>It's interesting that there are still products (hats, watches, cars, ...) for which the finest examples are made by craftsmen with enormous skill, and not by machine.
Eh, for a lot of those, the thing you are buying is the... immeasurable something you get from it being made by hand. Uniqueness. What someone like me might call flaws.
My Toyota van is gonna be way more reliable than a Maybach Landaulet. It can haul more, too. Hell, if I got a more expensive Toyota, say, one of the faster lexus LS models that is more in the shape of the Landaulet, it wouldn't even be much any slower, and the LS is, if not affordable, at least realistic for your average silicon valley tech nerd.
I'm not saying that a Lexus LS really compares to a Maybach Landaulet in the market or in people's minds; it doesn't. One is like $70K and the other is like one and a half million. But the strongest objective advantage the Maybach has is simple exclusivity; There are a lot of Toyotas on the road; a lot of the value in the Maybach is in the process... and the process that makes it rare.
Objectively, I would easily argue that the Maybach is worse. It's going to be vastly less reliable than that Lexus. and certainly, for telling time, your $10 drug store watch is vastly superior to your hand-built analog wrist-art piece.
And if you want to get fancy, even the cheapest cellphones these days come with time synced from GPS satellites. (GPS is fucking amazing. One of those things where the more you learn about how it works, the more amazed you will be that it works ever at all.)
So... yeah, I'm not saying there isn't value in having a hand-built art-piece; sometimes, there's a whole lot of value. And if you've got that much money, why do you really care what time it is, anyhow? But I am saying that you're going to have to search pretty hard to find an example where the hand-built example is objectively better at fulfilling it's ostensible purpose (e.g. transporting people and telling time) than something mass-produced by machines.
Eh, for a lot of those, the thing you are buying is the... immeasurable something you get from it being made by hand. Uniqueness. What someone like me might call flaws.
My Toyota van is gonna be way more reliable than a Maybach Landaulet. It can haul more, too. Hell, if I got a more expensive Toyota, say, one of the faster lexus LS models that is more in the shape of the Landaulet, it wouldn't even be much any slower, and the LS is, if not affordable, at least realistic for your average silicon valley tech nerd.
I'm not saying that a Lexus LS really compares to a Maybach Landaulet in the market or in people's minds; it doesn't. One is like $70K and the other is like one and a half million. But the strongest objective advantage the Maybach has is simple exclusivity; There are a lot of Toyotas on the road; a lot of the value in the Maybach is in the process... and the process that makes it rare.
Objectively, I would easily argue that the Maybach is worse. It's going to be vastly less reliable than that Lexus. and certainly, for telling time, your $10 drug store watch is vastly superior to your hand-built analog wrist-art piece.
And if you want to get fancy, even the cheapest cellphones these days come with time synced from GPS satellites. (GPS is fucking amazing. One of those things where the more you learn about how it works, the more amazed you will be that it works ever at all.)
So... yeah, I'm not saying there isn't value in having a hand-built art-piece; sometimes, there's a whole lot of value. And if you've got that much money, why do you really care what time it is, anyhow? But I am saying that you're going to have to search pretty hard to find an example where the hand-built example is objectively better at fulfilling it's ostensible purpose (e.g. transporting people and telling time) than something mass-produced by machines.