Why does the author equate expensive with fragile? My rule is “buy nice or buy twice”. My 20 year old All-Clad saucepan is still going strong. It costed 3X compare to others. I see no reason why it won’t last another 10 year. My Weber charcoal grill is 15 years old. Store outside all season around, it still works while my neighbor’s 4 year old home cheapo grill is a rust bucket. His grill is 50% cheaper but I wouldn’t eat cooked on that grill.
Huh, I read the article differently. I read it as more of the difference between cheap sunglasses and a nice brand-name pair. With the cheap ones if they get lost/scratched/smashed you don’t end up caring as much and have less worry about it.
But… I could easily have read into the article wrong.
(PS I agree with your “buy nice” sentiment. And Webers are fantastic grills.)
If you haven't tried a nice pair of sunglasses, you should. It's a game changer. I got a pair of Maui Jim at company raffle, it was one of their high-end ones and man, I can't believe how clear I see on sunny days. Like I said, 'buy nice or buy twice". I don't think you need to buy the absolute highest end on everything, but cheapest is almost never the right choice.
>Why does the author equate expensive with fragile?
He doesn't. His last paragraph literally starts "If buying an expensive product makes you a hostage of it"
Also keep in mind he's in Morocco. A $150 smart watch breaking is absolutely devastating when you earn $800 a month[1] and don't have access to the same warranty and support that people in the US do.
[1] This number is based a sample size of 1: a telecoms engineer who I was talking to (in fluent English) back in 2019 about hardware startups. It may not be indicative of the average salary in the region and is almost certainly above average.
You are absolutely right about the situation in the developing countries. Here in India, an Apple product costs around 150% of what it cost in USA. But when it comes about after sale service, they are absolutely horrible. Xiaomi after sale service is miles better and cheaper than Apple. I had an iPhone X which was just shy of 2 years old. I dropped it last year from a 1 ft height and the thing doesn’t turn on after that. When I took it to an Apple’s authorised service centre (they don’t directly provide service in India), they quoted such huge amount for replacement (yeah, they don’t repair here) that it was cheaper for me to simply buy the latest model at that time, an iPhone 11.
Everytime I buy something (usually from Amazon US to Haiti), I had to review several products just to be sure I don't end up with a crap one. You have to buy the expensive one because of the better build quality. I have an two Sennheiser headphones that are still going strong (one is a renewed product) while my friends buying cheaper headphones have already spent more than me.
In 2009 I bought an old 1960s muscle car. The interior and underbody were all nice but the paint was really needing an update (scratched, chipped, etc).
Fast forward a few years, extensive bodywork, and a whole lot of cash and the car had show car quality paint.
But there were certainly days that I missed driving around my old, beaten up paint job car. I would leave my coffee mug on the roof as I got in, would park wherever I wanted, and I generally didn’t worry about the car much. Now I fret over parking it and have to walk from the back of any lot.
I’m not complaining… I certainly love driving around shiny car. But it’s an interesting observation that the cheap/beaten up version had virtues that I miss - to the article’s point.
There's a certain aesthetic to this though - the beater that survives. Often these things were expensive when new.
Music gear, machine tools and well loved laptops are great for this.
A 1960's car (survivorship bias!) has this quality in a way that cheap electronic crap tends not to. The connectors wear out. The battery dies. It just kaputs for no discernable reason and it's not economic to fix.
You want stuff early in its lifecycle where the manufacturers accidentally over-engineer it because they're not confident about the lifespan yet - or that kind of "Toyota" stage in the lifecycle where they got making it good cheaply fully down.
I reckon you'd have to go through a lot of cheap smart watches to find a proper "beater", and the whole function of the devices tend to fight against this with interface standard and apps that render them quickly obsolete.
I think everybody evaluates the quality they need and want. I want the nicest sound system for my computer and top notch headphones but for a vehicle I just need something that gets from A to B. I'm not really sure what his point is.
