September 28, 2012 at 18:26Why iron is not the main thing
Good evening, Habr.
I want to talk about one very exciting topic for me too much contribution of technical characteristics to the subjective assessment of devices.
Imagine this: you are using a modern electronic device. A desktop computer, laptop, tablet, smartphone, miniature player is not the point. It is important for you that he carry out the tasks that you give him - show sites, videos, books, allow you to call, write messages, visit social networks, open and edit documents, send emails, edit videos and images, type code, make calculations and so on - Depends on the device itself. This is the primary goal of the highest priority, you can not argue with this - the device should do its job. Everything else is secondary entities.
In the concept of "do my job" I put not only the formal fulfillment of the task, but also the final quality of the execution. You cannot watch movies on small screens. You can not play games with brakes and lags. You cannot type any large texts on a nine-button keyboard with a drop-down key. This is almost always true, except in extreme cases, imposing a restriction on the process of the task itself.
There are tasks for which the performance of iron is really needed, which directly depend on it; if they will be weaker on iron, their implementation will take several times longer. This, for example, video editing, rendering three-dimensional graphics, assembling large programs, image processing, folding proteins and hundreds, and thousands of other processes. Hats off to those who do this. I respect their right to be demanding on performance.
There are tasks that require a completely limited amount of resources and rarely crawl beyond the requirements. This includes web surfing, watching videos, editing text documents and spreadsheets, listening to music and the like. Hats off to those who do this. I respect their right to be demanding in the quality performance of tasks.
But it so happens that marketers are overwhelming. Marketers successfully suggest that listening to music and reading books is not enough just to do it well - it is absolutely essential that as much processor time and RAM as possible is available. A real disaster will happen if you play Angry Birds on a device with a processor with a frequency of less than 1 gigahertz. Spit on the fact that the game works perfectly on models three years ago - you can not do without the annual update of the device and much debate, which is better - +6 to PPI or 200 megahertz on the processor.
A comment thread on one article prompted me to write this article. Most accurately, a couple of comments can express it:
The author of a perfectly logical question received a bunch of minuses. People, what's wrong with you? Did you forget what I said at the beginning? The device should do its job, the rest is secondary. What is the difference, how fast is the processor in the phone, if everything, everything is absolutely fine on it? I could understand this only in one case - if on tablets and phones a statistically significant part of the audience carried out complex calculations and generated content. Fortunately, few people deal with this.
The era of slow computers has long passed. All everyday tasks are successfully performed by all modern devices, regardless of the filling. I repeat - regardless of the filling. Angry birds do not care, you have an iPhone, Nokia Lumia, Samsung Galaxy or someone else. Likewise, other games, movies and TV shows in 1080p, e-books, websites, music players and table editors apply to this.
All tasks that are assigned to mobile devices are performed in full and of excellent quality. All.
The rest are secondary entities.
Including device specifications. What is the difference, how many operatives are there, if everything works as it should? Recall Occam's razor: “One should not multiply things unnecessarily.” Why recall the characteristics of the device if this is not necessary? Why waste time and energy arguing on the Internet about what is initially meaningless, why do you personally worry about it?
I urge you - stop, we are going wrong.
I want to talk about one very exciting topic for me too much contribution of technical characteristics to the subjective assessment of devices.
Imagine this: you are using a modern electronic device. A desktop computer, laptop, tablet, smartphone, miniature player is not the point. It is important for you that he carry out the tasks that you give him - show sites, videos, books, allow you to call, write messages, visit social networks, open and edit documents, send emails, edit videos and images, type code, make calculations and so on - Depends on the device itself. This is the primary goal of the highest priority, you can not argue with this - the device should do its job. Everything else is secondary entities.
In the concept of "do my job" I put not only the formal fulfillment of the task, but also the final quality of the execution. You cannot watch movies on small screens. You can not play games with brakes and lags. You cannot type any large texts on a nine-button keyboard with a drop-down key. This is almost always true, except in extreme cases, imposing a restriction on the process of the task itself.
There are tasks for which the performance of iron is really needed, which directly depend on it; if they will be weaker on iron, their implementation will take several times longer. This, for example, video editing, rendering three-dimensional graphics, assembling large programs, image processing, folding proteins and hundreds, and thousands of other processes. Hats off to those who do this. I respect their right to be demanding on performance.
There are tasks that require a completely limited amount of resources and rarely crawl beyond the requirements. This includes web surfing, watching videos, editing text documents and spreadsheets, listening to music and the like. Hats off to those who do this. I respect their right to be demanding in the quality performance of tasks.
But it so happens that marketers are overwhelming. Marketers successfully suggest that listening to music and reading books is not enough just to do it well - it is absolutely essential that as much processor time and RAM as possible is available. A real disaster will happen if you play Angry Birds on a device with a processor with a frequency of less than 1 gigahertz. Spit on the fact that the game works perfectly on models three years ago - you can not do without the annual update of the device and much debate, which is better - +6 to PPI or 200 megahertz on the processor.
A comment thread on one article prompted me to write this article. Most accurately, a couple of comments can express it:
The author of a perfectly logical question received a bunch of minuses. People, what's wrong with you? Did you forget what I said at the beginning? The device should do its job, the rest is secondary. What is the difference, how fast is the processor in the phone, if everything, everything is absolutely fine on it? I could understand this only in one case - if on tablets and phones a statistically significant part of the audience carried out complex calculations and generated content. Fortunately, few people deal with this.
The era of slow computers has long passed. All everyday tasks are successfully performed by all modern devices, regardless of the filling. I repeat - regardless of the filling. Angry birds do not care, you have an iPhone, Nokia Lumia, Samsung Galaxy or someone else. Likewise, other games, movies and TV shows in 1080p, e-books, websites, music players and table editors apply to this.
All tasks that are assigned to mobile devices are performed in full and of excellent quality. All.
The rest are secondary entities.
Including device specifications. What is the difference, how many operatives are there, if everything works as it should? Recall Occam's razor: “One should not multiply things unnecessarily.” Why recall the characteristics of the device if this is not necessary? Why waste time and energy arguing on the Internet about what is initially meaningless, why do you personally worry about it?
I urge you - stop, we are going wrong.