[bryant]

This feels best summarized as:

• Product A has limited features but does them well. If the customer is okay with the features the product has, the reviewer can recommend it for this customer.

• Product B has more features but is impacted by QA issues as well as product design decisions that make those features harder to use. This impacts the ability of the customer to use features they might've paid for to use the product, and it may even impact their ability to use features core to other products. This potentially makes Product B less desirable for comparable use cases.

With this in mind, I'm inclined to agree with Wired's decision.

[mrheosuper]

I don't agree with this kind of thinking. You have to determine what exactly what you want, anything else is just "nice to have". If you want an air monitor and don't care about screen, having screen is just a "nice to have" and should not affect your experience. And if you do care about the screen, you should also remove all no-screen air monitors from the list.

[alwa]

The screen is the “how,” not the “what.” An item is designed to function with the parts it has. A unit designed without a screen is doing the job another way—say, with a row of LEDs or something. I care whether I can find out what the air quality is, I don’t care whether or not I do that using a screen. It seems to me like relying on a finicky screen was a poor design decision.

It also raises my eyebrows that they see “repairability [as] one of our core differentiators.” It’s cool to make that possible quietly for people who are into it, but would you want a “repairable” smoke detector? Or one that just works? If it broke, would you want them to send you one that’s not broken, or parts and a booklet of repair instructions?

[0cf8612b2e1e]

Do that enough and then the category becomes irrelevant. Every product is a unique snowflake owing to some perfect combination of features (has screen, 30cm3 volume, 19.3 db loud, etc.

If I pay for X, I will be mad if I can only use X-1.