I'm curious, how do you know that you need 1) 3500mah battery or 2) 2.1Ghz processor or 3) 4GB Ram on a smartphone? These things are meaningless without

1) detailed energy consumption analysis. 2) SoC Architecture details 3) OS Architecture details

Even if you are knowledgeable enough to understand all these, that information is useful only if you are going to do something different than the original design purpose. If you are going to use the product for the purpose that it's designed for, all you need is the average use time between charging.

Maybe you are an expert in the area but what about washing machines or tables? How likely is that the engineering specs of these products will also be in your domain?

For a random, unique electronic device alone, the specs like you gave are difficult to make use of; but in reality, consumer electronics is not random - most competing devices are in the same ballpark of functionality and internal implementation, so battery capacity, processor speed and amount of RAM can be easily used to compare between models and against expected use cases. E.g. if last year's model with 1GB RAM choked on its own stock operating system, I can be sure that this year's model with 1GB RAM will be choking even more, and it's probably a safe bet to go for the 4GB one.

I do not expect consumers to have expert knowledge in every possible domain. But some things can be estimated pretty easily if companies are providing relevant data. Which they go out of their way to avoid, to muddy the waters, so that people don't ballpark things.

You said washing machines or tables - two areas which are as far away from my expertise as one can be; I still believe I'd be able to do a good job shopping if I had the following data:

For washing machines - peak/average power/water/detergent use on "typical" and "highest cleaning" (worst efficiency) program. Also peak and average generated noise (in dB) for those programs.

For tables - size, weight and supported weight (I'm flabbergasted by companies which don't provide the last; do people buying desks/tables not care about the safety of secondary use cases like "sitting on a desk" or "standing on a desk to change the lightbulb in the ceiling light"?).

How battery mAh is any better than Talk time, browsing time and video watch time that Apple provides? After all, all you'll do is to try to guess these things from the battery capacity but despite what you believe battery capacity and use time are not always correlated linearly as the radio, SoC efficiency and OS optimisations etc. will have dramatic effect.

Giving engineering specs for consumer products is often very easy way to con to the consumer. All these knock off cheap devices have amazing specs that are advertised very loudly.

An interesting observation is that you actually don't want engineering specs about washing machines or tables :) That's probably because you are not very knowledgable about these things so you seek information that will affect you as a user. You are interested if you can fit the table and how much it will cost you to operate the washing machine, which are not exactly technical specs of the product but impact on the user.

If you step out of your techie shoes and step in the shoes of a washing machine nerd or a carpenter shoes you will find out that all you want to know bout a smartphone is how long the battery lasts and does it work nicely. Now, you probably want to know the type of the electric motor of the washing machine, it's power circuit and the material of and type of the pipes. As a carpenter you probably want to know what kind of process was applied to the wood and what's the brand of the glue used.

Talk time, browsing time and video watch time are even worse than technical specs, because they're heavily dependent on specifics of particular use cases. Is it "time watching Netflix" or "time watching YouTube" as tested by C-suites' kids? Or "time watching a video on our optimized player under minimum brightness, no connection and all other measures of power optimization engaged"?

The thing is, I don't trust the vendor. They have every incentive to stretch and lie in their marketing copy, and they do that. And you can put any bullshit into self-selected "real use" metrics like "talk time", "browsing time" or "number of songs / photos that fit on the device", by choosing unrealistic values in some parameters that make the result look favorable. But you can't cheat much on raw GHz, mAh or GB. In the atmosphere of (experience-based) lack of trust, I prefer raw facts and making the necessary ballpark calculations myself, thank you.

("Number of songs / photos / movies that fit on the device" is one of the more annoying/dumber metrics ever. It's as if car companies gave you "number of cities you can round-trip through on full tank" instead of MPG or l/km values.)

Or, if the vendor insists on "real use" metrics, they should at least provide the math behind it, so that I know they're not pulled out of the asses of people in marketing department. The core problem is, still, that I have experience-based (and market-understanding-based) bias against trusting what a vendor says at face value.

