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- [00:01]
Linus Sebastian
I'm ready for my life to change. ABC Sunday, American Idol returns. Give it your all. Good luck. Come out with a golden ticket. Let's hear it.
- [00:10]
Luke Lafreniere
This is immense world. I've never seen anything like it.
- [00:15]
Linus Sebastian
And a new chapter begins.
- [00:17]
Luke Lafreniere
You're going to Hollywood.
- [00:19]
Linus Sebastian
Carrie Underwood joins Lionel Richie, Luke Bryant and Ryan Seacrest on American idol. Season premieres Sunday 8, 7 Central on ABC and stream on Hulu. What is up everyone? Another day, another launch where the MSRP cards are either nowhere to be found or very needs a very tiny few to be found. We're going to be getting into that, talking about both the launch of the RTX 5070 and Radeon 9070 and 9070 XT. We will also be talking about an article that is from last week, but I think still merits some discussion today. Tech radar says pre built are always superior. That is the honest truth. Unless you are an it God. What? Okay, what else we got for this week? What a week it's going to be.
- [01:15]
Luke Lafreniere
For the seven people that care. Mozilla rewrites Firefox's terms of use after user backlash and they're bringing back dig, which, I mean, that might be good.
- [01:27]
Linus Sebastian
I'm digging it. Get it.
- [01:28]
Luke Lafreniere
Maybe. Yeah. Yeah.
- [01:48]
Linus Sebastian
The show is brought to you today by Squarespace, Vessi, Corsair, and of course Our rap partner dBrand, our laptop partner, Dell, and our chair partner. Oh, there it is. Oh, sorry, I gotta cover it up because it's a secret, secret lab. I get it. All right, why don't we jump right into our first topic today, which is of course going to be the biggest launches this week. Adam put, gosh darn it. He put so much work into preparing this topic that I'm gonna do my very best to read as much of it as I can without getting exhausted. Nvidia and AMD have launched their 70 class cards and boy were they doozies. Here's a rundown from worst to less. Worst, the Nvidia RTX 5070 turns out no, it does not in fact have 4090 performance. Dude.
- [02:42]
Luke Lafreniere
What?
- [02:42]
Linus Sebastian
Dude, you were there with me when I filmed that little clip where I like did the little quip to Austin, right? Or had you joined us yet? I don't think you had. Never mind. I lied because we were at the keynote together, but Luke was sitting somewhere else. He had better seats. And then I just went where they shepherded us into the press area where we were like, oh, okay, so I guess we're like third class citizens after the Investors and the analysts, because that's what Nvidia is into these days. Anywho, I didn't have great seats, but I was able to hear Jensen say that the upcoming RTX 5070 at 549 or 649 or whatever, 549 would match the performance of the 4090. And at the time my camera guy Andrew was like, do you want me like filming this? I'm like, buddy, we're at a press conference. A everyone and their dog is already filming it, as you can see. So we are contributing literally nothing to the zeitgeist, or however you pronounce that. Thank you. It's. Oh man, I got dunked on for my pronunciation of wunderkind. Anyway, it doesn't matter. The point is I said it wrong. Anyhoo, we are contributing absolutely nothing. Literally everything. Anything we record here of the stage is redundant because everyone else and their dog has their cameras out recording it. And number two, what they're doing is completely redundant anyway because Nvidia is live streaming the whole thing and you could do, you could get a way better quality version of it from YouTube.
- [04:18]
Luke Lafreniere
The gamer move seemed to be. I know, I know. I think Bitwick Kyle did this and a few other people, but I don't remember who where. They just restreamed the broadcast and stayed home.
- [04:27]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
- [04:28]
Luke Lafreniere
And they just commentated over it. Well, yeah, tons of live viewers. It was, it was like very, very.
- [04:33]
Linus Sebastian
I mean, dude, I, I told Nvidia I don't go to press conferences. The only reason I was there was because we were supposed to go get hands on with the 50 90. Anyway, the point is I was there when Jensen said it and in that moment I was like, yo, Andrew, I know I told you that we're not filming anything, but get, get the, get the camera, get the camera. I got mic'd up. Like put on the mic. Okay. And I got that clip. Dude, that clip has been. I'm gonna get so much mileage out of that. I'll believe it when I see it clip. Because every time Nvidia says something that is just complete bull, I'm gonna be able to pull out that clip. Pull it out again of me at the press conference for the 5090 launch being like, I'll believe it when I see it. So.
- [05:15]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, well, you would have been able to pull it out for every single Nvidia launch that I have personally seen.
- [05:19]
Linus Sebastian
So it's about 20% faster than a 4070. Barely nets a single digit percent increase over the 4070 Super. Its 12 gigs of vram poses longevity concerns, especially at 4k and it is pretty much non existent at retail. While those quick to the punch were able to get their hands on a card, most folks were unable to find them at MSRP and the more expensive partner cards, even those ones sold out shortly afterward. Adam included a picture from PC part picker where there is only one card in stock and this is a 5070 a card with a $549 MSRP and it is priced at $1029 as of 4:20pm March 6th. Nice hashtag blaze it your money.
- [06:12]
Luke Lafreniere
That is yeah sweet.
- [06:14]
Linus Sebastian
Just light it on fire. Light it all on fire. Yeah AMD things went a bit better but it looks like the story is complicated. It was a much better received launch including by yours truly. The 9070 has the same MSRP as the 5070 from Nvidia while being about 9% faster at 1440p and 4K raster in ray tracing. The 9070 beats out the previous flagship 7900 XTX which launched at an MSRP of $1,000 but actually fell behind the 5070 in our testing, though other outlets found that it was within 5 to 7% across their suite of ray traced games. We did notice that the worst performance for the 9070 was in black Myth Wukong, where it seems AMD is still struggling a little bit. It gets 16 gigs of GDDR6 though, which gives us a little bit more confidence that it will continue to be able to keep up in the future without seeing lag spikes, and was in stock for substantially long several hours rather than several minutes. Meanwhile, the 9070 XT competes in performance with the 5070 Ti and AMD 7900 XTX in Raster and ray tracing. It competes and even beats the 5070 in several titles. Great Card undercuts Nvidia's offerings and price, brings ray tracing to a serviceable level and is generally pretty good. However. However oh yeah, FSR4 looks pretty good image quality, no more distracting than DLSS4 and outlets who have done deep dives into the image quality rated as matching the DLSS CNN model but legs behind in some areas compared to Nvidia's latest Transformer model. However, it's not all sunshine and roses for AMD and there's going to be a number of sources that we're going to be talking about, so stick with me for a little bit here, guys, because there's a lot of sides to this story. Video cards with a z dot com. Oh, that makes sense because video cards with an S wouldn't exist because you'd have to have, like, video cards. Hey, I get it. They were planning for the future. They had a crystal ball when they bought that domain.
- [08:36]
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, boy.
- [08:37]
Linus Sebastian
Anyway, they got A quote from OCUK's Andrew Gibson, who stated, MSRP is a capped quantity of a few hundred, so prices will jump once those are sold through. They also received insight about rebates from Swedish retailer Inet Se, who claimed that MSRP prices will apply to a limited number of cards. The prices only apply to the first shipment of each model. I have a note in here from Adam, who prepared this topic. Linus, can you comment on this sort of rebate behavior? Is this commonplace? My experience in the grocery industry knows that this isn't out of the ordinary, but I also sold jam and shortening, so not sure how that translates. What I will say is this. Back when. Back when I was working in retail, demand for the latest GPU was not like it is today. I would say under normal circumstances, yes. There are elements of this launch that were. That would seem pretty wild if you haven't worked in the industry before, but are kind of normal. Like the fact that pricing didn't seem to be finalized up until, like, the hours before the launch. And I'll talk a little bit more about that later. That's not unusual. We would reg. I'm not saying it's good, it's not good. It's absolute madness. But it's not unusual. We would regularly cut POS for literally, like hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of GPUs and have no idea what our cost was for them and what our MSRP was going to be for them. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of GPUs, like, like hundreds of top spec cards. We literally wouldn't have a price. EVGA wouldn't have a price, and our direct Nvidia rep wouldn't have a price. They're just like, buy them. This is your allocation. Take them or someone else will take them. And you're like, okay, because what else are you gonna do? You don't. You don't have any GPUs to sell. What? Your computer store with no GPUs is ridiculous, right? So you just take them. And that's. And that's it. You kind of po. However, what I will say is that the idea of having a rebate like this, like an instant rebate because there's different kinds of, there's different kinds of rebates. Okay, so there's your mail in rebates. Those are the ones that have the little form you fill out for the consumer and they send in the mail in the form and they get some money back. The redemption rates on those are somewhere between 10 and 50% depending on the size of the rebate. The smaller ones tend to have a very low redemption rate and the higher ones tend to have a much higher redemption rate. Once you go past a certain number, don't quote me on those exact numbers. It's been a minute and consumer behavior might have changed a little bit. But the point is just that there's a wide range of redemption and the people who do redeem it are essentially being subsidized by the people who don't redeem it. That's the way the math works on the, on mail in rebate. So there's your mail in rebate. Okay. Then there is your kind of point of sale rebate, POS rebate. And that's going to take place at the point of sale. And those are, those are kind of like a commission or a spiff for a, for like a salesperson. But it goes at the retailer level. So you're expected to kind of use it for a short term promotion. And the idea is that you're driving sales during some kind of an event like March AMDness for March Madness. AMD usually does like a basketball themed promo for March Madness March amdness. So that would usually have something like a POS rebate across bundles of AMD products or partner products in order to kind of push up the volumes during that time. The last kind would be like a price protection slash like, like instant rebate. Instant rebate. Actually it's more of a terminology for POS rebate but like a price protection. So like a credit, essentially a credit where they are taking your entire inventory that you have and they are price protecting you down to a new, presumably permanent price. And that would happen in the event that you had something like a significant price drop. So I would say the only example that, that I remember seeing was when Nvidia launched the GTX 480 or 480 GTX. Excuse me, I've got my, my prefixes and suffixes moved around because Nvidia moved them around. Nvidia launched that card thinking that it was going to sell and it like didn't. I think, I think that was probably the worst Nvidia card launch that I saw in my, in my years working at ncix, we effectively, they were dead in the water on launch day. And so what happened was we had our inventory that we had bought without knowing how much we were paying for it and we basically went, look guys, you fucked this, you need to deal with this. And so we got our stock price protected down. If I recall correctly, it may have also been a POS rebate, but one that was like, this is a POS rebate. But the understanding was that it was perpetual to help us get rid of this stuff. And they effectively adjusted the price of that thing. So with all of that in mind, the idea of a new card arriving and some portion of my inventory being instant rebated as like an introductory promo, knowing that some of my inventory would jump back up to a higher price after the fact. No, I have never seen that before. And I consider that to be. If that is indeed what is happening, there is more to the story which we'll get to. But if that is indeed what is happening, I consider that to be extremely disingenuous because that is not reflective of what the long term situation is going to be. That's an introductory promo, that, that is not an msrp. And if you're not enabling, and I can tell you again from working in retail and knowing that this hasn't changed, I can tell you that the margins are not there to support selling this thing at 599. So I'll use the XT as my example. The margins are not there to support selling this at 599. If you need an instant rebate to get there, you make like six points on a gpu. Like, get real, as a retailer, that is, unless you are. Well, we'll get to the whole thing where you can have marketplaces sell the GPU and they can be at higher prices and you take a cut of that and. Well, I mean, it's not my fault. I didn't price it at that. Anyway, that's a whole, that's a whole other conversation. This is very, very deep, very complicated and we're just getting started. So I would say the closest thing that I ever saw to the kind of fervor that is going on in the GPU market right now, because I worked there. Pre AI boom, pre crypto boom. Right. I would say the 8800 GT was the closest I ever saw and that that was a rippin launch. Like it basically offered similar. See, he remembers this.
- [16:21]
Luke Lafreniere
It was a good time.
- [16:22]
Linus Sebastian
Anyone who was there for 8800 GT launch remembers because that thing was wild. It was Based on the G92 die, if I recall correctly. So it was a process node shrink compared to the G80, which was the 8800 GTX that was the top spec card. And this 8800 GT was on this new die that was on a new node was crazy power efficient. It clocked crazy. Well, it was, it was killer. I think it had a little bit less RAM or something like that. Like it had less vram, but it was available in two different configs, one with less and one with more. And you didn't really need the extra VRAM for a lot of modern games at that time. So a lot of people went with the lower priced, lower vram one and it offered bloody near the same performance. This 8800gt like non GTX and it was like a mid cycle refresh. The whole thing was bizarre. Near 8800 GTX performance at a fraction of the heat. Therefore it was a single slot card and at like half the price. Like it was wild. And if you compared it to the 8800 Ultra, which was barely better than a GTX but cost way more, the value proposition was like unheard of. Like people and remember, SLI was a thing back then and scaled pretty okay across a lot of games that people actually played. So people were buying two of these for like the price of a single 8800 GTX and absolutely curb stomping the GTX in terms of performance. Nobody could keep these things in stock. It was a feeding frenzy. And what happened was over time, the 8800 GT did go up in price, but it didn't happen like this. It didn't happen that your initial inventory would come in and they would basically have you pay a higher price and then instant rebate you down so you could sell a limited amount of them at lower price. No, you paid the lower price. And the way that pricing went up was that your next shipment would be at a higher price. So it was up to the retailer to determine how much they were going to mark it up or whatever with the manufacturer's suggestions. Right? It was up to the retailer how they were going to mark it up. But no one was kind of exercising external control on that card by having you pay a higher price and then enabling the MSRP with a spiff or a discount or an instant rebate or a POS rebate or whatever these mechanisms are. So no, in conclusion, I have never seen what Andrew Gibson and the Swedish retailer are describing. No I have not. So let's hear the other side of the story. The Verge asked amd, can you confirm or deny that the best prices on the best priced cards are capped in this way? And what AMD said is it is inaccurate that the 549599 MSRP is launch only pricing. We expect cards to be available from Multiple vendors at 549, 599, excluding region specific tariffs and or taxes based on the work we have done with our AIB partners. And more are coming at the same time. The AIBs have different premium configurations at higher price points and those will also continue. Now that's another thing that is different these days. It used to be that a premium version and I'm going to use EVGA's lingo. Okay, so a KO or SC or okay Kingpin's a bad example because those were a lot more expensive. But these, these, these, these premium versions of a card usually didn't encroach or barely encroached on the pricing of the card above them. Nowadays, dude, it feels like you can see like, like an overbuilt card, like a premium or an overclocked version of a card that literally costs like 30% more. And you're looking at it going like, hold on, shouldn't I just be getting like a completely new class of GPU for this? This is ridiculous. But because the price bands have been so stretched out like they used to have to fit like your 30 class GPU, your 50, your 50 TI, your 60, your 60 TI, your 70, your, you know, your 80, you're 90 or your Titan. All of that fit within about 200 to 800, $1,000, right? Well now, well, I don't know. We've got price bands all the way from like 400 bucks all the way to $2,000. So all of a sudden you can have a card that's supposed to be $400, you have an overbuilt version of it that's 550 or $600 and you're still like 50, 100 bucks below the next up card. It's ridiculous. So it's really, it's really hard to put downward pressure on the pricing of a 5070 when 5070 ti's are so much more expensive that jumping up to it isn't just a logical step. All right, what else do we have here?
- [21:49]
Luke Lafreniere
It's a long topic and that tangent took so long and it's still such a long topic.
- [21:54]
Linus Sebastian
Oh dude. I mean, is it interesting because you guys can Tell me if you're bored and we can move on. Okay.
- [21:59]
Luke Lafreniere
People seem pretty engaged.
- [22:00]
Linus Sebastian
Okay. Many folks have cried foul on AMD claiming they are doing evil deeds. Adam's guess is that it's mostly incompetence. I mean, of course companies are trying to maximize profits. That's what they exist to do. But AMD doesn't. AMD doesn't sell GPUs out of the goodness of their hearts. But there does seem to be some incompetence, but also maybe some strategic incompetence because I had another email hit my inbox that Adam didn't have access to. That will add a little bit more context to what I'm about to say. So strap in. The pricing was last minute hardware unboxed. Noted in their 9000 series announcement video that they had prepared multiple conclusions to the announcement because AMD hadn't determined pricing yet. And we did the same thing. We prepared three different conclusions for our video depending on the announced pricing from amd. That means that this information was likely provided last minute to retailers and even board partners who would have needed to prepare promotional materials, social media, posts, signage, advertising, database entries and more in an extremely short period of time. AMD would have had to communicate to all of their retail and manufacturing partners provide compensation if prices were being adjusted in the form of rebates or payments. Board partners would have had to reprice all their products communicate to retailers and sis and the like. And this scramble leaves a lot of room for errors like Best Buy listing the MSRP cards as on sale at launch time. AMD has since confirmed this was an error on Best Buy's part because the availability date was supposed to be a day after. Whoopsie. Doodles. Board partners also deal with razor thin margins and have a big interest in making as much money as possible from pent up demand. So the question is what can AMD do about this? And Adam's conclusion is, I mean, not much. Frank Azor from AMD says they will be encouraging AIBS to keep cards at msrp. And we spoke and I think that's, I think that's a little bit disingenuous personally because I do believe that AMD can do more than just suggest things. Here's an example of something that AMD could do is if board partners are not allocating enough of their cards to MSRP versions, they could not allocate them GPUs. That is literally the lever, that is the way that GPU makers. And this drives me crazy because I can be kind of pedantic sometimes. And this is a distinction that actually does matter in my opinion. GPU makers are named Intel, AMD and Nvidia. Graphics board or video card or graphics card or add in board partners. Those are the sapphires, Asus, msi, Power colors of the world. Okay, so that's not a gpu, that's a graphics card. A GPU is the actual silicon die. So that's the leverage that GPU makers traditionally have over their board partners over the graphics card makers is that they can basically say, look, play by our rules or you will, you will either sell at the price that we dictate or you will sell nothing. Now there's a problem and with that, the problem with that is that then they are exerting a kind of ridiculous level of control over their, you know, partners and really not treating them very well, especially if they don't give them enough margin to survive. See exhibit A. EVGA, who didn't survive in the graphics card market because they simply, and this is, this is a little bit of conjecture on my part, but simply got squeezed out. There was just not enough margin for them to continue to make it. Now here's where the story gets a little bit, where we get a little bit more color commentary on the story. We spoke with a system integrator who had a bit of a different, and I wouldn't say different take, but a more expanded upon take. Their take was basically that all AMD really cares about to call this launch a success is to see big lineups at Micro Center. And we did see some evidence that Micro center got a huge allocation compared to what was available online. I don't know this for sure, but it does seem like retail. I feel like we're, I feel like we've gone back two decades. It does seem like retail got the priority for the launch compared to E tail compared to online, which again, you want to talk about things that I don't remember seeing in my entire career? Well, that's one of them. That's wild, dude. That the way to get these products on launch day is that you have you like go line up and buy something in person. So they were pretty frustrated. Their total allocation of 9070 xts from one board partner that they were able to use in their systems was three units. Those units, their cost was over msrp. So what that tells me, what that tells me is that we are not getting the whole story from AMD because it's very clear from those retailers telling us, hey, we only have pricing support on a limited number of these cards. And AMD never actually said that the everyday MSRP will be or the everyday price on these cards will be 549, 599. All they said is that they'll continue to be available. They didn't say in what kinds of quantities. Right. So what that tells us is that it takes some kind of spiff or POS rebate or something in order to hit these prices. These are not everyday prices because if they were, then an SI would be able to buy a card at $570 and make a few points of margin. Selling it at 599. That would be possible. But what tends to happen when your pricing is controlled via spiff or via instant rebate is that only the large players will have access to that. And so when you go buy something at a mom and pop shop or from a small system integrator, it'll be at a much higher price because they don't have access to any of that. They just buy from a distributor. And the price is whatever the channel price is, whatever the market will bear. Another element that they brought up with us is that curiously, a lot.
- [28:44]
Luke Lafreniere
Hovership said his 9070 XT from Micro center was $1100.
- [28:51]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, that doesn't surprise. Okay, how do I say this in a nice way?
- [28:57]
Luke Lafreniere
He said 789. What?
- [28:58]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, okay. Okay.
- [29:00]
Luke Lafreniere
He said 1100 and then he said 789.
- [29:02]
Linus Sebastian
Okay. 789. Okay. That actually ties really well into the next point. This SI contact who we're not going to name just because we don't want them to get in trouble for giving us this inside baseball. This SI contact pointed out that it's curious that a lot of the cards have ended up kind of for. For the 70 for the 9070 XT have ended up in the kind of $720 range, kind of plus depending on how overbuilt they are. Well, here's something to consider. 599 plus a 20% tariff equals what? $720. Gotcha. And here's the thing. Here's the thing. When Nvidia launched their newest generation cards, they didn't know what the tariffs would be. There is at least an argument to be made that Nvidia did not know that there would be tariffs on their cards impacting the pricing. And don't kid yourself, there are tariffs and they are impacting the pricing. AMD knew before AMD announced their retail MSRP, they knew that there would be 20% tariffs on these cards if they were shipping out of China and many, many of them are manufactured there. So what it appears to me, and I can't say this for certain, but with all of the evidence that I've seen and with all the experience that I have, what it appears to me is happening here is AMD wanted to undercut Nvidia on their MSRP is selling these cards into the market with 20% tariffs on them, knowing that realistically their partners will not be able to hit those prices across the entire inventory that they have, but that they could strategically trickle out a few of them at that price while selling the rest at a much higher price that reflects the tariffs which they expect customers to simply accept and absorb. Because GPU prices are so high in the market, it appears to me that AMD has no real intention of actually hitting those prices. But it may not be entirely their fault because AMD certainly didn't start a trade war.
- [31:28]
Luke Lafreniere
Question, I don't think while you were working at NCX there was noticeable tariffs, but no. Do you know anyone or have any experience with stores that operate during. Like, I haven't seen this so far, but would it be normal to display that like this is the base price and then it increases by this much because of the tariff? Like, would you explain that to the user?
- [31:51]
Linus Sebastian
What would normally happen is if you were a Canadian store, let's say, or actually let's, let's use a Chinese store as a, as a better example, if you were a Chinese store. And by Chinese store, I don't mean AliExpress.com that's very much owned by Alibaba Group or whatever. Right. But like, it's very much a Chinese store, but it is, it has an English storefront. Like it is a, it is a, you know, Western storefront for a Chinese company. So when I say Chinese store, I'm talking like Taobao, like an actual like four Chinese people in China Chinese store. So the way that I would expect them to handle it is if you are ordering from a tariff country, they would either have some kind of disclaimer that there may be certain that they're not responsible for any import duties, tariffs, whatever, and then you would be slapped with a tariff bill when it arrives.
- [32:42]
Luke Lafreniere
When it arrives.
- [32:43]
Linus Sebastian
That's how I would expect that to happen. If you are a retailer and you are buying in bulk from a tariff source, then I would expect that to simply be bundled into your cost the same way that anything else would be, whether it's freight or, you know, transaction fees or, or Whatever else, like when we were at ncix, you would have kind of, we had kind like a cheat sheet for what the rough costs would be. So on something like a power supply, I could, I could basically say as long as I'm ordering in pallet quantities and not in, in just box quantities somewhere in the neighborhood of around. Over the time that I was there, freight costs went up a lot. So it started at around A$150 and then went up to probably around $2 to $2 and $0.50 per power supply in terms of factoring in your freight cost. So you would just account for that, that, that import tariff as part of your, of your import cost of the item and then you would mark up from there and that would be transparent to the customer. Other than just that the prices suck.
- [33:45]
Luke Lafreniere
Okay, fair enough.
- [33:49]
Linus Sebastian
So in summary, I don't think that AMD had any intention of these cards being universally available at these prices or if they did have an intention, I think that it might have been kind of a misguided hope or. I mean, I mean things have gone kind of ping pong back and forth on the whole tariff thing a fair bit. So maybe it was a naive hope then that the tariffs would not be there and that they would be able to hit them. But as it is now, I don't.
- [34:25]
Luke Lafreniere
Think they did on China. I think they did on Canada and Mexico.
- [34:28]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, actually, yeah, no, that's right. So as it is now, I think that the more, I think the more transparent thing for AMD to do would be to say there are outside factors impacting our costs. We are going to do our best to make sure that there are cards available at these MSRPs. However, it is very clear from these external factors that are impacting our costs to import these cards that not every card will be available at these prices. And we are effectively going to be shifting margin from the buckets on the cards where we're making money down to these deeply discounted ones at msrp. MSRP is a, is a discounted price. It's a promotional price as far as I can tell. And I am, I'm deeply dis. I'm disappointed. I was about to say I'm deeply discounted. Yeah.
- [35:34]
Luke Lafreniere
Speaking of you being deeply discounted, you can take off the hat.
- [35:37]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, yeah, thanks.
- [35:38]
Luke Lafreniere
No worries.
- [35:44]
Linus Sebastian
There we go. That is much more comfortable. Headphones over top of a toque is not my vibe.
- [35:51]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Questions or people.
- [35:56]
Linus Sebastian
People bored of this conversation? I can't, I can't tell if they, they were into it or not because I don't have all my chats open. Yeah, it seems like people are alright with it, so yeah, good luck everybody.
- [36:10]
Luke Lafreniere
The discussion questions are pretty good. What is the source of the supply shortage? How are board partners feeling? I'm sure they would much rather be selling more GPUs. I mean, and then do you think Nvidia and AMD are indulging in scarcity marketing?
- [36:22]
Linus Sebastian
No.
- [36:23]
Luke Lafreniere
Well, I don't think so.
- [36:24]
Linus Sebastian
No, I don't think marketing is the primary driver. I think with amd, I mean their GPU launches have been low volume and then their post launch sales have been even lower volume for years and years and years. At this point, like I remember having like a really silly conversation with a viewer at one point where they were like, why don't you ever acknowledge Vega 56? And I'm like, what are you even talking about?
- [36:46]
Luke Lafreniere
I literally like seven of them.
- [36:47]
Linus Sebastian
I pulled up, yeah, I pulled up Newegg and I was like, there's one card and it's like an open box card. Like this, this GPU effectively doesn't exist. What are you even talking about? Or like, no, it wasn't Vega 56, it was Radeon 7.
- [37:01]
Luke Lafreniere
Even Vega miners bottle them.
- [37:03]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, but no, Radeon 7 was different. Radeon 7 just wasn't a card. It was this like weird launch thing. AMD made like a few of them with their partners. It was like repurposed dies from some workstation or compute card or something and then they dropped driver support like immediately for it. Like it was a complete clown show of a product. It wasn't a real product. And, and people were like, why don't you don't acknowledge AMG the reading on something. It's like, dude, drop the, drop your fanboy because I don't care. That doesn't. Yeah, you're not making sense. You don't make any sense right now. So that. But that's been AMD situation for years and years and years. I mean even 7900 series kind of did okay. But that was it. It kind of did okay. I'm not convinced that they made any enormous volume of these cards. So if I was AMD and their partners, even if I thought I might have something good on my hands, I'd have like PTSD from how many times I'd been given the smackdown from Nvidia. Every time I tried to launch something decent and have them just like pull another ace out of their butt crack and be like, boom. Guess you get to sell nothing. So overbuilding for Them, I mean, is risky. You got to think about the numbers involved here. Okay, guys, think about the numbers. If I'm amd, okay, or I'm. Let's actually, let's put ourselves in the, in the, in the situation of a board partner instead, because that's a much tougher one. AMD's margins are going to be better and their, their inventory holdings are going to be lower because amd only holds GPUs, or in some cases, don't quote me on this, but my understanding, at least on the Nvidia side, is that they will actually provide kits like GPU kits to board partners and that will include the GPU and the memory. So they may take some margin there, they may actually take on some inventory risk there. Don't quote me on that for AMD or even Nvidia for that matter. But what I'm saying is that they carry inventory for only part of the finished product, the board partner. They have to take on inventory for the GPU die itself, for the memory, for the power delivery components, the raw PCBs, any connectors and doodads. Coolers. Coolers are a very significant expense. So they are holding enormous inventory. There's lead time in terms of building them, packing them, shipping them. So by the time they're actually delivering this thing to a consumer, if all goes according to plan, they have paid all of their suppliers for this stuff. They are effectively probably not able to utilize their, their net payment terms much. And that becomes even more true the longer this thing sits and rots. So if I'm a board partner and we're Talking about a599 product, I can assume that my bill of materials is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 to $450 at least. So let's use, let's use 450. If I overbook, right? Like if I overestimate and I'm a global company, right? So for I'm sapphire, right, I gotta supply, if I supply even one single GPU to every computer shop around the world, how many am I making, right? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? You know, we're talking about enormous amounts of money. So if I, if I get it wrong by even 5,000 units, right, that's $2.25 million. I can't get it wrong. And if I'm going to get it wrong, I'd rather get it wrong on the low side, especially if I've been burned time and time and time and time and time again on building a bunch of these stupid radeon cards and then nobody freaking wanting them. Right. So no, I don't think this is scarcity marketing. I think this is on the Nvidia side, them just much rather using these, these wafers to build AI products. And on the AMD side, I think this is as simple as not buying enough allocation. Not buying enough wafer allocation from tsmc. I'm sure AMD would love to be selling more cards, but they've got to book wafers months in advance. They don't know that Nvidia's 50 series is going to suck back. When they're booking launch allocation for production for 9070, they don't know that they might have. That is awful, by the way. I can pick you up louder and clear. Oh, yeah, all right, I'll stop. Yeah, or just lean away maybe. Anyway, the point is that I don't know. I don't know that Nvidia is gonna lay a huge egg on their 50 series launch. I might have some sort of whispers and scuttlebutt, but I'm not gonna know that their pricing is gonna suck because Nvidia probably hasn't even determined their pricing yet. And they certainly haven't leaked it to anybody. We don't find out till the very last minute. So if I'm amd, I'm going like, oh my God, I don't know how many wafers, because 5080 might be. They might pull a 30 series and just like bomb, try to go after the console market. You guys remember that, right? That's how aggressive Nvidia can be when they want to be. Because they were like basically the PlayStation with this Radeon crap graphics hardware in it. The Xbox 3080 is. I forget what the 3080 MSRP was, but I think it was like 600 bucks or something like that. Like it was aggressive and the 70 was so powerful. It was such good pricing. Right? Nvidia can be aggressive. So I don't want to overplay my pathetic, you know, 90, 70 hand. If I think I might be up against Nvidia's top tier GPU at that price, I have no idea. But then as it turned out, AMD was going to be up against their like 4th tier down and they were super competitive. So yeah, they might ramp things up, but it's going to take time. What else did we have for discussion here?
- [43:03]
Luke Lafreniere
I think that's it for the GPUs.
- [43:06]
Linus Sebastian
All right, good chat. Fascinating. What do you want to talk about today? Oh. Oh my God. Are we supposed to do Merch messages already, Dan, Did I just take way too long to go through that?
- [43:16]
Dan
Yeah, you spoke for about 40 long, 45 minutes.
- [43:19]
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, so very long.
- [43:21]
Dan
We better rush through the rest of this.
- [43:23]
Linus Sebastian
Okay. Was it. Was it boring? Sorry, I'm feeling insecure.
- [43:27]
Luke Lafreniere
I think it was pretty good. I would have cut you off, but. Yeah, it was. I think it was good. It was just really long.
- [43:33]
Linus Sebastian
Cool. Circumcision doctor says what?
- [43:41]
Luke Lafreniere
It's probably up there for one of the longest topics we've ever done.
- [43:45]
Linus Sebastian
Okay, cool. Yeah, dead antisocial. And float plane chat says you talk too much on your show. All right, merch messages. The way to interact with the show is to send a merch message. We don't do twitch bits. We don't do whatever the other thing is. Super chats. We do merch messages because the way we see it, if you're gonna throw money at your screen, you should get some fine lttstore.com merchandise in return. And we've got a great little launch for you guys this week. Introducing the terminally online. Pun very much intended. Thank you.
- [44:32]
Luke Lafreniere
There we go.
- [44:33]
Linus Sebastian
Hoodie and T shirt. It is a brand new design that is an homage to 90s hardware and to your lifelong commitment to being online. It's available as both a hoodie and a T shirt. And I gotta say, man, I saw the hoodie on set the other day and I was like, yo, is that ours? Because I had forgotten that I greenlit this design. The hoodie looks flipping sick. These are printed to order here in Canada for a long lasting, vibrant print that was very well reviewed by Project Farm on our classic cozy terry cotton hoodie blanks or our legendary T shirt blanks. And like most of our sweatshirts, the hoodie also features a secure pocket for your phone, wallet, keys, or earbuds. Get it now at LMG GG Terminally Online.
- [45:21]
Luke Lafreniere
And I would say our T shirts are pretty well priced, even with tariffs. Let's go.
- [45:26]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. They're putting a lot of pressure on me to increase our T shirt pricing, by the way, so I'm not surprised. I've wanted to treat the T shirts like the Costco hot dog. I even told someone in a meeting, I'll kill you if you increase the price of the T shirt. It's a reference. It's a reference. It's a reference.
- [45:46]
Luke Lafreniere
Did Ariana know that before now?
- [45:48]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, it was Nick, so it doesn't matter. I can threaten to kill Nick. It's fine. The point is. The point is that it's a reference. It's a reference he gets. He knows the reference.
- [46:04]
Dan
He'll kill him. In Minecraft.
- [46:06]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, Exactly.
- [46:07]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, yeah. In Minecraft.
- [46:08]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. However, that team has goals in terms of maintaining profitability under CEO Taran Tong. And they are telling me that our T shirt pricing is becoming untenable. We have never adjusted it. It's funny, we take so much flack for our supposedly expensive products and. Yeah. Oh, here it is. This is an extremely expensive hoodie. I get is embroidered. This is not printed. Go find me an all over embroidered garment that is less than 150 US dollars. Go find it.
- [46:51]
Luke Lafreniere
It should. It should probably be at least a sweater because someone's gonna find like, sure.
- [46:56]
Linus Sebastian
Like find me pants or a hoodie or something. Find me pants or a hoodie. Something big. It costs a fortune. What do you want from me?
- [47:04]
Luke Lafreniere
Not every product is for me all over embroidered. Not just a little logo.
- [47:08]
Linus Sebastian
Not every product is for every person. I know it's expensive, but what it isn't is overpriced. It's priced for what it is. Anyway, the point is, our T shirts, they're like 20 bucks. I can't think of a single other, like, creator merch that is $20 for a T shirt. For a printed tee. Quality printed tee. So I don't even want to hear it. Anyway, the point is that we've also got the hoodie, which you guys can see here, which by the way, also has printing on the back, which costs us more. And that's US$60 for our fine, terminally online hoodie. This is a great shot, by the way. I love this. There they are. Gen Z not talking to each other on their phones. It's perfect. It's flawless. Great job, Tatiana. Sammy and I assume Artie was probably involved in that shoot as well.
- [47:57]
Luke Lafreniere
I'm trying to find a sweater because there's like, there's probably one of them. What I'm finding is a lot of them will say embroidered design and it's printed, but it looks like it's embroidered.
- [48:06]
Linus Sebastian
Digitized, says I digitize embroidery. And I promise that's cheap for a hoodie. Exactly. And I'm not. Okay, it's not cheap. But what it is, is fair. It is fairly priced. We have. We have a cost markup model for our stuff. We're not demanding some ridiculous margin. And if you think we are, hey, you don't have to buy anything. That's totally okay.
- [48:30]
Luke Lafreniere
Hey, any. Any news on the. I left it alone for. I did. I was a good boy for a little bit. I'M going to. I'm going to. I'm going to get one in there.
- [48:40]
Linus Sebastian
What's coming?
- [48:41]
Luke Lafreniere
Any news on the talls? Oh, the tall blanks.
- [48:44]
Linus Sebastian
I don't know. As far as I know, we're just ordering them. I was told, I was told we have no less than $3 million of inventory incoming. So things are a little bare right now on the store. We know, we know. And I have been told we have $3 million of stuff on order. So hopefully there's some tall blanks in there, but that's all I know.
- [49:07]
Luke Lafreniere
Sell a bunch of tall blanks immediately because I'm not waiting this time.
- [49:10]
Linus Sebastian
Let's go.
- [49:11]
Luke Lafreniere
I'm just gonna buy a bunch immediately. I was nice last time. I was like, I'll let the audience get some this time. Screw you guys. I'm tired of this. I don't want to wait like seven more months to be able to buy a shirt. I will sit on WAN show when they're announced and I will order them live. I will race all of you.
- [49:31]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, my goodness.
- [49:32]
Luke Lafreniere
Fight me now.
- [49:33]
Linus Sebastian
Okay. Anyway, we have an announcement. If you were wondering about the toque that I was wearing, I refuse to call it a beanie. That is my. That is my act of solidarity with my fellow Canadians in this trying time. If you're wondering about the toque that I was wearing earlier, it's because of the why is WAN Late? Series. A fan favorite floatplane exclusive series that shows you the behind the scenes of what Luke and I are up to each Friday. We been competing to see who is the one who makes a WAN late. And as you can see, I lost most recently. To see all seven episodes in this monthly series, head over to lmd.gg floatplane.
- [50:16]
Luke Lafreniere
Actually, every time.
- [50:17]
Linus Sebastian
Actually, I think I have a new. I think I have a new favorite exclusive over there. I checked out a little bit of this and then Sammy told me I had to stop watching it because he wants to get me to react to it. But it is so funny. LMG team members share their first meeting with me. So we've got Emily from the editing team, Mark from the editing team, Vance the executive assistant, and then Nicole from hr. And excuse me, what do they call. Oh, bloody hell. What's the like custodian version of hr? Culture and talent? Culture and talent department.
- [50:52]
Luke Lafreniere
Custodian version?
- [50:53]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, like, like custodian versus janitor, Receptionist versus secretary. Culture and talent instead of hr, you know, like. Yeah, sure. Yeah, sure.
- [51:06]
Luke Lafreniere
All right.
- [51:07]
Linus Sebastian
Anyway, people are loving this one. Check it out at LMG GG Floatplane. Oh, we haven't even done a merch message yet. Right? How do you send a merch message? You go on the store, pick up something nice and in the cart you will see a little box to send a merch message to producer Dan who, sorry, has been waiting staged for this terminally online moment for lord only knows how long and and will give us who will either reply to your message, pop it up down there, or curate it for me and Luke to talk about. Hit me, Dan.
- [51:39]
Dan
I got one occasionally. Why do you guys completely remove products from the website that is the Tech Pro or the Workshop jacket? It means there's no info and tech specs to reference for reselling or just.
- [51:49]
Linus Sebastian
Product comparing in general because it was confusing and made the site really cluttered for people who were shopping for stuff that we do have for sale. However, when we I think there's a redesign coming up that will include an old product archive and we we are going to do that. It's taking longer than I would like but I don't know what to say other than things take time sometimes and I'm really sorry for that.
- [52:16]
Dan
Hey DLL. On launch day I tried to buy a 9070 XT while watching stock vanish. I accidentally bought a 9070 for US$650 on Newegg. Should I just cut my losses and return it or is this an okay price?
- [52:34]
Linus Sebastian
Was it 650?
- [52:36]
Dan
650?
- [52:37]
Linus Sebastian
Man, I do not love that card.
- [52:40]
Luke Lafreniere
However, dude, it's so hard to determine what an okay price is when nothing's in stock and all the price is just yo yoing constantly.
- [52:46]
Linus Sebastian
Like a big problem with the 70 is the clock speed. Like yeah, it's got fewer cus and and all of that, but it has 16 gigs of RAM. And so a big part of the problem is the clock speed. I actually we didn't there was. We don't have much time when it comes to launch like launch embargo reviews. So I don't know if it overclocks like a bat out of hell. Like it's possible that that card could be a much more competent card than it reviewed as I don't love that card at that price. And personally I still have not actually pulled the trigger on my 5090 upgrade for this cycle because I'm waiting to see if Plouffe actually doesn't go through with his order. He has a pre order in at Best Buy and he said he'd give it to me because he decided not to go through with it. But I Think he might change his mind still. So I'm not going to hold him to it, but I'll take that. But I. I gotta be honest with you guys on principle. And it's funny because I often see people kind of getting on me about being rich and, Sorry, how did you phrase it? Quite wealthy.
- [53:59]
Luke Lafreniere
Okay. Yeah, you talk shade, Mr. I'm gonna buy a Plane.
- [54:03]
Linus Sebastian
I'm not talking shade. I'm not talking shade. What I'm saying is, what I'm saying is.
- [54:13]
Luke Lafreniere
Sorry. You're good.
- [54:14]
Linus Sebastian
Do you need a minute?
- [54:15]
Luke Lafreniere
You need a minute?
- [54:17]
Linus Sebastian
So I'll often see people kind of come at me because I'll say, like, look, no, that's expensive. I'm not gonna buy it. Yeah, the reality of it is I could buy a 50 90. I could buy a 5090 right now. I could go on ebay. I could buy a scalped 50 90. But that I'm not going to, because that's lame because I'm sitting here telling you guys, don't buy scalped GPUs, don't contribute to the crappiness of the GPU market by paying these prices. So what? Because I'm in a position where I can just afford to just buy it. So then I just should. How hypocritical would that be? And so I was looking at the, I was looking at the comments on the MacBook announcement video where I was like, yeah, oh, this sucks. I bought mine at a bad time. And half of it is people telling me to return it because I'm within 10 days. But guys, movie magic. Our video came out 10 days ago. I bought it like three weeks ago almost. So, no, I can't return it. And then the other half was people telling me, you know, suck it up, crybaby. You can afford to buy a new one anyway. And I can. But that's not the point. That doesn't change anything. That doesn't change the fact that I bought it at a bad time because I got a last gen product days before Apple announced the new one. And that sucks. Nobody likes that. That sucks. That's the whole point. Also, I just needed a hook for the intro for the video. Who cares? Like, I literally, when I was shopping for my MacBook, bought a last, last gen one. I bought an M2 because I knew that all I was gonna do was word process on it and it wasn't gonna matter anyway, so.
- [55:53]
Luke Lafreniere
You're funny too, right?
- [55:54]
Linus Sebastian
Like, I'm not actually mad. I just, I. I just am saying a thing. I bought this at the Wrong time. And that blows. It blows for anyone regardless of the money.
- [56:04]
Luke Lafreniere
You got roasted recently at an event because people like, oh, why do you have the like crappy iPhone?
- [56:09]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, the 16 Plus. Yeah, yeah.
- [56:11]
Luke Lafreniere
Remember? Yeah, because I like, I don't know, I've always. As much as, as much as you are. What did I say before? Fairly wealthy or whatever. I, I have always appreciated that like you know, you'll sit in, you'll sit in economy, you'll buy the lower end thing. You'll not scalp stuff like there's.
- [56:27]
Linus Sebastian
Well, it's the principle of the thing.
- [56:29]
Luke Lafreniere
Principles that you've stuck to. Yeah.
- [56:30]
Linus Sebastian
And the thing with this one is that this is the phone that I thought made the most Sense in Apple's 16 series lineup. Yeah, I can afford a Pro. Of course I can. Don't be ridiculous. Literally I bought a Pro and a Pro Max or whatever the top spec one is. They're sitting in a warehouse. I literally bought them. But this is, was the one that I wanted to review the platform on because I thought that in terms of what people should actually be spending their money on, this was one that made a lot more sense. Those features on the Pro series. Yeah, I appreciate a higher refresh rate display, of course I do. And I guess I'd love to be able to do a 3D scan of my room if the situation arises. And USB3 transfer speeds are better for the. Once every couple months that I'll plug in and I'll do an over the cable backup of my photos or whatever. But that's it. I'm not going to pay hundreds of dollars more for that and I'm especially not going to recommend that someone else pay hundreds of dollars more for that. And I think that reviewing a product the way that I would actually recommend buying it more useful, I think that's more meaningful. It's kind of like years ago actually anytime we would order a laptop, Alex would ask that instead of ordering the starting at configuration, we order the minimum we would recommend configuration. So if starting at had four gigs of RAM or something, we basically don't acknowledge that and we go no, this is not a 999 laptop. This is a 1299 laptop. It has 16 gigs of RAM and etc. I think philosophically that that's something that I can get behind and it's something that I am trying to continue to be behind. Yeah. Not pretending I can't afford it. I mean you guys are, you guys are going to see some stuff over the next month or so of just Stuff that we could do for the memes. You're going to see some stuff. Anyway, the point is, we have our challenges, but we're still. We're still doing okay. No, it is not going to be a tech yacht. I promise it will not be a tech yacht.
- [58:53]
Luke Lafreniere
Tech blimp.
- [58:54]
Linus Sebastian
Tech blimp. Yeah, sure, sure. Let me get right on that.
- [58:58]
Luke Lafreniere
Put one person and a laptop on it.
- [59:02]
Linus Sebastian
Aw, thanks, Dan. Oh, right. Did we ever do a second merge message?
- [59:06]
Dan
Yes.
- [59:07]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, wonderful. What am I supposed to do?
- [59:09]
Dan
Let's go straight into sponsors.
- [59:11]
Linus Sebastian
Oh. The show is brought to you by Squarespace. You might not like my fashion sense, but you gotta admit, our website, built with our sponsor, Squarespace, actually pretty tasteful. They make building a website ridiculously easy. So easy that our HR team, that is Talent and culture team, can quickly post job listings without bugging the IT department. Applicants can fill out their info and upload resumes and cover letters directly on the site. And Squarespace has tons of stunning layouts and styling options that look amazing on any device. Not much of a writer. Well, Squarespace also offers AI tools to help you craft product descriptions with just a simple prompt. They also support all major credit cards and other popular payment methods, making it effortless to set up your online store. Need help? You can message them through live chat, browse their video guides, or even hire a Squarespace expert. So start building your website today and get 10% off your first purchase by visiting squarespace.com Wan the show is also brought to you by Vessi if you're running out to grab a new graphics card this week. Okay, I get where you're going with this, Dennis, but why am I holding a GPU already as I run to get a graphics card? Fail. Absolute fail. You might as well run in a pair of Vessis from our sponsor. Vessi keeps your socks dry while staying breathable, lightweight and stretchy. And thanks to their versatility, I even wore them to Disneyland last week. Of course, Dennis would get me in the Vessis. They're comfortable and fantastic for long walks. It's the lightweightness that makes the biggest difference for me. Honestly, I'm going off script here. Check out their Storm Bursts. They combine sneaker like comfort with boot level protection. Great for spontaneous weekend adventures, especially hiking. I mean, you'd hate to get your socks muddy or worse, slip on the trail. The Storm Bursts feature a rugged outsole designed for superior traction on wet, slippery or uneven surfaces. And Stormburst offers both high and low top options. They have tons of positive reviews and Many of our team members wear Vessi's every day, so step boldly into any weather with Vessi Stormburst. You can get your pair now@vessi.com wanshow to make every step an adventure and get an instant 15% off your first purchase at checkout. Finally, the show is brought to you by Corsair. Not too pleased with the PC case you've got? Our sponsor Corsair's frame 4000D might be the case that'll make you happy. Its modular design and infinirail fan mounting system make building or upgrading your PC easier than ever, offering you the flexibility to support up to 12120 millimeter fans and even dual 360mm radiators. Got one of them uber chonky GPUs? Well, first of all, lucky you. And second of all, the frame 4000D is larger than its predecessor with plenty of room to fit your graphics card. Plus it features reverse connection motherboard support and removable internal panels to keep everything looking clean. Built for easy IQ link integration, this case lets you manage all your components seamlessly. So check out the Corsair frame 4000D today. Link in the video description Lies, damned lies. And then MSRP Bamboozled that was the guidance for the title and thumbnail. I was just reading it. Dan put it at the bottom of the doc under sponsors. Okay, Dan, what do you want to talk about next?
- [62:36]
Luke Lafreniere
Mr. Luke, let's let's cover the Firefox terms rewrite because we were we were a little kind of unsure about it last time. I was pretty sure that's not what they meant at the very least. So I'm happy that they have done this, although I haven't actually reviewed it. I'm assuming it's fine. Mozilla has responded to user backlash over new Firefox Terms of Use introduced last week, rewriting the policy to address the overly broad language. That's one way of saying it used in the original version, which, you know, critics said the language implied that Mozilla was asking for rights to any data input or uploaded or anything uploaded through Firefox, which is literally what it said. So. Yep, which raised concerns about data being sold to advertisers or used to train AI. Mozilla claimed that the new terms didn't represent a change in the way that the company used data, and that the company's ability to use collected data was still limited by a separate Firefox privacy notice. Two days after the initial uproar, Firefox product chief Ajit Varma Varna. Yeah. Announced that the terms of use have been rewritten to more clearly reflect the limited scope of how Firefox interacts with user data. And the new terms explicitly state that Mozilla does not gain ownership of inputted content. Discussion Question how diligent are you about reading terms and licenses for the apps you use? Not very.
- [64:03]
Linus Sebastian
I think it depends.
- [64:04]
Luke Lafreniere
Completely honest.
- [64:05]
Linus Sebastian
I actually read an entire contract today for the first time in a while.
- [64:09]
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, I read contracts all the time. Oh, I don't read.
- [64:13]
Linus Sebastian
Well, that included terms of service, so I guess. Yeah, but okay, yeah, it was more of a sales sale contract, so yeah.
- [64:19]
Luke Lafreniere
I read those for sure. I read every single one of those. I don't. When I'm signing stuff on behalf of the company, I'm a lot more careful. If I'm using like, I don't know, like Discord, I should. Because they're almost certainly like selling everything. But yeah, I don't. I don't know.
- [64:39]
Linus Sebastian
They're probably not even selling it. I mean, aren't they. Where are they based?
- [64:45]
Luke Lafreniere
I think they have significant company ownership in China.
- [64:47]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. So they're. So they're just giving it to the Chinese government. You know, don't even worry about them selling it.
- [64:52]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I don't know.
- [64:57]
Linus Sebastian
Now I want to know who does.
- [64:59]
Luke Lafreniere
Own Discord owned by co founders. I could be super wrong.
- [65:03]
Linus Sebastian
I thought there was a significant chunk, oh, 10 cents in there.
- [65:09]
Luke Lafreniere
It says most likely has a majority stake. What does that mean?
- [65:13]
Linus Sebastian
Nice.
- [65:14]
Luke Lafreniere
Can you just tell me if it actually does or not?
- [65:17]
Linus Sebastian
Nice.
- [65:23]
Luke Lafreniere
I'm not 100 certain because multiple sources say most likely. I don't know what that means.
- [65:29]
Linus Sebastian
Is it banned in China? Oh, it's blocked in China.
- [65:34]
Luke Lafreniere
So it's not funneling information.
- [65:37]
Linus Sebastian
That also doesn't mean that it's not owned by. It looks like there hasn't been a lot of conversation about this recently. So you know what, I'm just gonna. I'm just gonna un. Allegedly. There. I said allegedly.
- [65:50]
Luke Lafreniere
I don't know. Well, they have some amount of stake, 10 cent seems to have some amount of stake in the company, but it's. It's not very clear how much. I don't know anyways, either way. Yeah, I read and have raised issues with actually many times contracts that the company has. Has signed, including one very intense one with. Yeah, I'll say it. One with a sponsor where they were. They were trying to give us information early, which would have been very helpful. But I don't even know if you know about this, but the contract included a line like 3/4 through it that said that we couldn't say any disparaging comments about them ever. And I was like, no, it's like, there's no way we're signing this.
- [66:38]
Linus Sebastian
No, I think I did hear this one. I think I did hear this one.
- [66:41]
Luke Lafreniere
You did?
- [66:42]
Linus Sebastian
That would have been hilarious. We would have just. We would have just unbatted.
- [66:47]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [66:48]
Linus Sebastian
We would have had to just say whatever we want, because that's not how this works.
- [66:50]
Luke Lafreniere
We would have had to break contract.
- [66:52]
Linus Sebastian
That's hilarious.
- [66:52]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. I sent it back to them, and they're like, oh, like, we're never gonna do anything.
- [66:56]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
- [66:56]
Luke Lafreniere
I was like, no, you're removing this.
- [66:57]
Linus Sebastian
Like, then you'll have no problem removing it.
- [67:00]
Luke Lafreniere
Exactly.
- [67:01]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
- [67:01]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [67:02]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, that's great.
- [67:04]
Luke Lafreniere
Which, if I remember correctly, I don't know that they did.
- [67:07]
Linus Sebastian
No, they didn't. I don't think they removed it, ultimately.
- [67:09]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. So we never signed it.
- [67:11]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. Now there's. Man, there's been all kinds of stuff like that that's, like, stuff that we'd love to do that would be beneficial, mutually beneficial. Like, we had a. We had a laptop company framework disclosure, but it wasn't framework, so whatever. But we had a laptop company come to us recently and say, hey, like, we'd love to integrate more deeply with you guys, get feedback on branding and product design and, you know, give you guys early looks at stuff so that you can kind of help guide us. Because realistically, we really do appreciate your feedback as a. As independent media, but the reality of it is, by the time we get it, the product's done, so there's not really anything we can do about it. You know, how about this? And I had the business team bring it to me, and I basically was like, I don't see what planet this can work on, because I'm making the exact same gesture as my doppelganger here. I don't see what planet this can work on, because either we do this for free, which is a complete waste of our time, because we're busy and we have a lot to do. You know, it's not that we don't want to be helpful or whatever, it's just that, like, we can't make it a habit to just do consulting for free for everybody. That's ridiculous. So that's not an option. And we can't take money for it, because even if they gave us a contract that was like, oh, yeah, you could totally say whatever you want, we actually wouldn't be able to because Anything that we were bound by that didn't make it into the final product. Right. Like any of that decision making process that we're privy to now, because we're privy to it, we wouldn't be able to speculate on it without sort of violating the, I mean, at least the, the spirit of the agreement. Like you can't, like we couldn't. Man. Imagine if we were doing a review of this MacBook. And I'm going to use a far fetched example so that I'm really not giving any hints because I promise you it wasn't Apple talking to us about this. Apple doesn't talk to me. If I was doing a review of this MacBook. Like, imagine me knowing that I advised them that I do actually like the keyboard. So again, I'm gonna use an example that is not real. Imagine if I advise them that the keyboard sucked and they shipped that sucky keyboard in spite of me saying that I didn't like it. So now I'm sitting here doing my editorial review and I'm like, yeah, I told them this keyboard sucked, but they shipped this anyway. So they're especially stupid. Imagine the strain that that would put on the relationship. Even if I was allowed to say that, that's like you're just in a position where things are like, just not a good idea. Bizarre, you know?
- [69:56]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [69:56]
Linus Sebastian
Like it's, it's not even, like it's not even conflict of interest, it's just conflict that's just, that just, that just doesn't work. So I think, I think that's come up probably half a dozen times over the years and every time I just kind of kick it back and just kind of go like that. Is this. How does this make any sense? It doesn't make any sense.
- [70:14]
Luke Lafreniere
In the particular example that I laid out as well, the, the thing that was kind of funny to me was that they were, it was, it was clearly more. If we ignored the thing that I had to sign, it was clearly more beneficial to them. Like the thing that we would have been doing would have been better for them than it would have been for us. So it's just kind of stupid. But I think, I think, you know, they're just a pretty big company and they have one boilerplate thing and their lawyers just didn't want to change it. So like the person I was talking to understood, I get it. But they, they couldn't get the legal team.
- [70:44]
Linus Sebastian
It probably would have cost 20 grand because they probably would have had to take the entire agreement back to the law. Firm and like, yeah, this is why I don't like involving lawyers and things. And if you're a lawyer, whatever, like, nothing personal. You got, you got your expertise, you got to be paid for that. You got a job to do. I get it. But I don't like talking, dude. I don't like talking to you neither. Yes. Yeah, sorry. You know, I'm sorry. Nothing personal. What do we want to talk about next?
- [71:16]
Luke Lafreniere
Should we do the dig thing?
- [71:18]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, let's do the dig thing. Diggs coming back. What?
- [71:22]
Luke Lafreniere
Digg founder Kevin Rose and Reddit co founder Alexis Ohanian. Sure. Have acquired Digg with the intent of reviving the platform with a fresh vision to restore the spirit of discovery and genuine community that made the early web a fun and exciting place to be. Good luck with that. I would love it if you can accomplish it. Digg launched in 2004 with its innovative user curated content system and quickly became the homepage of the Internet for more than 40 million unique visitors a month. After a very poorly received redesign in 2010, users abandoned the site in favor of Reddit. And by 2012, Diggs unique visitor count was down 90% from its peak and the site and assets were sold off for less than $16 million.
- [72:07]
Linus Sebastian
Isn't that crazy to think? Like absolutely crazy. The heights that it was at nothing and Digg was everything and practically overnight, that was it. That's how fast platforms used to come and go. And now, I mean, you've talked about this extensively. We don't have to reopen this can of worms. But it feels like things are so permanent. They're. The momentum is enormous for platforms now anyway. Carry on. Sorry.
- [72:34]
Luke Lafreniere
The moats are huge. Like, anyone attempting to attack YouTube is going to lose. Like, it just. I don't know. It is what it is. Even. Even TikTok. Like, they're winning in a space, but they're. They. They didn't win. Like YouTube style VODs.
- [72:47]
Linus Sebastian
No. And shorts.
- [72:48]
Luke Lafreniere
Even then, YouTube shorts are taking off.
- [72:50]
Linus Sebastian
More importantly, they didn't win the profitability of traditional VOD.
- [72:56]
Luke Lafreniere
Yep.
- [72:56]
Linus Sebastian
Like, I'm sure TikTok makes money, but the creators sure as heck don't.
- [73:00]
Luke Lafreniere
Yep. In a press release, Ohanian summed up the plans for the new site, stating, kevin and I are here to build something better than what social platforms are offering today. AI should handle the grunt work in the background while humans focus on what they do best, building real connections. No one dreams of spending their day hunting down spam or playing content police. They want to create, connect, and build thriving communities and I'm all in on this chapter. Interesting. So, like, AI content curation with humans just commenting on it? Maybe. I don't know, it sounds like, from that description, that humans aren't even posting the links. I should handle the grunt work in the background while.
- [73:46]
Linus Sebastian
I don't know what that means.
- [73:48]
Luke Lafreniere
Real connections. No one dreams of spending their day hunting down spam or playing content police. So no mod, no active moderation.
- [73:55]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, I don't know what that means.
- [73:57]
Luke Lafreniere
I don't know what that means either. And because I didn't know what that meant, I went to their website and I learned nothing at all. It is. It is completely useless.
- [74:13]
Linus Sebastian
I mean, that makes sense because it's not like they've had time to work on anything yet. It's just an announcement of an intent to work on something.
- [74:21]
Luke Lafreniere
No explainer of. You know what it is? I don't know, they have a little button that every time you click it iterates by one.
- [74:27]
Linus Sebastian
I mean, I'd be down to give it a shot, but I just had a lot. Oh, there's so much. There's so much of why I use Reddit is because of what's already there, not because of what I want to be there in the future. And that's true of YouTube as well, which was another great example you gave of just like a platform with enormous inertia.
- [74:49]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [74:50]
Linus Sebastian
Conceptually, what is the difference between inertia and momentum? I guess momentum has to actually have. Well, momentum. But inertia is always an innate quality quantity. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Different side, same coin.
- [75:12]
Luke Lafreniere
Momentum is defined as a tendency of a body to remain in motion. Inertia is defined as a tendency for a body to oppose the change in its position.
- [75:25]
Linus Sebastian
So they're the same thing?
- [75:27]
Dan
No, no.
- [75:31]
Linus Sebastian
I mean, they sound like the same value once you calculate them.
- [75:34]
Luke Lafreniere
In simple words, momentum is your force or speed of movement, and inertia is what keeps you going.
- [75:42]
Linus Sebastian
Mm. What wouldn't your speed of movement and your mass be? What keeps you going?
- [75:48]
Dan
No, because if you had an elephant that was stationary, it would have enormous.
- [75:52]
Linus Sebastian
Inertia, but no momentum.
- [75:53]
Luke Lafreniere
A lot of inertia.
- [75:54]
Linus Sebastian
But then if I wanted to, I guess we could. Okay, so only if it's completely stationary inertness, then it's inertia. I guess that kind of. I can kind of get behind that.
- [76:09]
Dan
If you had a very tiny thing that was moving very fast, it would have a high inertia.
- [76:21]
Luke Lafreniere
I don't think that's right.
- [76:23]
Linus Sebastian
I'm not gonna worry about it. I'M bored. The best subscription ever just got more affordable. YouTube Premium Light On March 5, YouTube announced that they are adding a cheaper tier to the YouTube premium lineup called Premium Lite. It will cost $8 a month instead of $14. But there are some differences. You will not get access to downloading or background play on mobile.
- [76:52]
Luke Lafreniere
No background play.
- [76:53]
Linus Sebastian
Okay. YouTube music, music, videos, shorts and the homepage will still get ads. And they also have a footnote saying that most videos are ad free such as gaming, fashion, beauty news and more. So what am I actually getting? Well, you get no in video like mid roll and pre roll ads it sounds like in most videos. But that does not include music videos, shorts or the homepage. And you don't get YouTube music. This actually sounds like a terrible deal and you should just get the regular premium.
- [77:38]
Luke Lafreniere
I also hate that it's. It's unclear. So it feels like they can change it on me without even updating the terms.
- [77:45]
Linus Sebastian
Well, this basically sounds like they just can't afford the music licensing because that's why you can't have background play. Like that's why background play costs because it's instead of Spotify. Right? You can just have YouTube music videos playing in the background. So like I get it. But also it just seems like not that compelling a value add because I don't know if I know a single adult working person in my life that doesn't have a Spotify or YouTube Music or Apple Music or Tidal or whatever like a music subscription. I really don't think I do. So if you're going to have one anyway, then you should just get YouTube Music because at this price difference of $6, it's basically nothing. And if you sign up as a family with some family, then honestly the difference in price is even smaller to just get the full YouTube Premium.
- [78:40]
Luke Lafreniere
Next up, correction for placebos. Correction for the discussion about placebos on February 14th Wan Show.
- [78:52]
Linus Sebastian
Oh sure, this is pretty short.
- [78:54]
Luke Lafreniere
The Skeptics Guide featuring Yale associate professor and neurology doctor Stephen Novella reacted to our discussion about the placebo effect on the WAN show a couple weeks ago. Dr. Novella pointed out a misleading. Where'd it go? A misleading sentence we said about the placebo effect and cancer survival rates. And we'd like to issue a corrective statement. Believing you'll survive cancer improves your quality of life, but it hasn't been shown to extend survival in cancer patients. You can find more information at links.
- [79:24]
Linus Sebastian
Dan will throw them in the chat.
- [79:25]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, okay. We unequivocally do not endorse companies and individuals who use placebo effect to push scan. Oh, well, obviously scam products and earn a profit from each other's unfortunate situations. You guys know we hate scams. Did people think we did that?
- [79:39]
Linus Sebastian
I don't know. Not encourage you to always think in.
- [79:41]
Luke Lafreniere
Good faith, but maybe, yeah, we encourage you to always contact your healthcare professional if you have a medical situation. Also, I'll say this now, and I don't know if we said this then or not. We're not a medical podcast. We talk for four and a half hours sometimes. So sometimes we're going to say some stuff about other things in our lives that aren't tech. But yeah, maybe go listen to the Yale doctor guy and. And not so much us.
- [80:07]
Linus Sebastian
And something that we do know is that having a good outlook can absolutely increase patient compliance and better patient compliance can absolutely impact outcomes no matter what the disease is. So, yeah, maybe not directly, but the main point of our conversation was just that if people maintain a positive outlook and if they think that things are working, it can have a positive outcome. The very, very specifics. My apologies if we were not correct there. And we were never obviously never endorsing people selling placebos as real remedies and saying that like that's okay. I think our main point was just that, like, it's a thing and that's why they get away with it, because they sell you a placebo and then it is actually quite likely, depending on what ails you, that you might feel better. And that's why it's so hard to nail these guys. Microsoft is testing free Office desktop ads. Sorry, apps. Wow. I actually didn't mean to do that, but that was one heck of a Freudian slip.
- [81:24]
Dan
Wow.
- [81:25]
Linus Sebastian
Microsoft is testing a free desktop version. Microsoft 365. When installing the productivity suite formerly known as Office, users that opt to skip signing in with a Microsoft account will be presented with the option to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint for free. Of course there's a catch or three. It is ad supported with a persistent ad banner on the right side of the screen. And every few hours. This is great. A 15 second video ad will play, although at least it can be muted. It can only save to OneDrive and includes up to 5 gigabytes of storage as part of the free package. Many features are missing. These are listed on beebomb, but the basics are there. I've been warned. Beebomb has lots of ads. Oh, wow. Boy, do they ever.
- [82:18]
Luke Lafreniere
That is a lot of ads.
- [82:19]
Linus Sebastian
My goodness. What are the limitations? Where? What parts of this are article and what parts of it are ads. Good lord, I can earn Roblox gift cards. How to install free editing features missing. Oh, my goodness. Dictation line spacing. Okay. Text box spacing. Pivot charts. Okay. Pivot table. Oh, boy. Okay, so they're quite cut down. Okay, so basically use Google's product, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Jordan prepared this. He goes, is this going to result in enough paid subs to be viable? And also asks is this for the seven people that are not aware of Google Docs? Is kind of feeling that way a little bit. Kind of feeling that way a little bit. Yeah. NM White and floatplane chat says literally just get LibreOffice at that point. Like, what are we even. What are we even talking about here? This is a fun one. Wacky Foldables and other stuff. At Mobile World Congress, MWC ran this week from March 3rd to March 6th in. I'm gonna say this wrong. Barthelona. I think it's. You're supposed to do it with a th sound, right? I wish they would. I wish they would just spell things the way that they're supposed to be said. Because if you're gonna have an anglicized spelling anyway, why not in good faith try to spell it in a way that makes it spelled like it sounds Barcelona. I don't know.
- [83:52]
Luke Lafreniere
I don't think that is.
- [83:53]
Linus Sebastian
Dude.
- [83:54]
Luke Lafreniere
I think it's just spelled the same way in Spanish, which is probably why it sounds different than it's spelled.
- [83:59]
Linus Sebastian
Well, then give me an anglicized spelling like everything else. Anyway, we're supposed to rapid fire react to each device and give it a one to ten score. All right, so first up is the Lenovo Thinkbook Flip AI prototype. A mega two in one. Oh, my gosh. This is from PCMeg.com Whoa. Okay, we should decide. We should decide what our scale means. So is this out of 10 in terms of like, would I buy it or would I use it? Because those definitely are not the same thing in this case. Like, if somebody gave this to me for free, I feel like I might consider using.
- [84:54]
Dan
Looks like a joke.
- [84:56]
Linus Sebastian
It looks like a. It looks like it's photoshopped. It looks. It looks like a meme. Okay. The outer display can flip up to become a large vertical display. So it kind of goes in. It looks. Yeah, there you go. There's a better shot of it. Wow. Also, this is like the ugliest hotel room. But great job, PC Mag for making it work. It kind of works. Luke, what's your rating?
- [85:30]
Luke Lafreniere
So, again, sorry, Are we doing it based on if we would use it or if we'd buy it?
- [85:36]
Linus Sebastian
You wouldn't buy anything. So let's go with, if we use.
- [85:38]
Luke Lafreniere
It, I might buy something. We'll see.
- [85:41]
Dan
How about if you would use it for work?
- [85:44]
Luke Lafreniere
If this was our standardized laptop, I would. I would use this.
- [85:48]
Linus Sebastian
Out of 10. Out of 10?
- [85:50]
Luke Lafreniere
I would unfold it. Would I use it out of 10? I would definitely use it.
- [85:55]
Linus Sebastian
Like, you wouldn't ask for something else because we could give you something else. Would you prefer it?
- [86:00]
Luke Lafreniere
I wouldn't.
- [86:02]
Dan
This is sounding like a six.
- [86:04]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I think it might be a six or a seven because I travel with an extra screen.
- [86:09]
Linus Sebastian
Okay.
- [86:10]
Luke Lafreniere
And this is just an extra screen, but slightly less cool because it's up instead of.
- [86:16]
Linus Sebastian
How are you gonna use this on a plane?
- [86:18]
Luke Lafreniere
Like, I just don't think you would.
- [86:20]
Linus Sebastian
Dude, buddy behind you is gonna lean their seat back. I mean, I guess it wouldn't break it, though, because it's bendable.
- [86:27]
Dan
I think it bends the other way so it Absolutely.
- [86:30]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, yeah, right.
- [86:31]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Well, to be fair, though, it wouldn't crunch under because it would go all the way to the top of the seat.
- [86:36]
Dan
You'd have to, like, pull their hair off of it.
- [86:40]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, yeah, I'd give it a six, I think.
- [86:45]
Linus Sebastian
I don't think I can go higher than a four.
- [86:48]
Luke Lafreniere
I would definitely use it in, like, hotel rooms and stuff. I would use it.
- [86:54]
Linus Sebastian
All right, let's go.
- [86:55]
Luke Lafreniere
Let's move on to our next one. Windows on it, basically.
- [87:01]
Linus Sebastian
Next up is the Lenovo Magic Bay dual display concept. Here we go. This is from Digital Trends. Oh, this looks more like your style, Luke.
- [87:12]
Luke Lafreniere
It sure does.
- [87:15]
Linus Sebastian
Two screens or one? It's up to you.
- [87:20]
Luke Lafreniere
The thing that gets me with this stuff is it's really not much harder to just have an external display and a normal laptop external.
- [87:29]
Linus Sebastian
So this uses special external displays that use Lenovo's Magic Bay connection to add either two 13 inch screens or a single vertical 8 inch screen. It uses also pins and magnets, a.
- [87:44]
Luke Lafreniere
Proprietary connector, so you can't just carry it to the next one. And I've been using the same. I've been using the same external screen for two different laptops.
- [87:54]
Linus Sebastian
So far, you won't be doing that here.
- [87:57]
Luke Lafreniere
Exactly. So, like, the buying of this, very low. The using of this, at least one of the external displays, probably like a 7.
- [88:07]
Linus Sebastian
How much do you think that drives the design of these products? Because if I'm a Lenovo and I'm targeting businesses, do I care at all? If Luke the individual would buy this. Maybe not because I don't need.
- [88:19]
Luke Lafreniere
But you care a lot that you might get lock in to the IT team.
- [88:23]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. Of this because Luke's company bought it for him.
- [88:27]
Luke Lafreniere
That you have.
- [88:28]
Linus Sebastian
And Luke likes it and will complain to it if he doesn't get one again or whatever. Right.
- [88:34]
Luke Lafreniere
Or if the new laptop doesn't have those screens.
- [88:36]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, boy. Lenovo Yoga Solar PC concept.
- [88:42]
Luke Lafreniere
Solar.
- [88:44]
Linus Sebastian
It's a solar PC. Solar panels on the lid. Okay.
- [88:54]
Luke Lafreniere
How well do they work when they have horrible line of sight?
- [88:59]
Linus Sebastian
They claim.
- [89:00]
Dan
Or it's covered in stickers.
- [89:01]
Linus Sebastian
They claim that even in low light conditions, the panel can generate enough power to sustain the battery charge when the PC is idle. They also claim that with Enough direct sunlight, 20 minutes of exposure can power up to 1 hour of video playback. With a long disclaimer on this claim. What do you think this feels like? This feels like a three to me.
- [89:32]
Luke Lafreniere
A two.
- [89:33]
Linus Sebastian
Like they know battery banks exist. Right. Like, I. If I wanted to carry like. Solar panels are good. They're gonna add weight to this thing. I have to carry them around all the time and I'm gonna use them sometimes.
- [89:48]
Dan
How often do you, like, use it outside?
- [89:50]
Luke Lafreniere
Involved with it also adds more weight. Often you use it outside. Is a big question. Often use it outside. Indirect line of sight of the sun. When you're not like, putting it so far folded back that it's not going to see the sun at all anyways. Yeah, exactly. And then you can't put stickers on the back like Dan said.
- [90:11]
Linus Sebastian
Okay, I don't know if that's a.
- [90:12]
Luke Lafreniere
Major consideration, but that matters a lot in my field. Linus. Okay, how will they know I use arch? This needs to be taken seriously.
- [90:19]
Linus Sebastian
Okay, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
- [90:22]
Luke Lafreniere
Have you ever been. Have you ever been to an IT conference? Everyone's. The back of their laptops are covered in stickers.
- [90:29]
Linus Sebastian
I'm sorry I brought it up.
- [90:30]
Luke Lafreniere
See the chat. You also sell stickers.
- [90:35]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, goodness. More from Lenovo. This time from Tom's hardware. A USB C connected 32, tops. NPU. That's right, my friends. Instead of purchasing an AI laptop, you could get a regular laptop and add AI by USB. C. I think this is a zero for me.
- [91:11]
Dan
Wow.
- [91:12]
Linus Sebastian
At least for my laptop. Like, if I had like. Like, I think I actually have a similar little USB AI dongle in my server right now because we're using it for training for a. Like a machine vision project or something like that. But in terms of the pitch of this It's Thunderbolt. Oh, my God. Okay, so you're not plugging it into anything that matters. Oh, what's gonna have Thunderbolt? Okay.
- [91:35]
Luke Lafreniere
It's too anemic.
- [91:37]
Linus Sebastian
32, tops. Not enough for you, huh?
- [91:39]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Yeah.
- [91:41]
Linus Sebastian
All right. Okay, here we go. Infinix zero series mini trifold concept. This is on tech radar. No, really? Just straight up. No.
- [91:59]
Luke Lafreniere
No.
- [92:00]
Linus Sebastian
You're not even gonna give me a number?
- [92:03]
Luke Lafreniere
Zero.
- [92:05]
Linus Sebastian
Zero. Oh, man. This is like a four.
- [92:07]
Luke Lafreniere
Maybe a. Maybe a one.
- [92:08]
Linus Sebastian
I didn't see this being.
- [92:09]
Luke Lafreniere
You're gonna deal with the. Of unfolding this the whole way. Because it's not just a flip. It. It's not one movement. You have to. I think you have to, like, pull the thing apart. It looks super annoying.
- [92:19]
Linus Sebastian
But look, I could clip it to my backpack. That's from lttstore.com. yeah, yeah. Look, I'm just saying I could. I'm treating a five like a neutral. Okay? So I. I'm, like, below neutral. Like, I don't want it. I don't want it.
- [92:41]
Luke Lafreniere
I would actively dislike this. If I was given a new one of these. I would use my old pixel that I don't like over it.
- [92:50]
Linus Sebastian
All right.
- [92:51]
Luke Lafreniere
Next time, it just looks very annoying to use most of the time when I'm looking something on my phone, I want it fast. And then I want to put the phone away. I don't want to just like, oh, let me unfold this twice so I can get a full actual phone and then go through and check things and then fold it two more times to put it back down, and then it's a massive brick in my pocket. Then I can put it away. That's so annoying. I don't know.
- [93:12]
Linus Sebastian
Okay, this time from the Verge. Infinix zero series. Oh, wait, shoot. So no. Infinix solar energy reserving technology uses perovskite solar cells, which are thinner and cheaper than traditional silicon solar cells. Its current iteration was able to deliver 2 watts of charging. Being able to just, like, huck your phone onto, like, a. Like a car mount or something and get charged with the sun coming through the dash. I mean, yeah, I could see that becoming kind of useful. Why you don't use MagSafe and just plug in a cable, I don't know, but that's something.
- [93:51]
Luke Lafreniere
I think it's cool if you're outside somewhere and you put your phone face down on a table and it charges it. I think it's pretty sweet.
- [94:00]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, I'd be interested.
- [94:02]
Luke Lafreniere
Overheating problems. I would be interested to see. Oh, yeah, how that goes.
- [94:07]
Linus Sebastian
All right, next up.
- [94:09]
Luke Lafreniere
I like it though.
- [94:09]
Linus Sebastian
Whoa. Xiaomi Buds 5 Pro. Now, they might look like just regular, you know, AirPods clones, but they can stream music over WI Fi. They utilize Qualcomm's expanded personal area network to provide audio at up to 96 kilohertz, 24 bit up to 4.2 megabit per second, exceeding Bluetooth's bandwidth. And if WI fi is not available, they switch back to Bluetooth mode. That's pretty cool. They look bulky though.
- [94:44]
Luke Lafreniere
I don't care.
- [94:47]
Linus Sebastian
Okay.
- [94:48]
Dan
As a dub said, on flow plane, no solar panels on them. Two out of ten.
- [94:54]
Linus Sebastian
Okay.
- [94:56]
Luke Lafreniere
I just like, I don't know if I'm at home. It's not like I don't have my phone on me. If I'm not at home, I'm pretty much not using WI fi.
- [95:08]
Linus Sebastian
I don't know. Do they use WI Fi direct though? Because if they could do that, then that's cool.
- [95:13]
Dan
I think it means that they're using WI fi to the phone.
- [95:17]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, I think so.
- [95:18]
Dan
I think that's what it means.
- [95:20]
Linus Sebastian
Not all devices handle WI FI to multiple points very well though. Like I realized using the Mac as my daily driver that you can't Internet connection share your wifi connection on this. So I use that feature on Windows for flights. I'll buy one in flight pass and then I'll share it with everyone that I'm with or with my phone, like with my multiple devices. And I can't do that on the Mac, which kind of blows. Like it can share. It can Internet connection share. If you plug in a wired connection and then you share over WI Fi, it can do that, but it can't WI fi share its WI FI connection as far as I can tell. Here's another one. This is. Wait, where is it? Ah, here we go. Yes, the Samsung Flex gaming concept. Hold on someone. Hold on. Someone says yes, you can over Bluetooth. Well, what am I connecting to it via Bluetooth? Might be able to with a USB WI fi that way. I'm not doing that Bluetooth WI fi sharing, man. I. I swear I googled this and I did not find it. And I went into, I had to like go deep into the settings and enable Internet connection sharing in some, some submenu somewhere and then it just didn't offer me the option. Well, what I will say then at the very least is it's much easier in Windows. You just click a button just like you would on your phone or whatever.
- [96:53]
Luke Lafreniere
Okay, so looking at this next device, have You. Have you brought it up yet?
- [96:57]
Linus Sebastian
There you go.
- [96:58]
Luke Lafreniere
Looking at this next device, it looks like the thumbsticks have to go into the holes on the other side and the ABXY and left, right, up, down are like the slanted sides of the holes, which is horrible.
- [97:13]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, this is just a concept. This is not a real product.
- [97:16]
Luke Lafreniere
It's a cool idea. It's a cool concept. I don't want to use the arrow keys or ABXY at all ever. But it's a cool concept. So you have to thumb the holes. Yeah, I think, I think you like put your thumb in the hole and then have to like hit the side of the button.
- [97:38]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, I'm not into that at all.
- [97:41]
Luke Lafreniere
I don't think so. Yeah, it might end up being okay, but I don't think I would like it. Yeah, no, I think I would dislike it so much that I would not use it. I wouldn't buy it.
- [97:51]
Linus Sebastian
However, if you could, if you could give me something where like the thumbsticks are like a pop it or something and I can like push them in and I can just fold it flat and have decent buttons or something, I could, I could maybe get into that.
- [98:02]
Luke Lafreniere
I would like to be able to fold my, my handheld gaming device because I do get sketched out about them when traveling and if I could avoid having like a big carrying case for and could just fold it and then the like, if I had a nice case on the back of it, that'd be pretty sick.
- [98:19]
Linus Sebastian
Ad Dubbin float plane chat says now I can rage quit. Like I'm hanging up on my boss.
- [98:24]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Sweet.
- [98:26]
Linus Sebastian
I love it. Okay, our last one is the Samsung Trifold smartphone concept called the asymmetric Flip. For now, similar to the Galaxy Z flip but with two fold points.
- [98:42]
Luke Lafreniere
Like why?
- [98:45]
Linus Sebastian
Oh God, why? Okay, why? Yeah, well, that's something that someone.
- [98:57]
Luke Lafreniere
Why not just fold it in half?
- [98:59]
Linus Sebastian
I mean, it's a concept. These are concepts and like concept cars, they're going to include things that don't make it to market. And that's the things we looked at. That's all of them.
- [99:12]
Luke Lafreniere
Cool. Nice.
- [99:14]
Linus Sebastian
Last week, TechRadar said built or published an article titled built versus bought. Why pre built systems are always superior to Custom Gaming PCs? It starts by giving some background on Zach as someone who loves to build rigs and even encourages people to keep building them before immediately 1 80ing and saying the following. The honest truth is that unless you're an IT God who spent years pruning over every little detail of system building with intimate knowledge of all the latest and greatest hardware and its caveats. You're just not going to be able to compete with a consummate professional whose day job it is is to build gaming PCs. It's like comparing your dad's famous Chili Con Karen recipe to Gordon Ramsay's. The article does highlight some real issues from building your own PC, such as that it can be tough to get stock of the latest and greatest if that's what you're after, especially because SI's can often have deals that guarantee them better stock on those parts, although as we discussed earlier, not always. It also talks about QC from system integrators, which yes, can be a big advantage to making sure that your computer arrives in working conditions. But if you've ever seen our Secret Shopper series, you'll know that QC can miss things, including things that Zach highlights that you won't have to worry about, like BIOS updates, cable management, cooling and overclocking. There is one more comparison at the end of the article and I quote it's like your car, right? You're always going to get the folk who go around and build their own, tweak the ones they've got and get ridiculous horsepower out of an engine in ways that shouldn't be possible, usually for some ridiculous investment of time or sum of money along the way. Or alternatively you could save the drama and just buy a 400 horsepower EV or whatever your engine of choice is straight off the shop floor with few issues of any and do 100 miles per hour in less than five seconds. End quote. Elijah puts in here I found this quote funny because Jake T and I looked and there's no such thing as a 400 horsepower EV that can do that. Our discussion question here is as easy as it is to see the headline and possibly get upset, can you think of any other reasons that pre builts are better? I would say the main one for me comes down to support after the fact. Like if their support sucks then I see no reason to buy a pre built whatsoever. But if their support is good or offers types of support that you need, like if you're buying it as a business and you need on site service, you know I could see a pre built making sense for that otherwise I don't know man. I do think things can be very confusing and we do rail against sort of the the misleading naming schemes that manufacturers use and the way that specs get obfuscated pre built. But yeah, that's the thing is I think I don't see the difference between talking to an SI and asking them to advise me on buying a pre built PC or talking to a sales rep at a computer parts store and asking them to advise me on building a computer. And honestly, and I think comparing, you know, someone who builds computers to Gordon Ramsay is like kind of ridiculous.
- [102:32]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, maybe, maybe you're comparing it to like the Gordon Ramsay restaurant in the airport.
- [102:42]
Linus Sebastian
Building computers. Like it's not as easy as some people make it out to be if you have never done it or you don't do it on the regular. But it isn't rocket science. And I, I've gotten the kick out of like SIS over the years that will introduce their like their system builders as like PC engineers or like system system building engineers or whatever. Like here in Canada, engineer is a protected term. You actually have to like have an education up to a standard to call yourself an engineer. But in other places it's not necessarily the case. And there is nothing engineer about configuring a computer and putting it together. That's not engineering. So yeah, it can be a little bit challenging when you're just getting your feet wet. But no, I don't think I can agree with this headline. And yeah, it's not engineering. I think it's time for us to move on to after dark because I have a place that I need to be that I kind of like get away from me seven minutes time wise. So what do we got in the. In the curated Birch messages? Oh, Dan didn't curate too many this week, so let's go.
- [103:51]
Luke Lafreniere
Good work.
- [103:52]
Dan
Yeah, we had a lighter week than last week. I'll. I'll put it that way. Although I think every week is light compared to last week. All right, I have to do the magenta. Let's see.
- [104:07]
Luke Lafreniere
What do we got?
- [104:08]
Dan
What do we got to Linus, what's the deal with not reviewing 12 gig cards on 4K? Developers should be able to add uncompressed Textures without meaning 12 gigs is not enough for 4K. I play at 12 gigs and it looks great.
- [104:32]
Luke Lafreniere
I can't hear. I can't hear. He's muted. He's.
- [104:35]
Linus Sebastian
We discussed this in our 9070 and 9070 XT review and I forget what the game was. Was it Last of Us or crud? I really don't remember. But basically we. We highlighted some lag spikes that we were getting on the, the RTX 5070, the 12 gig card that were not present on any of our 16 gig cards regardless of how much raw horsepower they had. And so for us the fact that that's a problem right now, today indicates to us that these, these cards are not in the, in the midterm even going to be suitable for 4K Triple A gaming. And you know, if we're talking about running League of legends at 4k or whatever, then yeah, sure. But was it really a question if you're buying a 12 gig card if league of Legends was going to run? Probably not. So, you know, for us, the point of a review is not necessarily to show you exactly what FPS every game under the sun will run at. That's not what we're trying to achieve. What we are trying to achieve is to contextualize the relative performance of these cards and their relative price so you can make an informed decision. It's not the be all and end all. If you want to know how that card runs in an exact game, there's lots of channels out there that will upload like gameplay footage with FPS counters or there's lots of other reviewers out there that will have a different test suite and you should absolutely go out and seek out those additional resources. We are just trying to give you the thousand foot view of how these cards compete with each other. And in general, no, I don't think that moving forward we can recommend 12 gig cards for 4k gaming.
- [106:29]
Dan
Hi guys. Wondering what your favorite tape to tape characters and perks are? I'm hooked on the game.
- [106:35]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, I had. Oh dude. I had one run that I was using Gawain Goretzky, who is. Yeah, he's this knight character that levels up as you make your way through the different bosses. And we basically put every perk on him so that as he got bigger and slower, he was still fast and he was a. Were you in that run, Luke? Yeah, you were. He was comically tanky. And then he also has the headshot redirect ability, which is by far the most broken ability in the game because you just, you slap shot to one of your allies and they just like header, like in soccer. They header the puck into the net and so you can just be racing up the wing, have one of your allies go up the other wing. He was completely tanky. No one could even touch him. We had the body check while skating with the puck ability and I think we had the body armor on him so if anyone even tried to check him, they would get knocked over. So I could just basically charge up the ice, whack it off of Luke's head. What do we get like 20, 20 goals on the final boss?
- [107:41]
Luke Lafreniere
We got 12 goals in the first period.
- [107:43]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
- [107:46]
Luke Lafreniere
With over 20. Yeah.
- [107:47]
Linus Sebastian
It was not even close. That. That's the most broken run that we've done so far, I think.
- [107:53]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Yeah.
- [107:55]
Linus Sebastian
I have a super broken run that I'm in the middle of right now and I'm not finishing it on my own. I'm just on the first world. But dude, it is completely broken. I fossilized star for plus 20 speed on all my bench warmers. I got growth serum. Growth serum. So everyone's big and I got like a couple other things. Basically my bench warmers all have superstar stats. It's. The team is cracked. It's gonna be. It's gonna be a great run. So I was gonna wait till the some humans can come and help me finish it because I bet. I think, I think it's a record breaking run.
- [108:27]
Luke Lafreniere
Nice.
- [108:29]
Dan
I really like researching PC parts and building PCs, so I take every opportunity to build a PC for a family member. Linus, do you still enjoy building PCs for yourself?
- [108:40]
Linus Sebastian
I enjoy it as long as I'm doing something different. I don't really like doing the same thing over and over again. Nice. So probably, I think I probably had the most fun building a PC than I've had in definitely weeks, probably months working on the machine that's on the other side of that wall over there.
- [109:04]
Dan
I'm so excited for that video.
- [109:05]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, dude. Oh, ye. Yeah. It's very different from the other ones. Anything that we've done in a while. I don't know if it's practical, but it's so cool. It's a Kickstarter project that took eight years to finally be delivered. And we got one. It looks absolutely nothing like what they promised in their original Kickstarter. It is so much better.
- [109:30]
Dan
And I'm.
- [109:30]
Linus Sebastian
I'm so excited. I'm so excited. And yeah, I had a blast. Alex and I built it together and it was so much fun. And so, yeah, I love, I still love building PCs, but I don't really, I don't really love just like, you know, upgrading my motherboard. Like I kind of get locked into like trouble troubleshooting. I would say I still maybe enjoy more than just like building a PC. I like something free dopamine.
- [109:58]
Dan
Hello? LLD Question for Luke. It looks like he's leaving, so maybe not.
- [110:03]
Luke Lafreniere
No, no, no. I'm here.
- [110:04]
Dan
Okay. Where is a place you want to check out that you've never been to? We live in Flathead Valley in Montana. Please come check us out.
- [110:12]
Linus Sebastian
Flathead Valley isn't Montana what they Call a wonderful state that everyone visits is a region known valley.
- [110:23]
Luke Lafreniere
Looks amazing, dude.
- [110:24]
Linus Sebastian
Stunning natural beauty. Wow.
- [110:27]
Luke Lafreniere
These pictures look amazing.
- [110:29]
Linus Sebastian
This place looks amazing. Look at this. Oh, my goodness. I was like, why is there a picture of Dan in my Google image results? And then I moved it.
- [110:41]
Luke Lafreniere
Look at the third picture in the results.
- [110:45]
Linus Sebastian
That's incredible. Steve J3D says Montana is our Canada. Yeah. Okay. That checks out. That's gorgeous.
- [110:55]
Luke Lafreniere
I would like it there.
- [110:56]
Linus Sebastian
That's gorgeous. I don't actually. I don't have any North American travel booked over the next little bit here, so we'll see. How. We'll see. We'll see. But it looks beautiful. Looks really beautiful.
- [111:13]
Luke Lafreniere
I've never been to Banff. I'd really like to go to Banff. That'd be pretty sweet. There's a bunch of Asian countries I've never been to. That would be awesome. I was in Iceland for, like, a very extended layover. I would like to actually go there for real. I also want to go to, like, some less common destination countries, though. Like, I'd like to go to Greenland. I'd like to go to some likes. Yeah.
- [111:46]
Linus Sebastian
You mean America?
- [111:47]
Luke Lafreniere
Is.
- [111:50]
Linus Sebastian
That maybe not Oz is on my list. I really.
- [111:54]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, That'll be sick. Never been there.
- [111:55]
Linus Sebastian
Need to go to Oz.
- [111:57]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [111:58]
Linus Sebastian
I want to go scuba diving in Australia. That's. That's gonna say the next thing I actually want to do. That's a sad thing to hear.
- [112:05]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. I'm just saying, though.
- [112:08]
Dan
Last one. Yeah, Last one I got for you.
- [112:12]
Linus Sebastian
People call it Oz, don't they?
- [112:13]
Dan
Yeah, don't they?
- [112:14]
Luke Lafreniere
They do, but some people in the comments were confused. Yeah. You're not wrong.
- [112:17]
Linus Sebastian
I mean, Australia.
- [112:19]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Yeah.
- [112:20]
Dan
Yes. Last one. Hey, lld Linus, you've noted you're a fan of Final Fantasy Tactics. Have you tried any of the mods or total conversions for the game? I'd recommend final fantasy tactics 1.3. Thanks for all the cool vids.
- [112:36]
Linus Sebastian
Did I try one? No, I tried a. I tried a Final Fantasy 6 mod that I really enjoyed that I actually think you might have enjoyed better than the Pixel remaster. I'm. Honestly, I'm kind of over the Pixel remaster.
- [112:47]
Luke Lafreniere
No, but I burn on it. I played it a little bit more too, but, like, I was really into it when I first got into the game, and it's. It feels like it tapers off pretty hard.
- [112:55]
Linus Sebastian
Would you like me to explain why?
- [112:58]
Luke Lafreniere
Yes. Yeah.
- [112:59]
Linus Sebastian
The game was supposed to end on the floating continent, and then they, like, realized that they had more room on the cart. This is what I've heard. This is what I've heard. They, like, okay, realized that they had more room on the cart and that they, like, had more time and budget and they, like, made another, like, half of the game.
- [113:25]
Luke Lafreniere
That honestly makes a lot of sense because it feels like there's a pretty notable quality shift right around that time because I was. I was like genuinely, like, really into it for a while, and then it's. It's just. It feels like it's kind of over and I'm at that point. So at this point, it's a little bit of a slog. I'll finish it. But it's a. It's a little bit of a slog. But the. Yeah, the first. Let's call it first half because I didn't know how far in I was.
- [113:49]
Linus Sebastian
The World of Balance.
- [113:50]
Luke Lafreniere
Let's call it the first half.
- [113:51]
Linus Sebastian
The World of Balance is what it's called, was fantastic.
- [113:55]
Luke Lafreniere
It is super good. Super, super good. Like, worth just playing that. Even. Even if you're not going to play the whole thing.
- [114:01]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. You can just pretend the game ends there. And honestly, you get. You get most of it. Yeah. I should probably try a total conversion for Final Fantasy Tactics or like a cool mod. Man, I feel like. I feel like I did try a mod at some point like this. It rings such a bell for me. Thank you for that.
- [114:34]
Dan
I missed one of the front, so now I'm like jumping at it.
- [114:37]
Linus Sebastian
For me at this point, though, I think a big part of what I love about. Oh, no, I did. I tried War of the Lions 1.3. That's like a different mod or something. Or wait, no. Original projects, changes in content, unique features. Okay. No, I don't know. I don't know. I feel like I tried to try something at some point, but maybe I didn't get into it. But yeah, I'd like to try something. Something. But for me, going back to Final Fantasy Tactics, a big part of it is honestly just the familiarity at this point. Like, I. If I was gonna dive into a new game, there's so many other games that I feel like I should play first. Like, what's that other. What's that Tactics series that got so many games and is supposed to be so good? Oh, no, it's for PC games. Like, games like this. Oh, no, this is terrible. I feel so bad. I think it's a western in game. Someone help me. No, not Fire Emblem. Xcom. That's the one. Yeah. Like, I've never played an XCOM game.
- [115:36]
Luke Lafreniere
Like how can I say was sick?
- [115:39]
Linus Sebastian
How can I say I'm a fan of the genre if I've never played an XCOM game? Like that's ridiculous. So if I'm gonna jump into a new game, I should probably like play something I've never played before rather than a mod.
- [115:50]
Dan
Yeah.
- [115:50]
Linus Sebastian
People like it's different but it's good. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Next time is fun. 99 is a miss is real with that series. I mean, yeah, you're gonna get that with any kind of tactics game. And it could. It's always at the worst possible moment. That's why, dude, anytime an ability is like hit super hard but low percentage, I'm like it. You're on the bench. You are seeing zero combat. I literally will not take anything that is not a guaranteed hit. Like, I think my first couple playthroughs of Final Fantasy Tactics, I didn't even figure out that the Archer like has evolutions because I literally just never used them because they missed so much. It was like, forget it. You're done, you're out.
- [116:34]
Luke Lafreniere
Enemy Unknown. I loved Enemy Unknown. I played it on, I think it's called Iron man where there's like permadeath and you. You only have one save. Like you can't go back ever. And I. I got to the very end of the game and if I remember correctly, it's like I had beat the actually challenging part. I just needed to go into like one more room and the game was just going to end, but it glitched and I couldn't get through the wall. So I had like beat the game but I couldn't see the ending. So I had beat the game but had to like YouTube the ending. It was so disappointing.
- [117:09]
Linus Sebastian
I YouTubed the ending of Fantasian and I still feel icky about it. But the final boss was just so tedious and such a slog. Like I made it through the first stage of it and then I googled it and apparently there's two more like evolutions of the final boss and I'm just like, forget this, forget this. I'm done. That's good enough.
- [117:30]
Luke Lafreniere
Speaking of forget this, do you need to go?
- [117:32]
Linus Sebastian
I do. So I'll see you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel.
- [117:36]
Luke Lafreniere
Bye. Okay, I'm leaving.
- [117:44]
Dan
Bye. But Linus is leaving.
- [117:52]
Luke Lafreniere
Okay. Yeah, I'm. Bye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Bye.
- [117:57]
Dan
Bye.
- [117:57]
Luke Lafreniere
Goodbye.
- [118:05]
Dan
I'm alone.
- [118:06]
Linus Sebastian
I'm alone.