> Making quality products for consumers [..] is dying. This is a tired old line. The art and craft movement rose a century ago on the same ideas. But the exam

> Making quality products for consumers [..] is dying. This is a tired old line. The art and craft movement rose a century ago on the same ideas. But the examples he gives are bizarre - Fender?? Fender is a text-book example of the strength of engineering things to be mass-produced. Fender guitars were conceived to be mass-produced. Where Gibson makes a big deal about the supposed tone benefit of a guitar with a continuous neck to the base of the noise-box, the Stratocaster has always had a bolt-on-neck. The paint is Dupont car paint. Yet Clapton prefers it to the hand-built stuff. Better yet, if you break one you can just go and buy another off-the-shelf that matches it. Some people pay a lot of money for old fenders, but people make strange purchase decisions when it comes to music and art. I think people want to believe that hand-made things are better (particularly when they are committed to hobbies to build things that have no market), but I rarely see an example of it.