Lego is one of those companies that is simultaneously amazing and kind of sucks. On one hand the core product is incredible. The tolerances on the bricks are micrometer-level precision and the fact that pieces from the 70s snap perfectly into ones made today is mind blowing.
On the other hand, a lot what the company does today just sucks. Set prices are outrageous. Printed bricks get replaced with stickers and many sets feel like display models than something you can play with. The Mindstorms/NXT line had huge potential but then just sort of fizzled out. And the push towards smartphone-dependent toys feels weird. Who actually wants their kids staring at a phone to play Lego?
It's so sad, because the core product is basically perfect.
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.
Yes, they have kept up with inflation, and that is the problem. Manufactured goods like Lego bricks should fall in price through innovation in processes, scale, etc. What does raise higher than the average inflation should be be labor-intensive products/services. In other words, it feels much stranger today how expensive Legos are compared to 47 years ago.
It has almost 4 times the number of pieces, but is only about 50% longer and wider - there's just way more smaller pieces. Price per piece is very misleading when comparing older and newer sets. The newer ones have more details, look slicker, but have a lot less "meat". Which is not that great for creative play.
I have the re-release secondhand unopened and I think I paid about that much, so even in a collector's market, not terrible at all. An expensive toy to be sure but a deeply satisfying experience if you like that kind of thing.
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.
The existence of specialty sets doesn’t subtract from creating building.
My kids get some of the specialty sets, build them, then hours later they’re either taken apart or heavily modified.
The specialty sets can provide some interesting unique pieces too. My kids have a photographic memory of each of those special pieces and which set they came from. They’ll remember them and search until they find that exact piece.
> Sets become collectible, perishable, trends can form, secondary markets exists, etc. It's simply about the baseline, not the principle. Sorry.
I don’t know what this is supposed to mean, but you can completely ignore secondary markets and collector sets if you want.
There are more sets and pieces than ever. You don’t have to collect anything.
Lego sets aimed at children are still good! They work as standalone toys, and can also be reassembled, modified and combined. Very few toys are like this.
Adults collect them, true, but there are whole lines dedicated to them.
It was kinda funny to see the Lego Movie, which puts a bunch of emphasis on breaking the rules and mixing and matching everything, and then seeing them release the sets for the movie. I mean, it makes perfect sense. But it was still kinda lowkey humorous. But imo they're still a great toy; very fun to go to conventions and the like, where people just have giant piles of loose pieces you can buy by weight.
Lego is still amazing and you don't have to buy expensive sets for your kids to enjoy them. My son loves Legos and if he gets a set for his birthday it doesn't last long before he takes it apart and starts building other stuff with it.
This is one of those instances where it feels like people are terminally online. Or like the meme of the guy standing in the corner while everyone else is having fun at the party. You can find Legos being given away in a local buy-nothing group. It's still just as magical for kids as it ever was. These complaints are only from an adult who doesn't play with Legos. Who cares if sets become collectibles? Get other sets and have fun with Legos. These are toys that are meant to be played with. Play with them.
They still sell the sets of generic bricks. At that point it is up to the individual customer to buy them if he prefers that. I could see your point if they stopped selling the more free form product, but they haven't.
There's nothing stopping you from buying the basic sets and only the basic sets. They didn't stop making basic sets, unless you're objecting to the new colors that go beyond blue red yellow and black?
You can also only get so creative with lego. At the end of the day roblox/minecraft and video games trains kids to build more "relevant" things. Apart from tactility, I don't see what technic/mindstorm offers over digital.
It's a little out of date, but the conclusions are still relevant.
Main things of note: Brickheads are pretty economical as a "parts pack." No significant correlation between per-piece pricing and IP licensing (except for Star Wars). Star Wars and City sets are overpriced.
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 disappearance of real metal Meccano is really crazy. I know metal is expensive, but also bulk processing of it has never been cheaper or faster.
It's also a shame because it's really good for mechanical rapid prototyping and you can bend and cut it in a pinch and it stays put. But buying vintage Meccano to abuse like that is expensive and feels like a war crime.
My son inherited (well, we're co-owning it I guess) my Lego, and that includes two sets of Technic aimed at educational use (1030 and 1032) which come with a stack of instructions for fairly simple mechanical models to build — each demonstrating basic mechanical principles like gear reduction and pulleys. Those sets used the 4.5V motors which have all broken down, but we also have the 1990 Technic Control Centre fully working and use those instead. That Control Centre is a simple controller used with 9V motors. It is brilliant for explaining the basic principles of computerised automation.
