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Lego to Stop Producing Mindstorms
nick58b writes "Lego, in response to the worst financial loss in its history, has announced they will stop making the electronics and movie tie-in products. This would include Mindstorms, one of the greatest educational toys ever produced." It saddens me greatly to see the toy that was such a mainstay of my childhood to be in such dire financial straits. If I were a more qualified sociologist, I'd think it may have inspired by the way that our children play today versus how they played twenty years ago.
The Mindstorm line of stuff was really awesome.. what happened? Poor sales?
Okay, I could not care one tad bit less if I never see another lego Harry Potter set. But the loss of Mindstorm is nearly unbearable! The things people have done with this simple but effective robotics set eclips even more ambitious sets like the ER1. This is a sad day.
SCO must be behind this somehow!
David Whatley
the movie tie ins were horrible...but it saddens me to see mindstorms go....
I've been a Lego fan most of my life too, but I have to say that I'm not surprised or terribly upset about the way this has turned out. Lego sets have become so ungodly expensive over the years (many $100+ sets having nothing to offer for their high price points other than "collector's series" or some other buzzword), it's no wonder more people aren't buying them.
Glog!
Though I've never played with them because I'm a grown up now, I've never hesitated in recommending them as fun and educational toys for friends' kids.
What really impresses me more than just the base set is the amount of hacking towards making the programming of these little toys simpler with stuff like Mindstorms VB and Python.
It's sad to see this stuff just pass away. How cool would it be to have a way to pitch in and get Lego to keep the Mindstorm factories open.
I have been pwned because my
Plus Lego is Danish for "play well"
Just a few Lego facts.
I would say that it might send a message if you buy as direct as possible from them.. but I would make sure that they are all bought up by the end of the month. Even if Lego cant keep the product.. it might inspire some other company to do so.
-- SJS smooge at smoogespace dot com
If I were a more qualified sociologist, I'd think it may have inspired by the way that our children play today versus how they played twenty years ago.
It's a cool toy and all, but I think you're giving it waaaaay too much credit here. How many kids actually have Lego Mindstorms? Maybe the few kids who's wealthy parents can afford it.
Somehow, I can understand why they are stopping the production of MindStorms. Let's face it, the basic "Robotics Invention System 2.0" set cost $200 and probably contained $250 worth of parts. I mean, a microcontroller with three inputs and outputs, 32 kB RAM, and some ROM (512 kiB IIRC) has to cost at least $100. Add that to the cost of making the plastic blocks themselves... I can understand why they are stopping. P.S. I'm gonna miss them.
"one of the greatest educational toys ever produced." That happens to be your opinion. I would argue that erector sets rule!!
they charge twice as much for the same stuff you can get from other brands. Of course, the high value of the Euro isn't helping. Those are the reasons why the company is having financial problems.
Too many of the new lego products have so few generic bricks and too many specialist bricks that can't easily be used for other things, eg, you can build a lego buggy into, um, a slightly different buggy, but not a lot else.
Get back to providing big bags of ordinary bricks, and encourage creativity!
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
Easy solution: Lower the freaking prices. I love Legos, but I could never justify $100+ on a box of plastic.
I'm not sure the price of these toys is the problem. Toys in general aren't exactly cheap these days. Neither are video games, and video games seem to be what is the most appealing to children these days. So what we might need to look into is why expensive video games are more interesting than expensive toys where children have to actually think to use them. Or did I just answer my own question?
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
If I were a more qualified sociologist, I'd think it may have inspired by the way that our children play today versus how they played twenty years ago.
You mean kids play nowadays? With kids as young as six owning cellphones and gossiping to friends about the most inane shit, and text messaging each other with crap like "I lv u r 1drfl ltz mt 4 lnch" it's not like they have time to PLAY any more.
I drove past a school bus stop not long ago. Every single kid there was using their cells. mindless.
It may be a change in how children play from then until now. From what I see, a lot of parents just stick their children in front of TVs now to get them to be content. I think many people need to take a good look at the benefits that these kinds of creative toys have to offer for young learners.
At the very least, they could outsource the playing with Legos to India!
The mindstorms were cool toys, for a little while. But Lego never upgraded them- realistically, they had not released a significant upgrade of any type in the now 6 years since they released the product. They could have made them either more powerful (and hence more appealing to the adults who bought tons of them early on, but got frustrated by HW limitations quickly) or they could have made them simpler (and hence more appealing to the kids who they normally try to target.) They did neither, and let the product stagnate. And that's why they have to kill it now. Shame, really- they could have been really, really great. [I used to maintain legOS, so I fall into the category of 'adults frustrated by the limitations.]
IAAL,BIANLY
They have not announced any stoppage of production on Mindstorms. You are reading a little too much into the story.
The Mindstorms stuff is great, and it's a shame to see it killed. Can't help but think it was too expensive though, several times I've looked at buying a set and reluctantly decided it's too expensive. Lego's always been expensive though, so maybe they know their market.
I'm actually quite happy they're killing the movie tie-in stuff, because the sets seem to be mostly specialist blocks that are fairly useless outside the movie setting. More of a "play set" than a construction set.
Hopefully they will focus on the stuff that makes them different from the usual single-purpose fad toys.
I've kept my eye on Lego, even though I haven't purchased much for years. My greatest disappointment is the "special" pieces that are now so common. All the special pieces detract from your ability to make new and interesting things with multiple sets.
It's time to go back to castles and space ships and cities.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Is to continue making Mindstorms. And also the Legos they used to make. Not the 3-piece Bionic-shits they have nowadays, but the good old fashioned multiblock things which allowed for imagination and weren't pre-chewn.
Just look at those "Bionic" Legos or whatever they are. I'm not surprised they make a loss by selling those. They're ugly, they're no fun, they're not Lego. They're just crap.
Bring back the old Lego! Duplo, the Lego, Technic Legos and Mindstorms! That's all what you need.
The damn things cost too much and you can't make much with the sets anymore. All those one use, custom shapped pieces suck.
72 Years Lego has been around..
How long does copyright last?
I'd say lego has lost its copyright on its blocks, so people are making it cheaper.
The problem with Lego sets in recent years has been the fact that they are very specialized. You used to be able to buy sets that allowed for lots of imagination, such as "pirate", "city", and "space" legos. Now, all I see is "Star Wars: Episode I" or other such sets that don't inspire the imagination in the slightest.
Perfect time for another company to step in and make the electronic part of the Mindstorm system. Then all you'd need is the Lego blocks themselves.
I'd buy that.
This post is NOT insightful.
First of all, it contains no insight but just a question.
Second, that question is already answered above, where it says: Lego, in response to the worst financial loss in its history, has announced...
Crap! When we found out we were having a boy, we went to Toy's 'R Us so I could see all the cool toys I would get to play with again (in a few years...) The highlight were the Lego Mindstorm robots and the stop-action movie studios. I guess I had better buy some now, eh?
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
First Lego League is a relatively successful robotics competition program for kids running around the world...
Would be a shame to see it impacted by this cancellation. Seems inevitable that it will be, however.
When I was a kid, Lego was about the blocks. That's what they do well. Theme parks, CD Roms, and expensive movie character licensing are not blocks. You're in the block business. Time to get back to the block business.
Also, at least at first, the main production work was done in Switzerland- not exactly the cheapest place on earth to produce microelectronics.
IAAL,BIANLY
I for one am happy to see that Lego is making some serious changes. I disagree that it is the youth that is to blame. I have several young cousins that love to play with Lego but I see them less and less impressed with the "put these 4 custom pieces together and you have a Star-Jedi-Saurus-O-Tron-Laser-Car-Thingy". In my opinion Lego took to much to the 'build it once' toys and todays youth, just like in the good old days gets its real pleasure from the huge collection of small blocks with which you can build a House, a Plane, a Car or even a Spaceship.
Just before christmass I walked into a newly found Lego store at Valley Fair Mall (popular luxury mall in San Jose) and was discusted by the choices offered. Crappy replica's of crappy movies and stories that would not add anything of value to a kid's Lego collection other then a bunch of unusable custom pieces. Let alone the rediculous prices.
Rethink your strategy Lego. What worked in the past will really work in the future, there is still time since there is still no competition!
If I were a more qualified sociologist, I'd think it may have inspired by the way that our children play today versus how they played twenty years ago.
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one that wonders why we get such innane commentary along with our story intros, but did CowboyNeal ever stop to think that maybe 20 years ago -- or even *30* years ago -- children played with Legos! One Christmas I got one of those plastic portable "parts bins" and proceeded to ensure all my Legos (from a half-dozen different sets) were all organized and sorted by size and color.
We didn't have mindstorms in the 70s (in fact I don't think even the Tech set that let you build the car with the moving cylinders was around), but we had huge lego sets and a MOTOR set that came with a chunky power chasis and various snap-in wheels and tank tracks. With some creativity you could build powered machines with it, although I found that some of my "old" legos had lost their gripping power and under torque from the motor would sometimes break my contraptions, but hey, ya gotta learn about engineering limitations some day.
Anyway, pull your head out and open your eyes. Its not like you were the first generation to play with mechanical toys, and I can remember seeing family photos from much older kids who had built even cooler stuff with Erector sets and other pre-lego toys.
URL included this time:
First Lego League
have you seen their product line lately? Congratualtions to the board on finally figuring out they have lousy execs who were driving the line away from what people wanted. You can hardly buy a decent set (lego builder sets are the exclusion) that doesn't have half of its pieces as special components, non-lego coloring or exclusive stickering. The result is a bunch of pieces you can only use if you are building a particular set - counter intuitive to the whole lego concept. The whole Jack Stone thing - the guys are twice the size of the old 'mini-fig' guys. What, is Jack Stone a giant? Are the old mini-figs halflings? Are old my old mini-figs obsolete now? How is jack stone suppoed to drive the car with the tiny steering wheel - from the old set. Its most irritating because, if you are like me you already have a good sized pile of these and its like Lego moved the ball on you. It will be sad if they quit mindstorms - hopefully it will be picked up by an educational company on licence. What I really miss is the set that had all the gears and socketed I-beams. That was a great mechanical engineering kit. This will not destroy Lego - they will endure. As any 5 year old (mine included) what his favorite thing to do at school.
A good friend of mine, Russ, has a great and interesting and THOROUGH page detailing everything you could ever want to know about Mindstorms.
