(I’m trying to adjust my shopping habits for quality, long-lasting goods from reputable brands. This isn’t some hailcorporate thing)
(I’m trying to adjust my shopping habits for quality, long-lasting goods from reputable brands. This isn’t some hailcorporate thing)
I’m going to name a few as I do a lot of different hobbies.
For tools (hand\power) Milwaukee brand is hard to beat, and for hand tools I’m a fan of Husky generally. Underrated.
For Music equipment: Boss and Roland are always a safe bet and worth at least comparing to whatever you are looking at. (amps, pedals, drum machines, synths… etc)
For inflatable water craft (rafts, kayaks, fishing boats): Sea Eagle is the shit.
For computer components (motherboards, video cards, etc): ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI. (ASRock is an honorable mention) I’ve built PC’s for over 30 years now. Thousands of systems. I stand by this.
For computer accessories (hard drive docks, adapters, misc) Startech makes great stuff for the price and all kinds of useful equipment.
For 3D Printers - I love Ender’s due to the amount of easy upgrades\hacks\upgradability to turn a $200 3d printer into a printer that can rival anything out there for it’s type. And a lot of the parts you can just print with the printer you bought. You can do this with many brands but I found Ender to be very accessible with a lot of ready made parts on the web you can get started with immediately. Not to mention upgrading the motherboard\step motors and what not. It’s a great hobby if you like to tinker.
Cars (vehicles): I’ve owned many brands at this point in my life. From high end Volkswagen sports cars (2008 Rabbit modded out) to low end beater 96 Ford Escort, Dodge Dakota pickups and Chevy SUVs. And at this point in my life, with all the money spent, accidents, long road trips and broken parts, I’ll never buy anything besides a Honda or Toyota. They are the best value out there. Period.
Seconding Startech - I bought a DP to DVI-D adapter for my MacBook Pro and while it worked flawlessly with my PC, macOS was only showing me 1280x800 resolution instead of the monitor’s full 2560x1600 resolution. I found that under Windows on Bootcamp it fully worked on the same hardware so it was clearly a macOS thing.
Emailed their support about it and within a day, got a guy who immediately gave me very technical and specific advice and suggestions, clearly very experienced. We weren’t able to solve it (chalked it up to a weird macOS limitation and work gave me a different adapter that worked) but he was still incredibly helpful, and I’ll have confidence in buying from them in the future that their support should be excellent.
Didn’t Asus start enshittifying recently? Thought I saw some chatter about that on here 😢
Just stay away from the RoG nonsense and you should be fine.
They have had some sus stuff very recently yes… disappointing.
For 3D printers I think prusa is the bramd that can be trusted with quality.
They are expensive but made in Europe and very reliable out of the box. I’ve been printing tons of parts for the renovation of my house and tools organization with no issues. I just start the print and come back once it done. Now I even do it remotely from work.
Compared to my brother who had a Ender 3, tinkered quite a lot with it but was constantly baby sitting the prints and eventually just gave up on it.