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Comment by palata | Hacker News Reader

First, there is a huge difference between art and engineering that the author completely misses.

Because most people are not competent to judge the quality of two similar product does not mean they don't care about quality. They just usually can't tell, so they go for the cheaper (which has a higher probability of being worse). And it drives the prices down, and the quality with it. Or it reinforces monopolies, because only those who already produce at scale can produce better quality at lower price.

But if there was a way to correctly tell people: "look, this smartphone is 20% more expensive, but it will last twice as long and it will be more convenient for you in ways you can't understand right now", nobody would go for the worse quality, right? The problem is not that people don't care about quality, it's that they are not competent to judge it and marketing does the rest.

Then the article talks a lot about art. Interestingly, the author says "I'm pride to not understand art, but let me still explain to you how it works". And then proves it by giving contradictory examples like "people don't care about quality, they will just listen to ABBA or go to the Louvre". You have to not understand ABBA or what's in the Louvre to think like that.

So here is my rant: it's okay to be proud to not be knowledgeable about stuff. But then don't be surprised if people notice that you have no clue if you write about it.

(Yes, I noticed the irony of writing a pedant comment about a mediocre article that prides itself in being mediocre and criticises pedantry :-) ).

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I agree. I have made a lot of recent purchases of things for which I would be willing to pay a premium for something better (e.g. more durable washing machine) but where I settled for cheap and not obviously bad because I do not know how to verify the more expensive option is actually higher quality.

> And then proves it by giving contradictory examples like "people don't care about quality, they will just listen to ABBA or go to the Louvre".

True. IMO what is in the Louvre is of higher quality than anything you are likely to find in "some little art gallery showcasing new artists". Is the article seriously arguing that it is probable that some little gallery will have works better than the Mona Lisa?

The problem is that nowadays even companies that have/had a reputation for high quality are cutting corners to increase their margins.

This. I used to spend time researching more premium purchases. Now either the quality of the brands I love has diminished, their prices have skyrocketed, or there are too many players thanks to the ease of standing up e-commerce that I fall back to the mid-range thing. This is especially true with clothes.

I'm not sure if quality is objective or subjective, especially when referring to art.

I read this anecdote somewhere:

A visitor to the Louvre in Paris viewed the renowned Mona Lisa and stated loudly: "That painting is nothing special. I am unimpressed." A curator who was standing nearby said: "Sir, the painting is not on trial. You are."

Could have said the same thing about "Starry Night".

> A visitor to the Louvre in Paris viewed the renowned Mona Lisa and stated loudly: "That painting is nothing special. I am unimpressed." A curator who was standing nearby said: "Sir, the painting is not on trial. You are."

I wonder, is the quote trying to say something about pretentious audiences, or about pretentious curators?

The Mona Lisa is famous in no small part because it was stolen. Its fame gave it appeal, as did its out-of-copyright status that allowed so many derivatives. Now, I'm not saying "it's terrible", just "it's overrated" and "standards have risen".

People speak of Lisa del Giocondo's "enigmatic expression": I see simply a neutral, resting face, there is no enigma for me.

The composition? No, the background has some of the flaws used today to identify AI generated images: Look at the waterline on the right, just below her eye-line, that's at an angle, and contradicts the elements on the other side of her head.

This isn't to diss Leonardo, he and his peers had to invent a lot from first principles, and that's much more difficult than learning the same techniques from others; but at the same time, the fact that we don't need to invent it all from scratch and we can learn from others, means that it's much easier to get to a higher quality standard today — and the corollary, if you want to be seen as a genius on the level of Leonardo, the bar is much higher than "do what Leonardo did with the Mona Lisa".

I prefer the version in Prado, Madrid: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gioconda_(copia_del_...

(Now one I will say "it's terrible", to the horror of those that love it, is Der Kuss by Klimt: the woman's head is at such an angle it seems to have been disconnected from her body, rotated 90°, and reattached at the ear).

We don't consider it a masterpiece because we think nobody could do something like that nowadays. We consider it a masterpiece because back then, it was a masterpiece. And we have had time to compare a lot of work from that era and we can say that Da Vinci was worth it.

This particular painting (Mona Lisa) is indeed famous because it got stolen, and that's also why people wait in line to take a selfie with it and completely ignore "The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne" that is in the next room. But still, its quality is undeniable. As is the quality of the other paintings around. Then of course, you may like the painting or not, that's orthogonal.

Da Vinci started a painting technique called "Sfumato", which is used there. Many other painters used and developed that technique, of course, but it means that Da Vinci created something meaningful there. Famous painters usually had an impact in their time.

We can say that da-vinci, bernini, and cervantes did care about quality, but are all held at a remove, and the story of the critic bieng repremanded, by pointing out they, he not the mona lisa was on trial, is quite exact. Facing a true master piece can be wonder, amazment and elation, or a trial and an afront. Your simple egotist now has an easy solution, by taking a selfie, in FRONT of the amazing thing, but this is leading to fist fights in order to claim the exact right spot, with then certain municipalitys and private owners, building blockades to deter self(ie) seekers. Its the difference between facing something special, or getting in the way, and we all do both one time or another.

That's the heart of it!

I think the faces in Mona Lisa and The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne looks fairly bad. I much prefer Titian's portraits.

>I wonder, is the quote trying to say something about pretentious audiences, or about pretentious curators?

About tourists pretending to be a museum audience.

>The Mona Lisa is famous in no small part because it was stolen. Its fame gave it appeal, as did its out-of-copyright status that allowed so many derivatives.

That's a myth, only applicable to mass audiences who wouldn't have the education to recognize, much less understand, the majority of what they saw in the museum in the first place. Da Vinci's work was in high esteem for centuries by the point the painting was stolen, which is also why Mona Lisa was displayed in the Louvre to begin with. That's regardless whether Joe and Jane Q. Public knew about it or read about it on magazine "must see" lists.

>just "it's overrated" and "standards have risen".

LOL

>>just "it's overrated" and "standards have risen".

> LOL

If it were simply the art itself, and not the name attached to it, nobody would care if a piece in the style of Leonardo was forgery or an original, they would only care if it was good.

There wouldn't even be a word for forgery, in the context of art, if it was really about the art itself.

Art is subjective, there’s no right or wrong interpretation of it, and I wouldn’t be sure there is higher or lower quality either. Would you say that a Monet is higher quality than a Banksy?

Possibly both, I guess we're not the first ones to wonder why it's so famous. She isn't even a good looking lady, but obviously the painting must have something going for it, or some other painting would take its place.

I would put Starry Night in that place if it were my decision to make. But it's not.

> but obviously the painting must have something going for it, or some other painting would take its place.

that's exactly what everyone else thinks, and so they just take it for granted

Yeah, me too, but thankfully Starry Night is owned by New York's MOMA. So the french can't have it, but I can see it in New York.

