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I don't understand when did the ability to choose a product fitting your preferences become a bad thing on HackerNews Because so many on HN have been indoctrin

I don't understand when did the ability to choose a product fitting your preferences become a bad thing on HackerNews Because so many on HN have been indoctrinated into the "scale at all costs" mentality. It demonstrates the difference between HN and the real world. On HN, if you can't serve a billion people, your product is niche. In the real world, billions of people earn a very nice living making niche products. It's why so many people on HN don't understand Panic, or its PlayDate. They don't understand artisan anything. They've forgotten the whole hipster movement, which still exists in pockets of the world. They can't grok that there are companies that have been in business for hundreds of years making products one at a time — by hand. "X doesn't scale" is HN for "I know nothing about how the world works."

cortesoft 5y ago
> In the real world, billions of people earn a very nice living making niche products. But rarely something as expensive to create as a smart phone.
- izacus 5y ago
  Really? Because things like cabriolet cars, speciality cars, high-end audio equipment, luxury furniture and many others exist. If anything, mobile phone market is exceedingly horrible because of consolidation into a single product with not much choice.
  - cortesoft 5y ago
    Maybe we could have a market for very high end phones that cost $3000, but I haven't seen anyone try to fill that niche yet. Maybe it isn't there? Even if it was there, that doesn't mean the phone would be small. People who want small phones aren't necessarily wealthy, so they would only be going after the market for the intersection of 'wealthy + want small phone'... which might be a very small market and not worth pursuing.
    - a4isms 5y ago
      That market absolutely exists, and a few people have tried to serve it over the years. Here's an old example, a Samsung phone promoted by Jackie Chan that cost about $3,000 back in 2012: https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-sch-w2013-jackie-chan-android-flip-phone-launched-china-133700/ https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-sch-w2013-jackie-ch... And in 2018, One Plus had a $3,000 phone: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/this-3000-oneplus-6-is-the-most-luxurious-oneplus-around/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/this-3000-oneplus-6-is-the-...
      - shadowtree 5y ago
        The fact that none of these still exist proves that there is no market. It does prove that companies tried to see if there is one.
        a4isms 5y ago
        I'd be very careful about suggesting that failure proves there is no market for something. Many PC companies failed before Apple succeeded. Apple itself failed to the point of almost being acquired by Sun before succeeding by buying NeXT and shipping some hit products in the form of colourful iMacs and iPods with click-wheels. The biggest problem with luxury products is that they have almost nothing to do with the product's tangible features and everything to do with whether you can establish a valuable brand. We live in a world where people spend thousands of dollars on fancy numbers that we have a kind of gentleman's agreement signify that they "own" a jpeg anyone can copy. I suggest that there is absolutely a market for ridiculously priced phones, but the problem is not hand-crafting a phone with rare materials, the problem is creating the collective hallucination that owning such a phone will make other people envy you. Apple actually sold some solid gold watches. There was a market for a $18,000 Apple Watch. It wasn't something worth sustaining in perpetuity, but there was a market. They also launched ridiculously priced accessories from Hermes, and there is still a market for them almost a decade later. People will pay large amounts of money for exclusive items, but it takes a particular set of skills to launch something and convince the world it's the must-have accessory of the moment.
      - 5y ago
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - hjkl0 4y ago
    > Really? Because things like cabriolet cars, speciality cars, high-end audio equipment, luxury furniture and many others exist. Indeed, all those things are much much easier and cheaper to produce than a smartphone. You could do them at your home. Try building from scratch a small Android phone at home.
- bsder 5y ago
  The limitation to making niche phones are the stupid, sclerotic, CARRIERS--not the manufacturers. It's the carrier gatekeeping that prevents niche phones from forming. We need a ruling like from back in the Bell System era where you are allowed to bring customer equipment to the network without the network owner permission.
  - scarface74 5y ago
    You don’t need a network owners permission for GSM/LTE. The only time you needed that was for CDMA.
    - izacus 5y ago
      You need one for VoLTE (so any voice calls), 5G and Wifi calling. Without carrier phone whitelist, you won't be able to call on AT&T and many other networks.
disharko 5y ago
Also consider he's specifically appealing to makers of premium phones - you can bet Google and Samsung care a lot about scale. And to the parent's point about the iPhone 13 mini's sales still being more than all Pixels: ok, so then consider the already much smaller Pixel market share and how many people are left at the % of iPhone sales that the mini made up. I'd love for this to happen, signed the petition, and will hope for the best, but I think even if there would be a decent market for this the big players don't care to make that bet.
bee_rider 5y ago
If hipster culture was so good, it would have expanded across the world and taken over everything.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wiseowise 5y ago
  That’s not how it works. X is amazing, but has a steep price so only “hipsters” can buy it which prevents it from taking over the world.
- NoSorryCannot 5y ago
  Are you saying hipsterism can't be very good because it didn't scale?
- pcmoney 5y ago
  If hipster culture is predicated on being different/“not like the other girls” then by definition it is unscalable. The whole point of a lot of things is that they are unscalable and if they somehow do scale they are not longer what they were.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Bud 5y ago
Saying that HN readers (who are quite diverse, btw) "know nothing about how the world works" or "don't understand" things in this context is just lazy thinking. We understand just fine. It's not difficult to comprehend the appeal of customized, handmade work. The appeal is clear. It's just that it's completely irrelevant in the context of this thread. Because you can't design and make smartphones by hand, one at a time. So what are you even talking about?
scarface74 5y ago
And it took Panic a decade to release the Playdate and it is still back ordered for over a year. Hardware has to “scale” to get manufacturing capacity and scale economies.
tablespoon 5y ago
>> I don't understand when did the ability to choose a product fitting your preferences become a bad thing on HackerNews > Because so many on HN have been indoctrinated into the "scale at all costs" mentality. HN also has many fanboys that slavishly celebrate the decisions of certain prestigious companies as the best possible ones, because that prestigious company made it. Other decisions can be assumed to be inferior because, if they had merit, the company would have picked that instead. IMHO, a lot of technology has plateaued, to the point where the hip new thing is objectively a regression that just looks different.

