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Comment by cinntaile | Hacker News Reader

I checked out the Wired article. Not recommended seems to mostly be about the fact that it's a tiny display, which some people (like the reporter) will have trouble to read. That the screen degraded didn't help of course. The reporter doesn't want to use a web dashboard to check out the readings on his indoor air monitor. I think that's a fair comment, maybe just a bit harsh to put it in the not recommended bucket. I understand that this can affect sales quite a bit for a small supplier like AirGradient.

It's linked in the article but here it is. https://www.wired.com/gallery/best-indoor-air-quality-monito...

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> However, the reviewers logic is difficult to follow when you compare it across products:

> - Our monitor: Downgraded due to a faulty display (a warranty-covered hardware issue).

> - Another Monitor: Recommended, despite having no display at all.

> - Another Monitor: Also recommended, despite lacking a CO2 sensor—one of the most critical metrics for assessing indoor air quality and ventilation.

The problem with that "no display" example is that the monitor isn't failing to do a thing they're trying to do, which AirGradient's did in the reviewer's perspective.

It's not a failure that the one without a display doesn't have a display. It's a design choice. The AirGradient unit has a display, but it's tiny and hard to read. Scrolling through the article, all the other units with displays have much larger and more readable text. You can read the biggest data points from across a room. The AirGradient has a display, but it fails to be a good display, hence the reviewer's perspective - it's not living up to its goals.

This feels best summarized as:

• Product A has limited features but does them well. If the customer is okay with the features the product has, the reviewer can recommend it for this customer.

• Product B has more features but is impacted by QA issues as well as product design decisions that make those features harder to use. This impacts the ability of the customer to use features they might've paid for to use the product, and it may even impact their ability to use features core to other products. This potentially makes Product B less desirable for comparable use cases.

With this in mind, I'm inclined to agree with Wired's decision.

I don't agree with this kind of thinking. You have to determine what exactly what you want, anything else is just "nice to have". If you want an air monitor and don't care about screen, having screen is just a "nice to have" and should not affect your experience. And if you do care about the screen, you should also remove all no-screen air monitors from the list.

The screen is the “how,” not the “what.” An item is designed to function with the parts it has. A unit designed without a screen is doing the job another way—say, with a row of LEDs or something. I care whether I can find out what the air quality is, I don’t care whether or not I do that using a screen. It seems to me like relying on a finicky screen was a poor design decision.

It also raises my eyebrows that they see “repairability [as] one of our core differentiators.” It’s cool to make that possible quietly for people who are into it, but would you want a “repairable” smoke detector? Or one that just works? If it broke, would you want them to send you one that’s not broken, or parts and a booklet of repair instructions?

Do that enough and then the category becomes irrelevant. Every product is a unique snowflake owing to some perfect combination of features (has screen, 30cm3 volume, 19.3 db loud, etc.

If I pay for X, I will be mad if I can only use X-1.

I have an air gradient monitor.

There are three outputs. LEDs that go from green to yellow or red. The small display. A webpage dashboard. Or you can plug the data into HA for whatever you want.

The only issue I have with the display is that it’s monochrome and that prevents making data easy to read the trends, by showing positive changes as green or negative ones as red.

If the display is too small the LEDs are easily visible for quick information and then the dashboard is for more data.

Reviewers often have their issues really understanding how people use products, often because rapidly changing things to review, doesn’t allow them the time to truly use and understand a product.

> Reviewers often have their issues really understanding how people use products, often because rapidly changing things to review, doesn’t allow them the time to truly use and understand a product.

The reviewer states:

    I’ve been using AirVisual Pros for the past five years.

so it's not like they're new to the field. They know what they want out of the product they're reviewing. That may not be what someone reading the review may be after, but that doesn't invalidate the review.

I'm not sure this contradicts GP's point - this reinforces that the author is comfortable using a different product (AirVisual Pro) and may therefore, almost paradoxically, struggle more with a product that displays data differently than someone who has never used either product.

To draw a parallel, I think an iPhone user may have a harder time using Android than someone who has never used either phone.

Admittedly, I'm another happy AirGradient user.

Yes, time to adjust and familiarize oneself with a new product is often too short. Let alone adopting new sensors into a smart home ecosystem and fully setting everything up the way you want, rather than just the default settings, etc.

I get a new laptop and phone and generally dislike it, because it's not what I am familiar with and it's not yet setup just the way I like it.

And then there is the fact, that the reviewers favoured product has a logo on the product page for the reviewers publication.

There is certainly potential for financial interests to impact reviews.

Achim from AirGradient here. Some thoughts on this.

Purely focusing on the display, I can see a certain logic to say: Display not working => Not recommended. And probably I chose the wrong title for this as it made the article too much focused on this aspect.

However, the main critique for me is actually the general subjective nature of the article and the lack of a systematic testing approach for the monitors. In my opinion this review should not to be called "The Best Indoor Monitors" if Wired has an intention to provide objective and a balanced assessment of indoor monitors.

Of course I am unhappy that our monitor got labelled as "Not Recommended", but the bigger picture to what extent these "Best ..." reviews do provide a fair and comprehensive assessment is in my opinion the much more important discussion that we should have.

That, and many reviewers are given the "here's 20 products, I need an article hitting these buzzwords in X Weeks" task.

You can't just do that and get in quality testing time with more than one or two products.

