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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

We seem to be leaving the Industrial Age in the dust. That is too bad. From Tinker Toys to Lincoln Logs to Lego to Erector — even a weird 70's toy, the Hasbro Astrolite, my childhood was filled with construction toys. Engineering, thinking in 3 dimensions, creativity, mechanical movements, "sculpting", re-playability were all there.

I hope those things never go away.

(I remember some IQ-like test as a youth that showed I was off the charts in "Spatial Reasoning" — no doubt helped by my constant manipulation of construction blocks/tpys.)

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In my excellent engineering school in France, one group reliably had very bad marks at technical drawings, the Morrocans. It required seeing the pieces in 3D based on flat drawings. It’s not IQ since they all went on to have great careers, and most performed excellently in calculus or language.

It was also a specific type of Morrocans: Those who strived enough at school to emigrate to France, compared to a specific type of French students, those who succeed in engineering.

To this day, it’s still a mystery to me why a specific group could be so markedly different in only one subject matter. Could it be that Morrocans who succeeded had had no time in their childhood to play spatially? My favorite theory is they didn’t have as much Lego in Morrocco as we (at least future engineers) had in France.

This probably isn't the reason but people who spend more time in nature have less spatial intuition about artificial things like 90 degree angles and perfect circles.

A possibility is that aphants have an advantage in abstract thought so they are the top percentile in maths. If the 96th percentile (in standardized tests of maths) of Moroccans studied at your school instead of the 99th, I would expect them to be better at drawing.

Moroccans also had to spend a lot of time learning French.

They probably had to study Ebglish too.

People often forget how long it takes to learn another language.

Are you french? I'm asking because if so you might remember the "techno" class in middle school.

Those classes introduced 3d modeling for me ( in the 90s, on paper, without computer )

That was not a important class, but you were left knowing how to draw and read a 3d shape in several 2d views

What saddens me is that despite technological advances and scaling, these toys remained expensive as hell.

It's actually worse, quality has gone down with many things.

It's kind of odd that a small microcontroller IC costs less than a LEGO brick. As if injection molding is a more expensive process than semiconductor fabbing.

The new bricks made from ecological materials seem to last shorter than the old ones made from ABS.

Feels like planned obsolescense marketed under the guise of ecology.

The current Lego site says they are made from ABS still.

Reasons include automation cycle time and base process parallelism, warehousing cost, shipping cost, distribution cost, manner of use.

Basically a LEGO brick is expensive because when being fabbed it is part of a relatively small volume (single color) injection run with limited parallelism, has to be 'manually' handled to be retrieved and packed, and then is effectively a large block of air requiring inefficient shipping, storage and retail presentation around the world. Changing the injection machine out to a new material means down time. Changing the mould takes even more time. Every SKU needs new retail packaging design, documentation and assets. Direct to consumer retail leaves scope for fat margins. Primary USP is "unique IP".

Whereas an MCU is tiny, can be fabbed in hugely parallel process, is designed to be packaged and distributed in a space efficient tape which remains trivial to consume en-masse owing to its automation-friendliness. Industrial sales leave little scope for fat margins. Primary USP is "functionality and reliability as supply chain component at competitive price point".

Bullshit. It’s expensive because they want to exploit whales.

I can buy chinese made lego sets that cost £15. An official set would be hundreds or thousands. It’s the same pieces.

Are there any knock off bricks with the same fit tolerances? I haven't seen any.

Although you might ask, should be accept a slightly lower tolerance to drive down the cost?

A bunch of manufacturers are nowadays equal to Lego quality (and beat them in other qualities, e.g. recently Lego really seems to struggle with color consistency). Not always easy to find out what a certain set manufacturer uses (they often buy the bricks from someone else), but e. g. Gobricks (afaik used by Panlos) and whatever Bluebricks Pro uses are really good.

Maybe the one part in thousand inconsistency isn't worth 10-100x the price.

My kids got a few MEGA Bloks sets when they were younger, and 1/1000 is an incredibly generous description of their tolerances. Things just... didn't stick together consistently. They'd just fall apart.

No. Lego is expensive, because it’s luxury toy brand. There many many guys analyzing this topic, here is one of them: https://bricknerd.com/home/greed-or-inflation-an-economic-an... Long story short: each year new sets contain less parts AND cost more.

The piece you cite does not support your conclusion; it is an analysis of Lego’s price increases on existing sets, and concludes that they are, in fact, inflation-driven. The only thing it says relevant to your conclusion is mostly dismissive of it as viable for Lego, though indicating its outside the scope of the article (quote: Another way around this is “Shrinkflation” where companies provide slightly smaller goods at the same price as before in an attempt to disguise the price increase, though when LEGO fans closely judge sets by size and piece count, this is harder to pull off. That’s an article for another day.)

I found very good metric somewhere: part count in all of the season sets vs. price. I don’t remember where, but there was writing, that while part count was decreasing, price increasing. And the best deal was too look for ~decade old used sets. They were bigger and feature rich. But I am not into buying anymore, I have hundreds pounds of it from last 3 decades.

And it’s hard to compare Lego bricks and semiconductors. Lego is not that hard, they only use special, a bit more expensive injection molding machines with pressure sensors. While even cheapest Padauk chip needs very very expensive foundry.

I often wonder if this is named and studied.

> We seem to be leaving the Industrial Age in the dust.

I wouldn't say that. My take is that producing small metalic pieces is such a trivial task nowadays that it makes far more sense to subcontract this instead of maintaining a full blown factory.

I know people in aerospace that can order custom pieces with tight tolerances in whatever alloy they choose, choose the production method and treatments, and get those pieces delivered to their doorstep in a matter of days.

A Meccano set doesn't even come near regarding demand and tolerances, and I'm sure that it can be as expensive to assemble as plain old nails, and requiring far less specialized equipment.

Maybe 3d printing will inherit this. Even though it won't probably feel the same. Simple mechanical toys vs 3d printed electromechanical drones .. not exactly similar.

I recall that they even tried to make Lincoln Logs out of plastic for a short while, but there was a near-universal uproar.

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