> 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.
Are new ryobi batteries still compatible with all their old tools? I remember it used to be a big selling point that that they never changed their battery system.
What year? I got one like 5(?) years ago and it was lithium.
Definitely doesn't run as long as when it was new but does enough.
For those of you getting a lawn mower, don't get the cheapest one you can. A 13" wide blade is uh gunna take nearly double the passes a 20" wide blade will.
What are the price points though? Maybe I lucked into a sale, but when I was looking at drills, all the prices were similar. Maybe Bosch was the (expensive) outlier...
Which is market segmentation at work. If the DIYers get good enough tools at cheap prices and the pros have a separate line that’s more expensive and more durable, what are we supposed to be mad about?
If you buy their brushless line, you can add a few decent tools to your lineup while using the cheap stuff for everything else. Same battery platform generally. I have a lot of their cheap stuff, plus a few good ones that see more use.
Their tools work, but that's different from being good, in comparison to others. They feel and sound terrible and don't perform well at all. If you buy any other brand than Ryobi, you will immediately go "oh, this is clearly better". It's like they designed Ryobi to be as bad as possible without being defective, so that you can't complain about it, but have a great reason to buy Ridgid or Milwaukee.
There has generally been a grade below Ryobi that is junk. Been that way for decades before Ryobi even existed. Ryobi isn't the best quality, but it is generally good enough and cheaper.
I love my Ryobi drill. Bought a set ~10 years ago and it’s still going strong. I charge the battery once every 3 to 4 years. Used it to assemble a bunch of furniture just this weekend. Some of the screw heads are getting a little worn from me being an idiot, but so far haven’t had to replace anything and never needed any more parts than came with the initial beginner set (1 hand drill for screwing, 1 strong drill for drilling, 2 boxes of screw and drill attachments)
A more expensive “proper” set would be completely wasted on me.
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":
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.
I had no idea I was missing out on anything - their product line is big even in the US. Our battery tools are 100% Makita (except the lawnmower - I forget what made me decide on EGO, but I've been happy with it).
Anyway, I'm glad to see an article claiming that Makita has still resisted enshittification.
Interestingly, Makita, like Festool, and to a lesser extent Mafell got its start by _repairing_ stuff, only expanding into tool manufacture long after the company was established --- some folks argue that this experience of repairing other tools/motors/transformers allowed them to learn how _not_ to build a tool. These three are pretty much the only independent power tool companies left, and the tools I've bought of them have been excellent quality.
- Makita 9.6V drill which I've had 4 of (first I stupidly sold in an estate sale, second my son claimed, third I gifted to my daughter, current is an NOS from eBay which I'm planning on keeping/using for forever) --- my son later bought into the newer Makita 18V line and uses them extensively for his backstage theater work, as well as a stick vacuum w/ a cyclone which he uses to clean his apartment. (Finally broke down and bought some Dremel battery powered tools (apparently they use the same 12V batteries as Bosch tools) --- debating on expanding on that....)
- Festool CT Midi vacuum --- purchased in a noise-induced migraine-fueled rage, this is quiet and works perfectly as dust collection for my CNC machines
- Mafell FM 1000 WS --- a quick change spindle/milling motor, the engineering on this brings a smile to my face whenever I use it
Buy once, cry once --- the quality will remain long after the sting of the initial high price is forgotten.
For hand tools, consider Bridge City Tool Works and Blue Spruce Tools, or Mitutoyo, or Starrett, or buying vintage.
In his workshop, my father only use Festool (plus whatever he use for metalwork), but everytime he have to work outside, crawl somewhere or drill a concrete slab on a rooftop, it's Makita everytime. His makita tools have been dinked, have fallen 10+ meters, have weathered both storm and heatwaves, and some of them still run fine after 20 years.
Strong agreement with this! I managed somehow to jam a drill bit in my Makita cordless drill a few years back. It was just enough of a pain that I didn't feel comfortable trying to fix it myself, so I requested a repair through Makita. I remember calling them and getting it all set up via a real customer service person who seemed pretty obviously based in the U.S. (ironically). His name was Mark and he was great and made it all super smooth for me.
