And this is why the destruction of antitrust in the US in the latter part of the 20th century has screwed us all. The massive wave of consolidation that followed that (ongoing to this day) makes the barrier to entry for every market much, much higher. The very fact that the most common desired endgame for a startup is "exit"—ie, being bought out by a larger company—should demonstrate this very well.
If we want quality, customer service, decent prices, or anything like them to come back, we need to restore real antitrust, not the morally-and-intellectually-bankrupt Chicago School bullshit that's been pushed on us for decades, benefiting only the already-wealthy.
I read years ago about a drill which was sold at Walmart with the same sku as in higher-end stores but the Walmart version had plastic gears. This was due to pricing pressure by Walmart on the manufacturer.
Me, personally, I seek out first Swiss brands then German brands when buying most things. I'm willing to pay extra.
In fact I'm a little pissed off this week because I ordered some oxygen absorbers off a Swiss website that listed a Swiss address but they were shipped directly from china. Investigating the site more closely, yeah, it's just a fake website made to look Swiss.
Yes, I've heard of this effect in marketing. If you make any reference to Switzerland, it's instant sales bump, even if you hold everything else equal. This is also how you got "Häagen-Dazs" ice cream brand. It's fully American, but the name sounds vaguely Scandinavian, so it has to be better, right? Well, customers sure do think so, and are willing to pay the premium.
Sometimes. My Bosch washing machine died young due to cheap bearings. The AEG dryer had soldering problems and the German dishwasher's time light projector died slowly.
Incredibly depressing, but a good and important thing to read!
Not to sound overly cheerful, but shout out to my Makita DHP484 combo drill/driver and 100 piece bit set that, for a low three figure price, is far more powerful and capable than the noisy old corded monster it replaces.
One massive unmentioned counterexample: High quality Chinese tools continue to proliferate and sucker-punch these brands for being so egregious with quality. They are now the high quality standard if you know what brands to look for, and not because their competition got worse as mentioned here, they are simply iterating and improving and making better tools and designs than they did 10 years ago. Sometimes you are getting the exact same tool as the name-brand but with less warranty for a fraction of the price. "Corporate Greed" is self-correcting in a free and fair market! Vote with your wallet.
>Knipex is family-owned out of Germany. They make what many consider the best pliers on the planet. Part of a larger group (Knipex Group) but not publicly traded, not for sale.
In my experience in recent years, Oppo and Vivo phones look better, they are more robust and last longer than iPhones and Samsung premium phones.
When giants like Apple and Samsung fail to innovate enough (and when they price their best products beyond the reach of the middle class of most nations), then upstarts will take their throne.
This may be good for industry so there's healthy competition, but it is unfortunate because China's CCP has a policy that Chinese companies must store and share customer and company data in China. So anyone using Chinese electronic gadgets is saying goodbye to their data security and privacy, even if it is an expensive gadget by a bigshot Chinese company (e.g., Lenovo was caught bundling adware on its premium laptops some years ago - search for "Lenovo Superfish" to know more).
I recently bought one of the Yukon tool chest / benches and the experience totally flipped my opinion of HF. I've been a customer for a while, but always considered them lower-quality in the back of my mind. The tool chest came in perfect condition, easy purchase. Whereas the Huskies I had bought previously were a hassle that involved returning multiple damaged-in-box units back to the store, driving an hour to another store with stock, dodgily swapping parts (drawer slides and top) to make a good one, etc.
It's of course never just one thing - I had been waiting for the Husky to show up in stock again (it has a 24 inch depth vs 18), but at this point it seems like HD has discontinued the 24 in favor of enshittifying with 18 inches instead. And of course I've been shying away from HD recently because of the F-word. It's like these companies want to self-immolate (or put more technically, they create short term boosts by arbitraging away their reputation).
This entire site can be boiled down to: products get decrease in quality when customers don't know or don't care what quality is.
Price is a clear and obvious thing to measure, quality is much more difficult. Consumers get little or no formal education in quality, and advertisements (and even review sites!) almost never address it properly. Any review site that is paid for by ads or affiliate links has the default position of trying to get you to buy something.
Why do I no longer have any reliable signals for quality? Price, brand, materials, and word of mouth are all you really get, but price and materials are meaningless and brand and word of mouth stop mattering as a company starts to coast on its reputation for higher margin. Genuinely don't know how customers are supposed to choose quality when they want it. I always want it.
