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Coke computer vs. Pepsi computer

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53 pointseykanal42 comments

The essential point about specs is bang on, but comparing computer purchasing to soft drinks over-trivializes it. Soft drinks have nearly zero feature differentiation.

Lots of consumer goods have meaningful features. One dishwasher might be quiet. Another might use very little energy. A third may heat its own water, sanitizing the dishes. You may want a model that can be fitted with a panel to match the cabinetry.

What dishwasher manufacturers have moved away from is specifications that do not strongly correlate with features. How many horsepower does a dishwasher motor have? How many chips are in its circuitry? What does it weigh? These things are rarely front and centre, because most buyers can't draw a connection between them and a benefit they will enjoy.

The trend is not towards brands being the only thing that matter, but rather towards features that probide benefits. RAM and Megahertz are specifications. Being powerful enough to do speech recognition in real time is a feature. Siri is a benefit.

Your point about over-trivializing is a good one. I had a hard time figuring out what sector to use as an example.

Movies. Handtools. Paintings.

They may seem a disparate set, the connexion is subjectivity. Movies and paintings both speak in different ways to different people, and everyone knows they may like something their closest friend hated.

It's even more of a clear cut with handtools. If you don't get the right one to fit your task, any talk of quality/speed is useless. The best concrete drill can't replace a carpenter's hammer if what you need is to extract nails.

Some specs matter; the problem is that they don't present their strengths clearly or they dilute it with meaningless ones. I could send a soccer mom to a store and tell her to prefer an SSD over 4200 RPM, i7 over Atom, 4GB RAM over 512MB. She doesn't know what these are, but she does know which one is better, the same way she'd know that a V6 is more jumpy than a 4-cylinder.

(edit, had RAM specs swapped)

Specs are an awful proxy.

Specs do matter insofar as they impact user experience. That relation, however, is not linear. Diminishing returns are very common and there are also discontinuities.

Also, there are tradeoffs to consider: noise, temperature, weight, size, speed, battery, price, software …

You can’t have it all. That’s just not an option.

Specs are an implementation detail. They matter, sure, but the average consumer shouldn’t try and judge products based on them. That’s destined to fail. They should look at user experience and tradeoffs.

Companies and reviewers should try to translate the specs that were used to implement tradeoffs into user experience. Who is this device good for? What tradeoffs does it try to pick? Does it do a good job at that?

That’s what matters.

The problem with doing that is it would require very comprehensive reviews or for customers to very thoroughly try out all products before purchase.

For example if a new product is launched on the market and it appears to be cheap but you know that it has a Fast Quad Core CPU and decent video hardware , you already know in a relatively small amount of text that it will be good for video editing , gaming and various other tasks.

If it only has a 300Mhz CPU you already know that it will not be good for any of these tasks and you can confidently avoid it.

As another example I remember years ago seeing computer adverts which would attempt to simplying their specs with bylines such as "Family Computer" , "Small business computer" , "Games Computer" etc. What if you want a PC for use by all the family for homework/internet etc but the oldest child happens to be an avid WoW/COD Player and Dad plans to use it to prepare accounts for his small retail business?

It’s not so hard, really. There are a very limited number of use cases, a limited number of tradeoffs. A long list of specs is much worse than just writing “This machine is great if you need a lot of power for video editing and rendering and other creative tasks. It is, however, correspondingly noisy, hot and big, not a very good fit for mobile use or for anyone who needs a quiet computer.” That’s so much more helpful. Specs are code in comparison.

Specs confuse, specs frighten, specs suck. They force consumers to figure out the tradeoffs that stand behind them. That’s too much work.

Not necessarily , the specs do confuse but that is mainly because the computer market as it is at the moment is confusing.

Just to pick on the example you used, let's say I want to write a novel and create a flyer for a local charity event. These are "creative tasks" how do I know if this computer will be able to do that, do I really need a $2000 Mac Pro for these?

It is big, but how big? Will it fit into the cupboard next to my desk?

Computers have a huge number of use cases that will continue to grow rather than decline, listing the suitability of a computer for each one of these would take far too much space in a brochure if it didn't computer manufacturers would have been marketing this way already.

(Edited for reply to next post)

I think my point is that it would be very difficult , almost impossible to write comprehensive reviews without any specifications to work from, especially brochure/advetising which needs to be very short.