;-)
His page, at http://www.crynwr.com/lego-robotics/, discusses the internals in great detail. You really won't believe how ADVANCED his knowledge is, so you've gotta check it out for yourself.
The page contains EVERYTHING about these amazing toys. I can't believe they're being discontinued. It's probably due to kids having too many activities (to beef-up their resumes) and videogames/television/radio taking up their time. No one sits down anymore to spend quality time with their family and build toys like these Mindstorms. We all have our own schedules and stuff, and it's probably NOT good for America in the long term.
Anyway, sorry to jade off a bit there, but here are some other links from my friend's page:
1) Create a Spider Robot
2) LEGO MINDSTORMS Group official SDK
Enjoy these links and much more on Russ's page! I helped him with the HTML code
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
I've looked at a 100 box: 1 cheap electric motor and a couple of "sensors" (switches) packaged with a couple dozens plastic bits.
Do you know the spider guy personally?
I'd like to speak with him in person about the cost/plans/etc. of that project and possibly work on some custom Star Wars Mindstorms with his help.
Thanks for the great links, Amsterdam.
"It saddens me greatly to see the toy that was such a mainstay of my childhood"
Man, do I ever feel old.
Amen to that. I was a kid in the sixties, and we had lego. Although for technical/mecanical stuff, in this time Meccano, and a little bit later Fischer Technik was more useful.
Sorry, but for 100$ you get a a64 3000+. You know, 1024KiB high speed cache, 6.4GB/s HT io, ect.
Those little microcontrollers cost you 5$ at most if you buy a few 1000.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
It's no wonder that lego is losing money. They seem to be putting a heck of a lot of their resources into stuff like Bionicle. Have you seen those things? There are like 10 pieces, they are not standard brick, and you can only make one thing out of them.
Bring back castle lego at a reasonable price and we'll talk. I would love to get my hands on that original black knight's castle. The big black square one. Now all they make is bionicle, harry potter, and some star wars. It's not the same as it was.
It used to be a toy of building. Now it's just a toy you build.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
When I was a kid, there were very few specialized blocks. Even the railroad kit didn't have any except for the lego motor modules (I have always had a soft heart for the 70's-era motor modules) and the railroad tracks. Even the railroad track ties were standard 8x2 thin blocks.
In those days the vast majority of legos were sold in generic kits. You could even get small boxes of 50 or 100 generic blocks, up through the large 400 and 600 and 1000 block kits. All generic. They'd come with a little booklet of suggestions but the possibilities were endless.
The 70's-era house kits had doors, windows, and roof blocks all of which tied in with standard blocks. You could build a wall of doors or use an architectural door in your Moon Rover. You could use your roof blocks to make an Aztec pyramid.
Now you buy a little kit for, say, a TIE fighter and it costs $20 and there's not much you can build with it except things that look a hell of a lot like TIE fighters. The big generic kits aren't even sold any more; if they were they'd probably cost $1,000 and nobody would buy them.
Lego should go back to making the generic kits, price them reasonably, and let the kids think of stuff to build themselves again.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
I wanted to just say thank you for those really cool links. My son and I will probably spend all of tomorrow (after church) working with his Mindstorms to try one of those projects. Of course, we'll have to blow the dust off them first because they've been in the basement for so long.
Thanks again dude.
I think that it was time to retire the current incarnation of Mindstorms anyway. It would be nice if the next gen. robot toy featured:
wireless (802.11x or cell)
a linux based os (of course)
more sophisticated moving parts
cooler ai modules...
I definitely think that there is a market out there for such a product.
That's some really nifty tech there.
The real problem Lego is facing right now (let's hope they realize it) is they produce too much custom pieces. Every set has at least 5 - 10 custom bricks and therefore:
1) costs much to produce
2) contains less ordinary pieces to reduce the costs
3) Since it contains less pieces and the ones it contains are custom, there's very little play value to justify the cost.
I would suggest Lego to:
1)reduce custom pieces. Kids are suppose to have fantasy you know... I remember I put two triangles together and pretend it was a star destroyer...
2)kill most of the cinema stuff. Starwars stuff is ok (meaning it's well done and designed). reduce cutom pieces and completely kill the other series ( If they can't make other movies with the same quality, then it's a no go.)
3)Kill bionicles!!!! (what in the world are those things? are they LEGO at all? and they DO contain very few pieces and they're mostly custom!!!! They're model kits, not LEGO!)
4) where are the old series? trains castles cities... there was really tons and tons of stuff!!! (and some amazing works to say the truth) where's all that stuff gone?
Anyway, probably Lego is facing the usual toy VS digital dilemma where most of the kids don't want dull toys and prefer videgames... anyway, I really believe the company isn't facing the crisis for the good... A few steps in the same direction and Lego is gone.
I don't know about 20 years ago, but 35 years ago I used to play with plain rectangular Lego blocks and generic wheels. I had to use my own mind and imagination to assemble these general-purpose blocks into the wide variety of things I wanted to build.
From the look of today's Lego sets, children play today by using the custom single-purpose pieces to assemble a verbatim copy of the picture on the box.
As the father of 7 and 8 year old boys, the elder of which has quite a collection of Bionicles, I've observed one little tidbit about Lego: if you lose or break a piece, it's gonna cost you an arm and a leg to replace it (No Bionicle Pun Intended ;).
What does this have to do with their financial success? A lot, IMHO. It certainly has affected our brand loyalty. As Kewl as Bionicles are, we have tried to steer our boyz towards products made by more consumer friendly companies, such as K'nex.
I know there's more to running a company, but this to me says they still Just Don't Get It.
Mark
I'm sure Mindstorm Lego people must have some similar tails to tell, and await a few replies.
Letter To Iran
I mean, you posted the page on slashdot.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Am I the only one who has noticed that Lego barely sells a kit (in stores) that require any effort or concentration to complete?
When I was younger (here we go....), toy stores always had a great selection of the classic Technics kits. The large, complicated kits seemed to be the hottest items, because they were *challenging* and *interesting*.
Today, most of the sets I see are low-piece count, over-simplifed, plug-the-head-into-the-pelvic-chassis Bionicle garbage, which seems only to make the statement that kids today aren't interested in anything unless it's presented as a completely non-cerebral AARRRGGGHHH-type of monster package.
This really is a shame. I'll never stop appreciating the endless hours I spent creating machines of every type imaginable, and can't help but to think that my exposure to Lego helped to form a little bit of who I am today.
I don't know what a childhood of building Bionicles might do to kid, expect possibly make them wish their parents were cool enough to buy them a toy that doesn't require assembly, like the kid next door.
And that's a sad thing
It costs $10 USD to buy a small toy consisting of no more than 20 or 30 pieces. In my day, you could buy a thousand piece bucket of blocks for $40 (adjusted for inflation). Now they can't even sell 1000 piece buckets, and a 150 piece model is damn near $35. Meanwhile, there are lego compatible blocks which are just as good, but way cheaper.
Lego needs to stop overcharging for their product if they expect to prosper. If they do, I'll buy 'em.
Could the less use of legos be due to video games???? I think so. Why use your imaginagtion when someone else can do it for you.
Evolution or ID?
They have come out recently with some "just blocks" sets with ideas for stuff you can build. I agree about the over specialization. (bionicle anyone??)
Didn't they make a bundle off Bionicles?
How the hell do you lose so much money selligng somthing that has a 10,000% markup?
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
"Legos" is in wide-spread use in America. Sorry if that's not how "Lego" is used by the Danish, but real-world usage drives grammar rules, always has.
Excuse me while I go play with my Legos.
> If I were a more qualified sociologist, I'd think it may have inspired by
> the way that our children play today versus how they played twenty years ago.
If you were a more qualified historian, you might remember that kids twenty
years ago played with the regular, non-Mindstorms type of legos, the ones that
are _not_ being discontinued (presumably, because they're cheaper to make and
so the markup is better).
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
While the MindStorms series was cool and all, Lego did themselves in by marrying themselves to the idiotic first trilogy of Star Wars. I haven't met an eight year old yet who thinks Episodes I and II are anything but crap. So now we're supposed to go and plunk down $20 for a Lego kit that can build... this stupid, doberman-headed droid thing that fought the frog people in Episode I... and nothing else. Great. And that's ALL they make now - MindStorms and THIS. If you scour the aisles at a Toys R Us, you might be lucky to find an old school castle kit or something, but for the most part, you're getting Star Wars, dammit. We paid millions for this license, and damned if we aren't ramming it up your butt until we make it back.
Pass.
"Oh, well I'm sorry if you don't appreciate my random murders!" - Crow T. Robot,
we used it at work for a remote controlled mars rover demo a few years ago. The Junior first robotics competition Http://www.usfirst.org/jrobtcs/flego.htm uses mindstorms. I don't know what they'll do now.
I took a course in realtime systems were we used Lego mindstorm together with Legos in one of the projects. A great way to learn about realtime systems. If I weren't just a poor student I would go out and by myself a mindstorm kit right now. http://www.noga.de/legOS/
Give me a break... or at least some evidence of that claim. The existing evidence seems to point to the exact opposite conclusion.
WTF is this? :
If I were a more qualified sociologist, I'd think it may have inspired by the way that our children play today versus how they played twenty years ago.
Anyway, when I was a kid, we had Lego blocks. Maybe 4 major sizes, and a few gimick pieces thrown in. It required imagination. We had to improvise to build guns on our improvised spaceships. A favorite thing to do was to build space ships with a little chamber in the middle, closed off with one of those wheel socket blocks (these had a round hole bored all the way through, in which you would stick the 'wheels'). In this chamber would be a firecracker, with the wick sticking out of the wheel socket block. The challenge was to see if we could build a ship that could survive the internal explosion. Of course, they never would; they would blow all to hell, pieces flying 10 feet or more. Ahh, memories.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
From what I hear, Lego made money, but it just had to pay so much to Lucas, Disney, and whoever makes Harry Potter, that it had the loss.
Corps overvalue their own IP, while everyone else's IP is theirs to exploit.
God spoke to me
If I were a more qualified sociologist, I'd think it may have inspired by the way that our children play today versus how they played twenty years ago.
I wish you were a more qualified writer so readers wouldn't have to choke down sentences like that one.
The intended plural may have been Lego many moons ago, but intention does not define language and neither do dictionary makers or corporations. Usage does.
