Why tech specs are going to be meaningless in the age of the iPad | Hacker News Reader

Why tech specs are going to be meaningless in the age of the iPad

ipadwatcher.com

13 pointsmlongo12 comments

For regular users tech specs haven't mattered in years.

Although I suppose if you're writing for a website called ipadwatcher.com you feel obliged to relate everything to the iPad.

True. Most Apple products aren't very good if you compare them in a "tech spec per dollar" kind of way. If all I wanted was a laptop with processor X and Y amount of RAM I could have found something cheaper than a Macbook.

You could say that, but the fact is that it was my feeling of stragenss with the iPad / netbook comparison I mentioned in another comment here that got me to thinking about this.

The netbook has 8 times more memory, but can't play movies as well as the iPad can. So comparing such a basic spec isn't meaningful any more.

Yes, tech specs do not matter if all you are doing is looking at the device as a consumable.

For techies i suspect it will continue to matter.

We (techies) tend to ignore that the vast majority of the web users today are not techies.

Not bothering with the tech specs is nothing new, game console market's been like that for years. People (normal people, not geeks salivating over specs) don't care how fast the CPU in their console is - they only care which games can be played with it.

They can still compare the quality of the consoles (newer, bigger, nicer, games will run on newer consoles, but not on older - or, one can complain about lack of DVD playback on Wii, without going into tech details).

(Feature) phone market used to be like this, too, at least from what I remember in the past 13-14 years in europe. Only with the rise of the smartphone (when people started looking at the more like computers) and phone cameras (the unavoidable megapixel comparisons) did tech specs started get into everyday conversation about phones.

It's hard to relay how "fast" and "crisp" it feels with numbers, which certainly seems to be part of the game apple is playing.

My understanding is tech specs are generally used to maintain price points.

"Yes, it's the same price as last year's model but look at the specs."

When I first saw the iPad I immediately drew a comparison to two other technologies -- the netbook and the Kindle. I guess I did the tech specs for the iPad by proxy.

Many tech specs have been close to incomprehensible to the average consumer for some time. Remember the gigahertz gamesmanship Intel was playing with the P4? The clock speed number was being inflated for marketing purposes, even though it resulted in hotter, slower chips.

I'm pretty sure every tech marketing manual ever written has had the mantra "push benefits not features".

What about battery life? device memory? screen resolution? Triangles/sec (for GPU/games)?

While those points might still seem relevant, I'm sure that they really are. Take the iPad as an example. With it's puny amount of memory it plays 720p movies perfectly which my netbook with 8 times doesn't.

Simply comparing these things directly isn't so meaningful anymore.

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