Consumer tech reviews failed the people reading them. This is what a different standard looks like.
The specific failure that created this site wasn’t that reviews were wrong — it was that they were wrong in a way that was almost impossible to detect before you’d already bought the product. The benchmark conditions were the problem. A laptop review published at the end of a press trip, run on a configured demo unit, with a controlled workload that maximized performance figures — these numbers were technically accurate and practically useless. The noise-cancellation test run in an anechoic chamber while the product’s actual behavior on a bus was entirely different. The router throughput measured at 1 meter between lab-grade access points while real households have drywall, interference, and competing devices on the same band. Review sites weren’t lying. They were testing conditions that existed nowhere outside of their own reviews.
The first product we bought specifically to test this hypothesis was a mid-range laptop that had received strong reviews across four major tech publications. Advertised battery: 12 hours. Measured under a workday that included browser tabs, a document editor, and two video calls: 7.5 hours. The discrepancy wasn’t a flaw — it was the gap between testing for the spec sheet and testing for the actual owner. In the same month, we found a pair of over-ear headphones with ANC rated at -35dB that we measured at -22dB in the specific noise profile of an office open floor plan. The products weren’t bad. The claims were just built around conditions that didn’t survive contact with a real person’s day.
The principle Deep In Spec settled on is not complicated, but it has consequences. Every verdict describes a specific buyer in a specific situation — not a statistical average user who doesn’t exist. Every claimed specification gets measured in a real-world scenario relevant to that buyer. When the measurement differs from the claim, the gap gets published — the number, plainly, without softening language about how results may vary or how the product performs well under typical conditions. The consequence of this approach is that roughly one in four products we buy doesn’t result in a published review, because the product didn’t clear the threshold for a recommendation. We publish less. What gets published carries more weight for it.
What happens in a given week
On any given week, there are between two and five products in active testing. Each follows a protocol specific to its category: laptops cycle through workday simulation, sustained compute loads, battery rundown from full charge, and thermal performance under fan-profiled conditions. Monitors go through color accuracy verification at native resolution, brightness measured at center and corners, and extended use evaluation for PWM flicker at mid-brightness settings. Audio hardware gets evaluated in three distinct environments.
When testing completes, every manufacturer claim on the product page gets checked against our measurements. The ones that match get noted. The ones that don’t get documented as Spec Gap findings, with the specific measurement context that produced the gap. Products that don’t meet the threshold for recommendation don’t become reviews. That’s the end of the process for roughly one in four products we test.
What changes if this approach becomes standard
Manufacturers write specification sheets knowing that most review sites will reproduce those numbers without measuring them. The result is a spec-sheet ecosystem where the numbers are optimized for competitive comparison rather than accurate prediction of real-world performance. If testing against real-world conditions became the standard, spec sheets would be written to survive that testing — not because manufacturers suddenly became more honest, but because the cost of publishing a gap between claim and measurement would be too visible to ignore.
The concrete end state isn’t a more trusting relationship between buyers and brands. It’s spec sheets that mean what they say — where a battery figure was measured at a brightness level a real person would use, and a throughput number was tested under real network conditions. The buyer shouldn’t have to know the testing context to trust the number. That’s what changes.
Six principles named
for how this site works
These are operational decisions, not aspiration statements. Each one has a specific, observable consequence on what gets published.
No single-session data point becomes a verdict. Testing runs are repeated across different days and conditions before numbers get recorded. When two sessions produce different results, both are documented and the discrepancy explained. A ±2h battery variance across two test days is information, not noise — it tells you something about thermal state and workload interaction that a single figure doesn’t.
When measured performance diverges from claimed performance, the gap is the headline finding — not a footnote to a score. A router that delivers 680Mbps against an advertised 1.2Gbps isn’t a bad router — but the gap changes whether it’s the right router for someone paying for a gigabit connection. That information belongs at the top of the review, not buried in a footnote.