Agree, but there’s also an element of consumer irrationality. Lower price + lower quality means you can buy more of what you want now, even if it means that you’ll end up with net less of what you want in the long term.
Most consumers, me included, are not making purely rational decisions based in price and quality, even in domains where they are qualified to judge quality.
That might be an outdated accusation. There was a time when a touch of research or “caring about quality” was enough to avoid the pitfalls of garbage products, but I don’t believe that to be a fair statement anymore. The website details the history of some examples, but the implication is between the lines: the only reason you used to know a product would last 20 years is because that specific product with those specific parts has already lasted 20 years. Don’t take advice about living to 100 from a 32 year old, don’t trust a warranty that’s longer than the company selling it has existed, and don’t trust that model XB5 is the same as your grandmas XB1.
How can you possibly know if you’re getting a quality product when the reviews you’re reading are for a model that doesn’t exist anymore, or are meaningless generalizations about a mega conglomerate? Saying “Brand X sucks/wins” only has the potential to be meaningful when it’s a single company in a single area and that has made that exact model in the same way for longer than your warranty on it. “Whirlpool sucks/wins” is as meaningless as reading “Water tastes good/bad” from everyone on the planet.
> and advertisements (and even review sites!) almost never address it properly
The thing that annoys me the most is when the reviewer opens the box, shakes it gently and says "feels well built" or "plastic build". It is actually harmful. Weight doesn't equal quality (there is some correlation, building well often results in more weight, but it is unreliable and easy to game) and plastic is a huge range of materials and some are absolutely the most robust option for many use cases (think a sturdy plastic water bottle that outlasts and glass or metal equivalent).
The problem is quality is very hard to measure. The only really good test is to use the product for many years. But by that time the existing model hasn't been sold for years, in theory you could correlate the new model's quality with the old one but brands are apparently disposable these days so it is very likely that all costs were cut on the new one once their previous model gained a reputation for quality.
I think the only real measure for quality is a warranty. That is the manufacturer promising a lifespan. However they are usually short, can be unreliable to get (often at manufacturer discretion) and more often than not cover only "manufacturing defects" not reasonable wear and tear.
It's the third or fourth time I see it on HN, I have not read anything other than the first two, which were more of complaints about tiered products. E.g. one was about backpacks and how a $40 backpack from Walmart is not going to last 20 years of summiting Mt. Everest like the $400 backpack of the same brand sold elsewhere...
It's not just customers, many (most?) established reviewers have no idea what quality is. I don't know how many YT review videos I've seen... well, seen the first 30s of, where the reviewer lines up a dozen products and measures some pointless feature of each one of them purely because that's the only thing they can think of to measure and it then allows them to rank them on a scale, rather than saying anything about ease of use, build quality, availability of spare parts, accuracy/repeatability/clean finish of whatever it is the tool does, etc. Project Farm is a prime example of this.
A company makes a really good product as first challenging incumbents. They get so big, they eventually become the incumbent. All this time, they’re probably losing money on the product or breaking even. Eventually, investors will want returns on their investment. This will first happen with prices increases to save the quality of the product. Once they can’t raise prices anymore, the quality will be decreased. By this point, the brand is strong enough to get sales even on this worse product.
Then another company will come in and make the same product but better than the incumbent. The cycle continues.
My point is find these new companies that are trying to get market share by making a higher quality product. And if you really like that product, buy 2.
I find it odd how corporate greed is always the focal point. But its never consumer greed. The consumer is the one who dictate's a market. So cheap, low quality products are the direct result of consumers paying for a less expensive product. The consumer has proven it doesn't care about quality. So as much as corporations are greedy so are consumers.
Someone linked to The Market for Lemons below. This is exactly right. We now live in the World of Lemons. Everything is lemons, because we can only properly judge quality for the tiny number of things we truly care about. For everything else, we just buy the cheapest thing, because by definition we don’t care enough to do otherwise.
The only possible solution is to buy less stuff, to the point where you have the capacity to care more about each thing, and enough money to pay for these things, which will inevitably cost more.
But then that means making peace with the idea that not having a thing can be better than having a crappy thing. It’s a tough sell to the consumption mindset.
And what if I do care about quality? As the consumer, I do not even have that choice to make 99% of the time. This is very much a false equivalency and it isn't even close.
Companies get to choose what products or product qualities to make. If I, a consumer, want or need a product, I can only choose between what is made available to me by the companies.