Has anyone else noticed the increasing trend toward specialized parts and non-lego lego products? I've begun to lose faith in lego as they continue to market Bionicle or lego computer games or lego or the lego products with the creative elements removed. I miss the lego where you could be creative -- where you could actually build! Mindstorms is one of the all time great lego products and to see it replaced by bionicle and such saddens me.
You used to be able to buy sets that allowed for lots of imagination, such as "pirate", "city", and "space" legos.
When I was a kid, I bought Lego sets that just came with x number of assorted blocks with no theme whatsoever. That took REAL creativity. I don't even know if you can buy just plain ol' regular blocks anymore.
They did a movie, and as far as I can tell it and the accompanying toy line probably didn't do that well. (I can't find actual figures for box office, though.)
That's probably what's responsible for the losses. I know I kept looking at the Bionicle displays in stores and thinking "this looks bad, please don't go out of business!"
There were "electronic toys" involved in Bionicle too, in the form of Lego computer games and video games. Maybe they're laying off their software division? That would seem to make more sense.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
...we could build wonders from simple blocks and sentences from simple words. Sadly, it seems both pursuits are becoming a lost art.
Quite frankly, is the markup. I've wanted a Mindstorms set since day 1.. However, like most geeks, I wait for something to come out, wait for the people that just *HAVE* to have the new thing and are willing to pay top dollar for it, get it, then wait for the price to come down. Guess how much the price has come down on the Mindstorms set? *NONE* *NADA* *ZILCH* If Lego had dropped the price of the Mindstorms to $150, I'd have picked one up in a heartbeat. However, for the same price as a Mindstorms, I can get an XBox or a PS2! (And, quite frankly, there is *NO* way in hell that you can convince me that the markup on Mindstorms crap is such that they couldn't afford to lower the price...)
Lego dug their own grave.. They got what they deserved...
I grew out of legos some 8 or 9 years ago, but LOVED them as a kid. I had everything from Ice Planet to Space Police to the robots (can't remember the name of the series). I have at least 2 or 3 big boxes full of these complete with instruction manuals. I probably recieved/spent $2000 on that stuff and its just sitting in my attic. It will be interesting to see if they skyrocket in value in the near future.
Unbelievable - another swim to a sinking ship!
Town, Space, Castle.
I had more fun with the basic themed sets (although I never had any castle sets, just town and space) because there were enough generic pieces that you could be really creative.
The merchandise tie-ins and specialty sets really tarnished the company's sterling reputation for making simple toys that really inspired kids to create.
The sad commentary on our time is that given a choice, kids today would rather have a video game than a Lego set.
Lego should go back to basics...perhaps reissue old but favorite sets for those who wish to recapture the past.
I still remember the little spaceship my parents bought me when we visited Legoland in Denmark. As I recall it was set number 918: Space Transport. I still have the 4x1 bricks that have "LL 918" printed on the side.
-Crolis
Alas, I also got frustrated with the hardware limitations. There's only so much one can do with three sensor/actuator channels, and I was never able to come up with a decent method of I/O expansion. An I/O expansion unit or expansion connector would have made more I/O's possible, vastly expanding the RCX's capabilities and potential market (the geeks with $ and their kids). Processor power was certainly not the limiting factor on the RCX.
That said, NQC and LegOS really rock. Many thanks to you who developed and maintained them!
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
The problem as I see it is that Lego is not very different from most other toys on the market since they've gradually turned from selling bricks for building stuff, and instead sell finished buildings, vehicles and other stuff from solid plastic. The creativity Lego always invited in the past is mostly gone, and so is the very thing that made them great to begin with :|
sig sig sputnik
There is nothing wrong with a high price for good toys, but the following is completely ridiculous (the imperial star destroyer):
1 4& c=70632933%2DFEF6%2D4B18%2D9D06%2D6124A1D78027
http://shop.lego.com/product.asp?p=10030&t=5&d=
Yes, it has a lot of pieces, but the same amount of pieces in buckets would only cost about 120 euro.
Drop the price a bit, and dump all the special elements. If I'm too lazy too build, I'll buy playmobil or other IMHO uninteresting stuff.
I've been looking for something to put my retirement saings in. The Mindstorm kits are showing their age, but I still love them & I think they'll be around for some time to come.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
If they are losing money at the prices they're charging, they must have some major structural problems.
Clear, Dark Skies
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Find funky gifts
And pirate ships too!
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
The submitter's CHILDHOOD? But these things just came out, like a few years ago. God I feel old.
Sheeat. I was hoping on buying myself some Mindstorms a little later on when I'll be self sustained, because the darn things cost way too much (students have a very limited budget)... But by then they'll be gone. They were really one of a kind, and it saddens me no end to see Lego botched this try... (where are the upgrades? A PIC or any microcontroller costs zilch!) They messed up their market aim.
Movie tie-ins? eech, all those special pieces were worthless!
But I pray they'll still be around when I'll be looking for stuff for my kids.
In the meantime, I'll cry a tear of nostalgia with the Legomania Demo (for those of you who still have a windows lying around, a majority, don't lie to yourselves).
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
Wizards of the Coast has attracted a ton of third party roleplaying game content to its d20 system because, according to the license, anyone can make supplements or even whole games based on the d20 game mechanics and other 'Open Gaming Content'. (See here for some plain English info.)
Maybe somebody should try making Lego-like toys with a similar license -- it would be very cool if manufacturers converged on interchangable components, from the complex (Mindstorms-like stuff, and 'Expert Set' gearing componentry) to the low (simple old-style bricks). And if some company wanted to make the idiotic prefab pieces that predominate today, they could do that too.
I just spoke with someone at MrRobot.com and they say this:
1. Lego has discontinued everything Mindstorms EXCEPT the actual RIS 2.0 (#3804).
2. The RIS 2.0 is still listed in the 2004 LEGO dealer catalog (it is the only one in the mindstorms line).
3. When asked why they are having a "clearance sale" on the RIS 2.0 ($160), they said they just had tons of product that got delivered after Christmas and that they will still carry Mindstorms in 2004.
Hope that helps,
Lewis.
Their new products, including those horrible 'glorm' whatevers, have zero play utility. Its funny how the current Lego management seems to have forgotten why Lego is fun for kids to play with. Its because they are GENERIC INTERCHANGABLE PARTS THAT CAN BE USED CREATIVELY. I used to make it an annual tradition to purchase legos for ALL of my newphews and neices, but have stopped in the last few years because I couldn't find ANY sets worth purchasing due to the overly specialized parts they where made from.
CLUE TO LEGO: classic castle: good, harry potty: stupid
LEGO my Mindstorms! Adults like to play too.
1. Price - wow. Am I stunned when I see legos in the store now. Multiple hundreds of dollars. The most expensive kit I owned as a kid was 60 bucks for the lastest and bestest. Which leads me to...
2. The kits themselves. I got Technics as a kid and made *everything* with them. The manuals were thick, had many different things you could make with them. Now - the kits are one project. There's no imagination to them. My 60 dollar kit was a red dump truck. It had the frame of a windshield - imagination filled in the rest. Now the windshield comes with the set. Who needs to stretch their thinking? I liked it when *I* made the choice of what the pieces were for.
3. Bionicles. Ironically, that brought legos to my attention (free toy at Burger World), but when I investigated, it was lousy. Hey look, I put this part here and *nowhere* else. Isn't the reason behind legos being able to place a piece wherever you want it? Gahh.
Put all these together, and what do you have? Someone who would like to buy legos, but the kits I want aren't around. I'd love to use legos in a more industrial manner (say building a case for something) but the basic sets are few and far between.
Three things that keep me from busting out my legos:
1. Cats.
2. Cat hair. (I can just imagine it sticking out of the seams and it makes me freak :)
3. Not enough room/time to mess with them. House is too small after the holidays and time is always short. Not like the halcyon days of my youth.
LEGO! Go back to the basics! Give us the old Technic sets, the massive 'generic' kits. Fire the Bionicle guy. You are digging your own grave. The more specialized you make your toys, the more people will just buy toys that are already 'done'. And that was never the point in the first place.
BTW - No. I won't sell any of my extensive collection of Technics or my wonderful zillion piece basic set. If ever there was something to be buried with, its my legos. You can try and pry them out of my cold, dead hands, but look out for the transforming watchdog I just made. His mouth moves and he's looking at you.
Now compare and contrast this attitude to another attitude often seen on Slashdot, the complete lack of sympathy for mass-market music publishers.
Lego is losing its market due, primarily, to two factors: (1) over-priced products, and (2) kids wanting different toys to play with.
Music publishers are losing their market due to piracy, especially on p2p networks owned by companies which directly profit from such piracy.
I'm generalising here, of course, but why does Slashdot deride the music industry for having its business ruined by pirates, but then feel sympathy for a company which has ruined its own business by being greedy and failing to move with the times?
The company now plans to stop making the electronics and movie tie-in products and return to its core mission: producing colored plastic building blocks for children.
It's about time. They're privately held, it's not like they have public pressure to increase profits. They're finally getting back to their core competency.
thats not cool :-(
And I hate those pointy ridges that put on the end of them. And why do they insist on having feathers on some of the newer models? Why can't they just go back to making plain old whips-and-chains style stuff without all the kooky colored blinking vibrating bits. Oh well...
And what is this "mindstorms" that you speak of? Am I on the right message board here???
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Mindstorms is a truly great product but it misses the boat in one critical respect: interactivity.
When I was a kid, we would build a fleet of vehicles then go on an expedition with them or we would build two castles and engage in siege warfare. Occasionally (especially as we got older) we would build something just for the challenge of building but that was surprisingly rare.
Since Mindstorms is all about building autonomous systems, the play value of a model, once built, is somewhat limited: turn it on and watch it go.
I believe that Lego has recognized this which is why they've gone more to the R/C side (with Lego Racers).
It's not just the licenses...
It's not just the specialty parts...
The most recent customer fuck over was changing several colors in their existing palette to colors that are not compatible with the bricks you might already have. Among the colors changed were the light and dark grays (critical to many users), and the brown.
Somebody mentioned the compatibility of the Jack Stone line with the time-tested minifigure, this color thing is the same problem -- no backwards compatibility is being respected.
