In high school, I worked a retail job for an office supply store, and one of the PC brands we would sell was Packard Bell.

We sold many different models with similar specs, and the main feature many of the potential buyers would be concerned with:

Will it fit with my current office furniture?

We sold both desktops and tower configurations, and the type of desk the computer would be used with was the determining factor in which model to buy.

And essentially, why not? If I want to work on a machine, I want it to be fast. Not 1.33x of the baseline benchmark CPU when equipped with X GB RAM. Just fast enough it doesn't annoy me.

And with today's PCI-E-based SSD's, waiting for data to be written to "disk" is a non-issue, so the system feels much faster.

Apple’s goal is to eliminate technical specifications from marketing: tech specs are an excuse - make it good enough that few care what those specs are.

I can't think of a technological product where that mentality applies. Can you?

In fact, it seems that the opposite is true; as a product gets better, people care more about the specs. Whether you're buying a Wusthof knife or a luxury car, you want to know what makes the product good enough to justify its price and position in the market.

Vanishingly few people buy phones based on screen resolution, RAM, bandwidth, etc. Ditto computers used mostly for mundane email, web browsing, games (not hardcore), and such. Few buy cars based on horsepower, range, etc.

Insofar as people do consider specs, it’s usually because the specs are injected into the conversation, customers being taught to care by salesman trying to baffle them into choosing their product.

Most customers want it to just work. Apple is pursuing that.

It's like how no one cares about which chip is in their smart TV, regardless of price range. They just want to watch Netflix without UI bugs.

TVs are sold on refresh rate, color accuracy, contrast, backlight localization, and panel resolution. This stuff is written on the box and promoted in marketing material. They are unavoidably differentiated on technical specs, even in the eyes of a layperson. Some of those specs depend on the panel (itself a semiconductor product) and others depend on processors/ICs.

I'm not suggesting that no parts can ever be a commodity (like capacitors in a laptop), but as I spend more, I increasingly tend to look for a technical advantage that justifies the marginal price.

I'll give you an example. If you want to buy a docking station for an Apple TB3 enabled MacBook, you have a couple of controller options at the higher end: Alpine Ridge and Titan Ridge. Better chips exist but they haven't found their way into truly well engineered consumer docks. I have a multi monitor setup with one superultrawide screen that can do 120Hz, so I opted for the Titan Ridge dock. It was buggy, so I ended up returning it and buying an Alpine Ridge dock that lacks the ability to push my big monitor at its best-looking resolution. And that's for a sub-$300 peripheral.

Like most of us here on HN, I'm one of the "few" that GP mentioned. But these are consumer products and they are mass marketed based on their technical specs.

Apple itself markets technical innovations in its 6k IPS monitors. The back is designed to dissipate heat, the monitor works with TB3 (ie, an Intel chip)...they even market the glass treatment in a deeply specific way.

Most TV customers can’t articulate the difference. Many may state a preference but only because such numbers are prevalent and associated. Were the numbers not advertised, most wouldn’t ask.

That was the game change with the original iPad. When you strip all the other specs away and put an original iPad next to a 2010 laptop, you realize just how awful the mainstream LCD panels were at the time. It's an exciting change I think will benefit consumers. Less being upsold on questionable i7s and more nice displays please.