Yeah.
Well, there's a difference between scope creep
and just like a successful product in iterating.
That you want to add more features to.
Yeah, it's kind of a different thing.
Welcome to the WAN Show, ladies and gentlemen.
That was a little awkward.
We've got a great show for you guys today.
We have lots of good topics.
Oh boy.
See, I always want to see the worst in everyone.
So I had taken the situation between Gamer's Nexus
and Newegg and kind of gone,
okay, well here's all the different ways it could have.
Yeah, forget all of that.
Gamer's Nexus posted a follow-up video yesterday,
basically proving that this is 100% on Newegg.
So we're going to talk about that.
Also, Best Buy is at it again,
putting GPU's behind paywalls.
So we'll be discussing that.
What else have we got today?
It keeps getting worse.
There was some contaminated materials at Kioxia?
Kioxia.
Kioxia.
Which is going to cause the loss of 6.5 exabytes.
Exabytes.
Exabytes worth of NAND.
So flash prices are going to go up.
That's the order it goes in.
You've got your petabytes and then you've got your exabytes.
And when you lose 6.5 million exabytes, it's sad.
Yeah.
So that's going to suck.
Also rip square, potentially,
if stores actually end up using it.
But tap to pay makes it so all iPhones can be used
as mobile payment terminals.
Whoops.
That's going to be a little awkward.
Pretty big deal.
Let's roll out intro.
This show is brought to you by ID Agents, MSI,
and Mechanical Keyboards.
I figure we better jump right into this Newegg thing
right off the hop here.
Last week, GamersNexus revealed
how bad Newegg's return system was
with an open box motherboard that they bought
that had a problem with it that Newegg blamed on them,
even though GamersNexus said
they hadn't even opened the box.
They just tried to return it saying,
look, we don't need it anymore.
Newegg refused the refund saying the board was damaged
and GamersNexus was at fault.
Oh boy.
It gets worse.
Yesterday, they posted a new video
where they investigated the RMA chain.
Apparently, Newegg RMA'd the board themselves to Gigabyte
under Magnell Associates Inc, a company they own,
which was confirmed through corporate filings.
I'm surprised they were able to get the name
that they filed the RMA under.
That's like, that's some good detective work.
Gigabyte said it would cost $100 to fix it,
which is actually a pretty reasonable quote
for a socket replacement.
That's among the lowest I've heard,
but I've been out of the game for a little while.
Back when I was doing this stuff,
it was more in the neighborhood of 150 to 200.
And typically, motherboards weren't even worth
that much then.
So I guess it's kind of a good thing
that motherboards are way more expensive.
Because it's worth it to repair them.
Anyway.
I'm assuming this is machine done now.
That was probably hand done back then.
Hard to say.
There's been a lot of-
You'd need machines either way,
but-
Yeah, for sure.
Newegg apparently rejected the offer to fix it for $100.
So then Gigabyte returned the board to Newegg.
After this, Newegg sold the known defective board to Steve,
meaning that he was out $500 despite never opening the box.
Apparently they left the Magnell associate sticker
on the box, which is amazing.
Genius.
Gamer's Nexus unboxed the board.
So they did get it back.
Initially, my understanding is that Newegg had refused
to send the damaged board back to them,
but now they've got it.
And the socket is in very rough shape.
The thermal paste mentioned previously by customer support
though is markedly absent.
That was one of Newegg's claims,
that there was thermal paste on the socket.
Steve says he's been getting calls from Newegg.
Lol.
I'm not surprised.
So, now what?
At what point is, at what point do we look at this and go,
this couldn't possibly have been an error.
This had to be malice.
Yeah, it's a scam.
There's gotta be, I don't know what,
there's gotta be something in here that's illegal.
Well, oh, there's almost certainly something in here
that's illegal because ripping people off is illegal.
But whether or not YouTube-
They're selling a known defective product
has essentially worked.
Whether or not that illegal thing that Newegg did
was caused by an actual policy
or whether it was caused by a careless, sloppy employee
is a little bit harder to tell.
And sometimes the line between those things
can be blurry indeed.
So let's walk through three possible scenarios here.
Okay, scenario number one is that Newegg's internal policy
is that they should take back merchandise
that is known defective,
box it back up and try to sell it as new,
even though they know it doesn't work.
Then when someone gets it and sends it back in for RMA,
they say, ha ha, too bad.
Now we've got the money and the product, we win.
That's- Pretty unlikely.
That's probably not it.
If you put that in writing, like you're in trouble.
And I said last week when we talked about this,
that if they had any kind of procedure like that
that existed, there would almost certainly be a whistleblower
that would have called them out on it.
And we had people saying, there are whistleblowers.
There's people who have bought things from Newegg
and gotten ripped up.
That's not what a whistleblower is.
A whistleblower is someone who is on the inside,
someone who's in the know who exposes this type of policy
or this type of practice.
So I think we can say with a fair degree of certainty
that that's probably not it.
Okay, let's go the other route.
We've got someone who just out of absolute
dunderheaded carelessness managed to take this board
and like in a sleepwalking state,
pack it back up into the box, carry it out to the shelf,
get it scanned back into the system under a,
change the status,
cause I'm sure they have like an internal RMA,
like ticket system, kind of like we had at NCIX,
get it transferred back to stock,
marked as brand new rather than as refurbished
and then managed to sleepwalk themselves
back to their station where presumably they woke up
having had no awareness that they ever did any of this.
Lunchtime.
Yeah.
I think that we can probably agree
that that is equally unlikely.
Yeah.
Okay.
So let me talk through what I think
is the more likely third scenario.
What I think is that Newegg's policy is by and large
to do things pretty much correctly.
And I think that by and large,
most Newegg employees are awake at work.
I mean, I don't know.
I can't actually prove this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
What can happen sometimes is that in spite of the policy
being whatever it is, there can be pressure on employees.
Or benefit structures or whatever.
That might incentivize them to cut corners in certain ways.
Say for example, as an RMA technician,
I was incentivized to have a very low rate of discard.
Because when something comes in for customer RMA,
there's a number of different paths
that it can follow through the system.
So it could be defective at no fault
and it goes back to the manufacturer and you get a new one.
It could be defective at fault
and then it would go back to the customer
and they get nothing.
Or you just keep it and dispose of it
and you keep their money, right?
So those are two options.
Newegg clearly has a favorite one here.
It could be defective at fault and you do the repair.
Like what apparently happened with this particular board.
But there's basically,
there's different paths that it can follow.
Now there are cases where it might be
that it's not the customer's fault
and it's not the manufacturer's fault
and you might have to just eat it.