“We all agreed to breathe harder when talking about it, and you have no right of vote here”. That’s how I perceive this art thing. It often is objective, but it’s always amplified 100x+ by some heavy breath and tonal attitude. General subjectivity doesn’t even have a voice here. That curator could use a good collar grab stare.

Doesn't it also happen in software? :-)

All the time.

Not sure why you are being downvoted here...

But yeah, defining "quality" may be difficult for art. Maybe rather for contemporary art, though. I think we tend to have some kind of consensus for older art?

Then for instance in cinema, I think it's pretty objective. It doesn't have to be related to how popular the movie is, though.

Yes, it's puzzling to me how posterity can tell if something has the quality to stand the test of time, but we, the contemporaries, cannot.

Though it seems that eventually, remarkable work does find its way up, even if the authors might not be around to enjoy the belated appraisal.

And in that case, what more can one do but do the work and hope for the best?

Which washing machine did you get? I researched them a bit last year when I needed to buy one (for the first time in my life) and my takeaway was basically that all the "premium" models are crap now too, except perhaps for a few quasi-commercial models (Speed Queen comes up a lot) that are probably more reliable and repairable but also loud and rough on clothing.

> "look, this smartphone is 20% more expensive, but it will last twice as long and it will be more convenient for you in ways you can't understand right now"

That is not the proposition. A Motorola Moto G Play is $110 no contract. The cheapest iPhone is $429. It's is not 20% more, it's 4x more. My sister got a Moto G Play this summer. She's perfectly happy with it. She's got a family of 5 so $550 for 5 phones is quite a deal compared to $2145 for 5 phones.

The Moto G Play also has a micro-SD slot so she can take it to 512gb for $40.

I am not sure what point you are trying to make.

I made an example to explain what would happen if consumers had a way to know, for sure, the quality of a product.

I didn't mean for you to take my example, try to find smartphone models that may match and then come back to me saying "your example is wrong because I can't find those models in real life". The whole point of my example was to share an idea, not to sell a smartphone.

The point is, for the example you have, the difference is not 20% and that price difference is important in the tradeoff. I agree with you, if people knew the quality was significantly better for +20% then they'd probably choose higher quality. But if the difference is 400% then no, lots of people aren't going to pick higher quality as it's out of their budget, period.

A BMW/Mercedes might be a more quality car than a Kia but someone that only has a budget for a Kia isn't going to even consider a BMW/Mercedes for 2x to 8x more.

On top of that "quality" is subjective. I might agree that a Macbook Air ($999) is better than a $300 window laptop (there's tons of them) but both the Kia and the $300 Windows laptop will serve people's needs. a Kia will get them to/from work. Let them transport their kids. Etc.. A window laptop will let them browse the net, view youtube, write a resume. It's not like the Kia and windows laptop are useless. Plus, for the laptop, they can get 3 of them for the price of 1 mac. So everyone in the family gets one. It's like buying a Vizio TV for every room instead of one Sony TV for one room.

> I agree with you, if people knew the quality was significantly better for +20% then they'd probably choose higher quality.

Right, we agree then. People do care about quality. That was my point.

> A Motorola Moto G Play is $110 no contract. The cheapest iPhone is $429. It's is not 20% more, it's 4x more.

But this is the market failure.

If you ask a normal person why they should care about having a phone with drivers in the mainline kernel tree, they don't even know what you're asking. But the answer is, because then it can keep running the latest version of stock Android indefinitely, instead of being forced to buy a new phone over and over.

At which point a 20% difference in the hardware price will be relevant, because if you want to keep the phone a long time you'll want the one with 16GB of RAM instead of 4GB -- which is fine because RAM is under $1/GB.

But since the average phone customer doesn't know this, the phone they want isn't even available and their choices are the cheap phone which will be out of support in less than a year or the one that costs four times as much up front and will still be out of support before they otherwise actually need a new phone.

A "normal person" is a Starbucks barista making $38k/year (roughly 2000 hours at $19/hour).

That person doesn't spend 3 days' wages for "mainline kernel drivers" -- either they buy the iPhone because it's a status symbol, or they use the Android OS that shipped with the device for three years until the screen is cracked and the battery stops charging. To them security patches are just an inconvenience.

I don't think "if only people had the right information they'd spend money on the right things" is the right thesis -- I think it's more "why is everyone so poor? how do we make it so that more people can afford our wares?"

My impression (citation needed) is that globally folks have been worse off the last few years and so the median Android device spec was actually going down.

> either they buy the iPhone because it's a status symbol, or they use the Android OS that shipped with the device for three years until the screen is cracked and the battery stops charging.

That's also exactly the point. Why is it hard or expensive to repair the device? Would they have purposely chosen a phone they have to throw away like trash and then pay more than a hundred dollars for a new one if they could get one where a new battery is $15 and can be replaced like they do the batteries in their TV remote?

> My impression (citation needed) is that globally folks have been worse off the last few years and so the median Android device spec was actually going down.

Or people have realized that they only use their phone for maps and texting and they don't need a flagship if they're just going to throw it in the trash in two years anyway.

Because repairability has tradeoffs

The biggest tradeoff being that customers don't have to buy a new phone as soon.

> the median Android device spec was actually going down.

What is so great about the top end phone that I should get one? They all have cameras (plural) with more pixels than I can see. They all have a fair amount of storage.... Sure the top end models have more of everything, but is there anything that I as a user would notice?

I was one of the first to have an Android back when the G1 came out - the hardware was lacking, but any phone from 4 years later was good enough (except none had a slide out keyboard that was so much nicer than touch screens)

It's not a "failure" - people don't owe you to behave in ways that are approved by you. They have different priorities, and you can tell them they "actually" need something else until you blue in the face, but they'll buy what they want, even after your disapproval.

Having different priorities is not the same as having different (i.e. less) information. In one case they just want something different, in the other they're not getting what they want because the sellers are taking advantage of an information asymmetry to screw them.

What kind of information do you think would allow you to make the market of the phones substantially different than it is now?

If you think the problem is information, the sales of iPhones is about $200 billion per year. I am pretty sure that whatever is the information you are thinking about, it is possible to deliver it to the vast majority of the customer base for the small fraction of this sum. Which would allow to capture if not the whole market, than the significant portion of it - billions-sized portion. Why do you think nobody thought about doing it before you?

Lots of people thought about doing it.

The problem is this: What people want is existing phones with some minor alterations that make them last longer and be easier to repair, which wouldn't significantly affect the manufacturing cost but would reduce future sales across the industry, because many people could buy a phone and be good for ten years. So the large incumbents like Apple and Samsung don't even offer this, because they have such high market share that losing industry-wide future sales costs them more than making more current sales, and also they have such high market share that they were already the ones getting the current sales.

