The TechWeu Score: How We Rate Products

The TechWeu Score is a single number from 0 to 10 that summarises how much product a device delivers for its price. This page explains exactly how it is calculated, what it deliberately excludes, and how to argue with it.

We publish this because a score you can’t audit is just an opinion with a decimal point.

What the Score is — and what it isn’t

It is: a structured comparison of published specifications, weighted against the typical price of the band the product competes in.

It is not a lab measurement. We do not currently run instrumented battery tests, colorimeter readings or thermal benchmarks. Where we quote a number — 1000 nits, 46dB, 7000mAh, 109 PPI — it comes from the manufacturer’s published specification or is arithmetic we’ve done on those specifications, and we say which.

It is not a review. A score cannot tell you how a keyboard feels, whether a fan whines, or whether software is buggy. Read the article; the score is a summary, not a substitute.

We would rather tell you the limits of what we know than dress up someone else’s testing as our own.

The five dimensions

Four dimensions are specific to the product category. The fifth — Value — is the same everywhere and is computed, not assigned.

Category	Dimensions scored
Laptops	Silicon · Display · Build · Longevity
Monitors	Panel · Motion · Connectivity · Colour
Smartphones	Silicon · Display · Battery · Longevity
Earbuds	Drivers · Noise Control · Battery · Connectivity
Smartwatches	Display · Sensors · Battery · Build

Using one rubric for every category would be dishonest — “Silicon” is meaningless for a pair of earbuds, and “Noise Control” is meaningless for a monitor.

What each dimension considers

• Silicon — CPU architecture generation (not the marketing model number), physical cores and threads, and cache. This is where we catch chips like the Ryzen 3 7320U, which carries a 7000-series name on 2019-era Zen 2 cores.
• Display / Panel — panel technology (IPS, VA, TN, AMOLED, LCD), resolution, pixels per inch calculated from resolution and diagonal, peak brightness, and refresh rate. A 31.5-inch 1080p monitor scores badly here because 70 PPI is genuinely poor, regardless of how large it is.
• Build — chassis material, weight, ingress rating, and any durability certification.
• Longevity — how long the device stays useful: RAM upgradability (soldered memory is heavily penalised), storage expandability, port generation, stated OS-update commitments, and battery capacity relative to class.
• Motion — refresh rate, response time, adaptive sync, and whether a refresh figure is native or overclocked.
• Connectivity — port generation and count. A “144Hz gaming monitor” whose only inputs are HDMI and VGA scores poorly, because there’s no DisplayPort to carry the signal properly.
• Colour — stated gamut coverage and contrast ratio.
• Drivers — driver diameter and any stated material (titanium coating, planar elements).
• Noise Control — ANC depth in dB, and critically whether the implementation is hybrid or feedforward-only. ENC-only products score around 3–4 here, because environmental noise cancellation improves your voice for callers and does nothing for what you hear.
• Battery — stated capacity or runtime, and fast-charge return.
• Sensors — which health metrics are present, weighted toward the ones that are meaningful at the price (HRV and VO2 max score higher than another sports-mode count).

How Value is calculated

Value is not a judgement call. It is arithmetic:

specMean = average of the four category dimensions
Value    = specMean × (band median price ÷ product price)
           clamped to the range 0–10

The band median price is the midpoint of the price range that article covers. A product priced below the band median scores above its spec average; one priced above the median scores below it.

The overall Score is then the plain mean of all five numbers — the four dimensions plus Value. No hidden weighting.

Worked example

Acer Aspire Lite AL15-41, from our ₹50,000 laptop guide:

Silicon    6.0   Ryzen 3 5400U — Zen 3, 4C/8T, 8MB L3
Display    6.5   15.6" FHD IPS
Build      6.5   metal body, 1.59kg
Longevity  7.5   2 SO-DIMM slots to 32GB, M.2 accessible

specMean = (6.0 + 6.5 + 6.5 + 7.5) / 4 = 6.625
Value    = 6.625 × (46,500 / 39,990) = 7.7

Score    = (6.0 + 6.5 + 6.5 + 7.5 + 7.7) / 5 = 6.8

Every number in that calculation traces to a line on the manufacturer’s specification sheet.

When our pick disagrees with the Score

This happens, and we don’t hide it.

In the ₹50,000 laptop guide, our “Best overall” pick scores 6.4 while our “Best value” pick scores 6.8. In the ₹30,000 guide, the Chromebook outscores the refurbished ThinkPad we named best overall.

That’s not an error. The Score is value-weighted; our editorial pick is capability-weighted. The Score answers “what delivers most per rupee in this band.” Our pick answers “what should most people actually buy,” which factors in things a spec sheet can’t hold — that a Chromebook can’t run Windows software at all, or that not everyone wants to install their own RAM.

Where the two diverge, the article says so and explains why. Two honest answers to two different questions is more useful than one number pretending to answer both.

Where the data comes from

• Prices, availability and product images — pulled live from the Amazon Creators API and refreshed at least every 24 hours. Nothing is hardcoded, which is why prices on our pages match what you’ll actually pay.
• Specifications — the manufacturer’s own listing text and published spec sheets.
• Architecture and generation data — public processor documentation from Intel, AMD, MediaTek and Qualcomm.
• Derived figures — PPI is calculated by us from resolution and screen diagonal. We show our working.

Where a manufacturer doesn’t publish a specification, we say “unstated” and score conservatively. A brand that won’t publish its panel type or peak brightness is telling you something, and we treat it that way rather than assuming the best.

What the Score cannot see

Being explicit about this matters more than the score itself:

• Real battery life under actual use, as opposed to stated capacity
• Thermal behaviour — whether a laptop sustains its boost clocks or throttles after ten minutes
• Measured brightness and colour accuracy, as against claimed figures
• Sound signature — a 13mm driver can be tuned well or badly
• Keyboard feel, trackpad quality, fan noise, coil whine
• Software quality — bloatware, ad-serving in the OS, update reliability in practice
• Long-term reliability and the real quality of after-sales service

Several of these matter enormously. They’re covered in the article text where we can speak to them, and flagged as unknown where we can’t.

How to challenge a score

If you think a number is wrong, tell us which dimension and why — ideally with the specification that contradicts it. Because the rubric is published and the inputs are specifications rather than impressions, disagreements are usually resolvable by pointing at a spec sheet.

Scores are recalculated when prices move materially, when a product is superseded, or when a manufacturer publishes a specification that was previously unstated.

Our commitments

1. We never present someone else’s testing as our own.
2. We never invent a measurement we haven’t taken.
3. We never link a listing we believe to be counterfeit, even to warn about it.
4. Affiliate commissions never influence a score. The rubric is fixed before prices are pulled, and Value is computed by formula — we cannot nudge it toward a product that pays more.
5. When we think you should spend less, wait, or buy nothing, we say so.

TechWeu earns a commission when you buy through our links. That is exactly why the scoring model is arithmetic you can check rather than a number we assert.