7 ms·

I hate this trend of dumbing down product specifications. I don't know who started it (probably Apple?), but everyone does it now. Like what fucking i5 or i7 pr

I hate this trend of dumbing down product specifications. I don't know who started it (probably Apple?), but everyone does it now. Like what fucking i5 or i7 processor ? Is the storage soldered even for the nvme option ? It doesn't help that Intel keeps playing tricks with their naming either. i7 used to be quad core, then it became dual core for thin laptops. Now they are back to low freq quad core in some SKUs. For a $1k-$2k device which is supposed to be the pinnacle of science with billions of transistors, they spend all of the 20 minutes they have on stage showing puppy and kid pictures.

Romanulus 9y ago
... but... four mics!
rimliu 9y ago
What do you think majority of the users will do with those $1k-$2k devices—desoldering storage or looking at the pictures of cats and kids? The CPU or RAM specs alone don't tell much how well the device will perform.
- uniformlyrandom 9y ago
  But who are the majority of users here? If all the developers betrayed by latest Apple's MBP lineup migrate to a new platform, suddenly 'majority' starts to care about number of cores and upgradable memory. But that is not likely to happen, given the dumbed-down specs and OS.
  - rimliu 9y ago
    Last I heard new MBS were doing just fine. Do not confuse very local minority with all. And "betrayed"? Apple did not promise anything to anybody.
  - BinaryIdiot 9y ago
    Didn't the latest MBP line have the best sales in MBP history? I get many people were upset by some of the changes (including myself) but that doesn't mean people are migrating in mass. Also, a chromebook? No developers are migrating to a chromebook. This is targeting the normal user who wants a nice laptop to do normal web surfing and text work.
    - blacksmith_tb 9y ago
      Well, there's certainly a segment of the developer market who are always on the lookout for a laptop with good hardware which is also well-supported in Linux. Given that ChromeOS is running on the same kernel, I would expect that to be true here, though some Chromebooks are easier than others to directly install Linux onto.
  - BHSPitMonkey 9y ago
    If I need to know the exact specs of the processor in the new Pixel laptop, my method of retrieving that information isn't going to be to pull up the 90-minute keynote presentation and skip around to the part where someone on a stage dictates it (or hope that I memorized it when I watched the keynote the first time). I will just look up that information directly (from the product site's Tech Specs section, or Wikipedia, or one of several other sources). Faulting a company for not making time during the keynote to include unnecessary, largely irrelevant data is silly. This isn't Intel or NVIDIA unveiling a new microprocessor architecture, it's a consumer product made for browsing the web (which happens to need a CPU/GPU as an implementation detail).
colemannugent 9y ago
I think the reason why things like this piss people like us off is because this product isn't targeted at us. "Normal" people don't care what is in a device as long as they can justify the cost with the perceived value they see in the device. For them the sticker saying "i7" on the laptop makes it a "top-of-the-line" laptop and justifies the cost as they expect to pay more for "top-of-the-line".
- FractalNerve 9y ago
  Yes, but that's the definition of "false and deceptive advertisement", isn't it? I'd wish for someone to sue a giant corp. so that a law can stop other mega corporations from doing deceptive advertisements. Just like factualized "health-benefits" on supplements were prohibited unless proven right via 'a study (?)' as a gateway. $999 for a much underpowered Sony Vaio like Subnotebook is too much! You also BUY the strongest VENDOR-LOCKIN made into a product ever, the "Google-Ecosystem". Allow installation of any OS, then we're good, but until then, don't say it's a notebook or laptop. It is not! As a sidenote, using "false" as a strawman as in "fake-news", thus allowing government to "silence false voices" should be stopped. Censorship, illegalization, demonization are the enforcment of rules made for a minority onto the majority and we know why this is bad for a healthy 'governence of a country'.
- ehsankia 9y ago
  Also, numbers often don't mean much, or at least not what most consumer think they do. I've seen so many people choosing product A over product B because the "ram" number was bigger and the price was lower. The situation is that as hardware levels off more and more, with Moore's Law slowly dying, the onus falls much more on software to make up for it. That's why a phone like the Pixel feels much smoother and responsive than other Android phones, which run on the exact same hardware.
- 013a 9y ago
  I don't think this product is targeted at anyone. Their commercial during the keynote showed a skateboarding teenager using the pen, a couple watching a movie on the couch with the laptop propped up on the coffee table, someone editing video, children playing with it... Google doesn't even know who to market this thing at. This product does not convey thought or design. It screams "hey we built another expensive chromebook because I guess we have to."
bischofs 9y ago
I agree, I love that they don't even mention what the GPU is, It is now assumed that you don't really ever need any dedicated graphics. All this despite integrated graphics still sucking with all of its dedicated memory and such. Just look at a desktop GPU and then a processor and tell me you can cram all of that into one chip.
TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
AMD's new lineup makes some sense at least, but who knows, next year's laptops might be Powered by AMD® 5th Gen Processors. I think the extremely vague branding must be at least partly from Intel's cues. Intel advertises their own NUCs in the same way, and perhaps wants customers to think in terms of generations and ignore the specs. After all, if consumers mistakenly assume a 7th gen i5 is a meaningful improvement over a 6th gen i5 and make a purchasing decision based on that, Intel aren't going to complain…
BinaryIdiot 9y ago
Get used to it. No one cares about which i5 or i7 beyond a small niche (which is likely concentrated on HN). There are probably technical specs someone, or you can wait for a teardown, to get the hard core specifications but the target market for those is so tiny no one is catering to them anymore.
- bubblethink 9y ago
  There is some confusion over what the target market for chromebooks is. There is a big rumored push towards enterprise with support for virtualization etc. So the cores, RAM, storage etc. all matter for that use case, which is within their ecosystem. Outside that ecosystem, as an end user, I care about specs to know if it's a good linux laptop.
madeofpalk 9y ago
> Is the storage soldered even for the nvme option? Leaving that out isn't "dumbing down of product specs".
rfdub 9y ago
Not to mention that most so called "Reviews" these days are just a rote listing of the products features from company press releases. I can't count the number of laptop / smartphone reviews I've seen the last couple of years that don't even contain a single benchmark. The extent of the actual "reviewing" that takes place is some glib anecdote about how "there didn't seem to be much noticeable lag" or some other contrite BS. I hate this race to the bottom of the customers presumed intelligence.
undersuit 9y ago
The specifications will be released in full eventually, right now the buy link is just a waiting list. No money is exchanging hands so why does it matter if it's a Intel Core i7-7660U or a Intel Core i7-7560U Processor? What really bothers me is I can't find the timings for the memory. I need to know that my CAS settings aren't going to hamper the performance of my cutting edge app transitions. Kidding, we don't even know if this is using DDR3 or DDR4.
- bubblethink 9y ago
  It turns out the processors are i5-7Y57 and i7-7Y75 (source B&H). Super low power year old chips. Not too optimistic about the performance as a general linux laptop.
  - undersuit 9y ago
    I saw those 4.5 watt chips on Intel Ark, but I thought that maybe you could fit the 15 W models in the enclosure. At least this probably means no fans! Oh and that it uses DDR3. :)