I got the drill back a little while later entirely repaired, the bent drill bit included in the return package, and I was charged absolutely nothing for any of it because I guess I was still under warranty and I didn't realize it. It was a fantastic customer service interaction and absolutely increased my loyalty to the company.
...and that's leaving aside the quality of their tools. In my experience they are incredibly rugged--among other things, for a week-long landscaping project I used that same drill with a gigantic bit to dig holes in frozen dirt, and it powered through it without issues. Great tools and a solid company.
Honestly, Ryobi is fine for just about anything a non-professional will need. Buy it, use it until it breaks (if it does), and then consider whether a more expensive one will be necessary.
I started with Ryobi and burned out a drill using it to hog out a 3" mortise with a 2.5" forstner bit (far beyond any reasonable use case for a drill), and upgraded to DeWalt. All of my other Ryobi pieces (circular saw, reciprocating, jigsaw, lights, non-orbital sander) work great, and I've never said to my tool "You'd be able to do this if you were a DeWalt, ya piece of shit!"
The more important thing to do once you start on one brand, and have a bunch of their batteries, is simply wait until the big sales come. All the brands have ridiculous, stock-dumping deals to move volume at least once or twice a year, and that's when it almost becomes buy-one-get-one-free.
Where I avoid the Ryobi brand is in consumables: bits, blades, and such. That's where the cheapness is most obvious. Bits wear more quickly, blades go dull faster. Milwaukee and DeWalt stuff lasts longer, but this is where you go for specialty names like Diablo that are even better. My Ryobi circular saw with Diablo blade is a tank.
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.
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.
The larger factor here is batteries are expensive enough that you don't want to mix and match. There is no reason your corded drill and saw need to be the same brand so you can choose whatever. However if your cordless drill and saw take the battery that means you don't have to buy as many batteries (or alternatively when your drill battery goes to the charger you take the saw battery instead of being unable to drill any holes).
Though people are starting to figure out that there are only a couple different batteries and so a cheap adapter means you don't need to buy all the same anymore.
Yeah if you look at the power tool industry as a whole, over the last 20 years has seen massive improvements in quality across the board.
Cordless tools were a niche product, they could barely run an hour and they didn't have 1/10th the power a corded tool does. Things like cordless angle grinders didn't even exist because there was no way to get the required power to drive them.
You also have the advent of brushless tools recently which drive even more power to cordless tools. Smaller, lighter, more power and longer runtime. You put a cheap 18v Ryobi driver against an all metal housing Craftsman corded from the 80s, that cheap plastic Ryobi will outclass that Craftsman every time.
Some brands have risen and fallen. What's happened to Porter Cable is a shame. But conversely, how completely competitive a brand like Ryobi has gotten is also a near miracle. It's a great time for power tools!
What boggles the mind is that, at this point, corded gets dunked on by battery-run tools in power output. Corded is limited to the 1500W one can safely pull fromn the wall, but cordless can have higher output. Normally one might assume it'd be a distinction without a difference, but things like table or chop saws can be hungry.
This is why I evaluate if a tool type needs to be cordless when buying. Drills, impact drivers? You want cordless, or to have the option. For a circular saw being used by a homeowner for most DIY purposes, it's worth any arrangement issues to have corded. The cordless ones tend to take less common blade sizes and eat batteries even with the provided extra-lightweight blades.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tip: Emailing the moderation team at hn@ycombinator.com is more effective (and more welcome, I believe) than invoking @dang in comments. They and the rest of the team are preturnaturally responsive.
Yep, clearly written by AI. Seems like an SEO-type play where they just have AI do deep research and write these reports on as many categories as possible to get traction.
Pretty smart business idea as I imagine people love ragebait about why products aren't as good as they used to be.
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.
The only full colons are in the headings, and there are no semicolons whatsoever. For embedding a large volume of factual info in prose, these are irreplaceable.
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
>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.
The only Snap-on tools I have, I picked up off the side of the road, except for a ratchet which my father somehow brought home from Vietnam --- his comment on the brand?
>It's pretty easy to get the about the same quality, but it's hard to pay more.