I'm a long-time lego user, but I'm in a holding pattern until they figure this shit out. I may never buy another new set again if things continue this way.
first. Though not a huge fan of Mindstorms, I got in at about the same time with some huge Technic sets. You can't go that wrong with thousands of Technic/brick pieces when going for creativity, and I think they've lost the creativity factor more than anything else. The sets now are only useful to create one thing and doing it once is fun - doing it twice is torture - doing it more is masochism. I remember a set when I was a kid that had wheels, gears, pulleys and bricks. That's it. Played with it for years. Nowadays the huge rubbermaid totes I store my Technics in keep drawing me back the same way.
:) Plus, the new micro ships are very well done with very few custom parts (unless you consider anything other than a 2x4 brick custom) and I have them all sitting on my desk at home.
I do like the star wars sets even though they have many custom pieces because they are perfectly designed for creating ships if you have a bunch of the early sets. The collector edition X-Wing I had on my desk for a while was the right size to use a Time-Traveller as the pilot.
The problem since they started the movie tie-ins was that was all you could buy for a couple of years. I only have about 5 or 6 large Technic sets plus a few smaller ones, but none of them are newer than 4 years old because Lego phased out decent Technics since they started putting out the computer games and movie tie-ins. Bionicle is a kind of fake Technic for kids they were using as an attempt to grab some of the already failing action-figure market and the prosperous collectible trading market. I hope Bionicle dies a quick death. I hope it doesn't take Lego with it, though.
As for the sports sets, they were a waste of Lego's cash to make. I don't think I've seen anybody actually buy them - the stores around me that have them all seem to have an overstock until they slide onto the discount rack. They made it even worse by licencing NBA players and selling them like they were baseball cards, 3 stars to a box - collect them all! Not.
Go back to what was good, Lego.
The Handy Board seems like it's showing its age, though. It's not a great development environment; a little arcane, with an odd language (Interactive C... interpreted C, the worst of all worlds?), and connectivity seemed very ad hoc. The supply of kits seemed precarious as well, and I'm not sure if there's much of any supply at all anymore. But they were cool -- certainly something similar must exist? All you have to do to Legoize a robot kit is glue Legos on, it seems. It's clunky but effective.
I found the programming and physical configuration interesting, but the electronics a bit tedious, which made the Handy Board (and potentially Mindstorms) quite inviting. Are there newer options available? (And relatedly, are there good Lego-compatible brick options available? There's always been cheap knock offs, but I've never tried them, and they generally don't have anything Technic-like)
Judging by the existing market for discontinued, yet popular, toys, I am going to get on E-bay right away and pick some Mindstorms sets up.
I know how hard it has been to fill out my Yoda doll collection.
The only reason lego charges such outrageous prices for them is because they can.
:/
I think you meant... because they thought they could. Their strategy of "sell a little at outrageous prices to the lego fanatics who will buy them anyway" is a total failure, and what we see today is the sad result
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The buggy as hell Bionicle video games come to mind too. And Lego Racer. I wonder if they're going to stop making that kind of stuff too.
I doubt they'd stop making Bionicles because they're quite popular here, but they're certainly not what the article made sound like a "core product."
The article confirms that Lego has been hurting badly. The writing has been on the wall for a while now though. Just look at Lego's product lines over the past 5-10 years. Added: Harry Potter, Star Wars, video games, Bionicle, Sports, Mindstorms. Lost: classic space, castle, pirates. Plus the saddest thing for me, a lack of focus on good Technic sets.
Why so many problems? I think kids expect more from today's toys than just bricks. That's kind of a sad fact that says something about our culture I think. Second, since the expiration of Lego's stud-and-tube patent, there's been competition from Mega Bloks, which are inferior but cheaper. In today's world though, I think it makes sense that many parents choose cheaper rather than better. Another sad fact.
In any event, while I'm unhappy about Mindstorms, I'm happy they're abandoning Harry Potter and the like. They have totally lost their identity by branching out, and I think they really do need to get back to their core business as they're doing now. I wonder though, is it too late already?
There use to be a steady stream of great Technic sets worth getting, but recently good sets have slowed to a trickle, with just one catching my eye recently... 8455 Backhoe. Check it out, it might be one of your last few chances to grab a great Lego set.
Check this out: http://www.lego.com/eng/info/default.asp?page=pres s
See the Jan 8 post. Nothing there about Mindstorms being cancelled.
I just read something on LugNet as well that was an interview at one of the Lego shows, and one of the Lego reps said that Mindstorms 3 was in development.
Here's hoping!
Mindstorms are used across the country to teach elementary school students robotics, programming, and non-technical skills like teamwork. This is very disappointing news considering that there are few products that could easily caputre the imagination and bring sophisticated concepts to a high enough level of abstraction for children. Kill the movie licensing deals, but find some way to save these products! I know that's irrational to ask from the company from the point of view of a consumer, so this message is to the population at large, find one of these robotics contests and get involved or create one!
I've got a mass of lego that's 20 years old hidden away in a box. It's still perfectly servicable. SOME of that set is a generation older. Why would I bug a new set for my kids, when I have them? The product is too durable, I think, for it's own good.
I could spend hours and hours playing with Lego either by myself or with my best friend - this was all before the RIS etc came out. I always wanted Mindstorms but it was too expensive for me. My dad got me a Cybermaster, the CD application had a way to programme it but it didn't seem to work. And I couldn't get NQC to use sensors... But I got it out the loft recently and looked at the API and I hadn't made the sensors boolean, teehee.
Anyway, in summary: pBricks/RIS/Mindstorms = GOOOOOD, single-use bricks = BAAAAAAD. Lego Technic = GOOOOD, Lego train set = GOOOD, franchise = BAAAAD.
Aren't all Lego products made in Europe?
I wonder if they'll have to relocate overseas to bring the cost down..
free speach
Did you mean: free speech
I participate in an event called FIRST LEGO League. Last year our team won First Place Nationally (U.S.). We'll be going to Nationals this year (one team from each state competion will be) in April, and signup for next year is planned to start May 3rd.
One of our coaches is at FIRST's headquarters with several people from LEGO from Thursday to today, and (at least as of several hours ago), no talk of disbanding Mindstorms has gone on.
I'm sure that because FIRST has so many ties to LEGO, they would have been told ahead of time, so something seems amiss.
Just a few thoughts,
Coolhelperguy
P.S. Dean Kamen (the guy who made the Segway) is the founder of FIRST, to give some idea of size, and the fact that it's not a fly-by-night orginization.
'nuff said.
Folks in this thread keep saying the current sets are too specialized and that generic sets no longer exist.
1000 piece Generic Block set
There's plenty of them around, my local toys-r-us usually has a dozen or so of the 650 piece sets in stock. So it's not that the old stuff isn't around, maybe it just not marketed enough. Is there still a yearly book of cool stuff you can make (was called the Idea Book in my era)?
Rokenbok is pretty cool too. My son (and I) get very creative with it.
It's like an Erector set, combined with wireless remote control vehicles, and chutes and hoppers for moving little plastic balls around. It's hard to explain until you've seen it. Some people really take it to extremes.
It's pretty expensive, though. We have spent over $1000 on all our sets and vehicles.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Why visit a website when you can construct your own?
Why learn calculus from a second party source when you can invent it yourself with pebbles?
Thinks ...
:)
.... Nah.
1) Snap up LEGO discontinued lines.
2) Sell on e-bay at hyper-inflated price.
3) Profit.
Seriously tho.
LEGO Mindstorms is/was a great introduction to mechatronics and it would be a
pity to see it bite the dust. All is not lost though, it's relativly easy to
build your own RCX controller thingy using PICs or a Basic Stamp etc...
LEGO has always been a useful source of parts for hombrew bot makers. Come to
think of it hasn't the Scout Mars rover got some LEGO incorporated into it?
Now if only the Beagle engineers had used
Presumably the Technics and Mindstorm stuff will still be available via
LEGOs educational division. (I hope)
siggy played guitar
You're a bit quick to jump on this guy for stating that his wife was having a "boy" rather than just stating that she was having a "baby". Maybe the poster does have some gender bias, but maybe he was just being more specific by using "boy" instead of "baby".
My wife is a physicist and my sister is a mechanical engineer so I certainly don't hold with 1950's gender biases. But I didn't automatically get offended at the poster's possibly innocent statement.
I hear many people in here complaining that Lego has become too 'specialized' and they need to get back to simple blocks. This is absolutley rediculous. You can still buy simple bricks. They haven't stopped making them, they have just expanded their product line. You hear about the specialized sets more only because they bring in more cash for Lego.
Such a shame that Mindstorms are to be retired.
One thing that Lego could do is to license the LegOS spec to other interested companies. Such companies could then build Mindstrom-like hardware around their own implementation of the OS spec, with their own compilers and IDE's. This might also bring the price down if enough companies get into the act.
The actual toy built around a LegOS need not even be a brick kit like Mindstorms. Instead smaller toy companies could just use the OS to create pre-built sophisticated toys. They needn't go to the trouble of creating their own OS.
End result ==> Another revenue stream for Lego.
Now that LEGO will no longer be producing movie tie-in sets those STAR WARS packs are looking a little more lucrative. Yes... Nothing cooler than LEGO Obiwan chopping of the hand of some LEGO guy in the bar of my LEGO city. To Toys R' Us. Away!
.deviatefromtheabsolute.
you cocksucking karmawhore faggot
When I was little it seemed like the basic categories were "town", "space", and "castle" with duplos for toddlers and technics for older kids. While I don't necessarily think it was bad for them to branch out to things like "pirate" and "star wars" (heck, I played with my legos like they were star wars sets before those even came out)... they really got too far away with this bionicle nonsense. About 6 years ago (even though I was still an adult), I still had the desire to buy legos and loved browsing. Now the only thing that interests me is the mindstorms, but the price turns me away. And it's because everything is so far out there and has too many customized peices. I mean look at their NBA stuff...It's rediculous.
And as a side, every tv show that gets away from the core story is doomed to fail or at least lose a lot of viewership. That's why babies and marriages are show killers. Or completely changing the premise of the story (see Alias). Shows like Seinfeld lasted for so long and became more popular until the end because they had a core theme, and stuck with it. Lego could take a page from that.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
I don't see anywhere where it explicitly says Mindstorms is gone, just a vaguely-worded mention of "electronics". They say their new mission is focusing on their own products, not the tie-ins, so that they have control over what they do - Mindstorms is owned by them, no? I took it to mean they were dropping the Star Wars line (which was cool, admittedly), the Harry Potter line, etc. and would stop making the video games (where presumably they are not responsible for making them, but license out the Lego name or contract other companies, either way they're not in control).