Then we would expect some smaller company to come by and eat their lunch, right? And you get ones like Fairphone and Librem that make the attempt, but those aren't just "Samsung Galaxy with a removable battery and open source drivers" because Samsung also won't sell you 95% of their existing phone wholesale and let you make those couple of changes people want. So they're stuck designing an entire phone instead of making a couple of changes to an existing phone, which is a heavy lift for a small company, and then the other aspects of the phone aren't competitive, or the price isn't. It's possible that someone will eventually get this right, but that doesn't mean that it's easy, and in the meantime the large incumbents are screwing everyone because the market is insufficiently competitive.

Lots of people thought about doing lots of things. Thinking about doing it and actually successfully doing it are two very, very different things, as any startup entrepreneur can tell you.

> So they're stuck designing an entire phone instead of making a couple of changes to an existing phone, which is a heavy lift for a small company,

Why a big company doesn't do it then? I mean, there are a lot of big companies not having a phone, and a bunch of big companies that used to have a phone and now don't. You'd think they'd do the easy thing and just add the extra 5% and eat Apple's lunch - but somehow they don't. Maybe that lunch is not as easily eatable as you think it is.

> You'd think they'd do the easy thing and just add the extra 5% and eat Apple's lunch - but somehow they don't.

Because the market failure is the size of the companies in the market. If you're big enough to sink the resources to make a competitive phone from scratch then you're expecting to capture a large chunk of the market, in which case you'll behave like a large incumbent with the incentive to sell disposable phones.

To avoid this you need to bust up the vertical integration that makes it hard for small companies to make a competitive phone so that it's possible for a small company to make a device which is overall competitive while they're still hungry enough for market share to give customers what they want.

If you say "people" want something else than what is offered now, then by providing this something else you should be able to capture a lot of the market. Example: Apple produced an iphone, but some people wanted more open, not-so-closed-garden, customizable, moddable phone. And they wanted an OS to go with it. And here it it, Android and a booming Android phone market. Yes, a giant - Google - owns the OS. But another giant - which are many around - could dislodge them if they slept at the wheel.

Another example: Microsoft owned the browser market with their Explorer. Then they fell asleep at the wheel and now Chrome owns the market. Sure, again, it took Google to do it, but it can be done. And it will be done again - when there is a substantial unsatisfied market need.

If this is not happening for a long time, then I think it's time to consider the possibility that it's not that the "market" "fails", but just your ideas about what people should want are not the same as what people actually want. If nobody buys the "ideal" phone somebody built - maybe it's not actually ideal for enough people.

> If you say "people" want something else than what is offered now, then by providing this something else you should be able to capture a lot of the market.

Suppose you could capture a lot of the market in the sense that the installed base of people using your phones goes from 25% to 40%, but then your repeat customer interval goes from an average of 3 years to 9 years. Your future sales outlook would be down. You're not going to do it.

Now suppose that your existing installed base is below 1%, or you're a new company and it's zero, and by doing this you could capture even 3% of the market. Then you do have the incentive to do it, as long as that percentage of the market can recover your R&D for developing a competitive phone to begin with. But what happens if the existing market is vertically integrated, so you have to do a lot of unrelated work from scratch instead of starting with a competitive reference design? Then your R&D costs are much higher and you don't do it.

And then nobody is making the competitive phone that people want.

> If nobody buys the "ideal" phone somebody built - maybe it's not actually ideal for enough people.

Let's pick some random midrange device; Samsung A35. It's ~$265, has 8 cores at >2GHz, 8GB RAM, 128GB storage, 2k display, etc. All I want is that with a removable battery and the ability to run a mainline Linux kernel. These are similar specs to the Fairphone 5, which doesn't yet appear to run a mainline linux kernel (they're working on it), but that's $800. Even at that price they're selling them, but which phone is the open competitor in the A35's price range? Can you identify anyone offering this device?

You can't say the market doesn't want something the market isn't offered.

The vertical integration is why the $110 phone exists in the first place…

If you arbitarily move the pricing bar then of course there may be more competitive small companies, relative to the new baseline.

> The vertical integration is why the $110 phone exists in the first place…

There is no evidence of that. If anything more vertically integrated devices (e.g. iPhone, Samsung flagships) cost more, because a vertically integrated market increases barriers to entry and impairs competition.

A Samsung phone might very well have a Samsung CPU with Samsung RAM and Samsung flash made in Samsung fabs with a Samsung battery and a Samsung screen. Galaxy S24 Ultra, ~$1000.

Meanwhile, the $110 phone was the Moto G Play. That's a Qualcomm CPU with Samsung RAM, a "Motorola"-branded battery which is probably Sanyo or Panasonic, and a third party screen and flash because Motorola doesn't make those either. It's $110 because it's full of fungible commodity parts.

The issue is, some of them -- especially that CPU -- are poorly documented and full of tightly integrated but closed source firmware/drivers. Which has nothing to do with the manufacturing cost of the hardware. A fully-documented open-source RISC-V CPU is not going to cost more.

“No evidence”… according to who?

Based on what arguments that such evidence does not exist?

The phones market is completely distorted by several kinds of anti-competitive and purposeful social-engineering forces.

For a start, it's not a given that the Moto G Play has a lower quality than the iPhone. If the market was competitive, there would be comparable alternatives on every dimension, but it isn't, and those can't be compared.

That is not the proposition. For $15/month savings her child will be ostracized at school because of the blue message box. Is it worth it?

Phones have outsized influence on our lives. A phone costs 1/10 as much as a car per month, but we spend more time with them, and most younger people today would rather give up their car than their phone.

Better screen quality will more than pay itself in optics prescriptions later in life. Batter quality photos you take today will stay with you for the remainder of our life, and past it. Longer battery life would mean avoiding a lot of unpleasant situations.

> For $15/month savings her child will be ostracized at school because of the blue message box

FWIW I have teenage kids, and nothing like this has ever happened in their lives.

It seems to me like you are an expert on rationalizing expensive purchases. If that's unconscious, I think it would be good for you to bring it to conscious awareness.

While I disagree with your first paragraph, the other two are spot on. When comparing prices of tech products, people focus too much on the percentage difference, while the dollar difference is not that significant. Depending on the person making the purchase. Anybody who can afford a car could easily afford the most expensive smart phone for sale.

> Anybody who can afford a car could easily afford the most expensive smart phone for sale.

This is ignoring that many people “afford” these purchases on credit.

To answer this question properly she would have to use both and then make a judgement, no?

> But if there was a way to correctly tell people: "look, this smartphone is 20% more expensive, but it will last twice as long and it will be more convenient for you in ways you can't understand right now", nobody would go for the worse quality, right?

Wrong. Most of the population is limited by cash flow so that extra 20% they get to spend on food today is worth more than the quality of the phone a year from now. That’s a problem for tomorrow, hunger is felt now.

That’s why most people choose the cheap option, not some inability to evaluate quality.

