Their claim is technically true, if the way you agree to measure size is diagonally (this is how TVs are advertised after all), and also pretty meaningless and disingenuous. What I find interesting is that Apple on the other hand rarely seems to focus the message on numbers, even when they have a real numerical advantage.
Apple seems to appeal to consumers by the appearance and experience more than anything. When they do mention numbers, it's always "x% faster, x% smaller!", which is really all anyone cares about -- "How much better is this compared to what I already have?"
Screens are traditionally measured diagonally. This worked fine when everything was a 4:3 ratio. Now that ratios are more variable, but we still use that measurement. Microsoft's claim about the diagonal measurement is absolutely true; they never mentioned screen area. Apple was certainly happy to make the iPhone 5 screen taller and call it a brilliant, beautiful, amazing, really great, 4" screen.
I think what they say is shady, but as the parent of this thread states, it is technically accurate to say that their screen is larger by industry standard measurements (i.e. corner to corner).
But the way we measure the size of things is ... by their size. We could just as well say their statement is true if we agree to define "bigger" as "smaller" and vice-versa.
I'm definitely not defending microsoft here, because it's not something I understand the reasoning of. For some reason, we decide to measure monitors/tvs/displays by their diagonal. I don't get it, but that's what happens. When someone says '15 in screen' they mean 'a screen with a 15 in diagonal'.
When microsoft says 'it has a bigger screen' it is a shortcut to saying 'the ipad has a 9.7 in screen, and we have a 10.1 in screen. therefore ours is bigger.' Given the context of talking about screens, this does make sense.
You can point out that 'oh, but the ipad has a bigger screen by area' and you are correct. But that doesn't change the fact that the number associated with screensize for every fricken screen on sale today is bigger on their product than it is for the ipad. That's not a lie.
I wouldn't be surprised if they can legally say "The Asus tablet has a 10.1" screen and the iPad has a 9.7" screen", but I'd strongly expect they need a "* based on diagonal measurement" footnote to get away with calling that display "bigger". But I'm not a lawyer.
I think what you mean to say is "by their area" which is not necessarily true.
Sometimes, we do measure things by a single dimension. Such as height. A person can't claim a world record on hobese.
Area would probably be a more useful measurement for screens but historically, for better or worse, that's not they've been advertised and that's not how consumers are used to comparing them.
A person can't claim a world record on height by being morbidly obese.
Yeah, but a person could claim a world record on size by being morbidly obese. If they said "I'm the biggest person in the world", they'd be making a statement that can be reasonably judged technically true, even if the listener might mistake their meaning to be that they're the tallest. Anyway, I know what you mean, I just think this is past the line of being arguably "technically true".
All the laptops, tablets, TV screens I have seen are measured diagonally. That's how it's always been done. Maybe that's not how it should be done. But it IS how it's generally done.
And I've got no problem with them saying their diagonal is bigger. But, to me at least, they can't say the screen is bigger and be on the "OK" side of even technical truthfulness.
Apple not only refrains from focusing on numbers, but they actively go out of their way not to.
Apple simply does not list any number they don't think is important. For example, this is the sum total of their information, in their tech specs, about what kind of CPU the iPad has, how fast it is, and how much RAM it has:
"Dual-core A6X with quad-core graphics"
If you want to know the clock rate or RAM quantity, you have to go to third-party sites that have basically reverse-engineered the information.
To a techie, this behavior looks mildly crazy, but it seems to work.
> To a techie, this behavior looks mildly crazy, but it seems to work.
Problem is that the numbers are mostly meaningless, and are becoming ever more so. People don't buy cars based on the type of brakes, the size of the oil sump, or even the number of cylinders. "does it have enough power to pull a trailer?" "is the handling nice?" "do you get a lot of road noise?" "can I connect my iPhone into the stereo?" "does it look good?" "is it safe?" "is it comfortable?"
The PC industry for a long time has competed in "numbers", to it's detriment. You can't meaningfully compare a A6 vs Core2 vs i7 vs AMD vs ARM processors (let alone computers) by looking at clock speed - what you're actually wanting to know is "will it compile my code quickly?" "can the latest games run at a high frame rate?" "do I get good battery life?" "does it get hot?" "will it boot up quickly?" "can I connect 3x screens all playing simultaneous HD video?" - those questions are about the whole system, and arguably the OS/software/disks have magnitudes more impact than the actual CPU in a lot of cases.
Apple gets this. New iPads will always perform better than the previous one, just like virtually every tech device. And the only way to meaningfully compare against android or other tablets is by comparing battery life, UI response, app startup times, display types - all system-level comparisons.
I agree, it generally makes sense in advertising, because buyers care about other things.
Where it bugs me is as a developer. I'd be fine if Apple wouldn't market based on tech specs, but Apple doesn't even make them available. A buyer doesn't need to know how much RAM an iPad has, but I do, and it's annoying that I have to rely on my own poking and third-party reverse engineering to find out instead of just looking it up.
I really don't understand why this is crazy at all. Clock speeds haven't been useful for years in determining your overall system preformance (have they ever, really? There are so many numbers involved in getting a meaningful picture of performance for almost any computing device that putting that information out there would confuse most people.
Furthermore, you can't just run almost any OS on the iPad anyway (like, say, you can with a Mac) so it's not directly relevant as say, on a PC.
Their claim is technically true, if the way you agree to measure size is diagonally (this is how TVs are advertised after all), and also pretty meaningless and disingenuous. What I find interesting is that Apple on the other hand rarely seems to focus the message on numbers, even when they have a real numerical advantage.