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Comment by uniqueuid | Hacker News Reader

I find it very sad to think that masses cannot have style.

Some old Swiss everyday products are affordable yet beautiful; I am convinced both is possible.

Apple and companies in general need to make a profit.

Those same "old Swiss everyday products" are most likely no longer affordable based on the modern cost of labor and materials.

The price of, say, a basic victorinox Swiss Army knife or a simple Caran d‘ache ball pen is still around one hourly wage in Western Europe and perhaps 2 to 5 in Eastern Europe.

Are they made with the same quality of materials as older, more reliable versions? I would guess no. It's also a poor comparison because both are low tech products.

You many be surprised, but ball pens or even pencils are not really low-tech products. Their production needs precision equipment and cutting-edge supply chain. You can´t make a pencil in your basement.

side note: "caran d'ache" actually means pencil in Russian which in turn borrowed the name from Turkic, where cara(n) means black and ache is stone. The company is Swiss, but it was set up by a Russian cartoonist that fled the 1917 revolution, worked in Paris and settled in Switzerland inbetween the world wars.

Sure, pen and pencil factories may need complicated factory equipment to manufacture, but they are still extremely low tech products compared to computer chips and other silicon related components which are still evolving relatively fast compared to pen and pencil products. The related manufacturing process for chips is also a lot more complex and advanced compared to the manufacturing process for pens and pencils. It's still a poor comparison.

Actually, if I may, Caran d'Ache was the "nom de plume" of a French satirist, who died in 1909 (before the russian revolution), but the Swiss company was inspired by his name and his life, as he was one of the first to create what would become (sort of) newspaper comic strips.

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