Can top-quality products survive these days ?

[Puppy]

Watching the situation with ThinkPads for last months I'm asking myself whether top-quality products in general can survive in current economy driven by (mostly crappy) consumer products for the masses. I don't have anything against the mainstream category (I use a lot of such products) but I'm getting a bit scared than even willingness to pay extra money for good products does not guarantee their availability.

I expect the same situation with audio CDs. I'm ignoring current hype with online music in MP3 and other loosy formats because the quality is questionable. But I fear that Audio CD (or similar format) becomes rare in few years. Options ? None. The same goes for DVB-T television where the quality is much worse than old analog PAL system.

[qviri]

Did high-end amps and speakers die after the introduction of boomboxes? How about professional cameras during the present digicam craze?

[Puppy]

Did high-end amps and speakers die after the introduction of boomboxes? How about professional cameras during the present digicam craze?

Well ... not yet. But the situation with notebooks is alarming enough, isn't it ?

[jdhurst]

Over the very long haul, quality seems to me to be inexorably decreasing. Some electronics like Thinkpads have countered that trend, because electronic quality can improve with smallness and integration. So my T41 made by IBM is a very good, reliable machine. Whether Lenovo will keep it up continues to be a debate.

However, I purchase a CRT Televsion about once every 15-20 years (so I have had exactly two colour TV's in my life, and still have the second one). I don't know anyone who expects an LCD TV to last 15 years, but they are ruthlessly expensive given their apparently short life.

I have tools (Craftsman, Utica, Kline, Rigid and so on) that are so good that, for example, the ultra-hardened Utica diagonal cutters in my toolbox are older than me, and they are the only pliers I will use to cut piano wire. Indestructible. There is no such thing any more.

My fountain pen (Parker) got me through University and still works. No longer made, no more parts, nothing like it unless you wish to pay thousands. My is the sterling silver pen, and I paid 30 dollars for it.

I got my Knirps umbrella in University and it remains in good order. I have cheaper ones that I am willing to lose, and they break in a brisk wind.

My Tekronix Lab scopes were the end of a breed. 1 Ghz real time is as fast as it got in practical use and that is the 25 year old 7104 model I have. The newer digital scopes remain expensive, but if I believe what I read, they are difficult to repair and so don't last long in the scheme of things.

I could go on, but you get the picture. ... JDH

[GomJabbar]

Over the very long haul, quality seems to me to be inexorably decreasing. Some electronics like Thinkpads have countered that trend, because electronic quality can improve with smallness and integration.

Exactly the way I see it.

I am consistently frustrated when I go to replace something and find that the newer models are a lower build quality, are missing features, or an equivalent is no longer available.

I know Puppy is lamenting the apparent demise of the Flexview panels. While I personally have not seen one, I can understand his frustration. You find something you really like, and they pull it from the market.

Beancounters...
Lemmings...

[anthean]

Although its not exactly the same . . . my father gave me a slide rule when I was in high school. That slide rule (which I never used--calculators reached the mass market about then) could have withstood a lifetime of use. Many in previous generations, in fact, did. Now, I keep it in memory of my father.

Perhaps another example . . . the calculator that replaced that slide rule cost about $200. It was as solid as a rock (thank you, HP). I got at least of decade and a half out it.

Now, with calculators as cheap as they are, who cares how long they last ?

Something has changed. Perhaps not features, but certainly longevity.

[AlphaKilo470]

I don't know. If you go onto eBay, you'll see that the HP48 series still has a pretty active market going. In fact, I have a 48GX with broken screen on it's way here that I intend to fix by adding the screen pulled from a somewhat rought condition 48G.

I have another HP 48G that I never leave home without.

[ronbo613]

I still use a twenty year old fishing reel(in salt water). Cost about $25 when it was new. I'm sure I have tools that are at least that old. I have a 17 year old Toyota pickup that runs great.
That said, I would say that the overall quality of merchandise in general is not as good as it was in the past, but when I go to the store and buy a finished product for less than the cost of the raw materials needed to make it, I wonder what the heck is going on.

[jdhurst]

I am doing some work in my basement today: some electrical and some table work (model railroad).

For the table work, I need to erect risers to hold the sub-roadbed (plywood) and level the roadbed vertically and horizontally. So I need to clamp the risers to the gridwork, level, then screw in. So I need several C-Clamps.

Now I have C-Clamps in my tool chest. I have 5 inch, 3 inch and smaller. One side of the big clamp says "Craftsman", the other side says "Malleable" I remember buying them (30 years ago). They work, and they are essentially indestructible. They are guaranteed forever.

I need more C-Clamps, so I go into my nearby Home Depot, and they have C-Clamps. Made of Plastic for crying out loud

What kind of corrupt engineer, what kind of idiot manufacturer and what kind of truly useless, doofus retailer would sell Plastic C-Clamps. I could bend of those things out of true in ONE use. Iron C-Clamps? Nowhere to be seen.