There is obvious value in choosing less expensive products from an environmental standpoint, I suppose. Where it gets tricky is obsolescence, safety, durability, supporting local manufacturing, sustainable sourcing, etc.
You can own a good-quality, expensive product and at the same time acknowledge that its lifetime is limited.
I do it all the time without worrying too much.
What tool do you need for what purpose, is the right question to ask.
Are you using it as a professional, as a hobbyist or out of curiosity ?
Then choose the product from your real needs.
I tried a cheap bracelet for many years then I felt frustrated because of the inherent limits of a 30$ electronic bracelet. It wasn’t very nice as well and in some situations plain ugly and because I didn’t want to have a nice watch + an ugly cheap 30$ bracelet at the same time it was annoying … then I found that it wasn’t precise enough with sports.
Since I bought a more expensive smartwatch, I can use it even when I’m going out, it’s really better with sports and synchronisation, and I just take the best care I can and I put it away if I do some kinds of manual work.
I don’t think of the price anymore after some months to a year it’s just sunken cost. But I enjoy it every day for it’s aesthetics and features.
People used to buy 500$+ watches for decades and the watches were just giving time (and the current day). They could’ve just bought a 15$ watch isn’t it ? It’s the same time on it.
Nothing changed, we have a choice and buy to invest for utility, pleasure or both.
Usually more expensive tools last longer than cheap ones based on the same use. That is by design, more expensive materials vs cheap materials. So cheap stuff is usually made for occasional and not really heavy use. Every time I used heavily or often a cheap product, it broke.
Harbor Freight Tools. Why buy a fancy, durable specialty tool when you only need it for one project? Buy it cheap, use it once, forget about it, sell it in a garage sale a decade from now. Don't forget to clip their coupons, they used to give out an unusual amount of low quality tarps free with any purchase.
Absolutely. I’ve DIY renovated my whole house with hard-wired harbor freight tools, none have failed and cost a fraction of the price. My philosophy is if it breaks I’ll be the top of the line equivalent. So far that has only happened on my drill, and only because I had to go from 12 to 20 volts for more power. (Coincidentally it’s the only battery tool I own)
I see it as more 'what can be replaced/repaired' and how long of a timeframe that is, as to how much I concern myself with what I use. There are also well-made things that are cheap but the converse isn't always true. It's preferable to me to own things that last and don't require being gentle with than merely being cheap/disposable.
I bought a pair of Sennheiser HD-25 Mk. II headphones specifically because I appreciated that they're high quality (and I preferred the sound signature to previous Sennheisers I've owned), designed to withstand being knocked about and every single part is replaceable. The company has been producing virtually the same headphone and making its parts available for more than 30 years.
By purchasing such a product I'm getting something that I likely don't have to worry about finding a replacement part or the entire product in 10-20 years (already owned them for over 10 years).
This attitude is the reason why we have so much e-waste. We need to stop treating technology as disposable.
"The worst-case scenario is I’ll get a new one if it stopped working for some reason." Sure, just chuck it in the trash and let it end up in the ocean—or dispose of it properly and it ends up in an e-waste pile halfway around the world.
I agree. Also I find the word "disposable" to be q misnomer since it's actually very hard to dispose of this junk properly. One time use plastic, e-waste etc really should be called "non disposable" since that crap is still going be around somewhere 1000 years from now in the oceans and land fills.
It’s easy to safely dispose of this stuff, there simply isn’t enough of an incentive to do so. Sure lead and mercury for example are toxic, but they where toxic sitting in the ground before we extracted them in the first place.
I mean it's a natural progression of how products are designed and made. We have electronics that are relatively easy to break (either through normal use or casual misuse), and then are simply not economical to repair.
All sorts of things (both supply and demand side) are misaligned with respect to minimizing wastage as a whole.
And that all being said, there really is something valuable about the 'cheap product' thinking - and that's specifically the mindset of decoupling your enjoyment and utility of a product from its up-front cost. And this is valuable, because the very thing that we need to do to minimize waste is to increase the up-front cost of like... everything.
