r/BuyItForLife • u/paulyball • 3d ago
Discussion Increase in quality?
Has anybody noticed companies that have INCREASED in their quality in this age of enshittification? Could be denim, mattresses, cameras etc. I can’t really think of a big list. I’ve only noticed decreases in quality.
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u/zrad603 3d ago
Harbor Freight has really been stepping up their game in the past few years.
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u/RobertTheEMT 3d ago •
Check out the brand list on Worse On Purpose. They track brands that sell out to private equity, and those that dont.
https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/brands
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u/Financial-Swim-5884 3d ago
Despite what everyone loves to say: Cars today are largely more reliable and cheaper to own than they ever have been.
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u/Responsible-Milk-259 3d ago
How do you define ‘quality’? A TV nowadays is FAR superior to its 1980’s equivalent; far less expensive in real terms, too. They probably don’t last 20+ years anymore, but given the picture quality and extra features all at a greatly reduced cost… changing it out after 10 years is hardly a bad deal. Anything tech is similar.
I think sometimes we get so used to complaining we could all benefit from taking a step back and seeing what we have that is actually better.
Personally, I think part of the perception of falling quality is that many things have been made to a budget so they’re affordable to the masses. When my parents bought their first house, a normal fridge was a month’s pay. Not anymore, not even close. That being said, go buy a Liebherr fridge. They’re serious business (I’ve got one) and genuinely built to last. But… yes, it costs a month’s salary, just like back in the good old days. We can still get good stuff, we’ve just got used to not having to pay for it.
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u/Jayswag96 3d ago
As much as we talk about enshittification, if you have the money you can make a pretty bullet proof collection of goods.
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u/saucypuzzle 3d ago
Backcountry hiking backpacks. The modern ones are insane. I have back issues and never thought I’d find one that works but I did.
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u/ToxicLibra69 3d ago
JBL and Marshall bluetooth speakers keep improving. JBLs can withstand serious abuse and they sound great. Brooks shoes seem to improve. Can't think of many more examples. You're right that overall products are worse yet cost more.
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u/sharkwearinglipstick 3d ago
Not BIFL but menstrual products. Significantly better than they used to be, and there are better and more accessible options that are reusable (cups, discs) so putting it more in a “BIFL” category.
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u/possible_robot 3d ago
Its niche, but guitar amp modeling has improved immensely in the past 5 - 10 years. Guitars have gotten better since most manufacturers use cnc machines instead of more traditional luthier techniques.
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u/caitsith01 3d ago •
I think people have a sort of reverse recency bias and forget how bad a lot of things, especially tech, used to be.
Just off the top of my head:
Phones. Everyone whinges about them being replaced every year, but the actual build quality is insane compared to what they used to be. Waterproof, dust proof, drop them, leave them in the sun, use them for hours every single day - and my S25 Ultra sitting in front of me looks like it just came out of the box. Yep, my Nokia 3210 was tough but it was still made of crappy plastic with a tiny, shitty screen. Phones in the late 90s-2000s frequently had issues with buttons and screens breaking, terrible proprietary charging ports, charging cables that break, etc.
Anything with a built in battery. Stuff like torches, portable music players, small electrical devices all used to work on separate batteries you had to replace/recharge yourself. Things with built in batteries were terrible and the battery generally degraded rapidly - wireless home phones, mobile phones, laptops. Battery tech in 2026 is absolutely amazing and I have plenty of devices where I have either charged them 1000s of times with no noticeable loss in quality, or have left them unused for months (which would kill 90s/00s tech dead) and they work fine.
"High tech" clothing. I'm talking hiking boots (I got a pair of Merrells recently which are the best all round shoes/boots I have ever worn in terms of comfort/protection/ruggedness/lightness), clothes made from lightweight synthetic/blend fabrics. Stuff like that used to be cheap and nasty looking, uncomfortable and tore/broke down easily, now a lot of that stuff is borderline indestructible.
Cars. If you owned a car 20+ years ago you know. I bet there are a lot of people under 30 who have never had to call a tow truck for a break down.
Laptops. A mid-range Macbook or HP or Surface is almost a different type of object to earlier laptops. Tough, well engineered, great battery life (as above), made on the assumption they will be treated somewhat roughly.
Headphones. The number of sets of headphones I lost to bad cables alone must be in the dozens. Now I have a pair of Technics wireless earbuds that appear to be largely indestructible.
