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.

Great stuff, but...

[BillFarber]

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.

Article Submiter Jumping to Conclusions

[Henry V .009]

They have not announced any stoppage of production on Mindstorms. You are reading a little too much into the story.

Re:What happens to FLL? - URL

[trickfish]

URL included this time:
First Lego League [firstlegoleague.org]

Visit my colleague's page on MINDSTORMS

[Amsterdam Vallon]

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/ [crynwr.com], 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 [homepage.dk]
2) LEGO MINDSTORMS Group official SDK [lego.com]

Enjoy these links and much more on Russ's page! I helped him with the HTML code ;-)

Re:What happened?

[Drakin]

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.

Re:Mindstorms was awesome

[doon]

Though I've never played with them because I'm a grown up now

So you don't play with Lego anymore that you are "grown up"? How sad :) 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 [sourceforge.net] and building my own sensors for it, I enojoy it much more then the Programming kit that came with it.

Re:Get back to ordinary bricks!

[pcraven]

If you want just plain bricks, they sell them [lego.com]. And those sets aren't that expensive.

Unholy deals with corporations

[CrazyJim0]

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.

Re:No wonder

[nucal]

Bionicle is one of the few product lines that is actually making money. In fact, rather than make tie-ins to movies, Lego corp is now making movies [imdb.com] on its own.

Re:Article Submiter Jumping to Conclusions

[XenonOfArcticus]

Serious LEGO and Mindstorms geek have been discussing this already on the Lego Robotics Mailing List [crynwr.com].

The consensus is that LEGO probably will not stop production of Mindstorms, though they may drop from 'public' perception and possibly only be available through LEGO educations resellers like Pitsco Lego/Dacta [pldstore.com].

I will not mourn the loss of the Harry Potter and other movie tie-in crap. Sounds too much like MBA-fodder and not the genius that makes Lego what they are.

Re:Star Wars did it

[mark-t]

Actually if I were take a bet on this, I'd say not.

My money would be on the Harry Potter line being the kicker. The previous two years, the HP line did *VERY* well, but it clearly didn't do well this last year simply because there was no new Harry Potter film released to recapture the interest of the public. Star Wars merchandise in general has consistently sold well past the "hype period" that is commonly associated with movie merchandising, so it's unlikely that the LEGO Star Wars line itself was to blame. That said, the licensing fees that LEGO had to pay coupled with a poor sales figure last year still did them in.

Re:Don't forget...

[thue]

From wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

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".

Re:MindStorms

[AllUsernamesAreGone]

"What Lego is using is most likely a pre-programmed chip w/o Flash, which are about 1/3 of the price."

RCX Internals [stanford.edu] has details - the microcontroller is a Hitachi H8 job, HD6433292B02F, with a preprogrammed ROM and space for software.

It's not exactly rocket science either, AFAIK they got help from MIT with the design (MIT have a "Programmable Brick") but it's something that a fairly competant hobby hardware hacker with a copy of Eagle and etching kit (or even use somewhere like Olimex) could knock together.

Price and Pieces

[MarkoNo5]

There is nothing wrong with a high price for good toys, but the following is completely ridiculous (the imperial star destroyer):

http://shop.lego.com/product.asp?p=10030&t=5&d=1 4& c=70632933%2DFEF6%2D4B18%2D9D06%2D6124A1D78027

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.

Re:Do they mean the whole Bionicle debacle?

[bvk]

The movie was direct-to-video, so there wouldn't be box-office numbers for it. The toy line was out for quite a while before the movie, and was popular enough that they decided to make the movie.

Actually, among the 6-year-and-up set in my son's school (in NJ), Bionicles are quite popular. And a few weeks ago we visited in Kentucky and they seemed to be quite popular there, too. I think the storyline and the fact that the sets are character-based make them popular. Plus the complex backstory and wide assortment of characters hits some of the same mental buttons as Pokemon, in that kids can develop a deep specialized knowledge area and be experts on it (even more than their parents).

Check out bzpower.com [bzpower.com] to see some of the Bionicle fan community.

By the way, even though Bionicle are built with quite a few specialized pieces, they are compatible with Lego Technic, and can be rebuilt to form as many different creatures as you can imagine (large numbers of which are currently populating my livingroom). They use quite a few technic pieces in their construction, especially in the larger Bionicle models, which are primarily standard technic pieces.

Maybe the huge licensing fees for Star Wars, Spiderman, and Harry Potter are part of the loss.

There still are generic block sets

[Anonymous Coward]

Folks in this thread keep saying the current sets are too specialized and that generic sets no longer exist.

1000 piece Generic Block set [amazon.com]

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)?

Where does it say Mindstorms is gone?

[SiW]

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.

Re:Mindstorm no more!

[Blondie-Wan]

But they also make general parts assortments. In some ways, one can find more "open," "nonspecialized" LEGO now than back in the '70s. You can directly order bags of just one kind of basic brick from them, for example, and many of the LEGO stores have bins of parts so one can just fill a cup or a bag with parts, as in a candy store.

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...

Re:Visit my colleague's page on MINDSTORMS

[arjun]

Enjoy these links and much more on Russ's page! I helped him with the HTML code ;-)

are you sure ? the page says that html was generated from LaTex !!!

Re:No

[aceh0]

actually it doesnt. try 220$ and 512 KB of cache.