> I mean it's a natural progression of how products are designed and made. We have electronics that are relatively easy to break (either through normal use or casual misuse), and then are simply not economical to repair.
The primary reason this happens is that companies don't want you to repair their products because that hurts their revenue. It's only natural in a system that rewards profits above all else and has little to no mechanisms to enforce compensation for the externalities.
A huge portion of the dynamic is that people will buy a $398 device over a $399 device. It isn't just companies relentlessly pushing unrepairable stuff.
Not disagreeing, but part of the underlying reality is that companies are not financially responsible for the externalities they contribute to (such as climate change) or post-consumer costs such as disposal. The result is that the "true" cost of the product to society is not reflected in the consumer-facing price.
I think regulation should be a last resort, but in this case, some kind of taxation or regulation is necessary, because there is absolutely no incentive to be good stewards of the Earth within our current version of capitalism.
It can sure help, but then, as a company, you might want to find a way to avoid the regulation to keep the price low if that's what your customers care about.
Maybe some form of labelling could have a greater real impact: let the customer know what the real impact/cost of the product is, and let the customer made an informed decision.
No, the primary reason is that being unrepairable is simply a side effect of being the least expensive way to manufacture it and people buy primarily on cost. I used to work for an outfit that made wearable consumer electronics: customer being able to repair something was never on the table. Hell, even with the right equipment, it was difficult for us to repair them sometimes, if we had a limited number of prototypes and needed to get a broken one working.
Yes, it seems like it's in the company's best interest to make something unrepairable, but the reality is that repairing a cheap electronic item simply doesn't even occur to most consumers.
I'll admit upfront that I'm not a fan of more legislation but let's look at that.
Lack of documentation: some components are provided with docs under NDA, so you can't get them anyway.
Can't find the components for sale: many components are only sold through approved representatives and their MOQ (Minimum Order Quantity) may be in the thousands.
Design choices: are you planning on legislating how a device is designed?
Look, I'm all in favor of Right To Repair: I'm a cheapass who still uses a 35 year old snowblower (that I've had for 15 years) because fixing it is cheaper than a new one and I Hate Waste. I repair everything. I'm practically on a first-name basis with the guys at eReplacementParts.com but still even I accept that there's a limit to what's reasonably practical. When a watch uses a COB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_on_board) part with the only documentation available in Chinese, you have to accept that it's probably not going to be repairable. And the reality is that that's a common state of consumer products these days.
Cherry-picking wearable consumer electronics as a class that intrinsically suffers from diminishing returns with respect to repairability doesn't negate the fact that there's a crapton of other classes in a common household whose design space isn't fundamentally constrained in the same ways but nevertheless artificially suffer from unsustainable lifecycle trade-offs that could have easily been designed around or avoided altogether if objectively targeted from the onset.
The "problem" is that people get what they pay for. The majority of consumers prioritize cost, so they get price-optimized devices that are difficult or impossible to repair.
When you prioritize, e.g., reliability or ease of service, that problem goes away, but now stuff costs more. Worth it for commercial/industrial products, but it tanks the consumer market.
My Kitchen-Aid mixer has had its sacrificial plastic gear replaced a few times because I keep overloading it with bread dough. It was designed to be repairable. My cheap Walmart TV, OTOH, is in the garage awaiting the annual electronics scrap pickup because although I know what the problem is, for $200 (about what I paid for the mixer 20 years ago) it simply isn't worth my time fixing it when I can buy a better one for the same price.
As maxerickson notes, I believe it's really important to note that this is an issue that impacts and stems from both sides. While I agree that manufacturers are incentivized to increase revenue, we should also be clear that the likely end-game is that everything becomes more expensive upfront.
We can't dance around with bullshit and tell people that right to repair (depending on the flavor), and sustainable pricing, and proper pricing of disposal will just result in the same or cheaper upfront costs - it won't - and we need the right answers for the obvious questions like "won't this just screw over the poorest people"?