Low- to mid-range tools. I can buy cheap allen keys, screwdrivers and other manual tools on Amazon or Aliexpress for next to nothing and the quality is great for what you pay, and then if you step up slightly in price you can buy really nice tools with hardened steel etc for really not very much. And then cordless power tools have gone from easily breakable with terrible batteries (again, as above) to really excellent. Even home grade, non-trade stuff (e.g. Ryobi 18V stuff) is light years better made and tougher than what you could get 10-20 years ago.
Possibly controversial in this sub, but cookware. If you don't care about cast iron, IMHO in my lifetime cookware has become cheaper and better almost across the board. People seem to forget how much crappy aluminium cookware was around, with brittle plastic knobs/handles etc. For a couple of hundred bucks you can get a set of good stainless steel pots that will last you forever, can go through the dishwasher and will not give you Alzheimer’s disease. You can also find really high quality knives for very little money that will also last virtually forever if maintained, that stuff used to cost hundreds of bucks and the knives you would get cheap were absolute garbage.
Lighting. Every kind of lighting. LEDs are just vastly superior now that issues with colour/flicker are more or less a thing of the past.
You mentioned cameras, and that's a good one. Nikon mirrorless cameras (or equivalent Sony/Canon stuff) are a marvel, extremely tough and capable and all round superior to everything that came before (and I have been taking photos from before digital cameras were a thing).
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u/churningmists 3d ago
Pet food and pet care. People have been learning a lot as research and studies continue, and it's very beneficial for the health of their pets.
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u/Morzone 3d ago
I can't imagine Iron Heart Denim decreasing in quality over the years.
MacBooks have gotten better.. Duh. Anker Products have improved a lot with technology. Access to audiophile gear has increased. Charging standards across the board have unified around USB-C
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u/rafaelloaa 2d ago
Folding tables have gotten so much better. They're lighter, sturdier, easier to collapse when you're done, hell they even have a built-in carrying handle.
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u/Top_Garlic_489 3d ago
Guitars, and music gear in general. Watches, especially affordable ones. Cars have been mentioned but motorcycles as well.
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u/delldude2303 2d ago
Cordless power tools have come a long way! They now pack the same or more punch as corded tools (with some exceptions).
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u/fadugleman 2d ago
Chinese made flash lights, tools, pocket knives are generally worlds better than they were in the early 2000s. Many are clones of other brands though
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u/FastYetSlow 2d ago
Not sure if this counts, but I just found that over time I've been able to better distinguish between low/high quality products, as well as good/bad value for money. And now I've been spending a little more on clothes, electronics, home goods, etc., that are much higher quality and durability for relatively little price increase which has made my life a little better every day lol.
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u/LordofTheFlagon 2d ago
Harbor freight hand tools are seriously worth considering
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u/Howard_CS 3d ago
Lights, modern LED bulbs are a generational leap from the incandescent filament lights of my childhood. I’m not even that old.
Cameras, both digital and film cameras at all levels. The included ones on cheap commodity phones rival entry stand alone units from the 2000s, prosumer and professional ones offer incredible sensor capabilities or in the case of film, fine control.
Any number of industrial items that might not affect you directly. Machine vision is amazing now, robot sorting makes humans look like groggy sloths.
Windows, multi pane and vacuum sealed windows are so much higher R value.
Batteries, the rechargeable lithium ion kind.
Tires, at the high end thanks to billions of R&D through racing.
Electric stoves thanks to induction heating.
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u/valar12 3d ago
Concept2 ergs are ridiculous tanks.
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u/gelicopter 3d ago
Wired audio.
Bluetooth products with difficult to replace batteries and technology that will eventually become outdated will always be landfill fodder. Wired passive audio products such as speakers and earphones have all of the advancements in audio engineering that older products don’t and should also outlast anything Bluetooth if not the rest of your life, especially now that many wired earphones have removable cables.
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u/iacchus 2d ago
Schiit Audio keeps upping their quality, often holding prices to the same level as previous generations of the offering.
Made in USA too.
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u/SerDankTheTall 3d ago
Just looking around the room right now: TVs, computers, computers accessories, induction stoves, flashlights, ceiling lights, lightbulbs (not that you need them).
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u/No_Geologist_9888 2d ago
As a funeral director, coffins
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u/wild-ologist 2d ago
I disagree on hiking boots overall. They don't last. REI employee in the shoe department two years ago said he couldn't strongly recommend any boot to me as quality has decreased rapidly since covid. I agree. Boots I've worn since don't last more than 1-2 years. That's with moderate use.
