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Lego was always expensive, you can compare prices adjusted for inflation. For example, the 1979 Galaxy Explorer <https://brickset.com/sets/497-1> was around $32, that's $144 today. The reimagined set from 2023 <https://brickset.com/sets/10497-1> was sold at $99, $106 today. Not only it is cheaper, but much larger and with many more pieces.

Nostalgia... Lego was amazing decades ago so we want it to remain so. It's not anymore though. The whole raison d'etre, namely infinitely recomposable bricks to be creative, was lost the moment they realized they were a LOT more money in custom sets. Sets become collectible, perishable, trends can form, secondary markets exists, etc. It's simply about the baseline, not the principle. Sorry.

I believe the inflation adjusted price per piece has remained fairly consistent? https://flowingdata.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/priceperp...

Perhaps sets of a given physical size have more pieces now compared to before? Not sure.

Agree. They seem to have a “price per piece” equation. Perhaps as a result, the 5+ sets are made of hundreds of small pieces.

Older sets had larger foundational and platform pieces which gave a good starting place for new creative builds.

Today, airplanes fuselages, wings, and car chassis are instead built up piece by piece.

It’s hard for my 6 year old to start creative builds that are stable when he hardly has any pieces larger than 2x6 across dozens of sets.

My wife found a huge mixed bin from the 80s and 90s at an estate sale. It really helped.

The decline of technic sets is such a shame. There's so little support for anything but representative models of specific cars, despite the platform being able to support a ton of mechanical creativity.

> the push towards smartphone-dependent toys feels weird

I haven't seen this push? The new Lego Smart stuff is explicitly "screen free play". There is an app but it's just for firmware update and configuration and you can't even connect it unless the brick is on the charger.

Call me names, but I'll go to bat for stickers.

Even when I was a kid, I wasn't keen on graphic designs on the pieces. I liked the uniformity of consistently-colored pieces. Most graphics only make sense in the context of the set they were packaged in. Stickers give the customer flexibility. Use them when you build the set, and remove them later if you take the set apart and don't want them anymore.

Killing Mindstorms was a head-scratcher to me. Hell, there was an entire international tournament built around Mindstorms. I know FLL still exists, but why kill that darling specifically?

NXT still kicks ass by the way. I have a backup of the NXT programming environment somewhere, it can be coaxed into running on Windows 11.

If you want advancements in engineering and plastics for much better prices, see the wonders that Bandai has made with modern Gundam models. A Gundam Aerial HG is under $20, and you end up with a large multicolor model that assembles easily, has minimal mold lines, and needs no glue. And that's one of the intro models

Oddly enough I found the Duplo line much more fun to play with as our kid went through the blocks years. You could build something substantial with fewer block clicks, there were fewer different types of blocks, they were less fiddly and prone to vanishing into rugs/carpets, etc. Also the proper Legos tended to be sets which makes it very stressful to mix them into a misc bag.

I feel the same... I remember as a kid, being able to get kits of hundreds of just random blocks and variations and just being able to build/play... all the sets today are all custom blocks that just constrain you and often aren't significantly reusable while I'm not sure that I've even seen basic block kits anywhere in decades now.

edit: I know you can get thousands piece brick sets from third parties or random bulk set sales on Amazon... the issue is the random bits are from the current sets mostly with little reuse value, and the bricks sets are from third parties of questionable tolerance compared to real lego. I just want to be able to get a classic 1000-3000 piece set of classic bricks/pieces from Lego proper, even if it's $100-200 total, still way more than 3rd party but maybe not the same margins for Lego as the bespoke sets.

edit2: there are some "Lego Classic" sets that are closer to what I would like to see, this is probably the closest.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B5FMF8BF/

But even then, maybe need that many more bricks that are just bricks... again, there are third party sets that are all block variants that are much bigger/cheaper... would just be nice to be able to get more of those without paying an arm and a leg.

They suck because instead of buying the rights to the bricks they outright stole the design, the packaging and the marketing materials from the original inventor.

And then they sued the pants of everybody that tried to do the same thing to them.

> the fact that pieces from the 70s snap perfectly into ones made today is mind blowing

Is it? It's not like it's hard to keep producing the pieces to the same original specifications. If they snapped then they snap now.

In terms of creativity of model options, the Chinese compatibles are stomping them.

