7 ms·

After my S5, an SSD, and a Samsung TV, I've learned that Samsung delivers medium/low quality products at high prices through relentless marketing. Any company

After my S5, an SSD, and a Samsung TV, I've learned that Samsung delivers medium/low quality products at high prices through relentless marketing. Any company that needs to advertise as much as Samsung/Apple/Jeep/Nintendo should be cause for skepticism.

tyleo 5y ago
You lost me at Samsung/Apple/Jeep/Nintendo. I’d definitely put Apple in the top tier of phone and laptop quality. Especially w.r.t laptops, the majority of Windows devices seem comparatively low quality. I’m not sure about their other products but I also don’t see them advertised as much. Similarly with Nintendo, they seem to deliver consistently higher quality than competitors. They may not be as fast but they last for years and deliver equal or more enjoyment at a lower price point. A product is more than it’s specs.
- deregulateMed 5y ago
  I could see where you were coming from because Apple doesn't offer budget hardware and it's easy to mistakenly compare a $1000 laptop with a $500 laptop that doesn't have a video card. But Nintendo is notorious for releasing low quality stuff with their IP skinned on it. A product isn't more than it's quality metrics, if you believe so, I highly recommend taking a marketing class.
  - roblabla 5y ago
    > But Nintendo is notorious for releasing low quality stuff with their IP skinned on it. Nintendo is also widely praised for consistently releasing innovative gaming platforms at fair prices. And that's what they tend to market and invest in heavily - I've never seen an advertisement for any of their low-quality cash-grab toys (which, yeah, they do exist, and they do suck...). > A product isn't more than it's quality metrics, if you believe so, I highly recommend taking a marketing class. OP's claim was that nintendo's product are low-quality, sold at high-price, thanks to relentless marketing. But the products being heavily marketed by Nintendo do tend to be high-quality (for instance, The Switch, a portable console that can be used comfortably enough as a home console, with several innovative input methods and a fairly wide range of high-quality games). If you purely look at the hardware specs, it may seem like a low-quality product, but that's not the correct quality metric to use in this case.
    - deregulateMed 5y ago
      Take a marketing class to defend yourself from corporate brainwashing. Nintendo has been literally brainwashing us since we were babies and had no concept of marketing. I'm not even talking about hardware specs. The switch has joycon issues, expensive games that are mediocre, and for some reason you confuse investment and innovation with quality. Wasting money and bad ideas are not qualities. I used to be a Nintendo fanatic, but their systems and flagship games since N64 have woken me up to their quality issues. The fact that people suggested BOTW was a greatest game of all time despite having only 1 temple theme and 3 enemies (with various skins), shows you that we are under mind control.
      - parasubvert 5y ago
        Or, perhaps, you are not in touch with how people evaluate and experience products, unless your intent is dry humour. People love the Switch and loved games like BOTW , Mario Odyssey, etc. because they were the best products Nintendo had shipped in 20 years. I hadn’t owned a Nintendo console since the SNES, thought the Wii was “meh”. They knocked this one out of the park - they managed to make a portable gaming device relevant in a world where everyone has a smartphone. Part of the challenge is that the completion largely do not build portable gaming devices. Apple and Samsung also consistently rank very high in tech support and customer satisfaction indexes. Let’s look at the main alternatives in the smartphone space: Pixel, LG, Motorola, Xiaomi, Huawei. Are these paragons of quality? Or are you comparing against an imaginary standard of quality?
    - Ygg2 5y ago
      > But the products being heavily marketed by Nintendo do tend to be high-quality Didn't they have a few hardware related scandals. Like the famous joy control drift.
      - mcphage 5y ago
        > Like the famous joy control drift. Yep, but that's pretty much it. Every company—even the best of companies—have poor products. The analog sticks on the Switch are Nintendo's worst hardware in decades.
  - machello13 5y ago
    > it's easy to mistakenly compare a $1000 laptop with a $500 laptop that doesn't have a video card. Lol, come on dude. "Yeah I can see where you're coming from, if you're an idiot it's easy to think Apple is good."
- Fnoord 5y ago
  > I’d definitely put Apple in the top tier of phone and laptop quality. Especially w.r.t laptops, the majority of Windows devices seem comparatively low quality. I’m not sure about their other products but I also don’t see them advertised as much. Every MBP/MBA/MB had design flaws. From butterfly keyboard to discrete GPU, only 1 port (USB-C, for battery), etc. They fixed the keyboard problem finally, but from 2016-2019 it was terrible.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I have yet to see a better laptop for 90% of people who want a laptop than a MacBook Air. Battery life, portability, weight, heat production, reliability, adequate performance, price, ports. They seem to have made all the right compromises.
    - OrvalWintermute 5y ago
      I think you might be neglecting to include people that like high performance dedicated GPUs - (A) scientists, (B) engineers, (C) developers, (D) artists, (E)motion graphics types, (F) gamers. Professionally speaking, my work is full of A-E, so, an Air is a big nope.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        …that’s why I wrote 90% of people. Maybe it’s 80% or 70%, but it certainly is top of the line for the average user.
        deregulateMed 5y ago
        You mentioned reliability, but I remember the butterfly keyboard debacle that was denied by Apple for years.
        lotsofpulp 5y ago
        The MacBook Air never had the butterfly keyboard.
- swiley 5y ago
  Apple used to be ok but you're pretty much stuck with OSX in their newer machines which is a pretty mediocre OS for development.
