The M1 Macs

Gruber’s review of the M1 MacBook Air has this nugget which feels so relevant to product and software:

What you need to understand is that the best aspects of these Macs aren’t benchmark-able. It’s about how nice they are. The cooling system never making any noise doesn’t show up in a benchmark. I suppose you could assign it a decibel value in an anechoic chamber, but silent operation, and a palm rest that remains cool to the touch even under heavy load, aren’t quantities. They’re qualities. They’re just nice.

We’re always trying to quantify things that we can measure in order to show, with objective data, that they improved. But insanely great human-to-computer interaction isn’t solely a science. It’s also an art, which means the qualities you can’t or don’t measure have a huge impact.