No app. No Bluetooth. Just wires and a simple controller built to be used and understood by children.
Historically Lego was a construction toy. This is what it was in my youth. These days Lego sell model construction kits - most are constructed once and then the owner plays with the model. This represents a radical and fundamental change. I’m not sure when it happened or how suddenly it happened as there is a large (decades) gap in time since I played with Lego as a kid and my current exposure to Lego via my own kids. Our home is full of Lego models but I don’t recall seeing my kid using his vast amount (compared to the shoe box I used to store my Lego as a kid) of Lego to actually construct something. The “studless” change - with its inside-out building technique makes it virtually impossible to alter a model once built - unlike the old bottom-up approach where it’s trivial to alter. It makes me sad because I remember with nostalgia the hours I spent building all sorts of fanciful constructions with my box of generic Lego pieces but I also acknowledge that model building — which I do with my kids - is also fun. But it’s just not the same play/toy as it was years ago.
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.
You can argue this for their sets targeting children and I don't think anyone minds stickers on those.
On display sets for multiple hundred Euros however it just looks cheap due to different surfaces and colors - especially as no one is ever going to disassemble these sets.
> 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.
I hate app obsolescence, and licenses that expire on your old hardware (Microsoft Word..) I exhibit 1980s video games. The hardware just continues to work. It's a disgrace what happens to mobile games, they just disappear. (Whattaya do, save all your old phones? I'm hating on you, Atari Classics app on iPad 2; revoked my paid license to use it.)
But to be fair, Lego has gone to great lengths to keep their companion software alive. Still, the nature of mobile: apps require constant updates to stay listed for new OS versions.
For one, Lego Commander existed uselessly on my phone long after it ceased to work... until one iOS it wouldn't install anymore.
Lego giving you a CD with software and instruction was a comfort (challenge: find a CD drive!) but only Mindstorms really.
For desktop apps in the 2010s, Lego relied on Silverlight to get Mac and PC compatibility. So what happens when you rely on a Microsoft framework... still as late as 2015 I was still able to download Mindstorms 2.0 (introduced 2002??) from Lego.
With instructions pdfs, Lego has been ok to let hobbyists reproduce the downloads (last I saw.)
Another thing Lego did was to provide SDKs for Mindstorms (a while after the community reverse-engineered a lot of it...). Opening it up that way was encouraging. (Lego even started distributing HiTechnic's 3rd party sensors, the folks that reverse-engineered the Mindstorms 1.0 RCX.)
I was part of the fan movement from 1998-2001 that hammered on the message for Lego to open things up. What happened is that they hired several of us :)
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.
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
I think this comes from higher tonnage (clamp force) molding machines. Injected plastic exerts force at the mold seam. Pressing the mold open by even a teeny tiny amount is unpalatable. Mold lines also can result where a mold has insertable parts, like sliding rods to form inner holes.
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.
Yes, it was a shame. After Lego lost in court (to Hilary Page's heirs I think by then) I believe they finally atoned for that.
Still, Lego didn't just sell the Kiddicraft brick unmodified. Lego patented the tubes inside, which gave it superior clutch power. (I have a lot of 2x4 bricks with "Pat Pend" molded on them!)
As I've heard it, Ole Kirk Christiansen had seen Hilary Page's brick as a sample from a molding machine vendor. Lego previously made wooden toys (until his son Godtfred allegedly set the factory on fire) and was casting about for what production to invest in for the future.
The Kiddicraft brick was a little rectangular box, no tubes inside. A lot of brick toys came out in the 60s that were little shells with varying clutch power.
I think it's more the consistency of product design than the manufacturing process. Everything around me, especially in the software world, seems to change for no good reason on a frequent basis. Companies change products all the time for reasons other than utility/functionality. A consistent specification over 50+ years is an outlier.
Did you even read the article? No, even just the Title? Nothing is ever impressive I guess. Certainly not a 60 years running manufacturing process where your childhood pieces can be passed down and combined seamlessly with a set you just bought for your kid. So trivial and easy to do guys.
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.
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.
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.
