The Death of the Specification

TL;DR version - the relative popularity of technology gizmos doesn't correllate well with their specifications.

Somebody rolled out from under a rock that they ahd been in since 2000 and woke up apparently. The history was that with x86 flavored personal computers, there was a 15 year period between 1985 and 2000 where you could take two machines, compare the specs of the ram/processor/video and come up with a 'good, better, best' scale. This made it easy for technology journalists, they could get a press release for the new HP or Toshiba or Alienware PC and say "this is better than last years/competitor X's/etc model." Easy sauce. But eventually PCs and laptops got to be good enough so that most people didn't care, it just worked, and having more features was better, or having better features. So the 'specs' or the details of how the manufacturer did, was less important.

Why Techcrunch's editors didn't figure this out, oh, 5 or 6 years ago, is anyone's guess.

Now it would be great if they would internalize this newfound understanding and stop pumping up OMGWTFBBQ we have PS3 graphics on an ARM chip! Type headlines and instead focus on the people and companies who are using the capabilities of this embarassment of riches to provide new and interesting products. They do some of that of course but so far, for me at least, its not nearly enough relative to this 'specs are dead' stuff.

News flash: Consumer Reports is not a cheerleader for the top selling products. They are an organization concerned over what you get in actual fact for your money.

Consumer Reports is read by people who want to know all of the quality issues and hard facts about a product before making a purchasing decision. Such consumers always have, and always will be, a small market segment.

This "credibility rant" reads like a sycophant lamenting those who don't heap lavish praise upon the popular kids.

Based on the headline, I thought this would be about how software engineering is now most often done in a scattershot--sorry, agile--manner, without documents that first detail customer requirements, then product specifications, and so on.*

By the way, my somewhat sarcastic, somewhat serious rule of thumb is to avoid specs when doing software in-house that I direct and to insist on specs when contracting out work.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model

It is a bad thing that companies can charge monopoly prices.

It is a good thing that companies write good software.

Some specs are important. People care about storage space, screen quality, device responsiveness and battery life.

Some companies have escaped the competitive hardware market with differentiated software (or other things). So while 32GB micro SD cards cost $30, some others can charge $100 for 32GB of flash storage.

http://www.google.com/search?q=32gb+micro+sd&tbm=shop...

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_ipod/family/ipod_...

In an area of specification that people definitely care about, some companies can charge a 300% premium.

This is a good article, but the spec has been dead since the release of the first iPhone. (Maybe earlier, but that was when everyone talked about it.) Apple showed that users don't really care about spec unless everything else looks the same. When all consumers have are rows and rows of identical-looking computers, they pick the one with the highest numbers. When they have a single piece of hardware, with no specs at all, but which behaves intuitively and does what they need, the spec doesn't matter.

Everything the article says follows from that.

Just another way for MG to place Apple on a pedestal.

Look, it does make sense that when my mother goes to buy a computer, she can be confident in knowing what she's getting, without having to understand gigabytes, megahertz and cores. I get that.

But the first thing I did after clicking on the link to buy my Macbook Air? Spec'd it out the way I wanted. It's not transparent, and people like "specs". i7, 256 GB HD. It's the same reason I know the fuel mileage, tire size and horsepower of my car.

How can anyone take this guy seriously when he says things like:

"My MacBook Air doesn’t have the specs of a brand new HP PC laptop — but it still feels faster."

This is a less well thought version of Marc Andreessen's Software eats the World essay[1]. For devices like phones and tablets the platform (aka software+services) matters a lot more than the hardware.

Sure, there are a few exceptions: gaming requires specific hardware, the connected fitness market likes Ant+, Bluetooth 3.0 or dongles, etc. But the general case is that the software matters, not the hardware.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190348090457651...

Another way to look at this is that raw specs don't matter because it's execution and quality that matter. Every Apple product I've ever owned has cost 2x as much as the "equally spec'd" rival, but Apple products last longer and work better because they're better designed and made to a higher quality. I've had the same Macbook for 2+ years and it's still working great, while the EEEPC netbook is slower, full of bloatware and has had it's AC adapter plug fail.

On the one hand, I agree that the experience of using something is all that matters, and only a handful of specs (like storage capacity) actually mean anything.

On the other, I'm kinda not looking forward to the upcoming glut of Kindle Fire owners spouting off about what goobers iPad owners are, because they got the same thing (as far as they're concerned) for less than half the money.