> It is easy to see this, from the fetishization of unboxing and endless gear fidgeting reviews to the details that won't matter to 99.9% of the users.

I've said it before and I'll keep saying it, Reddit has really turned "picking up a hobby" into "selecting and purchasing the correct gear, talking about the gear, and deciding which gear to purchase next". Don't even get me started on keyboard fetishists, who dispense with the hobby pretense and just buy gear (yeah a nice keyboard is a great thing to have but I've never lubricated a switch in my life and never intend to)

It's not just Reddit. It's all of social media.

I think the fundamental problem is that if you're sitting somewhere bored, maybe at work, maybe elsewhere, you can consume some media about a hobby, and you can make an online purchase of some gear for the hobby, but you often can't actually do the hobby.

It's dumb, but I will catch myself watching a ten minute video on synthsizers while I'm at work, but I would never whip out a synth and spend ten minutes playing it at work. But it's the playing it that actually satisfies the desire. Consuming media just increases it.

It's a dumb loop but it's really hard to get out of because:

1. The activation energy of doing a hobby is always higher than the energy required to just consume media about it, or even buy gear online for it.

2. We're often in environments where it's impossible or inappropriate to do the hobby (work, in line at the DMV, etc.) but where we are able to consume media or make purchases.

It is not entirely fruitless. Doing this with different things you might eventually stumble upon something that will become your hobby.

Good point. It's a mixed bag. I've gotten back into music making the past few years (hello, mid-life crisis). And while watching synth videos on YouTube can easily encourage me to just be a synthesizer collector and not a music-maker, it has also been really inspiring, taught me a lot, and actually encouraged me to make more.

Finding the right balance can be hard but for me at least, it's a net positive. But I do have to be diligent about asking myself "Will this piece of gear really further my goals, or am I just bored and looking for a seratonin hit?"

Also this, its captialism, consumerism, and people chasing the dream of being an "influencer". All rubbish.

I "stopped" taking pictures after I went down the extreme build your own cameras art tract and found it all devoid of meaning. This was 2005...

I actually didnt stop... I still shoot film because we live in a dark age of cloud storage and I believe there will be little recorded daily history still left in the near future, or overran by AI/Deepfake content...

Great comments! Makes you feel like we live at the end of the rubbish world! :D

Fuck I hope so. Craftsman unit!

> Reddit has really turned...

Next time you have a free weekend, pop into some estate sales and flip through people's old magazine collections and piles of hobby crap. You'll find a few people with well worn items and a sensible collection (people who had enough time to really practice the hobby) and many wealthier people that spent money aspiring to commit time they never made while collecting the most featured and esteemed baubles.

There's nothing new to this.

The joke about audiophiles applies to many activities:

"Audiophiles don't use their equipment to listen to your music.

Audiophiles use your music to listen to their equipment.” - Alan Parsons

> has really turned "picking up a hobby" into "selecting and purchasing the correct gear, talking about the gear, and deciding which gear to purchase next".

Thank you for saying it so clearly.

I used to love reading a few subreddits where I would get tips and advice on doing things that I love doing, like /r/snowboarding /r/photography /r/overlanding /r/vandwellers /r/cycling

and all of them have devolved into exactly what you describe. Endless discussion about purchasing new & expensive equipment to do said thing. Extremely minimal discussion about actually doing said thing.

Reddit may have continued or even increased an existing practice, but this phenomenon predates reddit (founded 2005) by quite a bit.

And Leica being an overprived status symbol, I explicitly include Leica glass, predates any Sony digital camera by a couple of decades as well.

Is there a name for that? "wishful purchasing" maybe?

GAS: Gear Acquisition Syndrome, at least photographers call it that.

Not to be confused with collecting, which has no notions of taling better pictures and is purely concerned with acquiring things for the sake of having it. GAS always has this underlying assumption of being a better photographer if only the gear was better, as in the latest and highest priced.