- chaosharmonic 5y ago
  Nintendo is arguably a weird example though -- in that they're a stellar game studio, a decent hardware vendor, and an awful business. They can survive on less powerful consoles, and historically have especially in the era before indies blew up, in large part because they sell them pretty much entirely off first-party titles anyway. Even as of this year (Wikipedia's stats on this were last updated 3/31), the top-selling third-party release for Switch is ranked 15 overall. [0] That game, Monster Hunter Rise, sold less than a remake of Pokemon Yellow, ports of multiple Wii U titles -- namely New Super Mario Bros. U and Mario Kart 8 (which is incidentally at the top of the list), Ring Fit Adventure -- a game that's only available via physical copies because it requires specialized hardware and has still repeatedly sold out, and whatever the hell you want to call the travesty that was Super Mario 3D All-Stars. (I'll get back to that one.) As a hardware company, they're all over the place. They experiment a lot, particularly with control schemes, but some (Wii, DS) execute better than others (Wii U) and not all of them are the best quality. The Switch is a marvel, conceptually, but the Joy-Cons have well-documented drift issues, and the Pro Controller has the worst D-Pad I've ever used despite being from the company that invented those. Its heyday included a pad that seemed to be built for comic book characters (6-arm Spider-Man and Professor X both come to mind), and while the GameCube pad is one of their better-designed ones overall, I started to understand Smash players' hand issues the moment I tried using it for Tetris. Meanwhile it took a literal plague for them to stop being the only vendor since Microsoft, with the original X-Box, not to include Ethernet. Which brings me to Nintendo as a company. The kind whose stated solution for online when demoing Smash Ultimate was "lol hope you've bought our $30 wired adapter!" (And let's note, refusing to ship with this has made their already-dodgy online worse, at scale.) The one that would shut down Smash tournaments for using emulators on a 20-year-old game to enable online play during a plague, as if that same crowd wouldn't 100% just buy Super Smash Bros. Melee for the Nintendo GameCube again if they just gave it an actual re-release on a modern console. The company that, when it does port older titles, typically just ships lightly-retooled versions of them and proceeds to charge the full price of a modern AAA. The publisher that took Super Mario 64, one of the most iconic games it's ever released, for its 25th anniversary, and not only shipped a barebones port (of this and two other titles), but actively enabled scalpers by giving it a release so limited that they de-listed the digital version after six months. As someone who enjoys a number of their games I totally see what you mean, but getting legitimate access to those titles involves a bunch of compromises I wouldn't generally have to make with other platforms and/or studios. As much as I don't exactly wish for consoles to become a duopoly again, a part of me really wonders what it would be like if Nintendo had gone the way of Sega. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Nintendo_Switch_video_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Nintendo_...
whitepaint 5y ago
I got my Samsung phone recently for ~$200 and it is absolutely amazing. I've had 4 by now from them, and they've all be great imo. Which companies produce better phones?
- nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
  Any company that does major OS updates more than twice? Apple? Then again, Samsung doesn't try to deliberately slow my phone down or drain the battery. So no company I guess. Everyone is churning out pretty-looking garbage.
  - foobiekr 5y ago
    Samsung absolutely does battery drain management. Every single vendor does.
  - slownews45 5y ago
    Because it helps the customer everyone has copied Apple on battery management. If you don't like it turn it off and just let your phone die.
thatguy0900 5y ago
Nintendo might not release cutting edge hardware, but they're pretty much the only big video game company left that doesn't openly release half finished games with the intention to maybe fix them a few months later.
- deregulateMed 5y ago
  This stopped being true with the Switch.
  - the_doctah 5y ago
    Gonna need sources on that claim
    - mcphage 5y ago
      Super Mario Party was not up to their content standards—the minigames were good, but there were only 4 boards, and they were both tiny and dull. Animal Crossing is a mixed bag—it has stuff previous entries don't, and is missing a lot that previous entries contained. But that might have gotten derailed due to Covid. The Mario Golf game that just came out supposedly has minimal content too, but I haven't played it. On the other hand, it's not universal—New Pokémon Snap is a sequel to a game that could be completed in ~5 hours, and is absolutely filled with content.
      - vimacs2 5y ago
        . . . That's not what people mean when they say "half finished". It's when a game with a defined scope fails to meet that scope. You might not like the dearth of content with those titles but there is no indication that they were ever meant to go beyond what was provided on release.
        mcphage 5y ago
        I certainly can't speak to what their defined scope was—generally Nintendo doesn't specify, and when they do say something—like saying Animal Crossing was designed to have "two or three years worth of content"—there's no indication what that actually means. All I can speak to is, when playing a game, does this game feel complete and finished? Traditionally Nintendo has been pretty good about that. Recently, not so much. I've been playing Mario Party since the late 90s, you develop a feel for what Nintendo considers a complete release. Whether that's changed intentionally not, is pretty immaterial.
tremon 5y ago
Samsung SSD prices are in line with other vendors. The Galaxy Note II was a very high-quality smartphone. Can't say anything about Samsung TVs, never owned one.