Like say for example, it comes back
and in testing you realize,
oh, the board is working just fine.
We could sell it as an open box
and then you drop it on the floor.
Now that's your problem and you need to eat it.
So it could be-
Just one quick thing.
Someone in chat said it was marked as open box.
You should watch the content to report on it correctly.
I never said it wasn't marked as open box.
I said that internally in their system-
During your sleepwalking thing,
you said scanned in as new inbox.
He knows-
Yeah, but I'm talking about like a UPC.
Yeah.
Yeah, so because you got to remember,
like how do I say this?
Not every person working in a warehouse,
like picking and packing product
is looking closely at what they're doing, right?
So just because the box was clearly labeled
doesn't mean anything.
If it was in a pile and the number matches the number,
it is quite possible that regardless
of what markings are on it,
someone could just grab it and put it in a box
and it could get shipped out.
Anyway, so sorry, where was I saying?
What was I saying?
You were talking-
Right, right, right, third possible outcome.
So you might have incentives to avoid
certain final outcomes for RMA experiences.
And that might lead you to do things
that are unethical or outright illegal,
that are destructive to the customer.
Now, it's one of those things
that's really frustrating for me
because it gives Newegg a layer
of sort of plausible deniability if they can,
and we haven't seen yet how they're going to respond to this.
To my knowledge,
they haven't actually addressed it publicly yet.
So I don't know what yarn they're gonna spin,
but it does give them a layer of plausible deniability
if they can just pin it on an individual employee
and say, oh, well, it's their fault.
So we've seen this kind of thing before.
And I'm not saying this is absolutely what happened.
I'm just saying it seems like the most plausible one.
And an instance of this would be the experiences
that we've had dealing with Dell.
That's what I'm reminded of.
I think you could make the argument
that Dell has done things
as we've gone through our secret shopper experience
with them that are unethical, illegal,
and in some cases, both.
Whether it is pushing financing on us
or whether it's adding extended warranties to our order
that we never agreed to,
or whether it's arranging for us to ship our computer
to their depot when we actually had an onsite warranty
that we had paid for.
Like there's plenty of things that they clearly did wrong.
And my belief is that even though Dell has talked to me
about these experiences and said,
this is not the experience we want people to have,
it is my belief that because of the way
their representatives are incentivized,
because of the way that they're compensated,
there's basically no other way to survive.
So they could say, well, our policy is to offer nicely,
but clearly, clearly if you're in the know,
you get pushy about it, you get them commissions,
and you manage to eat a nice dinner every day that month
instead of scraping by
or whatever that difference ends up being.
But I suspect it's a big one based on the consistency
with which we've seen that behavior from Dell.
So have you seen Paul's video?
I haven't watched Paul's video, unfortunately.
So apparently Paul was an RMA tech at Newegg.
I know he worked at Newegg.
I didn't know he was an RMA tech.
Me neither.
And apparently he posted a video
on Dig Newegg Scam, Gamer's Nexus,
a former RMA inspector's opinion.
I have not watched it.
It's probably excellent.
That's what I would say.
All right, yeah.
If anyone has kind of a somewhat TLDR at all,
that would be amazing.
Would love to know Paul's perspective
and we're not just gonna pull a,
just watching someone else's content
and reacting to it on stream thing right now,
just this time.
But yeah, I'll definitely go check out the whole thing
when I have time.
Yeah, I didn't know this came out.
I'll definitely watch it too, just not now.
At this point, I mean, what do we do?
Because it's pretty clear that-
This has happened to an abnormally large amount of people.
That whether it's through policy
or whether it's through-
Lack of resources, or-
Yeah, it's almost impossible to paint a picture
where Newegg comes out looking like anything but shady here.
So now what do we do?
We've got Amazon, great.
We got Newegg, great.
Where do you buy your computer hardware?
I mean, Micro Center technically does have
an online presence and they've been pretty good
from what we've seen so far.
We've worked with them a lot.
And typically, especially when someone shows up
in a sponsor spot with us,
we will get people crawling out of the woodwork
to tell us about their bad experiences with them.
And by and large, everything that has come out
about Micro Center has been very positive.
If I was American, my reaction to this
would probably be to go to Micro Center.
As a Canadian, my reaction to this would be like,
I don't know, kind of like Computers Memory Express,
something like that.
Yeah, but that's, you're in Canada.
Yeah.
So that doesn't help our American friends.
Yeah, it's at Micro Center though.
I haven't personally heard notable bad things
about Micro Center.
I have heard people say that they're like,
and someone literally just said this in FlowPlane chat,
but I have heard this elsewhere as well,
where they're like upset when they move away
from a Micro Center, that type of stuff.
But like, I don't know, B&H also has some things.
Yeah, B&H though for component selection, it's not amazing.
Hey, you're live on the WAN show.
Is that chill?
Sure, but my dog is in the car too though.
Hey, Hana, Hana, say hi.
Okay, she's shy.
Yeah, it was worth a shot.
I know how it goes.
Can you guys hear Paul all right?
Okay, hopefully the chat's gonna let us know.
All right, so Paul, I actually did not know
about your video before we came on stream
and we wanted to talk about the Gamers Nexus thing.
And I figured, hey, since I've got you on speed dial anyway,
can you tell us a little bit about your experiences
as an RMA tech?
We already told people to go watch your video
for the whole story, but I need a TLDR
and I didn't know where else to turn.
Sure, yeah, and thank you.
I mean, it was my job for about a year.
It was within the first year that I joined Newegg.
It was part of customer service,
but I worked out in the RMA warehouse,
which was attached to the same,
it was all in the same warehouse facility.
Interesting, so at Newegg,
sorry, at Newegg the structure then
is that RMA technicians also replied
directly to customer tickets?
I can't speak to how they do it now.
And I think it might be different now than it was then.
Like the point of my job at the time
was to have someone who could talk to the customer
and communicate and be like, oh, okay,
take special circumstances into account.
But you know, I was also a customer service agent,
not a warehouse worker, CS agents I think get paid more.
So I'm not sure if at some point they decided
that they should separate that
and now there's a different team
who looks at special RMAs in the warehouse
versus the CS agents who are actually
in direct contact with the customer.
But at the time, like I had that ability.
So I was there physically holding your return
and also emailing back and forth with you.
So it was a pretty, there wasn't any communication gap there.
Got it, okay.
And so from your experience working at Newegg,
what are the odds that they could have accidentally
sold this motherboard again, knowing that it was damaged?
I mean, that's another good question.
And also it could also be something
that is two separate departments at this point.
There could be returns that go to one facility
and then there could be another facility
that has actual like open box products
or other stuff like that, that they,
hey, I'm live on the land ship.
