Do specifications really matter?

Just over three and a half years ago, I purchased a used business computer : Lenovo ThinkPad T61p. I loved just about everything about it. For what I could afford, it was the best thing around. It is still lugged around with me, but its battery life has dropped from about three hours to one and a half. The occasional falls, including once from a top bunk bed in a hostel, have caused a few blemishes on the chassis, and the excessive pressure caused some darker spots on the screen. Regardless, the machine still works very well.

For a reviewer, talk about numbers is a must, but when it comes do daily use of a machine, whether it is you cell phone or computer, it is difficult to say. Numbers are easy to relate to. The bigger or the smaller, is an indication of how well a system performs. It has nothing to do with how well the user can craft a sentence, make conclusions about survey data or sketch on paper. 
You might have heard about the controversy over vacuum cleaner specifications where they indicate the current rating (Amps or Amperes) rather than the "peak horsepower". Anyone with basic arithmetic would know that a 3 horsepower or greater vacuum cleaner would be a no-no in a regular 110V socket - (one horsepower or 1 HP is equivalent to 745W; the maximum current draw for most circuits is 15 amp so about 1650W ).

I ask myself why don't computer specifications matter that much :

• Screen resolution : you get used to a lower resolution. I have a 1920x1200 screen. However when I used an older ThinkPad with a 1024x768 display, I wasn't bothered in the least. It worked fine. In fact with the larger cells in the LCD, it meant that the screen was much brighter.
• CPU (Central Processing Unit) : Unless you are working with multi-layer photographs or video editing, and need to process a large amount of them on a daily basis, you won't feel the need to have the mightiest CPU. Even if it ran hot, an old Pentium M from 2002, which is more than enough to browse the web, play games, work on spreadsheet and make a report. I could go further back in time, and this would still hold true. Computers have not really changed in past 20 years.
• RAM : This one is a little more debatable, but it is now rare to find a machine with less than 512MB of RAM. There are some out there, and for the greater part they should be fine as long as the operating system, assuming it is Windows XP or a light version of Linux like Puppy 
• GPU ( Graphics Processing Unit ): This really depends on the type of game. For simple online games, where 3D graphics are not that important, an integrated GPU, on a low end Intel Celeron, i3-32XX or AMD E1, E2 or A4 is more than enough. If you want to play games at high resolutions, that is you intend to connect your computer to a large screen TV set, you may want to consider getting a GPU with greater capacity. In some games, the CPU is most important, in others the GPU. For obvious reasons, if you are reading this, a high performance PC is not your main concern. 

Finally, if the newest Xbox and Playstation consoles are any indication, games are meant to be fun.  it is no longer about the numbers that fewer and fewer people care to understand.