Essentially a good spec is the normalization of a description of it's suitability for different use cases.

For example a computer which can run Angry Birds happily but not Call of Duty MW3 at all.. Would you describe this as a "poor games computer"?

If all I want to play is Angry Birds (and similar games) then it may be a fantastic games computer , if I want to run COD then it isn't a suitable games computer at all.. At least a spec listing allows me to look at the minimum requirements of the software I want to run and know whether it is suitable or not.

Video rigs would be overpowered for other work, but we only know that because we understand the requirements of video editing on a computers hardware. A layman will not necessarily know this but they will know that their computer meets the recommended requirements for Microsoft Word and Publisher but not for Final Cut Pro because it "doesn't contain enough ghz".

I’m a terrible review writer, really. Don’t judge me.

When I say specs I’m mostly talking about internals. Size and weight do matter very much and those are also two things people actually understand†. CPUs, GPUs? Not so much.

Other than that you need only a better description. Video rigs are overpowered for other creative tasks, the review wouldn’t read as I wrote it.

—

† And now you can argue whether it’s better to actually write down numbers or to compare devices with aircraft carriers and football fields. I think both can be appropriate at times.

a V6 is more jumpy than a 4-cylinder

What?

I don't agree, this is a gross over-simplification and the comparison with Coke and Pepsi doesn't work.

Drinking a soft drink gives you an immediate, hard-wired response. Tasting something is, well, relying on your taste buds for one. How does this translate to something like working with a computer? It's just a dishonest and intellectually lazy comparison.

Mac or PC, Laptop or Desktop, Battlefield 3 or browsing the web. If your grandfather with arthritis and bad sight buys a 11.6" MacBook Air with a 1366×768 resolution and a pixel density of 135 good luck evading him at future family ceremonies if you're the head geek of the family.

Also, I don't know about you guys, but I certainly don't want to be held accountable for a guy ending up with Norton Antivirus just because I went "you want a pc, uhh, it doesn't matter, just go with anything".

A computer is a tool, like a hammer. Have you used different hammers before? There are differences between different brands, and those differences are typically subtle. Computers are similar; they're mostly identical, and the differences between them (to the "consumer") is very subtle. If you buy your near-blind grandfather a 13" macbook for reading the news, yes, things will go badly. However, you don't need to look at the specs to know that.

I don't really know what your point is re: NAV.

Except the differences aren't subtle at all. In laptops, choosing between brands can mean a major change in build quality/durability.

The difference between 4gb and 8gb of ram? Huge difference (even if you aren't running memory hog programs, the OS uses it for prefetch)

How about ssd vs rotational disk? Anyone who's had an ssd as their boot drive will tell you, it makes a radical difference.

So no, its not like a hammer at all.

Many things can be a tool. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_animals

Now, how is a soft drink a tool?

Using the glass bottle to smash someone's head in might constitute the use of a tool. The bottle could be seen as a tool, it allows you store liquid for future use.

"a computer is a tool", "a computer is a tool like a hammer" - Great. What does this actually say? These are bad analogies. Using a broad definition, an airplane is a tool. So what does this mean, because the differences of hammers are subtle to you, all airplanes are alike? Or, well, weapons are tools. So, really, what's the difference between a nuclear bomb and a grenade?

A computer is allot more complicated than a hammer, a hammer doesn't have any moving parts for one. Of course there are still vast differences between types of hammers (e.g clawhammer vs a sledgehammer).

You will also have to consider peoples use cases for a computer, for example suppose somebody wants to buy a computer for use in their home but you know that they want to be able to run the latest Call of Duty every year and also archive a massive collection of video. Or perhaps instead they are worried about their power bill or are very environmentally conscious.

In both of these cases you will need to consider things like GPU brand & Model , HDD Spin Speed and Size and PSU power consumption. You really do need to know these things in order to be able to advise.

How is '13 inch screen' not part of the specs?

Aren't hammers a counter example, yes the difference between brand is subtle, but the difference between spec-between what it's actually good for is- large and important.

You don't need to look at the specs, because you see that when you're looking at a device. Just like you don't need to know the size of the hammer -- you see it. I guess that's what the grandparent tried to say.

