About Spec Baseline

Spec Baseline is a small network of sites that do one thing: read a whole product category from its published specifications and work out what ordinary looks like in it.

Why the sites are separate

Each category gets its own site because specifications are only meaningful against their own kind. A freezer is compared to freezers of its own form factor and size band, never to a mini split or a solid-state drive. Keeping them apart is what allows a baseline to mean something; putting them together would produce an average that describes nothing anyone is shopping for.

Who writes this

Each site names its editor on its own about page, and that name is the point of accountability for what the site publishes. Those are pen names, and every site says so plainly rather than implying a masthead that does not exist. What stands behind the work is not a credential; it is that the method is written down, applied the same way to every product, and documented where it fails.

What we do not claim

We do not test products. We have no lab, no instruments and no sample units, and no page here will imply otherwise. Everything published is derived from what manufacturers state in their own listings, read consistently across a whole category.

That has real limits, and they are worth stating plainly. A manufacturer's figure can be optimistic, measured under conditions it does not disclose, or simply wrong. Where a listing states something a product cannot do, the figure is held out rather than published — but the process catches what it can catch, not everything.

The method, in one paragraph

Every product in a category is read into a common set of fields. Listings that contradict themselves are corrected or excluded. Figures far outside a category's own range are held back as data defects rather than presented as unusual products. What survives becomes a baseline for its class and size band, published only where the class holds enough products for a median to describe the market instead of the sample. The methodology page has the detail, including the parts that go wrong.

Contact

Corrections are welcome, and a specific one — a product, a field and what the listing actually says — is the most useful thing anyone can send. Contact details are here.