In a lot of cases, older stuff is actually better by many objective criteria.
I love old tools, both hand tools and power tools.
There are many criteria by which you could judge the older tools, made in the USA, Canada, or UK, and say they are objectively better than even the highest-end tools I could buy today at Home Depot.
Thicker metal, designs which are more repairable with swappable parts, they were obviously designed to be more durable. I have a roofing square I use on the job site which is over 100 years old, and it's better than one I could buy at the store. I use a chop saw which was made in Japan in the 80's and it is going to outlast any equivalent chop saw I could buy at the store today. You can tell immediately by just using the thing that it is more durable and higher quality.
Yes, older tools lack some modern improvements like lasers or safety stops, but when it comes to reliability and durability you can't buy a brand new tool with the same quality of old tools for any price.
I don't know if the same is actually true for digicams or whatever, but things like record players or typewriters have similar qualities to what I'm talking about with tools.
I've run into this with nostalgia-toys and board games. Modern "reprints" usually suck, even if they superficially look the same.
Loopin' Louie? The modern one's lighter and has a weaker motor, even if the original was never exactly greatest-games-of-all-time material, the modern one's just non-functional.
Rock 'em sock 'em robots? Weaker punches, plastic's lighter, new models are often smaller. They suck compared to vintage ones.
Hell even soda bottles are kinda like this. Those things used to be thick and you could re-use them for all kinds of stuff.
It seems like at some point around the late '90s and early '00s we got a ton better at precisely optimizing plastic use in mass manufacturing processes, and all plastic products got somewhere between a little, and a lot, worse, because manufacturers could make them just barely thick enough to not fall apart. Good for waste on the one hand, for disposable things, so that hits "reduce" at the expense of making "re-use" a lot worse. But also makes non-disposable things so shitty they become disposable (often because they suck so bad to begin with that you're gonna toss them out after one use)
I was very disappointed when I bought my kid a “vintage” Fischer Price record player. Turns out it’s made in 2023 by a company that licensed the look. [1]
Instead of winding a spring, the wind knob turns on an electric motor that takes batteries.
Instead of playing the music with an embedded set of metal tines in the play head, the disk just holds and RFID and the player loads the mp3 file of what the original 1980s toy sounded like.
I love old tools, both hand tools and power tools.
There are many criteria by which you could judge the older tools, made in the USA, Canada, or UK, and say they are objectively better than even the highest-end tools I could buy today at Home Depot.
Thicker metal, designs which are more repairable with swappable parts, they were obviously designed to be more durable. I have a roofing square I use on the job site which is over 100 years old, and it's better than one I could buy at the store. I use a chop saw which was made in Japan in the 80's and it is going to outlast any equivalent chop saw I could buy at the store today. You can tell immediately by just using the thing that it is more durable and higher quality.
Yes, older tools lack some modern improvements like lasers or safety stops, but when it comes to reliability and durability you can't buy a brand new tool with the same quality of old tools for any price.
I don't know if the same is actually true for digicams or whatever, but things like record players or typewriters have similar qualities to what I'm talking about with tools.