The two options would be that either the perception is unsubstantiated but persists, or there has been a continuous decline for the last 40 years. I'm strongly leaning towards the latter. I also having the same issues in the 00s looking at old sets from the 80s, and looking back now the 00s look much better than what we have today. Obviously not in every way, and not all recent sets were bad. But overall I have the feeling that there's been a steady trend that the bricks got better but the sets got worse
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.
When you build a knock off set, though, you can tell that the Lego versions have so much more thought put into the actual build process and the stability and functionality of the finished product.
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.
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.
Yes they are aggressively targeting "grown ups" with many sets, but they also have very playable sets. I don't see any problem with having different offerings.
There are enough sets for everyone to find something interesting if they are into Lego.
> 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.
That's probably the biggest change in the last few decades, they went from never doing anything out of the ordinary to SNOT (studs not on top) for "adult model" sets only (first in the trains I believe), to now where advanced techniques are used even it children's toys that aren't models.
If you're not interested in the new sets, the core product is readily available. Moreover, enjoy the fact that you can get that bucket of bricks for cheap partly because the expensive shiny high-margin SKUs provide a subsidy.
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.
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.
Classic Technic was brilliant, but when they switched to 'studless Technic' it became far more difficult to build creatively with it (even if it enabled far more intricate builds with complex mechanisms, like the gearboxes in the supercar sets) - there was no natural 'up' direction any more, and building anything became more of a 3D logic puzzle than just building with bricks.
Real shame that they discontinued Mindstorms, though.
Set prices are a lot more reasonable if you stay away from the branded options, Disney and Star Wars sets, especially have a intense premium associated with them.
At least LEGO is probably the toy that gets "passed down" the most, my own LEGO parts who I got from an older cousin, is now on its 4th generation (first my sisters children, then some family-friend to theirs), and I'm sure the pile(s) will get further passed down as time goes on.
True, but at least it's not single use. Is there a viable alternative? A non-petrochemical plastic that has the same qualities? It's not like they can whittle them out of wood or cast them with metal so it'll always be some form of polymer, and I'm sure they would jump at a more ecologically sound option.
> 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.
I was just about to reply about their financial woes over the years too [0][1][2]
Being a collector of stuff ever since I was a kid (toys, comics, cards, physical media, printed collateral, etc), and being in my 40's (target market / demographic for expensive nostalgia) living in 2026 (the world is a casino! everything's a collector's item!), it is a little annoying to see LEGO appear to turn into something that it wasn't .. but objectively that doesn't eradicate the fundamentals of LEGO, and I'd rather see them be a healthy company with longevity (via current product strategy) than wither and die on the vine out of stubbornness.
That said, aside from leaning on the AAA IP that drives prices through the roof in some lines, I do wish they'd stop with the tech gimmicks (Hidden Side, Smart Bricks), renew one of their focuses on real tech/engineering-adjacent platforms (Mindstorms / NXT / a modern version of these), and acknowledge that wealthy adults aren't the only customers. It really prices out young, fertile minds who a lot of their product and ethos should be directed towards.
Of course, that's a huge problem right now with anything that can command aftermarket prices as collectibles! [3]
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.
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.
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.
More than just bricks fitting into each other at a superficial level, it matters how firmly they fit together, and it's one of the areas where LEGO is generally superior to the similar types of bricks.
A detail I didn't realise until I was an adult was the difference between the black and grey technic connecting pins. They look interchangeable, and for a lot of things they are.
But there's a fraction of a mm raised lines on the black one, and it's enough to produce significantly more friction, and that difference is utilised in designs.
And apprently there's now a new version of the black one, and people notice these things, and measure them - this article gives an idea of just how these tiny changes, well below tolerances for some of the "knockoffs", can produce a different effect:
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
My memory of twenty years ago says the dark-grey pins were 1 stud wide on one side, and half-wide on the other, and low-friction like the light-grey ones.
> 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.
I got the Pantasy Neo Geo set a while ago, and was pretty blown away compared to the better known imitators that have been available at retail. The mechanics are not as robust as I’d expect from Lego, but it was about a quarter of the price and externally looks as good with some really fun and well thought out details.
Interesting - never come across Pantasy/GoBricks, or Lumibricks but then it's a few years since my son decided he was too old for LEGO, and I see Pantasy is just a few years old, and Funwhole/Lumibricks just a few more. Great if there are more options of similar quality.
But "should not be taken apart anymore" fits into an entirely different category for me. If you don't need to be able to take them apart any more, it fundamentally changes requirements.
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.
