What's in a Number?

The PIKOM PC Fair just blew through KL over the weekend. For those of you who missed it, or who have never gone for one, it’s a veritable bazaar of the latest and greatest in technology consumer products.

Faced with a bewildering array of computers, laptops, camcorders, digital cameras, printers, PDAs and their attendant accessories, the average consumer can be forgiven some confusion in choosing what’s right for him. Relying on the salesman for edification – while he is spouting rapid-fire Cantonese and brandishing his product in your face – sounds more like a recipe for uninhibited expenditure than careful product comparison..

The problem is worsened by the industries’ usage of numerical specifications. To paraphrase a well known saying, there are lies, there are damned lies, and then there are specifications.

Numbers never lie…

A curious thing often happens in the marketing of products: someone somewhere latches on to a product specification, something which has a number attached to it, and starts to emphasise it beyond all proportion in the promotional literature. That leads to an “arms race” of sorts, as rival manufacturers are sucked into this competition and need to retaliate with their own numbers.

The megapixel (MP) controversy is an excellent example. Consumers go around proudly brandishing their new 10MP cameras saying its so sharp and so clear. Actually, as photographers can tell you, megapixels have little to do with sharpness, clarity, or even the size of the image you want to blow up. As Ken Rockwell notes in his blog kenrockwell.com, if you want to shoot sharper pictures, have better technique, and if you want to print a larger print, stand further back when you take the shot. Stand 100 feet back and you can print a billboard with an ordinary 5MP camera.

I think its because marketers, especially consumer marketers, are pressured to accomplish two things: to sell and to simplify. The problem occurs when complex products are over-simplified by the marketing department in order to make the job of selling easier. The quantitative aspects of the product specifications, being easier to understand, start to replace the qualitative aspects of the product.

…but they only tell half the story

Certainly a 200 gig hard drive is better than a 100 gig hard drive, of course, but the key thing is that its better, ceteris paribus, “all things remaining the same.” In the tech business, all things rarely remain the same.

The tendency for consumers at exhibitions like PC Fair is to go spec-comparing. I think this is a big mistake. I’d rather go test-comparing. Nothing beats getting your hands and fingers on the product, working the interface, and bashing it about to simulate the real world.

To give an example, these are the “soft”, qualitative attributes I look for when it comes to laptops/notebooks:

• Keyboard layout and comfort. I can’t emphasise this enough. Nothing frustrates me on a notebook more than a non-intuitive placement of the ‘Home’, ‘End’, ‘Del’ and ‘Ins’ and arrow keys, since I use these a lot.

• Heat management. It is understandable for laptops to heat up and start to burn your laps (should you still be one of the few people in the world to take the term “laptop” literally), but when they start to burn your wrists too, it’s time to get another one.

• Screen brightness and lifetime. Bad laptops start to lose their shine, literally, after a few months or years, when the LCD backlight starts to fade. Its tough on the eyes and the bad thing is, you don’t even notice until its too late and your eyes have suffered for too long.

Now, do you see any of the above traits marketed by the notebook companies? Of course not, they’re just not as sexy as “2 gig RAM” and “1.6Ghz processor”.

Thread Counts

If you think it’s only the tech industry that creates these sorts of non-informative specification arms races, think again. For instance, would you say a 800-thread count cotton bed sheet is better than a 300-thread count cotton bed sheet?

You should know the answer to that one. If you don’t, you can Google “thread count” and find out for yourself.


Appeared in theSun, 8th August 2008. e-Paper link here.