Just figure out their OEM and buy a Williams brand screwdriver for example.
That said, for a professional mechanic, there's a lot of value in buying a tool which one can get warrantied the next time the tool truck makes its rounds.
With how well Chinese manufacturing has improved in the last 10-20 years the snap-on edge is largely eroded. You can buy a similar quality tool at Harbor Freight for a quarter of the price that will most likely last just as long. For most of the tools in a mechanics box there is rarely a specific tool that will put you out of work for the day.
There is some value having a truck that delivers the items to do and does infield warranty but I don’t think it warrants a 4x cost.
I would imagine most mechanics would do well these days buying the premium cheap option, like Icon, and buy better when they know what they need and identify longevity issues. I could absolutely see certain air tools or power tools where you may buy brand but even then the Harbor Freights of the world have come a long way.
> 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.
All too often I've seen amateurs do this and thing think "don't blame the tool, I must be bad", when it really is the tool! A good craftsman never blames his tools is a reflection on the types of tool a craftsman has, not just the skill they have.
Replace "breaks" with "fails to work as intended" then.
A tool that doesn't break but does smell like a refinery or damages nearby electronics when used, gets strangely hot or inexplicably changes shape when idle, etc. should still be replaced.
I don't think anyone is asking you to stupidly follow the advice off a cliff. You're welcome to call "stripping all your screw heads" broken and take appropriate action.
I don't think that is how screws work. I really have a hard time seeing how the drill makes a difference with that. The bit you use, sure. How you use the drill, sure. Maybe if the drill has a completely messed up clutch maybe, but then the tool is not functional and you should return it.
Perfect. The dirty little secret of this strategy is that most people's uses just aren't that demanding, so the cheap stuff is more than sufficient. Additionally, breaking a cheap tool is a great indicator of where your real needs for quality lie, which is rarely where you think it will be.
I think he means "eyeware is next" in the sense that it's the industry he'll be covering next. Pretty much every brand and every layer of the eyewear industry has been owned by Luxxotica for a long time.
To save folks the search, these both sell ~$300 sunglasses.
They show action shots of people wearing them kayaking or at the beach but I'd be so worried about dropping them in the river or scratching the lenses with sand that I'd never take them those places. $300 is more than I paid for my kayak, LOL. Probably more expensive than entire sets of clothes I might wear while doing those activities, or at least right around the same price.
seems like a good business model to watch where PE is moving in. Start investing in quality designs while PE drives quality down, then sweep in and be the "quality amongst trash" brand.
I feel the same, but I do wonder sometimes if that’s true. Are there PE firms out there quietly operating great businesses that they’ve acquired? If not, why not? Surely in the long run that’s a better ROI, and private capital should be able to take a longer view, right?
And that's the rub. PE is all about short term ROI at any price. Their business model doesn't take product superiority or brand loyalty into account. If a widget can be made cheaper, you do it, damn the collateral damage.
OK, but that doesn't answer why? Why is PE about short term ROI at any price? Is it really true that the maximum long-term ROI is by doing it this way? I'm skeptical, and people's intuitions based on their observations isn't very useful.
Maybe this is like the toupee fallacy, and we only pay attention to the ones with this kind of strip mining approach, and we don't see the majority where they run the businesses to maximize ROI in the long run?
The longer term of continuing to buy businesses, load them with debt, strip them of value, and move on to the next, promises much better ROI than focussing on a single business.
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.
> 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.
I don't think there's anything to apologize for.
Buying a professional tool with tens of thousands of hours of potential runtime and 1000lb+ of torque is wasteful.
A Ryobi tool will realistically last for the many decades you need it for and do everything you ask of it.
Lower price points doesn't just mean something is junk. It can also be engineering efficiency.
As the saying goes, anyone can build a bridge that lasts forever. It takes an engineer to build one that lasts fifty years.
Excellent, I love it!
It remind me of the quote from Blaise Pascale:
"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."
— source: https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2014/02/03/270680304/this-...
The idea that you need expertise and experience to produce something efficient and refined that fit perfectly the need that it fulfills.
