Making/Rating ‘according to spec’.
rzwitserloot posted in apple on April 16th, 2006

Since the beginning of the computer industry, everything that has anything to do with computers has basically been made, and is rated, according to the list of specifications. Is it faster? Does the screen support a higher resolution? Etcetera.

Apple is leading the way in realizing that this is a fairly ridiculous practice these days. I can’t think of any industry that works like that. Take the car industry. I don’t know anyone that bought a car just because it had a higher maximum speed. Yet, in the Computer industry, most other companies aren’t getting it. A good example to make my point clear: the origami mini laptop. Microsoft, Intel, Samsung: wake up and smell the 21st century, would you? This thing looks about as fun to use as this intriguing device. ouch.

Read on for a more thorough trouncing of the importance of the specification list.

EDIT: This entire article is filled with gems. A voice activated remote control? Aside from the fact that that stuff neverworks, who would POSSIBLY want to use this? It’s a remote control for crying out loud!

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This whole ’specification list obsession’ made sense for a while: Processor X ‘is better than’ processor Y solely because it is faster. GFX card X is ‘better than’ GFX card Y because ‘it rates more Frames per Second on popular game Z’. This CD-ROM is better than that CD-ROM because it spins quicker.

That last one was really the wake up call. I didn’t heed it, but I should have known by then in retrospect. See, with CD-ROM drives, the ability to read damaged CDs as well as steadily burn when writing far, far exceeds the importance of how long it takes. Something like ‘acceptance rate’ might still be construed as a spec but it is sufficiently vague that it is usually no longer possible to point out a clear winner. Yet everyone, me included, still looked at that ‘50X’ thing and forgot about any other concerns.

My last computer was still designed with specs in mind. I wrote down the basic properties of each component and custom-ordered some parts to fill the job. This much RAM, that much HDD size, this many Ghzes on the processor, etcetera.

Of course, my current computer is an absolute piece of turdery when looking at it from the ’specifications’ angle. And yet it is the first computer I’ve ever owned that doesn’t get on my nerves.

In fact, many of Apples products don’t exactly look good when you look at them through the ’specifications’ glasses, while products like Origami really shine through them. At the low end, for example, dell laptops offer similar hardware as my iBook for about 2/3s the price, even with my lucky deals on this thing. And yet right now I’d be perfectly willing to drop 3x or more if that’s what it takes to get the coherency of an iBook.

These days, your average 500 bucks computer has enough raw capability to do whatever you could possibly want from a PC, really. Even live digital compression of video streams if you want it to. It therefore makes ever so much more sense to look at computers like people look at cars: Horsepower, 0 to 60, maximum speed, etcetera are really only minor bylines. It’s all about how the car drives, looks, feels - how much room is inside, how safe is it when I decide to get personal with a treeline or a ditch, etcetera. Apple products virtually always come off very strong when looking at them that way.

For example, I just spent half my day screwing around trying to get an Epson PictureMate personal photo printer to work. I did sort of get it to work but it now still costs about 29c a print, whereas in iPhoto, a little button called ‘order’ allows me to let kodak do the work (even better than this little printer can) professionally, for slightly less money, with absolutely zero hassle. They can even make whole calendars, A1 size pictures, etcetera. A simple solution that no printer manufacturor could possibly beat on flexibility, price, or utility.

You just can’t put this sort of thing on some sort of specification list, but that’s truely where the next steps lie in the computer industry.

Microsoft, Samsung, and Intel (not to mention half the CS students at the TU Delft) still intrinsically think in specifications, though. The first ‘informed opinion’ about the iBook is, at least for some: But isn’t the processor really slow? Nevermind that the OS is more responsive than your average XP or Linux install on a real monster PC. Just about everyone outside the CS world - that would be most of the customers of CS equipment, in fact - look at an iBook and say: Ooooh, shiny!

As long as Apple remembers this, and as long as the rest of the CS world doesn’t, Apple’s financial security should be quite safe. Apple appears to have absolutely no intentions of giving up their ‘design and user appeal first, everything else is detail’ philosophy, and clearly this new Origami project shows that at least 2 competitors of apple still haven’t got the first clue. If anything, this origami thing has given lip service to usability design in the same way that an iPod Shuffle hasn’t.