Never mind Lego

[lastberserker]

Get your nephew a Handy Board or a couple of Handy Crickets :-) http://www.handyboard.com/

Re:Too specialized

[Anonymous Coward]

Lego still makes tubs of lego bricks, can't remember, but I think they're called Lego Creation or something, they run about 20 bucks for 700 pieces , usually in a wide variety of colors. Go check at your local Toy's R Us or other big store, and look down on the end of the lego section, they're usually kinda hidden away on a shelf towards the middle or bottom.

-- vranash

Re:Where does it say Mindstorms is gone?

[mark-t]

They are dropping all of the electronics lines, which includes Mindstorms, from their retail division.

But LEGO Dacta, the educational division of LEGO will still sell Mindstorms stuff. Pitsco is the distributor of LEGO Dacta in the USA, and will sell to anyone anywhere within an area that isn't already serviced by another regional LEGO Dacta supplier.

Re:Official Word From LEGO

[skippy1]

OK, I found the LugNet article talking about 3.0:
http://news.lugnet.com/events/legoworld/?n=30 [lugnet.com]

Here's another longer post about the same subject:

http://news.lugnet.com/robotics/?n=21957&t=i&v =a [lugnet.com]

Re:Mindstorm no more!

[homer_ca]

Very sad, to lose Mindstorms, although I never tried it myself. However, one maker of similar toys is Fischertechnik [fischertechnik.com]. 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.

Re:They Don't Care About Customers

[Apathetic1]

if you lose or break a piece, it's gonna cost you an arm and a leg to replace it

Huh? I wrote to Lego last year about a broken piece of my Lego watch band and they sent me a replacement for free. I also received a letter saying that they would continue to replace parts that were lost or broken but I would have to pay for shipping next time.

I don't think this has changed...

Re:Mindstorm no more!

[Blondie-Wan]

They do still have those buckets of bricks. As far as I can tell, they've always offered at least a few large plastic buckets or tubs full of hundreds of basic, general parts in assorted colors; certainly one can get those now (they have one large tub now that has 1000 pieces and costs $20).

The price of LEGO has indeed gone up over the years, it's true; so have the prices of cars, peanut butter, shirts, and most other things. LEGO is just as vulnerable to the effects of inflation and other economic phenomena as anything else, sadly enough, and they simply can't produce and offer stuff at '70s prices any more.

Re:Lego cost

[qc_dk]

According to a map on legos homepage they have production facilities in Denmark, Schwitzerland, Poland, somewhere on the east coast of north america and japan or korea.

They also have a nice flash animation on how the bricks are made http://www.lego.com/eng/info/default.asp?page=bric ks

When you see the movie with all its links in the chain of production please remember that the minimum wage in Denmark for a person with no education and no union affiliation is about 12$/hour, and pretty much any person in that chain would be entitled to more.

The reason for the high salaries is the income tax, which is about 45% for a low income family.

I am about as low income as you can get. I am on student wellfare(less than ordinary wellfare), and have a 8 hour/week job on a school, and i pay 40% net in tax. also of the wellfare. I postulate the 45% on that background.

I've seen some people saying they do not feel sorry for lego because ... specialized bricks.. too expensive. Please remember that denmark is not a big country and we are affected when one of our larger exports fail. Back in 2000 when the last lego crises hit, the taxes in Billund Kommune (the county where lego is situated), had to increase their taxes. A loss of 200 million dollars for the company is a loss of about 40 million dollars in taxes(assuming they could have a comparable profit). That is quite a lot of money to lose for a county of 8700.

And to all the people who have been nagging about the specialisation of pieces. Yes i have to agree i miss the simple bricks too, luckily I also have bags of them in the basement. But i am pretty sure that lego made that move for a reason, the crass commercialisation of our times. I am saddened that that is the way we are moving but there seems to be little we can do about it. It seems to be in keeping with the loss of small specialized shops with craftsmen running them to large supermarkets/superstores (ie wal-mart), where you'll be lucky to actually get bread, when you ask for some sort of bread that would go well with salmon. (this specific example is not from walmart but from a danish supermarket. Yes i am bitter ;-))

On a lighter note a couple of friends where over and we where bored when we remembered my old legos in the basement, so hours of fun later we had built a replica of a Blide (a danish siegeweapon) it is only 8" tall but is able to fire a 2-by-4 3 meters up into the air and hit a target ten meters away. (replace meters with yards for the metrically challenged).

production moving to china

[acomj]

Legos used to me made in europe. They've been moving production to china to lower cost.

Re:What happened?

[lahi]

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

Re:Mindstorm no more!

[Anonymous Coward]

my mom bought me several fishertechnik kits back in the early 70's, and they continue to be one of may favorite toys. I still have all my sets, and they have aged *very* well. They don't have instructions per se, they have illustrations of models and it up to the user to figure out how to put the various models together. I highly recommend them!

Bionicles Review

[Vagary]

My little brother got a Rahkshi Kaita Vo Kit [lego.com] 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.

Definitely not the price - Lego can be cheap

[magullo]

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).

Lego keeps on selling 1949 [lego.com] designs (basic lego bricks with ~11-year industrial patents [fcj.hvu.nl]) because nobody can beat them at their prices. Lego invests quite a bit in product design ... but also in manufacturing design. Their systems [lego.com] are partly secret [wikipedia.org] (and the company is 100% privately-owned).

There are clones that can *potentially* be attached to regular Lego, but their quality is glaringly inferior ... 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.

---

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 [bricklink.com] and Pitsco [pitsco-legodacta.com] are your friends.