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Lego IKEA Bygglek – First Look
- DocG 6y ago√ I like shopping in IKEA √ I like Lego √ I like boxes..
- themodelplumber 6y agoThat's pretty cool. Definitely would get younger me to stop groaning and sighing for the remainder of the shopping trip, it's unique, and the price seems reasonable.
- dividedbyzero 6y agoFeels obvious in retrospect, because both brands have a pretty similar vibe (at least for me). I don't really get it, though – is this fundamentally different from a plain old Lego Starter Set, apart from the nicer box?
- mc32 6y agoLegos to me are bit more premium than Ikea. Ikea for the most part, with some exceptions, comes across as cheap and disposable —the opposite of Legos which have durability built in. The main commonality may be the “design language” but not so much the engineering language. Ikea plastics are cheap and degrade rapidly (compared to Legos’s premium polymers).
- asdasfasdfasdf 6y ago> comes across as cheap and disposable I think they get a bit of a bad rep because, yes you can get a $10 MDF nightstand that will probably last a couple years... but once you stop scraping the bottom of the barrel, their mid-range and up stuff does complete really well on quality and price, especially if mid-century style aesthetics appeal to you...
- jedberg 6y agoThat may be true, but most people go to Ikea for the cheap stuff, otherwise they would go to a "real" furniture store.
- nkozyra 6y agoWell someone's buying the more expensive stuff or Ikea would stop bothering.
- crazygringo 6y agoIt really depends on the category. If you're going to IKEA for a sofa, mattress, or coffee table -- yeah, it's going to be super-cheap stuff that doesn't last. But IKEA's phenomenal at a whole range of other stuff that's just as high quality but far cheaper than elsewhere. Lighting/lamps, storage boxes, kitchenware, a lot of their chairs/stools, bathroom, and so on. They're also really good for a lot of "basic" apartment pieces like bookshelves, dressers, storage cubes. A lot of people shop for those things at IKEA not for the price, but simply for the aesthetics. People with a lot of money and good taste still often wind up buying a bunch of stuff at IKEA because it works well. Not for a nice wooden coffee table mind you, but a nice white media stand for sure.
- colechristensen 6y agoThe problem is the “real” furniture with a decent design aesthetic and quality is 10x the cost. The rest of “real” furniture shopping involves sifting though large volumes of future which are nearly as bad as ikea’s worst quality for some multiple of the price, or of decent quality with a “grandma’s house” look or cheap suburban look. Reasonably priced, reasonably designed, furniture of reasonable quality is very hard to find. Expensive furniture would own me, as in the value lost through worry about damage, time spent finding, or moving hassle outweighs the value gained with aesthetics, durability, and other quality. Ikea furniture is often of questionable quality, but frequently of acceptable design and price such that i can’t find anything of middling price that i actually want. In other words, I want a $300 couch or a $3000 couch but can’t find or am not willing to spend any more time looking for something in between.
- Waterluvian 6y agoI thought this too until I started buying the solid wood IKEA furniture. That stuff will be with me for a long long time.
- rags2riches 6y agoI believe my kitchen table was bought at Ikea by my parents inlaw in the seventies... It's a solid build and has been moved many times over the years. The chipboard stuff often breaks when moving between homes.
- mc32 6y agoSolid solid or the finger jointed stuff glued together stuff —I’ve tried their pine and it was on the thin side. The solid solid stuff is as expensive as dedicated furniture stuff. They also have pretty veneered stuff but it’s not to my taste.
- Waterluvian 6y agoI can’t help with taste but Good furniture is expensive. I realised that when I bought my house and my dad gave me some wonderful pieces from his grandfather. Not that ikea is an heirloom but good furniture is bought once and wears gracefully. The kids have put dings in the stuff but they’re just that. Dings. They’re not fake wood texture peeling to expose particleboard. I encourage people to reconsider the value of good furniture.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago> solid wood IKEA furniture Interesting, got a list somewhere.
- selectodude 6y agoIf you spend what you think is way too expensive for ikea furniture, that’s the stuff. I have a $400 ikea table that is basically bulletproof.
- techdevangelist 6y ago
- Hamuko 6y ago>Ikea for the most part, with some exceptions, comes across as cheap and disposable I wouldn't really call IKEA furniture "disposable". I've had my glass IKEA desk since like 2006 or something. And even though my MARKUS chair recently broke down, I did have it for 5+ years and I got it exchanged for a working one under warranty as it has one for 10 years. I think most of my stuff is from IKEA and that pretty much all of it beats stuff from other stores at the same price range. My TV stand is quite nice and robust and only cost me like 120 euro. I only found really shit, low-quality alternatives for the same price where the doors didn't have any soft closing and there were no ready-made holes for cable management.