But it still works, it is still in use, so no e-waste.
A product you don't use is waste all along. Maybe it will sit in a drawer for a decade or two before it becomes obsolete and you trash it. But it doesn't mean it lasted for decades, it means you kept your waste for decades.
A cheap product you use to its fullest because you are not scared of breaking it is less of a waste than an expensive product you hesitate to use.
I find another beauty in cheap products, which is the optimized cost-engineering that goes into them.
For example with electronics, it's possible to use two common-valued (=> cheap) resistors in series, rather than a more obscure resistor of twice the value. This both reduces cost, and shrinks the list of unique parts.
Of course the idea of cost-engineering is to reduce the cost, while maintaining adequate function and quality. It loses it's charm beyond that, as evidenced by so much of the garbage flowing from certain places these days.
I really prefer a model where the market niche for the budget conscious is filled by second-hand high quality products. Much less waste gets produced this way, and no one has to suffer using cheap plastic crap.
I do this with all the technology I own - be it cars, phones, computers, audio gear, motorcycles, sports equipment... you get the best of both worlds.
Of course, in order for this to be possible, these products have to be repairable, and that's why we have to fight for it.
Or maybe don’t buy stupid cheap gizmos that you don’t really benefit from. If I don’t want something enough to buy a quality instance, I probably won’t buy it at all.
For exactly the same reason I use mainly iPhone 7, it cost me ca. $100 and if I lost it today I would buy another one tomorrow without even thinking about it. I use it for various tasks without worrying about it for a moment. On the other hand, there is nothing cheap about it, it feels very solid and works reliably. I would never feel the same about, say, iPhone 12 Pro.
I get a perverse pleasure sometimes in taking extra care of cheap products. It's like a paradox - you're supposed to treat, say, a dollar store whiteboard with rough disdain, since it's only a dollar and you can just trivially go buy another one.
But there's an almost ironic fun in taking good care of it, handling it well, cleaning it carefully, making it last.
And of course you can often be more rough and careless with expensive and heavily built products - it's one of their benefits. But they're often more clunky, with an unnecessary leather carrying case, 3x the weight, etc. Not always a clear win.
While I agree with the general idea outlined in the article, I'd go for cheap AND sturdy (mil surplus usually checks both boxes), thinking that worst that happens you'll buy another one is toxic to the environment and your finances.
I think an element most of the comments are missing is the element of salary. Whether you "worry" about an item is related not to its absolute price, but to its price relative to your salary. So whereas the writer would be wary of swimming with a smartwatch "because it costs a fortune", someone else would not because it didn't cost a fortune relative to their bank account.
I think software developers (especially US-based ones) are kind of the secret "nouveau riche". They make a lot more than people realize, and I think they themselves don't often realize how much more money they make than most people.
I have the opposite problem where I'm terrified to invite regular income people to activities because of the cost. If I invite someone to an event/activity and their response is "That's kind of expensive," I feel embarrassed that I put them in a position to have to say that.
*See my prev. comment in a same comment branch.
I have similar experience being with my close friends who don't make a lot of money. We never go to expensive restaurants or expensive places. If we get together and I think the bill will be high, I just cover for myself, my gf and person in the group who makes the least. That pretty much covers 75% of the bill. My friends are OK with that, because they know, I always there for them and never will use it as point of leverage or being show off.
Been there. But what I try to do is just invite them.
Like literally tell them before hand the food is on me. Or find some stupid reason to pay for them.
Even if it's just two pizzas, but it's at my place, I'll just pay and say it's our home and its on us. But if I bring the pizzas to someone's place I'll say it's their place so it's on me, lol.
I used to be poor, and always saw people pay for my stuff without second thought. I really love being able to do that now.
You see this in effect in threads about the price of Apple products. People complain about people complaining about a new smartphone being 1200$, saying it's so reasonably priced and they don't understand the complaints. You would see fewer comments like that in a forum not dominated by software developers.
