When quality is hard to judge, price becomes a shortcut.
More quotesBang & Olufsen put dead weight in a remote control and made it feel more alive.
Engineers can find this offensive. Weight that performs no electronic function is waste. Customers, inconsiderately, do not experience products as circuit diagrams. They pick the thing up and the hand makes a judgement before procurement has located the specification sheet.
Heavy says substantial. Stable. Expensive. Built by people who did not panic at the shipping quote. The association may be crude, but crude associations still have bank accounts.
We accept the trick everywhere else. Restaurants use cutlery with the heft of minor weaponry. Hotel doors close with a deliberate thud. A presentation box opens slowly enough to suggest the contents have a solicitor. Nobody cries fraud because the fork contains more metal than strictly required to move a pea.
Then comes the fashionable confession: “It’s only perception.”
Only perception is a magnificent phrase for dismissing the bit the customer actually experiences.
That does not mean heavier always wins. The premium remote becomes a brick when it strains a wrist, dents the floor or costs a fortune to ship. A device carried all day has a different job from one resting beside a sofa. Added mass must earn its inconvenience in the context of use.
But function is larger than mechanics. If weight changes care, confidence, willingness to pay or the chance of losing the remote between cushions, it has done something. You may dislike what it did. The scale will not settle the argument.
Somebody added useless metal and created useful meaning. That is either design or a splendid insult to the word useless.