It certainly doesn't help that it's nearly impossible to tell what is or isn't a quality product before or even after you buy it. What am I supposed to do when I buy a new power tool? Rip it apart and inspect all the parts to determine if it's "quality"? How am I supposed to tell if it even is "quality"? I'm not a manufacturing or engineering expert. Even when you think you're buying quality, it's not most of the time. Companies sell shit products at premium prices all the time because almost no one can tell the difference.
Consumers seeking a deal could be a symptom of affordability problems as wages stagnate while inflation keeps prices going up.
One could also blame corporate greed here as well, choosing to keep those extra profits or distributing them at the executive level, rather than increasing wages for employees to maintain their buying power.
So instead of more money to buy better quality items, we get things like Temu as the answer, selling trash and framing it as “shop like a billionaire.”
That's certainly part of the problem e.g. with airline seats. But there's also the issue that quality attributes can be difficult for casual customers to discern.
Ethical attestations about treatment of workers, animals, and environment are not always honest. Design flaws may not become apparent until the product has been in use for some time and longevity may only become apparent after many years of use, by which point the newer iterations may be qualitatively different.
It used to be that one could invest time in identifying quality brands, but many brands now are simply a temporary asset to be quickly squeezed of value.
It's completely possible to go high quality and low price - it's precisely how China is pretty much taking over every single industry in existence. But in the US you tend to pay low prices for junk, or unreasonably high prices for ostensibly high quality. I think that's largely because of implicit collusion between companies in most industries, particularly those with high barriers to entry.
So for instance see the Phoebus Cartel. [1] It was a cartel in the US (and Europe) including General Electric, Philips, and others that engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy to exploit the market for lightbulbs. They intentionally lowered the quality of bulbs, driving planned obsolescence and thus increased sales, and even engaged in spot [un]quality checking of cartel members to ensure that nobody's lightbulbs would last too long.
In modern times I don't think companies would usually be so overt, but there's nothing illegal about unspoken cartels doing the exact same thing. For instance even in the video game domain, up until the PS4 era major players used to subsidize game console hardware to a wide degree. Then with the PS4 Sony stopped stopped doing that, and simultaneously so did Microsoft. In a competitive market that's exactly when you'd go subsidization to the extreme, to clinch the market to yourself. But so long as both companies agree to stop subsidizing hardware, then they both stand to make a whole lot more money. And that's exactly what happened. In the end, the consumer ends up with worse hardware, pay more for it than they would in a competitive market, and companies make way more money. I think that makes it fair to blame corporate greed.
There is also a demographics angle to this. People who grew up poor and now are middle class tend to favor larger quantities of goods over quality. And this is exacerbated by immigration.
The problem is that most shopping we do is one-off, as opposed to being a recurring customer. For example, if you're selling bread, your potential customers are 1000 locals and if these 1000 locals decide your bread sucks, your business goes belly up. But if you're selling ice cream in a tourist destination, then you'll never see your customers again even if your ice cream is so good it causes instant involuntary orgasm, so you have zero reason not to scam them.
Sure, consumers looking for a bargain creates a market for cheap stuff.
But didn't you read the article? It used to be that brand names had meaning, providing a reliable indicator for the quality to expect.
That doesn't hold anymore. As brands are bought & sold by private equity, the relation between brand & what to expect is lost. And in many cases, reputation brands are gutted, $$ extracted, and the sucked-dry corpse discarded. In that environment, how can a consumer tell what's what? Brand X used to be quality, and now it's not. With brand as (often) an unreliable indicator, consumers look at price instead.
What I personally find most amazing, is that quality stuff that used to be household names (and affordable!), are seemingly impossible to produce these days even though technology advanced for 50y+. Example: Arcoroc Sierra (from Arc France, which still exists today). Tableware in tempered, coloured glass, with a nice surface texture. Comes in amber-brown, red & green. Pour in boiling water no problem, lasts a lifetime (and keeps looking like day 1 as long as you keep it out of dishwashers).
Look around in shops today: soup bowls are nice-looking but cheap earthenware, or non-coloured, cheap soda-lime glass. Colour you say? Often it's a thin layer on the glass (sometimes even plastic!). Not a coloured solid material. Scratch it & the non-coloured base material shows underneath.
Something with comparable looks & quality from that 50y old stuff? Not available (at any price), not produced anywhere today. And it's not that people don't want it.