For me, the beauty of Lego was just a huge bin of interconnectable parts that I used to make whatever my imagination came up with. For my kids, Lego is pre-built model airplane set that they build one time and then display. I liked my Lego better :)
From experience there's a motivation, almost a compulsion, to follow the instructions to build the cool thing. Then... they sit there, those bricks never taken apart.
That compulsion doesn't seem present in freeform building, and there's been zero interest in it in our household. I know that's not true for all, but it seems like a lost art. Maybe it's because the IP sets show how but not the why it's constructed in a certain way, so given a bag of Lego most wouldn't know the process of creating something they can see in their minds eye within the constraints of the available bricks.
Not really. Even LEGO Classic has way too many different colors (and only a few bricks of each), and too many weird shapes. Even if you buy a lot of it, it's hard to make your own designs that actually look nice (as in, not having that one incorrectly-colored brick in that one place, and so on).
I for the love of God can't comprehend why LEGO Classic has 4 shades of blue. It makes everything worse.
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.
They still do that. I can go to the store right this very moment and get a bin of bricks. There's no problem here: people who want designed sets can get those, and people who want just bricks to use as building material can get those.
After working in automotive, this is less impressive than it appears.
Tons of dimensions on 100k/yr injection molded(and otherwise) parts have similar dimensions. (Although admittedly, after testing in pre-production, I don't know if they are tested again and have drift)
Lego has been making the same parts for decades and their parts are extremely simple. I imagine their 1-off parts for intellectual property based sets do not have this requirement.
I think Lego has a huge incentive to promote this idea that they are high quality to justify the enormous price of decades old technology.
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.
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).
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.
We use a Lego phantom[0] to control for geometric distortions in a few of our MRI studies. The tolerances are so tight that it works really well. Especially important in multi-site studies.
> A 2x4 LEGO brick manufactured in 1958 will snap perfectly onto a brick molded this morning in Denmark, China, Hungary, Mexico, or the Czech Republic.
In the late 90ies, I regularly played with my uncle's old LEGOs from the late 60ies and early 70ies. They were stored in an unheated attic for 25 years. I remember that some of the old bricks didn't "snap" at all anymore to my newer bricks. They were either extremely difficult to stack onto a new brick, or didn't have any friction left.
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).
Was this written using AI? It does contain some interesting information, but the same information is repeated (with small variations) over and over again in a mind-numbing way that made me stop reading after about half of the article...
"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.
Lego's original moat was their patent. This expired in the 80s, and so their new moat became their manufacturing tolerances. None of their competitors could match the quality of their product. This lasted until about the 2010s when clone brands in China finally caught up, and coincidentally, Lego's own quality started slipping. Thus, they needed a new moat, and the choice was obvious: licensing.
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.
I've ordered 2 sets off of AliExpress (the Stargate BC303 and BC304 MOCs) and was quite impressed. No box, digital instructions, and a few minor color swapped pieces; but complete and everything went together very well.
Readit News
On the other hand, a lot what the company does today just sucks. Set prices are outrageous. Printed bricks get replaced with stickers and many sets feel like display models than something you can play with. The Mindstorms/NXT line had huge potential but then just sort of fizzled out. And the push towards smartphone-dependent toys feels weird. Who actually wants their kids staring at a phone to play Lego?
It's so sad, because the core product is basically perfect.
My kids get some of the specialty sets, build them, then hours later they’re either taken apart or heavily modified.
The specialty sets can provide some interesting unique pieces too. My kids have a photographic memory of each of those special pieces and which set they came from. They’ll remember them and search until they find that exact piece.
> Sets become collectible, perishable, trends can form, secondary markets exists, etc. It's simply about the baseline, not the principle. Sorry.
I don’t know what this is supposed to mean, but you can completely ignore secondary markets and collector sets if you want.
There are more sets and pieces than ever. You don’t have to collect anything.
And for $100 you get a lot of bricks to play with and let your imagination go wild. Just don't buy sets aimed at adults and IP fansumers.
Adults collect them, true, but there are whole lines dedicated to them.
This is one of those instances where it feels like people are terminally online. Or like the meme of the guy standing in the corner while everyone else is having fun at the party. You can find Legos being given away in a local buy-nothing group. It's still just as magical for kids as it ever was. These complaints are only from an adult who doesn't play with Legos. Who cares if sets become collectibles? Get other sets and have fun with Legos. These are toys that are meant to be played with. Play with them.
