How we work

LaptopSpec is a specification archive with a news desk attached. This page says what that means in practice: what gets published, where every figure on the site comes from, and which things we deliberately do not do.

What is on this site

Two kinds of page. Model pages record a laptop or netbook's specification as its maker published it, at the time it was published: processor, memory, storage, panel, ports, battery, weight, and the price quoted at announcement in the currency it was quoted in. Explainers and guides are written by the desk and say what those specification lines mean and how to verify them on a machine in front of you.

Where the numbers come from

Every figure on a model page comes from the manufacturer's own published material for that model. Where a figure was never published, the field is absent rather than estimated. We do not interpolate, we do not average across variants, and we do not convert historical prices into today's money.

Model pages are not retro-fitted. A page that says a 2010 netbook ran for eight hours is a record of the claim made in 2010, and it is useful precisely as that. Where a later revision changed the specification, the revision gets its own entry instead of overwriting the earlier one.

What we do not publish

• Benchmark numbers whose test conditions we cannot see. A frame rate without a resolution, a preset and a power mode is not a measurement.
• A single confident figure where the manufacturer published a range. If the honest answer depends on the chassis, we say what it depends on.
• Current prices. Every price on the site is dated and historical, and the deal pages say so on the page itself.
• Buying recommendations dressed as reviews. The guides make a specification legible; the decision is the reader's.

Who writes it

Everything here is filed by the LaptopSpec desk. We publish under the desk rather than under personal bylines, because the material is reference work built on published manufacturer data rather than personal testimony, and because a page corrected three years after it was written should not still carry the name of whoever typed it first.

Corrections

If a specification on a model page contradicts the manufacturer's own documentation, that is an error and we want to know. Corrections are made on the page itself; where a correction changes a figure a reader might have acted on, the change is noted on the page. Reach the desk through contacts.

Advertising

The site carries display advertising, which is marked as such. Advertising has no bearing on what is published or on how a specification is recorded, and no advertiser sees a page before it goes up.