3 ms·
Buying Quality vs. Buying Crap
- mechanical_fish 18y agoWhen I was a kid my parents bought a really high quality Atari 2600. And I've got to admit: It works as well today as it did the day we bought it. Other people's high-quality eight-track tape decks, quadraphonic amplifiers, and laserdisc systems are also working fine. My Powerbook G3 "Wall Street" was still working great when I sold it. What a tank. Of course, it wouldn't run a modern browser because it still had Mac OS 9... I had tried Mac OS X on it but it was just so slow... and I was never quite able to devote enough time to get Linux working. (PB G3 Linux was always a bit of a delicate hack... and it turns out that if you wait seven or eight years after a machine's heyday the Linux hobbyists have all turned to something else and their pages on installing Linux on the G3 have all gone stale.) The moral of this story is that, while it might pay to throw money at a high-quality vacuum cleaner -- because vacuum cleaners are a relatively mature technology that doesn't change much over time [1] -- in tech the problem is not so simple, because the money you spend on gold-plating may simply be wasted. The baseline is moving too fast. [1] Of course, my father-in-law has an old Electrolux vacuum that still works fine... but I'm an allergy sufferer who prefers a HEPA vacuum, a technology that is now quite common -- it's fully supported by the best vacuums and claimed by every other vacuum -- but which AFAIK didn't exist back in the 1970s. So even vacuum cleaners are not immune to true obsolescence.