Are new ryobi batteries still compatible with all their old tools? I remember it used to be a big selling point that that they never changed their battery system.
Yes and IMO one of the selling points. They have upgraded the batteries over the years but still base compatibility
> A Ryobi tool will realistically last for the many decades you need it for and do everything you ask of it
Until you buy one of their lawn mowers and the SLA batteries die after a year...
What year? I got one like 5(?) years ago and it was lithium.
Definitely doesn't run as long as when it was new but does enough.
For those of you getting a lawn mower, don't get the cheapest one you can. A 13" wide blade is uh gunna take nearly double the passes a 20" wide blade will.
you can cherrypick similar stories from any company
What are the price points though? Maybe I lucked into a sale, but when I was looking at drills, all the prices were similar. Maybe Bosch was the (expensive) outlier...
Ryobi make mostly good tools though. The results produced by most Ryobi users, myself included, are limited by user skill not tool quality.
If you are a DIY, you might use a tool once a week, or once a year. A pro might use a tool everyday, all day.
A different durability requirement.
A Ryobi is not bad, if it fills your needs, but might not be enough for heavy use.
Which is market segmentation at work. If the DIYers get good enough tools at cheap prices and the pros have a separate line that’s more expensive and more durable, what are we supposed to be mad about?
If you buy their brushless line, you can add a few decent tools to your lineup while using the cheap stuff for everything else. Same battery platform generally. I have a lot of their cheap stuff, plus a few good ones that see more use.
You can buy or make adapters so there is no battery platforms. If we had a functioning FTC there would be no battery platform.
Didn't realize adapters were common! I agree on the FTC / standardization point.
Their tools work, but that's different from being good, in comparison to others. They feel and sound terrible and don't perform well at all. If you buy any other brand than Ryobi, you will immediately go "oh, this is clearly better". It's like they designed Ryobi to be as bad as possible without being defective, so that you can't complain about it, but have a great reason to buy Ridgid or Milwaukee.
There has generally been a grade below Ryobi that is junk. Been that way for decades before Ryobi even existed. Ryobi isn't the best quality, but it is generally good enough and cheaper.
I love my Ryobi drill. Bought a set ~10 years ago and it’s still going strong. I charge the battery once every 3 to 4 years. Used it to assemble a bunch of furniture just this weekend. Some of the screw heads are getting a little worn from me being an idiot, but so far haven’t had to replace anything and never needed any more parts than came with the initial beginner set (1 hand drill for screwing, 1 strong drill for drilling, 2 boxes of screw and drill attachments)
A more expensive “proper” set would be completely wasted on me.
What are my options if I'm one of the unwashed massed that aren't able to afford anything but Ryobi/Spirit (RIP)?
What if I'm a professional who needs to use Milwuake/American Airlines if I plan to get my work done?
These feel like choices in the same way you can choose to pay your extortion fee to the mob or choose to pay your taxes.
I own some Ryobi and Harbor Freight tools as well as some Milwaukee and SnapOn.
I don’t see it as a problem that tools of different quality, specifications, and price are available in the market.
I wouldn’t want there to be only select 80% ground beef nor only A5 Wagyu beef for sale. Both have their place.
Who's breaking down your door with muscle to make you pay for Ryobi?
The Home Despot
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
The author works at Palantir as well. One of the prime offenders for making life and liberty Worse on Purpose.
Kinda baffled why a Palantir goon would make an agitslop article about power tools of all things, but here we are.
I'm glad I'm not the only one that noticed the article felt AI generated.
Not just AI generated. Completely full of slop. Generations of readers who never knew anything else.
Oh damn good eye.
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.
For power tools, there's also Festool
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.
The Makita US product line seems ludicrously big to me. I don’t really get what this article is throwing down when it comes to Makita.
My (not battery) Makita chainsaw is fantastic, and I have definitely put it through its paces.
I have Makita products .. a lawnmower and a bush clearing tool ..somewhat expensive, but the quality is superb.
Do they have the Makita coffee maker?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xOEIpbxM4w
If Makita would finally just make a right angle die grinder I would be so happy. It's like the one thing they're missing.