It seems like it's more like Audi computer vs. Honda computer:

1. Price matters

2. Key metrics like HP are used in sales brochures to most buyers

3. Metrics like 0-60 time or torque will be available for advanced buyers

I've seen several people who bought machines with 512Mb, not realising that was a small amount, who then complain that their computer is very slow, despite being brand new. It does make a difference, however, most people don't understand the specs and top brands insist on shipping machines with poor specs.

As a side note, I wish my iPad had more memory (it has 256Mb), because the browser crashes on web pages with a lot of data/javascript.

I'm not sure I agree. I look at the nutrition facts on the food I purchase. I look at the specs. when I'm buying a car, and the specs. do inform my purchasing decision. When I'm buying a computer, I do look at specs. to decide which computer will run my computational tasks most efficiently.

For me, a world without specs. would be bleak indeed.

While I agree with you, I think the article was talking about the nontechnical consumers, the ones who don't understand what mhz and gigabytes mean, they just want a computer that does what they want it to do (yes, I'm being intentionally vague here).

That said, I'd like to think that most people/kids under the age of 20 or so have much better grasps on a computers technical specs, at least comparable to how most people are familiar with the relevant specifications on a car (HP, torque, fuel efficiency, etc)

Most completely non technical people will ask the advise of a friend/family member in order to make a computer purchase even if they don't know anybody they will ask a shop attendant to advise, these people will then interpret the specs on their behalf.

The reason that specs don't seem to be so important in the tablet world so far is that there really aren't many to choose from and in many cases people simply want an ipad in which case there are really only 2 to choose from and they are basically the same anyway.

The main reason that specs become so important in PC purchase is because with the IBM compatible PC there needed to be some way to differentiate between a bewildering amount of brands and models. There needed to be a clear reason as to why a $1000 PC was worth more money than a $500 one.

The problem was that there seemed to a spec war a few years ago (still continues to some extent) with computer companies trying to get as many high numbers into their ads as possible. For example allot of ads saying stuff like:

3Ghz CPU , 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD , 128MB Graphics Card for Only £300!!!!!

Of course this would actually mean you got a Celeron , lots of basic slow RAM , a low speed IDE HDD and a shared memory graphics card with minimal acceleration features but of course it would sound impressive to the less savvy buyer who had a basic notion of what the numbers meant but who didn't really understand performance overall.

I always compare this to people who compare the performance of 2 cars by quoting the engine displacement as the key figure for performance without considering induction method , valve configuration, fuel delivery etc etc. Of course cars at least have numbers like bhp and torque and bhp per ton which at least provide something to compare, I often have people show me 2 computers of similar price in a catalog and ask me "which one would be faster" and there is no way I can really answer that question with much confidence.

It was also important of course because many pieces of software , especially games would have a "minimum requirements" portion on the box.

Apple computers have always been less spec focused in their marketing , mainly because there are fewer models to choose between, so a simple Standard/Pro/Pro++ works just as well.

Of course specs are still important really , this is evident in how much hype is given to the CPU etc of a new smartphone when it comes out. Even apple have a "tech specs" section for each of their computers on their website , and usually give options for faster CPU , Extra Memory etc. When lots of android tablets hit the market I can't really think of many others ways in which people will distinguish between them apart from obvious stuff like screen size and weight (which are really specs themselves anyway). You need some heuristic which can be used for answering questions like "If I buy this tablet , how likely will it be to still be able to run all the newest graphically intense games in 2 years time"

The only thing that I can think of that has really changed recently is that more stuff can be offloaded to "the cloud" rather than computed locally, obviously in those cases local hardware specs become less important but specs like latency and bandwidth (especially upload) of your ISP / telco provider suddenly become more important.

Far more important the the GHz, RAM or VRAM size or HDD size is the construction of the machine (especially for laptops). That's where I'd spend the time doing the research. Dell uses cheap plastic, HP has shiny screens, Lenovo has magical alloy stuff they make the backing from, Apple sometimes uses aluminum for its cases.

Picking out a laptop is not like buying a car, but it's not a soft drink either. It's more like picking out clothing. Yes, quality is important, but you also want it look and feel nice and feel that it's not going to let you down (think stain resistant cloth, wrinkle free shirts, ties that go with everything, etc).

