Just so everyone is aware of the "coincidences" that happen with this index:
- Two days ago AA announced their v5 Index which added a few new benchmarks and tweaked a few things.
- Today the newest model announced from a big lab tops the charts.
I'm not saying that AA is definitely taking money from the big labs and changing the benchmark to make the labs' new models look better, but it kind of looks that way. This pattern of behavior has happened before, where the index gets tweaked right around when a new model comes out, and the new model is on top. AA does not, AFAIK, provide a way to see how the new models would have scored under the older index versions. You could probably calculate it yourself, but I'm not going to do that much legwork just for an HN comment.
It's interesting because they publish the index methodology, so you can't really accuse them of not being transparent, but I don't really believe that the choices to update the index were completely independent of the model they happened to be evaluating at the time.
Related: The DXOMark camera scoring method also had similar behavior, where they would release new testing methodology right before flagship smartphones were released. Again, they are technically being transparent about the process, but it kind of smells like the "independent" testers may not be as independent as the average user would hope.
- Two days ago AA announced their v5 Index which added a few new benchmarks and tweaked a few things.
- Today the newest model announced from a big lab tops the charts.
I'm not saying that AA is definitely taking money from the big labs and changing the benchmark to make the labs' new models look better, but it kind of looks that way. This pattern of behavior has happened before, where the index gets tweaked right around when a new model comes out, and the new model is on top. AA does not, AFAIK, provide a way to see how the new models would have scored under the older index versions. You could probably calculate it yourself, but I'm not going to do that much legwork just for an HN comment.
It's interesting because they publish the index methodology, so you can't really accuse them of not being transparent, but I don't really believe that the choices to update the index were completely independent of the model they happened to be evaluating at the time.
Related: The DXOMark camera scoring method also had similar behavior, where they would release new testing methodology right before flagship smartphones were released. Again, they are technically being transparent about the process, but it kind of smells like the "independent" testers may not be as independent as the average user would hope.