When Product Specs Become Meaningless

Gizmodo posted back in November 2012 that PPI - pixels per inch on digital displays - was about to become the "new most meaningless spec."  It made me think about the forward progress of many product specifications until they reach a plateau of meaninglessness - where every product has it, making it better wouldn't matter, and so it's not worth talking about anymore. This has already happened with, for example, the number of colors a display can show, which is in the millions for essentially all displays. Sure, it's technically possible to keep going into billions and then trillions of colors - but nobody would be able to see the difference. PPI is about to join this club, with Apple's marketing blazing the trail by coining the term "Retina Display." But it's worth noting that they've constrained themselves with this designation: it makes no sense to create anything more than a Retina display, since it is by definition the PPI at which the human eye can no longer see pixelation. So, this is where the PPI arms race will end - and we focus on other specs that haven't yet become meaningless, but eventually will: processor speed, RAM and storage, network speed, camera resolution, and on and on and on...