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Comment by lonelappde | Hacker News Reader

It's brand exploitation. They build a good brand, than sacrifice it for short term gain to rip off customers, while building a new brand to replace it. It's very common in the fashion industry (Gucci, etc)

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Sort of like how Pyrex used to mean borosilicate glass, which has a low coefficient of thermal expansion, and is thus oven-safe.

This was the case for sixtysome years.

Then some douchebag decided that Pyrex wasn't a material, it was a "brand", and started slapping the name on kitchenware made of soda-lime glass, which will straight-up explode if you treat it like borosilicate.

In the UK and probably the rest of Europe you can still buy borosilicate Pyrex made in France, but this single decision destroyed any trust I had in the brand. It's not even a new decision[0] and I am mostly unaffected by it but any discussion about Pyrex in person will invariably lead to me butting in with an emphasis on borosilicate making the glass temperature resistant and not the brand, it shouldn't even be necessary but occasionally import Pyrex makes its way onto places like Amazon.

[0] http://themainframe.ca/content/images/2015/09/Pyrex-infograp...

Given the enthusiasm for class action lawsuits in the US I am amazed this passed muster with management and the legal department.

war on drugs was their reasoning; not sure if it's true or acceptable and yeah I'm pretty amazed it flew in the US.

But then another brand by Corning is the same, they had a range of unbreakable product called Corelle, the new stuff since it got sold off just isn't the same.

Old school Corelle is the best ceramics you could get. I have 40+ year old Corelle plates and bowls in the cabinets right now. Used daily and dropped hundreds of times over the years.

> war on drugs was their reasoning

Uh what ? What do you mean, I don’t see any relationship between Pyrex and the war on drugs at all and I’m really curious !

I'm not sure how their PR dept spun it but borosilicate glass is incredibly resistant to sudden changes in temperature as well as having better chemical and acid resistance making it ideal for chemistry lab work, presumably some news stories broke about 'amateur chemists' using Pyrex cookware for a different type of cooking. It's not like borosilicate is a controlled material though, the reason for the switch is likely that soda lime glass is significantly cheaper to produce, they did suggest that their soda lime glass was more mechanically durable but then again borosilicate glass is also known for being mechanically durable.

This is exactly what Intel did to the Pentium line. Remember when that brand was synonymous with high-performance consumer CPUs?

They burned the brand name through incompetence, not malice.

To be fair they weren't using Pentium for high performance processors for a while. It's not like they put out 2c/4t parts and called them i9.

Which is what they have been doing the i7/i9 line. Suddenly you can buy a i7/i9 laptop, despite it not having anywhere near the performance of the desktop class processors except maybe for a few seconds of burst activity.

A few years ago i7 also meant basically the high end desktop market (socket 2011) which meant more ram and IO. But then they slapped it on the dual channel desktop socket market.

So, yah the brand becomes meaningless when its just marketing for "this one will cost you more".

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