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RE washing machines, don't confuse engineering numbers on the interface with use cases (the "technical specs" of a product) and the engineering numbers for internals. I don't give a damn what kind of motor you put inside, much like I don't give a damn what particular CPU you put in a mobile phone. The motor turns, and apparently has enough power and torque to drive a loaded machine to stated speeds; all I need to know now is how much power it (or rather, the whole machine) eats and how noisy it is. With phones, the CPU is ARM and runs Android; there's little user-facing difference between various SoC models, so all I care is how much cores it has and how fast are they.

(And yeah, I actually might be interested in the materials used in the internals of my washing machine, as a proxy for its reliability; however, given how hard it is to find reliable white goods these days, I just don't bother - I assume they're made out of costs saving and super glue, and plan accordingly.)

You misunderstand me.

> You claim that you can accurately estimate usage time from battery capacity in mAh, performance from Ghz number

I'm not claiming that I can accurately do that, for engineering values of "accurate". I'm claiming that I can estimate the fit of the device for my use cases better with those values than with manufacturer-provided "real-life" benchmarks.

Ignoring your sarcasm for a moment; you mention benchmarks providers - yet the reason those third-party benchmark shows and sites exist is because manufacturer-provided benchmarks are usually pulled out of asses of the marketing department and are utterly worthless and usually (by design) not usable for comparison shopping.

This comment pretty much circles us back to the original quote I pulled out of the discussed article: "[Japanese] People require a high degree of assurance, by means of lengthy descriptions and technical specifications, before making a purchasing decision – they are not going to be easily swayed by a catchy headline or a pretty image." You seem to be advocating that one should be "easily swayed by a catchy headline or a pretty image". Well, I don't trust marketing departments of consumer-good vendors that much.

The thing is that battery time is a function of capacity AND consumption.

I don’t think that you can use average consumption since even software update can make or break your use time as it can drastically alter the behavior of the device.

Oh and it’s still the marketing department that choose to communicate these numbers to you, not engineers. If the battery doesn’t last they will choose to slap the mAh of the battery instead of the estimates.

but maybe i’m wrong, maybe these days the phones use about the same energy and battery capacity is a useful measure

Why are you attacking him instead of replying to his points?

He's saying that with the battery capacity he can estimate how long it'll run for him because he know what his current phone is like. It's a relative comparison.

If he's told by the manufacturer that it plays X hours of video he can't try and figure out what that means for him, especially if his phone is from a different manufacture. Also two different manufacturers will use different video players making it harder to compare the two.

mAh is a the best we can get. I know that given two phones one with 3000mAh and one with 2000mAh the former will probably have longer battery life under the same OS. If there are different OS's then I need to apply a bit more comparison from knowledge but I still have more information.

I tried to hint at this point, but let me say it explicitly: devices from the same category, like mobile phones of given "class" and year, tend to have more-less the same power consumption. This "tend to" and "more-less" are good enough for rough estimates and comparison. Of course, I would also include other knowledge like common sense (a phone that holds less than 1 day on average is considered broken; no smartphone will hold for more than 2 days in actual constant use).

Also, knowing battery capacity in mAh gives you another funny side effects:

1/ I can ballpark how long it will take to charge it.

2/ I can ballpark how many times I can recharge it with my powerbank (or conversely, what powerbank to buy to have at least two recharges of my phone).

That's the nice thing about such "natural" metrics - they allow for further comparison for different use cases.

This strategy might work semi OK for the same vendor, but I struggle to see how it works for Android vs iPhone since iPhones typically have half the RAM (since it's all native code instead of GC'ed Java) & a drastically more efficient CPU (i.e. runs faster with less battery use at a smaller clock speed than other ARM manufacturers). Moreover, the Apple chips (at least in the past) are able to run all cores at their full clock frequency whereas other vendors have had to throttle down drastically which makes for a pretty large performance/battery life gap that isn't visible from just the GhZ/RAM size/mAh. Even Android vs Android this is difficult to compare as even SoCs from the same ARM family will vary within the same family for the same reason (better thermal design, optimized for GPU performance vs CPU compute, etc). Once you go across ARM families, GhZ numbers are generally not useful for relative comparison & definitely not for power numbers.

