A few days ago, we had a thread about games that released in 2004, and I made a comment that ended with "old shit is better." And then I started thinking about it... old things are better.
Case in point: vehicles. I needed a truck for the family farm, and I went shopping. Quickly I realized that 1) newer 3/4 ton diesels are designed to fail as a revenue stream and 2) buying a $80,000 truck that will probably need at least one, maybe two $5,000 service visits before it hits six digit mileage wasn't in the cards. So I bought a 20 year old truck... that every mechanic who has seen it has tried to buy. Total cost was less than a Tabroma with the same mileage.
This continues on to just about everything. My house was built before I was born, and has the original air conditioner, stove and hot water heater. The original fridge died a few years ago, and the washer and dryer finally shuffled off this mortal coil last year. I doubt, seriously, that any of the replacement appliances lasts a decade, much less two or three.
Printers? Unless it's Japanese, don't buy a new one. HP will remote control your printer, if you opt in to the program (which they don't make clear what it is), and Xerox is a crapshoot if it works out of the box. Meanwhile, I have seen cheap Brother lasers go to half a million pages easily.
Tractors? Buy a new John Deere, and if it breaks, you either have Deere's mechanic fix it, or it stays broken. (Keep making your payments, please.) Meanwhile, you can buy an older Deere or Yanmar tractor and keep it going forever.
The modern world is starting to give me serious 40k vibes. Almost nobody knows how things work, new things are bad knockoffs, and there are mutants everywhere.
It's a consequence of inflation.
I'll give you an example with sewing machines.
I have 3 sewing machines in my house. One is a modern sewing machine from the 1990's. It broke after about 5 years. Another is a 1970's Sewing machine. It cumbersome, loud, but it gets the job done. Another is from 1903. It is made of cast iron, is manual speed, but in such a way that it is basically unlimited in it's variability, and it has never broken. It actually can't break.
Most people, and all Leftists would tell you that this is "Planned Obsolescence", but that's actually not true. It's not truly designed to fail. It's designed with an assumed life-span, but everything has a limited lifespan because no product is unlimited in life with or without maintenance. The issue here is that they have a life-span at a given purchasing power.
In 1903, that sewing machine would have been relatively expensive. Probably worth something like a few weeks worth of wages, which probably would have ended up being something like $20. (The prices don't have to be perfect, but stick with me) In 1970, that sewing machine might be worth several days of wages, somewhere around $20. In 1990, that sewing machine would have been worth several hours worth of wages, somewhere around $20. Translated to gold coins, that would have been around a 1 oz gold coin in 1903, a 1/10th an once of a gold coin in 1970, and 1/100th a gold coin in 1990.
So let's think about it. How good of a sewing machine could you get today for 1 oz of gold? Well, something like a $2,000 sewing machine is probably pretty good and comes with a life-time warranty. ... So what kind of sewing machine could you get in 1903 with 1/100th an ounce of gold? Nothing, they would have laughed you out of the General Store. So you would have probably had to go to your local "Tinkerer's Shop", and had to have brought a broken, barely functional, piece of junk... just like your 1990's sewing machine.
Technology has a deflationary pressure, but our Fabian Socialist monetary system (operating since 1913), has inflation that has outpaced technological innovation. Worse, the only types of companies that can manufacture goods as cheap in purchasing power are only the absolute largest mega-companies on Earth, who can drive the price of their product down by manufacturing 100 billion of the same identical products. It's all part of the same scam.
This is the same reason "Shrinkflation" exists. Notice how Arby's sliders aren't even the size of your palm anymore? They can't sell you a slider for $1 at the size of meat. They have to reduce the quality of the good in order to keep the price down. The reason they don't make pennies out of copper anymore is because copper is too expensive for how worthless your money is.
If the price point has to stay the same, but the money doesn't have the same purchasing power, then the quality MUST GO DOWN.
Congratulations, that has been happening unabated for over 100 years. If technological innovation hadn't countered the rate of inflation as good as it has, you'd realize you were a serf a lot sooner, because no one would wonder whether or not their parents had it better. The answer would be an obvious yes.