- vidarh 6y agoAlmost my entire house is furnished with IKEA stuff, bought between 10-15 years ago, and I've so far never had to throw stuff away because of wear or breakage. It's not like any of it will be family heirlooms handed down through generations like really high end furniture easily can, but I can easily see most of it lasting another 10-20 years or more. My couch has survived 10 years of my son treating it as a trampoline, for example. Last couple of years I've had to constantly try to get him to stop jumping onto it from a running start through the living room...
- sukilot 6y agoWhat's not to get?
- hbosch 6y agoTo me this looks more like LEGO Starter Set Classic, and actually appeals to me quite a bit more.
- lloyddobbler 6y agoMe, looking over the printed product images... ...is that a double-decker couch I see?
- hanspragt 6y agoI got that reference!
- kazinator 6y agoWhy now, and not thirty-plus years ago? I suspect this may be the result of some lengthy negotiation process. IKEA could have brought in off-brand LEGO-compatible blocks years ago. It seems like a no-brainer. Any half decent dollar store in North America has them. Maybe IKEA carrying off-brand LEGO-like blocks would have pissed off LEGO, who protect their brand quite vehemently. So then if you want real LEGO(tm) blocks that are simultaneously IKEA-branded, you need a deal; and who knows how long that had been brewing.
- colechristensen 6y agoIkea seems to have a relatively new effort to do these kinds of collaboration. The other one i’m aware of is with Teenage Engineering https://www.ikea.com/us/en/news/frekvens-limited-collection-pubcd6f39e0 https://www.ikea.com/us/en/news/frekvens-limited-collection-...
- crooked-v 6y agoThey've also got a thing going on with Sonos, and the Ikea-branded Sonos-compatible speakers are the cheapest ones you can get for that ecosystem currently.
- xyzzy_plugh 6y agoWow this stuff is pretty neat. Shame it's not available everywhere.
- dbcurtis 6y agoDanes and Swedes collaborating? I am thinking the big motivation here is the tax-free booze on the ferry ride to meetings.
- 082349872349872 6y agoBroen/Bron was just a warmup?
- johnyzee 6y agoIt's funny, the biggest Danish multinational (by some measure) is a company that lets people build stuff themselves, and so is the biggest Swedish multinational. Is this something in Scandinavian culture? Denmark is also overrepresented in software tooling, such as inventing C++ (Stroustrup), PHP (Lerdorf), Turbo Pascal and C# (Hejlsberg), Unity, etc. Even Denmark's actual biggest corporation (by market cap), Maersk, became big by inventing modular, stackable shipping containers!
- mongol 6y agoDIY is quite Swedish. Not uniqly Swedish, I can't comment on that, but historically (until end of the 80s especially), the income tax levels made it so expensive to pay someone else to do things such as paint your house, renovations of various kinds etc, that people either did it themselves, or paid someone to do it "without receipt". There was a tax reform around 1990, that put a more reasonable ceiling on taxes on labour, and later also additional tax exemptions for some renovation work, which turned a black economy more white. Today it is much more common to pay for home renovations, but I think a DIY culture remains.
- smhg 6y agoTo add to the software list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Bak_(computer_programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Bak_(computer_programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Heinemeier_Hansson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Heinemeier_Hansson
- usrusr 6y agoThe new Viking Age is upon us. Soon they will have all our yellow round 1x1.
- owenversteeg 6y agoAs for the set (and the LEGO economics that HN loves), 201 pieces for €14.99 is 7.45 eurocents per piece, which is lower than the average price per piece for all sets (around 11 cents per piece) but around the average price for this style of sets (which is around 6/7 cents per piece.) However, unlike most Bricks and More sets, this one includes two minifigures and some nifty window/door pieces.
- nicoburns 6y agoI think the main issue with Brick sets is supply. My step-mum ran a toy store a few years ago, and Lego wouldn't sell her sets of bricks unless she bought several hundred pounds worth of the themed sets.
- afandian 6y agoFor some reason I feel really saddened by that. The management at Lego are the custodians of a significant cultural artifact. Really seems like they've lost their way.
- pmorici 6y agoLEGO went through a period of financial difficulty around the turn of the century. The pivot to more themed and licensed brand sets is one of the things credited to turning around the company. They still sell the basic stuff but they can’t survive on that alone.
- the_arun 6y agoNot available in IKEA, USA :(
- jdmichal 6y agoTFA says October was the planned launch. This early release in Munich might be a test market thing.