Hi.
My wife says that too.
Let me switch to my phone since I just got home.
Okay, can you still hear me?
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Okay, so yeah, what was I talking about?
It's entirely possible that wherever that open box,
like whatever route that product took
as far as Newegg getting it,
returning it back to Gigabyte,
Gigabyte being like, no, we can't accept this
or you have to pay for it.
And then I don't know how it got back to Newegg
and then how it got back into Newegg's inventory.
That's the big mystery.
And whether that was intentional or not,
I mean, that's not answer the question mark.
Is there someone there who's like,
oh, I'm going to take this product
that was otherwise a loss and try to make something of it?
Yeah.
But, oh, and he's dead.
Let's see if he comes back.
So one interesting thing,
and this was brought up on last Wednesday,
I believe is that Liaison Interactive
purchased out Newegg in 2016.
So Paul would have worked for them before that.
Hi, you're back.
I'm back.
So, yeah, so you kind of pitched the,
maybe an enterprising employee who was trying to,
you know, make some extra money for the company
by selling a defective motherboard to someone or whatever,
could have conceivably done this.
And you know what?
That might've been one of my possible hypotheses as well,
because I remember back at NCIX, the eBay department,
and this was honestly what I felt probably happened
with that fiasco where MSI was caught
scalping GPU supposedly.
And my understanding is this ultimately was what happened
is that the eBay department is not necessarily involved
in every strategic business meeting
and will sometimes just go and do very random rogue stuff.
So I can tell you from my experience at NCIX,
once something made its way into eBay land,
the odds of something sketchy happening
went up exponentially.
Like they were much higher.
But the problem for me is that this is a product
that was just not bought on eBay.
Like it was just bought on newegg.com.
Yeah, that combined with, you know,
how they're labeling the open box stuff a lot less,
obviously now that's a concern.
Cause it's not the kind of product
that should have been sold as a new product.
Like that should be completely separate inventory.
But once you get into the stuff
that has already been handled or returned
or damaged in shipping or something like that,
all of that, I will say that when I worked
in the RMA warehouse, stuff piled up.
Like there was stuff that arrived that even I was like,
well, it's not, you know, I'm not responsible for it
or whatever, things would just get shoved off
into the corner cause there was nothing else to do with it.
And eventually you might have someone come along
who's like, let's try to make more profit
out of this stuff, regardless of its condition.
But yeah, I think if you want to give Newegg
the benefit of the doubt and assume that there is
maybe a problem here that could be fixed,
if there is someone at the company
who is making shady decisions and deciding
to take products like that and try to resell them
and be like, aha, the customer's just going to get
screwed over, but we'll make some money.
Like if that person gets rooted out, then cool.
If there's someone who has oversight over this,
who is also aware of it and it's a bigger problem,
then obviously that's a bigger problem
and people should hold them accountable
for how they're treating customers.
The most unbelievable one to me,
cause I don't even actually necessarily mind
that the label's not super obvious.
I mean, going back to NCIX, our systems
weren't particularly advanced, but I can tell you
that our internal label would say refurbished on it
if it was anything other than brand new.
And it wasn't super obvious, but what would happen
is we tracked it electronically.
That's why I was saying earlier in the show,
I said, well, hey, someone would have had to
manually move this thing out of the RMA pool
into not an open box and not a refurbished pool,
but into a brand new inventory pool because,
and I'm assuming Newegg has to have at least
this level of sophistication.
There was absolutely no way that on a customer invoice,
cause the way it worked is you'd get the bin.
The bin would roll down the conveyor
and then we had the scanning station
that would verify the contents of the bin
against the physical invoice at the time of,
before it would go on to the next conveyor
where it would be boxed and shipped.
And so the way that process worked
was every single item in the bin would be scanned
against the physical invoice.
And then we would check electronically in the system
to make sure that the electronic version of the invoice
matched the physical one
and that that matched the contents of the bin.
And there was no way to scan an open box item
onto a brand new purchase
because they were separate inventory pools.
And there is just no conceivable way for me
that even if you could miss the label, right?
You can miss a label, okay?
You can miss a piece of text or a piece of tape
or even a big piece of paper taped onto something.
You can miss that conceivably if you were sleepwalking.
But there's no way-
The sticker on the motherboard was massive on Steve.
Yeah, but there's no way that you can miss.
There's no way you can miss a miss scan
where it says, hey, this order is not complete.
Like we had a sound that played.
Like it wouldn't let you do it.
It can't be that bad.
And that should be to prevent the wrong item
getting put in the box and shipped to the customer.
So I guess you're questioning whether he even got
the proper item that was supposed to be sent to him
or if just somehow oopsie in the warehouse,
they tossed in this random crappy open box motherboard
with 10 pins versus the one
that they were actually supposed to ship.
So the chat's clarifying that it was marked open box.
So that's fine.
But either way, guys, inventory pools at an organization
like an NCIX or like a Newegg
are going to be tracked separately.
Your RMA pool of inventory,
like when you're, okay, when you're a product manager,
cause that's what I did,
when you're a product manager
going through your inventory report
for a gigabyte motherboards, right?
I don't see inventory on that report
that is in our RMA pool.
How would that be useful to me in my job, right?
I see open box and I see brand new inbox,
but I don't see RMA.
When you move something from one place to another,
a decision has to be made to do that.
And there's no way that you could scan something
on a brand new invoice that is open box.
And there should be no way that you can scan something
from an RMA pool that is supposed to be open box.
Do you kind of get what I mean?
So how the heck could this possibly happen?
And that's maybe why it deserves like a lot more scrutiny
because I would be curious to know what agreements
are in place between like manufacturers such as like an MSI
or a gigabyte and a retailer like doing
when it comes to the resale of like products
that have been returned or that are open box
or something like that.
And like, it's easy to think it's a, it's what is Z,
it was a Z 590 motherboard, right?
Or it was, it's not a new motherboard.
No.
Like how many open box versions,
how many open box of that motherboard do they have?
I would bet it's a very, very small amount.
Yeah, I'd wager it's not very many.
But somebody has to have, you know,
created maybe a branch view or something like that
for open box versions of the same product
and then listed it for sale.
So that's what, that's why to me,
it doesn't seem like the wrong product
was tossed in the box.
It seemed like they intentionally listed this motherboard
specifically for sale on the website.
And obviously they shouldn't have,
but how did it get there and who, you know,
who's job is it currently to take products like this
and list them for sale?
And are they being very, very, very horrible at their job,
you know, and, or potentially even, you know,
going over that line to the point where they're,
you know, scamming customers.
