> Ryobi handles DIY at Home Depot. Milwaukee handles pros. The two brands don't eat each other. They serve different people at different price points with different expectations

So market fit is driving both worse and better products at the same time. Cheap DIYers like me are buying the cheapest stuff we can find, and complaining that it's as cheap as its price. My neighbor the contractor buys the expensive stuff and finds that the quality at least somewhat reflects that.

Worse on purpose is my fault, because I'm the guy who bought a cheap Ryobi saw, instead of none at all. Plane flights are worse because I'm the guy who buys the cheapest ticket and tolerates the resulting discomforts, instead of staying home. You can see that through the lens of greed and exploitation, or as just a market evolving to supply consumer demand.

Just for the record, this is a novelty domain with a history of posting AI-generated articles that are clearly designed to get clicks based on nostalgia for how random things "used to be better":

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=worseonpurpose.com

This article is missing conversation about tools. It’s as if someone prompted ChatGPT to look up business deals for power tool companies and then write a summary with dollar amounts in bold.

There are some exceptions in every product line, but the current crop of power tools are actually pretty good. If you know people in the trades they can tell you which specific products are best in each category because trades people are generally very good at sharing that info on social media with each other.

For us US folks, Amazon.jp will send you the unobtanium Makita tools you know you want.... like the Makita battery-operated microwave.

Shout out to TTI for keeping Ryobi cheap, cheerful, and a good value. Not my cup of tea, but their stuff is reasonably fine for the price.

I think most pros agree that Klein tools have fallen off. And conspicuously missing on the list is Wiha and Wera.

Wiha is a family-owned private company in Germany. Relies on self-funding and conservative growth using long-standing relationships with German banks rather than private equity. They manufacture in Germany, Vietnam, Switzerland, and a tiny plant in the US. Well known by electricians. Much better warranty.

Wera is also privately owned, by Bitburger Holding. They avoid debt financing and focus on high-volume production and advertising. Almost all of their manufacturing has left Germany, and is now Czech Republic and Thailand. Well known by auto mechanics. Limited warranty.

We need: "Investigatory blogging got worse on purpose: using LLMs to confirm popular biases for attention".

I'm not saying this site doesn't speak some truths, but previous on this topic have been so thin, and ignore battery, motor and materials improvements that they totally undercut a real discussion on tool quality and value. If you actually want to talk tools, find a DIY/woodworking group.

The big thing that happened to power tools was Lithium-Ion batteries. All of these companies competed when they were still corded electric tools. You could just make a really good drill or saw or router.

Interchangeable batteries got really good and made every set of tools a platform. More importantly, there are only a handful of sources to get batteries from. For all these companies to differentiate and compete they needed to insert their products into wide lines of platforms.

Not sure where “Who Owns DeWalt, Craftsman, and Milwaukee?” in the title came from.

> Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

How is this post two hours old and I don't see any references to Project Farm:

https://www.youtube.com/c/projectfarm

One of the best review channels for products in this area. I moved from DeWalt to Milwaukee for most of my daily drivers about six years ago and have been very happy with them, but for things I will rarely use I tend to go with whatever Harbor Freight is selling. If I break it then it's time to upgrade.

Way back when, Black & Decker tried to make a push with a professional line of high-quality tools, but nobody was buying them because of B&D’s reputation for cheap, low-quality tools. So they had to introduce a whole new brand line with a distinctive yellow paint scheme. Sad to see them repeating the same mistakes.

Project Farm often shows middle of the road/big box store tools are often pretty average - what the consumer often wants/needs

I feel so lucky to have an arsenal of power tools purchased by my father and grandfather. My 65 year old Black&Decker circular saw still works flawlessly.

The bottom line is that you can also compete by investing in quality.

The metabo situation is weird, the European company appears to be completely different to the one in the USA>

I'm so tired of reading things in this imbecilic ChatGPT voice. I'm going to start flagging the most egregious AI slop, following my interpretation of the guidelines:

> If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it

Dang, feel free to let me know if this is an inappropriate use of flagging.

I don’t know if it’s by LLM generation or just contemporary style, but I find the style of omitting the subject from sentence after sentence after sentence unreadable. Once is fine. Six in a row is insufferable.