I think this is less common than you would assume. Yes, there is a 'poor tax' on low quality items that are more expensive in the long run, but also people have gotten burned enough times paying more for an item that still turned out to be crap, so it's hard to justify taking the risk on such an investment.

I think this is true as well. Paying more does not mean higher quality. There are a few brands which seem to release quality products consistently (Apple etc) that paying more is justified but for many others it is just not worth it.

Getting the cheapest product always means worse quality. The biggest jump in cost/benefit is between the cheapest product and the second cheapest. So if you only care about price, you should always get the second cheapest product, which will almost guarantee at least 50% better quality than the cheapest. After that, the ratio is diminishing.

> Getting the cheapest product always means worse quality.

Not true. New entrants to markets often will price to undercut markets (see Uber and Airbnb in their early days). Also loss leaders are a very much a thing.

Over time markets do typically stabilize and this could be true.

The cheapest accommodation will usually not be listed on AirBnB or Booking, because of severe short-comings meaning the platform won't do business with them for any price.

As for Uber, I guess you're right in many regions. But there's a plethora of Uber competitors around the world, offering a worse experience for a cheaper price.

In 100% of cases, the cheapest product you can find will be of significantly worse quality than the second cheapest product, without bringing much savings. The rest is edge cases.

As you pointed out, I'm talking about reasonably mature markets.

In my country, studies regularly show that the cheapest toothpaste or shampoo (and other similar products) are some of the best. I would consider that mature.

I think it's an interesting heuristic, though.

> Paying more does not mean higher quality.

Exactly! It is actually hard to estimate the quality of a product. And when you can't, most of the time you go for the cheaper one (unless money doesn't matter much for you).

Or you use brand as a proxy for quality and buy the Apple one without actually knowing why or how it’s “better”

In which case you obviously care about quality. That's all I'm saying: people do care about quality.

On average, the people I know to have expensive phones and very big TVs are a lot poorer than the people with cheaper phones. The former eat domino's pizzas. There's a lot more psychological effect at play than just price and amount of food in the table.

Back in the 1990s when researchers went to write about millionaires they discovered most people who look rich are in debt such that they have less to live on day to day than poor people - they have nicer houses and toys but for their day to day budget they are in trouble. When they found people who had a high net worth they were living in poor neighborhoods and otherwise looked poor - but their bank account was big. Then they wrote "The millionaire next door".

After looking at life I've concluded both are wrong ways to live. you should save 10% for retirement (that is a good number for discussion but I'm open to other numbers). Spend the rest on toys - but don't go into debt. You can't take it with you, and do not know for sure that you will be healthy enough to do whatever activity you are saving up for in retirement. (at 50 my body is already such that I don't think any amount of training could get me ready to climb Mt Everest - good thing that was never my dream because it is too late. I could have done that at 30 if I wanted and there are plenty of less extreme things I can still do)

> Most of the population is limited by cash flow so that extra 20% they get to spend on food today is worth more than the quality of the phone a year from now.

Most of the population in the US has an iPhone. If you were right, they would most definitely have a cheaper phone.

Because they are on contract. Your point does not refute the earlier, it is a cashflow issue. Most people buy phones on contract and pay X per month over Y months rather than paying X*Y total upfront.

And getting an iPhone on contract is cheaper than getting a cheaper Android on contract?

They are around the same price. Given that, most people opt to use an iPhone, for reasons more cultural than quality wise (blue vs green bubble, network effects, apps they want to use, etc), given that high end Androids have similar quality levels.

So when I ask if the iPhone are more expensive than Android, your answer is "given that they go for iPhone or high end Androids, they are the same price"? It means that some contracts are cheaper, for cheaper Androids, right?

Not sure I understand.

A significant number of people have enough money that they can decide between options that cost less or more. Otherwise we wouldn't have $2000 phones or TVs that range from $500-100.000. If the number of people with sufficient budget to choose between options was so small that we can ignore it in this discussion, no manufacturer would bother with market segmentation.

However, they do bother, so it's wrong to just assume baseline that most people just care about the cheapest option because that's all they can afford and that we shouldn't bother.

Many of us strive to get the best possible deal within a budget which satisfies our preferences and delivers a certain amount of quality. The fact that most of us don't have an unlimited budget makes it all the more important to us and this discussion that manufacturers can skimp on quality in a way that's unrecognisable to 99% of the market until a certain amount of time has passed. This has other consequences than just "it's cheaper but it's shitter and we don't know how much shittier". It allows utter bullshit like "I bought this $200 Xbox controller and the bumper broke after 3 months and I got it replaced twice and now the replacement is broken again after another 2 months". And all we can do is shrug because that's just what modern manufacturing is like. Skimping on everything while setting a price point as high as they can get away with using marketing.

Lots of the population isn't paying up-front for their phone, and the monthly fee on a longer lasting phone would be lower in a competitive market.

> The problem is not that people don't care about quality, it's that they are not competent to judge it and marketing does the rest.

I disagree with this.

Just a small background: I was around in some of the cultures that value quality (e.g. Switzerland, Germany (in some aspects), Nordic countries, etc.), and the biggest issues that I have with the modern concept of quality are 1) quality is not property anymore but instead is something that "someone needs to tell you 'cause you're not capable to see for yourself" and it gives not only a lot of avenue for status signaling but as mechanism that I call "veil of sophistication and exclusivity," and 2) due to the economies of scale, lack of education in terms of taste (aesthetics), and due to the number 1) most of the quality industry became a pervasive mechanism to place huge premiums that does not match with the marginal utility.

One simple example that I can think of is about the car industry, specifically the German auto industry for luxury cars.

With the new competitors from China and the US, several people are perceiving that, in relative terms, those new competitors are bringing more perceived and felt quality in comparison with the European brands.

Some editions of Mercedes you pay more than 100K in a car with a lot of plastic in its finishing, very dubious vehicle dynamics (if you're outside of the nice german/european roads) or if you need to operate in the 40% vehicle performance, awful spare parts coverage outside of Europe, and way inefficient (due to sandbagging and green washing) engines in terms of performance x value.

I can go on and on bringing several examples of this "Premium Scalping" in a lot of products: Beer, Wine, Fashion Industry, Watches, etc.

It feels like we are not talking about the same thing. I totally agree with you regarding "luxury". Buying a luxury Swiss watch can be somewhere between status signaling or art; you don't need a luxury Swiss watch to get sufficient time precision.

But I was talking about quality: how does one compare two laptops costing respectively 400$ and 800$? It regularly happens to me that friends ask help choosing a laptop. Sometimes they blindly trust me when I say "in your situation, I would buy that". Often though, they're more like "okay but you like computers so of course you would want a 'rolls-royce', but for me I think the cheaper one will be enough". Where actually my opinion was that both are not good enough for me, but the cheaper one is a piece of crap for everybody and the less cheap one is good enough for this particular friend.