So forget the C-Clamps for now.

I go down to the basement to add a couple of outlets for the train table. I am hooking a #14 wire around a screw and there is a bit too much wire left over. I need a little pair of diagonal cutters.

I look in my tool chest, and pull out my Utica 41-6 dykes. Perfect for the job. Tuck deep into the box and nip off the end.

Those blessed Utica dykes are older than I am and no matter what I cut with them (including piano wire), I have never marked or dulled them in the 40 years I have been using them. That! is quality in spades. I have good solid Klein pliers as well. Excellent tools, but no match for Utica.
... JDH

[mattbiernat]

Now, with calculators as cheap as they are, who cares how long they last ?

Something has changed. Perhaps not features, but certainly longevity.

I got $30 Texas Instruments calculator. It has been bent (45 degrees) when i wanted to brake it in half after failing a course in chem. It has been thrown against floor after failing a course in physics. It still works after 5 years of abuse. And i have a feelings its going to get me through grad school as well... I found a little bit different pattern than some people here. I think that the cheaper stuff that is not very expansive to produce is usually of high quality. The more expansive stuff such as laptops, ipods etc... is usually of poor quality. My hunch is that most people want higher end electronics without care how long its going to last them - they just want something new or to show off.

[rushdy]

Yeah, exactly.

What annoys me more than low quality products, are the ones engineered to break. Much like those C-Clamps jdhurst mentioned.

The classic example that gets me going is a stainless steel hand whisk I saw. The ones with a handle and wheel you turn. Great stuff, except they'd used cheap plastic cogs! Ha, jokers...

[K. Eng]

Watching the situation with ThinkPads for last months I'm asking myself whether top-quality products in general can survive in current economy driven by (mostly crappy) consumer products for the masses.

I think so. With respect to business notebooks, I've seen quality decline throughout the late 1990's and early 2000's. However, newer stuff has improved. ThinkPads are more durable due to magnesium roll cages, the Dell Latitude D620 and up are far and away better than the creaky C series, and HP's stuff is much better as well.

Even in the consumer space, things have gotten better. The HP dv2000 series is far sturdier than the flexing, creaking dv1000 family.

[BillMorrow]

I got $30 Texas Instruments calculator. It has been bent (45 degrees) when i wanted to brake it in half after failing a course in chem. It has been thrown against floor after failing a course in physics. It still works after 5 years of abuse. And i have a feelings its going to get me through grad school as well... I found a little bit different pattern than some people here. I think that the cheaper stuff that is not very expansive to produce is usually of high quality. The more expansive stuff such as laptops, ipods etc... is usually of poor quality. My hunch is that most people want higher end electronics without care how long its going to last them - they just want something new or to show off.

i think you need to cool your jets..

relax..

let the TI calculator live..

IRT Quality and the slow decline thereof..

IMO the problem is that technology is moving so fast, todays top product is obsolete in two weeks..
so why bother making something that will last 100 years when it will spend 99.9% of its life in a drawer..?

[The Spirit of X21]

Hmmm....

I get the feeling that 200 years from now all that will remain of the hardware of the early twenty-first century will be the electronics manuals that no one ever reads.

[AlphaKilo470]

What needs to be focused on is how cheap quality can actually be dangerous. Back in June, a day or two after buying my used Infiniti, I went to AutoZone to buy new battery clamps and all they had were these cheap looking clamps that were cheap looking metal and had plastic release tabs in place of bolts. Well, I install them in the car not thinking a thing about them and then later that night, when I'm going across a multiple lane road to get into the parking lot of a grocery store, my car dies totally as in no lights, no engine, nothing. Luckily there was a cop right behind me who was nice enough to push me in the parking lot but that's beside the point for now. When I got into a parking space and popped the hood opened, I immediately noticed that one of the battery clamp's plastic tabs had come undone. Imagine if this had happened on an interstate at 9am as opposed to a suburban road at 10pm.

However, not all products are cheap these days. I got my hands on a Lenovo 3000 N200 earlier this year and it's more structurally sound than my ThinkPad T23. I'm also using the same cell phone I had back in late 2004 (Samsung X105; there is no way to destroy this phone).

I think one reason we think products of past times are higher quality is that after a couple of decades, a significant amount of the cheap products from a given time will have fallen off the face of the Earth. It's indisputable that there are many more cheap quality products being produced now than 20 years ago but in that regard, there are many more products being produced now than 20 years ago.

[GomJabbar]

While I generally agree with the theme of this thread, I sometimes find the converse to be true. Recently I went to look for some cables to hook up a DVD/VCR player to a DVD recorder. I wanted a S-Video, a Component Video, and a Digital Optical Audio cable. I went to the local Radio Shack, and all they had were expensive relatively high-end cables. All of them were over $30 each. The store clerk said that was all they carried now. I did not want to spend that kind of money for quality I did not need. I ended up finding the cables I wanted at Walmart for about 1/3 the cost of the ones at Radio Shack.

