I think the classic example would be womens’ clothing, where what used to be a size 6 is now a size 2 or whatever. Same amount of fabric covers the same amount of body, but the purchaser can think she now fits into a smaller size. Pretty sure they did the same thing with men’s “relaxed fit” jeans.
I recently bought new golf clubs. Modern manufacturers have changed various factors such that a new club with the same number goes further than an old club. Mine - about 10% further. For decades, I hit my 8 iron 150 yards. Now, as a creaky 65 year old, I’m blasting it 165. (For non-golfers, golf clubs are - very generally - woods and irons. Woods are numbered 1 through 7 or 9, and irons 3 through 9 - and then wedges. Clubs travel progressively longer distance as the club’s number drops.)
What is the point of that? Why not give the new club the same numerical designation as the old one that used to fly about the same distance?
Not trying to make this a golf thread, as those always die quickly around here! Do you have any other examples of a product where the description stays the same, but the product/performance/quantity drastically changes? I suppose shrinkflation might be one such area.
Bit of a niche but most tires come with a “treadwear” rating that’s supposed to give consumers some indication of how long the tires will last strictly from a wear perspective. These ratings are entirely up to the manufacturer and are minimally useful for comparing tires within the same brand, less useful across brands. But you can assume that a 380 treadwear tire will be grippier but shorter lived than a 680 treadwear tire. I’ve noticed that cheaper tires from, say, China, seem to inflate (no pun intended) their treadwear ratings to make consumers think the tires are durable. Normal consumer marketing stuff.
True racing slicks don’t have treadwear ratings, but they’re also expensive and there’s always an arms race for who has the stickiest tires, which means pay-to-win racing. Spec series will often adopt a single tire (brand/model/size) to keep costs in check, but that only works if everyone has the same car.
Another option that became really popular maybe 15 to 20 years ago was to use the treadwear rating. There are “baby slicks” usually in the 40 or 100 rating, but far and away the most common spec is 200. Originally 200TW tires were the stickiest DOT tires that you’d put on a performance car for summer driving. Lots of manufacturers made them and they were not all equal. An arms race began.
Currently, in order to stay ahead of the competition (no pun intended), 200TW tires from several manufacturers are actually grippier than some of the baby slicks. They burn up quick. They’re nowhere near durable enough for a street car. But they say 200 on the sidewall so they’re legal in a bunch of series. Welcome back to pay-to-win.
SATs have changed over and over again, to the point where I wouldn’t have a clue what a score actually is supposed to tell me.
Every few years the Scouts change what activities are required for their various merit badges, same badge, new requirements.
WRT your golf club example, I was going to argue that it’s about loft, not distance, but then I hear the lofts have been changing over the years, so today’s 7 iron is more like a yesteryear 5 iron.
Light bulbs are still typically marketed as “Watts” even though that isn’t remotely accurate. It’ really lumens and temperature that matter, but we’re still selling “40-W equivalents” for some reason.
Appliances have “Energy Star” ratings which have consistently gotten stricter over time. An appliance with an Energy Star rating now is probably much more efficient than one from 20 years ago.
Well, I believe the loft affects the distance. Golfers who know and care about such things have tried to explain such things to me, but I don’t care so it never sticks. And I am not interested in going into it here. Pretty sure most people say modern irons are “delofted” or have “stronger” lofts.
As a golfer, all I want to know is how high and how far a particular club will go. If I am 150 yards out, all I want is the club that I consistently hit 150 yards. Whether that club is called an 8 iron or a 9 iron makes zero difference to me.
Here is a weird thing (going further into golf geekdom). I generally prefer to take a full swing with a club, than a partial swing. I’d rather hit a full sand wedge from 100 yards, than try to take a 1/2 or 3/4 swing from 50 yards. So the shortest club in my bag is a 60 degree lob wedge. I used to hit my lob 70 yards - so it was only from inside of 70 that I had to take a partial swing. My new 60 degree lob wedge flies 85 yards. so I have a greater “gap” in which I have to take a partial swing.
But I’m sure that will be as confusing to non-golfers as the description of tires upthread. Sorry, I read it a couple of times and really tried to get my head around it.
