It’s not always about the numbers
One of my good friends is a pretty big Android guy, and whenever we talk about phones, he’ll often get excited about the new dual- and quad-core processors that are “just around the corner.” I’m a geek, so I totally understand the appeal of faster processors, but I can’t help but wonder whether specs even matter anymore.
First of all, “normal” people (read; non-geeks) don’t care about specs. They couldn’t care less about which CPU is in their new phone so long as it works and it’s fast. Having said that, the iPhone 4 has been out for over a year now, and despite running a single-core processor, it has never once felt slow to me. Since the iPhone 4’s release, countless Android phones have come out featuring dual-core processors and much faster CPU speeds. But are these phones noticeably faster than the iPhone?
Well, it just so happens that Anandtech posted some benchmarks today. Actually, the benchmarks were meant to showcase the new iPhone 4S (spoiler alert: it’s really fast), but what really caught my eye was just how well the old iPhone 4 performed against the rest of the field. I’m sure iOS 5 had something to do with it, but the iPhone 4 held its own against the newer Android phones — at least when it comes to web browser performance.
And that’s the thing: what’s the point of these dual-core 1.5 GHz processors if the performance benefits are marginal at best? That’s why Apple has stayed out of the spec wars by refusing to list the CPU speeds and RAM of its devices. It’s not because they tend to have lower specs. Sure, that may play a small part, but more importantly, it simply doesn’t matter. The overall user experience is all that counts.
So while traditional geeks still harp about the specs on all the new Android phones, the bottom line is that they’re fighting the wrong fight: it simply doesn’t matter anymore.
Joshua Topolsky summed it up best in a post he wrote earlier this year on the Post-PC era:
It won’t be a debate about displays, memory, wireless options — it will be a debate about the quality of the experience. Apple is not just eschewing the spec conversation in favor of a different conversation — it’s rendering those former conversations useless. It would be like trying to compare a race car to a deeply satisfying book. In a post-PC world, the experience of the product is central and significant above all else. It’s not the RAM or CPU speed, screen resolution or number of ports which dictate whether a product is valuable; it becomes purely about the experience of using the device.