This is just 1 of many examples. Imho the article does a good job of explaining some of the causes.
Consumer behavior is absolutely the problem, but it's not just greed, it's also factors like blind brand or retailer loyalty. I have friends that own pick up trucks, tools, sporting goods and clothing that express a personal brand but barely get used.
“corporate greed” is a signal to me of low quality commentary. The opening premise of Econ is that consumers want all the goods for free and producers want to give nothing in exchange for as much money as they can.
The problem here is that when the consumers try it they go to actual jail. Meanwhile the producers have been richly rewarded for getting away with their side of it.
So yeah, corporate greed actually has a meaning in this context for people.
You should do clothing brands like PVH brands (CK, Hilfiger, VS, and more) where they have a high end line and use it to build a brand and then sell a totally different cheap line of terrible goods with the same name on it in different stores. Luxury consolidation with LVMH and the enshittification there would be a good one too
I remember the emphasis on quality - and on safety and security - in the 1990s. A substantial part of company life revolved around Quality Circles, quality meetings, quality inspectors, and the 5S methodology. A ton of money invested in the pursuit of compliance with ISO 9000 standards. It's disconcerting to see how little of that mentality has survived, and it leaves me with a certain personal feeling of defeat.
But one has to recognize that the weakening of regulatory enforcement, reduced labor bargaining power, increased pressure for quarterly earnings, and less aggressive antitrust enforcement - all developments I associate with the broader neoliberal shift and the retreat of social democracy - have greatly contributed to what we now call the enshittification of products and services. My use of the term extends beyond Doctorow's original definition.
What if there was a way to tax things that encouraged people to buy things that would last longer and then let the market correct?
Basically, we've done our experiment of hyper-disposable consumerism. It was great and the world has gotten richer. But not it seems like we should parlay that benefit into transitioning into a new era of quality.
About 4-5 years ago I bought a Bosch 500 dishwasher. Loved it. Excellent performance. The top silverware rack could be adjusted to fit slightly larger items. There was a very basic clock display to tell you how long the cycle would take. And of course you could delay start by whatever number of hours.
Well, last year I moved, and as it happens, the dishwasher failed and I leapt on the chance to replace it with another Bosch 500. The salesman showed me a new addition to the model (an alleged potscrubber) but didn't tell me what they had taken away.
I should have looked more closely. I assumed I was getting largely the same dishwasher. After purchase I discovered that all those things I listed in the first paragraph were gone. Rack is no longer adjustable. The clock has been replaced with a trio of LEDs indicating >2 hours, 1-2 hrs, and <1 hour. And you cannot delay start at all from the control panel. You have to download their app of course, get a sign in of course, and then you can delay start from the app.
It's absolutely trashy of Bosch to take features away while raising the price several hundred dollars.
49 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 60.1 ms ] threadIf we want quality, customer service, decent prices, or anything like them to come back, we need to restore real antitrust, not the morally-and-intellectually-bankrupt Chicago School bullshit that's been pushed on us for decades, benefiting only the already-wealthy.
Me, personally, I seek out first Swiss brands then German brands when buying most things. I'm willing to pay extra.
In fact I'm a little pissed off this week because I ordered some oxygen absorbers off a Swiss website that listed a Swiss address but they were shipped directly from china. Investigating the site more closely, yeah, it's just a fake website made to look Swiss.
https://www.elektroda.com/rtvforum/topic3652484.html#1966024...
Not to sound overly cheerful, but shout out to my Makita DHP484 combo drill/driver and 100 piece bit set that, for a low three figure price, is far more powerful and capable than the noisy old corded monster it replaces.
Example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/harborfreight/comments/1v1ujxe/hmmm...
Which directly contradicts the blog's post about Knipex never selling-out on quality:
https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-power-tools-got-worse-...
>Knipex is family-owned out of Germany. They make what many consider the best pliers on the planet. Part of a larger group (Knipex Group) but not publicly traded, not for sale.
When giants like Apple and Samsung fail to innovate enough (and when they price their best products beyond the reach of the middle class of most nations), then upstarts will take their throne.
This may be good for industry so there's healthy competition, but it is unfortunate because China's CCP has a policy that Chinese companies must store and share customer and company data in China. So anyone using Chinese electronic gadgets is saying goodbye to their data security and privacy, even if it is an expensive gadget by a bigshot Chinese company (e.g., Lenovo was caught bundling adware on its premium laptops some years ago - search for "Lenovo Superfish" to know more).
https://legioncyber.com/lenovos-security-failures-and-hidden...
