[sigma2015]

In my (anecdotal) experience the relation between price an quality is not just not proportional - it seems to be completely spurious after a certain minimum-price is reached.

You can get very high quality and long lasting stuff for reasonable prices. People who are poor though tend to not investigate products or reflect on decisions they make in that area. This leads to buying overpriced and unnecessary gadgets - often of very low-quality.

The shoe-analogy doesn't really work in my opinion nowadays that manufacturing is industrialized and automated.

[glomph]

Having a lack of money usually means you have a lack of time as well. Buying (say) boots because your only other pair of boots has broken does not afford you the same oppertiunity to be picky. Perhaps you will need boots before a certain time, say to go to work. You probably don't have the disposable income to buy boots before the point where you need them. This means you don't have the same freedom to research this long lasting reasonably priced stuff even if you do happen to have the budget to reach that minimum price you are talking about.

[sigma2015]

Absolutely ... the same principle can be extrapolated to self-confidence, education, patience, ...

- self-confidence to not buy an expensive Apple smartphone like your peers but a reasonable priced one from Huawai

- education to efficiently think about a products features

- patience to not buy as soon as possible but take time to observe prices and wait for meaningful reviews on amazon

At the end of the day it all comes down to your personal biography, upbringing etc.

[pbhjpbhj]

>self-confidence to not buy an expensive Apple smartphone like your peers but a reasonable priced one from Huawai //

Huawei aren't a cheap brand, they are compared to Apple, for sure, but for me it's do I buy a name brand product from Acer, LG, Huawei or do I get a no-name item. My current TV is a Polaroid(!), it's a white-label product with the same internals as Panasonics, Toshibas and LGs. It's this or nothing. Bought less than a year ago I've already had to have it opened up for fault-finding. More expensive products are definitely better, but not the next level up (the cheaper Toshibas, etc.) but the level above that - which is more by model but I'd probably include Samsung there. It really is just like the leather boots analogy.

Another instance of this for me is trousers. I basically have 2 pairs of trousers for daily wear, one is a pair of jeans. I get supermarket own-brand (UK) jeans, they all wear out at the crotch, the stitching comes apart after about 6-9months. £10 a pair (or less if I catch a sale). Now I could buy more expensive ones that are better made, there's an apparent variation in longevity even now Sainsburys > Tesco > ASDA. More expensive trousers - in the past - have never split at the crotch seam. The problem is that the more expensive ones that are still in my price range seem equally likely to fail early.

High price doesn't indicate high quality but I've found very few products for a relatively low price that weren't low quality; often atrocious designs that could be so much better using the same materials too.

[ptaipale]

Indeed, and particularly nowadays that price differentiation is often based on brand images and customer segmantation, not actual differences in manufacturing.

On a related note: if you look for a quality car (quality defined as "will drive you from one place with reliability and sufficient comfort"), then cheap cars, manufactured in great numbers with consistent quality, are far superior to "premium" cars which are manufactured in small numbers and then to have lots of quirks and little problems. The premium cars have luxury features of course, and can make the owner feel happy about them, but the Toyota Corolla or whatever is going to be more reliable.