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.