It's of course never just one thing - I had been waiting for the Husky to show up in stock again (it has a 24 inch depth vs 18), but at this point it seems like HD has discontinued the 24 in favor of enshittifying with 18 inches instead. And of course I've been shying away from HD recently because of the F-word. It's like these companies want to self-immolate (or put more technically, they create short term boosts by arbitraging away their reputation).
So someone cloned the market quality leader and you are suggesting that means the design, engineering and QA in the original isn’t valuable?
Show me those tools in 10 years.
The process of working out how to make them great is what you pay for.
Price is a clear and obvious thing to measure, quality is much more difficult. Consumers get little or no formal education in quality, and advertisements (and even review sites!) almost never address it properly. Any review site that is paid for by ads or affiliate links has the default position of trying to get you to buy something.
Most consumers, me included, are not making purely rational decisions based in price and quality, even in domains where they are qualified to judge quality.
How can you possibly know if you’re getting a quality product when the reviews you’re reading are for a model that doesn’t exist anymore, or are meaningless generalizations about a mega conglomerate? Saying “Brand X sucks/wins” only has the potential to be meaningful when it’s a single company in a single area and that has made that exact model in the same way for longer than your warranty on it. “Whirlpool sucks/wins” is as meaningless as reading “Water tastes good/bad” from everyone on the planet.
The thing that annoys me the most is when the reviewer opens the box, shakes it gently and says "feels well built" or "plastic build". It is actually harmful. Weight doesn't equal quality (there is some correlation, building well often results in more weight, but it is unreliable and easy to game) and plastic is a huge range of materials and some are absolutely the most robust option for many use cases (think a sturdy plastic water bottle that outlasts and glass or metal equivalent).
The problem is quality is very hard to measure. The only really good test is to use the product for many years. But by that time the existing model hasn't been sold for years, in theory you could correlate the new model's quality with the old one but brands are apparently disposable these days so it is very likely that all costs were cut on the new one once their previous model gained a reputation for quality.
I think the only real measure for quality is a warranty. That is the manufacturer promising a lifespan. However they are usually short, can be unreliable to get (often at manufacturer discretion) and more often than not cover only "manufacturing defects" not reasonable wear and tear.
I guess you could say this site is… worse on purpose.
A company makes a really good product as first challenging incumbents. They get so big, they eventually become the incumbent. All this time, they’re probably losing money on the product or breaking even. Eventually, investors will want returns on their investment. This will first happen with prices increases to save the quality of the product. Once they can’t raise prices anymore, the quality will be decreased. By this point, the brand is strong enough to get sales even on this worse product.
Then another company will come in and make the same product but better than the incumbent. The cycle continues.
My point is find these new companies that are trying to get market share by making a higher quality product. And if you really like that product, buy 2.
Someone linked to The Market for Lemons below. This is exactly right. We now live in the World of Lemons. Everything is lemons, because we can only properly judge quality for the tiny number of things we truly care about. For everything else, we just buy the cheapest thing, because by definition we don’t care enough to do otherwise.
The only possible solution is to buy less stuff, to the point where you have the capacity to care more about each thing, and enough money to pay for these things, which will inevitably cost more.
But then that means making peace with the idea that not having a thing can be better than having a crappy thing. It’s a tough sell to the consumption mindset.
If this was really the truth, the brand names wouldn't matter. But instead the brand ends up as the sole desirable target in the corporate sales.
I think the more likely answer is that being an expert judge on a product's quality is just very hard.
More so when you have to buy it before you can use it.
So people tend to trust brands they've had good experiences with, or heard others having good experiences with.
The greed here is in leveraging that trust to sell a shitty updated version of the product.
Companies get to choose what products or product qualities to make. If I, a consumer, want or need a product, I can only choose between what is made available to me by the companies.
It certainly doesn't help that it's nearly impossible to tell what is or isn't a quality product before or even after you buy it. What am I supposed to do when I buy a new power tool? Rip it apart and inspect all the parts to determine if it's "quality"? How am I supposed to tell if it even is "quality"? I'm not a manufacturing or engineering expert. Even when you think you're buying quality, it's not most of the time. Companies sell shit products at premium prices all the time because almost no one can tell the difference.
