there’s a trend you see in certain product spaces, most notably the retro handheld space, where certain companies will put out products that are mostly good, but have some caveats that you must mention that kinda result in everything feeling “imperfect” in a way. (e.g. “the miyoo mini plus is great because of x and y but i really wish it had a and b”.) you never really end up purchasing a product that makes you think, “yeah that’s enough. i can stop here.” because every product has these flaws that leave you wanting more, and the only way to get that is to try to buy more stuff in the hopes of finding the one product that doesn’t leave you wanting (you see this in fountain pen spaces with talk of a “grail” pen). i don’t really know where to go with this, but it’s just an interesting little wrinkle on what the video is talking about. please talk more about it because i intentionally try to distance myself from some of these communities because i have really major self control issues that can result in a lot of impulse buying.
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gay plural trans lesbian disaster. i've done some cursed programming stuff but i'm hoping that if i can just get better and hotter then maybe i can make something even worse
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in reply to @ewie's post:
I think this applies to Polaroid in that the modern polaroids suck ass, none of them are perfect, except maybe the £500 one. My 600 series cost me £5, but what I so dearly miss is manual focus. The best route for me to get that I think is buying the classic bellows style Polaroid, but getting a new modern iType instead of 600 means that the battery is in the camera and not the cartridge, which is less waste and cheaper. But the only iTypes (as far as I know) with manual focus is the aforementioned £500 one. Manual focus surely doesn't cost that much.
i will chip in that something i didn’t mention in the original post is another unique aspect of the more modern consumption communities is a very rapid rate of product releases. retro handhelds get multiple releases per year just in the same company. this is great for influencers because they always have new products to review, while also adding pressure to the person in the community to keep up with the joneses and/or maybe get this new thing that’ll fix their minor issues with the old thing. you especially see this from chinese manufacturers, who put out a lot of products at very low prices that all come with major caveats. modern polaroid doesn’t really have the same exact thing going on, but cameras have their own slew of unique things in regards to consumptive communities.
That's totally fair, I did end up focusing on the lack of "yeah that’s enough. i can stop here." part of your post. Polaroid doesn't even really fit it, because it has that end point in Polaroid I-2, it's just that end point 100x more expensive than the start point.