and push substandard mouse technology even harder.
While we're all getting used to the treadmill of buy, break, and buy again as if this were just normal, let's take a moment to contemplate the old man yelling at the clouds. It's not always for his benefit only, but sometimes truly an effort to educate the public about something they are missing.
In a lot of contexts, consumers will never be able to trust products/manufacturers again. What can work though is if stores/distributors provide the warranty though, because unlike consumers, they may still have some power.
https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/anker/soundcore-sp...
> When storing our unit, we noticed that the yokes didn't allow the ear cups to lay flat on the table. It also seems like pressing them down puts pressure on the yokes, which can mean that this part may get damaged over time if you're constantly folding and unfolding them to store in their carrying case. While our unit hasn't had issues, there are reports (for example, here and here) that the hinges and headband can crack.
You will find countless reports of hinges breaking after a few months of light use about every model that came out in the last 5-10 years, yet nothing has been done to fix it.
That number isn't increasing, it is constantly dropping, which is how we got where we are. Boiled frogs, and Overton Windows, etc.
And once you've kept the quality of something low for about 20 years, you start having people enter the market who have never known the quality to be high.
The perception that the number of dissatisfied people is rising comes from a bunch of people getting old and comparing new stuff to 30 year old stuff, and being loud about it. And when we were young, old people were yelling about the quality of dishes, furniture, books, buildings etc. And we just accepted the crappy stuff because it was all that was available.
We buy the crappy stuff now, too, because the people who make the good stuff mark it up like crazy; the good stuff takes tooling and expertise that is now hard to locate and even recognize if you aren't familiar with it. Good stuff ends up being low competition in small markets of knowledgeable people who probably already own the best stuff that they rarely have to replace, and who are more likely to be brand loyal (although not blindly.) When we have to buy the crappy stuff, we complain about it online.
> Surely there must be a way to run a viable business which is 10-20% more expensive than its competition, but which isn't complete crap and willing to back that up with things like extended warranty?
So I say that there's no reason for those people not to mark it up 100-200%, because they're not going to sell any more than if they only mark it up 10-20%. They're not going to throw money away, at least not forever. Somebody smart is going to get in there and mark it up and/or lower the quality and drain the value of the brand (a brand that they can hedge with smart marketing.)
I think the bottom feeders have driven the cost of garbage down so far that it's no longer a 10-20% price premium to get trustworthy things.
eg grinders. You could (I have a 15+ year old one that has been repaired multiple times as gears have worn out, that withstands 3-6x daily uses) sell a very long-lived coffee grinder (Baratza) for $200. You can buy a piece of crap for $40. Unsurprisingly, that piece of crap is completely unrepairable and doesn't even do a good job of grinding... but it's cheap.
But what can you do about it? It’s not like these things are labeled with a honest assessment of their realistic lifespan. Reviews? That only gives you an early snapshot. That might catch the worst of the trash but it won’t distinguish between a lifespan of 5 years or 50 years. Reputation? Everyone knows how often companies go for short-term thinking and chasing next quarter’s profits. Just because they made stuff to last ten years ago doesn’t mean they don’t make crap today.
So what do you do? Buy the cheapest one and it might be crap? Or spend more and it might still be crap?
And Darn Tough would have a monopoly on socks.
People only care about cost. The #1 irrefutable indicator of this is airline ticket prices: if Airline A charges $117 for a ticket and Airline B charges $110 but will also kick you in the nuts and nickel-and-dime you for everything to the point that it actually costs more in the end than Airline A...
...people will choose Airline B every time.
The vast majority of people will search for a flight, sort by price, and buy the cheapest ticket no matter what.
To prove this, imagine if airline A & B had similar very cheap prices (and the attendant poor service that comes with it), but airline B has slightly (and noticeably) better service than airline A. Most people will choose airline B.
That, what you just wrote, your own words, not my, but your, assertion, literally and explicitly means that people don't care about quality.
>but airline B has slightly (and noticeably) better service than airline A. Most people will choose airline B.
This is demonstrably false and every airline that has tried has either failed or been subsidized by their national government. (Signed, a former Continental Airlines devotee.)
If no one ever cared about airline quality, there would be no first-class or even economy plus class. And yet basically every airline has them.
Yes, airplane travellers are incredibly price conscious--that's the nature of a near-commodity market. But nearly every single flight has a significant fraction of travelers who have paid more for a higher-quality product.
I consider 95% of all people in a population to be the "close enough please shut the fuck up about it and be reasonable for once in your god damned life" threshold where "everybody" becomes an acceptable descriptor.