I had no idea I was missing out on anything - their product line is big even in the US. Our battery tools are 100% Makita (except the lawnmower - I forget what made me decide on EGO, but I've been happy with it).
Anyway, I'm glad to see an article claiming that Makita has still resisted enshittification.
What’s a good one to start with
If you can afford to pay that bit more for quality product, from the article plus a few comments here; seems that people really like Makita.
- hasn’t enshitifed
- makes quality tools that last
- much more repairable (saving you even more in the long term)
- single company, not a conglomerate, no weird vc influence.
For most tools you won’t need upgrades, just build out your collection as you go.
Interestingly, Makita, like Festool, and to a lesser extent Mafell got its start by _repairing_ stuff, only expanding into tool manufacture long after the company was established --- some folks argue that this experience of repairing other tools/motors/transformers allowed them to learn how _not_ to build a tool. These three are pretty much the only independent power tool companies left, and the tools I've bought of them have been excellent quality.
- Makita 9.6V drill which I've had 4 of (first I stupidly sold in an estate sale, second my son claimed, third I gifted to my daughter, current is an NOS from eBay which I'm planning on keeping/using for forever) --- my son later bought into the newer Makita 18V line and uses them extensively for his backstage theater work, as well as a stick vacuum w/ a cyclone which he uses to clean his apartment. (Finally broke down and bought some Dremel battery powered tools (apparently they use the same 12V batteries as Bosch tools) --- debating on expanding on that....)
- Festool CT Midi vacuum --- purchased in a noise-induced migraine-fueled rage, this is quiet and works perfectly as dust collection for my CNC machines
- Mafell FM 1000 WS --- a quick change spindle/milling motor, the engineering on this brings a smile to my face whenever I use it
Buy once, cry once --- the quality will remain long after the sting of the initial high price is forgotten.
For hand tools, consider Bridge City Tool Works and Blue Spruce Tools, or Mitutoyo, or Starrett, or buying vintage.
> Festool CT ... vacuum
I use one of these for household floors: quiet, powerful, rolls easily.
In his workshop, my father only use Festool (plus whatever he use for metalwork), but everytime he have to work outside, crawl somewhere or drill a concrete slab on a rooftop, it's Makita everytime. His makita tools have been dinked, have fallen 10+ meters, have weathered both storm and heatwaves, and some of them still run fine after 20 years.
Strong agreement with this! I managed somehow to jam a drill bit in my Makita cordless drill a few years back. It was just enough of a pain that I didn't feel comfortable trying to fix it myself, so I requested a repair through Makita. I remember calling them and getting it all set up via a real customer service person who seemed pretty obviously based in the U.S. (ironically). His name was Mark and he was great and made it all super smooth for me.
I got the drill back a little while later entirely repaired, the bent drill bit included in the return package, and I was charged absolutely nothing for any of it because I guess I was still under warranty and I didn't realize it. It was a fantastic customer service interaction and absolutely increased my loyalty to the company.
...and that's leaving aside the quality of their tools. In my experience they are incredibly rugged--among other things, for a week-long landscaping project I used that same drill with a gigantic bit to dig holes in frozen dirt, and it powered through it without issues. Great tools and a solid company.
Honestly, Ryobi is fine for just about anything a non-professional will need. Buy it, use it until it breaks (if it does), and then consider whether a more expensive one will be necessary.
I started with Ryobi and burned out a drill using it to hog out a 3" mortise with a 2.5" forstner bit (far beyond any reasonable use case for a drill), and upgraded to DeWalt. All of my other Ryobi pieces (circular saw, reciprocating, jigsaw, lights, non-orbital sander) work great, and I've never said to my tool "You'd be able to do this if you were a DeWalt, ya piece of shit!"
The more important thing to do once you start on one brand, and have a bunch of their batteries, is simply wait until the big sales come. All the brands have ridiculous, stock-dumping deals to move volume at least once or twice a year, and that's when it almost becomes buy-one-get-one-free.
