We used to have earbuds that don’t need to be charged because they had a headphone jack, didn’t get lost so easily because they had a cord attached to a headphone jack, never lost the bluetooth connection because they had a headphone jack, and they cost less because they had a headphone jack. https://bsky.app/profile/daisyfm.bsky.social/post/3l3mfjc6sn62k

  • @[email protected]
    English
    1•11 days ago

    This is tough -

    Making consumer electronics cheap crap that breaks easily and everything of decent quality prohibitively expensive is 100% on the greedy corporations, not their victims the consumers.

    (US here) Gets me thinking about dollar store headphones. Consumers could buy decent headphones for about $10 direct from overseas. When that’s equivalent to more than an hour of wages, there’s still demand for the $1 version. Should this need not be met out of a sense of social responsibility?

    (I don’t have a perfect answer myself)

    Econ 101 on my mind here btw:

    • @[email protected]English
      2•11 days ago

      The problem is that our economic system has encouraged an environment where reputation is a thing to be immediately cashed out. You can’t even know if those $10 earbuds are any better than the $1 version.

      • @[email protected]
        English
        3•11 days ago

        You can make some reasonable assumptions although they will be imperfect:

        Wouldn’t be as frequently imperfect if freaking review fraud weren’t entirely ubiquitous (grrrr)