3 ms·

Is that really useless, though? If I'm about to drop $3-6k on a laptop, I want to know beforehand that it's going to be a PITA connecting things to it. The fa

Is that really useless, though? If I'm about to drop $3-6k on a laptop, I want to know beforehand that it's going to be a PITA connecting things to it. The fact that lots of people think it's difficult, and that Apple responded to their problems, is also useful to see.

derefr 7y ago
Products are rated relative to one-another, though, not on any absolute scale (because everyone uses a different personal subjective scale, so all a review or recommendation system can hope to do is to normalize each person's ratings against their own learned model of rating criteria such that the person's lowest score becomes a 1 and their highest a 5.) If people don't like USB-C, they're just going to rate everything Apple makes as a 1.0/5, which, as far as a normalization algorithm is concerned, is the same as rating everything a 5.0/5. It carries no signal and gets completely dropped from the algorithm.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  I don't think anyone has a psychological issue with USB C. What they have is a perfectly legitimate issue with not being able to use their existing peripherals with a supposedly top-of-the-line professional laptop/desktop with an unquestionably professional price. Removing the reviews is PR sterilisation. It's appearance management. It's wilfully turning a deaf ear to any feedback that suggests the Emperor may not be fully clothed. It has absolutely nothing to do with raising the SNR in the store.
  - derefr 7y ago
    Let me be clear; I was mostly talking about ratings re: SNR. Ratings, in a very explicit mathematical sense, become literally undefined when you aren't comparing them between things, but just comparing something to itself. You can't have a vote with one candidate; you can't have an auction with one bidder; etc. The results are all undefined. In the exact same sense, you can't have a ratings system in a marketplace with one product in it. Or, for a direct analogy: you can't have Hot or Not where it's just one dude. Is he hot? Is he not? Undefined. Now, freeform text reviews: sure, they might hold some meaning, even in a single-seller marketplace. (For subtle behavioral-economic reasons, I would hypothesize that they probably don't, but let's pretend they do.) I would posit, though, that whatever's in those reviews is already the result of "PR sterilization." What you're seeing is what Apple wants you to see. It's their store. Reviews only "work" (i.e. have guaranteed real signal, rather than "maybe real, maybe fake" signal) when incentives in a marketplace are aligned such that even the marketplace owner has no incentive to tamper with which reviews are or are not visible. That is not true here, and so the reviews are not, and never were, trustworthy. They were noise from the start.
- jlarocco 7y ago
  I'm skeptical people are maliciously rating products 1/5 because they have an agenda against USB-C. More likely, they dislike it because it's inconvenient and difficult to use with their devices. Hell, APPLES OWN DEVICES don't even support USB-C.
  - asdff 7y ago
    It used to be when apple came out with a fancy i/o, they would just give you the new port and take out something vestigial, keeping the half dozen other ports. Now apple has wiped the laptop clean and introduced a port that they don't even support with their own product lines, despite it being the only port on a macbook pro for nearly 4 years.

derefr 7y ago

Products are rated relative to one-another, though, not on any absolute scale (because everyone uses a different personal subjective scale, so all a review or recommendation system can hope to do is to normalize each person's ratings against their own learned model of rating criteria such that the person's lowest score becomes a 1 and their highest a 5.) If people don't like USB-C, they're just going to rate everything Apple makes as a 1.0/5, which, as far as a normalization algorithm is concerned, is the same as rating everything a 5.0/5. It carries no signal and gets completely dropped from the algorithm.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
I don't think anyone has a psychological issue with USB C. What they have is a perfectly legitimate issue with not being able to use their existing peripherals with a supposedly top-of-the-line professional laptop/desktop with an unquestionably professional price. Removing the reviews is PR sterilisation. It's appearance management. It's wilfully turning a deaf ear to any feedback that suggests the Emperor may not be fully clothed. It has absolutely nothing to do with raising the SNR in the store.
- derefr 7y ago
  Let me be clear; I was mostly talking about ratings re: SNR. Ratings, in a very explicit mathematical sense, become literally undefined when you aren't comparing them between things, but just comparing something to itself. You can't have a vote with one candidate; you can't have an auction with one bidder; etc. The results are all undefined. In the exact same sense, you can't have a ratings system in a marketplace with one product in it. Or, for a direct analogy: you can't have Hot or Not where it's just one dude. Is he hot? Is he not? Undefined. Now, freeform text reviews: sure, they might hold some meaning, even in a single-seller marketplace. (For subtle behavioral-economic reasons, I would hypothesize that they probably don't, but let's pretend they do.) I would posit, though, that whatever's in those reviews is already the result of "PR sterilization." What you're seeing is what Apple wants you to see. It's their store. Reviews only "work" (i.e. have guaranteed real signal, rather than "maybe real, maybe fake" signal) when incentives in a marketplace are aligned such that even the marketplace owner has no incentive to tamper with which reviews are or are not visible. That is not true here, and so the reviews are not, and never were, trustworthy. They were noise from the start.
jlarocco 7y ago
I'm skeptical people are maliciously rating products 1/5 because they have an agenda against USB-C. More likely, they dislike it because it's inconvenient and difficult to use with their devices. Hell, APPLES OWN DEVICES don't even support USB-C.
- asdff 7y ago
  It used to be when apple came out with a fancy i/o, they would just give you the new port and take out something vestigial, keeping the half dozen other ports. Now apple has wiped the laptop clean and introduced a port that they don't even support with their own product lines, despite it being the only port on a macbook pro for nearly 4 years.