MG Siegler for TechCrunch:

[Tablet] makers may be largely failing because they’ve sold their soul to Android and are now just in the middle of a spec war, which no one can win. I’m gonna go one step further in that line of thinking: the spec is dead.

I’ve been arguing this for years to anyone who’d listen, but with techies, specs have always been the only means of differentiation. That’s because they are solid numbers, rather than subjective traits. And when people wanted to buy tech kit, they roped in a techie, who’d spew numbers at them and come up with a ‘winner’. Most reviewers did (indeed, often still do) exactly the same thing.

I mostly put that paragraph in the past tense, because, as Siegler suggests in his article, a change is finally occurring, which has been driven primarily by Apple and Amazon. When the iPhone came out, its specs weren’t the best, but it offered an overall experience superior to the competition. This started to seed the idea that buying a gadget was more than just about numbers—something Apple had often been unsuccessful in promoting with its Mac hardware versus PCs. With the iPad and Kindle, this became far more apparent. Apple’s tablet lacked features the competition tried to ram down people’s throats, and the people didn’t care; Amazon’s Kindle was a simple, ‘underpowered’ device compared to, say, the Nook, but was perfect at the task for which it was designed for. Again, the experience was winning over spec lists.

This week, we’ve seen Apple’s PC growth figures, which outpace pretty much everyone else in the industry (the only notable exception being a big spike from Samsung in some European countries), and much of that success is down to the MacBook Air. On paper, that device looks overpriced and underpowered. Its specs are weak: slow processor, not much storage, and so on. But the experience is, according to those who own one, amazing. The machine is light and feels great; it’s fast, due to a combination of factors, down to… well, down to stuff that no-one really cares about any more. And that’s the point: perhaps we’re finally getting to a place where people will walk into a store and buy the best experience rather than the device with the best numbers.