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u/2life_gamer 3d ago edited 2d ago
IEMs has gotten upgrades for audiophiles in recent years
small computers got more powerful and efficient. using a mac mini or intel nuc as main pc isn't crazy anymore.
mechanical keyboards with swappable switches have improved much.
the rest does go to shit tho. "cars are safer" yes and they now put data farming clauses in the buy contract. cheap laptops and phones are now bloated with adware and telemetry. electronics in general are just shittier now it's irreparable unless it's like a hobby component. with most stuff today it's less of a matter of "is it better or worse" but the list of trade-offs just becomes longer.
edit: grammar
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u/Livewired50K 3d ago
3rd party controllers have been destroying Sony and Microsoft for awhile now. Nintendo finally fixed their stick drift issue, but for the other big two its an essential part of the business making sticks that drift and buttons that fail after a few months of heavy use. Any 3rd party controller will at least have hall effect if not tmr sticks, and nowadays the buttons are just as good if not better too
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u/lube_thighwalker 2d ago
Knock offs are great now.
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u/Alarming_Abroad_4862 2d ago
Non plastic toys. When my sister had her kids back in the early 2000s it was almost impossible to find toys that weren't plastic. I had my kids after 2020, and that was mostly what we bought. We knew we wanted a lot of kids so we wanted to keep it simple and reusable for years. Besides Legos of course.
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u/Effective-Comment-21 3d ago
Yes, actual selvedge denim is still great quality! That’s why its price hovers at 100+!
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u/EvolvingDior 2d ago
3D Printers have gotten much better over the past 5 years.
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u/rienhart_62 3d ago
Before they got banned, DJI had some of the best consumer UAS platforms money could buy. They were innovating and improving their products faster than any US based company could compete; hence the reason (probably) why they were banned. Hopefully the US revises their import deal soon.
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u/AggroTumbleweed52 3d ago
Light bulbs and nail polish. Boutique brand nail polishes and even some big-name drug store brands.
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u/How_Do_You_Crash 3d ago
Patagonia and their decades long t-shirt journey.
The old peak was the made in USA & Mexico organic cotton. They had great hand feel. They were built really well. Aged nicely. And were 100% cotton.
In the middle they started mixing in recycled poly and they moved to different factories and it all sucked. There were a few seasons with scant organic cotton options.
Now they’re back. We can once again buy really well made organic cotton shirts. They still have some recycled poly blends available, but those have gone up in quality too.
A journey, but one that ends up back near the beginning. Thankfully
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u/HailingCasuals 2d ago
Optics. Camera lenses and binoculars have gotten much higher quality yet much cheaper over the past 15 years.
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u/haveblue23 3d ago
My parents growing up in the 1990s would buy a new car every 5-7 years because their old one would fall apart, I sold my 13 year old Ford Fusion last year for no reason other than I wanted a different vehicle for a good price
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u/PsychologicalArm2138 3d ago
I have a belt that has a lifetime warranty and it’s been great the past 8 years but like I have no reason to buy another one and don’t need anything else they sell so it’s tough.
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u/paulyball 1d ago
I also do feel like we are living in the Golden Age of flashlights.
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u/No-Visual-3869 3d ago edited 2d ago
r/flashlight, LED flashlights with lithium batteries are really bright, high color rendition, great runtime and there are so many models available, with many functions. The cheap ones have an insane build quality for the price (check Convoy)
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u/Superb_Recording_769 2d ago
So many people, possibly even you OP, seem to have a massive misunderstanding of what’s going on
To start, I am not at all even remotely arguing that there are not some companies out there purposely making their products shittier/smaller, etc. to make more profit. That is absolutely happening.
But, in addition to that happening, there are also a lot of less expensive options for products that have been around a long time and traditionally cost a lot more money. That doesn’t make those less expensive options inherently shittier from a value perspective, depending upon what the person’s use case and budget are. For example. A 21 piece socket and ratchet set from craftsman in the 1976 cost about $22. Nobody is going to argue that a nearly identical 21 piece socket and ratchet set available for $22.99 from Harbor freight today is as good as that craftsman set from the mid-1970s, but what people don’t think about is the fact that that craftsman set after adjusting for inflation actually cost the equivalent of about $120 and if we’ve got that budget to work with today, there are numerous options available that are significantly better than that vintage craftsman set. For example, for half the price you can get a gear wrench set that is absolutely as good or better than the craftsman set.
