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Originally Posted by HansTWN
It makes sense for companies to de-emphasize specs. That way they can use cheaper components and make more money. And Apple, with such a strong hold over its users who tend to be not interested in technical details, was in a unique position to do so. Others have followed, all companies love an opportunity for extra profits, not just Apple!
What we are saying is that this is not in the interest of consumers, why should it be good for consumers to be kept in the dark, buying the cat in the bag? Sort of "hey, who cares about MPG on a car, look at the memory function on those seats!" Specs are indicators of performance.
It is true that specs cannot be used as the only means to compare different platforms -- but specs should be a very important part of upgrade decisions within the platform. As in "is it worth for me to get the iPad3 when I have the iPad2 already"? Another reason to keep quiet about specs, if consumers knew the truth they would be a lot less willing to upgrade every year. I personally will keep on using my phone (a Dell Streak) for the foreseeable future, since nothing has come up that is that much better to justify an upgrade.
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You are making a fundamental error in your analysis by assuming that Apple's deemphasis of specs means that their specs are worse. Or that the motive for deemphasizing specs is because they are worse.
Neither of these are true, but this is hard for people who don't pay attention to get their head around. By most measures, Apple has *better* specs than competing devices - better screens, better battery life, better chips - in particular, much better GPUs. Apple deemphasizes specs because they tend to believe - and correctly, I think - that consumers *don't care.* Again, Apple believes that it is more effective to show people what they can do with their products...how they can fit them into their lives...than to get involved in a religious argument about whether 512MB of dual channel memory @ 1066 is better than 1GB of single channel memory @667.
Most consumers just don't care about that. And more and more companies are catching on (it has, I think, been true for a while, although Apple was probably the first major tech company to make this point explicitly).
But if you *are* one of the people who are interested in specs, they are available. Go to Anandtech and read spec-laden reviews of the 4S crushing the competition, if that's important to you. (I always read his reviews). But you would need to go elsewhere *anyway*, since whatever specs even the tech-heaviest device manufacturer put out in its advertising material are going to be cherry picked and not useful without a more thorough breakdown anyway.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JD Gumby
Bullcrap. Android had 27% the shipped tablet market (iPad 67%) for the 3rd quarter '11, up from 2.3% in 3rd quarter '10. That is not consumer/distributor rejection. Quite the opposite, in fact. Might take a little while, but they'll get there. Now, individual brands are a different matter, but not that big a deal.
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As has been well documented, the "shipped" number for Android tablets includes a huge number of tablets that did not sell. I.e., Samsung shipped 1 million Galaxy Tabs in 2010, but apparently only sold 20,000. Here's a link, but there's a lot more like this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...ung-galaxy-tab