So until someone explicitly tells me the Mindstorms line is done, I'm not going to hold out any hope for seeing it in the clearance aisle.
I love Legos I had them as a kid a big 5 gallon bucket full of bricks of all types though thinking back on it I bet the total number of unique bricks (discounting color we're talking shape) was small, maybe 50 including the tires and stuff. Now you can buy a 200 piece set and you might get 50 different pieces in that one set. But that aside here's why Lego failed with me.
:) I put them all in a big rubbermaid tub and we spill them into the floor and play with them together.
Price
I go to and I see Lego sets priced roughly 2 to nearly 3 times as much as the competition. When I went Xmas shopping for my kid I bought him an assload of "legos" but they were Mega Bloks, the BIG sets of Mega Bloks are around $50 and we're talking aircraft carrier/detailed clipper ship big. And the little sets (65-80 pieces) ran like $3 each, the mid sized sets (500-800 pieces) ran in the $20 range. Legos was more like $8 and $50 and when I got ready to spend my money I spent it on Mega Bloks.
Two examples:
772 Piece Lego Truck $59.99
635 Piece Mega Bloks Ship $15.99
I spent Xmas morning building the models for my kid (he's only 3 but he's learning) and he spent the morning tearing them up
Also bought him K'nex god those are cool, wish I had those as a kid.
--- www.f-theocean.com
I've worked with a number of their products and have found them to be well-designed and accompanied by clear, easy-to-comprehend instructions. And if you do get into a bind, their tech support is both informed and responsive. All-in-all, they're a top-notch company!
When I was a little kid, we didn't have any of this "Movie Lego" crap. And lets face it, it is crap. I was over at a friends house, and his little brother has oodles and oodles of the new Harry Potter stuff. There are so little generic, simple pieces in there that it just made me cry... You couldn't build anything else with that, because about 3/4 of the pieces were specially made for that... I mean WTF. Lego is undermining their principle of encouraging creativity here. Now, I am not saying that all movie Lego is crap. Star Wars still uses a very large amount of generic pieces, they only colored them differently for the sets. I have an X-Wing set that I got when I was a kid, and now my little sister can build all kinds of stuff with it. Lego should go back to the days of Castles and Ships. I have one of the big Castle sets, and while it does have some custom pieces, those custom pieces can be used building something other than a castle. The hugeass pirate ship set that we is almost everything generic, except for the cannons (and I'm sure you can stick those on lots of different things) the sails, and the ship base which can be used for building tons of different ships. As far as Mindstorms goes... Lego screwed up. It may have been a bit too complicated for kids, and as one user said, too limited for adults. There is no real in between they can go for there... they messed up, and thus swalloed their own ass.
Just my two cents
Am I the only one who has noticed that Lego barely sells a kit (in stores) that require any effort or concentration to complete?
No, every second bloody poster seems to have observed that.
Thanks for your insight, Sherlock.
used to sell their sets of bridge building kits, an inexepensive kit had enough posts, girders, and braces to build a suspension bridge a couple feet long.
Motorized Erector Sets were great, but I suppose the sharp edges scared the canvas swing seat crowd.
And Strombecker 1/32 slot cars, or Aurora HO scale race sets. Oh, for the fun days, now we have Captain Planet.
or else you might *really* offend someone 'round these parts...
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
until a couple of weeks ago when I saw an ad in Time for the Honda Element. The element pictured was actually built out of the blocks, with a small note in the corner that it was megabloks it was built out of.
They also have those tv commercials where the element is built up using stop motion photography out of the blocks also - along with a note it is Megabloks.
Something of a PR coup to megabloks in a way there...
-
I'm afraid that Lego is not returning to its roots (building blocks), but may just cut the licensed products (Star Wars, Harry Potter) and concentrate on its own Bionicles line.
I was not thrilled to see that my second grader brought home a Bionicles novella from the Scholastic book fair (which is increasingly a toy fair), especially after I looked at it and saw a grammatical error in the book's very first sentence. Lego has a whole mythology about Bionicles, and that's attractive to kids. But my son lost a couple essential pieces of his Bionicle within days of getting it, and I'm not going to encourage this overpriced, intellectually shallow, proprietary product line as a hobby.
Unfortunately, I could not find more generic Lego blocks in my Christmas shopping. There were some overpriced ($30-$40) Star Wars kits, and a space shuttle for $100, but nothing I wanted to buy. I'm beginning to associate Lego with brands like Scholastic and Disney, that have turned their once-respected product lines into brands of dumb, overpriced junk.
the cost of product tie-ins. Those involve extremely large sums of money.
Reminds me of the Journey atari videogame... the game was crap and was made in a week, but the company went under because it had cost them enormous sums of money to license the name of Journey.
http://www.x-entertainment.com/messages/472.htm
-
Get your nephew a Handy Board or a couple of Handy Crickets :-) http://www.handyboard.com/
My other Beowulf cluster is... er...
Modern MBA programs are to blame, I think...
How many great products of the past can you think of which have been sugarred up, dumbed down, and turned into bland pap? Why? Because the "Focus Group" said it "tasted better" that way. The little herd of Johnies and Suzies didn't squeeze their little vacant eyes and bawl, because the little pieces fit together just so...
And the MBAs smiled in unison, and checked their little boxes...
-- -pjk Perry Kundert perry@kundert.ca http://kundert.2y.net
So since you aren't "a more qualified sociologist," you're not allowed to think this way? Don't be an idiot.
I'll add my voice to the others agreeing with your statement.
When I was a kid, I played with much simpler construction toys, such as Mini-Bricks, a log cabin set, a Mechano set, plain wooden blocks, and the dirt pile out in the back yard.
But the construction toy that my brothers and I played with the longest was Lego. We only had the basic bricks, but we would play for hours, competing to see who could make the coolest robot, or spaceship, or castle.
And every Christmas, our parents would buy another box, and our Lego pile would grow larger.
But when I became a parent, I bought my son one of the Lego speciality kits (a dragster racing car). We played with it a couple of times, and then stopped. It was too hard to build anything. It wouldn't build the things we wanted. In short, it was no fun.
I never bought Lego again, and it was years later before I realized my mistake.
So I agree completely. Lego needs to get back to basics.
Losing mindstorm sucks but all the rest of that crap, movie placement &^!@# has to go.
Give us more sets of building pieces at a reasonable price and maybe come out with advanced builder pieces. BTW my little ones never did anything with the big blocks but chew on them, now that they are older they love my lego blocks from 1970!!!
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
One of their problems are copy products from companies. Looks somewhat like lego, but ain't.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I don't know about a website, but you can get a catalog from Amazon.
I am the very model of a modern major general!
We alredy agreed that one of the big competitors is computer and video games, but its also time. Kids parents, and the kids themselves have less time and they want the play-expirence to come earlier and earlier. Therefore we produce bigger bricks, so the kid can assemble the car in less time, and drive around with it in more time...
"If I were a more qualified sociologist, I'd think it may have inspired by the way that our children play today versus how they played twenty years ago."
As a 31 year old I can confirm that I was playing with lego about 25 years ago much the same as my 5 year old does today.
lego (the company) was started in 1932 by master carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen. in 1947 they started making plastic toys (a little ahead of the curve) one of the toys created was automatic binding bricks. They where renamed lego bricks (well lego mursten) and over the next few years became a favoutite toy the world over.
I am pretty sure I learnt a lot from my lego and enjoy watching my son playing with his. But they are not a new toy and I don't think you will find a trend in the way people play since lego since they are just one of a long line of constrution toys produced in europe.
blog and junk
is Legoer
:)
Plus Lego is Danish for "play well"
And as others have said, no it isn't
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
My kids love the bionicles. They mix and match the pieces. The bionicles are cheap enough for them to buy with their allowance.
Neither of those points can be said for the really expensive pirate ships, star wars toys, etc.
Sometimes, a child is more demanding than you would think. I have a 4 month old. Some days I go without showers and without food because I'm so busy taking care of her, and keeping her entertained.
I'd much rather hear that a parent let their child watch some TV, so they could catch up and take care of themselves. Some of us aren't well enough off to have a wetnurse, and for two parents to work full time jobs.
That they are going to get rid of the RoboLAB compontent of their mindstorm kit? I for one use the RSX based on the Mindstorm module for my engineering class in college and it is a useful tool in understanding construction and programming, helping students realize how difficult it is to make prototypes of products. It also helps others understand key concepts of reverse engineering and construction. They are also amazing, and so much fun.
I can't imagine Lego completely discontinuing the Mindstorms. Dean Kamen, of Segway fame (among many many other things), runs a yearly competition for middle school students across the country that uses the Mindstorms bricks.
Perhaps they will be removed from stores, but I can't see them going away completely.
Lego needed to update the things anyway to help them stay relevant.
Lego has as long as I remembered tried to squeze every little penny out of the customers. They really live for "less is more". But in this case its more in their pockets. My 4yrs son got a *HUGE* Lego explorer box at hist birthday this week. The box was like 70cm*40*15. But concisted of a very small number of buildingblocks/figures/cars etc. My mother had paid $120 for it in the store. I'd rather say that $50 is a fair price. Talk about no value for the money. Speaking to my friend the reaction is almost the same. Why should they receive NEW EXPENSIVE Lego sets. The kids can go with the old LEgo that we had when we where young.
You want to make a city? Make a game level in your editor of choice like UnrealEd or QRadiant
Want to make a model? Pop open milkshape or max for games.
The Sims, Quake, Half-Life, Unreal. All of these games have huge communities and toolsets for creating new worlds.
Kids still are building things -- the blocks and tools just became more advanced. Instead of physical objects, they get simulated ones. It also happens to be EXTREMELY cheap by comparision if you have a PC.
The creativity isn't gone, it just relocated a bit.
Can't say I've used them in 20 years or so, but damn I loved legos as a kid. I used to have a giant plastic bin into which I tossed all the pieces from all the kits and would just make stuff.
Though I remember this one kid I used to play with sometimes, he'd get the kits and make what was on the cover of the box, and then that was it. He'd usually put them on a shelf and never take them apart. One time I tried to and he got mad at me and accused me of "breaking" his legos. LOL!
