[IdiotSavage]

> Goods are usually (although not always) inferior when made by a machine.

This is only true in the beginning, when machines are still primitive (e.g. first automatic looms). Nowadays machines mostly yield much better quality than any human can produce (e.g. automated welding, anything CNC controlled). Many things are only possible to build with machines (e.g. semiconductors).

> A hand-crafted solid wood table is still superior to something from Ikea.

This is by choice. Ikea chooses to produce the cheapest furniture possible, using cheap, crappy materials. Other manufacturers still produce high quality furniture, which is much more expensive.

[sgarland]

I know you said “mostly,” but wood is a huge outlier. It’s too heterogeneous to be accurately worked by machines at the level of accuracy that truly fine craftsmanship demands. To be clear, I’m talking about the level where a single chair can cost $20K, and represents hundreds of hours of labor. My FIL is at that level, and the stuff he makes is insane. The market for it is of course tiny, and I’d wager most of his buyers don’t even appreciate the attention to detail he puts into it, but yeah - there are no machines that I’m aware of that can feel perturbations at the sub-mm level and adjust the tool head on the fly, but he can.

This may simply be due to a lack of demand, but regardless, I assure you that machine-produced furniture can’t touch human-produced at the apex of fine craftsmanship.

[Voultapher]

Even something as "simple" as a kitchen knife - the same basic concept found in ancient roman everyday kitchens - can't be made to the same quality by a machine as per hand. CNC can't do the tolerances needed behind the apex. Even ignoring the story attached to a specific maker and going solely by cutting ability the really top end hand-made stuff noticeably outperforms everything mass-produced.

[IdiotSavage]

Are you talking about a chef's knife? If well done, I see no reason why it should be any worse than a high end knife made by a skilled human.

Have a look at this if you're interested:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5lq2d-03T0

[morberg]

I watched the video, but don’t understand the point you are trying to make. It was only a How things are made collage from some factory.

[IdiotSavage]

The point was to show that machines can produce knifes with precision. The other commenter stated that "CNC can't do the tolerances needed behind the apex.", whatever that means exactly.

[Voultapher]

Long story short, your point was that machines can do many things better than humans and I argue they can't even do kitchen knives better. How easily and well you cut through things depends on the thickness of the blade wedging them apart. Especially noticeable on denser food like carrots. The apex is the actual pointy part of the blade, and the thickness of the part after the apex and overall blade geometry dictate the cutting experience. Getting the front part thin is usually done via hand-grinding even in the video you shared, a fully controlled process would use something like C&C, but that tech currently can't get things thin enough to be a good knive.

[c0de517e]

I'd wager that razor blades and scalpels and many other things sharper than kitchen knives are made by machines. Sometimes we don't automate fully expensive things because handmade is also a premium, not necessarily because if we were to dedicate engineering resources to the problem it would be impossible to automate. That said there are things that machines currently can't do despite good efforts to solve the problem. That's true

[SAI_Peregrinus]

John Grimsmo's knifemaking business has a Kern which is perfectly capable of doing the tolerances needed behind the apex. That's a very expensive CNC machine, but it's capable of precision & accuracy well beyond what's possible to achieve by hand.

[Voultapher]

https://grimsmoknives.com/products/norseman-8359-8730526 look at those steps, calling this "precision & accuracy well beyond what's possible to achieve by hand" has to be a joke. Their other non CNC knives look much cleaner.

[kay_o]

Ikea does sell both ends of range; its has solid wood and particle boards.

[IdiotSavage]

They have "bottom of the barrel" and slightly better quality products. But the better products are nowhere near the (top) end of the range.

[ahartmetz]

No, really: They have pretty decent quality, too. Much better than slightly better than bottom the barrel anyway.

[IdiotSavage]

But can you show me a "top of the range" product? Not Ikea's top range, but "high end" in the common sense.

[ahartmetz]

They don't have particularly high end products, which is not what I claimed anyway. But they have good quality for the price, which extends to medium prices.

[account42]

You didn't claim it but the comment that spawned this chain did claim that Ikea sells "both ends of the range" which is simply not true. They do sell products made of real wood but they are still optimized for transport rather than quality.