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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, the price of consumer electronics is falling through the floor too. A routine living room television (say a 60" 4k panel) is literally 50x cheaper in real value the 16" color set my family bought in 1982.

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.

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Would you be willing to pay, say, $4000 for a laptop where all the quality engineering was top notch?

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).

> lugging around a backup device would be too inconvenient

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)

> Would you be willing to pay, say, $4000 for a laptop where all the quality engineering was top notch?

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.

Would you be willing to pay, say, $4000 for a laptop where all the quality engineering was top notch?

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.

I'd definitely want to pay on quality on some stuff, the problem is that it is very hard to spot that quality and not just product being more expensive because of a bunch of features I don't need, or just plainly on brand name.

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.

> Would you be willing to pay, say, $4000 for a laptop where all the quality engineering was top notch?

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.

Didn’t they face a class action lawsuit due to keyboard defects a couple year back?

Thinkpads are still decent, and some other manufacturers do okay too.

Are they? I used to be a huge lover of Thinkpads. IMO, they've been going downhill since the T60, I had a T430 and I ended up getting rid of it. I kept my X32 still going though.

While I agree in spirit, honestly my T60 broke much more than my current X230. I replaced the T60's keyboard 4-5 times under warranty, while maybe once or twice for the X230 over a longer period of time. I did use the T60 more though (no-desktop phase). I've no experience with more recent models, since I prefer personal computers (ie no ME crapware).

> Thinkpads are still decent

The ones from 2011 are.

They've been sold to Lenovo, it's just a matter of time

It’s been 17 years, they aren’t IBM quality, but they’re still very sturdy.

We would be able to find a balance between quality and price if the Fed stopped creating new money to erase lower prices. Your argument is only apparent for high technology because computing advances so fast that it has been able to outrun the policy of inflation. For example, appliances are being designed ever cheaper while also costing more. Consumers end up anchored to the bottom of the market based on sticky expectations of price, the market as a whole never develops a sense of wealth, and economies of scale make it so straying from the herd is very expensive.

(edit: changed "printing" -> "creating" since the former is a tribalism trigger)

> We would be able to find a balance between quality and price if the Fed stopped printing new money to erase lower prices.

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".

Erm, no. I'm not talking about the past two months, rather I'm talking about the past several decades. For example, all that offshoring was supposed to "lower prices" thereby giving consumers more purchasing power to make up for the loss in income. But the Fed has drawn a feedback loop around prices and asserted they must always go up, so the net effect of offshoring was only to wreck the manufacturing economy.

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.

Inflation has been at historic lows over the past several decades. I don't see how that follows, sorry.

Yes, price inflation measured by the CPI, which consists of a changing basket of goods from the lower end of the market, has been low.

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.

Wow, OK. Your point seems to be "If you discount economic growth, then inflation has been high". Well... OK. Granted. But let's game that out:

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.

Its not about discounting growth, but rather correctly accounting for growth. Why should the financial benefit of growth accrue to the central bank rather than remaining distributed throughout society? In these terms, decades of high growth have allowed the centralized government (including Wall Street) to balloon. Now that growth has slowed (the low hanging information technology and offshoring fruit has been picked), the costs of those policies will increasingly show themselves.

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.

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