tyleo 5y ago

You lost me at Samsung/Apple/Jeep/Nintendo. I’d definitely put Apple in the top tier of phone and laptop quality. Especially w.r.t laptops, the majority of Windows devices seem comparatively low quality. I’m not sure about their other products but I also don’t see them advertised as much. Similarly with Nintendo, they seem to deliver consistently higher quality than competitors. They may not be as fast but they last for years and deliver equal or more enjoyment at a lower price point. A product is more than it’s specs.

deregulateMed 5y ago
I could see where you were coming from because Apple doesn't offer budget hardware and it's easy to mistakenly compare a $1000 laptop with a $500 laptop that doesn't have a video card. But Nintendo is notorious for releasing low quality stuff with their IP skinned on it. A product isn't more than it's quality metrics, if you believe so, I highly recommend taking a marketing class.
- roblabla 5y ago
  > But Nintendo is notorious for releasing low quality stuff with their IP skinned on it. Nintendo is also widely praised for consistently releasing innovative gaming platforms at fair prices. And that's what they tend to market and invest in heavily - I've never seen an advertisement for any of their low-quality cash-grab toys (which, yeah, they do exist, and they do suck...). > A product isn't more than it's quality metrics, if you believe so, I highly recommend taking a marketing class. OP's claim was that nintendo's product are low-quality, sold at high-price, thanks to relentless marketing. But the products being heavily marketed by Nintendo do tend to be high-quality (for instance, The Switch, a portable console that can be used comfortably enough as a home console, with several innovative input methods and a fairly wide range of high-quality games). If you purely look at the hardware specs, it may seem like a low-quality product, but that's not the correct quality metric to use in this case.
  - deregulateMed 5y ago
    Take a marketing class to defend yourself from corporate brainwashing. Nintendo has been literally brainwashing us since we were babies and had no concept of marketing. I'm not even talking about hardware specs. The switch has joycon issues, expensive games that are mediocre, and for some reason you confuse investment and innovation with quality. Wasting money and bad ideas are not qualities. I used to be a Nintendo fanatic, but their systems and flagship games since N64 have woken me up to their quality issues. The fact that people suggested BOTW was a greatest game of all time despite having only 1 temple theme and 3 enemies (with various skins), shows you that we are under mind control.
    - parasubvert 5y ago
      Or, perhaps, you are not in touch with how people evaluate and experience products, unless your intent is dry humour. People love the Switch and loved games like BOTW , Mario Odyssey, etc. because they were the best products Nintendo had shipped in 20 years. I hadn’t owned a Nintendo console since the SNES, thought the Wii was “meh”. They knocked this one out of the park - they managed to make a portable gaming device relevant in a world where everyone has a smartphone. Part of the challenge is that the completion largely do not build portable gaming devices. Apple and Samsung also consistently rank very high in tech support and customer satisfaction indexes. Let’s look at the main alternatives in the smartphone space: Pixel, LG, Motorola, Xiaomi, Huawei. Are these paragons of quality? Or are you comparing against an imaginary standard of quality?
  - Ygg2 5y ago
    > But the products being heavily marketed by Nintendo do tend to be high-quality Didn't they have a few hardware related scandals. Like the famous joy control drift.
    - mcphage 5y ago
      > Like the famous joy control drift. Yep, but that's pretty much it. Every company—even the best of companies—have poor products. The analog sticks on the Switch are Nintendo's worst hardware in decades.
- machello13 5y ago
  > it's easy to mistakenly compare a $1000 laptop with a $500 laptop that doesn't have a video card. Lol, come on dude. "Yeah I can see where you're coming from, if you're an idiot it's easy to think Apple is good."
Fnoord 5y ago