- nxc18 6y agoI’m getting ready to move to a new apartment this fall and I’ve also recently gotten back into Lego so this is a welcome surprise! Storage has always been a pain point given the amount of LEGO you need to have to be able to freely model things. Aside from this LEGO has been innovating in other areas. I absolutely love the new art pieces - they’ve got mini sets [1] and larger pieces [2] that are going to be used in my new home. They’re a little different from traditional LEGO use but I appreciate them branching out. They look expensive until you actually try to buy wall art for real and suddenly they’re a bargain. There are lots of adults now with nostalgic LEGO memories and they seem to be doing a great job capitalizing on it. [1] https://www.lego.com/en-us/themes/brick-sketches?icmp=LP-SHD-Standard-MT_DIsruptor_Brick_Sketches_Star_Wars_lifestyle-TH-MT-HJWHURE7YT https://www.lego.com/en-us/themes/brick-sketches?icmp=LP-SHD... [2] https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/andy-warhol-s-marilyn-monroe-31197 https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/andy-warhol-s-marilyn-mon...
- em-bee 6y agoi am still working on that storage problem. however i think transparent boxes are better for lego
- asdff 6y agolook into hardware storage shelves
- em-bee 6y agocould you elaborate that please? how does hardware storage look like? do you mean, these tiny drawers for screws and elecric parts? i am not sure that helps much. many parts are hard to categorize. you'll end up searching through many drawers. i think larger groupings that don't sort every part into a different drawer are better. i just haven't found the right kind of shelf for that.
- Fiahil 6y agoI'm using this : https://www.amazon.com/Keter-17185073-KETER-boite-outils/dp/B003NUIUEW https://www.amazon.com/Keter-17185073-KETER-boite-outils/dp/... The little boxes come in different size and are removable from their enclosure. the boxes are -of course- stackable
- ruffrey 6y agoMy heart skipped a beat, thinking for a moment the possibilities of LEGO-like furniture. Oh well.
- annoyingnoob 6y agoWith so many lego collaborations, special sets, special parts, I kind of miss the days when lego was more simple and required more imagination.
- jedberg 6y agoThere is a good documentary on Netflix and a different good one on HBOMax about lego. If you watch both there is some overlap and also different info in each one, but you get a pretty complete picture of why they do all the special sets. The summary is that they almost went bankrupt and licensing basically saved them.
- teddyh 6y agoIt’s interesting that you identified the documentaries by topic and where to find them, not by title. Is this the Google generation, or does it herald a return of the AOL keywords? Or, in other words: What are the titles of those documentaries?
- jedberg 6y agoTo be honest I wrote that because I couldn't remember the names and was too lazy to look it up. On Netflix it's The Toys that Made Us and on HBOMax its A Lego Brickumentary.
- ObsoleteNerd 6y agoLicensed sets saved them from bankruptcy, and now that they're healthily profitable again they've been releasing more "classic" sets like the Lego City, Lego Creator (and Creator Advanced), and Technics sets. As someone who's been into Lego for life, and as a middle-aged parent who still regularly buys sets to build myself independent of the sets I buy for my kids, I'm more than happy for them to crank out the licensed sets (which I ignore) in exchange for them to still be here making those Creator/Technics ones for me.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
- x87678r 6y agoforget that, where is the new mindstorms inventor 51515?
- kart23 6y agoIkea has been doing a lot of cool collaborations these days, with a wide variety of focuses. Its pretty cool to see and hopefully they produce enough so its not sold out everywhere on the first day.
- pengaru 6y agoHow is this not just spam for a new IKEA item?
- jerrysievert 6y agohacker news is for topics that we might find interesting: > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. (from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) this definitely falls into the former for me.
- kaonwarb 6y agoReceiving 42 comments so far supports that quite a few of us find it sufficiently interesting!
- acvny 6y agoFinally a reasonable comment. I was looking for it thinking that I've gone crazy and it's only me who thinks there is not much to talk about an advertisement for an overpriced crap item. Most of those comments seem to be paid content as well as the original article.
- galaxyLogic 6y agoWhat are LEGOs good for? They are good for explaining Graphical Linear Algebra: https://graphicallinearalgebra.net/2015/04/29/dumbing-down-magic-lego-and-the-rules-of-the-game-part-1/ https://graphicallinearalgebra.net/2015/04/29/dumbing-down-m...
- ggm 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuisenaire_rods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuisenaire_rods
- 082349872349872 6y ago"Modular arithmetic leading to group theory" can also lead to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyominoes:_Puzzles,_Patterns,_Problems,_and_Packings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyominoes:_Puzzles,_Patterns... , which is the book that made a lot of theory CS click for me. (The Cuisenaire colours would make a nice alternative to resistor colours for low-bandwidth covert channels. I enjoyed one of the Aubrey/Maturin books in which the ballroom has been decorated with the following signal flags: http://tmg110.tripod.com/SigFl/sig-1.gif http://tmg110.tripod.com/SigFl/sig-1.gif , encouraging the maritime wallflowers who could read them to "engage the enemy more closely.")
