I agree, large corporations tend to design their products for early self-destruction. There are exceptions, for example Seiko makes very good watches, but it's a good rule of thumb.
However, if you research carefully you can often find a long-lasting high-quality product from a smaller company. For example: Unicomp keyboards,the Docter Monocular, Kaweco pens, the Fisher "bullet" space pen, saddlebackleather, Beyerdynamic and Grado earphones. Despite all the marketing hype, you can sometimes still sometimes spot when a company takes real pride in their products.
What bothers me that it's hard to find good consumer electronics, though. That market seems to be flooded with crap.
I was mostly thinking about things like consumer electronics, tools, appliances, etc. when it comes to this. Items that have to be built by larger companies rather than ones that can be built at a more "craft" scale where the companies developing them aren't beholden to investors trying to maximize their return.
it makes me really sad that these companies (and sennheiser) are not more well known. I get that not everyone can be an audio enthusiast, but what kills me is that people will actually spend more money on skullcandy or beats and never know how badly they are getting shafted.
What's more depressing is that most people can't tell the difference, so it doesn't matter to many. It does to me. But I've let people Liston to my Grados and say "meh, my EarPods are good enough".
I guess that comes down to "because my EarPods came free with my phone; they're a high-enough quality experience for free" as opposed to having to actually go out of their way to research and pay for audiophile stuff.
I mean, most people are listening to pop music, heavily-crunched podcasts, and 32 kbps audiobooks; there aren't any subtle nuances they're missing that are worth spending money for.
Even when people do go for things like AirPods instead of some nice, high-quality Grados as you own, you have to weigh up the complete difference in experience outside of audio quality, so that if people do happen to drop money on headphones that aren't to your taste, you still understand that their preferences are different to yours.
However, if you research carefully you can often find a long-lasting high-quality product from a smaller company. For example: Unicomp keyboards,the Docter Monocular, Kaweco pens, the Fisher "bullet" space pen, saddlebackleather, Beyerdynamic and Grado earphones. Despite all the marketing hype, you can sometimes still sometimes spot when a company takes real pride in their products.
What bothers me that it's hard to find good consumer electronics, though. That market seems to be flooded with crap.