I think the car analogy still holds quite well here for laptops. You are making a big assumption in saying that material/construction quality is more important than GHz/RAM etc, this may be true for a certain segment of the market (who are probably just buying apple everything anyway).

If I buy a laptop and it feels abit cheap then that's unpleasant and maybe I wish I had a better one but if it is too underpowered to be able to run the applications I need in order to do my work/play the games that I want to then that is a total deal breaker and having it made from aluminum really isn't going to matter.

People do this allot with car purchases and will buy cars that are ugly , unreliable and have cheap interiors simply because they provide enough space for their family + dog with lots of safety features and decent gas mileage. This is how Renault make their money.

Specs are only ever irrelevant if there is only one product out there. The analogy with Coke and Pepsi don't really work (to me anyway) because you can try both out and can differentiate by taste. In addition, they both serve only one purpose - to quench your thirst.

Computers, on the other hand, are expensive (you can't just try them out) and used for a wide variety of tasks. For maximum benefit, you need to tailor it and for that you need to know the specs. Non-techies know that these things matter but they have no knowledge about it which is why they go to their tech friends for help.

I've learned to immediately divert those questions by asking what they want to do with their computer instead. And if they can't answer that immediately, I ask why their current computer isn't working for them (which usually nets an extremely specific answer before the question even finishes).

Diablo 3? $++. Pong? $--. Non-work-related and no high-gpu gaming? Size--.

Non-techies tend to fall into one of these groups, and computer manufacturers (except Apple) overcomplicate the choices to such mind-blowing degrees that it's impossible to determine between HP36Q9X and A95i, and even if you could you couldn't state your decision because it's impossible to remember or even pronounce. Buying computers is such a horrifying experience, I really can't blame people for remaining ignorant of the reasons behind things.

Computers are to specs as wine is to specify gravity. Someone cares, but it probably isn't you.

I think specs are important on products that are configurable. You measure the value of, say, a computer by the individual parts used to assemble the product. You remove and replace any of those parts, the value immediately changes.

Ipods, Ipads, Kindles, etc. have no (easily) configurable parts, so the price you see reflects all you get.

And plus, isn't software king nowadays anyway? Maybe companies like Amazon and Apple recognize hardware may be reaching some plateau with diminishing returns in speed, efficiency, etc. (or at least the differences between hardware competitors is becoming more negligible over time); therefore it's irrelevant to add a spec sheet.

"We’re finally getting close to customer-centric computer shopping, and hopefully more and more manufacturers will jump on the bandwagon."

This is an awful attitude to have. People do care about specs in hindsight. If they have a poor experience with a netbook, and it turns out that it's because of the dog-slow Atom under the hood, they're definitely going to care. Except, by the time the realize that they do care, they've already spent their money and they're probably without recourse.

For those of us that do understand tech specs, we shouldn't celebrate being deprived of the ability to avoid making costly mistakes.

I think this is a bit naive. It's like buying a car. Do people care if they buy a Toyota with a V-8 engine? Absolutely. They just don't know if that's good or bad, so they'll ask a car geek. After all, they want a car that is fast, gets good gas milage, and doesn't break all the time, and the engine affects all of those things. They just don't know if "Toyota with a V-8 engine" translates into those things.

Apple's biggest contribution is in making sure that the customer doesn't need to worry about the spec, not in making specs irrelevant.

A lot of low-end Android tablets don't tell you what CPU they have. Not the most helpful thing in the world if you're trying to develop a game.

A very good point; what's good for the goose may not be good for the gander, so to speak. I would love to hear an Android developer's take on the usefulness of specs.

This may apply to phones but I disagree with "computers". A PC with better specs is going to perform better than a PC with worse specs. Just like a macbook pro with worse specs will perform worse than a pc laptop with better specs (running Win7 at least).

Anyone else think of gaming consoles when they read this?

Gaming consoles, even today, don't need to share their specs. They do, but that's not why people by them. Very little in the way of hardware influences people. In fact, even the BluRay part of the PS3 isn't the reason people like the PS3. It's because they can play BluRays on it.

So, for certain people, Halo is important. For others, it's Mario. What does this have in common with things like iPad, iPhones, etc? The product enables you to use a specific ecosystem of features. If I buy an XBox, I can partake in XBox Live. PS3, I can watch BluRays and use PSN.

Kinect is the same thing: the hardware really isn't important. It's what it allows you to do.

