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Originally posted by schuyler
I'm amazed how products are getting better and better. Take automobiles, for example. Remember the pieces of crap you bought in the seventies? They had to have a tune up every few thousand miles, replace points & plugs. They got 10-12 miles per gallon and belched an amazing amount of smoke. You had to pay extra for things like an AM radio or an automatic transmission. You had to actually roll the windows down manually. A/C was a luxury on more expensive models. By the time you got to 100,000 miles the things would barely start. The motor would have to be overhauled. The body was rusting out. The paint was gone. It was worthless. Have you ever tried to drive a car from, say, the sixties? They're a pain to drive. You actually have to work at it. Remember the first Subarus? They came with a 2 cylinder 2 cycle engine that wore out at 60,000 miles.
Today, for the same relative price. your auto is just getting broken in at 100,000 miles. Tune ups are a thing of the past. I have a 2004 with 122,000 miles on it and it looks and drives like a new car. Mechanical devices of all sorts are made with finer tolerances and more precision such that they don't even compare to the crap we used to be forced to buy. I'll take any brand, foreign or domestic, today over yesteryear.
Or what about computers? I bought my first Apple ][ in 1978 for $2000, invested another $5,000 into it for disk drives ($500 apiece), all kinds of cards like a CP/M card for $400. memory cost $120 for 16K, i.e.: 16,384 bytes. The thing had a 40 character wide screen and was all uppercase letters. By today's standards it was primitive. But today I can buy a brand new laptop with a 100gig drive and 6 gigs of memory for $500!
As far as food, yeah, I have to admit it angered me when they shaved the middle out of the Dial soap bars. That was a low blow. But the fact is you don't have to buy hamburger helper. Look at the produce aisle. It used to be a given veggie was available only when it was "in season." Today you can get the most exotic veggies from anywhere in the world year around. The only stuff you can only buy "in season" are local berries and English peas. I can even buy salmon year around now.
I sure wouldn;t want to go back to the "good old days." That's because they were called "These trying times."
Originally posted by BravoBull
While some of what you say is true, you give absolutely no context.
1. Are cars built better than in the late 70's and early 80's? Yes, But the late 70's and early 80's is when the automobile industry decided to go with planned obsolescence. By the time, the 90's rolled around and they lost a significant amount of market share to the Japanese auto industry, They then started to change there manufacturing methods, but they still keep the planned absolescence. They've just moved it out a little farther. Cars from the 60's were hard to kill, so what if they didn't have all the comforts.of the cars today. This post is about quality, not technological advancements.
2. Your Apple reference is to technological advancement and price, not quality.
3. Your reference to food out of season does not touch upon QUALITY. It is only a by product of globalism. The fact is, you don't know how the food was grown or what chemicals were used to produce and transport it.
Clearly, you don't get the premise of the post. It is about QUALITY. It seemed pretty clear. Geez, if I didn't know better, I would say your intent was to obfuscate the premise of the original post. Why would you do that? It doesn't make sense?!
Originally posted by Dreamer99
S&F
Your rant was enough to get me out of my hidey-hole today.
Immediately made me think of the old Nintendo products. The Gameboy was nearly indestructible, there's an image from Nintendo Power showing a Gameboy running Tetris that had survived a Gulf war bombing. Going on that theme, Nintendo Power decided to test their products for durability.
I can't remember the exact results, but it was surprising that most products survived most things they dished out. The one I remember the most was a Gameboy Color that they named Jesus, because they drowned it in the toilet and after 3 days it came back to life.
Personally, I have a second hand N64 that had been thrown against a concrete floor, busting off most of the outer shell. The damned thing still works. Actually, that one works better than my intact N64; the intact one freezes up randomly.
The thing is, that's where it seems to end. I never owned a gamecube, but I would imagine being smacked against concrete wouldn't be good for the optical laser. I owned a Wii, but it mysteriously went kaputski one day and I don't know why. It turns on but won't load into anything, whether it's in memory or on a disc. I owned two DS's. First one fell from my TV stand and broke. Wasn't a large fall either, but it cracked the case and the device wouldn't stay on for more than a minute or two. The second DS went the way of my Wii. Mysteriously kaput.
So that's what gamers these days have to deal with. Mysteriously kaput devices. I have a few friends who had 1st generation Xboxes or PS3's that went kaput. The really odd thing is that they conveniently seem to crap the bed right after the warranty runs out..