- they have a finite production capacity
- they have a finite warehousing capacity
- there is a certain number of sets which will be bought
- crates of bricks without an established design have a limited appeal and while a consistent SKU, don't have the baked in demand a new set will have
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.
It's a little out of date, but the conclusions are still relevant.
Main things of note: Brickheads are pretty economical as a "parts pack." No significant correlation between per-piece pricing and IP licensing (except for Star Wars). Star Wars and City sets are overpriced.
Well, people did complain about the whole 'special pieces' trend that you praise.
They stopped doing the many unique parts because it was bankrupting them.
It's also a shame because it's really good for mechanical rapid prototyping and you can bend and cut it in a pinch and it stays put. But buying vintage Meccano to abuse like that is expensive and feels like a war crime.
No app. No Bluetooth. Just wires and a simple controller built to be used and understood by children.
https://rebrickable.com/sets/8094-1/technic-control-centre
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.
On display sets for multiple hundred Euros however it just looks cheap due to different surfaces and colors - especially as no one is ever going to disassemble these sets.
I coached FLL 9+ and Junior FLL 6-8. FLL moved on to Boost and Java programming. These days I only do high-school FIRST.
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.
The ones I know of are the Mario ones, but they apparently need a phone anyway to setup the little characters.
I hate app obsolescence, and licenses that expire on your old hardware (Microsoft Word..) I exhibit 1980s video games. The hardware just continues to work. It's a disgrace what happens to mobile games, they just disappear. (Whattaya do, save all your old phones? I'm hating on you, Atari Classics app on iPad 2; revoked my paid license to use it.)
But to be fair, Lego has gone to great lengths to keep their companion software alive. Still, the nature of mobile: apps require constant updates to stay listed for new OS versions.
For one, Lego Commander existed uselessly on my phone long after it ceased to work... until one iOS it wouldn't install anymore.
Lego giving you a CD with software and instruction was a comfort (challenge: find a CD drive!) but only Mindstorms really.
For desktop apps in the 2010s, Lego relied on Silverlight to get Mac and PC compatibility. So what happens when you rely on a Microsoft framework... still as late as 2015 I was still able to download Mindstorms 2.0 (introduced 2002??) from Lego.
With instructions pdfs, Lego has been ok to let hobbyists reproduce the downloads (last I saw.)
Another thing Lego did was to provide SDKs for Mindstorms (a while after the community reverse-engineered a lot of it...). Opening it up that way was encouraging. (Lego even started distributing HiTechnic's 3rd party sensors, the folks that reverse-engineered the Mindstorms 1.0 RCX.)
I was part of the fan movement from 1998-2001 that hammered on the message for Lego to open things up. What happened is that they hired several of us :)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/LEGO-kom...
>minimal mold lines
I think this comes from higher tonnage (clamp force) molding machines. Injected plastic exerts force at the mold seam. Pressing the mold open by even a teeny tiny amount is unpalatable. Mold lines also can result where a mold has insertable parts, like sliding rods to form inner holes.
But those models do look rad!
And then they sued the pants of everybody that tried to do the same thing to them.
Yes, it was a shame. After Lego lost in court (to Hilary Page's heirs I think by then) I believe they finally atoned for that.
Still, Lego didn't just sell the Kiddicraft brick unmodified. Lego patented the tubes inside, which gave it superior clutch power. (I have a lot of 2x4 bricks with "Pat Pend" molded on them!)
As I've heard it, Ole Kirk Christiansen had seen Hilary Page's brick as a sample from a molding machine vendor. Lego previously made wooden toys (until his son Godtfred allegedly set the factory on fire) and was casting about for what production to invest in for the future.
The Kiddicraft brick was a little rectangular box, no tubes inside. A lot of brick toys came out in the 60s that were little shells with varying clutch power.
For a museum of the many brick toys, go to https://www.architoys.net
In particular, Betta Bilda, Block City, American Bricks.
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.
It’s extremely hard to build consistent products to the spec.
There are a lot of knock-off LEGO on the market now. We get them as gifts. Some of them stack okay, some are too tight, some are too loose.
It’s hard to manufacture at scale at these tolerances and keep it that way for decades.
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.
Given the crazy assembly that is happening in the adjacent room, my kid would vehemently disagree.
Perhaps sets of a given physical size have more pieces now compared to before? Not sure.
