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Comment by asuffield | Hacker News Reader

It appears that you are placing a very high value on how shiny things are and their presentation. In that case Dyson is probably not for you; they are fundamentally an industrial engineering organisation.

I own that model of vacuum you have photographed, and it's just.... good. Lightweight, easy to push around tight corners, and sucks up everything in my flat in under 10 minutes without ever having to fight it. It makes it very clear that ever other model I've ever used was not very well-designed.

It is not the kind of status symbol that you appear to be seeking. Kirby makes those and I think you'd be a lot happier with their products.

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I don't care about a status symbol. I'm not in the vacuum market right now and already own a miele.

Based on all the hype Dyson tries to generate, their product renders, commercials, sales lingo, etc, I expected this to be the iPhone of vacuums, where it was priced high, because it functions well, and has a great build quality.

Instead, it just looked overpriced, and the quality appeared no better than the vacuums a third of the price. I was disappointed, that's all, it looks like they spent their budget on marketing and the quality of the product came second.

Agree with the GP -- I own this vacuum and it works great. If you're more in the market for a chrome-and-platinum vacuum and don't care as much about the performance, you're probably headed the right direction with what you have.

What may be worth understanding, though, is that there are people who are equally willing to pay money for good vacuums, but whose judgment of "good vacuum" runs much more to "suction power and functional ability" rather than "build quality."

The idea that there is not a single axis of quality, and that different products can optimize for different axes, is not a new one, but it's one that many tech people in a post-Steve-Jobs era seem to have a hard time remembering.

If you're more in the market for a chrome-and-platinum vacuum and don't care as much about the performance

Is no one listening here? I said I care about performance, and build quality. Why can't I ask for both? Perhaps the Dyson performs well. I said I don't have experience with it, but the quality looks cheap. When a product advertises itself as being premium and top of the line, and asks for a high price, I expect both of the above.

Likewise, when I spend money on a phone or laptop, I expect it to feel solid. Don't sell me a $1,500 laptop that's built like a $300 Dell Inspiron.

People are listening, but they disagree with you. The build quality is good as well as the performance. It is made of plastic because that is tough and soft (see previous comments about banging into things). You seem to be saying it should be made of metal and glass because plastic is "cheap", but that would be a worse vacuum.

More than anything else, plastic is light for comparable strength. This is important for something that you're going to be pushing around a lot.

I had a Miele cylinder before this one. The experience of using it was that I dragged it around the flat and needed both hands to manage it. This Dyson model, I point at things, with one hand. It seems to be a combination of low weight, and the ease of pivoting on the ball that means it's rolling everywhere, but the difference is huge.

I suspect also that fewer people have used a Miele (or seen advertising for one) than a Dyson. They are not fancy, but are very, very well made and designed.

I think the point asuffield is making is that you're judging "quality" not based on how it performs, but on how it looks.

I think it might be instructive here to think about how notions of what kind of "build quality" and materials are best might tend to differ between:

a) a jewel-like, highly refined computer that you hold in your hand and touch gently to use

b) an industrial cleaning device designed to be banged into objects on a regular basis, scrub surfaces aggressively, and suck up dusty dirty things, without damaging what you bang it into

Kirbys clean carpet & mattresses extremely well... that's the appeal. I have a really hard time believing anybody sees a Kirby as a status symbol, as "cool", as anything other than highly utilitarian. I think this is why Dyson was so successful disrupting Kirby: they sold these based on function, not looks, and Dyson came in and competed on functionality AND price.

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