The specification nobody prints on the box is cleaning time, and it is the one that decides whether a bean-to-cup machine is still on your counter in March. A milk system with tubes takes several minutes a day to clean properly, and it is the single most common reason these machines end up unused. The LatteGo system is two plastic parts with no tubes at all: they separate in a second and they go in the dishwasher. Over a year that is the difference between a machine you use daily and one you resent.
The grinder is 100% ceramic with twelve adjustment steps. Twelve is plenty — beyond that you are buying a hobby rather than a coffee machine, which is a fine thing to buy as long as you know that is what you are doing. Ceramic burrs also run cooler than steel, which matters more for consistency than the marketing suggests.
Fifteen bar of pressure is not a differentiator. Every machine in this class quotes it, and espresso is extracted at roughly nine bar anyway, so treat that number as noise. The 1.8 litre tank is more useful information: it is at the larger end for this class, which for a two-person household means filling it every two or three days rather than daily.
What you give up is control. There is no app, no saved profiles, and five beverages. If you want to store a different grind and volume per person, this is not the machine — and that is a deliberate design choice rather than an oversight. Philips’ own datasheet counts five, then lists six items including hot water, which tells you something about how firm that number is.
One practical warning about buying this line. Philips runs the same series name across several model numbers, and the suffix after the slash is the one that identifies what you are actually getting: the specifications here come from the EP3246/70 datasheet. Retailers list /70, /74 and others interchangeably. Check the suffix on the box against the datasheet for the region you are buying in, because the grinder, the milk system and the beverage list are not guaranteed to match across them.
The last specification to check before buying any machine in this category is service parts, and we are not going to assert anything about them here — Philips does not publish an availability term, and its own support pages list consumables rather than functional spares. A machine that cannot be serviced in year four is a subscription with a spout, so look up the spares listing for your exact model number before you buy.