

Buying Quality vs. Buying Crap - buckpost
http://www.markevanstech.com/2008/08/24/buying-quality-vs-buying-crap/

======
mechanical_fish
When I was a kid my parents bought a really high quality Atari 2600. And I've
got to admit: It works as well today as it did the day we bought it.

Other people's high-quality eight-track tape decks, quadraphonic amplifiers,
and laserdisc systems are also working fine.

My Powerbook G3 "Wall Street" was still working great when I sold it. What a
tank. Of course, it wouldn't run a modern browser because it still had Mac OS
9... I had tried Mac OS X on it but it was just so _slow_... and I was never
quite able to devote enough time to get Linux working. (PB G3 Linux was always
a bit of a delicate hack... and it turns out that if you wait seven or eight
years after a machine's heyday the Linux hobbyists have all turned to
something else and their pages on installing Linux on the G3 have all gone
stale.)

The moral of this story is that, while it might pay to throw money at a high-
quality vacuum cleaner -- because vacuum cleaners are a relatively mature
technology that doesn't change much over time [1] -- in tech the problem is
not so simple, because the money you spend on gold-plating may simply be
wasted. The baseline is moving too fast.

[1] Of course, my father-in-law has an old Electrolux vacuum that still works
fine... but I'm an allergy sufferer who prefers a HEPA vacuum, a technology
that is now quite common -- it's fully supported by the best vacuums and
claimed by every other vacuum -- but which AFAIK didn't exist back in the
1970s. So even vacuum cleaners are not immune to true obsolescence.

