Are We Soon to See a Death of the Spec?

[Rob Williams]

At Techgage, we deal a lot with product specs. Gigabytes, RPMs, DPI, resolution, IOPS, megahertz, cores, bits and so on. For a lot of people, these things matter. A 7200 RPM hard drive is going to perform better than a 5400 RPM one, and a CPU with 6 cores is likely to be more capable than one with 4. But regardless of that - is a "death of the spec" imminent?

Read the rest of our post and then discuss it here!

 

[Optix]

I think they should be saying bye, bye to specs for the average end user. Folks like us? Fat chance.

The same can be said about cars. There are those who simply care about features like cruise control, air conditioning and style and then there are gear heads that know all about engines, air intakes, and all of that grimy stuff that I stay away from.

Specs will NEVER go away for the select few enthusiasts.

 

[Doomsday]

I think they should be saying bye, bye to specs for the average end user. Folks like us? Fat chance.

The same can be said about cars. There are those who simply care about features like cruise control, air conditioning and style and then there are gear heads that know all about engines, air intakes, and all of that grimy stuff that I stay away from.

Specs will NEVER go away for the select few enthusiasts.

I concur!

 

[marfig]

The PC market is also largely dominated(?) by corporate customers, for whom specs matter and a relationship between functionality and price is often carefully examined before making a bulk purchase or setting a new contract.

The general consumer may be less caring of high specs. In fact, I feel I'm often one of those since I don't always (read, never) look for the best equipment, and concentrate my efforts instead of acquiring a system that is adequate for my needs and has a reasonable life expectancy. But even then I need to look at specs to make a good judgement. In a way I behave much like companies. And many PC customers do too.

I personally think the article fires a straight shot... at the wrong target. What instead the author should have been looking at is at how much of this isn't a consequence of a general technological illiteracy that is starting to take a foothold in our society. As the techno revolution seems to be coming to an apparent end, and the age of true innovation obvious success gives way to an age of commodities and technological progression that abstracts away their inherent complexity, so do technocrats and experts become a much smaller percentage of a larger technologically oriented society.

With the big numbers and a market centered on commodities that try to remove any barrier to the entry-level customers, illiteracy starts to take a hold and slowly progress upward. Specs aren't becoming a thing of the past as there will always be someone asking how many cylinders that engine has. But what we are witnessing is less informed customers making purchasing decisions... much like many of today's customers who buy a new car.

...Just a thought.

 

[MacMan]

When it comes to specs, such as those in computers, the important thing isn't that your computer has the highest specs possible, but rather just enough specs to enable your machine do exactly what you want and need it to do. Anything more is overkill.

For example, one doesn't need a 12-core cpu, 16GB or memory, or the latest-and-greatest whiz-bang graphic card, etc., etc., if all you need and want is to simply read email, watch a few videos, surf the net, or play an occasional low-level game now-or-then, which is what the majority of people want and use their computers for.

On the other hand, for a few people, such as scientists, business people, or heavy gamers who play a lot of high-level games, then specs do matter a lot.

The important thing is that your specs are sufficient for your needs, and therefore there is no need to spend money on specs that you'll never really need or even use. Nothing wrong if you like em, or need em, of course, but most of us, myself included, we simply don't need the latest or the greatest when it comes to specs.

 

[OriginalJoeCool]

Wait ... you guys are still using digital computers? That's so 1990's. Quantum computers FTW!

If you're interested, I found this article quite informative. http://www.howstuffworks.com/quantum-computer.htm

 

[Kougar]

I personally think the article fires a straight shot... at the wrong target. What instead the author should have been looking at is at how much of this isn't a consequence of a general technological illiteracy that is starting to take a foothold in our society. As the techno revolution seems to be coming to an apparent end, and the age of true innovation obvious success gives way to an age of commodities and technological progression that abstracts away their inherent complexity, so do technocrats and experts become a much smaller percentage of a larger technologically oriented society.

I'm going to counterpoint this as I have to disagree here. My take away from the article was that specs don't matter, not because of technological illiteracy, but because tech specs don't create the user experience anymore. (in most cases)

Take a smartphone... throw a quadcore into one (a few vendors already have), but the user experience doesn't change because the software runs just as fast on a dualcore SoC. Same with gaming... the SoC GPU's in smartphones are as advanced as today's gaming consoles, which is utterly silly given the size of the display. People would need a microscope to spot future IQ improvements.

The user experience is dictated by the functionality and ease-of-use, both of which have become purely reliant on the software package. Apps and built in software functionality will have the "make or break it" impact for the end user whether it is for phones or tablets.

As MacMan pointed out the same is true for desktops to some degree... anything in AMD's or Intel's current repertoire is so fast that it's going to run email, browsing, office software, and general applications exactly the same. Which means the user experience will depend on other factors, such as if something broke or crashed, or it was a crappy keyboard, etc.

