"Project Farm" on YouTube does really great tool reviews with zero BS. There are differences between major tool brands and it's not just a matter of same factory, different brand sticker like with a lot of electronics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpjBJ8aQ3NE is a good example. It's pretty hard to go wrong with any of the major players these days, more about what color you like or their tool ecosystem. I'm into Milwaukee and like a whole lot of their tools, so I ended up getting about a dozen of them over the years. Milwaukee tends to be on or near the top in terms of performance, and while that might not be necessary for occasional non-professional use, I have done a few things with them where I was glad to have the extra power or just have a well-designed tool that is easy to use. Festool is even more premium but when I started buying Milwaukee they didn't have any or maybe only very few cordless tools, and they were too expensive for me at the time. Home Depot does pretty awesome holiday sales on Milwaukee if you keep an eye out, and eBay also has great deals on "tool only" once you have some batteries in your ecosystem of choice, as people do things like buy combo packs and sell the individual tools they don't want. Milwaukee also has excellent batteries that while pricey, are again relatively easy to find deals on if you keep an eye out.
Hand tools are sometimes more about feel than actual performance differences, but over the years I've come to appreciate (and be able to easily afford) the nicer stuff. It's nice not stripping Phillips head screws now that I've got really nice drivers with excellent sharp grippy tips in all the different sizes to properly fit. I grew up with the poorly-made fake chrome set of "jewelers" screw drivers that I'm sure many of y'all also learned on. I guess it makes me appreciate Wiha / PB Swiss / Wera / Felo / Klein MIUSA / custom boutique stuff (check out Scout Leather Co and CountyComm TPSK for some of the best precision multi-bit drivers I've used) more now.
I admit that there are some made-up Chinese brands that are just slapping a random name on stuff coming out of the same few factories and selling on Amazon (then changing the name if they get bad reviews) for tools, but that's only really at the bottom of the market. Mid and top-tier tools do actually have measurable performance differences in many cases. Whether that's worth it to you is for y'all to decide. I just really hate ruining a project / breaking stuff because of bad tools that can't do the job, and I dislike supporting companies that make knock-off designs (i.e. they don't pay for their own R&D) out of cheaper, weaker metals then selling look-alikes at still-too-much-for-what-you're-getting prices. There's actually a name for this in the bicycle world: "bike shaped objects".
I wish that most screws and hand screwdriver heads (I have more electronics than mechanical experience) were designed to not slip/strip in the first place. Torx is great, Phillips is not, I hear that there are alternative cross-shaped screw heads which don't strip, and I don't know if they work on Phillips screws or not. Though I don't have expensive hardened screwdrivers, and most products' screws aren't expensive and hardened either.
>It's nice not stripping Phillips head screws now that I've got really nice drivers with excellent sharp grippy tips in all the different sizes to properly fit.
Life hack: use a better screw. Pozidriv is 60 years old!
Hand tools are sometimes more about feel than actual performance differences, but over the years I've come to appreciate (and be able to easily afford) the nicer stuff. It's nice not stripping Phillips head screws now that I've got really nice drivers with excellent sharp grippy tips in all the different sizes to properly fit. I grew up with the poorly-made fake chrome set of "jewelers" screw drivers that I'm sure many of y'all also learned on. I guess it makes me appreciate Wiha / PB Swiss / Wera / Felo / Klein MIUSA / custom boutique stuff (check out Scout Leather Co and CountyComm TPSK for some of the best precision multi-bit drivers I've used) more now.
On hand tools, Project Farm reviews those too, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HP4uECoH8cc for torque wrenches.
I admit that there are some made-up Chinese brands that are just slapping a random name on stuff coming out of the same few factories and selling on Amazon (then changing the name if they get bad reviews) for tools, but that's only really at the bottom of the market. Mid and top-tier tools do actually have measurable performance differences in many cases. Whether that's worth it to you is for y'all to decide. I just really hate ruining a project / breaking stuff because of bad tools that can't do the job, and I dislike supporting companies that make knock-off designs (i.e. they don't pay for their own R&D) out of cheaper, weaker metals then selling look-alikes at still-too-much-for-what-you're-getting prices. There's actually a name for this in the bicycle world: "bike shaped objects".