Consumers get hung up on some single factor, as if that is a direct and sole metric for ‘quality’ - and so manufacturers optimise solely for that factor, even at the expense of having to compromise in other places which make actual quality worse.
Dan gives the examples of IQ and of CPU Gigaherts, but examples of this numbers fixation are everywhere.
In bed sheets, ‘thread count’ is a direct proxy for quality, but in reality the material choice matters a lot more than the thread count, and if the thread count is too high the sleep experience can actually get worse, as the sheets become unbreathable.
It’s not solely the consumer’s fault either, for sure.
Manufacturers are quite happy to perpetuate and abuse the single metric of quality, because it allows them to create cheaply-manufactured products which nontheless still sound good to consumers, and therefore still sell well, despite being overall inferior.
If I may present a counterpoint to you, it’s Daniel Rutter’s Enough Already With the Megapixels.
(This was published in 2005. Cut Dan some slack over it.)
Even 20 years later the message is still bang on.
Consumers get hung up on some single factor, as if that is a direct and sole metric for ‘quality’ - and so manufacturers optimise solely for that factor, even at the expense of having to compromise in other places which make actual quality worse.
Dan gives the examples of IQ and of CPU Gigaherts, but examples of this numbers fixation are everywhere.
In bed sheets, ‘thread count’ is a direct proxy for quality, but in reality the material choice matters a lot more than the thread count, and if the thread count is too high the sleep experience can actually get worse, as the sheets become unbreathable.
It’s not solely the consumer’s fault either, for sure.
Manufacturers are quite happy to perpetuate and abuse the single metric of quality, because it allows them to create cheaply-manufactured products which nontheless still sound good to consumers, and therefore still sell well, despite being overall inferior.
Now it’s nanometers for cpus, as if the manufacturing method matters more than the actual performance, user perception and resources usage.
If nanometer scale were all it’s cracked up to be, I’d have a lot fewer exes.