It's never "kids today" who are at fault, it's the "parents today" that are too fscking dumb to know what's good for their children.
DROPPING THE FUCKING PRICES?!
That stuff is expensive. Even when I was a kid it was hard for me to convince my parents to buy me much. I only got some on birthdays and/or christmas.
I looked at the prices a couple years ago because I thought it might be fun to pick up a few sets and it was priced ridiculously.
It's clear that having lots of special pieces encourages "collecting" lego sets, whereas once you have a big bag of the older simple bricks you don't crave more of them.
I think the early eighties were the first era of cheap, heavily marketed, "collectible" toys. I've heard that manufacturers actually designed the toys to be not that much fun to play with, so that once you get the toy, you just want more, because the fun is in the acquisition of the latest toy when watching the spinoff cartoon with embedded comercials, not the use.
Also, did anyone else feel really old when the original poster referred to Mindstorm as the toy that was such a mainstay of my childhood? Is he 14 years old or something?
No, "Youse is gonna sleep wit da fishhes, ya here?"
I find it stunning that all of these geeks are so obsessed with Legos. Yeah, they are cool and all, but they are actually a bad toy to give to your children if you want them to learn anything as they're being creative. Legos are just blocks you stack up. The most realistic thing you can build with them is a brick house. Meanwhile, there are lots of other toys that actually introduce kids to the concepts of physics and engineering in a subtle way. How many people here remember Construx? Or that truly ancient wonder, Tinker Toys? Both are marvelous toys to give kids because in the midst of playing with them, they start to learn about forces and stress points. They learn that long straight beams will sag in the middle if unsupported. They learn about the strength of triangles and the wobbliness of squares. They see why aircraft wings must be flexible. They learn an incredible amount about the world around them that they do not learn from Legos. Why is no one here talking about their old Tinker Toys? Why is no one asking whatever happened to Construx? The only Lego pieces that even begin to teach in the same ways are the ones modeled after Tinker Toys! (The Technic beams.)
If you want to make stuff, get a milling machine like everybody else. Legos are for kids.
We I was young we made guns (gun-shaped space laser rifles) out lego and we would chase each other all over the house arguing about who hit whom. Eventually we stopped building guns and resorted to building swords with which we would use to whack at each other in not-so-mock combat. This was prior to game consoles, cool squirt guns, Nerf weapons, or home computers cooler than the Commodore Vic 20. We used our imagination to build the toys we wanted to play with out of Lego because we did not have them otherwise. Now you can actually have the toys (and they are much cooler).
The ER1 from Evolution Robotics isn't a bad alternative. You can get one for as little as $199 via their garage sale.
Will the guy from the story posted yesterday got laid off?
Hi, I am also one who got very frustrated early on with MindStorms. I bought one for my 7 year old (then), and taught him a bit about programming, but personally couldn't figure out anything interesting to do with just two motors, so I dropped it.
So tell me, what kind of cool alternates exist now, 6 years later?
I had (and dearly loved) piles of Legos when I was little, but most of those came as hand-me-downs in buckets. Maybe we can convince the folks at Lego to stop spending as much effort in producing new, specialized blocks for new, specialized sets with fancy graphics on their boxes and start selling things in buckets.
On another note, I bet that if someone were to set up a PayPal account to donate to the Lego corporation, that the mobs of Lego maniacs out there would be able to generate a significant amount of money for them.
It saddens me greatly to see the toy that was such a mainstay of my childhood to be in such dire financial straits.
Oh yeah, it's so sad.
Lego wold have gotten my parents money when I was a kid and probably the money of a lot of other people if they wern't so overpriced.
Hi
I worked for Lego for 6 years ago on a very special and revolutionary project of moving the Lego way of play into the digital domain. In only 2 years we created a full object database of all the Lego blocks and tools to assemble them in the virtual world(s). We made a demo where Kirk interacted with the Lego men, by wearing a special motion tracking suit and digital glasses. All of this was shown on Danish television and at the time he proclaimed that this was the future of Lego, only to cancel the project only a few months later. All the people that worked on this project left, and it was top people from all over the world. I was the architect of the object APi (Corba) to the database.
Lego has since followed a path where it tries to sell its toys thru other brands, and not on the merits of Lego itself.
We all knew that at the time, and tried to make the management understand it, the big risk off this. Lego is such a strong concept that it has survived much longer that the other construction toys. As some has mentioned Lego as a physical concept belongs to the 70's and 80's.
We had so many ideas going, that would have been turned into very innovative toys today.
Imagine a blend of the physical and digital worlds. Plug a Lego cam module into your GBA and see a moving digital version of what you are building at the screen. Look at it from all angles and get other parameters like skill and strength...similar to e.g. Pokemon. Put your Bionical next to your friends and let them fight it on the GBA. Go back and alter your physical creation and have another go.
What if some blocks was like brains that could only be developed in the virtual world by using Lego genetics? Download your new skills and play again.
Some of the things the project left behind were the director line and the first digital content that is bundled with many off the Lego products.
The current problem for Lego is that the US sales have failed. It is common sense that it is computer games that is the problem, and it will only increase as the games and computer toys gets even better.
The message from Lego is to go back to the original bricks that had been so successful in the past...but that is such a funny thing to say since we live in the future.
Back in 1998 when the project was cancelled (also because of a bad year) we look at each other and say:
Well the company is run by accountants.
If the same people had run the company at the time the idea of the plastic brick was acquired and made usable, they would have turn it down, and gone back to improving its wooden toys!
If the Mindstorms product is discontinued, are there any alternatives? I agree with other posters that having only three motor controllers is somewhat limiting (you need two to drive/steer a vehicle, so only one motor socket is available for mobile robots). Furthermore, my son thought Knex had more building potential than Legos...
I think there's room for a "advanced" Mindstorms. What about third party bricks that have expanded capabilities (licensing issues?) What about a kit based on the metal version of Legos, Erector? Anyone know of any expandable robot kit alternatives that are out there already?
They are having trouble because Legos are an insane ripoff. They've always been expensive, but why in the hell would I buy a tiny set of them for $30 when I could go and get something electronic that I can stick in pocket for the same price?
Kids get hooked on these things at a young age, and parents aren't willing to spend the huge amount of money it takes to get a decent collection for a 6 or 7 year old that's possibly going to lose half the pieces.
Erector set is just as bad. I saw a really cool set at Zainy Brainy the other day, just a little moon buggy looking thing, but it was sweet. The damn kit was lik $50. I'm not going to spend $50 for something so small on me, let alone at little kid.
Gouging your customers will only get you so far.
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...to play CS:CZ, HL2, DNF, ...
or how old is this mindstorm series?
...and maybe some plastic people and some weird pieces that couldn't be called a "block"> But still, no need for bateries
i'm only 22 and thru all my childhood lego didn't needed any batteries! It was only the good ol' plastic blocks
Anyone else have this, remember this, know where toi buy it? When i was a kid in the 70s the only guy nerdier than me had a huge set when he was arond 7 or 8, and this German stuff was amazing - op amps, sensors, motors etc. I remember it being very, very expensive..
It did him good though - Cambridge and now a CTO somewhere...
http://www.fischertechnik.com/
Relatives know I like legos and buy my kids these really specialized star wars sets. I have an organized way of storing them (Flat pieces in one box, 2-4 in another... there is no place to put these specialized pieces.
Precision molds are very costly to produce, so it does not surprise me how hard it is for Lego to recoup these R+D costs when there are 20 or more complex new molds in the new style sets.
My other complaint about the star wars series is how easy the models FALL APART. Many aspects are held together by 1 lug. This is bad design folks.
I bought 'Snap Circuits' for my kid this holiday. That is a very hands-on lego-like way to learn about basic circuits. I think lego could meld these type of things into their product line. (The same way the Technic Pneumatic legos teach people about pneumatics without creating umpteen new molds.)
I applaud Lego for the courage to get back to their roots. From what I am hearing here, people buy lego for the creative aspect, not so the model looks EXACTLY like it's supposed to. Ridding the linup of all the specialized pieces should be a help to their bottom line (and keeping my boxes in a semblance of order!)
This sounds like a possibly great avenue for innovation and products.
So - why not get some of the "idea" people together and pitch a similar concept to megablocks, capsella or another lego competitor?
NDA or other contractual lock-up? There are ways around those, if the idea is good enough and the profit potential is there.
Here you are, all bitching about supplier issues, while the "open source" Meccano (Erector) set people can just make their OWN specialised pieces, if they see fit, plus they don't build models that effectively "GPF" if the cat stands on them. Meccano models can lift people.
Steve
Actcually Bionicle has great mechanical pieces for building and articulating robots with...far more complex motions are possible with those parts...and they have better structure too for things like gear boxes. It's a little secret I've never seen too many people pick up on. Not to mention that it fattens up their manufacturing for the small techinical bits that sets like mindstorms use..axles and such
I haven't really paid attention to Legos for years, but from what I've seen in your post and a brief glance at the Lego web site pretty much confirms my worries.
Legos was *always* about providing basic tools to build what you want. Building blocks were based on the same idea, but they allowed merely very vague, civil-style construction. Legos (well, at least Technics, which were the ones that I found interesting) allowed you to build all kinds of things -- a more friendly Erector set.
From what I see now, Legos have:
* Marketing tie-ins. If I could think of a single toy for which marketing tie-ins are actually detrimental, this has to be it. Why, why, why would you *ever* do this? Legos aren't just a puzzle -- hell, I rarely ever built the kit that you were "supposed" to build. They let you build what you want.
* Expense. I always found Legos to be disgustingly expensive as a kid, and they are much, much worse now. They really are just molded plastic, and patents aside, a company that specializes in selling lots of molded plastic should be good at doing so inexpensively. The only major changes might be slight materials change to improve grip and durability.
* The website sucks. Legos are one of the things for which a website could be incredibly valuable...and we have this annoying Flash monstrosity?
* Custom parts. Custom parts are a *terrible* idea. (You pointed out windshields. Actually, there were two windshield pieces that I remember that predated Technics. I think Space had a couple more. There are other ones, though.) Custom parts, including movie-tie-in parts, have a lot of disadvantages. They're frequently less useful outside of the kits they were designed around. They're probably much more expensive to produce. They inhibit the imagination component. When my childhood friend needed a custom part (say, a Technics rod 2.5 units long or so), he'd cut his own, with help from his father. The Pirate sets already had a lot of oddball parts. You don't need to make a perfectly colored Chevy door handle that's usable if you're, say, making a Chevy and nothing else.
