What does this reasoning look like in cases where all of the above strongly favours doing it yourself, but there’s ~no societal norm/support?
The obvious example is phones. I want several features of a flagship phone—I like fast 4G, fingerprint scanners, good cameras, and tapping my phone to pay for things. I also like several features of older phones—I like small phones that work in my small hands, ugly models that don’t tempt thieves, plastic materials that don’t shatter, and headphone jacks. And I don’t need the ability to play motorbike racer games at 60fps! Yet it’s very difficult to get a phone which doesn’t bundle all of the “high end” features into one package—some of which (nice camera) I want, some of which (shiny glass back) I actively don’t want—without getting a low end phone and forgoing all of them. This is for something I use for hours every day!
It’s not really feasible for me to design/build my own phone, where I only pay for the high-end features I want and don’t pay for what I don’t want. But presumably this is a feature of the modern economic landscape, where phones aren’t really sold in modular kits and it’s much easier to get training in building cars than building phones. Or is it? Is there any possible way to insource things like this? (Building my own computer was very easy!) Can I get together with other people and start a Kickstarter for high end phones that don’t have unwanted feature x?
For high complexity products, the answer is simply that you can’t and you will not ever be able to without tools that make high complexity products simple. (as an example of such a tool, complex plastic molded parts used to be infeasible to create yourself until 3d printers and easy to use 3d modeling software).
Cars and computer chips and phones are all examples of this. When you ‘build’ a computer it would be similar to if you could buy car modules are easy to bolt together sections and thus lego together whatever you wanted. The “DIY cars” you are thinking of are far inferior in critical ways to their mass produced designs, however. (handling and safety and weight distribution and efficiency and reliability are all far inferior for DIY vehicles). Just like you can hack together something that would functionally act like a phone and computer, even if it’s done by bodging a raspberry pi to a Nokia brick phone and using an acoustic modem for the internet access. It just won’t be very good.
Your best option for your phone needs is to buy a 1-2 year old used example of the high end model that has every feature you need.
What does this reasoning look like in cases where all of the above strongly favours doing it yourself, but there’s ~no societal norm/support?
The obvious example is phones. I want several features of a flagship phone—I like fast 4G, fingerprint scanners, good cameras, and tapping my phone to pay for things. I also like several features of older phones—I like small phones that work in my small hands, ugly models that don’t tempt thieves, plastic materials that don’t shatter, and headphone jacks. And I don’t need the ability to play motorbike racer games at 60fps! Yet it’s very difficult to get a phone which doesn’t bundle all of the “high end” features into one package—some of which (nice camera) I want, some of which (shiny glass back) I actively don’t want—without getting a low end phone and forgoing all of them. This is for something I use for hours every day!
It’s not really feasible for me to design/build my own phone, where I only pay for the high-end features I want and don’t pay for what I don’t want. But presumably this is a feature of the modern economic landscape, where phones aren’t really sold in modular kits and it’s much easier to get training in building cars than building phones. Or is it? Is there any possible way to insource things like this? (Building my own computer was very easy!) Can I get together with other people and start a Kickstarter for high end phones that don’t have unwanted feature x?
For high complexity products, the answer is simply that you can’t and you will not ever be able to without tools that make high complexity products simple. (as an example of such a tool, complex plastic molded parts used to be infeasible to create yourself until 3d printers and easy to use 3d modeling software).
Cars and computer chips and phones are all examples of this. When you ‘build’ a computer it would be similar to if you could buy car modules are easy to bolt together sections and thus lego together whatever you wanted. The “DIY cars” you are thinking of are far inferior in critical ways to their mass produced designs, however. (handling and safety and weight distribution and efficiency and reliability are all far inferior for DIY vehicles). Just like you can hack together something that would functionally act like a phone and computer, even if it’s done by bodging a raspberry pi to a Nokia brick phone and using an acoustic modem for the internet access. It just won’t be very good.
Your best option for your phone needs is to buy a 1-2 year old used example of the high end model that has every feature you need.