Along that line of thought I've noticed this recently:

I can buy an expensive tool for say $200 that will last me 10 years. Or I can buy a cheap tool that costs $20 but will only last me two years. But if I want to use that tool for the duration of 10 years it then makes more sense to buy five of the cheap tool and save half in costs. Which one is really providing more quality over time?

For some things this doesn't hold at all, the cheap entry level offerings just don't get the job done or break relatively immediately, but for others the premium offer doesn't really improve a whole lot over the cheapest.

Some tools are much easier to use if you spend more money, I’ve compared a Harbor Freight oscillating multi-tool against a Fein and the Fein is so much more usable due to less vibration in the tool body that the Harbor Freight version is almost useless in comparison.

Air compressors are another one where spending money vastly improves usability, the more you spend the quieter the compressor pump motor is.

Makita’s portaband only lasts ~10 cuts before the blade falls off, Milwaukee’s portaband blades don’t fall off ever. I run electrical work and my guys cost $100-130/hr, I’d rather have them spend time cutting conduit and strut with a functional tool than replacing blades on a cheaper version.

I’ll grant that professional tool and homeowner tool usage patterns differ greatly, but sometimes it is worth spending the extra money.

Very good perspective but I think that there is also a cost or loss of value in the inconvenience of a tool of good stopping its function at the wrong time. The opposite can also be true, that it is sometimes convenient that something breaks down because I actually wanted this new model anyway but could not justify throwing away a perfectly fine good.

That, and the cognitive load. You need to buy the right amount, remember where you stored the $5 replacements, or else spend $100 worth of your time to figure out where you ordered from five years ago. And if they are no longer available you need time to figure out which of the replacements isn't total crap.

Does the tool degrade gradually over time or is it sudden? If the former, you're much better off over the 10 year span with the high quality tool, because the time you spend dealing with its degraded performance is much less. IME it's almost always better to go for a high quality, old, used tool than to buy a low quality new one. Usually the wear parts are replaceable or rebuildable as well.

Your comment is just nit picking. Point was there's a lot of situations where the math hugely favors the cheap tool.

Used tools of the brands that anyone screeching about nice tools would consider to be of repute are going to generally be priced at equivalent to new tools of unknown brand. Specialty tools frequently aren't available on the used market.

Anything that spins or plugs into the wall tends to be finicky after decades of prior owner abuse and if you're not in a commercial setting (and even a lot of times if you are) it makes more sense to just buy new cheap stuff because then using your tools won't be a project by itself.

I've got like three people's worth of used tools from various sources because you can never have too many and I never throw stuff out but they are not the outstanding value the Garage Journal forum or Reddit type "polish my wrenches more than I use them" crowd makes them out to be.

I can't think of a single case where it has actually been true that the cheaper tool was better somehow apart from jackstands. I got some pretty decent 6 ton jackstands from harbor freight. Don't know that i'd actually trust them to hold 6 tons though. Shop press? Not really. Had to put a bunch of time and money into it to make it halfway decent. Should have just gotten a good one. For power hand tools I have all Makita stuff either bought new or remanufactured, wouldn't go near harbor freight for that stuff. My welder is a Miller, wouldn't dream of going with off brand stuff there. Torches however are northern tool (i think?) victor knockoffs which are ok apart from the orings, hoses, and regulators... should have just gone for the quality tool to start would have been cheaper in the long run. My machine tools are all antiques and work outstandingly well. Literally irreplaceable--could not buy something new that does the same job.

I guess all that is to say in my experience the cheap crap breaks and ends up being more expensive either in opportunity cost or cost of replacement/modification.

Depends on the failure mode I guess (if it explodes and hurts you, that could get expensive). Plus, you have to factor in 5 more trips to the store.

Even if it simply damages your work that's a considerable downside.

I do not buy cheap tools unless they are for a dedicated, simple purpose. (Such as the sockets that live in the car to permit me to install a battery.)

This is true, and in general people are usually financially better of getting cheap stuff and replacing it. But a lot of us like getting hobbyist stuff just because it's more fun. I have an expensive espresso machine because it's more fun than a standard breville machine or just making a pot of coffee. It's certainly not more economical, even though coffee nerds will try to convince (rather gaslight) themselves into thinking so.