Romanulus 9y ago

... but... four mics!

rimliu 9y ago

What do you think majority of the users will do with those $1k-$2k devices—desoldering storage or looking at the pictures of cats and kids? The CPU or RAM specs alone don't tell much how well the device will perform.

uniformlyrandom 9y ago
But who are the majority of users here? If all the developers betrayed by latest Apple's MBP lineup migrate to a new platform, suddenly 'majority' starts to care about number of cores and upgradable memory. But that is not likely to happen, given the dumbed-down specs and OS.
- rimliu 9y ago
  Last I heard new MBS were doing just fine. Do not confuse very local minority with all. And "betrayed"? Apple did not promise anything to anybody.
- BinaryIdiot 9y ago
  Didn't the latest MBP line have the best sales in MBP history? I get many people were upset by some of the changes (including myself) but that doesn't mean people are migrating in mass. Also, a chromebook? No developers are migrating to a chromebook. This is targeting the normal user who wants a nice laptop to do normal web surfing and text work.
  - blacksmith_tb 9y ago
    Well, there's certainly a segment of the developer market who are always on the lookout for a laptop with good hardware which is also well-supported in Linux. Given that ChromeOS is running on the same kernel, I would expect that to be true here, though some Chromebooks are easier than others to directly install Linux onto.
- BHSPitMonkey 9y ago
  If I need to know the exact specs of the processor in the new Pixel laptop, my method of retrieving that information isn't going to be to pull up the 90-minute keynote presentation and skip around to the part where someone on a stage dictates it (or hope that I memorized it when I watched the keynote the first time). I will just look up that information directly (from the product site's Tech Specs section, or Wikipedia, or one of several other sources). Faulting a company for not making time during the keynote to include unnecessary, largely irrelevant data is silly. This isn't Intel or NVIDIA unveiling a new microprocessor architecture, it's a consumer product made for browsing the web (which happens to need a CPU/GPU as an implementation detail).

colemannugent 9y ago

I think the reason why things like this piss people like us off is because this product isn't targeted at us. "Normal" people don't care what is in a device as long as they can justify the cost with the perceived value they see in the device. For them the sticker saying "i7" on the laptop makes it a "top-of-the-line" laptop and justifies the cost as they expect to pay more for "top-of-the-line".