I agree you can kind of estimate the charge time via mAh if you pick one charging speed (most now support multiple charging speeds & there's also wireless charging in the mix) but most vendors provide guidelines of charging times you can expect & there's a crapton of benchmarks by independent third parties validating those claims & providing a more complete set of results. Same goes for battery life claims. As for powerbanks, I guess the mAh is useful but there's plenty of info online outside of the vendor's website for that.

If I were the vendor providing this kind of in-depth detail that's demanded by/useful to a very small percentage of the customers would be counterproductive (if I'm providing the info in the best interest of the majority of customers) since it would be more likely to confuse customers who want to compare on just raw specs rather than what the device actually delivers. I can just rely on third parties to report that info for the people who care.

And how will that work with different manufacturers and different use models?

For example I play a certain game. I know how quickly that drains my current phone but I don't know how to compare that to video playing time.

Relative comparisons don't make sense to you?

Talk time and the like introduces even more variables (OS version, manufacturer's test conditions), so it makes comparisons to competing devices harder. Furthermore, if one plans to replace the manufacturer's OS with another version, these numbers become even less meaningful. On the other hand, one can be reasonably sure that a device with twice the battery capacity, same OS, same settings, SoC, display, etc will last roughly twice as long with the same usage.

Comparing hardware specs across ecosystems makes little sense, since all modern smartphones are generally fast enough, so it comes down to what kind of walled garden you prefer.

OK, for washing machines: I would like to know how many out of all machines, have been returned with a clause "damaged beyond repair during normal operation". How many of the manufacturers would happily advertise this information?

Same thing goes for everything else that I have no technical knowledge about: there's look and feel, general customer reviews; sadly most of which are getting highly commoditised via bot-fuelled channels. I would on the other hand love to see the version of the internet where these reviews are directly tied to your IDs.

So how can you trust the words of a company over a spec sheet? Apple has been caught lying before, it's not like they are some good guy company out to help out the common people.

for washing machines - how much is max load is also needed for ballparking.

>>'m curious, how do you know that you need 1) 3500mah battery or 2) 2.1Ghz processor or 3) 4GB Ram on a smartphone?...

Your way of comparison is wrong, most of the user neither need a phd in electric or computer science or are going to compare that way. The way is simple 3500mah> 3000mah 2.1 Ghz<2.6 Ghz 4 GB Ram < 8 GB Ram See.

But why? What benefit this brings to the user? Practice their pre-school math?

Why just don't write random numbers on the box so the users can compare these?

Write, for example, 400 capacitors and let users compare the number of capacitors on the circuit board. Let them brag that their phone have more capacitors.

Maybe write the number of diodes, so Huwei Hr67 users can enjoy the wonders of diode dominance over Mi 8jj that has 20 diodes less.

...or maybe you forgot the /s :)

Clock speed, number of cores, amount of RAM, battery capacity, etc. are not just "random numbers". They're very descriptive in real life, for devices grouped by similar purpose. They really are good enough they can be meaningfully used to compare mobile phones between all vendors using nothing but pre-school math, and they also have two additional benefits:

1/ They're more "natural" - which means it's easy for everyone to give those numbers, giving you something to compare in the first place. With "real-use" measurements, one vendor will give you "video time", the other will give you "browsing time", and you can't compare them.

2/ They're harder to fudge. Amount of RAM is amount of RAM, it does not depend on what testing procedure a vendor uses. "Video time" is not directly comparable between brands.

> But why? What benefit this brings to the user? Practice their pre-school math?

Because these numbers are harder to fake. Suppose phone A advertises "8 hours of typical use" and a 4Ah battery. Phone B advertises "10 hours of typical use" and a 3Ah battery. Which do you think would actually last longer in use?