That's what sells to people.

The problem is, when all the computers do basically the same thing, what's their to differentiate? What's does an HP do that a Dell does not?

So, how is this different then a Mac? Well, you basically have 4 macs right now: Mini, Air, MBP, and an iMac. The Pro is that machine for people that care about the hardware.

The Mini is clear in what it offers. The Air, MBP, and iMac are all specific, and the hardware features are fairly obvious, but they all enable access to the same ecosystem. The goal here is, when you go to buy a Mac, the only thing you need to decide is what you want to use it for (and, I firmly believe even that will slowly erode away).

Games consoles are odd in that there are usually only around 3 major ones in the market at any one time and they all do basically exactly the same job.

Even with a mac there is enough to differentiate the models in specifications alone, for example there are probably not enough people interested in playing high end games or do graphics work that they will ever need to put a high end video card into the Mac Mini so doing so would be a waste.

> Games consoles are odd in that there are usually only around 3 major ones in the market at any one time and they all do basically exactly the same job.

So you're saying people buy consoles based on how much RAM is in the machine because they all basically do the same thing?

> Even with a mac there is enough to differentiate the models in specifications alone,

That is slowly eroding away. No more Macbook. Now, what's the difference between a MBP and a MBA?

I think the most striking example is when you compare an MBP, an iMac, and a MBA with an iPad with a keyboard. What's the difference in the hardware? With an iPad, the screen is easily portable. That's pretty much it with regards to what matters.

> So you're saying people buy consoles based on how much RAM is in the machine because they all basically do the same thing?

No, I'm not saying that. I would say with consoles since the use cases are so similar the specifications are inevitably very similar in terms of performance (between Xbox and Playstation at least the wii is arguably in a different market altogether).

Since these are games consoles it's pretty obvious they are going to have powerful graphics hardware in the same was it is obvious that a ferrari will have a powerful engine.

The issue comes when you have a computer intended for a larger variety of use cases.

The apple devices mentioned do have relatively similar hardware but this is largely because they are all aimed towards the top of the market, it is more important at the lower end of the market where you have to make more trade-offs and you need some way of telling at a glance what those trade offs are.

One example of a difference would be if I was choosing a Mac that I wanted to run games on along with other use cases where the portability may be useful.

If I buy a MBA I get an Intel HD Graphics card whereas with the iMac I get some sort of ATI GPU.

The 3dmark06 score for iMac is 20915 whereas the score for the MBA 4185 (I found these numbers online so I can't vouch for their accuracy) this is going to make a monumental difference if you want to play the newest Call of Duty.

I suppose you could make an argument that instead of specs you should provide benchmarks but then the problem is that these need to be comprehensive and consistent.

Quoting specs is certainly far from ideal but if gives you a rough idea as to what the computing device will be capable of doing if that is not inferred simply by the name or appearance of the device.

The thing is that the Console companies control the supply of games so that only games that run fast (60fps+) are released. Basically you can't release a game that runs slow, so it's not an issue.

BluRay is that same, it's a standard and disc should work on all players.

Computers are not the same because the supply of software is not controlled, for example "Crysis" was released when it didn't work on most machines. In fact many machines were not even to fit to run the OS they came with, Vista, when they had 1GB or less of RAM - Microsoft does not stop even that.

But that's the point. Console companies control the supply of games, part in actual control, but also part in the known hardware part of things. The hardware is what it is, and developers develop for that. It's known. The issue with PC's is that it's unknown. Crysis wasn't bad if you had the machine for it.

But when you look at something like what Apple is doing, and what Microsoft is going to do with Windows 8 with the App Stores, you see things moving in that direction.

Basically:

> Computers are not the same because the supply of software is not controlled,

Yes, but that's something that's slowly going away. App stores are making that go away.

Apple’s decision not to release specs with the original iPod, and again with the iPhone and iPad, was them realizing that it just doesn’t matter.

Yeah, actually it does. What an odd thing to say.

With the ipod there were only really 3 specs that mattered, storage , size and weight. As long as the CPU is fast enough to decode MP3 in real time then it is basically irrelevant.

The original iPhone was basically in a market of one when it was first released, however now with more android phones becoming available people are becoming more interested in the technical differences between them mainly because it helps answer other questions about what will be possible with the device.

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