Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
Not low sales. Low profit margins. They're cutting the electronic, and licensed sets primarly. Which are the more expensive ones to make, electronic ones due to the cost of componates, and licensed sets for the costs of licensing.
One could only wish that they would license out the mindstorm excluseive items to be built and sold by someone else.
Though I've never played with them because I'm a grown up now
:) Even though I would consider myself all growned up now (27), I still love mindstorms. Then again having replaced the firmware on my RCX with Lejos and building my own sensors for it, I enojoy it much more then the Programming kit that came with it.
So you don't play with Lego anymore that you are "grown up"? How sad
To E-mail me, replace the first period in my domain with an @
If you want just plain bricks, they sell them. And those sets aren't that expensive.
From wikipedia:
The company's name was coined by Christiansen in 1934, from the Danish phrase "leg godt", meaning "play well". It is a myth that the word also means "I put together" or "I assemble" in Latin. "Lego" is in fact a Latin word, but it means "I read".
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.
Tellingly, the Make and Create sets are apparently a bright spot for the company; reportedly they're among the few things they do really well, which seems to indicate their customers do indeed want general, nonspecialized sets that encourage imaginative, free-form building and unguided play as much as possible (though I do know one of the Harry Potter sets was apparently their biggest seller last year, but I guess that's an aberration). If nothing else, those sets also have some of the better price/piece ratios among all their current offerings...
Very sad, to lose Mindstorms, although I never tried it myself. However, one maker of similar toys is Fischertechnik. They come from Germany, and they don't have much distribution here, but I had a set as a kid, and it's the absolute best quality I've seen for any mechanical tinkering. Imagine the best of Legos and Erector sets combined.
I've never tried their robotics kits, but it may be just what you're looking for. Eight digital inputs, two analog inputs, and four motor outputs. Also the quality of the gears, motors and structural pieces blows Legos away. Price is expensive, but not outrageously so. In the same ballpark as Mindstorms.
If this was a chinese company they'd sell 5lb buckets of assorted pieces for $5.
And each brick would have a lifetime of less than one year, developing cracks and warp. Of the 5 lb, at least 4 lb would be out-of-spec, either fit too loosely or too tight, and they would have sharp, annoying warts where they were carelessly ripped from the molding sprue. The color would vary extremely from batch to batch, be rather dull, and fade rapidly when exposed to the sun.
The problem with LEGO bricks is not that they are overpriced, but that they are overengineered. They are just too good. And quality is just not generally appreciated these days, especially when we're talking toys.
As a child, I had quite a few Matchbox, Corgi and Dinky cars, very accurate models, well made, often in England. Sure, you can still get those brands today, if you want to pay collector prices. The toy stores, at least here, abound with lousy chinese produced stuff, that breaks when you look too hard at it.
Mind you, many of my toys I had inherited from my older brothers. And many of my toys are still in such a good shape, that my son now continues to play with them. That's good for the customer, but it's just not good for sales: either kids inherit a toy (= no sale) or parents don't care about long life, and therefore buy cheaper toys.
I build plastic models (aircraft, military vehicles etc), and I can tell you that precisely molded plastic parts, even when they come in just one color and still attached to the sprue, as plastic model kits do, are *quite* expensive. *Even* when produced in China.
-Lasse
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.