I’m with you. However, if I bought an all new super high quality driver, I’d expect the ball to go farther than with my old driver. Same thing if I replace my cheap 20 year old 7 Iron, even if the club has identical “specs” I’d expect a better new technology club to go farther with the same swing.
But… that’s not really what happened, as you said, they’re apparently “delofted”, which is a BS way to make your 7 Iron go farther, they changed the specs. I also found out why nobody uses a 1 iron, they rebranded them 3 irons and everybody has one in their set.
Well, sort of. Horsepower is at least in the right units (power = work/time). It’s just a strange arbitrary amount of power that isn’t very relevant anymore (~750W).
Using Watts to measure brightness make no sense. It’s a measure of power consumption, which isn’t even accurate for LED bulbs, and is being used to indicate some measure of brightness.
I guess it’s not exactly right for the OP since the standard is still roughly the same (a 60W equivalent bulb should give off roughly the same amount of light as a 60W-equivalent LED). I just find it funny that they don’t think consumers are smart enough to shift to Lumens for brightness, even years later.
It makes sense to me: for a long time, incandescent bulbs were the standard, and they were sold as “40-watt,” “60-watt,” “90-watt” etc. That was how the consumer knew how bright to expect them to be. So what if a watt isn’t technically a measure of brightness; a calorie is technically a measure of heat, not fatteningness.
They’re not as variable as you might think. They’re part of the UTQG (Uniform Tire Quality Grading) scheme, and at least on paper, there’s a procedure to test it. They basically mount the candidate tires and a set of control tires from the NHSTA, and then drive around West Texas, wihch is about as dry and flat as it gets, for 7200 miles. Then they compare the wear before and after and across the two tires.
This is also the same scheme that gives us the traction and heat dissipation ratings (e.g. a tire might be rated 600 A B, meaning treadwear rating of 600, traction of A, and heat dissipation of B.
I think they’re intended to be “good enough”, and a sort of rough way to compare tires- while one manufacturer’s 680 may be another’s 620, they’re at least broadly comparable, so that consumers can tell that a tire is dramatically lower or longer life than another. Which I gather was a big improvement in the 1970s when this was introduced.
A lot of that is adjusting for changing circumstances and technology. I mean, they’ve probably had to revise the Photography merit badge several times since I’ve been in Scouts, if only to represent the shift from film to digital, and from there to smartphone.
Now why there would be any need to change something like say… Swimming, I don’t know.
Because people still think in terms of the light output of a soft white 60 watt bulb, because that was the standard for more than a century before LED bulbs came around. Most people neither know nor care that it’s a 800 lumen bulb with a 2700k color temperature.
A 60 watt equivalent soft white bulb is as coherent of a unit as the actual lumens and temperature when you come right down to it.
Yeah - I think your suggestion is exactly what I think manufacturers SHOULD do. I don’t care if they call a certain type of bulb 60 watts or a zillion wackydoodles. And I acknowledge I need to think harder than I ought to distinguish amps/watts/ohms. Pretty much the only times I really thought of watts was checking to see what a lamp socket specified, and generally thinking 100W is brighter than 60W. But decades of familiarity with the lighting that a 60W bulb provides makes it a meaningful measurement - whether it is accurately tied to some technical measurement or not. (Might make for an interesting different thread - what measurements misuse terms and DO NOT describe what they claim to describe.)
In my golf club example, I’m not even sure what the purported measurement means. Today’s “60 degree” wedge flies higher and further than yesterday’s. So how meaningful is the 60 degree measurement?
And when I got fitted for my clubs, the guy was messing with the lofts on various clubs. I don’t take an overly techinacal approach to my golf game, so I really don’t care what someone calls the specifications. But he would switch between - say - a driver with 9 degrees of loft and then tweaking it up to a higher loft, and one with 11 degrees of loft and tweak it down. While tweaking numerous other factors as well. Makes no difference to me. All I’m gonna do is grip it and rip it! Straight into the weeds, no doubt!
I am a film photographer, so I happily talk about a new 135mm lens or 50mm lens and it’s completely understood what that means.
But then along came digital photography.
If you ask me what a good portrait lens would be, I’ll say “Get something between 75 and 135mm because it forces you to stand far enough away for the subject’s geometry to look flattering.” and any digital photographer would know what I meant.
