Sooo much truth has been spoken!
The quality of consumer goods is decaying everyday. It is all about the last millionth of a cent to be spared.
Just nobody cares.
The quality of consumer goods is decaying everyday. It is all about the last millionth of a cent to be spared.
Just nobody cares.
You need to look at both sides of that equation. Would you be willing to pay, say, $4000 for a laptop where all the quality engineering was top notch? (It's a reasonably informed guess as to what that would cost.) Maybe some people would. Probably not many. Most people want the $700 laptop which is "just as good", even if the display sometimes fails.
(edit: changed "printing" -> "creating" since the former is a tribalism trigger)
That is... a weirdly revisionist interpretation. People have been complaining about consumer electronics quality consistently and pervasively for decades and decades. Absolutely nothing about that point is "modern" or "new". Yet... you really think it's due to events of the last few months? And not even just any events, politically charged events interpreted and explained using partisan language[1]. Really?
[1] Seriously, one of the easiest ways to tell whether or not to pay attention to an economics argument is whether it includes the phrase "printing money".
Politically, I call the current price inflation "Trumpflation", since that is when the monetary inflation that's driving much of it occurred. We'll see how the Biden administration did in a few years. And while being an Austrian-leaning libertarian, I think the Democrats are at least honest in that they want to use some of the newly created money to compensate for the financial damage that monetary inflation causes, whereas the Republicans want to give it all to the banks while preaching austerity for everyone else.
Let's say a given widget costs $10 to produce, and look at what happens over 4 years. Say offshoring, cost optimization, and technological progress would allow it to be produced for $7. The Fed creates enough new money that the new price is $11. The Fed calls this "2.5% inflation", whereas the actual inflation has been 12%. The sticker price reflects the 2.5%, and the remaining 9.5% is reflected in the item being made cheaper, not supporting the local economy, and the gains of technological progress accruing to the central bank rather than being distributed throughout society.
At the larger level, this does not happen uniformly to every component of CPI. Instead, prices for things that can be bought with new money increase more. So manufactured goods still have relatively low price inflation, where things that the consumer can finance (housing, education, healthcare, vehicles) shoot through the roof.
Bringing this back to the original topic - since the median consumer's expenditure is expected to be ~fixed (slightly rising) for a basket of goods that are decreasing in quality, they're unable to afford the previous baseline quality that is now considered luxury. Rather than seeing a choice between buying what they know and saving money with a lower-quality item, they're given a choice between paying slightly more for the lower quality one or paying much more for the quality that they were used to.
It's true, that if you correct for all the inventions and economies that have made its production possible, the relative "cost" of, say, a nice new five-burner induction range is indeed extremely high in comparison to, say, the bow drill your ancestors would have used. Probably in the billions or so, if not higher.
But that's not telling you anything! In point of fact the "cost" measured in hours of labor[1] of collecting fuel and starting fires over the course of a decade or so[2] is VASTLY higher for the paleolithic toolkit. And it's not even remotely close, which is why no one chooses to cook with an open fire and a bow drill except as an amusement.
Basically: you're bending yourself around and measuring the wrong thing to try to make a point about inflation in an area that has nothing to do with it.
[1] Which is, at the end of the day, all we really care about optimizing. We live one life and we want to live it well doing as little work as possible. Frankly this is sort of "postulate zero" of the whole field of economics.
[2] Just assume the range will last for a decade. I don't know what the real average is but it's in that range.
Furthermore, accounting for optimization via tradeoffs as if it's bona fide growth is doubly wrong. Cost reduction via quality reduction is actually the opposite of growth, but gets counted as increased efficiency for labor rather than reduced quality of life for humans.
Focusing on hours of labor and gradually reducing hours worked would have been a different way to keep the benefits of growth distributed throughout society. Instead full time employment has been fixed at 40 hours through a long period of high growth, with the new money feedback loop soaking up the individual's surplus.
Yes. This is also why I do exactly that. Thankfully there’s still one company making good laptops left, Apple.
Unfortunately, all the brands I used to buy from decided it was better to cut the cost by half by cutting the quality by 9/10s.
The ones from 2011 are.
YES, please, I beg of the industry give me this.
In a loud, resounding voice.
Buying a new laptop takes days of investment to get it all set up just right. Maintaining the software and OS to keep it snappy is also a timesink. The initial cost of the hardware is a trivial portion of the TCO for me.
It's also an item I only carry around one of (lugging around a backup device would be too inconvenient even if it only cost a dollar), so reliability is paramount.
My current laptop (Dell Precision from ~2011) cost a little over your price point, and has been upgraded many times over the years. Finding something I'm happy to replace it with has been a conundrum, there's a ton of absolute garbage out there. (Framework almost does what I need and is a leading contender).
I kind of do this. I bought two used laptops a few years ago, one 13" XPS and a big bulky ~17" ThinkPad. The XPS is great for meetings, the other one is great for software development, and I have a backup ready and set up, ready to go. And if I travel for more than a day I sometimes take both. (So far the strategy seems to be flawless, as both work in well their own sub-par broken but reliable way, as Windows machines tend to, maybe each one is kept blinking by pride, or just to spite the other one. :D)
The other problem is that niche high quality stuff also would not benefit from economies of scale as much, and at some point buying 4 of the cheap might get you thru longer than one of the "reliable" one
The top-end electronics are maybe a bad example as (at least till now, it seems to slow down at last) the performance is also a big factor, so buying $700 laptop you will want to replace anyway in few years is sensible over "will never break" $4000 one that will just go out of date.
But on like, just about everything else ? Reliability and repairability please, I will pay extra.
Isn't that what Emperor Linux is (nominally) about? Not that I have ever tried them out because that is way beyond my pay grade, but several of their machines are in that price range.
Absolutely. Yes please. That would mean I can use it for 10 years without major problems, I'm able to repair it, no Jail breaking needed... make it 5k. More than happy.
But I understand, I'm not the majority of the market.