Cutting corners is only for F1 drivers

Have you noticed that lately your gadgets break more often then they did in past? How about expensive gadgets? In the past year I’ve experienced some poor quality products that were inspiring good build quality at buy time, products that eventually broke completely or partially.

And I’m not talking about chineze dual-sim replicas, but products build by big brands like Nokia, ASUS, Antec, Sony, Nikon and such. What happened with the build quality? Well, I’ve got a theory on that, of course: the more the price race speeds up the less quality components are used, to keep price down. I’m not saying they’re using components with shorter lifespan that the one of the product, but when you build something made of 100 bit and pieces of low value eventually one will fail, breaking your beloved gadget.

Everybody is praising that consumers are the one who have to gain from the price war, but I’m pretty sure consumers don’t like to RMA their products and be deprived of them a few weeks every year. I’m getting this sense after my second phone broke this year. First my beloved ASUS P525 begun to shut itself down when a SIM card was inserted then my “like new” Nokia E51 begun to have problems with its ear piece, which can’t get the volume high enough to make a call possible in noisy places.

It seems that everyone puts a high price on functions and not quality, knowing that they’ll eventually exchange the product for a new model sometime soon. I agree with that, but I don’t like being forced to buy a new gadget because the last one broke.

What about you, do you think that cutting corners (in manufacturing process) is only for F1 drivers or you do think that I’m talking nonsense?