I gotta tell you, I have a big problem
with open box motherboards in the first place
because the motherboard I'd say right up there with memory
is the component is probably the most likely component
to have some kind of problem with it
that isn't obvious immediately.
If you kind of get what I mean.
Yeah.
And so-
Like a NIC not working or something like that.
Exactly.
Or like an instability issue that only pops up
once every six hours or something like that.
Like it's far more likely to encounter something like that
on a motherboard or on a stick of memory
compared to a CPU, for example, or a case, obviously.
Like it's just, it's what, or a GPU.
GPUs are typically broken or they're not broken
and it's relatively obvious.
You know what I mean?
And so even just the practice of selling a motherboard
that has already been returned
should be approached so cautiously and so carefully
that nevermind if it has a mangled socket, right?
You should be double-checking and triple-checking
that there was actually nothing wrong with this board,
that it was only returned because they exchanged it
for a different one with better onboard graphics
or a different color scheme or whatever the case may be
and that you know for a fact that it's working.
So to play devil's advocates,
as I know you like to do sometimes
and come at it from the manufacturer's perspective,
is you know how slim the margins are in this industry.
I do.
Should all motherboards cost a few more dollars?
Well-
To absorb the impact of having to eat the cost of returns
and not sell them as open box
or handle it in that sort of way.
It's funny you mentioned that.
We actually talked about the race to zero.
I mean, I'm sure you've heard the term a thousand times
being in this industry.
2% more.
And we talked about this on the WAN Show last week
where we, Luke and I talked about
how we should turn lttstore.com
into an electronics retailer and that'll be our model.
We'll just mark everything up.
Like literally two, 2.5% more
would probably be all that you would need
to have industry leading customer service
compared to everybody else
because that is how slim it was.
Do you remember when Newegg tried to go IPO?
Yeah, oh yeah.
I remember that.
I'm supposed to have some stock options
that never really, never really got up to anything.
Well, they would have been pretty poopy stocks
because I don't know if you,
did you look at the financials?
Neweggs or what?
Yeah, Neweggs.
It's a long time ago.
The net profit was somewhere in the neighborhood of like 1%.
And on like, I think it was on like
about a billion dollars annually in sales.
Like it was a freaking lot of money in sales.
And so 1% of a billion dollars
is still a freaking lot of money, right?
It's all about volume.
It's all about that volume, right?
But nobody is gonna invest in a company
that is making 1% net profit.
So I think that's something a lot of viewers
don't really understand when I do tend to come at things
from a manufacturer's or from a retailer's perspective
is that there's no free lunch.
If you want cheapest chips electronics,
it comes from somewhere.
Now that's not an excuse.
You still have to abide by the law.
And it appears as though Newegg,
whether intentionally or unintentionally,
clearly did not do that here.
You're putting it in pretty stark terms there
and yeah, I mean, are we ever going to find out for sure
whether it was intentional or unintentional?
Is there ever going to be any sort of like
direct addressing of this by Newegg on some level?
Not unless there's a whistleblower.
So if anyone from Newegg is watching, I implore you now,
blow the whistle, get in touch with us.
We wanna see the internal tickets
that have been sent around about this case
because I guarantee you they've made it
to the VP level at this point.
I wanna hear from you, what happened?
Someone blow the whistle, I'm ready.
Or better yet, reach out to Steve from Gamers Nexus
cause he's the one who should be breaking this story.
All right, all right, thanks Paul.
Yeah, thanks for calling
and have a great rest of the wind show
and what's up Luke?
That's Luke, right?
Hi Paul.
You better believe it.
Man, it's been so long.
Yeah, we'll have to, are you going to Computex this year?
I'm currently, that is like my intent, yeah.
Okay, I wanna go.
So if there's Computex, man,
we gotta have like a reunion dinner or something.
I haven't seen you in forever.
Yeah.
That would be awesome.
All right.
All right, later dude.
All right, thanks guys.
Bye.
So there you have it.
Paul with the very unusual for him balanced take.
Just kidding.
Obviously.
Paul is a very balanced and level person.
He really is.
New egg stock over the last year has gone whoof, by the way.
Yeah.
I mean, it's terrible, terrible, but if I was an investor,
it's the last bit.
I mean, I've had every opportunity guys.
I have had every opportunity.
Do you know how easy it is to sign up
for a distributor account with like Bell Micro
or Ingram or whatever and start just like drop shipping,
selling electronics?
Do you guys have any idea how easy that is?
We could probably be set up in a matter of hours.
There's a reason that I got better stuff to do.
Like selling these wonderful thread ripper edition.
If you want to have a good customer service experience.
We do have a good customer service.
No, I'm being serious.
Because we shamelessly charge enough for our products
that we can afford to have,
okay, it's a little slow right now.
We are hiring more people, but it's good.
We will get you taken care of, but yeah,
we charge enough that we can actually afford to provide,
you know, proper solutions when people have a problem.
And so we've got a number of new products.
We announced the ABC book character plushes last week.
And this week we've got the couch ripper.
It's available in three different sizes.
So Luke's got the big one.
It's huge, it's massive.
He's got that big one.
And I'm holding the medium one
and this is the itty bitty little small one.
So you guys can check them out.
They are significantly more expensive
than the Intel version, but let's, you know, they're better.
What do you want me to say?
No, no, no, it's cause they're bigger.
It's just cause they're thread ripper shaped and sized.
So they just are stuffed with a lot more, a lot more stuff,
but it starts at just 19.99
for the cute little couch ripper one that you can just,
you know, put on a shelf or whatever
as a little decorative piece.
All right, so new egg,
there's no way for them to come out of this looking good.
I don't think we'll ever get a clear answer
as to what exactly happened,
which leaves us finally back to the question I asked
probably like 20 minutes ago at this point,
what do we do?
Is this boycott worthy?
I would personally.
You would just not shop there anymore.
Yeah.
You're done.
At least for a period of time.
Send a message.
Yeah.
Okay.
We've said for the entirety of the length
of the land show has been live
to vote with your wallet, right?
Absolutely.
Even if it's a temporary thing, you can do that.
Send a message.
If I was a consistent new egg customer,
I would pause my new egg customer-ness
for at least a temporary period of time.
What do you think is fair?
What do they deserve?
A quarter?
Six months?
A year?
I'd do at least six months.
You'd say six months?
Yeah.
But that's on like a personal level, right?
I was feeling like six months
was a pretty good length of time as well.
What is my level of impact here?
I mean, I can tell you right now,
we've paused working with new egg
from a sponsor standpoint.
Like as a Canadian,
new egg isn't my go-to for buying electronics anyway.
