[sbx320]

Aside from the other mentioned issues, a significant part is also the lack of retesting. WD Red drives aren't a fancy new thing and have been on the market for years now. As a result a test of the same drives is unlikely to give you a whole lot of revenue, since it's a known old product. People don't usually care a lot about yet another test with the same results. As a result retesting isn't really worth your time _unless_ you find something significantly changed (like in this case). Also running a useful test is non-trival as you'd need to source a significant amount of platforms, comparision products and setup a testing environment for it. Testing a brand new (CPU|GPU|SSD) instead would be much more likely to attract new readers and increase revenue.

Manufacturers have slowly started realizing this circumstance and are obviously able to exploit it by making products cheaper to manufacture down the line.

[wtallis]

On the SSD side of the storage market, I know it's becoming more common over the past ~2 years for manufacturers to change drive internals without changing the model name/number (for consumer drives only). In the past year, I've had one brand proactively bring it up as part of a product announcement presentation and two other brands have mentioned it in the course of an extended conversation about their entire product line. For the one company that mentioned the hardware update in their press release, I asked if they could get me a review sample of the new revision, but the drive that arrived a few weeks later was the old version.

Most of the updates like this in the SSD market are actually pretty harmless—switching a SATA drive from 64L to 96L TLC generally isn't going to change the performance or power characteristics enough to care about, and is more likely to be beneficial than harmful. But when they start introducing QLC NAND into a product line that originally was TLC-only, that's a problem.

[fierarul]

> Manufacturers have slowly started realizing this circumstance and are obviously able to exploit it by making products cheaper to manufacture down the line.

I believe this is a known technique in mass-produced markets. Called 'debasing' or something like that. Even new cars have more bells and whistles when first released while as the model gets a stead consumer base the manufacturer might reduce accessories or get cheaper versions, etc.

[aspenmayer]

There’s an analogue here in the concept of shrinkflation. To my mind debasing occurs in capital purchase items that last years or for life to take advantage of the only opportunity to double dip on the single sale. Shrinkflation seems more applicable to commodity goods that are often consumable or single use, the hidden price increase of which causes larger impacts to ROI and and profitability as well as cost to the buyer. These factors combined make shrinkflation perhaps more impactful overall to the economy due to the frequency and necessity of such goods.

If you pay too much for too little on your car, oh well. Its probably too late to do anything about that now or you would have returned it to the seller already. For most people they settle for enough car for enough money. You can always add aftermarket parts or customize it, because there is a large secondary market waiting to make your outside investment even more worthwhile to your own judgement. If you pay too much for soap, it’s not even worth it to return it to the store in your time or your money so the market simply wins. It’s a rigged game akin to Las Vegas house games.

As buyers it’s just stressful being so wary all the time. I don’t know what the better way is but surely it must exist, we just haven’t made it profitable enough yet for the right people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinkflation