What is the difference in hardness pine trees and fir trees?

One of the best and easiest ways to tell the difference between a true spruce and fir tree is to look at the tree's cones. When mature, the cones on a fir tree stand straight up (point towards the sky) while the mature cones on a spruce grow down towards the ground from the bottom side of the branch. The way that I remember which grows up and which grows down is that I remember the "s" in spruce means that the cones "spray" the ground.