They do have a store up here,
but they're not necessarily as competitive
with Canadian first retail outlets.
So I would just go to Memex
or I'd go to Canada computers or whatever.
I've been going to Memex.
I like that they have a very local place.
I like picking up my stuff.
I don't really know why.
I've just always,
it was always a ritual for me to go pick up my stuff
from NCX and now I do that still from Memex.
Yeah, for sure.
So for me, I don't really have a way of,
I don't really have a way of pushing back on new egg
from a customer standpoint,
but from a, and this is sort of ironic,
from a sponsorship standpoint,
which is actually me, them being the customer,
they like, they pay me for sponsorships.
I could stop taking their money.
And because presumably when they pay me money,
there's a greater return for them.
So it's sort of like, it's very ass backwards,
but I think you guys get the point.
So I'm with you.
Let's say six months of not working with new egg
at which time we're gonna reevaluate it.
And this is a great opportunity for me to show you guys
that we've actually started a new initiative here
to give you guys an opportunity to weigh in,
not just on new egg when we revisit this in six months,
but also our other sponsors.
There's actually a whole new section of the forum here
called LMG sponsor discussion,
where we are going to be posting
new sponsorship opportunities that come up.
Obviously we're gonna do our own due diligence on sponsors.
That's something that we have been working consistently
to improve over the last few years
as we've grown our business team.
But we wanna hear from you guys,
because a lot of the time our experience
won't necessarily mirror the same
or the experiences that consumers might've had.
And it also doesn't allow us to look back in time.
We might go and order something from some new sponsor
and we might have a fantastic experience.
They might have our address flagged.
You never know, I wouldn't put it past,
that's not even that sophisticated these days.
We literally said,
if we were working at these companies, we would do it.
Absolutely, they might have our address flagged.
They might have recently cleaned up their act
and maybe they were really shady six months ago.
And there would be no way for us to know that
other than hearing from the community.
So we want you guys to start really being
an active participant in the brands
that we should be working with,
that you feel are complimentary to our brand.
So that's where we're at on that.
We wanna hear from you guys, but Newegg,
I think we've heard the message loud and clear.
Six month pause on working with Newegg.
So we'll revisit it sometime in August, I guess.
Yeah, yeah.
All right, that means they're gonna miss out
on the back to school period.
Should we jump on a few curated messages?
Yeah, let's do that.
To see if there's any like specifically about that
or anything else that's interesting.
Absolutely.
Oh, shoot.
I don't have it open.
What happened to my tab?
Oh, balls.
Well, you're on it then.
Okay.
Nevermind.
I have it.
It has a new favicon.
So I got confused.
Oh, yeah.
I don't know why it's a bike, but it sounds good.
Okay, it's a bike.
Linus bike.
That's a thing.
Yeah, actually.
Yeah, true.
And it's orange, so, you know, whatever.
Hold on.
MTHammer says, I legit can't think of a company
that was shady and no longer is.
There are companies that have rehabbed their images
in significant ways.
Here's one, Lucky Gold Star.
Really?
Lucky Gold Star was known for being absolute garbage
back in like the 80s, early 90s.
And nowadays, you know them as...
I don't know.
And I don't remember actually.
Lucky Gold Star.
Lucky Gold Star.
LG?
Yeah.
It's just LG, interesting.
Yeah.
Okay.
For me personally, Zotac.
Okay.
Yeah, I'll take it.
Yeah, because when I was first getting into computer stuff,
it was like, I don't know.
I didn't know them as like bad for customer service
or anything, but generally I knew them
as like generally lower quality products,
cheaper stuff and whatnot.
And then as the years have gone on, quality's gone up.
They're like attention to detail on different things.
Like they seem very legit now.
They've really innovated.
They've done some really cool like ultra compact cards
and stuff like that over the years.
They drove a lot of those ultra compact cards
for a while there.
So like, yeah, I've seen them on the come up quite a bit.
People who are like LMAO,
I literally thought LG stood for life's good.
Well, it does now,
but it's good for Lucky Gold Star back then.
A lot of particularly Asian companies started out
with sort of more,
names that were more culturally appropriate over there
and then rebranded to more Western sounding names
to improve their appeal.
Would you count MSI under that?
Yeah, Microstar International.
Yeah.
DFI, remember DFI motherboards?
Diamond Flower International.
Like that's just a thing.
That's like a very Taiwanese way of branding.
I mean, Asus was Pegasus.
Yeah.
That's where the Asus, Pegasus, Pegasus.
And so they, when they split into Pegatron,
which is their manufacturing arm and Asus,
which is their consumer electronics arm,
Pega and Asus.
Yeah, that's cute.
It's all right, yeah.
One of the merch messages from Maria M is,
Hey Luke, any advice on-
Hyundai Kia.
That's another one.
I didn't know that.
Hyundai and Kia.
No, no, no, just like that they sucked
and now they're great.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, like, oh man, Kia, whoa.
Yeah, weren't they just like super trash?
Yeah, I don't know as much about Kia.
Now you're like, you look at the Kia, like damn.
Sweet.
Look at that Kia.
Maria M merch message says,
Hey Luke, any advice for a first custom keyboard build?
Do lots of research.
And I think one of the biggest like gap makers
in custom keyboards is whether you actually use Lube or not.
You should really do it.
A lot of people don't,
and it's a big detractor in the overall feel of your,
of your board.
You should use Lube, Luke 2022.
Yeah, it's a good idea.
Just makes, you know, just,
it all works a little bit better, a little bit smoother.
It feels better.
David says,
I'm struggling to balance working toward my dream career
and family troubles at home.
During your career grind,
has there ever been a time when you felt overwhelmed?
Okay, so at risk of TMI here,
my wife and I have a dual head shower
and we often shower together.
And we've actually found that when we're in the shower
together is one of the few times that we can like really
talk because you're not doing anything else
when you're in the shower, right?
Like there's no kids bothering.
Well, okay, we're married.
So clearly, clearly that doesn't happen anymore.
So when you're in the shower,
your attention is focused entirely on each other
other than, you know, some absent-minded soap in the pits,
if you know what I'm saying.
So we've had a lot of like big talks in the shower.
And one of the times that really stands out to me
is a time that we were having like quite an emotional talk.
And like, she was quite emotional
and talking about how I keep saying,
we got to reach this next milestone.
And then we reached the milestone,
whether it's moving into the Langley house
that we used as an office or paying off the Langley house
or getting moved into the office or paying off the office
or hiring this next set of writers.
After we get this round of writer hires,
it'll be fine and I'll have more time.
