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Comment by alnwlsn | Hacker News Reader

Chinese stuff these days has pulled far ahead of the Harbor Freight reputation of my youth. I can't remember the last time I've seen a proper "Engrish" instruction manual, most of the things are well designed and well built. Meanwhile, the "good old American brands" seem to just be selling out for cheaper and better profit margin products, so you'll be ending up with Chinese stuff anyways, which is sometimes worse than the actual Chinese brands.

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The Chinese stuff is now more often than not better. You cannot be the world's manufacturer for 30 years and not get good at making stuff.

I always think it is amusing that some people make the mistake of thinking that the Chinese can only make cheap crap(forgetting all their cell phones and apple laptops come from there).

The American market only wants to buy cheap crap so that is what is made and sent. Usually though the skills involved in making something cut-rate are just as applicable to making something top notch.

American manufacturing skills have atrophied as it has moved to a service economy while as you say the Chinese have been boosting manufacturing for 30 years.

Maybe America needs a planned economy and minority ”re-education” camps to boost production.

Good news everyone!

Or maybe just better accounting for the total lifecycle and disposal of products. If a company had to pay a bond to cover the long term impact of their shit products I bet we'd see higher quality goods.

I was thinking a snarky thought reading another comment in the chain: "DJI and Anker aren't Chinese brands, because they're good and they have brand reputation".

"Chinese" in my ape brain is Harbor Freight junk, or cheap houseware from Amazon with names like "KRLFOCGY".

Honestly, even harbor freight has some pretty good tools these days. They do have disposable level crap, but even one level above that is quite serviceable.

One thing I've noticed and have also seen on Project Farm YT tool reviews is that Harbor Freight tiers tend to be by country: lowest end is often from mainland China but the next higher tier is from Taiwan.

Some of their icon tools literally beat snap-on

I honestly believe Harbor Freight toolboxes are the best value on the market

I think it makes more sense to separate "cheap" from "crap". US/EU never valued East Asian labor at equal value. Rather than complaining, East Asia just "let them have it" and it wrecked industrial base for both in the long run.

I mean, it doesn't make sense that typical guidance units for missiles are more expensive than DJI drones. Everyone thinks Chinese products got a little more expensive lately, so they must have quit doing cheap part of cheap and crap, and it's just my gut feeling, but, I would be not so sure about that.

It's the exact same thing that happened with Japanese cars. Believe it or not, Japanese autos used to be considered cheap junk in the 70s and early 80s.

Same thing with Germany in the 19th century: "inferior copies of English designs". Those who don't know history will be forced to repeat past mistakes.

I've recently been putting together a large aquarium build for the first time in ~15 years, and it's really shocking how good and how cheap the Chinese stuff is now. Of particular note is lighting, where the price/W on non-Chinese equipment is 4-10x the Chinese equivalent.

It shouldn't be a surprise to people that quality isn't there if you buy a nameless thing at the cheapest possible price, regardless of where it's made.

On the other hand, China has major brands in many markets. DJI drones, Anker chargers and cords, Lenovo computers, Polestar cars. TCL TVs and Haier appliances (which I believe also owns the GE consumer brand) are also very common. Roborock vacuums seem to be considered a better value than Roomba now.

It's an interesting counterpoint to the old cliche about paying for brands. Clearly buying on price alone is foolish, as is not considering the reputation of the maker of a product.

It's very common to have multiple chinese brands competing against each other, throwing out better products every year... with western companies maybe having one or two products.

See something like Roomba vs. Xiaomi/Roborock/Deebot/Ecovacs/etc.

This is a real example how western IP stagnates western economy and it's making it not competitive - the IP law makes it easy for incumbents to kill of iteration and competition.

> a proper "Engrish" instruction manual

At what point do the instruction manuals stop catering to Engrish and start focusing on 汉字?

I quite honestly fear this day. (But for other reasons, eg we might have to go to china for top conferences, universities, jobs, etc.).

I myself have been preparing for that day, learning simplified Mandarin and trying to expose myself to Chinese online presence. :)

I'm not sure that China will ever "overtake" the US in global technology mindshare, but they are getting closer, and if that ever properly happens, I'm quite ready, and if not, at least I get a whole new language out of it and a better understanding of a huge culture that felt a lot more out of reach before.

For context, I'm from Russia, so maybe it's easier for me to trade one foreign hegemony for another than for many others..

> I'm not sure that China will ever "overtake" the US in global technology mindshare

Is that adequately measured from the English side of the internet? I honestly don't know. I don't participate in Chinese technology communities online and have zero basis to measure any amount of tech mindshare that it has. I do know that a number of English based tech forums are entirely dependent on a select few microcontrollers for their builds. Surely on the Chinese side of things there are discussions going on about who is building the next cheapest microcontrollers and how they achieve it?

I do know that absolutely nothing that we have in the "West" can compare to what hardware hackers can accomplish in Shenzhen thanks to the overwhelming amount of electronics knowledge and availability in the area. I have to wonder how much of that mindshare "we" actually have.

It's already here. All the best cheap microcontrollers have datasheets written purely in Chinese. Most Westerners don't use them because the datasheets are written purely in Chinese, and therefore, Western products with cheap microcontrollers use inferior ones.

Recently I've bought a Xiaomi beard trimmer on AliExpress and its box and manual are 100% in Chinese. Google Translate took care of it.

Why did I buy a Xiaomi beard trimmer on AliExpress? It looks like all western brands decided to keep using NiMH batteries on their designs, and I really don't like my trimmers dying in the middle of a cut and me, now with a half-shaved beard, having to wait 12 hours for it to recharge. Xiaomi did something very revolutionary: used a Li-Ion battery.

Interesting. I never cared about what my Japanese beard trimmer uses as battery, because whenever it dies on me (which is long after prominently lighting a red LED), it works instantly fine connected to the wall to let me finish my cut, and can take however long it wants to recharge after that ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯

You see, some Philips MBA decided to pinch 0.0001 pennies and forgo installing a red LED to warn the user the battery is drained, and a diode to allow it to run from the wall.

Happy to give some profit to their competitor.

I came across this[1] recently. It compares a Harbor Freight Icon ratchet ($70) to a Snap-On ratchet ($195). They are essentially using the same design and same parts. The Snap-On replacement part kit fits inside an Icon ratchet. Oh and the Icon is performs better than the Snap-On for a fraction of the price. The Gearwrench ratchet ($45) was even more impressive as it's only slightly worse than either of the others and not necessarily in ways most people will ever experience.

Some brands of cheap tools are getting really fucking good. There's still a lot of garbage out there though.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBItmykqu0I

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