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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

It isn't really, tho'. For product X you could spend $y every year on Chinese-made because it's broken or obsolete, or $10y just once on German qualitat that will last for the rest of your life. We could all own fewer but better things, all made by workers who were decently paid and it would be cheaper. The difficult question is, why do so few people even want that?

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I expect mainly because in the world of tech, things only have a life of maybe 2 years before they're considered 'old'/'obsolete'/'stupid looking' etc.

Memory, megapixels, storage, screen, speed etc are all advancing so quickly that it doesn't make any sense to bother making something that'll last beyond a few years.

It would however be cool and responsible to make these devices more environmentally friendly, but that's a hard sell to some.

I'm sort of glad I didn't spend the extra on my first MP3 player - 32mb of wonderment.

We (the West) get a LOT of stuff from China. On a Chinese-made frying pan, for example, the handle is broken in a year, the non-stick coating comes off in a few washes. My (American-made) cast-iron skillet, on the other hand, cost more but I'll never need another. Heck, my grandkids, if I ever have any, could probably still use it...

I think we make the mistake of thinking everything made in China is cheap. You might be surprised to find out that some expensive and quality items are made in China. Somehow we have come to expect everything made in China to be cheap, though it is more a result of American companies looking for cheaper goods to advertise on the shelf because consumers are not qualified to make an informed decision.

The fact is, any labor will be cheaper in China than in the US. This could be factory garment assemblers or traditional metal workers. The cost of living is so much lower over there that even the best costs less from China than from the US.

No, you couldn't. You spend $10y on a computer or a cellphone made in Germany, it'll still be completely useless within a decade or two. Tech is different.

But that isn't true. 10 years ago were you having less fun on the original Playstation than you have on a PS3 now? What about 10 years before that on the Sega Megadrive?

The upgrade treadmill is just fashion and marketing.

Wow, Gaius, somebody's downvoting every one of your posts.

There's a big movement towards emulators among the gamer scene I'm able to observe, because a lot of gamers are realizing that games haven't become fundamentally better in the last decade. Yesterday evening at a friend's, the Wii was forsaken for a Genesis; it's surprising how entertaining those games still are, because we've been conditioned to think you can't have fun without being cutting-edge.

Touched a nerve I guess. Heck, I got 4000+ points, I'll call it like I see it.

You're right, we are conditioned to value the wrong things. The same game with more polygons is the same game.

Entertainment competition goes up. More tv, more books, more movies, more games, more music. I don't think i can objectively quantify fun had in a game 10 years ago or a game now. However, I think we can agree that how people spend their leisure time is a pretty good indicator of how much fun activity X is. In the early 80's movies were more fun than video games for just about everybody. Now, you see moms playing games on the wii. I think video games are objectively more fun than the alternatives than they were with their alternatives 20 years ago.

That's because video game consoles are more popular, and they've become more accepted by the media.

30 years ago, my father and his brothers played Atari. I grew up with parents that both understood video games, at least somewhat. There's nothing objective about the way we view video games, or any other form of media.

For instance: I primarily look for media with some sort of emotional power, which is all-but-impossible to find in video games. I can think of perhaps five or six video games that had any emotional impact on me. I can name far more movies that have had a similar impact. My secondary search is for polish, and there movies also have an edge over modern games. The things I look for aren't what you look for, though - they're subjective. I remember having much more fun on an SNES than I did with, say, the Xbox. Your milage varies.

Yes, I was. Online play is a significant improvement, and the gameplay is substantially different. Plus, the PlayStation doesn't have a catalog of new games. In order to continue playing new video games, you have to upgrade.

Tech is only different if you play by the game wherein anything that doesn't abuse a computer's stats is not worth toying with.

I'm guilty of playing this game along with everybody else, but at some point we'll realize that we don't need all of what we've got, and we'll start being satisfied with it. Hell, I can see myself sticking with the laptop I've got right now for a decade.

If you want to separate yourself from the world, then you could still use typewriters. Typewriters can't receive e-mail. Similarly, a Pentium can't run modern Web applications at a reasonable speed. A ten-year-old cellphone won't have a camera and all the associated applications of that. You can stay with old hardware -- but at the cost of eventually giving up access to contemporary applications.

at some point we'll realize that we don't need all of what we've got, and we'll start being satisfied with it.

That's called getting old.

The fun of chasing the new is half (or more) the point.

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