And she's like, you keep pushing,
you keep kicking this can down the road.
You keep saying, okay, when we have kids,
I'll be family first.
When the kid's old enough to remember anything,
I'll be family first.
When this, family first, well, when is it going to happen?
And when am I going to feed first?
When are you going to focus on doing stuff with me, with us?
And what we both ultimately came around to,
what we realized is that even though our life is consumed
by work and by taking care of kids
and by things that, I think a lot of people
would consider to be chores, right?
And even though we didn't, we never took a break.
Like we went straight from dating to marriage.
We took a two week honeymoon, that was it.
And then we got, we buckled right down into it.
I mean, we got married in April
and we had our first baby in April, all right?
And it was not shotgun wedding, not the same April,
the following April, but we basically got back
from our honeymoon and got down to it, right?
So we never really like took a break.
And I think that's been really hard.
I think that's been really hard on both of us
and especially Yvonne and what we ultimately came around to
and what I think has given us both a lot more peace
is that we have to see those choices that we made
as things that we do together.
Yeah, it can't be like, oh, all we did,
all we talked about this week was work and parenting.
It has to be work and parenting is what we do.
For better or for worse,
those are the life choices we've made.
Those are our hobbies.
Those are, you know,
maybe we don't build model ships in bottles together.
Maybe what we do is we parent three amazing children
together, that's what we do.
That's what we do together.
And so ever since we reframed work
and we reframed childcare in that manner,
it's been far less of an issue for us.
I mean, obviously you have to set aside a couple of times.
You have to.
You have to spend one-on-one time together doing nothing
but just looking at each other and talking to each other
because otherwise you will not make it.
You could, I guess I told that myself,
I wasn't gonna have any hot takes today,
but I guess that's one.
And man, I forget where I was really going with this,
but the point is, where did this even go?
Did you ever feel like there was time
when you felt overwhelmed?
Yeah, absolutely.
How'd you stay positive and focused?
I mean, working on things together was a big part of it.
And that was a big part of that conversation too,
is that, yeah, we're doing this thing
and, you know, okay, it's called Linus Media Group
and that's not always easy for you
because you're in the background a lot of the time,
but you gotta understand, like, I can't do it without you.
And I know a lot of people
don't appreciate properly what you do,
but a lot of them do.
The ones that were there from the beginning
know what you do and I know what you do.
But I mean, that's still like,
gotta be hard for her, right?
Because it's like-
I think it still is.
Linus Media Group, Linus Tech Tips.
She almost never gets that face time.
And a lot of the time, and this is really frustrating,
even internally, she's working on things
that are not for employee consumption.
Like, you know, she'll be working on something like,
okay, back when we were at the Langley House,
she was the one who did everything
getting this place arranged and set up.
And like a huge spectrum.
Whoa, my headphones just popped in and out.
A huge spectrum of work too,
because not only did she do the legwork
on acquiring the place,
which is extremely difficult on its own,
but also going every,
like setting the whole place up
all the way through like architectural design
to actual just like room design.
Very hands-on, extremely hands-on.
So spend time together.
As for staying positive, I mean, setting small goals.
Try not to, trying to make them realistic.
You know, when I would set small goals,
it'd be like, okay, let's get to this milestone.
But then you just like keep going.
You keep going 100% no matter what.
Take breaks.
I mean, these are all things that are,
you're gonna find in any sort of general life advice book
or article, but they're true.
Don't ignore them, I guess would be my summary.
I think the thing that I've been most concerned
about your guys aside from is the vacations.
And I can't speak very well for this
because I burn most of my vacation time.
Yeah, you're stupid.
Yeah.
He's like, honestly,
like I say that in the most affectionate possible way,
but you're an idiot.
He has vacation time.
I tell him, go away.
Stop working.
Goodbye.
And then he's like replying to emails and stuff.
And I'm like, goodbye.
Yeah.
And he just doesn't, because we only allow vacation time
to accrue for so long because we can't have people
just like taking six months off all of a sudden
in a row, like, you know,
I think we let you carry it over one extra year.
I don't remember the policy anymore,
but the point is that taking vacation time is healthy.
And so our policy is that you have to use it
because you are supposed to use it.
I did before COVID lockdowns.
I did.
Sort of.
Yeah, sort of, yeah.
I wanna go, the only thing I really like
to take vacation time to do is go travel.
So it's hard to do that
when that's been mostly shut down.
But a lot of your vacation time that you've taken,
and again, I'm not the right person to criticize on this,
but a lot of the vacation time that you've taken
has had to be things that are akin to work.
It's not been particularly restful.
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I've always kind of been concerned about that
because everybody needs that battery recharge time, right?
Yeah, I mean, for me, honestly speaking,
there's different things that recharge me more.
Sure.
Like I'd say I got more recharged from that Intel trip
checking out the fabs than I would have from a vacation.
Dude, I totally see that actually.
I really miss like work trips.
I worked my butt off.
The Brandon and Luke trips
were huge battery rechargers for me,
even though it was like gas, gas, gas 100% of the time.
Yeah.
It was, yeah, it's a change of pace.
Like I was fricking going.
Oh yeah.
But-
But it feels good.
It's like a, yeah.
I was on my way out of there one night
and one of the Intel employees asked me,
oh, are you going to do any sightseeing while you're here?
And I was like, are you kidding me?
I already saw the coolest thing.
That's what we were doing all day.
In this whole country.
Yeah.
What did you think I was here for?
Yeah.
I don't have to do this anymore.
Yeah.
I don't travel anymore.
Like that's something,
I actually haven't really talked about that publicly,
but I think viewers have probably noticed
that I don't go anywhere anymore.
I went down to, I went down to Seattle for Valve
because that was like an hour and a half drive
and it was the fricking Steam Deck.
Yeah.
Okay.
Going to Valve is kind of-
So in the last two years I have gone to Valve
and I have gone to the Intel Fab.
That is it.
I'm out.
And I'll do Computex because I love Computex.
I love Taipei.
I love getting together with all the other tech nerds.
They're my people.
For some reason, especially good at that.
Yeah.
It's great.
The meetups, yeah.
I just want to go walk around with Wendell again.
I know, right?
I hope he goes.
That'd be great.
I believe we were literally talking about it
like not that long ago.
I, yeah.
I hope he goes too.
I'm going.
Yeah. All right.
Am I paying for it?
Yeah.
Interesting.
Okay.
Anyway, I forget what we were talking about there.
He's on float plane.
Okay.
Yeah.
So you got to meet with Wendell
and you have to do it in Taipei.
That makes perfect sense.
Yep.
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All right, what's our next big topic today?
