Nick Farrell at the Inquirer deconstructs Venezia’s MacBook Air review and calls him an Apple apologist.
It is a pretty entertaining read. The comments are even better.
In particular, ‘pete’s’ point is something I can back up as a reviewer.
That’s about the level of uncritical commentary you get from reviews. The reviewers are so happy just to get a new toy, or so scared that any negative words will ban them from future reviews that rational thought and critical analysis goes out the window.
I once saw a product review in one of the mags for a PCI card that simply didn’t work – it still got 3 out of 5.Pete’s rules for getting the truth from reviews:
1.) the reviewer must have bought the product themselves – anonymously, with their own money
2.) they must use the product for 4 weeks before writing the review
3.) good comments count for nothing (we expect products to be good, right?)
4.) comments about the colour/style/feel count for nothing
5.) the reviewer should validate the specification of the product, in real-life useAs you can expect, I’m still waiting to see a review that is worth reading…
posted by : pete
I have written a couple of reviews where I gave the products failing grades. Needless to say, both companies have halted sending me review units. This is despite many previous samples from both companies getting good reviews (because they were legitimately good).
Most of my reviews are self funded now, bought in retail just like everyone else. That is the ideal, but as you can plainly see it greatly reduces the number of reviews I can post in a month.
For me, writing is a fun extra-curricular activity. But for other authors who rely on writing to make ends meat, and whose work is not published on a major site or syndicated by a media conglomerate giving a bad score to a product can be akin to slicing one’s own wrists.
The best bet is to frequent sites like NBR where user reviews are plentiful and the community can root out BS quickly and thoroughly.
And for the record, I still think the MacBook Air is pretty cool. Not $1,799.00 cool, but worth picking up once the early adopters move on to something better. Positioned as a cloud computer with a much smaller HDD and say a $999.00 price point, the Air really would have been something.