You can even get a model of post-explosion Chernobyl. Not to mention all the sci-fi tie in from Star Trek to Warhammer that real Lego hasn't signed contracts for. But if you want an 60cm Gloriana class, there it is.

Plus Technics-ish sets and bulk boxes that aren't 75% special body panels that only fit that specific model, since Technics itself mostly seems to have been downgraded to the automotive brands advertising department.

I got my first Lego set in the early 70’s through a Velveeta cheese mail in promotion. The company almost went out of business in the early 90’s before they discovered movie tie-ins. I believe the quality of play was lost in this transition because the sets became more literal and less open ended. My first big set was a fire station which certainly literal but somehow seems more open ended then the movie tie/in sets.

Lego was always expensive.

> many sets feel like display models than something you can play with.

That's because they are. There probably never been this many adults building lego than today.

> The Mindstorms/NXT line had huge potential but then just sort of fizzled out.

That's a small niche in today's world, a child is too young for arduino/feather/cyberbrick/whatever.

Other manufacturers give LEGO a run for their money nowadays. Look at the CaDA Mercedes-AMG One for example.

I'm not a Lego nerd, but I recently saw a really sweet Lego DeLorean in Walmart priced at almost $200. Now that I have disposable income, I would have impulse-purchased that thing so hard if it would have been closer to $100. But I can't quite bring myself to part with a pair of benji's for a plastic toy, no matter how thoroughly it triggers my nostalgia.

I heard your same rant in the 1980s - only small details have changed (not mindstorms then ...) But kids who want to build have always been able to, and most sets mix and match for those kids.

Quality is expensive.

Lego’s net profit margin is only about 19%.

They couldn’t lower prices much even if they wanted to.

> many sets feel like display models than something you can play with

That’s what I thought when comparing to my childhood sets, but it doesn’t stop my kids from loving them and playing with them.

My kids are learning a lot of cool building tricks from the advanced sets that I never thought of as a kid. Lots of angle pieces, hinges, and creative building.

The expensive sets ARE display models. They still have the older style generic sets for significantly cheaper.

Not just NX but technics basically was a build things that do stuff mechanically and now isn't that seemingly at all. Most kits I had came with one or more alternative models you could build with the primary kit as well.

They’ve basically adopted the Nintendo model. People have strong emotional connections for both, which can then be exploited for money.

It has momentum because they haven’t let quality and innovation slide. They know customers will be out with pitchforks if quality drops.

Maybe one last thing that sucks is that it’s all plastic.

> a lot what the company does today just sucks. Set prices are outrageou

This was all done planned and implemented by this one consulting guy (MCK?), who became CEO after delivering his report from his consulting company, Lego was near bankrupt back then - he started with all this subbranding shitty stuff and the "colorful" bricks and introduced all these many many "single-use-case-bricks" for more and more sets.

Just buy from one of the many way cheaper way better competitors.

If you're complaining about the prices, remember how capitalism works. The price is set by buyers, not sellers. That's the invisible hand, the seller will set the price to what buyers show they will pay. If you're unhappy about $500 for a Millennium Falcon or whatever, your beef is not with the company for accepting that when people choose to pay it, it's with those other buyers for paying that much.

As the other replies are saying, it's mostly brand power. If your complaint is that $500 for a Falcon is monopolistic because there's no competition because nobody else can legally sell Falcons, the monopoly is really with Star Wars not Lego, they're just delegating it to Lego. You're always free to find your cheapest source of bricks perhaps from other manufacturers and build your own equivalent.

As for stickers and apps and the other stuff... yeah that's the enshittification that also always accompanies capitalism. It's lamentable but it only changes if enough customers vote no with their wallets.

I mean it is a business after all, trying to make money..

I must say, the new smart bricks with all sorts of sensors(color, gyro, distance etc) triggers the inner child in me. I can’t wait to get them for my kiddo and teach him how that magic actually works beneath.

The regular LEGO at this points feels “just plastic” and I won’t feel bad offloading that purchase to AliExpress.

Basic Lego is actually decently affordable. It's the collector's sets that adults would buy whose prices are jacked sky high, based on demand it seems.

I've bought a decent amount of Duplo and Lego kits for my son (currently 3 years old) and it's great value.

Isn't that just capitalism? The rule is for companies to keep pushing for higher margins and profit, so given enough time any company will default to shady tactics and product enshitification.

