See e.g.:
- ISPs advertising network speeds in megabits per second instead of megabytes (who ever uses megabits otherwise???)
- Banks advertising interest-bearing accounts with APY and advertising loans with APR.
Do folks have other good examples? I’m sure there are lots.
EDIT: baud is not exactly the same as bits/second. But in those times, it was pretty much the same. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20534417/what-is-the-dif...
Media encoding also commonly uses bit rates, e.g. 320kbps MP3.
Regarding media encoding, there I’m less sure. I guess those values were originally in small enough absolute values, and have not continued to climb exponentially, such that measuring in bits maybe continues to make sense.
Anyway, thanks for sharing those examples.
* ISPs selling “up to” speeds.
* Screen sizes measured in inches-diagonal, without reference to aspect ratio.
* Cost of US products advertised without sales tax.
* Lots of things that “only cost X per day” to make the amount look small compared to the consumer’s monthly income.
* Supermarkets purposefully showing you price-per-unit for one product and price-per-weight for another allegedly comparable product.
* “Miles per gallon” still being used in countries where fuel is sold by the litre.
* Purposefully hard to multiply numbers used in monthly instalments. “Only 27 payments of $79!”
* Use of 9’s. “Only $999.99!”
* Food and drink manufacturers which are legally allowed to describe the quantity of an ingredient as zero if it is below a certain very small amount.
* CPUs sold as “up to X GHz” where that speed can only be sustained in specific and unmentioned thermal scenarios.
* Any product where the price is kept the same over time by decreasing the size over time, without mentioning it.
* Misdirection away from an important metric, like how AWS shouts about the great per-GB storage cost of S3 but doesn’t shout so loudly about the egress data transfer rate.
* Getting really basic now: simply putting a number in the product name to imply superiority. This is why Microsoft had to call the second Xbox the 360: because “Xbox 2” would sound less than its main competitor, the PlayStation 3.
Some of these probably go beyond the theme of misleading measurements and into the realm of my general hatred for the marketing profession.
Similarly, Samsung jumped from S10 to S20 for the 2020 model year, which makes great sense to consumers despite being nonsequential.