How scoring works

Every product on specly carries two scores per dimension, both out of 100. The launch score measures how the product ranked against the best of its category on its release date. The today score measures the same hardware against the market frontier right now. The gap between the two polygons on the spider graph is the ageing story.

advanceRate is how fast each category dimension moves, in points per year. Phone cameras advance ~5.5 points a year; headphone comfort barely 1. pressure makes frontier products fall faster — a 95-score dimension has further to drop than a 60, because the frontier pulls away from the top first. Scores floor at 15: a 2012 phone still makes calls.

When the frontier jumps — a new sensor generation, a new chip architecture — we update the category's advance rates and every today-score on the site shifts automatically. Today-scores are computed, never hand-edited.

Current advance rates

Independence

Specly earns affiliate commissions on some outbound retailer links. Commission rates never touch the scoring pipeline — the formula above is identical for every product, and launch scores are set before retailer links are attached.