I once saw Andy Rooney on '60 Minutes' commenting on the packaging of products. He remarked that the vacuum cleaner he had for the last 15 years finally broke a belt. He could not buy just one belt, he had to buy a package of two. That's 30 years worth of belts.

[crashnburn]

I think part of it is the relationships between lifecycle, expectancy, trend, volatility & innovation in every sphere.

For the very same reason that you would not want to use a 300 MHz Pentium-2 or a 486 that costed way more than a powerful laptop today.

Part of it is market demand, market evolution, shift of revenue / profit from high margin low volume to low margin, high volume (you spread the $profit per unit to more people).

Lets say you had ONE unit product costing X and your profit was 0.2X. If you dont sell it you lose on X & also on 0.2X. Your risk is bet against that ONE UNIT.

On the other hand, if you have a product costing X/4 your profit ratio is similar but you sell 3 of out of 4 units. You still recovered 75% of that RISK that was BET against the sale of 4 UNITS.

This could ALSO work in reverse. But, largely the trend is to HEDGE / SPREAD your risk over MULTIPLES - given how the people behavior in the markets work.

PS: Sell millions of toyotas or sell a couple of thousand aston martins. You choose where to sell & who to sell to.

[crashnburn]

Although its not exactly the same . . . my father gave me a slide rule when I was in high school. That slide rule (which I never used--calculators reached the mass market about then) could have withstood a lifetime of use. Many in previous generations, in fact, did. Now, I keep it in memory of my father.

Perhaps another example . . . the calculator that replaced that slide rule cost about $200. It was as solid as a rock (thank you, HP). I got at least of decade and a half out it.

Now, with calculators as cheap as they are, who cares how long they last ?

Something has changed. Perhaps not features, but certainly longevity.

At the same time COMPANIES want REPEATABLE business. Shorter product lifecycles AMOUNT to REPEAT BUSINESS.

If your car lasted a 100 years then they wont sell anymore. At the same time given how the market works in todays day & age MOST of us would get BORED of a car that lasted a 100 years.

We get bored of things faster, we need instant gratification, we need CUSTOMIZED / PERSONALIZED things..

So..

[jdhurst]

<snip>
At the same time COMPANIES want REPEATABLE business. Shorter product lifecycles AMOUNT to REPEAT BUSINESS.

If your car lasted a 100 years then they wont sell anymore. At the same time given how the market works in todays day & age MOST of us would get BORED of a car that lasted a 100 years.

We get bored of things faster, we need instant gratification, we need CUSTOMIZED / PERSONALIZED things..

So..

That level of quality (100 years) is a bit extreme in my opinion. I have only ever driven Volvos, for example, so they get repeat business, but I drove 2 for about 18 years, so the repeat business cycle is clearly long. But I have no problem with long repeat business cycles and it seems to me that manufacturers could and should adjust instead of engineering to ensure early demise.
... JDH

[mattbiernat]

But I have no problem with long repeat business cycles and it seems to me that manufacturers could and should adjust instead of engineering to ensure early demise.
... JDH

compare toyota or honda versus ford. the first two are known to have cars that just won't die while fords give up their souls after 100,000 miles. the thing about cars is that they don't change so much within 5 years, computers however do change a lot. seems like people are more willing to buy a new computer every 2 years than to buy one expansive one that lasts them for 5 years. IMO this is exactly what drove many companies such as dell and hp to make cheap and affordable consumer products that break down in a matter of months.

[dsigma6]

Just a quick recap if you've read this far:

- Quality is down, and it's only going to get worse.

- Ford sucks.

[crashnburn]

I think part of it is the relationships between lifecycle, expectancy, trend, volatility & innovation in every sphere.

For the very same reason that you would not want to use a 300 MHz Pentium-2 or a 486 that costed way more than a powerful laptop today.

Part of it is market demand, market evolution, shift of revenue / profit from high margin low volume to low margin, high volume (you spread the $profit per unit to more people).

Lets say you had ONE unit product costing X and your profit was 0.2X. If you dont sell it you lose on X & also on 0.2X. Your risk is bet against that ONE UNIT.

On the other hand, if you have a product costing X/4 your profit ratio is similar but you sell 3 of out of 4 units. You still recovered 75% of that RISK that was BET against the sale of 4 UNITS.

This could ALSO work in reverse. But, largely the trend is to HEDGE / SPREAD your risk over MULTIPLES - given how the people behavior in the markets work.

PS: Sell millions of toyotas or sell a couple of thousand aston martins. You choose where to sell & who to sell to.

[mattbiernat]

you have a good point. but how do you explain increasingly decreasing laptop quality?

[wearetheborg]

you have a good point. but how do you explain increasingly decreasing laptop quality?

If may be decreasing for particular companies, but not in general. Dell's quality has improved. LCDs have improved. I havent handled the new T61s but I have been led to believe they are more rigid, and dont have the LCD touching trackpoiint problem.