Comment by tptacek
12 hours ago
It's a poor analogy because mechanical watches and quartz watches aren't perfect substitutes and aren't purchased for the same reasons. Everybody's phone keeps better time than a watch; absolute accuracy isn't the exclusive measure.
Lab diamonds and mined diamonds are literally identical products.
> and aren't purchased for the same reasons
Yes, that's his point. Quartz watches have eaten the market for "I need a cheap portable time piece", like artificial diamonds did for "I need diamonds for tooling".
Both mechanical watches and natural diamonds have therefore been pushed into a niche market of posers and the easily-influenced, who buy them for different reasons than the mass market.
> Lab diamonds and mined diamonds are literally identical products.
No, mined diamonds are inferior for any industrial task due to their flaws and weaknesses.
Now a days the imperfections themselves in the rings are what are valued in natural diamonds.
People from India, thailand, Myanmar etc have not and probably won’t for a very long time abandon a strong preference for natural diamonds, regardless of how much “better” the lab grown ones are.
This is a textbook case of “worse is better”.