Comment by ethbr0
3 years ago
One thing that irks that shit out of me in reviews -- not normalizing or banding for cost.
Measuring performance without taking into account cost is meaningless.
Hat tip to (old) Tom's Hardware for being the first site I knew that did this well, with their cpu / gpu hierarchy, which attempted to rank the last 2 generations or so of product against each other.
It boiled it down to two columns (Intel, AMD), with gaps where each manufacturer didn't have product for that performance.
It really helped in "Should I buy previous gen +spec, or current gen -spec, given they both have the same price now?" questions.
Sadly, it seems to have devolved into this, which is less useful: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-hierarchy,4312.html
I don’t think I agree. The world gets really confusing when you take costs into account. Try buying a phone charger. The $5 one might be overflowing with 5 star reviews saying how great it is for the price, but it’s just crap. Likewise the $100 one that’s amazing but some 3 star reviews for “too expensive”.
The issue is why they completely ignore costs and legacy substitution: vendor relations and content.
The true answer is often "The old version was just as good or better, don't upgrade."
But nobody gets a continual churn of review clicks and affiliate purchase cuts off of that.
Ignoring it with "price is hard" is disingenuous on the part of review sites. Notably, this was initially one of Wirecutter's key draws: presenting winners in a price-segmented manner.