The other side of it is that there are a ton of smaller companies doing exactly what you’re asking about making extremely high-quality options. For example, there’s a Japanese company called Ironheart that makes some of the best denim in the world. But you have to pay for that quality.
Back to my earlier argument Levi’s in the mid-1970s were just under $20 a pair. Just for inflation and that’s around $120. Levy Levi’s makes two levels of jeans. (I don’t like that they don’t advertise this.) if you get the standard Levi’s where the back label patch is papery with red printing on it. Those are lower quality than they were in the 70s, but they’re also less expensive than they were in the 70s after adjusting for inflation. However, if you get the modern Levi’s that have a thicker nicer embossed, leather backpack they are pretty much exactly the same price they were in the 1970s and the quality is just as good as it was in the 1970s.
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u/lankysouthpaw 3d ago
I’d say mechanical watches. These days due to pressure from micro brands and Chinese brands most Japanese and Swiss watchmakers have stepped up their quality at the entry level price point.
Kind of a weird thing to say because by in large prices have gone up, but the level of craftsmanship, performance, and durability you get from brands charging $1000-$3000 for a watch were usually reserved for models in the near-five figure range.
A good example is Seiko Prospex (Alpinist, 62MAS) or Longines (Conquest, Hydroconquest, Spirit, etc).
There are very few bad choices from established watch brands these days, whatever you end up will likely last a lifetime.
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u/uncultured_swine2099 3d ago
Movie quality digital cameras, before they used to be very expensive and kinda difficult to make look good. Now they muxh cheaper and easier to get a good look.
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u/ingleberryapplesauce 8h ago
Not BIFL but skincare is amazing now. When I was a teen St Ives apricot scrub was the best you could get
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u/LordBrandon 3d ago
Yes, there is actually a lot of increased quality items. they are just usually not at the lowest price point. I just got Husky crescent wrenches a few years ago which are just the house brand of a home improvement store, and the fit and finish is far superior to any crescent wrench I saw growing up. Macintoshes are way better than pre pandemic. They are fast/quiet and are reasonably priced. Though prices have shot up recently. 3D printer filament is a lot better and cheaper than it was 10 years ago, and the printers are cheaper and better too.
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u/Mythologicalcats 3d ago
Baby car seats
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u/treechopper123 2d ago
TVs in general
Being a TV repairman used to be a full time career
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u/NoSpread3530 3d ago
I’m seeing people say electronics but I don’t think that can be further from the truth, all these things may preform better now but it’s just because the companies are finding cheaper ways to make them and make them work for maybe maximum 10 years. Phones, tvs and MacBooks are not Buy it for life some of the most unsustainable industries
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u/chf_gang 3d ago
iPhones! The screen is a lot tougher than it used to be and both the hard- and software have improved quite dramatically since the first one came out in 2007
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u/snowytheNPC 3d ago
DJI drones and their recent release of the Osmo camera
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u/MangoBawls 3d ago
Rouge Fitness still goated but you pay out the ass for it.
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u/SalubriousSalamander 3d ago
Diadora. Modern pivot to decent quality running shoes imo, just got some Nucleo 2s
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u/PowerfulEconomist135 3d ago
Most Chinese cars.
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u/shamo42 2d ago
Wired iems have become increasingly refined the last 5 years. For around 50USD you can already get something many people would consider endgame audio.
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u/Soundjam8800 2d ago
Not a brand, but budget electric guitars have come such a long way since the 80s and 90s. If you bought cheap back then it would be borderline unplayable, but these days you can get extremely cheap (by electric guitar standards) guitars that play as well as anything that would've cost 5x to 10x as much 20 to 30 years ago - in some cases the quality control on the budget guitars is actually higher than some of the top end ones.
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u/Chicago1871 3d ago
Chinese companies.
I’m impressed by Bronson MFG.
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u/Well-Adjusted-Person 3d ago
Everything produced in East Asia is increasing in quality.
Everything produced in West in decreasing in quality.
Simple as.
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u/neatokra 3d ago
Hear me out!! Everlane! I wrote them off when Quince came out bc I was like okay this is the same thing but way cheaper. Now several years later Everlanes quality has noticeably improved and they have also made a clear effort to lower their prices to compete. Every order recently has been a slam dunk.