- throwanem 6y agoThat's really adorable! I need to pick up that series again, and actually read it all the way through this time...
- agumonkey 6y agoLess advanced, there was a few pdfs on the geometrical and arithmetical ratios used by lego pieces (including technics) that shed light on the brilliance and versatility of the product. It's not this one but the spirit is there https://joncraton.org/media/files/UnofficialLEGOAdvancedBuildingTechniquesGuide.pdf https://joncraton.org/media/files/UnofficialLEGOAdvancedBuil...
- thdrdt 6y ago
- ggm 6y agoAs long as its rooted in blocks, I'm all for it. If it becomes rooted in precast IKEA specific shapes, its no better or worse than the Star Wars branded trash. If it becomes dominant, and removes the impetus for non-directed play in blocks, its net-negative. Lego now is not what it used to be. Minifigs changed it. If you want what lego used to be, Meccano or roblox or some of the other undirected play spaces may be better.
- backprojection 6y agoI understand and agree with your sentiment, but just don't buy the uni-tasker type lego. They make plenty of sets where most if not all of the parts are general and can be used for undirected play.
- ggm 6y agoYou can repurpose a lot of the space and themed bits, and some of them are truly wonderful, the ones which functionally allow bump-to-bump placement. And for lego fanatics you can buy specified unit-sizes in specified colours, so there is that. We got a lot of themed play stuff, fences, trees, animals. I do recognize how much kids love themed play too. Back in the 60s/70s I had the trainset, which included a "one noise forward two noise stop three noise backward" controller. There were two or more generations of the train motor: the one with rubber anti-slip on the wheels and the one without. depending on how much you enjoy crashes, either were useful...
- Cerium 6y agoI have always been fond of duplo blocks for this reason. They are totally undirected and up to the imagination. The resolution is too poor to really model what you want, so you have to dream instead. As a child my "tree house" was an 6x6 box on top of a 2x2 tower.
- xyzzy_plugh 6y agoI wish this were true but the new stuff is just like Lego -- one-off shapes and special pieces, lots of decals and characters and animals. It's still pretty great though!
- agumonkey 6y agoIt's getting more and more used as an embedded thing. Many times people showed ideas how to integrate legos for practical use (electronic cases, lego patterned strip to attach stuff). Quite fun
- vidarh 6y agoAs with a lot of IKEA product names, this references what the product is: 'bygg' is 'build', and 'lek' is 'play'.
- legulere 6y agoLek also refers to LEGO which is short for danish leg godt (play well)
- jo-m 6y agolek (Swedish) = leg (Danish), so lek is short for leg godt in the same sense play is short for play well ;)
- hansbo 6y agoIt is also one of those cases where one word in English becomes two words in a different language. Play as in playing a video game, or chess, or something similar, is called "spela", while play as children do is called "leka".
- vidarh 6y agoThis is an interesting pair, as both leke/lege/leka and spille/spela apparently comes from proto-Germanic, but via Norse (leikr) for the former and German (spelen/spielen) respectively. Interestingly Old English apparently has "lac" which belongs to the former group, while "play" is also of Germanic origin, but derived from words implying moving about and being engaged in rather than directly from the more specific Germanic words for play. When I looked it up I expected to see one of the more usual examples when there are pairs like this of one Norse/Germanic source and one imported and bastardised from latin or a romance language.
- cultofmetatron 6y agoI really wish lego would create expansion packs for mindstorms. In mind, thats their most underrated set.
- troydavis 6y agoFor anyone using this for actual modular storage, Everblock is also worth considering: https://www.everblocksystems.com/ https://www.everblocksystems.com/ It's remarkably well constructed. Here's some examples: https://www.everblocksystems.com/modular-furniture https://www.everblocksystems.com/modular-furniture
- mrfusion 6y agoHave you used them? What was your experience?
- troydavis 6y agoYes, they did everything they claimed and they’re really sturdy, even without the rod that can be inserted in a hole in the center. The two downsides I know of are that shipping is relatively expensive (these blocks are the opposite of flat-pack..) and that the shelves can’t be placed right next to one another on the long edge. I wanted to use 2 6x48” shelves (https://www.everblocksystems.com/accessories/48-lintelshelf https://www.everblocksystems.com/accessories/48-lintelshelf) as 1 12x48” and the current shelves don’t permit that. It appears to be possible but isn’t. Their team told me before I ordered. The team seems very committed. I also recommended it for a large set of modular office walls/phone booths a few years ago. That company used it for years and was very happy. For the right situation, I’d gladly buy it again.