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The overall trend is that things are getting much more expensive while the quality is declining. It's inevitable when companies insist on endlessly increasing p

The overall trend is that things are getting much more expensive while the quality is declining. It's inevitable when companies insist on endlessly increasing profits. Even the things that are "good enough" and cheap tend to come with massive hidden costs. For example, good looking clothing can be inexpensive enough for a person to wear everything once and throw it away, but behind the scenes there are child slaves, microplastics/PFAS contamination, and a textile waste crisis.

the_pwner224 8mo ago
> things are getting much more expensive while the quality is declining This is totally untrue, material things have gotten way cheaper over time. TVs, cars, phones, technology, appliances, the list goes on and on. And quality has improved on many of these, a $500 TV today is way bigger and better than a $5k TV from a few decades ago. Same for cars & phones when you adjust for inflation. Home gadgets / IOT are much more accessible & affordable. Appliances have gotten cheaper and even the higher end products are quite affordable. Ikea furniture is cheap and many of their products are quite durable and solid quality. And old things weren't always better or more reliable than the modern cheaper products.
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  We've gotten more pixels and bytes and flops, that's it. We haven't got more battery life, or faster computers, which is strange because they have orders of magnitude more flops in them. Casey Muratori showing off the speed of visual studio 6 on a Pentium something after ranting about it: Jump to 36:08 in https://youtu.be/GC-0tCy4P1U https://youtu.be/GC-0tCy4P1U
  - autoexec 8mo ago
    Every time we get faster computers we get much much slower software. We get larger hard drives, so software bloats until it takes GBs
  - the_pwner224 8mo ago
    > We haven't got more battery life 15 years ago even the high end smartphones could barely make it half the day before dying. Now all-day battery life is the norm, and the Chinese phones with the latest battery tech can easily last 2 days (Samsung, Google, Apple are very behind here). Laptop battery life isn't even comparable to what it was 20 years ago. And software getting slower doesn't change the fact that our material goods (pixels, bytes, flops) have improved orders of magnitude while getting cheaper.
    - decimalenough 8mo ago
      Back in the Nokia brick days you could easily go a full week between charges. Of course it's an apples to oranges comparison since a modern smartphone has infinitely more functionality, but in this one thing modern phones remain objectively worse.
      - direwolf20 8mo ago
        Does it, though? Unless you go back so far you're talking about fixed–layout b&w LCD screens, the next era after that had games and the internet — what's actually new since that time? Multitasking yes, what else?
      - charcircuit 8mo ago
        You can still go a week on a modern phone if you restrict your usage to what you would do on a Nokia brick phone.
        direwolf20 8mo ago
        I got a new phone but didn't set it up immediately. The battery lasted about two weeks. Once I installed my apps and SIM card it dropped to about one day. Once my old phone had no SIM card and was sitting permanently in flight mode with no apps running, its battery life rose from about one day to about two weeks.
      - jryle70 8mo ago
        You have to compare the old Nokia phone with the new Nokia dump phone. I doubt that the old phone's battery lasts longer than that of a new Nokia 2720 Flip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_2720_Flip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_2720_Flip The new dump phone likely has more functionality and uses a much more robust wireless network.
- autoexec 8mo ago
  Most of the things you call "way cheaper" have massive costs that aren't reflected in the price tag. The TVs, phones, and IoT appliances are spying on you 24/7 and pushing ads in your face. In terms of quality, much of that is highly debatable. If you compare a call over the newest iphone to a call over a rotary phone from 60 years ago guess which one gave users better call quality? I don't remember who made the joke about advertisers going from "You can hear a pin drop!" to "Can you hear me now?" but that sums up the problem very well. TVs are bigger but still can't do everything CRTs could (color accuracy, contrast, variable resolutions). We have faster hard drives with SSDs but with limited numbers of writes and they lose data when not powered. Everything is just trade offs. Some things have been improved, some things have gotten worse, but however good things are right now you can bet they will be made worse going forward. Enshittification is real and increasing all the time.
  - djoldman 8mo ago
    For calculating price changes over time, there will always be the question: "is this the same product as earlier?" Without a reasonableness factor, prices can't be compared for anything. An egg from a chicken in 1940 is different from one in 2026. If we want to be pedantic, every egg is different. But I think it's pretty uncontroversial that the prices of TVs, cell phones, and most appliances, with similar features, have fallen considerably over the last few decades.
  - jryle70 8mo ago
    Well, you can't call your loved ones from anywhere with rotary phone, when you need them, so which one is better? I know which one I'd choose. SSD is not only faster but also quieter and more efficient. See how much power a modern laptop consumes vs 20 years ago? > Some things have been improved, some things have gotten worse, but however good things are right now you can bet they will be made worse going forward. Enshittification is real and increasing all the time. You said everything is trade off but choose to believe the future will get worse. Seems contradictory? I believe life will go on, and in 2046 people will complain about modern life and talk about how good things were 20 years earlier.
- magicalist 8mo ago
  Yes, and you can get fresh tomatoes any time of year for cheap and they're so firm they won't get damaged in transit and with a blast of ethylene they're a perfect shade of red when you buy them. All things unquestionably better than the past. What's there to complain about?
  - rrr_oh_man 8mo ago
    > Yes, and you can get fresh tomatoes any time of year for cheap and they're so firm they won't get damaged in transit and with a blast of ethylene they're a perfect shade of red when you buy them My family calls those "water balloons".
  - Kbelicius 8mo ago
    > All things unquestionably better than the past. What's there to complain about? Taste and nutritional value a worse then in the past. Arguably the two most important things when it comes to food.
- _DeadFred_ 8mo ago
  Clothing is horrible. Shirts don't last a season. T-shirts (all brands) are kleenex. Like tshirts are basically how old scifi portrayed how UBI issued clothes would be. Outdoor gear companies no longer backup their products the failure rate is insanely high while being more expensive. Sony/Apple hugely expensive earbuds are basically disposable junk after a year or two whereas my old Sony headphones lasted decades. No earbuds are going to last decades. Olive oil mayonnaise number 2 and 3 ingredients are other oils (split to two types so that olive oil is TECHNICALLY the highest percentage oil still). Google broke my phones voice command so I can't use it to set timers and I have less functionality than I did 10 years ago (home automations all broke, etc). Music services broke the algos so they no longer give me the 'best results for me' but for the company. New vehicle prices are higher than they have ever been for vehicles with repair costs so high they are going to be an insurance rate nightmare later in their lifecycle. Other than TVs (which are literally the 1984 screens, where you buy something to spy on you) everything is trash/misleading now.
  - the_pwner224 8mo ago
    My Bose headphones are at 8 years and in perfect condition with 90% of original battery life. Adjusted for inflation, they were way cheaper than those older headphones. Excellent quality olive oil is incredibly easy to find, if you're buying bottom barrel junk then that's on you. New vehicle prices when adjusted for inflation have not risen at all; when adjusted for features/comfort/reliability/luxury they've fallen a ridiculous amount. Same for clothing. My $14.88 Walmart jeans lasted for years before I sized out of them. My $15 t-shirts from Target are going strong. I recently got $15 gym shirts from Target which seem to be excellent quality, thick material and good stitching. The cheap gym shorts I bought literally 10 years ago are still in perfect condition. And again you need to adjust for inflation when comparing to the older clothing you're talking about. The OLED TV I got for $2700 a few years ago is now closer to $2k and has superior specs. And again, way superior to more expensive TVs from a decade or two ago. For car repair... what repair do you even need on a modern Japanese car? They just work forever if you do even the bare minimum maintenance. And honestly even if you neglect that maintenance. Yes labor costs have gone up but that's not relevant to this discussion. All your other complaints are about software which isn't really relevant to this discussion. Honestly all of this sounds like a "you problem." No offense.