Reviewing things fairly and helpfully is hard and takes time, and especially as AI slop takes over writing (thankfully it looks like this article at least has a byline), I think it's going to be harder and harder to find actual useful human reviews to guide decisions.

Come on, these are air quality measuring devices. You set them all up, set their panels next to each other for the duration of the testing, and then you evaluate their performances. It doesn't take much time. You look at them when you take readings at whatever interval to compare accuracy. You glance at them to see readability. It doesn't require a lot of effort.

This is quite different from being tasked with comparing bicycles which would require a lot of effort to give equal time to each one. Unless the journo was a world class rider, I'd be shocked if they rode any one of them for more than 5 minutes.

Applied inversely to bikes: Come on, these are bikes. You get on the bike, you pedal around, it doesn't take much time.

These devices usually have between 3-8 sensors inside (with wildly varying quality and quality control), run firmware that _usually_ has access to your WiFi or requires an app to run on your phone (security implications), and are meant to exist in your home for years at a time.

Good reviews which consider all those aspects take time and effort, even for simpler devices.

If you are actually in good faith comparing the zero energy collecting of values from a set of monitors to the physical exertion of riding a bicycle as the same thing, then I just cannot have a conversation with someone that is deliberately being that obtuse.

Why do you believe that collecting data, collating it into useful information and making conclusions from that information is "zero energy"? Yes, testing bicycles will require more calories and exertion, but that doesn't mean that testing computers, sensors, or other technological devices is a zero energy effort.

I have one of these. The unit has bright LEDs that display the levels at a glance. Key point being that you can actually program the LEDs to report the parameter you're most interested in as well which is great. The LEDs are part of the "display" as well.

This seems like a big assumption to make since that isn't the reasoning presented in the review.

> I understand why I need to check a dashboard for an outdoor air quality monitor, but having to check a dashboard for an indoor monitor seemed like an extra unnecessary step.

This is after already mentioning the unit also has led light bars to display quality without reading the number.

The reviewer seems to be saying that just lights and a web dashboard isn't enough for and indoor monitor.

Yet earlier in the article the Author picked the "Touch Indoor" as the unit with the best display, even though that is an indoor unit with no screen and only led lights.

Given that, you'd think the AirGradient unit's lights would be compared to say why they are worse, but that doesn't happen.

Having read the wired reviews, they set off my internal alarms for "low quality reviewer" who doesn't display a deep understanding of the products being reviewed or the market segment. There's a lot of fluff and stuff about screen size and very little digging into which actual accuracy and functionality.

That said, I haven't seen any good reviews from wired in a log time.

I'd rather buy no display and get no display than buy yes display and get no display

Buy display, it’s super tiny, and then it breaks after a couple months.

LEDs mean something, you can program them, or not.

A screen I can read from across the room that changes would be nice. Not interested in running a server or going to a webpage or app to see my indoor air quality.

That’s not the dichotomy. You do get a display. The reviewer’s didn't work and instead of waiting for the replacement unit they just published a “not recommended” and told AirGradient “sorry I don’t get paid enough to give your product a fair shot”.

I think the right thing to do in that case is report the failure and the customer service experience you had in dealing with it. I've had companies that I recommend despite an initial failure because the customer service experience in correcting it was excellent, and companies I don't recommend whose product worked relatively well but when the inevitable happened their customer support was sorely lacking.

As a consumer I don't get to buy a unit that the company hand picked and inspected with extra fervor to ensure that it's perfect, I get to buy one off of the shelf. So when I'm reading a review I want to know what the off the shelf experience is. If I read a review that gave the company "a fair shot" by ignoring the broken unit and reviewing the replacement I'd feel lied to.

They didn't just include the “I had to get a replacement unit” as a part of a bigger review where they ultimately did what normal consumers do and have the manufacturer replace the unit. Kudos to AirGradient for not trying to pamper their reviewer with a hand-vetted unit like everyone else. But it backfired. The reviewer isn’t a normal consumer who cares enough to return their unit for a working one. That’s the point. You’re not getting an authentic experience because the reviewer just gave up because there wasn’t time/budget to do the fair review.

Or perhaps more accurately, "sorry you didn't pay us enough to give your product a fair shot".

The logic is more like “this is the only company that shipped us a broken review unit.”

The transparency of this company is nice but you can’t control what other people think about your products based on their experiences. It isn’t really “unfair” at all, at least not 100% unfair. They are essentially upset that the press is allowed to have an independent opinion.

If I buy a laptop and the screen is broken (warranty issue!) that’s still a lot worse of an experience than a desktop PC that has everything working. The excuse that a desktop PC doesn’t include a screen isn’t relevant, the idea is that the competition shipped a fully functioning product.

I guess you didn't tead the review, because that isn't what happened

> After using the monitor for a few months, the display began to fall apart into unreadable characters.

I did read it but missed that detail. This bolsters my original point that the review was being reasonable and the manufacturer is using farcical “transparency” to whine about a deserved bad review.

Looks like the AirGradient went up against a similar device with a huge colour screen that's easy to read. No wonder they preferred that, although I'm not sure if the $100 price difference is worth it for other people.

The AirGradient screen isn't even that small, but the UI can be much more user-friendly IMO. There's a reason all the other meters with screens do HUGE NUMBER+tiny label.

I'm sure many people will prefer the AirGradient, but I don't think the reviewer is wrong for having different preferences.

But it also had an LED light to show the quality at a glance.

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