[sirsinsalot]

Assuming both commenters are honest, I'm going to listen to the person who works in QA in the industry.

The parent just sounds like someone who loves a specific item and is a bit miffed they changed it.

Lots of "cheap plastic lenses" and "cheap spring hinges" type complaints without much backup.

Is carbon fiber cheap and rubbish because it isn't steel? Why does the parent think plastic means inferior?

"Mine are 40 years old and fine!!" Is a bit useless, and a sample of one.

I own a wide range of old and new sunglasses, and in my eyes, the new ones are mostly superior if you buy right. Granted Luxottica are a bad actor in many ways.

"... destroys the force of your argument ..." really? Does it? Does it tho? No.

I think the GP was bang on.

[hattmall]

This is just industry entrenchment. Owning a pair of old vs new raybans just doesn't compare, it's not just the weight. The springs and material are simply stronger, they don't break or get scuffed as easily. The new lenses may have some better technical properties in the lab or extreme settings but the biggest difference is just keeping them smudge free. Old lenses just stay clean and are so much easier to simply wipe down. The new ones are nearly impossible to clean without chemicals and seem to get dirty almost immediately.

The bit about cars is telling too. Yes new cars are better in everyway on paper and in extreme cases. But from an actual consumer usage standpoint it's not the always better... $3500 repair because I bumped a guardrail on the highway one night vs some touchup paint in an older car. High speed collision, sure new car is preferred.

No one at a marina is going to try and sell you on a 1980s Yamaha 2-Stroke vs the new EFI 4 Strokes, but anyone that owns both would tell you they just wish they made a few improvements to the old style instead of going completely modern. Of course the new motor makes 30 more HP and uses less fuel but it needs vastly more maintenance and you need an entire parts store to have a reasonable chance of avoiding being stranded.

The improvements are great, but for most things, for most people, they just want them to work well for their intended typical usage.

It's wonderful the new F225s can operate in 9ft swells at 0F but I would really just like it to have a greater than 50% chance of starting up in calm 75 degree weather which is like 90% of the time I'm boating.

You know the dealers recommendations though, and I'm not joking, is just buy two (or more) motors!

[hellomyguys]

You can touch up an old car because they were not made to crumple when hit, which makes them pretty unsafe.

[wyclif]

Are you seriously claiming that plastic lenses are higher quality and longer lasting than glass lenses? Plastic lenses scratch very easily; glass lenses don't. Also, I don't need to write a white paper or do a study to maintain that spring hinges are cheap compared to the barrel hinges. I've seen so many of the spring hinges break on glasses people had bought less than a year ago. They are demonstrably low quality.

[sirsinsalot]

Do you mean crown glass? High index glass? Polycarbonate?

What grade of scratch? What about cost to replace vs non-resistance? What about the average lifetime of glasses vs cost?

By cheap do you mean take less stress before fracture? How about actuations before failure?

See, you don't know. You're just ranting. Yes, you would need to you know ... at least cite some specifics and evidence beyond your own experience. That's how these things tend to work.

[wyclif]

This is just meaningless overqualification, as if you're trying to escape reality. Any kind of glass is going to be more resistant to scratches than plastic, even the kind that claims to be scratch-resistant. By cheap hinges, I mean they take less stress before fracture and fewer actuations before failure.

This is really not rocket surgery. We're talking about sunglasses. As I said above, I don't need to write a white paper or do an academic study to know this is true, it's based on my experiences wearing all these different types of sunglasses over decades and observing how they are constructed and how they respond to various types of normal wear to outright abuse.

[throwaway837367]

99.999% of all sunglasses and prescriptive lenses are plastic. Glass lenses haven't been a thing in decades.