the_pwner224 8mo ago

> things are getting much more expensive while the quality is declining This is totally untrue, material things have gotten way cheaper over time. TVs, cars, phones, technology, appliances, the list goes on and on. And quality has improved on many of these, a $500 TV today is way bigger and better than a $5k TV from a few decades ago. Same for cars & phones when you adjust for inflation. Home gadgets / IOT are much more accessible & affordable. Appliances have gotten cheaper and even the higher end products are quite affordable. Ikea furniture is cheap and many of their products are quite durable and solid quality. And old things weren't always better or more reliable than the modern cheaper products.

direwolf20 8mo ago
We've gotten more pixels and bytes and flops, that's it. We haven't got more battery life, or faster computers, which is strange because they have orders of magnitude more flops in them. Casey Muratori showing off the speed of visual studio 6 on a Pentium something after ranting about it: Jump to 36:08 in https://youtu.be/GC-0tCy4P1U https://youtu.be/GC-0tCy4P1U
- autoexec 8mo ago
  Every time we get faster computers we get much much slower software. We get larger hard drives, so software bloats until it takes GBs
- the_pwner224 8mo ago
  > We haven't got more battery life 15 years ago even the high end smartphones could barely make it half the day before dying. Now all-day battery life is the norm, and the Chinese phones with the latest battery tech can easily last 2 days (Samsung, Google, Apple are very behind here). Laptop battery life isn't even comparable to what it was 20 years ago. And software getting slower doesn't change the fact that our material goods (pixels, bytes, flops) have improved orders of magnitude while getting cheaper.
  - decimalenough 8mo ago
    Back in the Nokia brick days you could easily go a full week between charges. Of course it's an apples to oranges comparison since a modern smartphone has infinitely more functionality, but in this one thing modern phones remain objectively worse.
    - direwolf20 8mo ago
      Does it, though? Unless you go back so far you're talking about fixed–layout b&w LCD screens, the next era after that had games and the internet — what's actually new since that time? Multitasking yes, what else?
    - charcircuit 8mo ago
      You can still go a week on a modern phone if you restrict your usage to what you would do on a Nokia brick phone.
      - direwolf20 8mo ago
        I got a new phone but didn't set it up immediately. The battery lasted about two weeks. Once I installed my apps and SIM card it dropped to about one day. Once my old phone had no SIM card and was sitting permanently in flight mode with no apps running, its battery life rose from about one day to about two weeks.
    - jryle70 8mo ago
      You have to compare the old Nokia phone with the new Nokia dump phone. I doubt that the old phone's battery lasts longer than that of a new Nokia 2720 Flip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_2720_Flip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_2720_Flip The new dump phone likely has more functionality and uses a much more robust wireless network.
autoexec 8mo ago
Most of the things you call "way cheaper" have massive costs that aren't reflected in the price tag. The TVs, phones, and IoT appliances are spying on you 24/7 and pushing ads in your face. In terms of quality, much of that is highly debatable. If you compare a call over the newest iphone to a call over a rotary phone from 60 years ago guess which one gave users better call quality? I don't remember who made the joke about advertisers going from "You can hear a pin drop!" to "Can you hear me now?" but that sums up the problem very well. TVs are bigger but still can't do everything CRTs could (color accuracy, contrast, variable resolutions). We have faster hard drives with SSDs but with limited numbers of writes and they lose data when not powered. Everything is just trade offs. Some things have been improved, some things have gotten worse, but however good things are right now you can bet they will be made worse going forward. Enshittification is real and increasing all the time.
- djoldman 8mo ago
  For calculating price changes over time, there will always be the question: "is this the same product as earlier?" Without a reasonableness factor, prices can't be compared for anything. An egg from a chicken in 1940 is different from one in 2026. If we want to be pedantic, every egg is different. But I think it's pretty uncontroversial that the prices of TVs, cell phones, and most appliances, with similar features, have fallen considerably over the last few decades.
- jryle70 8mo ago
  Well, you can't call your loved ones from anywhere with rotary phone, when you need them, so which one is better? I know which one I'd choose. SSD is not only faster but also quieter and more efficient. See how much power a modern laptop consumes vs 20 years ago? > Some things have been improved, some things have gotten worse, but however good things are right now you can bet they will be made worse going forward. Enshittification is real and increasing all the time. You said everything is trade off but choose to believe the future will get worse. Seems contradictory? I believe life will go on, and in 2046 people will complain about modern life and talk about how good things were 20 years earlier.
magicalist 8mo ago
Yes, and you can get fresh tomatoes any time of year for cheap and they're so firm they won't get damaged in transit and with a blast of ethylene they're a perfect shade of red when you buy them. All things unquestionably better than the past. What's there to complain about?
- rrr_oh_man 8mo ago
  > Yes, and you can get fresh tomatoes any time of year for cheap and they're so firm they won't get damaged in transit and with a blast of ethylene they're a perfect shade of red when you buy them My family calls those "water balloons".
- Kbelicius 8mo ago
  > All things unquestionably better than the past. What's there to complain about? Taste and nutritional value a worse then in the past. Arguably the two most important things when it comes to food.
_DeadFred_ 8mo ago
Clothing is horrible. Shirts don't last a season. T-shirts (all brands) are kleenex. Like tshirts are basically how old scifi portrayed how UBI issued clothes would be. Outdoor gear companies no longer backup their products the failure rate is insanely high while being more expensive. Sony/Apple hugely expensive earbuds are basically disposable junk after a year or two whereas my old Sony headphones lasted decades. No earbuds are going to last decades. Olive oil mayonnaise number 2 and 3 ingredients are other oils (split to two types so that olive oil is TECHNICALLY the highest percentage oil still). Google broke my phones voice command so I can't use it to set timers and I have less functionality than I did 10 years ago (home automations all broke, etc). Music services broke the algos so they no longer give me the 'best results for me' but for the company. New vehicle prices are higher than they have ever been for vehicles with repair costs so high they are going to be an insurance rate nightmare later in their lifecycle. Other than TVs (which are literally the 1984 screens, where you buy something to spy on you) everything is trash/misleading now.
- the_pwner224 8mo ago
  My Bose headphones are at 8 years and in perfect condition with 90% of original battery life. Adjusted for inflation, they were way cheaper than those older headphones. Excellent quality olive oil is incredibly easy to find, if you're buying bottom barrel junk then that's on you. New vehicle prices when adjusted for inflation have not risen at all; when adjusted for features/comfort/reliability/luxury they've fallen a ridiculous amount. Same for clothing. My $14.88 Walmart jeans lasted for years before I sized out of them. My $15 t-shirts from Target are going strong. I recently got $15 gym shirts from Target which seem to be excellent quality, thick material and good stitching. The cheap gym shorts I bought literally 10 years ago are still in perfect condition. And again you need to adjust for inflation when comparing to the older clothing you're talking about. The OLED TV I got for $2700 a few years ago is now closer to $2k and has superior specs. And again, way superior to more expensive TVs from a decade or two ago. For car repair... what repair do you even need on a modern Japanese car? They just work forever if you do even the bare minimum maintenance. And honestly even if you neglect that maintenance. Yes labor costs have gone up but that's not relevant to this discussion. All your other complaints are about software which isn't really relevant to this discussion. Honestly all of this sounds like a "you problem." No offense.