FractalNerve 9y ago
Yes, but that's the definition of "false and deceptive advertisement", isn't it? I'd wish for someone to sue a giant corp. so that a law can stop other mega corporations from doing deceptive advertisements. Just like factualized "health-benefits" on supplements were prohibited unless proven right via 'a study (?)' as a gateway. $999 for a much underpowered Sony Vaio like Subnotebook is too much! You also BUY the strongest VENDOR-LOCKIN made into a product ever, the "Google-Ecosystem". Allow installation of any OS, then we're good, but until then, don't say it's a notebook or laptop. It is not! As a sidenote, using "false" as a strawman as in "fake-news", thus allowing government to "silence false voices" should be stopped. Censorship, illegalization, demonization are the enforcment of rules made for a minority onto the majority and we know why this is bad for a healthy 'governence of a country'.
ehsankia 9y ago
Also, numbers often don't mean much, or at least not what most consumer think they do. I've seen so many people choosing product A over product B because the "ram" number was bigger and the price was lower. The situation is that as hardware levels off more and more, with Moore's Law slowly dying, the onus falls much more on software to make up for it. That's why a phone like the Pixel feels much smoother and responsive than other Android phones, which run on the exact same hardware.
013a 9y ago
I don't think this product is targeted at anyone. Their commercial during the keynote showed a skateboarding teenager using the pen, a couple watching a movie on the couch with the laptop propped up on the coffee table, someone editing video, children playing with it... Google doesn't even know who to market this thing at. This product does not convey thought or design. It screams "hey we built another expensive chromebook because I guess we have to."

bischofs 9y ago

I agree, I love that they don't even mention what the GPU is, It is now assumed that you don't really ever need any dedicated graphics. All this despite integrated graphics still sucking with all of its dedicated memory and such. Just look at a desktop GPU and then a processor and tell me you can cram all of that into one chip.

TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago

AMD's new lineup makes some sense at least, but who knows, next year's laptops might be Powered by AMD® 5th Gen Processors. I think the extremely vague branding must be at least partly from Intel's cues. Intel advertises their own NUCs in the same way, and perhaps wants customers to think in terms of generations and ignore the specs. After all, if consumers mistakenly assume a 7th gen i5 is a meaningful improvement over a 6th gen i5 and make a purchasing decision based on that, Intel aren't going to complain…

BinaryIdiot 9y ago

Get used to it. No one cares about which i5 or i7 beyond a small niche (which is likely concentrated on HN). There are probably technical specs someone, or you can wait for a teardown, to get the hard core specifications but the target market for those is so tiny no one is catering to them anymore.

bubblethink 9y ago
There is some confusion over what the target market for chromebooks is. There is a big rumored push towards enterprise with support for virtualization etc. So the cores, RAM, storage etc. all matter for that use case, which is within their ecosystem. Outside that ecosystem, as an end user, I care about specs to know if it's a good linux laptop.

madeofpalk 9y ago

> Is the storage soldered even for the nvme option? Leaving that out isn't "dumbing down of product specs".

rfdub 9y ago

Not to mention that most so called "Reviews" these days are just a rote listing of the products features from company press releases. I can't count the number of laptop / smartphone reviews I've seen the last couple of years that don't even contain a single benchmark. The extent of the actual "reviewing" that takes place is some glib anecdote about how "there didn't seem to be much noticeable lag" or some other contrite BS. I hate this race to the bottom of the customers presumed intelligence.

undersuit 9y ago

The specifications will be released in full eventually, right now the buy link is just a waiting list. No money is exchanging hands so why does it matter if it's a Intel Core i7-7660U or a Intel Core i7-7560U Processor? What really bothers me is I can't find the timings for the memory. I need to know that my CAS settings aren't going to hamper the performance of my cutting edge app transitions. Kidding, we don't even know if this is using DDR3 or DDR4.

bubblethink 9y ago
It turns out the processors are i5-7Y57 and i7-7Y75 (source B&H). Super low power year old chips. Not too optimistic about the performance as a general linux laptop.
- undersuit 9y ago
  I saw those 4.5 watt chips on Intel Ark, but I thought that maybe you could fit the 15 W models in the enclosure. At least this probably means no fans! Oh and that it uses DDR3. :)