Maybe if something is too expensive don't buy it?

Do you mean between black and light grey? Light grey pins have always been the kind you use for rotating connections (low friction), whereas black was for non-rotating ones (high friction). Newer blue pins are also high friction, IIRC. I haven't bought new lego technic in a while, so I don't know if there's been any new colours added

EDIT: I think I also had some dark grey pins, but I don't remember if they were high or low friction

> it's one of the areas where LEGO is generally superior to the similar types of bricks

Imho, this is, objectively, not true (anymore).

Pantasy with GoBricks are superior in coloring and fit; Cobi are excellent for things that should not be taken apart anymore (like tank models); Lumibricks are excellent in fit and have amazing illumination solutions that are lightyears (haha) ahead of lego.

IIRC there's also light yellow pins that are also light friction

Ha, I noticed this too! And even my 3 y/o picked up on this.

We have a set (something with Spiderman IIRC) that attached wheels with yellow pins that allow for better rolling of wheels. The black pins are too tight for this indeed.

You can still buy LEGO Classic which is just a bunch of bricks.

Makes me think there could be a big cognitive difference when playing with Lego as well, for example, divergent vs convergent thinking.

Maybe Lego needs to manufacture sets that are just "collections of bricks". In fact, I think they did that at least for a while. I know my past self would have loved to have a few sets that when put together would provide the kinds and variety of pieces used in books such as The Lego Play Book.

The reason this is impressive has less to do with the tolerances themselves and more to do with backward compatibility across decades at scale. That's the genuinely hard part.

The history here is deeper than most people realize. The United States spent fifty years (roughly 1800 to 1853) at the Springfield and Harper's Ferry armories trying to achieve what LEGO now does routinely: parts manufactured to tight enough tolerances that they are truly interchangeable without fitting. In 1853, a visiting British inspector randomly selected ten muskets made in ten different years, disassembled them, mixed the parts, and reassembled ten functional muskets using only a screwdriver. Tolerances of a thousandth of an inch. It was considered impossible by most of the engineering establishment of the time.

The way they got there was by building machines, then using the parts those machines made to build better machines, then using those improved parts to build even better machines. A virtuous circle of transferring skill from human hands to tooling. This is the actual origin story of what historians call the American System of Manufacture, and it's the foundation the entire modern automotive supply chain sits on.

So yes, any competent injection molder holds tight tolerances today. But that's precisely the point: the reason it seems unremarkable now is that two centuries of compounding precision made it so

After working both in automotive and at LEGO, I think LEGO is more impressive tolerance wise when it comes to molds, molding and tolerance quality control.

Also to correct you, LEGO has been making most of the parts for decades, some have had changes due to new materials (which you can read upon online) but besides the ones that remained the same (not really), many new system elements got released in the last decades and new I.P tied elements get released on a yearly basis.

Ill admit that their parts do have higher quality than their competitors (various Chinese and other companies) making similar or compatible parts - some have injection molding blemishes or whatever on them that I've purchased from AliExpress or Walmart so in this space they are above everyone else in their space.

Agreed. Same or greater injection molding challenges for bottle caps, small plastic containers, things that also are in the hundreds of millions of parts annually. More challenging as they are often using polypropylene which is harder to mold due to its high anisotropy (shrinks in different rates depending on if it's flow or cross-flow direction).

There were some bricks from the very early days that were not made from ABS, nor did they have the current box and pin style. Those are often loose (or broken).

In my experience the bricks that didn’t snap well would have too many teeth marks

Really cool trivia, thanks for sharing :D

It certainly feels that way. Some tells:

"Precision, for LEGO, isn't an engineering choice, it's a brand promise." - The classic "It's not just x, it's y", just minus the "just".

"One philosophy optimizes for cost, the other for perfection." - Again we see the x/y structure; AI writing often features these forms, eg comparisons (x vs y), conversions (x into y), negated emphasis (not x, but y), etc.

"When you have multiple parts in an assembly, use statistical analysis for tolerance stack-up rather than worst-case math. Traceability matters. Track your defects so feedback turns precision into reliability." - More x/y followed by a short stinger ("Z matters"), and the closing sentence again follows the "x/y" pattern.

For funsies I tossed the whole thing into a purported AI detector and it said 90+% confidence of AI. I don't trust those types of things very much and suspect they have high false positive rates, but I have read that AI writing generally has measurably lower entropy, so maybe it's plausible, and in this case it aligns with my existing beliefs, so it obviously must be true.