cortesoft 5y ago

> In the real world, billions of people earn a very nice living making niche products. But rarely something as expensive to create as a smart phone.

izacus 5y ago
Really? Because things like cabriolet cars, speciality cars, high-end audio equipment, luxury furniture and many others exist. If anything, mobile phone market is exceedingly horrible because of consolidation into a single product with not much choice.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  Maybe we could have a market for very high end phones that cost $3000, but I haven't seen anyone try to fill that niche yet. Maybe it isn't there? Even if it was there, that doesn't mean the phone would be small. People who want small phones aren't necessarily wealthy, so they would only be going after the market for the intersection of 'wealthy + want small phone'... which might be a very small market and not worth pursuing.
  - a4isms 5y ago
    That market absolutely exists, and a few people have tried to serve it over the years. Here's an old example, a Samsung phone promoted by Jackie Chan that cost about $3,000 back in 2012: https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-sch-w2013-jackie-chan-android-flip-phone-launched-china-133700/ https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-sch-w2013-jackie-ch... And in 2018, One Plus had a $3,000 phone: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/this-3000-oneplus-6-is-the-most-luxurious-oneplus-around/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/this-3000-oneplus-6-is-the-...
    - shadowtree 5y ago
      The fact that none of these still exist proves that there is no market. It does prove that companies tried to see if there is one.
      - a4isms 5y ago
        I'd be very careful about suggesting that failure proves there is no market for something. Many PC companies failed before Apple succeeded. Apple itself failed to the point of almost being acquired by Sun before succeeding by buying NeXT and shipping some hit products in the form of colourful iMacs and iPods with click-wheels. The biggest problem with luxury products is that they have almost nothing to do with the product's tangible features and everything to do with whether you can establish a valuable brand. We live in a world where people spend thousands of dollars on fancy numbers that we have a kind of gentleman's agreement signify that they "own" a jpeg anyone can copy. I suggest that there is absolutely a market for ridiculously priced phones, but the problem is not hand-crafting a phone with rare materials, the problem is creating the collective hallucination that owning such a phone will make other people envy you. Apple actually sold some solid gold watches. There was a market for a $18,000 Apple Watch. It wasn't something worth sustaining in perpetuity, but there was a market. They also launched ridiculously priced accessories from Hermes, and there is still a market for them almost a decade later. People will pay large amounts of money for exclusive items, but it takes a particular set of skills to launch something and convince the world it's the must-have accessory of the moment.
    - 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- hjkl0 4y ago
  > Really? Because things like cabriolet cars, speciality cars, high-end audio equipment, luxury furniture and many others exist. Indeed, all those things are much much easier and cheaper to produce than a smartphone. You could do them at your home. Try building from scratch a small Android phone at home.
bsder 5y ago
The limitation to making niche phones are the stupid, sclerotic, CARRIERS--not the manufacturers. It's the carrier gatekeeping that prevents niche phones from forming. We need a ruling like from back in the Bell System era where you are allowed to bring customer equipment to the network without the network owner permission.
- scarface74 5y ago
  You don’t need a network owners permission for GSM/LTE. The only time you needed that was for CDMA.
  - izacus 5y ago
    You need one for VoLTE (so any voice calls), 5G and Wifi calling. Without carrier phone whitelist, you won't be able to call on AT&T and many other networks.

disharko 5y ago

Also consider he's specifically appealing to makers of premium phones - you can bet Google and Samsung care a lot about scale. And to the parent's point about the iPhone 13 mini's sales still being more than all Pixels: ok, so then consider the already much smaller Pixel market share and how many people are left at the % of iPhone sales that the mini made up. I'd love for this to happen, signed the petition, and will hope for the best, but I think even if there would be a decent market for this the big players don't care to make that bet.

bee_rider 5y ago

If hipster culture was so good, it would have expanded across the world and taken over everything.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
wiseowise 5y ago
That’s not how it works. X is amazing, but has a steep price so only “hipsters” can buy it which prevents it from taking over the world.
NoSorryCannot 5y ago
Are you saying hipsterism can't be very good because it didn't scale?
pcmoney 5y ago
If hipster culture is predicated on being different/“not like the other girls” then by definition it is unscalable. The whole point of a lot of things is that they are unscalable and if they somehow do scale they are not longer what they were.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Bud 5y ago

Saying that HN readers (who are quite diverse, btw) "know nothing about how the world works" or "don't understand" things in this context is just lazy thinking. We understand just fine. It's not difficult to comprehend the appeal of customized, handmade work. The appeal is clear. It's just that it's completely irrelevant in the context of this thread. Because you can't design and make smartphones by hand, one at a time. So what are you even talking about?

scarface74 5y ago

And it took Panic a decade to release the Playdate and it is still back ordered for over a year. Hardware has to “scale” to get manufacturing capacity and scale economies.

tablespoon 5y ago

>> I don't understand when did the ability to choose a product fitting your preferences become a bad thing on HackerNews > Because so many on HN have been indoctrinated into the "scale at all costs" mentality. HN also has many fanboys that slavishly celebrate the decisions of certain prestigious companies as the best possible ones, because that prestigious company made it. Other decisions can be assumed to be inferior because, if they had merit, the company would have picked that instead. IMHO, a lot of technology has plateaued, to the point where the hip new thing is objectively a regression that just looks different.