The thing is, I can't blame them for not knowing how to compare two laptops. And the one thing they understand is price: they see two laptops that look similar, and one of them is half the price. The assume similar quality and therefore go for the cheaper.

Again, it's not that they don't care about quality, it's that they fail to estimate it.

I'm not sure computers are a good example, there are objective tests that can be made to compare two computers, or at least numbers to point at to explain to your friends why one is better than the other.

Are you sure? Before buying the laptop, which test can you (or some reviewer) run that will say if the keyboard will start having issues after 6 months or if the lid will break after 10?

When you look at the numbers (I presume you mean the number of CPUs, their frequency, the amount of RAM, etc), on the paper they all have something similar. How do you know if one has higher-quality RAM than the other?

There are lines of products (like macbooks or thinkpads) where you can check the quality of earlier models, but macbooks and thinkpads are on the higher end. My friends who want Windows don't go for thinkpads...

I agree with this. For a lot of people where midrange-ish kind of specs more than fulfil their compute needs, the spec list practically doesn't matter. So long as they tick some basic numbers it'll be fine. With their needs a gig of RAM is a gig of RAM for the most part.

But that's not really the thing with the laptop recommendation question. It then comes down to how good of a hinge on the screen. How much flex does the body have when you actually hold it and use it. How janky are the ports. Does the trackpad and keyboard feel terrible to use? Do you feel like you risk cracking it in half tossing it in a backpack and carrying it across town? These are things where there aren't necessarily hard benchmarks and can be difficult to ascertain by just looking at listing photos.

Outside of some things like Thinkpads and Macbooks I often have a difficult time making real laptop recommendations without actually going to the store and holding the machine or hearing a trusted(ish) reviewer comment on the relative build qualities. It can be pretty easy to tell case rigidity when its in your hands. You can tell if a hinge feels like crap or not moving the screen a few times.

Where are the objective tests between touchpads, which is one of the most important ergonomic aspects of computer usage, and where MacBooks have been way ahead of competition for about two decades? Just the touchpad adds $200 value to a MacBook compared to other laptops.

I'm not sure how you are disagreeing with the comment you are replying to.

> With the new competitors from China and the US, several people are perceiving that, in relative terms, those new competitors are bringing more perceived and felt quality in comparison with the European brands.

So you agree that when people can actually perceive quality, they car about it, right

Didn't you just prove their point / agree with your post? The German car pricing example fits right in the "people can't judge quality adequately and marketing does the rest" narrative:

People buy overpriced cars that are not actually high quality.

You/marketing are telling me about how these chinese cars are higher quality and I should by them. While most people have no Idea whether "green engines" are good or bad. I could take your word for it and believe that they are inefficient. But that sounds bogus given that efficiency is a cornerstone of "green".

For the tools that we use day-to-day and week-to-week, it should be impossible for us to not be a judge of quality. A have a tale of ladles... those pieces of kitchenware that we use to slop soup into our bowls. For years and years, I'd only had really horrible, shitty ladles. Those plastic-handled, plastic-everything-ed pieces of garbage that Walmart buys in volume for 3 cents each and sells for $12.99, you know the ones I'm talking about. With bizarro neon-green colors that are so flexible that you know there must be three dozen banned-in-the-United-States plasticizers in them.

And if you could find one that's just plain stainless steel (with or without a nice wood handle), it was paper-thin steel, stamped into shape, that no one had ever bothered to grind/polish the burrs off the edge.

Then, just a few weeks ago, my wife and I were checking out this tiny little Korean grocery store. And the owner apparently orders everything from some Korean supplier. He had several different sizes of ladels. Stainless, in what must be 3/16ths, all the edges soft and beveled. The shape was nice too, not something rough and rushed, but looking like someone who cared about design actually spent time on that. And the small one was like $3.89 and the large was $7-something. This did not come from a Chinese factory.

Am I a world-renowned ladle expert? Do I have a PhD in ladelology? No. Hell, as a utensil, it's probably one that I only use twice a year. I couldn't design a die to make one of these, I couldn't tell you if the hydraulic press needed to be 50tons or 250tons, I'm not very knowledgeable at all about any detail that matters. I just care (some interesting psychology there... childhood trauma or something).

I don't think anyone needs to be especially qualified to judge the quality of products that they do or will use. Everyday experience should suffice, and the only people who might not manage that are kids who have just recently graduated and mama's not doing their laundry for them anymore.

I understand that you generally agree with me: people care about quality.

> I don't think anyone needs to be especially qualified to judge the quality of products that they do or will use.

In your example, though, what you have done is try multiple models over multiple years, while the use-case hasn't changed one bit. So you have found an example where you could actually test multiple products yourself, and then decide which one you like better.

Many times it's not like that. If you buy a smartphone today, you can't test 4 different models for 2 months and then choose. So you will have to pick one. And in a couple years, when this one is not good enough, you will have to buy a new one. But everything will have evolved: websites will be even bulkier and slower to load, mobile apps will be more Javascript wrappers on top of cross-platform frameworks etc etc that made them faster to write, etc. So the new phone you will buy will not compare to the old one, because it won't live in the same world.

Therefore you end up in the same situation: you need to buy a smartphone, you can test 4 different models for 2 months, and you don't know if the ones that are more expensive are better.

> In your example, though, what you have done is try multiple models over multiple years, while the use-case hasn't changed one bit. So you have found an example where you could actually test multiple products yourself, and then decide which one you like better.

Isn't it a bit puzzling that inferior ladles proliferate, though? You don't need to work in catering or have any particular training to recognise superior ladles, but it's more difficult to buy a ladle of reasonable quality than an inferior one. Why is that? I can think of a few possible reasons:

1) Because a sufficiently large proportion of buyers are too inexperienced to know better? Maybe they'll choose the high-quality option next time. This could explain buyers' behaviour - often including mine - but I don't think it explains the behaviour of retailers or manufacturers with brands to protect.

2) Because people pay so much more attention to big purchases than small ones? You might use a ladle quite frequently, and even an inferior one might last longer than a smartphone, so it might warrant some thought even though it's inexpensive.

3) Because too many buyers are poor? If I correctly understand the comment you're replying to, the inferior ladles were actually actually less expensive, but cost could contribute to other cases of buyers choosing worse value products.

4) Because people are suggestible, and the decision about which to buy is partly made for them? Maybe the inferior ladles are more expensive because of the resources put into putting them in front of so many buyers.

I think that for cheap stuff, people don't think too much. They will buy what they found. But if they find a choice of 3 ladles and can know which one is better quality, then the quality will matter.

It's just that they won't spend 2 years finding a Korean store. And for manufacturers, it seems like they make more profit by just building worse quality in the first place.

And that's another point: people do care about quality. Manufacturers do not. Manufacturers care about profit. And economists believe that both align perfectly, for some reason I don't get.