Where I avoid the Ryobi brand is in consumables: bits, blades, and such. That's where the cheapness is most obvious. Bits wear more quickly, blades go dull faster. Milwaukee and DeWalt stuff lasts longer, but this is where you go for specialty names like Diablo that are even better. My Ryobi circular saw with Diablo blade is a tank.
You can get adapters to use great batteries in low quality tools.
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.
> It’s as if someone prompted ChatGPT
Yes it is. I think you're on to something here.
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.
The larger factor here is batteries are expensive enough that you don't want to mix and match. There is no reason your corded drill and saw need to be the same brand so you can choose whatever. However if your cordless drill and saw take the battery that means you don't have to buy as many batteries (or alternatively when your drill battery goes to the charger you take the saw battery instead of being unable to drill any holes).
Though people are starting to figure out that there are only a couple different batteries and so a cheap adapter means you don't need to buy all the same anymore.
Yeah if you look at the power tool industry as a whole, over the last 20 years has seen massive improvements in quality across the board.
Cordless tools were a niche product, they could barely run an hour and they didn't have 1/10th the power a corded tool does. Things like cordless angle grinders didn't even exist because there was no way to get the required power to drive them.
You also have the advent of brushless tools recently which drive even more power to cordless tools. Smaller, lighter, more power and longer runtime. You put a cheap 18v Ryobi driver against an all metal housing Craftsman corded from the 80s, that cheap plastic Ryobi will outclass that Craftsman every time.
Some brands have risen and fallen. What's happened to Porter Cable is a shame. But conversely, how completely competitive a brand like Ryobi has gotten is also a near miracle. It's a great time for power tools!
> didn't have 1/10th the power a corded tool does
What boggles the mind is that, at this point, corded gets dunked on by battery-run tools in power output. Corded is limited to the 1500W one can safely pull fromn the wall, but cordless can have higher output. Normally one might assume it'd be a distinction without a difference, but things like table or chop saws can be hungry.
This is why I evaluate if a tool type needs to be cordless when buying. Drills, impact drivers? You want cordless, or to have the option. For a circular saw being used by a homeowner for most DIY purposes, it's worth any arrangement issues to have corded. The cordless ones tend to take less common blade sizes and eat batteries even with the provided extra-lightweight blades.
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
The <title> tag in the HTML has it: <title>Your Power Tools Got Worse On Purpose | Who Really Owns DeWalt, Craftsman, and Milwaukee?</title>
I wondered if that was it (I’m on my phone).
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/@TorqueTestChannel is another great channel for more tool-specific reviews
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>
Also Bosch is missing.
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.
Tip: Emailing the moderation team at hn@ycombinator.com is more effective (and more welcome, I believe) than invoking @dang in comments. They and the rest of the team are preturnaturally responsive.
Thanks, I'll do that.
Yep, clearly written by AI. Seems like an SEO-type play where they just have AI do deep research and write these reports on as many categories as possible to get traction.
Pretty smart business idea as I imagine people love ragebait about why products aren't as good as they used to be.
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.
The only full colons are in the headings, and there are no semicolons whatsoever. For embedding a large volume of factual info in prose, these are irreplaceable.
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
What’s Palantir’s angle on this?
If that’s what it take to draw attention to enshittification then, as the meme says, let them fight.
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.
Public trials.
Snap-on stays winning
Snap-on is one of the worst value buys out there. Even for professional mechanics.
The only Snap-on tools I have, I picked up off the side of the road, except for a ratchet which my father somehow brought home from Vietnam --- his comment on the brand?
>It's pretty easy to get the about the same quality, but it's hard to pay more.
Just figure out their OEM and buy a Williams brand screwdriver for example.
That said, for a professional mechanic, there's a lot of value in buying a tool which one can get warrantied the next time the tool truck makes its rounds.
With how well Chinese manufacturing has improved in the last 10-20 years the snap-on edge is largely eroded. You can buy a similar quality tool at Harbor Freight for a quarter of the price that will most likely last just as long. For most of the tools in a mechanics box there is rarely a specific tool that will put you out of work for the day.
There is some value having a truck that delivers the items to do and does infield warranty but I don’t think it warrants a 4x cost.