One could also blame corporate greed here as well, choosing to keep those extra profits or distributing them at the executive level, rather than increasing wages for employees to maintain their buying power.
So instead of more money to buy better quality items, we get things like Temu as the answer, selling trash and framing it as “shop like a billionaire.”
Ethical attestations about treatment of workers, animals, and environment are not always honest. Design flaws may not become apparent until the product has been in use for some time and longevity may only become apparent after many years of use, by which point the newer iterations may be qualitatively different.
It used to be that one could invest time in identifying quality brands, but many brands now are simply a temporary asset to be quickly squeezed of value.
So for instance see the Phoebus Cartel. [1] It was a cartel in the US (and Europe) including General Electric, Philips, and others that engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy to exploit the market for lightbulbs. They intentionally lowered the quality of bulbs, driving planned obsolescence and thus increased sales, and even engaged in spot [un]quality checking of cartel members to ensure that nobody's lightbulbs would last too long.
In modern times I don't think companies would usually be so overt, but there's nothing illegal about unspoken cartels doing the exact same thing. For instance even in the video game domain, up until the PS4 era major players used to subsidize game console hardware to a wide degree. Then with the PS4 Sony stopped stopped doing that, and simultaneously so did Microsoft. In a competitive market that's exactly when you'd go subsidization to the extreme, to clinch the market to yourself. But so long as both companies agree to stop subsidizing hardware, then they both stand to make a whole lot more money. And that's exactly what happened. In the end, the consumer ends up with worse hardware, pay more for it than they would in a competitive market, and companies make way more money. I think that makes it fair to blame corporate greed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
But didn't you read the article? It used to be that brand names had meaning, providing a reliable indicator for the quality to expect.
That doesn't hold anymore. As brands are bought & sold by private equity, the relation between brand & what to expect is lost. And in many cases, reputation brands are gutted, $$ extracted, and the sucked-dry corpse discarded. In that environment, how can a consumer tell what's what? Brand X used to be quality, and now it's not. With brand as (often) an unreliable indicator, consumers look at price instead.
What I personally find most amazing, is that quality stuff that used to be household names (and affordable!), are seemingly impossible to produce these days even though technology advanced for 50y+. Example: Arcoroc Sierra (from Arc France, which still exists today). Tableware in tempered, coloured glass, with a nice surface texture. Comes in amber-brown, red & green. Pour in boiling water no problem, lasts a lifetime (and keeps looking like day 1 as long as you keep it out of dishwashers).
Look around in shops today: soup bowls are nice-looking but cheap earthenware, or non-coloured, cheap soda-lime glass. Colour you say? Often it's a thin layer on the glass (sometimes even plastic!). Not a coloured solid material. Scratch it & the non-coloured base material shows underneath.
Something with comparable looks & quality from that 50y old stuff? Not available (at any price), not produced anywhere today. And it's not that people don't want it.
This is just 1 of many examples. Imho the article does a good job of explaining some of the causes.
So yeah, corporate greed actually has a meaning in this context for people.
But one has to recognize that the weakening of regulatory enforcement, reduced labor bargaining power, increased pressure for quarterly earnings, and less aggressive antitrust enforcement - all developments I associate with the broader neoliberal shift and the retreat of social democracy - have greatly contributed to what we now call the enshittification of products and services. My use of the term extends beyond Doctorow's original definition.
Basically, we've done our experiment of hyper-disposable consumerism. It was great and the world has gotten richer. But not it seems like we should parlay that benefit into transitioning into a new era of quality.
Power Tools Got Worse on Purpose
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48147665
Brands got worse on purpose
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47849221
Backpacks got worse on purpose
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777209
Well, last year I moved, and as it happens, the dishwasher failed and I leapt on the chance to replace it with another Bosch 500. The salesman showed me a new addition to the model (an alleged potscrubber) but didn't tell me what they had taken away.
I should have looked more closely. I assumed I was getting largely the same dishwasher. After purchase I discovered that all those things I listed in the first paragraph were gone. Rack is no longer adjustable. The clock has been replaced with a trio of LEDs indicating >2 hours, 1-2 hrs, and <1 hour. And you cannot delay start at all from the control panel. You have to download their app of course, get a sign in of course, and then you can delay start from the app.
It's absolutely trashy of Bosch to take features away while raising the price several hundred dollars.