I'm just looking at these merch messages,
but we do have a few things.
There's the Best Buy thing.
Oh yeah, Best Buy's at it again.
Okay, so tell me this.
What is the difference
between Best Buy's controversial Total Tech membership,
okay, which has already been used to block off access
to PlayStation fives and Xboxes.
What is the difference between their Total Tech membership
and say, for example, a members only store
in the first place like Costco?
Costco.
Tell me, because now GPUs
are behind the Total Tech paywall.
And there's been a whole lot of shenanigans around this
because some people didn't have it already
and they went to get it so they could buy a GPU,
but they were all gone.
And then it's like $200 a year for a Total Tech membership.
And they're like, ah, where's my GPU at, yo?
I think one of the big differences
is that the Costco membership,
I believe is like 40 bucks a year
and you get money back and stuff.
Only with the credit card, I think.
Or is that with the, no, with the executive membership,
but that one's cost more, that one's way more.
Right.
So what's the difference?
Why are people so upset?
I'm playing devil's advocate to be very clear.
I don't actually think it's all that different.
There's a difference
because you can still shop at some of the store.
You just can't buy the like highly desired items,
but the Total Tech membership
comes with other stuff as well.
I don't remember everything in it.
Extended warranty, and I can't remember what else.
I think you like automatically get,
whatever it's called, I don't remember,
but the Best Buy exclusive extended warranty thing,
I think you automatically get some amount
of Geek Squad coverage and some other stuff.
I don't remember.
Chat's going right now.
They're going right now.
It's great.
The difference is price.
It's $200 for a chance.
Yeah, the fact that it's a chance is super brutal.
Just let me play devil's advocate, okay?
Yeah, the price is super brutal.
The fact that it's a chance is super brutal.
Yeah, the fact that Costco's membership gives you access
to everything in the entire store at a deal
instead of just the opportunity to buy something at MSRP,
it's not even a deal.
It's basically a reseller program that you enroll in
disguised as a consumer program is sort of my take on it.
Now, something I don't know, I'm not American.
I don't shop at American Best Buy.
So I have no idea.
I've never actually looked into buying this for myself,
but can you buy more than one GPU if you have a membership?
If there's anyone who's got a membership, let me know.
Or do they use the membership as a way of validating
that you are just one person to make it difficult
to justify buying a new membership
for every time you buy a GPU,
like eating into your scalper margins?
Tell me that.
The fact that it's paying for a chance,
I find actually rather hilarious.
I do, I honestly think the inclusion of the other benefits
under the total tech program is mostly so that it doesn't
just look like you're paying to enter a lottery.
Yes, but as a reseller,
you would certainly benefit from extended warranty.
For sure, why not?
Yeah, it sure is interesting.
Blame it on dev says there's no limit.
Zirfel says you can as long as it's a different brand.
And Medavlevan says,
I have no idea what buying a GPU feels like
in any capacity.
Oh, that's sad.
To be frank, it's not that great.
They're very expensive.
Even when they weren't like this,
they were still pretty expensive.
Have you started your Steam Deck exclusive?
I haven't.
I'm not gonna do that until after I do the review,
because I want the switch to the Steam Deck
to be on final software.
And I mean, final is a very funny word in this case, but.
That's fair enough though.
Yeah, I wanna have the customer experience.
Release software.
I'm using exclusively the Steam Deck for a month.
Yeah, that's my goal.
Sure.
Cause I was gonna say like, honestly, at certain prices,
like I have heard people that didn't know
you were going to do that mention like, huh,
a reasonable upgrade path might be buying a Steam Deck
as my new computer.
I know, right?
Which is just crazy.
But Kael'thas in floatplane chat says
you can buy different SKUs,
but not more than one of each.
So a friend managed to get
the entire founders edition series other than a 60 TI
with the tech, whatever it's called,
total tech membership in the drop the other day.
So there you go.
Thank you.
Thank you for clarifying that for us.
If you're a kid or a teenager or whatever,
and you really can't find a card,
you don't wanna try to support scalpers,
you buy this thing and then your opportunity
doesn't really come up.
Like that's gotta burn so much.
Oh, that sucks.
That sucks.
The Xbox is a lot.
Hey, at least you've got an extended warranty.
Hey.
The stuff that you didn't buy.
Thanks, Del.
Oh, wait, sorry.
Yeah, that's brutal.
Cause like what I remember back in the, like, what was it?
PS4, I don't even remember what they call the Xbox
of that generation, but whatever.
Xbox One.
Xbox One.
Yeah, the PS4 and Xbox One launched.
We had a conversation topic talking about
how like $300 was the like monthly extra spend
for a household price point target thing.
Yeah, like just talking about how,
why is it that your entry-level consumer electronics,
but still premium.
So, why is it that an iPod,
the base model iPod is 300 bucks
and a game console is like 300 to 400 bucks.
And like all this stuff is around that price.
And we were kind of talking about how
that's that threshold between, I can't,
like I can spend this money without thinking about it at all
and I have to save up for multiple months.
It's like riding that.
It hits a lot of people within that column, yeah.
So the fact that it's $200
and that's such a significant portion
of that amount of money.
Yes, it's been a decent amount of time since then.
Inflation has happened.
That number has probably gone up a little bit,
but still 200 bucks is like, that's a very considerable
amount of money for a chance.
It's a ton of money.
Like what the heck, that's brutal.
Man, have you ever tried to look at the YouTube chat?
It goes so fast.
I can't even, anyway.
Yeah, it doesn't like buffer send like Twitch does.
Sir Flufficus had a really good point here.
The Steam Deck CAD files are a big deal.
Valve released CAD files for the Steam Deck housing.
You know, it's funny.
I asked them for them prior to launch
because we were considering working on a case
before we found out that Valve was going to make
their own case and just include it with us.
We're like, oh, okay, well that's pointless.
But we were going to do a case that would like fit
inside the backpack for the Steam Deck.
I think the Steam Deck's going to be just such a game changer
that they're going to sell so fricking many of these things.
Anyway.
If I can make enough.
Yeah, well, that's a thing.
So I actually asked them, I was like, hey,
can we get the file?
Can we either get an early one, an earlier one
so that we can start working on this
or can you send us the file so we can 3D print it?
And they just like, we're like, no.
And then they never mentioned it again.
And then suddenly they just dropped the CAD files,
which is amazing.
So that means that basically anyone,
at least I think can use those to develop accessories
for the Steam Deck or their own personal.
Little 3D printed case.
Say for example, you know, a full-size SSD adapter
doodad on the jig, because there's so much space.
Like it's thick on the sides,
but it's actually quite skinny in the middle.
