A similar thing I've noticed in the last ~6 years is in regards to smartphones, and in particular their cameras.<p>Android is pretty standardized these days, and even a fairly cheap Android phone will probably do most smartphone things (make calls, send texts, watch YouTube, etc.) reasonably well, but a corner that seems to be cut in cheaper phones is almost always the camera, and that kind of makes sense.<p>If you're buying your phone online, you can look at the more-or-less objective specs of the phone like how much RAM it has, or how fast the CPU is, but you can't really tell how the photos will look [1], and as such it's easy to put a cheaper sensor or lens in there, especially in the cheaper phones which (I think) have lower margins.<p>[1] Even if the listing has sample pictures, you don't know how representative they are of the actual experience; they could just have taken the sample photos with ideal lighting, with a tripod, in a controlled studio, for example.