As a software engineer in the US (and I don't make whole lot of money compared to other software engineer), I make more money than two of my closest friends(one has PhD) and my gf combined.
I realized this fact few months ago and made me almost depressed.
The trap I often fall into is buying cheap when getting into a hobby (camping, bicycling), because I’m not sure I’ll stick to it, or because the initial price of entry is high and I don’t want to make the wrong choice buying equipment.
I always end up buying twice. I can’t re-sell the cheap gear, and renting equipment is too time constrained to make up my mind.
That seems the right way to do it, though—buy cheap because you don’t know if you’ll need the good version (and because you don’t yet know enough to distinguish what you want out of an expensive tool)… and if you stick with it, you buy good tools, and if not you’re only out a fraction of the cost. The hardware equivalent of “build one to throw away”.
I think you can go a long way just by skipping the bottom 10% in any market. A £10 pair of jeans is always going to be compromised but there won't be much difference between a £20 pair and £100 pair.
I look for the simplest, least expensive thing that will do an acceptable job with minimal sweat-equity. All of those boxes have to be checked to some degree for consideration...
Cheap products an often be as good or even better than so called expensive products. A lot of times manufacturers will sell the same exact profit multiple prices at varying trim levels with just minor differences in features. For example dishwashers. Our dishwasher broke and we had to buy a “high end one” because the wait time for all the base models “the cheap ones” was over several months. Anyways I quickly realized the high end ones were no better than the base model with only a few minor features you never notice anyway.
> Buying an expensive product is surely more enjoyable. We all want quality products, and everyone deserves the best. But, is it always a good idea?
People often imply "long lifespan" when they buying expansive products, which is not always the case. Take phones for example, a well-made "cheap (inexpensive)" phone now days could last as long as the expensive one under the same usage.
(Heck, the cheap/boring phones lasts way longer than some crazy expensive ones such as Galaxy Fold/Flip)
I have a bluetooth bracelet myself, made by Garmin. And my friend got a similar product from Xiaomi at around half the price compare to how much I paid for mine Garmin. We all brought the device around the same time, around 2 years ago, and both device are still functional today.
However, due to how Garmin designed the product, the glass surface on my bracelet can be scratched really easily. While in the case of Xiaomi, they designed their product in such way that the robber fringe around the glass will protect it from been damaged. The result is, after 2 years of use, my friend's Xiaomi looked almost new, while my Garmin is telling the others that it been abused by a barbarian.
So I think the author has underestimated the "worst-case scenario". No, the real "the worst-case scenario" wasn't "the cheap one breaks", instead, it's "the expansive one breaks".
I've given away things i cherished to a family member. Be it a scooter, or a couch. The new owners just didn't have the same respect for the items and they deteriotated rather quickly.
I think the trick is to not make it free. Maybe sell it, well below market price but just enough to where they'll care.
I hate babying hand crafted items for this reason. Or flagship phones. Conscientiously downgraded to burner mid-tiers that I toss around without worry. I go out of my way to make a knick somewhere ASAP to pop the bubble of new item preciousness. Buying second hand is great too.
With exception of classic monobloc chairs, I really appreciate industrial, mass produced, value engineered products that brought affordability to the masses. Including relatively high-margin Apple products. Most cheap products are still developed by competent designers with adequate production oversign. But ecommerce and cheap global shipping started flooding markets with subpar products or knock offs designed for developing markets (i.e. Chinesium). So one has to be more vigilent with with purchases these days. That said design and quality for indigenous PRC brands has largely caught up with modernization, I wouldn't hesisitate to fill my life with Xiaomi/Mijia products for 1/2 the cost if they were more accessible. No more tier level distinction of same MD player between Japanese / Korean / Taiwan / PRC factories.
This is my exact thought process for keeping my 15 year old car. Never having to worry is a type of freedom I really value that most others seem to ignore.
reply