> I’d definitely put Apple in the top tier of phone and laptop quality. Especially w.r.t laptops, the majority of Windows devices seem comparatively low quality. I’m not sure about their other products but I also don’t see them advertised as much. Every MBP/MBA/MB had design flaws. From butterfly keyboard to discrete GPU, only 1 port (USB-C, for battery), etc. They fixed the keyboard problem finally, but from 2016-2019 it was terrible.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  I have yet to see a better laptop for 90% of people who want a laptop than a MacBook Air. Battery life, portability, weight, heat production, reliability, adequate performance, price, ports. They seem to have made all the right compromises.
  - OrvalWintermute 5y ago
    I think you might be neglecting to include people that like high performance dedicated GPUs - (A) scientists, (B) engineers, (C) developers, (D) artists, (E)motion graphics types, (F) gamers. Professionally speaking, my work is full of A-E, so, an Air is a big nope.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      …that’s why I wrote 90% of people. Maybe it’s 80% or 70%, but it certainly is top of the line for the average user.
      - deregulateMed 5y ago
        You mentioned reliability, but I remember the butterfly keyboard debacle that was denied by Apple for years.
        lotsofpulp 5y ago
        The MacBook Air never had the butterfly keyboard.
swiley 5y ago
Apple used to be ok but you're pretty much stuck with OSX in their newer machines which is a pretty mediocre OS for development.
chaosharmonic 5y ago
Nintendo is arguably a weird example though -- in that they're a stellar game studio, a decent hardware vendor, and an awful business. They can survive on less powerful consoles, and historically have especially in the era before indies blew up, in large part because they sell them pretty much entirely off first-party titles anyway. Even as of this year (Wikipedia's stats on this were last updated 3/31), the top-selling third-party release for Switch is ranked 15 overall. [0] That game, Monster Hunter Rise, sold less than a remake of Pokemon Yellow, ports of multiple Wii U titles -- namely New Super Mario Bros. U and Mario Kart 8 (which is incidentally at the top of the list), Ring Fit Adventure -- a game that's only available via physical copies because it requires specialized hardware and has still repeatedly sold out, and whatever the hell you want to call the travesty that was Super Mario 3D All-Stars. (I'll get back to that one.) As a hardware company, they're all over the place. They experiment a lot, particularly with control schemes, but some (Wii, DS) execute better than others (Wii U) and not all of them are the best quality. The Switch is a marvel, conceptually, but the Joy-Cons have well-documented drift issues, and the Pro Controller has the worst D-Pad I've ever used despite being from the company that invented those. Its heyday included a pad that seemed to be built for comic book characters (6-arm Spider-Man and Professor X both come to mind), and while the GameCube pad is one of their better-designed ones overall, I started to understand Smash players' hand issues the moment I tried using it for Tetris. Meanwhile it took a literal plague for them to stop being the only vendor since Microsoft, with the original X-Box, not to include Ethernet. Which brings me to Nintendo as a company. The kind whose stated solution for online when demoing Smash Ultimate was "lol hope you've bought our $30 wired adapter!" (And let's note, refusing to ship with this has made their already-dodgy online worse, at scale.) The one that would shut down Smash tournaments for using emulators on a 20-year-old game to enable online play during a plague, as if that same crowd wouldn't 100% just buy Super Smash Bros. Melee for the Nintendo GameCube again if they just gave it an actual re-release on a modern console. The company that, when it does port older titles, typically just ships lightly-retooled versions of them and proceeds to charge the full price of a modern AAA. The publisher that took Super Mario 64, one of the most iconic games it's ever released, for its 25th anniversary, and not only shipped a barebones port (of this and two other titles), but actively enabled scalpers by giving it a release so limited that they de-listed the digital version after six months. As someone who enjoys a number of their games I totally see what you mean, but getting legitimate access to those titles involves a bunch of compromises I wouldn't generally have to make with other platforms and/or studios. As much as I don't exactly wish for consoles to become a duopoly again, a part of me really wonders what it would be like if Nintendo had gone the way of Sega. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Nintendo_Switch_video_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Nintendo_...

