This is a question I find very important.
I think that the fundamental, general problem is that companies will bring in new features to make people buy products of a newer generation, BUT (sadly) at the same time to get the maximum financial gain they will drop some features and assets of the previous generation.
BTW, Festool, and then Tanos (they split the company to have competing power tool companies adopt systainers, creating Tanos to deal specially with systainers, putting Festool and Tanos under the TTS umbrella) don't make the systainers. They have offices for the design, marketing, sales, but the production is outsourced to Gardena, a Germany company known for making plastic connectors, etc. for garden hoses. If I remember correctly, the kind of plastic used in systainers is ABS.
Now going from the first Systainer generation (Classic) to the second (T-Loc), the manner of connecting the T-Loc boxes allowed to gain a huge amount of time and ease in connecting and disconnecting boxes. BUT they saved on the material, decreasing the plastic thickness by 0.5 mm; what you gained in time and ease you lost in solidity.
Going from the second generation to the third one (Systainer3), they brought several improvements:
+ lower side adaptation for attachement to the sliding rack system in trucks;
+ new heights not previously used;
+ hinge(s) in the back.
BUT:
- they saved again on the material, decreasing again the thickness of the plastic by 0.5 compared to gen 2 (for me their sides are the least solid of all systainer generations)
- they dropped some of the previously used heights, messing with some advantages of the common, established height system of gen 1 and 2.
I am copying a table I made in another post, re. the thickness of the most usual surfaces in M-sized systainers:
| Generation: | Majority of flat areas: | Minority of flat areas: |
| 1 (Classic) | 3.0 mm | 3.5 mm |
| 2 (T-Loc) | 2.5 mm | 3.0 mm |
| 3 (Systainer3) | 2.0 mm | 2.5 mm |
The frustration comes from assets they are dropping: decreasing each time the thickness of the plastic, dropping some established heights.
Similar frustrating evolution are well documented re. smartphones. While each generation brought some improvements, some features were dropped. At some point they dropped the Infra-Red light (with this, some people were using their smartphone to control their TV and about anything). Later they removed the tiny 3,5 mm audio out jack (most people need at some point to connect a cabled audio device...) to force people to buy bluetooth headphones (Apple had purchased the Beats company. Samsung was ridiculing Apple for removing the jack connector, but they did the same after buying the AKG company and trying to sell AKG bluetooth earphones...). And they removed the slot for micro sdxc storage card to force people to buy the more expensive models with more onboard storage...
The ideal systainer (gen 4) should keep all assets and have none removed:
- keep the original plastic thickness of the Classic gen 1
- use the T-Loc System of gen 2
- use the hinge of gen 3
- keep the heights of gen 1 and 2, if adding newer heights (gen 3).
But the world of managers is not ideal but one driven only by profit, so I sadly don't expect them to keep all the features that their users love, i.e. not to do better than what we see with smartphones, etc.
We could think that they would do something ideal if challenged by a company selling systainers compatible with Tanos'.
But I am cynical, I suspect this may precisely be a reason why they keep changing the systainers by dropping some features: to maintain their market dominance. Patents expire after 20 years, after which any competitor can make and sell products based on the same inventions and designs. By renewing product systems with newer generations, they impose the new generation as the standard, which they can legally protect for 20 years, making thereby the previous generations partially obsolete so less interesting for competitors...