Or the place you went to buy a ladle... aka the poster above suggested the Korean store, but typical bozo is in Walmart already.

I have a prefab solution: avoid shopping at Walmart and their ilk, get familiar with a wider range of stores. "Oh I'm about to go to the big city for the first time in 6 months, time to stock up on puerh tea, because i can't get it locally..."

For long time I used to think about crappy ladles and why steel ones in decent shapes not available in US stores. The kind that I had in India would last lifetime. Finally I found these kind of things in webstaurant store. Seems this kind of stuff is readily available in catering/ restaurant supply stores. Things mainstream stores sell is all inspired from Tv, media celebrity cooking etc. This stuff is more fragile but supposedly fancy looking. I now have stuff more practical, reliable and all steel (or at least part that touch food) from catering stores.

You can buy a good ladle in a US retail store, you just have to pay $30+ for it: https://www.crateandbarrel.com/crate-and-barrel-stainless-st...

For something that should last forever, $30 isn’t too bad.

It’s basically impossible to get a quality product at a Target or Walmart type store.

Crate and Barrel is decidedly for the market segment of "more money than ability to discern quality and wants social status". The last time I went into one, they had $70 ice bucket tongs that looked amazing but had no teeth, which totally defeat the point of ice tongs.

> nobody would go for the worse quality, right?

Some people would, some people wouldn't. Informing people is still important (and something that has been actively destroyed basically everywhere, for decades), so people can make the best choice for their situation.

Also, some people won't make the best choice for their situation. That's also ok for most choices.

Sure, but that's not quite what I meant.

I meant "if you could provably show them". Of course, if I tell you "this one is 20% more expensive but it will last twice as long", you have no reason to trust me. But that's a problem of trust, not a problem of how much you care about quality.

If quality provably means it's cheaper (because it will last twice as long), then it's completely irrational to buy the lower-quality, more expensive one. The whole idea is that people don't have a way to know about the quality for sure in advance, so they can't take the decision based on that.

> If quality provably means it's cheaper (because it will last twice as long), then it's completely irrational to buy the lower-quality, more expensive one.

No, it's not "completely irrational", and also not everybody acts rationally.

People exist in all kinds of contexts and situations. You won't be able to predict what the best option is for every single person.

It's a thought experiment. I am telling you: "What if, for this person, in this context and situation, we could know for sure what is the best option? Would that person go for the best option or not?" and you answer "it's not possible, you cannot know".

You are right: we cannot know (that's the reason for the debate), but that's beside the point. The point is that in my opinion, if people could know for sure about the quality when they make their choice, then quality would matter to them.

I think their point was that it can still be rational to buy the item that is 20% cheaper but will break in 50% of the time. Additionally, lots of people will choose to buy the worse option because they like it's branding or whatever other irrational reason.

> I think their point was that it can still be rational to buy the item that is 20% cheaper but will break in 50% of the time.

But that's not my thought experiment at all. I fix the rule for my thought experiment that is meant to convey my point. One can't change my experiment and then say that the modified experiment doesn't work...

> Additionally, lots of people will choose to buy the worse option because they like it's branding or whatever other irrational reason.

I strongly believe that they resort to irrational reasons when they don't have convincing rational ones. Again: if they don't know which one is better, they may as well take the one that looks better or that is cheaper or that their friends have. But if they could know, for sure, which one was a better deal?

> But that's not my thought experiment at all.

Your claim was "if one could prove that the item which costs 25% more will last twice as long, then any rational actor would buy that one". But this is not true: a rational actor which can't afford 25% more will not care about the increased quality, they will rationally choose the shoddier good, fully knowing that it's going to break twice as fast. So yes, this is exactly your thought experiment.

> I strongly believe that they resort to irrational reasons when they don't have convincing rational ones. Again: if they don't know which one is better, they may as well take the one that looks better or that is cheaper or that their friends have. But if they could know, for sure, which one was a better deal?

It's an extremely well studied phenomenon that people don't behave like rational market actors. Unless you define "a better deal" as "the one they would be happiest with", in which case by definition anyone would prefer the "better deal".

But consider this case: some people end up caring for and loving old beat up cars that they struggle with every time they use, and that they spend inordinate amounts of money and time keeping working just one more month. Those cars objectively cost far more to maintain and have worse performance and worse externalities (pollution) than other cars they could buy. Most other people would not even buy such a car. But, again, some people love them and would not in a million years sell them to buy a "better" car. So how do we handle those people? I would call them irrational market actors. You could also call them rational market actors with a highly unexpected value function; in that case if "know for sure which one is a better deal" was specifically tailored to their unusual tastes, then you would be right, and we're just quibbling over definitions.

> fully knowing that it's going to break twice as fast

Oooh, I misunderstood your "but will break in 50% of the time". I understood that you meant "knowing that they have a 50% chance of it breaking anyway". As in "you say it's better, but in reality it has a 50% chance of breaking anyway". Which was bending the rules :-).

So yeah, now that I understand it correctly, that's a valid point: if your finances are so bad that you can't afford to pay 25% now, even though you know for sure that this 25% will be compensated to the quadruple in 1-2 years, then it is rational to take the lower quality one. But I wouldn't think that this is the case for most of the western population, and importantly that wouldn't mean that people don't care about quality.

So yeah, valid extension of my thought experiment, I apologize :-).

> I would call them irrational market actors.

I agree, emotional value is irrational (doesn't mean it's a bad thing). And this is a valid and interesting point! However, I believe that it is not in the scope of what the feature article described. People do not only care about quality, and people are not always rational. But the article is arguing that people don't care about quality. I am not saying that the most important thing for people is quality; I am saying that people do care about quality. As in, "given the chance, quality is part of the decision-making process". Not having enough money to afford it or having an emotional attachment to something may both take over quality, but it doesn't mean that people do not care about quality.

What's your opinion on that?

> So yeah, valid extension of my thought experiment, I apologize :-).

No problem, I get how my language was confusing, sorry about that.

> Not having enough money to afford it or having an emotional attachment to something may both take over quality, but it doesn't mean that people do not care about quality.

I would agree with this, actually. People definitely do care for quality to some extent, at least for many categories of products.

You fixed the rule for your thought experiment to emulate something that doesn't exist. Congratulations, you got the result you expected, and it's completely useless.

Yes, for your thought "product" that has a single quality of "how long it lasts" the "people" that all have the universal characteristics of wanting to reuse it indefinitely and absolutely no practical restrictions to cash-flow will pick the better quality one if they are acting rationally.

I see, you're not actually interested in the discussion, you just want to win an argument. You win, I'm out.

Economics has the idea of expressed preferences.

So for instance, with that framework, if you choose the cheaper item instead of the inconvenience of understanding the tradeoffs between the items, you obviously care less about quality than price and convenience.

You would be right if it was possible to estimate the quality of the items.