I thought TechCrunch's article ripped pretty hard into ConsumerReports, but CR was never about predicting the next fad. I use CR all the time when buying electronics and in almost every case their ratings have usually steered me towards products that have given me a good user experience.

As another website pointed out... the iPhone 4's hardware is one of the most impractical designs ever. It's a thing of aesthetic beauty, yet anyone that owns one puts a bulky, ugly silicone case on them just to avoid cracking the screen. Now that the 4S has both the front and back made entirely of glass, it's one of the most fragile, easily damaged devices out there. Yet everyone buys them and sticks them in bulky, large cases to protect them, completely ruining the entire aesthetic design of the device.

 

[marfig]

It's possible you are right Kougar. This is nothing much more than a though that has been with me for some time, but which I haven't fully explored yet.

But I'm not swayed by the idea that "tech specs don't create the user experience anymore". I think you are entirely correct when you say this. But I defend the idea that this is a determining factor that leads to technology illiteracy. The conclusion can be easily drawn that if specs aren't determining factors, they don't matter as sources of knowledge.

Now, if we add to that a genuine and understandable effort to create tech gadgets (including computers) that more and more try to abstract away the technology inside them, providing users with easy-to-use devices with virtually no barrier to entry regardless of the user tech knowledge, I have an hard time understanding how we can expect tech literacy to remain at old levels, much less to increase.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. If nothing else, it is a demonstration of the maturity the technological revolution achieved. Neither tech illiteracy is some kind of derogatory description of a society surrounded by technology; simply, the picture of a society to which technology became ubiquitous and commoditized (sp?) enough to be largely ignored as a function of know-how.

Certainly we haven't achieved that spot yet, when tech knowledge is a genetic second nature to the society, everything has been abstracted away from the end user and resides only on those living on tech labs. One reason why I don't agree with TechCrunch article.

There seems to always be a need in technological circles to describe the present in terms of the future. Maybe it's just a desire to bring in the future to the now. It surely is a common marketing mantra in this area. From the television that would kill the radio, to specs being soon a thing of the past. An overreaction to a limited and localized effect that is in fact a rather small portion of the whole market.

Another thing to take into account is that we are just witnessing a very mature and old technology that, according to a recent article here on TG is celebrating its 40th birthday. It sure is about damn time that most of the form factors involved started to become more transparent to users, and their purchase choices weren't limited by technological devices that can't answer basic user requirements. After 40 years I don't want to feel I'm still in a cave being offered badly chiseled spearheads. Some may be better than others, but I want them all to basically just cut through a Mastodon. But what this means also is that specs will just come back on the next technological iteration. By the time we invent the technological equivalent of iron and leave behind our crude micro-processors.

 

[Rob Williams]

The important thing is that your specs are sufficient for your needs, and therefore there is no need to spend money on specs that you'll never really need or even use. Nothing wrong if you like em, or need em, of course, but most of us, myself included, we simply don't need the latest or the greatest when it comes to specs.

That's just it. I got to thinking about tablets and mobile devices last night though, and I was reminded of what things were like back in the 386/486 days where major strides were being made every year with the capabilities of our PCs. Nowadays, people buy a tablet one year that's inadequate for playing the latest games the next. The same could be said about our phones to some extent. We seem to be in the same sort of race, where it could be years before the average tablet can do everything well that we want it to. In that case, specs do still matter.

There seems to always be a need in technological circles to describe the present in terms of the future. Maybe it's just a desire to bring in the future to the now. It surely is a common marketing mantra in this area. From the television that would kill the radio, to specs being soon a thing of the past. An overreaction to a limited and localized effect that is in fact a rather small portion of the whole market

You're likely correct there. The hottest devices out there today are phones and tablets, and most people who own them don't know what's under the hood - at least by anything but the name. They just want a device that's going to do what they want it to do, and sometimes, specs don't even matter in that regard since it boils down to the software.

 

[Kougar]

Hm, well those are some good points regarding technical literacy. I recall reading about some other factors that cause technical illiteracy, one of them being the increasing ready access to knowledge within just seconds. It was a somewhat humorous article at Ars Technica where even the author admitted they found themselves remembering what to type into Google in order to find the answer to questions... but not the actual answer. Sadly I'm pretty guilty of this myself.

Anyway, "technical literacy" by itself has a wide range of meanings. Like, much of the population is literate enough to use computers easily now, and in the past they even recognize things like Intel's Centrino branding, one of Intel's few great marketing successes at the time. But by and large very few people understand actual hardware specifications as it is today, I'd even go as far to say extremely few.

So I don't actually disagree with ya, but I'm not sure that it matters too much when it comes to specs simply because so few people are spec literate, and most simply don't care enough to do the research to check the specs. And I say that to everything, not just computers. People still don't understand the difference as to why 1080P is better than 1080i, they see 1080i and assume it is better than 720p and that's the end of that. Nor do they pick up on "DLP" or other HDTV terminologies... no DLP TV is going to be remotely as thin, light, or have as good a picture as a plasma... hence why the cheapest HDTVs are still projection based.