I’m not sure why the Author makes the assertion that Apple stopped making small phones. For the iPhone 12 mini and 13 which was the premium product they just didn’t sell enough to justify the model itself while social media was clamoring for this model and Apple tried two iterations .

Also the new iPhone 15 pros are lighter than the previous models and have features that justify it such as a fully functional usbc port that while it’s only USB 3 it can function with a wide verity of dongles to get Ethernet and external media recording so you can not rely only the local amount of storage on the phone.

Hi! Author here: I use a Balmuda Phone now, an exotic Android 12 Japanese discontinued phone that still receives security updates and weighs 138g with a 4.9" display. The iPhone Mini is my previous phone. It sold millions and millions of units, close to the entire number of yearly shipments of Google's Pixel line, but that was not enough for Apple. I like phones that are less than 140mm in height, less than 5" screen, but run modern software. Apple made enough that it would have been considered a huge success for any other company in the world. But alas :)

I always wonder if they would have sold more minis if they made them more expensive than the standard model, rather than the discount option.

> just didn’t sell enough to justify the model itself

Bla bla they sold more of the minis than any model of Android phone. They're just asses.

Well, that's the natural outcome of most people in the Western world having no scarcity. The US is such a rich land. It makes sense why there's so many DTC brands here since marketing is king in that world. I tried a Liquid Death the other day and it's honestly nothing special. But that company is huge!

You'll see that in most things. Growing up I used to shave with a double-edge razor just for price. Eventually I started using disposable razors and a few years ago I tried to switch back to the double-edge (for convenience, since I'd keep running out of disposable razors - too big to store lots). The community around this shit is bog shit insane, man.

Like there's a good blade and a bad blade, yes, but the whole thing has turned into a damned art. You have to buy the best horse-hair brush with the best place to put it, and the write double-edge handle. Anyway, I did use a double-edge for a while and just used foam (unlike my teen years when I had a brush - synthetic no doubt).

The same with cologne. You go on Reddit or whatever to just get some baseline stuff and it's refined to oblivion. They'll recommend something like YSL Kouros ("a classic power-fougere") but you are guaranteed to empty a restaurant walking in wearing that! Madness.

Meh. You can always ignore them. I bought like 3 "classic" razors until I got one I really liked. Didn't even look online, grabbed whatever (few) options that i found in physical stores.

It's good enough, end of story.

Nobody worth listening to cares about Leica camera bodies independent of Leica glass. There is no alternative to Leica glass.

I do not own any Leica equipment myself, but I'm not blind.

Even Leica glass is somewhat overrated, at the very least incredibly overpriced. Same goes for Zeiss, even if Zeiss glass is really good.

Hi! The only reason why I keep a Panasonic GM1 body around is to use two Panasonic Leica DG lenses whenever I miss them :) I see your point.

"inconspicuous street photography" "discreet shooting"

I'm sure it's legal, but it shouldn't be

As a published street photog, we not talking about voyerism, were talking about not attracting bozos with "oh what lens is that"...

Also as a film photog, Leica lost their use 40 years ago... A couple old heads still use them in the field, but as the article says the cost does not justify the product anymore (except the glass...) but! Hell if they make a profit! That company is a loss leader and propped up by all of Leicas other offerings...

Haha, oh no, I'm in this picture. Last week I saw a guy with this massive lens and while walking by I said something like "Damn, that's a cool lens!". Okay, I'll file this away into the same class as "Rubik's cubes? Oh I just take the stickers off and put them on the same face" or whatever people say.

Look most people are kind. I'll chitchat for a moment... but yeah- if I could avoid gawkers... I mean FWIW much of my work is about people living on the fringe, on the road, or end of society. I spent years touring just living with people like that. You become one of them and "gawkers" are just that.

Im being reminded there was a name for this, Gonzo Journalism. But I see why in todays world people would confuse it with voyeurism.

The article is talking about photographing candid scenes in a public place while blending in, not covert spying.