…but your camera might have a cropped sensor, so that might actually mean a lower number. My favorite Fujifilm portrait lens is a 56mm X-mount lens, but that would be 84mm in full-frame equivalent.
This problem existed before digital photography: the idea of a “normal” lens (rendering what the human eye sees, more or less) on a 120 format film camera like a Mamiya C220 TLR would be an 80mm lens, not the 50mm we think of in a 35mm-film world.
And in my Fujifilm X-mount world, a “normal” lens is 35mm.
Hey - another topic I’m completely ignorant about! When I was in college and going through my stereo acquisition stage, I recall my mom saying something like, “Why don’t you get into photography? That would give you something else to throw your money away on!”
So with a digital camera, do they still call it a 35mm, even tho it performs very differently than a 35mm? Apologies that I really do not understand (nor care to understand) lens numbering.
I recall my wife bought a digital AE-1 to replace her old Canon 35mm. I thought she called that a digital 35m. She stopped that course when her perfectly good digital camera was bricked because Canon no longer supported the software. Now she just periodically buys a new point-and-shoot.
Using watts for understanding the relative strength/brightness of light bulbs may not be accurate, but it has 100 or so years of habit and familiarity behind it.
Chevy used to love to “demote” their model names. If that doesn’t make sense here’s what I mean: For most of the 1950s, the Bel-Air was the top of the line Chevy. Then they introduced the Impala, and the Impala became their top of the line trim, and the Bel-Air became the middle of the road trim. Then they introduced the Caprice as the top trim, and Impala became the middle of the road trim, and Bel-Air the base trim. (They called them separate models at the time, but they were more like what we’d call trim levels today, as they were all full size cars, so I called them trims here).
Better yet, junk the archaic single-digit integer designations and just tell us what the loft is on the club in question. Note they did so decades ago with the original names, like mashie and niblick…
As a former SAT tutor, I am glad I got out of that when I did. While I still have respect for the ACT people (whose changes have tended to be more incremental and commonsensical), the College Board (which makes the SAT) simply never sticks with a proven format for very long anymore. My inner language arts teacher got especially annoyed when they junked longer reading essays (vs. the ones they would write themselves, which is another annoying topic), as following the thread without losing it in a longer work is a definite skill that should be tested.
Even before that I’d have to go over every new batch of changes with my teachers, which proved immensely frustrating to them as older strategies which proved useful often became obsolete overnight. The current test is a worthless piece of crap now.
IMAX movies and theaters. Until 2008, when the company introduced its first digital projection system, all IMAX films were projected from 15-perf, 70mm film, with a frame ten times larger than standard 35mm, onto screens that averaged 60x80 feet (18.3x24.4 meters). The difference between regular movies and IMAX was enormous and unmistakable.
With IMAX digital systems, which used two modified versions of conventional digital cinema projectors, 2K at first, and later 4K lasers, the difference was much less obvious. And the company switched its emphasis from giant screens in museums, science centers, and other prestigious locations to multiplexes, where their screens were only slightly larger than in the average auditorium. The only giant screens in multiplexes were the handful that were originally built for a film projector, like Lincoln Square in NYC and Metreon in San Francisco.
The museums and science centers begged IMAX to brand or label the digital theaters differently from the film theaters but the company refused, insisting that all of them were the “IMAX Experience®”.
The move blew up in the company’s face in 2009 when comedian Aziz Ansari went to a digital IMAX theater expecting a giant screen and blasted the company in a tweet: “WARNING: AMC theaters are running FAKE IMAX’s and charging $5 extra for a slightly bigger screen. Boycott AMC. Don’t let them fool you.”
There was a huge media and public outcry for a couple of weeks, and IMAX paid some lip service to making the difference clearer, but eventually the hubbub died down, and thousands of IMAX digital systems were installed in ordinary multiplex screens.
Despite the fact that the average IMAX screen today is probably less than one fifth the area of the average size of pre-2008 screens, and that there are only about 100 true giant screens in the world and over 1,700 digital IMAXes, the media and others keep calling IMAX a “giant-screen” company.
Do you have any other examples of a product where the description stays the same, but the product/performance/quantity drastically changes? I suppose shrinkflation might be one such area.
Now she just periodically buys a new point-and-shoot.