But it generally is mostly impossible. Of course you can read about the products, you can read reviews, and then you can build some kind of belief around that. "From what I read, and assuming that the company doesn't bankrupt suddenly, and assuming that they won't deploy an update that erases all my data, I believe that this one is better". But that's a belief: you don't know anything about the hardware that is inside (other than a list of a few high-level components you think you understand, maybe) or about the software that is running inside.

Yes, but that's because the cost of evaluating the quality is very high, often infeasibly so.

(Seriously, it's pretty difficult. Read reviews? They can give some idea, but it's rare that they do any rigourous testing, and they can be corrupted. Have a brand or specific model that you like and has a good reputation? How do you know they haven't started to cash in on that by cutting quality but still charging the same prices?)

This is where Project Farm provides its value. Consumer Reports ostensibly once filled a similar niche.

But building trust in brands like Project Farm or Consumer Reports suffers from the same bootstrap problem.

IMO that is economists trying to argue that the market is working when the market is actually failing.

If people would like to be informed of the tradeoffs but do not have the information the end result is not optimal.

In the case of phones lasting twice as long may not be a good thing. There are many phones out there that are old enough they don't have 5g which is standard even on the cheapest phone now. All 3g phones are junk today because no towers exist they can talk to - probably no phone left as 3g, but plenty of cars are still 3g only and thus cannot phone home (farmers paid to upgrade their tractors because they find their tractor calling home useful - the radio itself was designed to run for 50 years, but it was still obsolete)

Is it just me or is 5G not an appealing feature? When I had good 4G signal I never felt limited in terms of speed. Now that I have 5G everything’s the same. What more am I going to do on my phone besides watch one 1080p video stream?

That depends. 5G at low speeds allows for much longer range which I like when I travel in a very remote area. 5G also allows for much faster speeds at very low range, so if you are in a very crowded city you will notice. For most people most of the time they are not in such a remote area that only 5G towers can be affordably built, nor are is data so congested that they would notice the shared bandwidth limitations.

About once a year I do travel through those remote areas where my 4g phone never got service, but as soon as I got 5g I had service (there are still areas so remote I don't get 5g service either)

"look, this smartphone is 20% more expensive, but it will last twice as long and it will be more convenient for you in ways you can't understand right now", nobody would go for the worse quality, right?"

But that assumes if you pay more quality increases as well. But that is not always the case. Case in point my iphone which has display issues within 2 yrs and apple is expecting me to pay half the price of the device to fix it. Against my old android which is 4x cheaper and still working great after 2 yrs.

Quality should not be associated with price.

> But that assumes if you pay more quality increases as well.

It's just a thought experiment. In this situation, people would probably go for the higher quality, because they would know it's higher quality.

In reality, it's very hard to assess the quality of a product, that's correct. And that's my point: people do care about quality, it's just often very hard to have a good idea about it.

>But if there was a way to correctly tell people: "look, this smartphone is 20% more expensive, but it will last twice as long and it will be more convenient for you in ways you can't understand right now", nobody would go for the worse quality, right?

I am not sure if we are living in the same world. No most people absolutely do not make rational choices like that. No matter how you tell them.

Most importantly what you think is best for people is stil a perspective. Especially in the context of tv.

I find it incredible how many times I have to re-explain this. Between those literally trying to find which model of smartphone costs 20% and lasts twice as long and those telling me "there is no point to wonder, because we can't know in advance if it will last twice as long".

Let me restart: the article says that "most people don't care about quality". I disagree, and offer a thought experiment. It is not real, it is just a way to share an idea. "Imagine a world where a person is offered a choice between two smartphones, where one is 20% more expensive but will last twice as long. Imagine that this person confidently knows this (it is impossible in real life, but let's imagine it for the sake of this argument). And obviously, imagine that the person does not have an irrational reason that will completely ruin the experiment, like someone putting a gun on their head and telling them which one to buy. Do you think that this person will say "I will take the one that is obviously worse, because I am completely irrational", or do you think that this person will say "well, the more expensive one is apparently a better deal due to the quality guarantees I know to be true"?

The point that I am trying to make being: quality matters to people. It's not the only thing that matters, and they don't always have a way to know about the actual quality of whatever they buy. But if they could know about the quality, then it would probably be part of the decision process. Therefore it feels wrong to say "most people don't care about quality".

In real life, people don't buy the better quality products, that's a fact. But it does not mean that people don't care about quality.

>nobody would go for the worse quality, right?

people who cannot afford to go for the better quality would, in fact where Smart phones are concerned I think it is commonly considered that for most metrics iPhone is better and people often buy Android because they cannot afford iPhone (of course except for specific subsets of HN who will not buy Apple for various social/cultural reasons)

> I think it is commonly considered that for most metrics iPhone is better

I would debate that.

One thing is that iPhone is one, whereas Android is thousands. It's easier to trust an iPhone than a random Android phone. But there are certainly really good Android phones that are cheaper than iPhones. It's just hard to estimate the quality, again.

I know you are not probably part of this group - but can we stop just comparing Android to iPhones? There are Android Devices which are in a lot of metrics way better than an iPhone and vice versa a lot of iPhones better than a big set of Android devices. But still, depending on different factory like price, ecosystem, habit etc., people go for one or another. It's not 2010, where iOS has been the only (relatively) mature OS.

Really not an Android Fanboy, and had devices from both worlds but this one thing is bugging me out as it is just a blatant product of Apple's "our devices are better because our name is on it" marketing - and it's bugging me out.

This is the most natural thing I've found here in a long long time.

Agreed. This is the part of the article that I really took issue with:

> You may take pride in your craft, but the majority of people physically cannot notice the difference between good and bad design. Not even subconsciously.

Particularly the "not even subconsciously" part thrown in at the end. Because, if this were true, then YouTube creators would not pour an insane amount of effort into the THUMBNAILS of their videos. Marketing talent would not study human psychology and do A/B tests to figure out why certain ads sell products and others don't.

There is so much theory and study behind design, attraction, pattern recognition, contrast and standing out from the crowd that even though the average person doesn't necessarily notice how these strings are being tugged on, it doesn't mean that they aren't having an influence .

And I don't even mean to this to say "we're all sheep being brainwashed by corporations." That's actually far from my point. My point is that attention to quality affects the user experience regardless of whether the user can recognize or articulate WHY.

In a photograph, and think about YouTube thumbnails as a good working example, the "mise en scene" is critical for supporting the clarity of the message. There's a reason that the majority of thumbnails contain pictures of peoples' faces: the human brain is distracted by faces... so if you're trying to pull attention to your thumbnail, it's a good method. Why are these faces usually obnoxious? Because the facial expression also communicates the tone of the content and how the viewer is intended to feel about it. The ALL CAPS sections in titles and captions, while annoying, also has a purpose: to highlight key words that describe the promise of the video.

