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Good products

May 7, 2015

You know of my love for old-school HP calculators (especially the HP 42S). In general, brands gaining my trust are rare. Only a few reached a status that make future purchases embalmed in confidence: confidence that my choice will be the right one.

Rock solid

Below, you can find my personal list of purchase trust:

  • Hp printers: I bought my first laser printer in 1989 (a 4L); I’m still buying HP printers, whether they are laser or inkjet printers. Not a single one has let me down. Good printing/scanning quality, acceptable running costs. Even at the office – when given a choice – I will choose an HP printer.
  • Braun shavers: I bought a Philips shaver once; I used it for a few months and then – after people started complaining that I should shave more often – again, I bought a Braun. The shaving is effortless and quick. The battery management is magnificent: batteries last a decade and the prediction on how many shaving minutes are left is awkwardly accurate.
  • Samsung products: I can’t mention a specific product line. It think that the South-Koreans from Samsung make a wide variety of very good products. I buy Samsung a lot: it all started with a 1Gb Yepp music player that supported Ogg-vorbis and some decent SRS-labs sound effects at an attractive price. It ran off a single standard AA battery. That’s what I call decent and straightforward technology. I didn’t need to install any specific software. The device just mounted as a bulk data device. Plug and play! Ten years later, I’m still using it. These days I have several Samsung harddrives, several LCD screens, Samsung memory for my laptop and even a Samsung cell phone.
  • And then the top of the bill: GNU/Linux. I’ve used slackware, mandrake, redhat, fedora, kubuntu and now more recently, plain ubuntu. Whenever I log on to my machine, it feels like coming home into a safe harbor of crea- and produc-tivity. Thanks to Torvalds and Stallman and the hurd of people supporting the free software and open source paradigm.

Does this mean that I just select any model out of the ‘approved’ brand-line? No, I spend quite some time documenting myself: analysis of my requirements, reading technical specs, browsing through user reviews – I take my time. I even consider other options. However, I still return to the safe harbor of trust.

What about iStuff and uStuff?

You will have noticed some notorious absents from my list: Apple, just to mention one. I’m not into apple. Too expensive, too closed, too... Microsoft to name another: I use Microsoft because my employer requires me to. I’m not tied to a car manufacturer either. I’ve driven many cars and for every one of them I loved some aspects and hated other aspects.

Circle of trust

Why do I bother declaring my love to some brands? To thank the engineers for doing a great job. Does it mean that the engineers working for other brands are doing a lousy job? No. Engineers always do a great job. However, it often goes unnoticed. My message: keep working hard. Your goal is to get in my circle of trust!