FTA : The tool companies that are still good. Klein, Makita, Knipex, Channellock, Hilti, Bosch.

> The pattern

> This isn't a tools story.

> The names change. The industries change. The strategy doesn’t.

The pattern

This isn't an insightful blog.

The names change. The topics change. The slop doesn’t.

Sigh, DeWalt. A few years ago, there were (I think) first to market with a cordless electric leaf blower that was competitive with gas for serious use — it had a blower in a backpack, two battery slots, used giant 40V “DeWalt XR” batteries, and could operate at high power and for quite a long time.

It was far from perfect — the backpack was not so comfortable and a bit heavy, and it was expensive. Still, the market was obviously growing and is currently booming, and DeWalt should have been a leader.

Instead they never followed up, and they gave everyone who bought one a giant “screw you” by discontinuing the batteries. And left the market wide open for new players and the big gas landscape tool companies (Stihl, Husqvarna) to step in.

Attention executives: when you lead the market in a growing category, you need to invest in it!

FWIW these worseonpurpose articles have been popping up regularly, consistently accused of being slop, and the purported author has been called out as a Palantir AI shill. e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47779481

Milwaukee tools are fine, I’ve got 20+ electricians working for me with Milwaukee tools. Hilti are better, but 2-3x more expensive.

There is a specific Hilti tool that allows concrete anchors to be shot in without powder, which lets us work in occupied spaces during regular hours instead of on double time, it’s $1,000 but pays for itself in a day: https://www.hilti.com/c/CLS_POWER_TOOLS_7125/CLS_DIRECT_FAST...

All power tools anre engineered for the bathtub curve. My guys like Milwaukee because the Makita portaband (metal bandsaw for cutting conduit) has a crappy tensioner and the blade falls off every 10 cuts. I’d rather pay someone not to keep putting a blade back on. I have no special love for Milwaukee, but one of the fundamental electrician power tools being that much more reliable makes buying into the whole line worth it.

It’s not always about the cost of the tool itself, but minimizing downtime when labor costs over $100/hr

I use Makita.

WFM. YMMV.

>These companies prove the same thing from the opposite direction. You don't have to get acquired. You don't have to take the PE money. You can just keep making good products and telling everyone else to go to hell. It's harder, and it's slower, and the growth chart won't impress a Wall Street analyst. But the tools last. And the brand means something 50 years from now instead of ending up in a clearance bin.

How can we convince business owners to take this path? It seems in a future everything will be owned by a few megacorps and crappyfied.

Snap-on stays winning

> But the tools last. And the brand means something 50 years from now instead of ending up in a clearance bin.

Professional builders, craftsman and people who care about their art care about these things.

The people that these companies are selling to (Home Depot “weekend warriors”) do not care about these things which is why they continue to sell despite the alternative existing at a higher price point

And even most entry-level professionals these days are using whatever they can get. I went to a yard sale in Manassas Virginia which is very blue-collar and mostly people working on houses and mowing lawns and things and somebody was selling all of their DeWalt tools because they just bought a new set for cheaper than they could’ve bought a really solid tool.

I recently decided I will go for the cheap Chinese store brand power tools for most things. It's about 1/5 to 1/3 the price of Ryobi, gets really good reviews, have been sold for more than 10 years now with the same batteries, and comes with a 5 year warranty which is 2 years more than ryobi. It's maybe not going to last 10 years, but at 1/5 the price it does not have to.

Same with all consumer white goods electronics: microwave ovens, washing machines, refrigerators, toasters, etc. most white label by a few conglomerates with the same Chinese factories.

The "high quality ones" that have their own R&D and manufacturing, are very expensive and out of reach for a lot of people.

Tangentially, Arrow T50 stapler used to be a tank but now it's wet shit. Apparently they changed to a new factory.

So when your reputation is big you can slack on the product. Or is that naive? Is it the natural progression for all products?

Like in that movie Brasil. The food is awful but the illustration of the food is wonderful.

Good example of what Private Equity did and doing to many industries. I also notice once a PE Firm takes over a Company, kiss quality good bye.

They mentioned Eye Wear is next, I think the author can guess where that is going. No reason to doubt the same will happen to that industry too.