> I don't think anyone needs to be especially qualified to judge the quality of products that they do or will use.
In your example, though, what you have done is try multiple models over multiple years, while the use-case hasn't changed one bit. So you have found an example where you could actually test multiple products yourself, and then decide which one you like better.
Many times it's not like that. If you buy a smartphone today, you can't test 4 different models for 2 months and then choose. So you will have to pick one. And in a couple years, when this one is not good enough, you will have to buy a new one. But everything will have evolved: websites will be even bulkier and slower to load, mobile apps will be more Javascript wrappers on top of cross-platform frameworks etc etc that made them faster to write, etc. So the new phone you will buy will not compare to the old one, because it won't live in the same world.
Therefore you end up in the same situation: you need to buy a smartphone, you can test 4 different models for 2 months, and you don't know if the ones that are more expensive are better.