Three numbers on almost every electronics page are true and useless at the same time.
Battery life
Quoted at 50% volume, screen off, one connection, and a codec chosen because it is cheap to decode. Ask for the figure at 60% with noise cancelling on, which is roughly how people listen, and the number usually drops by a third.
We publish the second figure. It makes our headline look worse than a competitor’s and it is the one that will match your experience.
Brightness
«1600 nits» is almost always peak, on a 3% window, for a few seconds, in HDR. Full-screen sustained brightness — the number that decides whether you can read a laptop outdoors — is often a quarter of it.
Noise cancelling
There is no standard, so every manufacturer picks a band that flatters their design. A figure without a frequency range attached means nothing at all.
What to ask
- Under what conditions was this measured?
- Is it peak or sustained?
- Over what range?
- Was it measured on the unit I am buying, or on a reference sample?
A manufacturer that cannot answer the fourth question does not measure per unit, and that is worth knowing before the money leaves.
