Program Critique reviews consumer technology — phones, notebooks, PC parts, the gadgets that collect around them, and the games people play on them. Every piece here is written to answer one question a specification never answers: is this worth the money, and for how long?
How we judge
A verdict on this site is an argument, not a score out of ten. Four things decide it, and we try to say which one is doing the work in any given piece:
- What it costs you per year, not on the day. A cheap thing replaced twice is not cheap. Where the arithmetic is the whole story, we show it — that is what the repair-or-replace tool does.
- What breaks first. Batteries, hinges, charge ports, thermal paste, panels. The part that fails decides whether a repair is worth paying for.
- How long it stays supported. A working device that stops receiving security updates is a different proposition from one that is merely old.
- Who it is actually for. Most disagreements about hardware are really disagreements about use. We name the use we are judging against.
What this site is not
We do not run a test lab, and we do not publish numbers we did not measure. What you get here is research, explanation and judgement: manufacturer specifications read carefully, the trade-offs behind them explained in plain language, and a clearly stated opinion at the end. For measured benchmarks of one exact unit, read a review from someone who had that unit on a bench — and treat any single set of numbers with the caution it deserves.
Prices and model names date faster than anything else we write. Where a piece depends on a price, we say so, and we would rather you re-check it than trust a figure from a year ago.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, out of date, or simply badly argued, tell us and we will fix it or say why we disagree. Write to [email protected] — the contact page has more on what is useful to include.
Languages
Program Critique publishes in English and Brazilian Portuguese. The two versions are separate sets of articles rather than machine translations of each other, so a piece may exist in one language and not the other.
Who writes it
Articles are published under the Program Critique Editorial Team. We are a small editorial group rather than a named byline: the reasoning in a piece is meant to stand on its own, and you should be able to check it without knowing who wrote it.