25% of products tested never become recommendations. This figure is published because it’s the statistic that makes the remaining 75% credible. Any review site can recommend everything with a score attached. Maintaining and disclosing a rejection rate — and accepting the slower publishing pace that comes with it — is what separates a curation from a catalogue.
Every verdict names the buyer it’s for. A laptop that scores well for a remote worker doing browser work and video calls may score differently for a student who needs to run local ML models. These are different products for different people, even if the hardware is identical. Writing for “most users” without defining what most people actually need is a way of being technically right and practically useless simultaneously.
Every product tested here was purchased at retail or from Amazon using our own money, at the price any buyer would pay. No early access units, no review loaner programs, no manufacturer-configured demo hardware. The reason isn’t a purity statement — it’s that products configured for press distribution sometimes behave differently than retail units, and purchasing at retail is the only way to test what an actual buyer receives.
Six products previously recommended on this site have had their verdicts updated after long-term testing revealed behavior that shorter testing didn’t. In three cases the update was minor. In two cases the recommendation was qualified with a caveat. In one case, the product was removed from the recommended list entirely because firmware updates changed its behavior in ways that weren’t recoverable. Each revision is documented publicly, including what changed and when.
The four steps between “bought it” and “published”
What six weeks of multi-scenario testing actually looks like — from the decision to buy through to the Spec Gap callout in the finished review.
How we decide what gets bought
Every category gets reviewed on a rolling 12-month cycle — meaning the recommendations visible on the site were tested within the last year. Products are selected to cover all three price tiers in a category: budget, mid-range, and premium. No reader gets pushed toward a price point the site hasn’t actually tested. Selection is also triggered by significant new releases, by price changes that move a product into a new tier, and by the 12–18 month “Still Worth It” check-in that determines whether a previous recommendation holds under current firmware and market conditions. Nothing gets purchased from manufacturer-provided samples.
What six weeks across real scenarios means
Testing protocols are category-specific. Laptops: full eight-hour workday simulation across browser, productivity, and communication applications; a video encoding session at fixed complexity; a battery rundown from 100% under controlled display brightness; thermal performance observation under sustained compute load to identify throttling behavior. Audio hardware: three distinct noise environments — open-plan office HVAC, bus/transit profile, quiet room — with ANC attenuation measured using a calibrated reference recording. SSDs: sequential read and write at rated conditions, then sustained write performance after cache saturation, which is the only number relevant to large file transfers. Manufacturer claims on each specification are checked against measurements at the conclusion of testing.
Every review has at least one direct competitor
Every published review includes a direct comparison against at least one product in the same price tier. The competitor is selected not by benchmark performance but by buyer-type relevance — a remote worker buying a monitor at $380 compares against the other $380 monitors a remote worker would actually consider, not against the $380 monitor with the best synthetic color accuracy score. “Better” is defined in terms of the use case the review is written for. Sometimes this means recommending the product that scores lower on a spec sheet because it behaves more predictably under the conditions the buyer described. That’s the comparison that matters.
What gets published and what gets shelved
A product clears the publication threshold if it represents a genuine recommendation for at least one specific buyer type at its price point — not a qualified maybe, not “fine if you don’t need X.” Products that don’t clear the threshold are documented internally but don’t become public reviews. The rejection rate currently sits at ~25%. At 12–18 months post-publication, every recommended product goes through a “Still Worth It” evaluation: firmware changes, price drift, new competitors in tier, and long-term durability observations all factor in. When that evaluation produces a changed verdict — which has happened six times — the update is published with the original review date, the revision date, and an explanation of what changed and why.
Spec Gap findings before
they become published reviews.
Newsletter subscribers receive Spec Gap measurements from the current testing batch as they’re completed — usually two weeks before the full review appears. That includes products that go on to receive strong recommendations and products that don’t make it to publication at all. The rejection findings are arguably more useful: knowing that a widely promoted product delivered sustained SSD write speeds 45% below rated spec before any review site has covered it is actionable information for someone with a purchase pending.