Lego’s net profit margin is only about 19%.
They couldn’t lower prices much even if they wanted to.
The two options would be that either the perception is unsubstantiated but persists, or there has been a continuous decline for the last 40 years. I'm strongly leaning towards the latter. I also having the same issues in the 00s looking at old sets from the 80s, and looking back now the 00s look much better than what we have today. Obviously not in every way, and not all recent sets were bad. But overall I have the feeling that there's been a steady trend that the bricks got better but the sets got worse
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.
This year's isn't huge: https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/fire-station-with-fire-tr...
But the police station is pretty big: https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/police-station-60316
(To me this looks more fun, but I'm a pirate guy: https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/police-prison-island-6041... )
> 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.
Yes they are aggressively targeting "grown ups" with many sets, but they also have very playable sets. I don't see any problem with having different offerings.
There are enough sets for everyone to find something interesting if they are into Lego.
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.
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I've bought a decent amount of Duplo and Lego kits for my son (currently 3 years old) and it's great value.
It has momentum because they haven’t let quality and innovation slide. They know customers will be out with pitchforks if quality drops.
Real shame that they discontinued Mindstorms, though.
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.
Being a collector of stuff ever since I was a kid (toys, comics, cards, physical media, printed collateral, etc), and being in my 40's (target market / demographic for expensive nostalgia) living in 2026 (the world is a casino! everything's a collector's item!), it is a little annoying to see LEGO appear to turn into something that it wasn't .. but objectively that doesn't eradicate the fundamentals of LEGO, and I'd rather see them be a healthy company with longevity (via current product strategy) than wither and die on the vine out of stubbornness.
That said, aside from leaning on the AAA IP that drives prices through the roof in some lines, I do wish they'd stop with the tech gimmicks (Hidden Side, Smart Bricks), renew one of their focuses on real tech/engineering-adjacent platforms (Mindstorms / NXT / a modern version of these), and acknowledge that wealthy adults aren't the only customers. It really prices out young, fertile minds who a lot of their product and ethos should be directed towards.
Of course, that's a huge problem right now with anything that can command aftermarket prices as collectibles! [3]
[0] - https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/innovation-almos...
[1] - https://blog.firestartoys.com/how-the-lego-company-almost-we...
[2] - https://www.toypro.com/us/news/710/learn-the-story-behind-le...
[3] - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7FZWovUTmL0
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.
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.
Why get up at all, when gravity always just pulls me back down?
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A detail I didn't realise until I was an adult was the difference between the black and grey technic connecting pins. They look interchangeable, and for a lot of things they are.
But there's a fraction of a mm raised lines on the black one, and it's enough to produce significantly more friction, and that difference is utilised in designs.
And apprently there's now a new version of the black one, and people notice these things, and measure them - this article gives an idea of just how these tiny changes, well below tolerances for some of the "knockoffs", can produce a different effect:
https://ramblingbrick.com/2021/01/27/what-if-they-introduced...
EDIT: I think I also had some dark grey pins, but I don't remember if they were high or low friction
I think the black ones were a later addition, likely late nineties.
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.
But "should not be taken apart anymore" fits into an entirely different category for me. If you don't need to be able to take them apart any more, it fundamentally changes requirements.
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.
That compulsion doesn't seem present in freeform building, and there's been zero interest in it in our household. I know that's not true for all, but it seems like a lost art. Maybe it's because the IP sets show how but not the why it's constructed in a certain way, so given a bag of Lego most wouldn't know the process of creating something they can see in their minds eye within the constraints of the available bricks.
I for the love of God can't comprehend why LEGO Classic has 4 shades of blue. It makes everything worse.
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Tons of dimensions on 100k/yr injection molded(and otherwise) parts have similar dimensions. (Although admittedly, after testing in pre-production, I don't know if they are tested again and have drift)
Lego has been making the same parts for decades and their parts are extremely simple. I imagine their 1-off parts for intellectual property based sets do not have this requirement.
I think Lego has a huge incentive to promote this idea that they are high quality to justify the enormous price of decades old technology.
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
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaging_phantom
In the late 90ies, I regularly played with my uncle's old LEGOs from the late 60ies and early 70ies. They were stored in an unheated attic for 25 years. I remember that some of the old bricks didn't "snap" at all anymore to my newer bricks. They were either extremely difficult to stack onto a new brick, or didn't have any friction left.
"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.
This was the tell for me.