I wish Lego would find a digital equivalent as universal as the bricks for programming. I think it could be another moat for them. But it seems they keep changing it and it does not seems as simple or as universal as it could be. I am thinking more programming with blocks than using a tablet etc. to program the blocks. IMO it is a wasted opportunity.

What knock off brands come even close in quality? Everything I’ve tried that isn’t name brand LEGO is hot garbage.

This is why we measure things in baby elephants per football field.

Is it a language mixup, ±0.001mm being called a 0.002mm tolerance? Otherwise I cant figure it out either lol.

This is the most interesting point in the thread to me. Tolerance stack-up is the reason tight per-part tolerances matter at all. A single brick being precise is table stakes for injection molding. The hard problem is what happens when you compose hundreds of them. The decoupling strategy you're describing is really similar to how you handle error accumulation in any large composed system. You can't make individual components perfect enough to avoid drift at scale, so you introduce boundaries where the accumulated error gets absorbed rather than propagated. In Lego's case that means designing joints between sections that are forgiving enough to accommodate the stack-up from each chunk independently.

It's also why knockoff bricks can feel fine for small builds and then fall apart (sometimes literally) on larger ones. If your per-part tolerance is 3x worse, it doesn't matter much for a 20-piece build, but for a 2000-piece build your cumulative error budget is blown long before you're done. The failure mode isn't that any individual brick is bad, it's that the composition doesn't hold.

I'd be curious whether Lego publishes or talks about those chunk size design rules anywhere. That seems like the actually interesting engineering story, more so than the per-part tolerance numbers that get repeated in every article about them.

I guess if a single cavity mold costs $30,000 and a 16 cavity mold costs $110,000 you have an additional expense of ~$80,000, divided over half million parts is 16 cents. So lets say somewhere from 5-10cents per part to go 16x faster. My numbers might be off a bit but seems in the ballpark. I also don't know much a lego brick costs to make in terms of materials/opex.

I agree, it doesn't say a lot. It also very confidently specifies a series of tolerances with no citations.

Lego does indeed have very tight tolerance, but I don't know if the numbers are in the public domain.

I too hate it when my kids apply 4 kN of force to off-brand construction bricks and they turn to ABS paste. Only LEGO (R) for my spawn!

I always remember the small, weird pieces being hard to get apart.

What I don't remember was every kit being made up of so many small, weird pieces.

Having grown up playing with LEGOs, I can still distinctly remember the feeling of sore fingers pulling tiny pieces apart after a long session. It wasn't until a few years ago I learned there's an official brick separator tool [1]. Would've changed my life as a kid.

[1] https://www.lego.com/en-us/service/help-topics/article/lego-...

The tolerance is definitely more applicable to the getting them apart then putting them together.

there is a solution for that, its called flip-flops. But it would be hilarious if LEGO would add a pair in one of their sets :)

The trick is to redesign the bricks for worse tolerances. With 3D printers you can print very nuanced springy elements that are impossible to achieve with injection molding. I got some reasonable bricks years ago on cheap printers with PETG, should work even better now with modern printers and ABS.

Not in terms of people printing lego bricks. But at least as an adult, designing things in Fusion and printing them scratches a similar itch as building lego. And 3d printing is now pretty accessible to the 14+ age group. I doubt this will completely replace legos, or that it's even their biggest threat, but I'd be surprised if it had no impact

It would be interesting if 3D printers could reach this tolerance

not true at all for most alternative brands (they are not knock offs, the patents are expired so they are legal, and comparable in quality), same for cloned sets (shady companies cloning lego sets using alternative bricks (the bricks are legal, the cloned sets aren't). the quality of alternative bricks is good. the quality of the instructions as well.

For me it is 1. Terrible quality of all rubbery/soft elements. 2. If it is original model (instead of ripping of existing set), it often contains huge, shell like elements, that can't be easily be in custom designs. 3. I guess the previous point doesn't really matter, when bricks are designed to be assembled once and are impossible to pull apart without hurting your fingers.

The 2. is very annoying. Especially when big sets fall apart due to this issue.

Let me add this: 4. no spare parts available. So when I break weird Chinese invention the whole set becomes useless without that very special part. It happened few times and I got back to used Lego sets.