No one is assuming printing costs are the only costs to produce the catalogue. The point of pricing the catalogue at printing costs is to cover the marginal cost of offering the catalogue for sale. The fixed costs of producing the calendar are incurred either way.
A company I worked for stopped doing physical catalogs too - after having done so for a very long time. The cost to produce the catalog was insane, and had quite a bit of dedicated staff working on it full-time. Making a catalog is a specialized skillset, and has little overlap with the business' core competencies, such as website administration.
Over time, the revenue attributed with the physical catalog declined year over year. People said they wanted the catalog, but it didn't translate into attributable sales. The ones that did order from the catalog were often the smallest, insignificant orders the company took in. The website and online advertising are where customers gravitated towards, and remain today.
The amount of people that actually want a physical catalog, even for IKEA, I would wager pales in comparison to the amonut of people that want to browse the catalog on their phone or tablet. Pricing changes, stock comes and goes, products get discontinued, colors/materials are changed, etc. The website is always up-to-date, the physical catalog... is not.
When I read comments like yours, I interpret them as people wanting nastolgic items more than marketing materials or ordering guides. The costs for the company are just too high to produce those anymore; well over $2 per catalog someone up-thread mentioned - we're talking more like $10-$20+ these days (not accounting for anything except print costs) for a full-color, glossy/professional catalog with hundreds of pages.
I have serious doubts IKEA printing catalogs today would garner any new business. They would give away (or perhaps sell) some copies to existing, long-time customers with a fond memory of the brand and their catalogs - and I'm afraid that's it.
I suppose on the plus side, my mailbox doesn't get completely stuffed with catalogs before Christmas every year. That aside, I do sort of miss leafing through all the catalogs I used to get.
Same way as IKEA restaurants were serving decent quality food for dimes.
It was business decision. People were thinking - we have a day off, we could go there and there, do some shopping, and then we go there for food, or we could go to the IKEA and eat there.
If you're "slave to the IKEA" and want to cherish your free day with consumerism, it was a no brainer if you wanted to shop on a budget and eat for free.
Unforntuantely, catalogues are gone and so are days of cheap food in IKEA.
It's because those markets are based on the LLM Arena leaderboard (https://lmarena.ai/), where Claude has historically done poorly.
That eval has also become a lot less relevant (it's considered not very indicative of real-world performance), so it's unlikely Anthropic will prioritize optimizing for it in future models.
Anthropic has always been one of the best at not optimizing for stupid metrics. Rather, they spend significant energy researching weaknesses and building metrics around that. Google is also pretty on point IMO, but they can also afford to dedicate to these nonsense metrics as they are still good marketing.
Meanwhile Meta and Xai are behind the ball and largely marketing focused.
Hi Simon. Do you recommend aider over Cursor? I've always used aider, and like it, but it just seems like Cursor is overtaking it in terms of features, and I wonder if sticking with aider still makes sense.
I don't actually use Aider or Cursor myself - I still mostly work in the ChatGPT and Claude web interfaces (or apps) directly and do a lot of copy and pasting.
Most people use Cursor. Aider and Cline are other options. All of these work with all of the popular LLM APIs. Even among people using Claude, I would bet more of them are using Claude through Cursor than through Claude code.
Just note that you will also need the Xreal Beam if you want the virtual screen to stay fixed in space while you move your head (it's too uncomfortable to use without it IMO).
You can plug them directly into your laptop (as long as it supports DP Alt mode, which I understand is common - my Thinkpad does). But, the virtual monitor will be in a fixed position relative to your head. Which is really not comfortable. In order to get the virtual screen to stay fixed in space while you move your head, you need the Beam.
I use the Xreal Air 1 with the Beam on my Thinkpad X1 and it's great. I really recommend it for flights. I don't understand why it hasn't gotten more popular. I can use my laptop comfortably for many hours, which makes long flights a lot more tolerable.
I only use them for laptop productivity. Not sure about VR stuff.
