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.