whitepaint 5y ago

I got my Samsung phone recently for ~$200 and it is absolutely amazing. I've had 4 by now from them, and they've all be great imo. Which companies produce better phones?

nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
Any company that does major OS updates more than twice? Apple? Then again, Samsung doesn't try to deliberately slow my phone down or drain the battery. So no company I guess. Everyone is churning out pretty-looking garbage.
- foobiekr 5y ago
  Samsung absolutely does battery drain management. Every single vendor does.
- slownews45 5y ago
  Because it helps the customer everyone has copied Apple on battery management. If you don't like it turn it off and just let your phone die.

thatguy0900 5y ago

Nintendo might not release cutting edge hardware, but they're pretty much the only big video game company left that doesn't openly release half finished games with the intention to maybe fix them a few months later.

deregulateMed 5y ago
This stopped being true with the Switch.
- the_doctah 5y ago
  Gonna need sources on that claim
  - mcphage 5y ago
    Super Mario Party was not up to their content standards—the minigames were good, but there were only 4 boards, and they were both tiny and dull. Animal Crossing is a mixed bag—it has stuff previous entries don't, and is missing a lot that previous entries contained. But that might have gotten derailed due to Covid. The Mario Golf game that just came out supposedly has minimal content too, but I haven't played it. On the other hand, it's not universal—New Pokémon Snap is a sequel to a game that could be completed in ~5 hours, and is absolutely filled with content.
    - vimacs2 5y ago
      . . . That's not what people mean when they say "half finished". It's when a game with a defined scope fails to meet that scope. You might not like the dearth of content with those titles but there is no indication that they were ever meant to go beyond what was provided on release.
      - mcphage 5y ago
        I certainly can't speak to what their defined scope was—generally Nintendo doesn't specify, and when they do say something—like saying Animal Crossing was designed to have "two or three years worth of content"—there's no indication what that actually means. All I can speak to is, when playing a game, does this game feel complete and finished? Traditionally Nintendo has been pretty good about that. Recently, not so much. I've been playing Mario Party since the late 90s, you develop a feel for what Nintendo considers a complete release. Whether that's changed intentionally not, is pretty immaterial.

tremon 5y ago

Samsung SSD prices are in line with other vendors. The Galaxy Note II was a very high-quality smartphone. Can't say anything about Samsung TVs, never owned one.