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These are two separate questions.

> How much of a premium are you, as a customer, willing to pay for the beauty?

Depends on the category of goods, but if I can afford it then I will probably choose something aesthetically pleasing to me most of the time. I can easily get by with an ugly screwdriver if it works well, but I would not like wearing bad-looking shoes.

Generally if I use something often, be it tools, clothes, guitars, utensils and whatnot, I try to find something appealing to my eye. Some people seemingly don’t care much about that, but it just so happens that I do. Paying a premium for the beauty relieves me from being very irritated about something I might not like.

Also, in my opinion, aesthetics, ergonomics and beauty sometimes all are side products of working hard on one of them. Beauty in tools and architecture and interfaces is not to be discarded since it makes our life more pleasing and tolerable. We could live in the holes in the ground, you know, if pure application of things to their intended purpose was all that mattered to us.

> How much functionality will you give up for the shinies?

I’m not sure something has to be given up at all, that’s the point.



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