[jacquesm]

Sewing machines are hard to miniaturize. I'll give you that the newer crop are cheaper, but they will also only last a fraction of the time, that decrease in price has also come at the expense of quality.

Not that that matters as much any more, people tend to buy clothing rather than make clothing, this particular machine was a wedding gift from my grandfather (a tailor) to my mother and it was meant to last a lifetime, so that the family would have clothes to wear. Making clothing was so common nobody thought anything special of the skill involved, everybody could do it!

But if you tried to seriously keep a family of four clothed today based on fabric bought and a modern day sewing machine you'd be buying new sewing machines ever few years.

[wcunning]

Modern sewing machines are cheaper because the intricately machined cams and drive mechanisms that connected the upper mechanism that moves the needle to the lower mechanism that moves the bobbin are no longer used. They're replaced by a pair of stepper motors that are driven by a microcontroller. Instead of having collars and set screws to adjust timing, it's all solidly built and ruined the minute the stepper motor slips or a tiny plastic part breaks and something no longer actuates. They're unrepairable because you'd have to get the actual OEM somewhere in China to release the source code and put a jtag pinout on their boards rather than getting the chips loaded at the factory where the main board is made. That's the difference. Same reason that cam machines have been replaced with vertical machining centers -- CNC is just waaaay cheaper.