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.
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.