This radio has twelve transistors!

http://www.antiqueradios.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=129131

Interesting, presumably the relevance here is you think mobile phone makers are putting 4-core processors in and blocking use if 2 of them, or putting an extra unused battery in? I can't see how it relates otherwise.

Interesting as it is from a "lies marketers tell" perspective aren't they much more likely to lie about 200 hours standby time than 3800mAh of battery power? The latter can be independently verified much more readily.

They can lie about the standby time in a way they can support in a court of law - it was tested in pre-production with no apps running and the best battery they could find that has been made to the specs, say. But they can't really support putting a 20% lower power battery in and labelling it wrongly.

If it tells you the processor, you can compare with other phones using the same, or other devices with similar chips. CPUs with disabled parts are given different courses by the manufacturer.

Hours of use, etc., would only be useful if done by an independent agency, like NCAP car safety ratings.

I didn't intend to comment on any active practices; I was just providing precedent for the parent's suggestion that we should

> Let them brag that their phone have more capacitors.

But in real terms, that might actually not be the case. The OS implementation, use case, and hardware setup will affect all of those things meaning direct comparisons aren't really all that valid.

You can dive down the rabbit hole of comparisons; a 3500mah battery might be bigger than a 3000mah, but if the 2.6Ghz processor demolishes it faster than the 2.1Ghz one, it'll end up worse.

This assumption that humans only make rational, logical decisions is inherently flawed. I know HN likes to decry marketing, but humans crave the way these things are framed. Granted that means it's open to manipulation, but the continual argument here is always "give me every single piece of objective information about absolutely everything and I'll make my decision" doesn't extend too far outside of this echo chamber.

Direct comparisons are valid enough, and are definitely more valid than whatever comparisons you can try and make with manufacturer's cooked numbers like "hours of video time". The goal isn't "perfect", it's "good enough in practice".

> Granted that means it's open to manipulation, but the continual argument here is always "give me every single piece of objective information about absolutely everything and I'll make my decision" doesn't extend too far outside of this echo chamber.

Again, the argument is that objective information, even if mostly incomprehensible to people, is still better than whatever fake-metrics vendor's marketing department spits out, by the virtue of reality not actively trying to confuse you.

And you end up with something misleading. The top Android phones always had hardware that was more powerful, yet they never felt as snappy as iOS. I don't know exactly why but it seems that Android was just a lot less efficient for whatever reason so they needed more powerful hardware to get in the same ballpark.

And the software makes a huge difference. I remember an old computer I had converted to Slackware linux completely burrying my much more powerful windows 95 machine because the networking stack was so bad on Windows it couldn't keep up with the efficient Linux one.

Also my phone has 64 gigasomething so is obvsly better.

I was at the Sprint store a few months ago and wanted a cheap phone that had a gyroscope. I couldnt find it listed anywhere on the phone kiosk, so i asked the sales rep. He didnt know so he asked his manager who also didnt know. I had to go home and google it.

> Does that mean I'm in the minority, because for me, the more a company tries to "communicate the utility or the feeling that this product will give you" instead of factual information, the more I perceive them as crappy and/or dishonest?

No, it means that you are probably not in the core audience that Apple tries to target with its ads (to use the iPhone example from the parent). This is nothing good or bad - I also prefer to compare specs instead of "feelings" (I openly admit that lots of important information is not given in the specs listened in a typical webshop, such as how long the mobile phone will be supported with Android updgrades). The important spec field that makes the difference is "Operating system": If you care about what iOS offers, you will only consider mobile phones that have "iOS" in this field (i.e. only compare the specs of the different iPhone versions). If you don't care about what iOS offers, you will probably not buy an iPhone anyway.

Yeah you probably should.

That's not how purchasing decisions are usually made outside of big ticket items, and even then.

Thanks to all of our basic needs being met there's only real emotional and psychological ones left. That's what all advertising targets, promise of fulfillment or some other emotional rewards. In our consumerist society you buy things not because you need them or because of their specific functions but because they promise to fulfill some imagined emotional need.