I would imagine most mechanics would do well these days buying the premium cheap option, like Icon, and buy better when they know what they need and identify longevity issues. I could absolutely see certain air tools or power tools where you may buy brand but even then the Harbor Freights of the world have come a long way.
> 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.
I think the rule of thumb for non-professionals is:
Buy cheap and if you use it enough that it breaks, buy expensive the second time.
All too often I've seen amateurs do this and thing think "don't blame the tool, I must be bad", when it really is the tool! A good craftsman never blames his tools is a reflection on the types of tool a craftsman has, not just the skill they have.
By following this rule you could easily end up with a tool that lasts forever but strips out all your screw heads.
Replace "breaks" with "fails to work as intended" then.
A tool that doesn't break but does smell like a refinery or damages nearby electronics when used, gets strangely hot or inexplicably changes shape when idle, etc. should still be replaced.
I don't think anyone is asking you to stupidly follow the advice off a cliff. You're welcome to call "stripping all your screw heads" broken and take appropriate action.
I don't think that is how screws work. I really have a hard time seeing how the drill makes a difference with that. The bit you use, sure. How you use the drill, sure. Maybe if the drill has a completely messed up clutch maybe, but then the tool is not functional and you should return it.
that's not an example of a tool that works, though.
I don't follow this example. Isn't stripping screw heads a skills issue? How does a tool help/hurt with that?
Better machining on a Phillips tip really does help.
Perfect. The dirty little secret of this strategy is that most people's uses just aren't that demanding, so the cheap stuff is more than sufficient. Additionally, breaking a cheap tool is a great indicator of where your real needs for quality lie, which is rarely where you think it will be.
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.
I think he means "eyeware is next" in the sense that it's the industry he'll be covering next. Pretty much every brand and every layer of the eyewear industry has been owned by Luxxotica for a long time.
It seems like not my preferred Serengeti or my recent work gift of Maui Jim.
To save folks the search, these both sell ~$300 sunglasses.
They show action shots of people wearing them kayaking or at the beach but I'd be so worried about dropping them in the river or scratching the lenses with sand that I'd never take them those places. $300 is more than I paid for my kayak, LOL. Probably more expensive than entire sets of clothes I might wear while doing those activities, or at least right around the same price.
seems like a good business model to watch where PE is moving in. Start investing in quality designs while PE drives quality down, then sweep in and be the "quality amongst trash" brand.
I feel the same, but I do wonder sometimes if that’s true. Are there PE firms out there quietly operating great businesses that they’ve acquired? If not, why not? Surely in the long run that’s a better ROI, and private capital should be able to take a longer view, right?
For every one public headline failure there are hundreds of profitable executions that never get mentioned.
I think the general rule is more like they expect only 1 in 4 to work out, but that 1 works out good enough for the rest.
Depends on the firm but even when we say 1 out of 4 it is not the case that the other 3 are wild failures.
> profitable executions
I can't tell if that's good or bad /s
> Surely in the long run…
And that's the rub. PE is all about short term ROI at any price. Their business model doesn't take product superiority or brand loyalty into account. If a widget can be made cheaper, you do it, damn the collateral damage.
OK, but that doesn't answer why? Why is PE about short term ROI at any price? Is it really true that the maximum long-term ROI is by doing it this way? I'm skeptical, and people's intuitions based on their observations isn't very useful.
Maybe this is like the toupee fallacy, and we only pay attention to the ones with this kind of strip mining approach, and we don't see the majority where they run the businesses to maximize ROI in the long run?
In reality that absolutely is part of the equation though.
Maybe your equation. Not theirs.
You would be surprised most of PE is not the evil enterprise it is characterized as.
What do we think of Apollo Global Management?
The longer term of continuing to buy businesses, load them with debt, strip them of value, and move on to the next, promises much better ROI than focussing on a single business.
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.
I have had two die at under 20k staples. 4 boxes.
The problem is MBAs see an unpriced asset of the commons and burn it down to get temporarily, one time ahead.
Old ones sell on eBay for not a lot.
I'm looking at some modern ones. Bostitch or whatever.