What percentage of people will ever, in their entire lives, fly first class?
https://robbreport.com/motors/aviation/airlines-increasing-p... Key number "53 premium seats per flight"
https://i0.wp.com/crankyflier.com/wp-content/uploads/image-8...
Start an airline that offers $1 cheaper tickets but they crash once a month, you’ll go out of business before you can say “but FAA regulations make that impossible anyway.”
People care deeply about airline quality on the axis of how good they are at keeping you alive. They don’t care so much about amenities. That’s not “don’t care about quality,” that’s “don’t care about a specific notion of quality that you believe everyone should care about.”
Having discerning taste is a vice not a virtue. I actively try to limit the number of areas where my taste is ruined by high quality because it makes me noticeably worse off. My life isn't better for experiencing better quality, it's worse for the other 99% of the time.
Now I have to buy the name brand which is more expensive, now I'm focused on all the schlock-y writing of the latest Marvel movie I'm at with my friends instead of enjoying it, now I can't unsee the damn keming or blurry fonts on everyone's computer but mine. Don't be the hi-fi nerd whose ears will be put through a cheese grater any time you hear music through cheap speakers for the rest of your life. Ignorance really is bliss.
It is possible I haven’t gotten far enough into the audiophile “hobby” to achieve miserableness. But, I wonder if it is enough to save yourself by staying grounded in a more reasonable frame of reference.
IMO it is possible (and I believe I have done it with effort) to achieve a high level of appreciation for popular, common, basic, what have you things, while also having a high level of appreciation for high quality things.
I completely agree that being unable to enjoy things is a negative, and if lots of people can enjoy a thing you might be better off working out how to also enjoy it. But you can do both.
Learning to understand music so that you can show off in society is (IMHO) stupid because you ruin your ability to enjoy "average" music. But if you really enjoy music, you're doomed to improve your understanding of it and start becoming more critical regarding "poor" music, however popular it is.
But there's some things where buying higher quality definitely offers a much better experience. Everything from soap dispensers to vacuum machines - higher quality ones will save time, look better, last longer, be easier to maintain, etc. Cheap ones will break, be a hassle to use, etc. As I'm writing this though, maybe this is actually in agreement with your post. Those quality issues are frustrating "for me". And one might assume needing to replace 5 out of 6 soap dispensers after 3mo-2yrs would be universally frustrating for all people. But perhaps that's not the case and people simply aren't bothered by these things.
Not enjoying crappy Marvel movies any more is a feature not a bug, it means you're growing as a human being.
I have a feeling that the best strategy is to avoid the bottom 10% of any market because that is guaranteed to be garbage. Beyond that it doesn't really matter.
They should come visit HackerNews once in a while :D
They are, but with one caveat: you need to have the right figure to pull it off. An important role of the suit is to hide loss of physique. That is why in general the youth can wear jeans and t-shirts, and older people often cannot.
Even for Netflix, sure the content on Netflix may be for casual watching but from a product design perspective I feel it is far superior to prime, max and disney. I strongly believe that I keep paying for netflix because of this, it is the easiest place for me to watch and reduces all friction in the entertainment experience.
Quality matters but it needs to be more holistic - the world doesn't care for your pixel perfection but solving the need - in this case casual entertainment.
A big test in the 90s showed that if pages load instantly visitors click around. For each tiny fraction of delay beyond the limit the clicking very gradually declines. Non of the visitors has a concious experience where they click only 3 in stead of 4 over 75ms extra delay.
The article describes what is wrong with capitalism most poetically. The only measure of success is consuming. I wish we could think of a hotswapable replacement but it wouldnt be as proffitable so it cant work.
Grasshopper pizza it is then
The flaw is in extrapolating from the fact that different situations require different levels of craftsmanship or attention to aesthetics, standards, etc—and something fancier or more meticulously or expertly made, like a meal from a Michelin star restaurant, might not even be more enjoyed by the particular person who experiences it—to make the point that the things only professionals and those versed in their field know to do, which a layperson might not even notice, don’t really matter.
The reality is, whether we enjoy the products and services and experiences that come our way or not is largely due to design decisions beyond what we can consciously attend to and appreciate. It’s all those little details.
There is a limit to how low-quality content can be, and it’s actively being explored with the help of AI.
