Comment by reaperducer
4 years ago
I don't understand when did the ability to choose a product fitting your preferences become a bad thing on HackerNews
Because so many on HN have been indoctrinated into the "scale at all costs" mentality.
It demonstrates the difference between HN and the real world.
On HN, if you can't serve a billion people, your product is niche. In the real world, billions of people earn a very nice living making niche products.
It's why so many people on HN don't understand Panic, or its PlayDate. They don't understand artisan anything. They've forgotten the whole hipster movement, which still exists in pockets of the world. They can't grok that there are companies that have been in business for hundreds of years making products one at a time — by hand.
"X doesn't scale" is HN for "I know nothing about how the world works."
>> I don't understand when did the ability to choose a product fitting your preferences become a bad thing on HackerNews
> Because so many on HN have been indoctrinated into the "scale at all costs" mentality.
HN also has many fanboys that slavishly celebrate the decisions of certain prestigious companies as the best possible ones, because that prestigious company made it. Other decisions can be assumed to be inferior because, if they had merit, the company would have picked that instead.
IMHO, a lot of technology has plateaued, to the point where the hip new thing is objectively a regression that just looks different.
> In the real world, billions of people earn a very nice living making niche products.
But rarely something as expensive to create as a smart phone.
Really? Because things like cabriolet cars, speciality cars, high-end audio equipment, luxury furniture and many others exist.
If anything, mobile phone market is exceedingly horrible because of consolidation into a single product with not much choice.
Maybe we could have a market for very high end phones that cost $3000, but I haven't seen anyone try to fill that niche yet. Maybe it isn't there?
Even if it was there, that doesn't mean the phone would be small. People who want small phones aren't necessarily wealthy, so they would only be going after the market for the intersection of 'wealthy + want small phone'... which might be a very small market and not worth pursuing.
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> Really? Because things like cabriolet cars, speciality cars, high-end audio equipment, luxury furniture and many others exist.
Indeed, all those things are much much easier and cheaper to produce than a smartphone. You could do them at your home.
Try building from scratch a small Android phone at home.
The limitation to making niche phones are the stupid, sclerotic, CARRIERS--not the manufacturers. It's the carrier gatekeeping that prevents niche phones from forming.
We need a ruling like from back in the Bell System era where you are allowed to bring customer equipment to the network without the network owner permission.
You don’t need a network owners permission for GSM/LTE. The only time you needed that was for CDMA.
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Also consider he's specifically appealing to makers of premium phones - you can bet Google and Samsung care a lot about scale. And to the parent's point about the iPhone 13 mini's sales still being more than all Pixels: ok, so then consider the already much smaller Pixel market share and how many people are left at the % of iPhone sales that the mini made up.
I'd love for this to happen, signed the petition, and will hope for the best, but I think even if there would be a decent market for this the big players don't care to make that bet.
If hipster culture was so good, it would have expanded across the world and taken over everything.
If hipster culture is predicated on being different/“not like the other girls” then by definition it is unscalable.
The whole point of a lot of things is that they are unscalable and if they somehow do scale they are not longer what they were.
Are you saying hipsterism can't be very good because it didn't scale?
That’s not how it works. X is amazing, but has a steep price so only “hipsters” can buy it which prevents it from taking over the world.
Saying that HN readers (who are quite diverse, btw) "know nothing about how the world works" or "don't understand" things in this context is just lazy thinking.
We understand just fine. It's not difficult to comprehend the appeal of customized, handmade work. The appeal is clear.
It's just that it's completely irrelevant in the context of this thread. Because you can't design and make smartphones by hand, one at a time. So what are you even talking about?
And it took Panic a decade to release the Playdate and it is still back ordered for over a year. Hardware has to “scale” to get manufacturing capacity and scale economies.