The main problem is that the average person has no way to evaluate quality. The closest most people get is heaver == built better (which is probably a correlation overall, but not that accurate for any two random products). At the extreme end of this you have companies putting little steel plates into things they want to appear higher quality.

How can consumers evaluate how robustly some Bluetooth firmware is written, if the product is actually durable or if some USB charger actually accurately follows the specification? For most cases there is no way to know. The best route for the average consumer is to find a review by and expert, but these are very rare (experts with the required skills can often find better jobs than reviewing) and they are more likely to find paid marketing which just misleads.

So we do end up the case that the only real metrics the user has is price and brand. Many formerly reputable brands have also started rebadging cheep crap so that works less often then you would hope. And while good products often can't be cheep, it is now common to see cheep crap sold at higher prices to seem premium.

So at the end of the day the consumer has really no way to judge product quality. So the market has very little incentive to actually provide quality.

That reminds me a bit of The Market for Lemons.

I mean you've just described why people pay the Apple premium. Their stuff is mostly going to work and work well.

Yes. They are one of the few examples of a brand that for most aspects of the word have kept quality up.

Expensive does mean higher quality if you know the right brands to pick*. Case in point, $180 for Sony Link Buds is pretty bad deal! There are much better options at the same price range like Apple Airpods, Samsung's AKG tuned Galaxy Buds or the higher end Sony XM4s or XM5.

Obviously there are many companies that do rely on branding to jack up prices like Beats or Marshal. But there are also companies that do no to little marketing and instead focus on craftsmanship where the majority of the cost is going into higher quality experience. And in those segments there isn't really some magical way to reduce costs. Akko is getting pretty popular, but their high-end IEMs like the Obsidian are still going to be in the same price-range as Sennheisers or AKG.

>Expensive does mean higher quality if you know the right brands to pick

<laughs in Toyota turbo-4cyl that can't stay together for a laundry list of reasons>

You can't base decision on brand, no matter ho much a bunch of screeching morons on the internet tell you you can. You have to also consider how much the company cares about the product line, how core the product line is to the company, where in the lifecycle it is, etc, etc. The brands that people herald as good are very capable of phoning it in or whoring themselves around. Kitchen-aid slaps their name on all sorts of garbage outside the core products they built their name on, to pick one example of the latter. And the brands that people herald as bad are very capable of producing very good stuff when the incentives align.

Bluetooth doesn’t follow the typical quality curve anyway, it is just random whether or not your devices like each other.

I bet the sound quality on the Sony buds was better.

Depending on your use case, sound quality may be way down the line in importance. The earbuds I use on the subway don’t need to be high quality. Anything better than AM radio will do the job.

Anything without ANC is basically unusable, and better ANC (which usually correlates with good sound quality) pretty noticeably improves your experience on the subway.

Yeah, probably. At least until the Sony's break down and start sounding like trash.

But, to be honest, I do more audiobooks and podcasts than I do music, so the audio quality was not the top reason I picked them. The link buds have a fairly unique design with a 2~3 mm hole in the middle of the earbuds that lets outside sound in. I like it a lot better than any active transparency mode I've ever tried. They also have much better controls than any other earbuds I've tried.

The problem with the Sony's is that they either get something messed up inside the speaker and start sounding like crap at medium to high volume, or the case's open/closed sensor breaks and they wake up and start discharging in the case, and then they're dead by the time I try to use them.

I occasionally try watching videos on my phone, but the latency that Bluetooth adds throws me off, so I don't really enjoy anything with dialogue because the lips are moving out of sync with the words. I've tried lots of different Bluetooth earbuds - from Sony, Aukey, Jlab, even the "gamer" ones from razr - and all of them seem to have noticeable amounts of latency.

I'm not sure if I'm more sensitive to it than most people or they're just all shit, but the latency is the big reason that I'm annoyed that nearly all the manufacturers removed headphones jacks from flagship phones. (Sony actually deserves some credit here, I think their flagship Xperia phone still include a headphone jack and a MicroSD slot!)

I haven't specifically tested it, but my $50 "Backbay Tempo" earbuds have a low-latency "Movie Mode" that sacrifices range to I think buffer sound for ~0 latency.

same here, i have been through several €50 Braun stabmixers which kept dying on me, the €8 no name one has now been working for over 10 years