All of this speaks to the quality of design. And users might not know why they prefer certain designs over others. Why certain websites sell products and others don't. Why certain videos and articles get clicked on while others don't. That doesn't mean that, therefore, "most people don't care about quality." It means that, like you said, most people don't have the relevant domain expertise necessary to be able to judge why the quality of one design "feels" better than the quality of another.

>Particularly the "not even subconsciously" part thrown in at the end. Because, if this were true, then YouTube creators would not pour an insane amount of effort into the THUMBNAILS of their videos. Marketing talent would not study human psychology and do A/B tests to figure out why certain ads sell products and others don't. ...

>There is so much theory and study behind design, attraction, pattern recognition, contrast and standing out from the crowd that even though the average person doesn't necessarily notice how these strings are being tugged on, it doesn't mean that they aren't having an influence .

I think that is the point he was trying to make. Marketers have done all that study to completely destroy the ability of "the majority of people physically cannot notice the difference between good and bad design. Not even subconsciously." Having destroyed the ability to tell shit from shinola, they are now free to sell shit at shinola prices.

> Marketers have done all that study to completely destroy the ability of ...

Yes, they abuse whatever mean we have of judging quality to sell us their product. But that's not the point the article is trying to make, I think. That's my point: people care about quality. It's just that it's generally very hard to estimate the quality. And on top of that marketers are paid to make it harder.

> > You may take pride in your craft, but the majority of people physically cannot notice the difference between good and bad design. Not even subconsciously.

> Particularly the "not even subconsciously" part thrown in at the end.

It's a bit of a tautology: people don't notice things that are targeted to guide them subconsciously. I don't know if that's the point the author was making; either way, it was kind of weak.

You're confusing marketing of a product (and the quality of the design of the marketing) for design of the product itself. The articles is claiming that most people will not notice, even subconsciously, if, say, a laptop is well designed (say, whether it has a robust body, whether the keyboards clack, whether the function buttons and inputs are placed in usable places).

This is completely orthogonal to whether the marketing campaign for said laptop is well made and hits certain conscious or unconscious buttons to make you want the laptop.

Now, I don't agree with the author, but the reasons are completely different. I would say that differences in design that end users don't notice are not relevant. Any design school that holds that one design is better and another is worse where the end users of those products wouldn't notice the difference is, by definition, a form of snobbery and a bad school of design.

> You're confusing marketing of a product (and the quality of the design of the marketing) for design of the product itself.

Why did you read this confusion into my post? Was it because I'm using YouTube thumbnails as an example or referring to A/B tests that websites employ to measure engagement?

These were concrete examples used to describe abstract concepts relating to human behaviour. The quality of a design affects how a user engages with the product, how they feel about the product and how they enjoy using it. I never really considered "marketing" in my comment at all. I was talking about demonstrable design elements (composition, mise en scene, copy, typography) and how those elements combine to affect the quality of the finished product .. and how that quality impacts user experience. This applies whether the "product" is ad copy or a physical object bought from the store.

The thumbnail of a YouTube video is marketing for that video, it's not a part of the video itself. It's commonly quite divorced in tone (and sometimes even content) from the video.

It's also a good example: you can have an excellent video, but if the thumbnail (marketing) is not spectacular enough, people won't watch it. Another example about how people care little for quality.

I think more accurately: it takes them a while to learn to judge quality, and in the meantime "at least it's cheap".

Also most people can't actually afford quality, even if they're aware in the long run it's more economical. Same reason pay day loans exist.

Yes buying one solid dining table that'll last a lifetime sounds great, but a poor person just doesn't have that dining table budget.

So I think many of these articles come down to middle class cluelessness, and sometimes narcissism. They either can't understand the situation of the poor, and so come to the conclusion they don't care about quality. Or they're fully capable of understanding but don't want to let this opportunity to subtle brag their superiority go to waste.

Serious question: how do you understand ABBA? Because I consider music listening a journey and songs that I dislike now might be my favorite ones in the future. But I really don’t know how it could lead me to like ABBA.

ABBA is one of the most iconic and beloved pop groups in history, whose songs are still enjoyed by a good chunk of the planet, 40+ years since they were first released. I'm not sure why it's baffling that you too could find something to enjoy about them, when so many people clearly have and still do.

Not sure I get your point, are you saying that I should enjoy them because many people do?

No, it's perfectly reasonable to not like popular music. I was only responding to what I perceived to be amazement in your previous post that someone is claiming you might find a way to enjoy ABBA: I was claiming that, since a lot of people do enjoy it, it shouldn't be hard to imagine that you could find something to like one day.

Conversely, if you said you don't know how you could possibly enjoy, say, the Plastic Ono band (Yoko Ono's band), then it would be harder to suggest it's even possible (not to say that enjoying them, for anyone who does, is in any way wrong!).

My understanding is that they say "it seems pretty reasonable to think that ABBA is of good quality, given all that", and then "because it is good quality, then it doesn't seem completely implausible that you may end up liking it someday".

But again, you don't have to of course :-). But I agree that it feels more likely that you may end up enjoying quality music you don't like now than bad music you don't like now!

Is it ABBA in particular, or do you not like the style in general?

Because there is a difference between quality and preference. You can totally dislike the Mona Lisa, but in its style, it would be very hard to say that it is not high quality painting.

And that brings me to another point that I think goes against the philosophy of the featured article: music is acquired taste, if I can say. We generally don't like music we don't understand. Some styles are easier to get (maybe because the music is just easier, or because it's broadcasted everywhere you go), some are harder. I like a lot of different styles of music (from classical to metal through rap, pop and jazz, etc). But in each of those styles, I did not immediately like everything. Of course there is good and bad quality, that's one thing. But the other axis is what I could understand of the style.

In rap, I started with very melodic songs, and then I started to get the rhythm and flow, and then downright the culture and the meaning of what they would say. I still don't like everything, but vastly more than I used to.

In jazz, I liked big bands and "soft" stuff like this until I started studying jazz. I forced myself to listen to jazz styles I really did not enjoy, up to free jazz. I regularly listened to good quality songs (I had to trust my music professor about the quality, of course) in those styles for a few months. And after a while (and I can't say precisely when it happened), I started enjoying some of those, until I could enjoy songs in all of them. Again, I don't like everything, but by learning and getting used to new styles, I got to enjoy them as well.

Of course, in doing all that effort, I improved my musical expertise. So I am now more critical about quality, which I feel like I compensate by being more open to very different styles. By voluntarily staying ignorant, I doubt the author enjoys all styles of music. So maybe they don't ruin the low-quality music of the style they are used to, but on the other hand they miss the high quality music in all the styles they are not used to :-).

Those women's voices are incredible.

He also completely misses the point here:

> Audiophiles complain about MP3 compression and crappy headphones. Most of us just want to listen to our tunes, not listen to the equipment.

I won't even bother. It's not possible to discuss with people having such bogus opinions.

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