One of the effects of capitalism in the US used to be that companies were trying to make higher-quality things for less, because of competition. The strategy now, by the big players, is to just sort of swallow everything up, and then as quality gets lower and prices get higher, consumers feel compelled to just roll with it, because the shift is happening everywhere all at once. In corporations’ ideal world, there is no social contract, no real market forces, the consumer has no leverage, the corporation puts in as little effort as possible, and the consumer pays as much as possible, and still buys the thing, because what else are they going to do.
You can put ice cream in front of someone and they’ll eat it, so let’s just all eat ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41311135 - We don't know how bad most things are nor precisely how they're bad (2024-08-21, 310 comments)
Beside, i'm not sure if this idea of necessarily mediocre majority is actually relevant. Take competitive businesses, sports, or even arts: any edge over the rest can make a big difference.
There's nothing we can say about a thing with "quality" we couldn't also say by tediously listing every single property it has. The only thing that only "quality" can add is information about what the speaker thinks is good.
In other words, it's purely an opinion. If most people don't have strong opinions on most products, which seems true, then quality is null for most pairs of person and product—so "most people don't care about quality."
The only thing I'd add by saying "quality" is that I think a screwdriver that "doesn't break" and "actually turns screws" is good, which only tells you something about me. If I'd be happy with a different one that breaks and won't turn screws, I simply wouldn't call the old one "quality" and nothing about either one would change.
You might think it's weird if I don't care about a basic thing like whether it turns screws, but maybe I just want a cheap, simple prop for a movie. Maybe it's about a guy whose tools don't work. Maybe I just want the crappy plastic part because it's perfect for some art I'm making. Maybe I bet someone I could break it with a hammer.
All that information about me could change what's fit for me to buy, but none of it would change what's true about the product.
When talking about the "quality" of an items intrinsic properties, it's not about what the person feels, some may wrongly use it in that way, but when using "quality" to describe a screwdriver, then that conveys that it is a device that "Doesn't break" and "actually turns screws". That is not my opinion, it is a fact; it continues to do the exact thing it is suppose to do without issue. I shouldn't have to specify that this device drives screws and doesn't break after one use to someone who knows what a screwdriver is. And who would probably find it condescending or patronizing. Saying it's "quality" is a short hand for all the things. If you had no idea what this device is for, then the extra explanation would probably be welcomed and saying "quality" would mean next to nothing to that person. Same for other tangible items; but for things like "quality" of life that is very much opinionated. If you want to avoid the short hand that's fine too, but that doesn't mean everyone who says something is "quality" is coming from a place of emotion.
And if you only want a prop, then you are not buying a driver of screws, you are specifically buying a prop--that's a different item, even if it is the same device.
In most fields (film, painting, music, etc), there are standards -- agreed upon to varying degrees, sometimes almost unanimously, sometimes with only a plurality -- based on objective or almost-objective criteria. In other words, there are "measurable" criteria that expert or even merely good practitioners can agree on. In these cases the word "quality" is often used as a shorthand for possessing these kinds of properties. In this sense, ascribing quality is functionally different from a mere opinion, linguistically and technically.
Of course, you can argue that all those experts have no priority over anyone else's opinion -- nevertheless, the usage distinction remains. In addition, I think that point of view is either trivially true (because sure, no we can't ask God to tell us who's right) or meaningless (because there are many differences between experts and non-experts, even if you have contempt for expertise).
Someone says, "Good cars are fast" and someone says, "Good cars have heated seats," and then the second person says "That car you like must not be fast because it isn't good because the seats aren't heated."
Mixing "is" and "ought" like that can be convenient, and separating them is usually pedantic, but the shorthand only makes a mess as soon as anybody starts debating.
Could that be selection bias, where people who think X is "quality" promote other people who agree and push down those who disagree?
At that point, it may be true Agree X has found something objective and measurable, but they're using circular reasoning: these metrics are important because they show "quality", and we know it is "quality" because of those metrics.
It's also true the selection-bias you described exists, in some cases to the point of collective delusion. But note how I can say that and you can immediately think of cases that fit and cases that don't...
On balance there is something real and (despite my first sentence) I want to say "objective" in most cases of expertise. In practice everyone lives as if that were true, even if they are arguing otherwise.
Regardless, even if you want to make the most contrarian, relativist case possible, the phenomenon of expertise (simply viewed as a social pattern) does exist and governs nearly every domain where people talk about "quality".
Please learn
But I do believe people care quality, what they did is comparing the quality with price, Netflix is a bad example since it's so cheap (compared to seeing movie or a show in theater). The viewer saw a bad movie they will just think, oh well, I don't care.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41311135