* I remember that Legos used to have space, medival, pirate, and modern styles. Then Technics came. That's probably about where they should have stopped. More parts means more market fragmentation, more costs, and less nice interoperation. Most of these groups interoperated well with the others. Yes, Technic parts had holes in them, modern came with windshields, and medieval and pirate with trees and medieval-looking pieces, but that's about it. Just glancing at their page, they have "Advanced Designer", "Inventor", "TECHNIC", "Sports", "BIONICLE", "LEGO Racers", "Intelli-train", "Story Builder", "Spybotics", and "Mindstorms". These vary so much that it's much harder to use parts from different things together.
Here's my suggestions for the Lego folks. Not that I'm a brilliant marketing director, just that I know what I like and liked, and it sure as hell isn't what they're selling now.
* Evaluate the additional merchandise (watches, clothes, pens, etc). Dump anything not making money.
* Drop as many toy ranges as possible. Keep Mindstorms (which could be merged with Technics), and the basic four original kits. All types should be at least 90% effectively compatible with other kits, so that folks can amass large sets of compatible parts and go crazy building Lego things. Don't have more than 10% bizarre windshields in Space, or parrots in Pirate.
* Dump tie-in things. There are dolls and action figures that do a much better job of tie-ins than Legos. Legos are good because they're generic.
* You have a damned website and generic parts. Let people order (with some surcharge, perhaps 10%) custom kits of some minimum value (say, $50). This would appeal greatly to hardcore Lego fans. If they want just 300 10 unit rods, let them order that and that alone.
* You have a website. You have programs that let people design Lego c
May we never see th
I have been thinking about this for some time. It would work very well with other kinds of toys, simpler ones, like e.g. Action man and Barbie. The only thing stopping me is that I am a technical person and not a business man.
Now the real question: how much are mindstorm parts going to go for on Ebay?
Anybody knows the email of the marketing departement of Lego? We need to send them the link to this Slashdot story; there are some good comments here. But I cannot find any emails on their site.
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
When I first got into Lego, their primary focus was Legoland and Lego Technic. I remember staring in awe at a friend's Legoland set up in his parent's garage, the entire floor of which was covered in baseplates with every kind of building, and even the Legoland train running around it.
In addition to that, another friend had the Technic lego car, with big wheels, cylinders, rack & pinion steering, suspension, etc. It ruled!
Where are those kits now? Relegated in favour of crappy Bionicles and Harry Potter themed kits. What can a child build with them? Bugger all, that's what!
Perhaps if they want their fortunes to improve, Lego should bring back the originals.
--- Commission free trading & free stock up to $500 - use http://share.robinhood.com/kelvinp6
First it was MEGO, now LEGO.
I have several of the Orient Expedition kits which are great even though they are specialized.
The main problem I have with Legos is that you really can only buy a kit to make a X-Wing or some Harry Potter shit. The kits are made really to make only what's on the box. They need to include more pieces so that a kids imagination can really go wild. Having a kit that can only build a couple of items blows. Plus they really do have some goofy crap. Bionicles, Sports? What's that.
I will never be able to finish my robot... My girl robot.
(I know its getting old, but really what else does a lego geek do on a weekend...)
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
We got a Star Destroyer as a wedding present, and we have no place to put it assembled. Wanna buy one, used, in good condition, with all boxes and docs? email me here: http://www.speakeasy.org/~morse/email.jpg
So where can I get a handyboard?
--- 11 meters/second, or 24 miles per hour - the airspeed velocity of an unladen European swallow. Really.
Legos used to me made in europe. They've been moving production to china to lower cost.
Maybe if they didn't charge $80 for a set more people would buy them? My broke ass doesn't play with Legos cuz their too damn expensive now.
Did you ever hear about rapid prototyping? People doing robotics, like everybody else, find Legos very useful.
I have a couple sets of something vaguely similar I use pretty often when I need to try if a design would work. A set of generic pre-made parts is what you need - and it doesn't matter much if they are originally intended for kids, that doesn't make them ANY less useful. Milling custom parts is a lot of hassle and time and cost, so it's better to do it only when really necessary, not just because it's the "grown-up way". Did you ever try it?
Many people in this thread have complained about the proliferation of custom Lego sets that are useless for general imagination building, while others, who seem to be Lego enthusiasts, claim that you can easily get generic Lego blocks from Lego.com or the Lego stores.
Well I live in a big city that does not have a Lego store. Less than a year ago I looked in every major toy store for generic Lego as a potential gift. There was none. Most stores had a pathetic selection of very specialized sets.
So if the generic, imagination encouraging sets are stil available, it seems that either they're too hard for stores to get, or Lego has somehow completely messed up their promotion.
the article says:
The company now plans to stop making the electronics and movie tie-in products and return to its core mission: producing colored plastic building blocks for children.
"We would rather be in control of our own products, the things that we can decide," Kirk Kristiansen said. "We want to go back to our core products, and that is a key part of our future strategy."
so:
1) electronics means lego mindstorms because there is nothing else that is "electronics" in the lego product line.
2) classic lego bricks are going to be back!
I may be totally wrong on the facts, however.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
They tried.
(Dune Quote)
"They tried and failed?"
"They tried and died."
Scrolling through the high-modded comments, i've seen the same critiques over and over:
1) the sets are overpriced
2) the sets are too expensive to produce
3) the sets are overspecialized
The first point is subjective (i'd tend to agree). The second is iffy (it's mass-produced plastic. Even with custom pieces, it's *plastic*). The third is just plain wrong. Many are calling for a return of the good old days of imagination and simple pieces available by the bagful, because we all remember how much fun those days were. The problem is, that would bankrupt the company. First of all, Lego is an extremely durable product. Maybe you lose a couple, maybe the dog eats some, but how often does a brick snap outright? Second, there's only so much of it one kid needs to reach a saturation point...eventually the combination of bricks owned and imagination yields infinite buildables, for all intents. Third, by the time boys and girls are old enough to have their own kids, the vast majority of them won't be playing with their old Lego anymore. Who gets it? Their kids. Their nephews and nieces. Their neighbours. Suddenly the demand for old school Lego has vanished.
So no, overspecialization isn't the problem at all. It's their only solution.
It was so STUPID I wondered how long it would take them. Then they kept doing it and now look.
I never thought we would suffer from it. They can kill that other crap, but mindstorms is GREAT!
They should put more into it and then they could get adults as well as the kids without video games. Maybe then they will stay in business.
I want mindstorms 2!
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
NOT Legos.
Lego Bricks
A collection of Lego bricks
Lego, not Legos.
Sorry to troll, but i'm sure Lego want the product Lego called Lego, not Legos.
The word Lego has now lost all meaning....
I disagree with most of the posts here, Lego needs to become more specialized to deal with the changing tastes of it's customer base - Lego Porn is the way of the future.
One of their problems are copy products from companies. Looks somewhat like lego, but ain't...
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
My parents just dropped off some old stuff from their attic, including my legos. I had a big box of the generic ones, and a couple of the space sets.
It was great back in those days - the biggest problem was usually that you were one block short of the color you wanted, but could do almost anything.
I had a motorized tank with a remote control I think...hardest part was designing something to fit over it where the wire didn't get in the way.
I even used that and some other legos in my high school physics project.
Now my daughter plays with them...much better than what I see in the stores today - everything is this or that set...unless you wanna contact the company, it's hard to just find lots of blocks.
Once the market dries up, there'll be an outcry for more intelligent toys for kids.
I, for one, will not allow a video game console in the house. Kids that I grew up with had a console in their house, and they're all pretty much deadbeats or just trying to make a living.
I, on the other hand, grew up with computers in the house, and legos to play with. Erector Sets and the old 160-in-one electronic project kits. I've got a great career, and I can fix anything. I owe so much in my life to the toys I played with when I was young. This is opposed to toys that are given to kids that just occupy their time and teach them nothing in return.
My kids aren't old enough yet to play with such toys, I guess I'll have to stock up before they all disappear.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
But not only are there the Mindstorms kits, there are also "special order" educational kits available. Lego sells specialized kits (some are electronic and can be connected to a PC or Mac for data collection or robotics) - to educators across the country (K-12). Will these kits still be available for those educators?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
If you want to prototype, there's Mecchano/Erector, and there are some higher-quality kids from Berg and 80/20.
Why am I in Wally Cleaver's bedroom?
I would certainly say that most men today really do suck. And a lot of problems that women have ARE in fact caused by the fact that men do suck so much. So I think if I were you I would shut up. And all the horrid human beings calling themselves men make it difficult for the men who are actually decent human beings. So I feel sorry for you men, and I certainly wouldn't want to be ya. And if a woman wants to be a "aggressive, tattooed, NASCAR/football watching beer-drinking mandroid" what do you care? I would say that's none of your business.
-------------------------------------
Technically, we are beyond survival.
I concur with the opinion that specialized bricks should be limited. But having a six-year-old of my own and a whole new lease on lego life, I must say that my son (and I) are playing with lego far more than I did in my childhood. That's due to certain "new" (at least to me) kinds of pieces: the long black "struts", the ball-in-socket joints, the gears, the "Toa" bodies and appendages... Pretty much the kinds that come with Bionicle characters. Granted, they aren't just bricks, but they allow for the creation of all kinds of nifty creatures. Which after all, is the point: going beyond the picture on the box with our own creativity. For example, we created a little car made mostly out of the strut pieces, with a 3 volt motor, an on/off switch, and battery. The axle was connected to the motor through the gears in within a Toa body. Easy enough for a young'un to get, but challenging. So this Toa-car is whipping around in the kitchen. Fantastic! So I say: keep those next generation pieces coming, but deliver them in sets that encourage a whole series of models and ideas. Provide 5 or 10 nifty plans per box, and never just one!
I played with Lego, and for the record, I'm a 28 year old female who got her set handed down from an older male cousin.... and handed my set down (with additions) to a younger female cousin.
Mum bought more sets of them for me because she thought they were great building toys and at the time, there was no real gender marketing associated with them.
Sadly, that is no longer true, as I was so disgusted to see when we saw a "preview-mercial" for Lego at "Peter Pan" last week. The kids in the commercial were all boys. I can't say I'm necessarily crying any tears for Lego right now, though I do want them to survive.
