This whole "the average consumer" thing is tiring. Can we just treat people as people and not cast wide nets on the non-HN reading population? Just because a person is not a programmer doesn't mean they are unable to think for themselves and just mindless buy whatever the person standing in front of them tells them to buy.
Uh sure. In that case, go ahead and just substitute every occurrence of "average consumers" with "all consumers" in what I said above. Though I'd be over-generalizing it would still pretty much true.
I didn't say that just because a person is not a programmer that they are unable to think for themselves. A vast majority of people are completely out of the loop when it comes technology and have learned to rely on the judgement of others who are more informed when it comes to technology purchasing decisions. This isn't "mindless" or inability to think for themselves, in fact it's the smartest decision most people can make. We all do it when outside our fields of expertise.
There a ton of extremely competent people that are technologically clueless. To believe otherwise is bubble thinking.
You can be out of the loop on something and still have an opinion on it. In fact, most opinions are not well-informed ones. Go read any political discussion and you'll see a lot of strong opinions of complicated issues that boil down to a feeling the person has.
Just examine the things that you buy; surely you don't mindlessly buy whatever the experts say you should, right? I know almost nothing about cars, but I still have an opinion on which I buy.
