I rock the teal, mostly because they have the best battery management in the business.
A lot of the other offerings have the BM in the tool, but on Makita it's in the battery, so if you choose to use the batteries to power something like
this, you don't have to rely on whatever the 3rd party put in there to keep you kosher.
Then there's the design philosophy, which is much like Toyota. Stick with what works and make small incremental improvements. Any big change is generally incredibly well vetted (w/ some notable exceptions). They are incredibly robust tools that are pretty hard to kill. Plus, they have the best vibration dampening in the business, bar none. I appreciate this more and more as I get older and my wrists and thumbs yell at me after a day's work sometimes.
Then there is the ability to actually repair the tools. I've worked w/ power tools for enough decades now to know that no matter the quality, if you use the thing enough, it will fail at some point. Just the nature of the beast, it's not a matter of when, but how often.
You can repair a Milwaukee tool, but the part to do it is more often than not almost as expensive as the tool itself, and half the time it is not designed to make the swap-in of a new part in any way easy. While I wouldn't go so far as calling them disposable, they get close. Dewalt I consider disposable for all but their most expensive offerings.
Trigger for your Makita hammer drill? $6. And it's on barrel connectors in there, so swapping in a new one is maybe a 15 minute job.
Makita's parent company? Makita. 'Nuff said there.
They tend to be a bit more expensive than the other options (except Milwaukee, whose prices are somewhat absurd), they aren't the most high in horsepower (but I've never felt undergunned using one), they have an absolute crap modular toolbox offering (which is whatever, it's a box, they don't have to match.), their battery operated framing nailers are ungodly bad, so use Metabo there (but Makita just fixed this and the proper ones should be on the market soon).
It isn't all butterflies and rainbows, but taken on the whole, I'm super happy w/ their line of products and have been more than satisfied with every purchase I have from them.
I do a lot of mid-level carpentry more often than I'd like, but hiring it out is outlandishly expensive and to be honest, I don't completely trust other's work anyway. So, saving $10K on a new complete floor or $20K on a new roof? An easy decision to make while I have the youth in me and the tools at hand.
I generally do one or two big jobs a year on my home or one of my family's houses. We all help each other, so nobody has to shoulder it solo. What I'm saying here is that these aren't used for light DIY service. I buy contractor grade tools because I'm often up against that sort of work and need them. The savings of doing it myself make the sticker pain of the tools not so bad.
Then there's my woodshop. That's a whole thing unto itself. A lot more corded options in there, though.
www.dewalt.com
www.makitatools.com