Lego is missing a HUGE market sector by failing to interest girls and parents of girls. They don't have to make pink and lavender bricks; the standard primary and natural colors are fine. But they do have to show girls interacting with Lego and build a few obviously female "people" - like they did with the Black Knight.
I used my set to build fairy tale settings for the tiny dolls my gran made for me; It was a totally and completely reconfigurable dollhouse in the best sense of the word. Lego made me adept with spacial reasoning, estimating and mathematics.
Lego's survival depends on three legs:
1) returning to the basics of creative building toys
2) reaching all children and their parents, regardless of gender (especially by marketing in parenting magazines as an educational toy, rather than a marketing toy)
3) Getting rid of the specialty bricks.
The first and third would bring down the cost. The second would increase their market share.
That said, I won't be buying a set for my niece until they grow up and stop thinking of themselves as "boy toys". I have put together a great set of wood blocks and artifical stone thingies that she'll get when she's past the "swallow everything in sight" stage.
It's unforgivably sexist to still think in terms of boy toys that way.....
Politicat
my guess is that they tried to diversify products too quickly and blew it for the year. I was wondering how the heck they could make money on the software they pushed last year. dropping mindstorms is a mind blowing mistake. who else is better primed to be the toy robot king of the future? even a working mini toy rover today should have made bank.
And most importantly, if you like Lego, do your part to support it. Buy the 8455 Technic Backhoe [$80 USD]. It's the coolest set I've ever seen come out of the company (and I can use all of the parts on MindStorms projects too).
If you can't afford that, check out the new 8453 Front-end Loader [$20 USD].
Either are suitable for display on top of your monitor.
How about the power to kill a yak from 200 yards away? With MIND BULLETS!
That's telekinesis, Kyle.
How about the power....to move you?
/. zen: Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Beowulf clusters...
So, kids used to appreciate cool toys like Lego. Now, they only like video-games and DVDs.
Want to really startle a child? Show him how to grow a plant -- on the kitchen counter -- that will completely blow his mind.
Any significantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Legos just arent magic anymore.
Actually, the deficiency in "Attention Deficiency Disorder" is not iin one's ability to focus, but in one's executive control over one's focus. Hyperfocus is a hallmark of ADD, and I would not be surprised to see a child with ADD work for hours on a project.
:-)
Take is from an adult with ADD!
When I grew up, I had meccano to burn. Well, being metal it wouldn't burn, of course. When I was in my teens, I was the friendly neighbourhood babysitter, and by then ('70s) Lego was all the rage. I used to build large constructions from the sets at some of my charges houses that they wouldn't pull apart until next time I came to babysit them.
When I saw the rise of sets like "Star Wars" and "Harry Potter" and so on I thought "Oh, yeah. Boring. No creativity need be applied here.".
Now, though, I have my own children. I have bought them basic boxes of blocks, and that's fine, and I've bought them specialised sets like Harry Potter (Hogwart's Castle) and SpiderMan (my wife is a spiderman nut, so my kids are too).
The interesting thing is, is that they sat right down and built it "like on the box" then immediately pulled it all apart and made amazingly creative stuff out of them. We now have pyramids, temples in the jungle (complete with mazes) secret laboratories (with traps, computers and mad scientists). We have Spiderman rescuing X, Y, or Z from some scenario that never happened in any comic. We have marble races, and endless things that fly and drive.
Most of the parts that allow all this wierd stuff to happen are actually the special ones. All of the neat secret panels and traps in Harry Potter are wonderfully repurposed in making a "Temple of Doom" (with a few Orient Expedition pieces, and a quick pyramid out of basic blocks...).
Creativity is pretty hard to hide, really. If you give a creative kid some toys to play with then he will be creative with it.
It is a shame to see MindStorms discontinued. I'm halfway tempted to go out and get one for my sons before they disappear. On the other hand the oldest (and most creative) one has just turned six, and I won't trust him not to destroy it for a couple of years yet. In those couple of years the landscape will change enough that I full expect something better will be available.
Lego is good enough for little kids but if you want to make robots, meccano is the stuff. I doubt if todays kids have the attention span, I'm not sure if we did when we were kids. Check out the projects on http://www.eleinmec.com particularly like the jukebox... loads more on http://www.meccanoweb.com/meccring
My little brother got a Rahkshi Kaita Vo Kit for Christmas and I had the opportunity to play with it for an hour or two. The kit contains the pieces to make three functionally identical models, which seems pretty useless to me, but since you can buy them separately I'll blame the person who bought it for him.
Yes, many of the fixed pieces are overly specialized. However, the characters also have novel motion features, which would be difficult to design with general pieces and need to be light weight. By far the most interesting aspect of the whole kit is that the articulation of the limbs is due entirely to ball and socket joints, so although the "bones" appear only stylistically different, when you actually start building with them you realise that the attachment of balls and sockets at slightly different angles makes a big difference.
So the Bionicles don't just look organic, but incorporate organic design principles. And that could be way more educational than yet another civil engineering simulator!
I was also happy to see that many of the pieces included connection points that weren't used in the default models. So reuse might not be as high a priority at Lego as it used to be, but its still considered a virtue.
I am an adult Lego fan with quite an inventory of the stuff. This parent is right on the quality issue (and others on the thread pointing to low margins are also there).
... but also in manufacturing design. Their systems are partly secret (and the company is 100% privately-owned).
... although some are put to good use in "realistic" castle walls, depicting stones of different hues and textures. There are also extremely high quality non-official Lego-compatible components for Mindstoms, but those are another story altogether.
Lego keeps on selling 1949 designs (basic lego bricks with ~11-year industrial patents) because nobody can beat them at their prices. Lego invests quite a bit in product design
There are clones that can *potentially* be attached to regular Lego, but their quality is glaringly inferior
---
Want to buy cheap Lego? Try searching ebay for bulk lego (which can be washed with lukewarm water and soap). Keep an eye out for the (regular) Lego sales at toy stores, including the official online Lego store (which also offers bulk sales). Or use the new pick-a-brick Lego outlets. For specialized/hard to find parts Bricklink and Pitsco are your friends.
"Nope. Plastic blocks cannot cost much more than a few cents. It's simple injection molding, the same way they make CDs. Not much material in each block. The only reason lego charges such outrageous prices for them is because they can."
As others have noted, plastic injection molding is a difficult process to do well.
American business leaders don't appear to understand the close tie between all the stages of delivering a product, so step by step the manufacturing process has been transferred overseas, mostly to Asia.
Few plastic products are made in Asia from molds made or designed in the US because the companies that did that found it necessary to move the mold and design work to Asia to be close to the manufacturing. In the area of notebook and handheld computers, all the work on the cases is done in Asia because no one in the US knows how to do it.
While you can point to many low quality products from China, that was the situation 40 years ago for products from Japan, and 20 years ago for products from Korea and Taiwan, but today the majority of high volume precision parts and components come from those countries. It won't be long before China is beating them in price and matching them in quality.
While the article doesn't actually say that mindstorms are being killed off, it does seem like Lego isn't going to invest in a better followup product. But that's probably a lesson they learned from Americans: assume that fewer people will lead to higher profits and that will lead to increased sales.
Right on, Fischertechnik is great, highly recommended for a wide age range (6 up). When it appeared back in the 70s it was a huge advance over old Lego and Meccano / Erector Set and I would think it holds up very well today against the likes of Knex and Mindstorms. The basics of wheels, gears, joints and axles and are very mechanically solid - like Meccano, unlike Lego - but very easy to snap together. The electronics always appeared very modern - all fine wires, quiet motors and tiny lights so I'm not surprised to hear that they've responded to the digital age in style.
"Lego" is in fact a Latin word, but it means "I read".
LotR suddenly makes sense. Legolas is latin for "I read women"!
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
The page that AV links to is real. However, AV is not. He has nothing to do with that page; he is not Russel Nelson's friend. Amsterdam Vallon is a known impostor troll.
Management with a clue (tm) would have realized about a decade ago it was time to produce the 'Lego Value Line' with probably 5-10 very generic and interchangable pieces that can serve as the base of some other larger more specialized constructions....
Hear, hear! I couldn't agree more. I'ld say it should be more like thirty or forty pieces, all in classic colors, with one of the big flat bases.
In fact, I seem to remember that when I was a kid (way back in the early seventies), there were kits just like that.
I'll say this much. If there were kits for a little under twenty bucks that would give a kid enough to be functional, I'ld be buying two or more kits per year, handing them off to every kid born to friends, relatives, whatever.
I spent around eighty bucks this year on simple basic toys for various kids in the under ten range and that is about average.
Oh, just for the record, *my* legos all got packed up in, yep, a bucket and shipped off to my nephew when he was around three. As of when he was hitting his teen years, he was still very happy to have gotten them.
As for the related issue of the market decreasing as the accumulated sets stay usable, all I can say is, ARE YOU HIGH?! India, China, and Indonesia are all seeing the creation of a middle class that will get larger to the tune of HALF A BILLION PEOPLE in the next ten years. Add in Mexico and assorted industrialising nations and the numbers are huge.
All Lego needs to do is focus on all those first-generation-prosperous parents, selling not as flash gimcracks but as real educational toys and they'll have more sales then they can handle for the next generation, at least.
Sell Lego as a quality, prestige product that will help their kids make money as adults and the 'rents will buy by the ton.
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
So, I've now been to the Lego site, Amazon, and about half a dozen other places, and clearly there are plenty of kits just like what we're talking about.
Funny, though, I go to ToysrUs & others like them on a regular basis and I, certainly haven't seen these around.
What we have here, yet again, is a failure to communicate. Lego needs to get their shit together and get decent placement and promotion for their core products.
And ya know what else, I am, in fact, gonna be buying some of those "creator" tubs in a few weeks for some upcoming birthdays. Sending a few of my dollars to the folks in the cold lands.
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
So the robotics lab will still be cool. I was afraid that these will return to the pre-lego era, with standard nerds (instead of cool geeks) programming obscure eproms and using black, funless screw-drivers.
ps. Finally found the reply button! I don't need to click the replies links and change topics anymore. Well, I actually asked the guy working besides me. He said You don't knooown?. And spent 10 minutes to remember it...
http://www.lego.com/eng/info/default.asp?page=pres sdetail