So if you made a new back piece, right.
You wouldn't even really notice too much.
That had like a little, you know,
You gotta dodge the buttons.
carve out for it.
You gotta dodge the buttons, but.
That'd be super awesome.
Right?
Yeah.
Cosmis says, everyone I talked to thinks it's over-hyped.
It won't be a game changer.
It's just a handheld gaming device.
I guess by that logic,
the Nintendo Switch wasn't a game changer.
It was just a handheld gaming device, right?
Yeah, who cares?
Yeah, how many Nintendo Switches did they move?
Not that many. I think it was like dozens.
Was it dozens?
I think.
It's at least a few dozen.
Yeah.
Total, total Switch sales.
Oh, sorry.
Hold on.
I gotta run some numbers here.
Calculator.
Here, let me just do this.
How many dozens is this?
Mm-hmm.
Divided by 12.
Okay, so it was a 7,583,333 dozens.
That's a few dozens.
That's a few dozens.
That's a few dozen Switches.
And not only that, but look at this sales curve.
It's barely even flattening.
Handheld gaming is a thing, ladies and gentlemen.
And what's so cool about the Steam Deck is the library.
A, it's enormous, and B, it's cheap.
Yeah.
It's so cheap.
How much does it cost to buy a game on the Switch
compared to the Steam Deck?
In a lot of cases, double, triple even.
Yeah.
It's ridiculous.
Even the same games.
And, and here's the coolest thing.
Moore's law might be dead, but there are other laws
and computers are definitely still getting faster.
So at the rate that Nintendo iterates, which is slow,
conceivably, we could see new Steam Decks year over year
with spec improvements that, yeah, right now,
okay, you're right.
Battery life, bit of a fly in the ointment,
unless you're playing pretty casual games.
Over time, I expect that to improve.
I am fricking excited because it's gonna be
an extremely big deal.
There.
I've said it once again, and I'll probably say it again.
Another person in chat brought up a really good point too,
is that you can buy a Steam Deck and then you automatically,
if you're a PC gamer, you automatically have a library
of games for the new device.
Now.
You don't have to buy new games.
That's right.
Already there.
That's right.
Very cool.
Fricking amazing.
I don't necessarily think the Steam Deck is gonna have
the amount of sales that the Switch had.
No.
Because the Switch is more compatible with normies.
Yes.
I don't think they're gonna move 91 million,
but they will sure as heck move a million.
And like the fact that people are strongly considering
using them as computer replacers is like,
that should tell you a lot.
We'll see how well that works.
It's so cool.
Like there's so many things that are great about it.
Right?
Cause like controller compatibility.
Oh yeah.
Literally anything with a Bluetooth connection.
I'm sure Valve's gonna be working on.
Whereas Nintendo's like,
we only use our expensive controller
that's not even that great.
No, no Nintendo.
No.
No.
Bam.
Someone in chat was like,
it doesn't have arms that like that like weird Switch game,
that like weird boxing Switch game with the like spring arms.
Okay.
Yeah, true.
Or a cardboard fishing rod.
Probably shouldn't pick it up then.
To be clear, I'm not down on the Switch.
Yeah, no, I think he was just joking.
I got a Switch, love the Switch.
Yeah, Switch is great.
It's certainly lighter and smaller.
And it runs Nintendo games, which is absolutely a benefit.
I picked up a Ring Fit Adventure for the kids.
It's cool.
My daughters were couch potatoes.
Like my son is, he's super,
I don't know where he got it from.
He's like super athletic.
But my daughters are like playing with their little horsies.
Like they don't like to really, they don't really run.
I guess would be my way of putting it.
They are super into Ring Fit Adventure.
Ring Fit's cool.
I'll go and I'll check on them.
You know, hey, how you doing?
I don't count Ring Fit Adventure as screen time.
Cause it actually does, have you tried it?
I own it.
Oh, okay, yeah, you go.
Oh yeah.
Like you go pretty good.
It's pretty awesome.
So that's one of the deals.
Is that Ring Fit Adventure doesn't count as screen time.
So if you ask to play video games,
if it's Ring Fit Adventure, it's basically 100% chance,
unless it's like bedtime that I'm going to say yes.
So they're super into it and I'll go check on them.
It's like, oh yeah, they're sweating.
My daughter's never sweat.
It'll make you burn.
Yeah, it's good.
It's good, it's amazing.
Yeah.
The first time I tried it,
I put it on like the maximum difficulty.
Cause it's like, oh, whatever.
And by the time I was done, I was like, oh, okay.
I might need to relax this down next time.
But yeah, it's a cool game.
I find the old Wii Sports to be more fun.
Oh yeah, Wii Sports was a blast.
I put so many hours in Wii Sports.
Doesn't burn you anywhere near as much as Ring Fit does.
Oh, not even close.
Boxing got you pretty good.
Especially if you're like my son
who would play the boxing games like this
and always beat me.
It was so frustrating because the motion controls
were so janky back then that there was like
almost no actual strategy.
It was just luck whether you would hit or not.
So annoying.
Conrad says Ring Fit is still like $80.
Otherwise I would get it.
But that's the Nintendo way.
I mean, Breath of the Wild is still like 60 Canadian dollars
or something stupid like that.
The Ring Fit was really, really difficult
to get a long time ago as well.
I don't know if it still is or not, but.
In other big news, Nvidia and Arm ain't getting together.
The deal is officially canceled
after pretty much everyone objected to it.
SoftBank will instead take Arm public in an IPO
which was their original plan to begin with.
They are leaning towards listing
on the NASDAQ stock exchange.
However, they remain embroiled in a legal fight
with the head of their Chinese joint venture, Ellen Wu
after the board tried to remove him.
Arm warned they had been stopped
from auditing the accounts last month
which their CFO, Inder Singh,
admitted they will need to fix in China
to proceed with their plans.
Ruh-roh, that's a little awkward.
Yeah.
Man, if I was like really,
you know what I want to know
is what would prevent us
from taking Linus Media Group public?
Like I think people would buy shares in Linus Media Group.
Yeah, but you don't want them to.
Right.
Aside from that though.
Okay, okay.
Aside from me, what would prevent,
I actually know so little about the process
because my understanding is the main benefits
of being a public company are A,
when you do your initial sale of stock,
you get a cash infusion because people just give you money
and then you have that to spend on expanding your business.
And then beyond that,
my understanding is somehow your market cap
affects how much you can borrow.
Like it's some kind of indicator
that financial institutions will look at
to determine your level of credit worthiness.
Yeah.
So beyond that, what's the point?
I don't really get it.
Why would I go public?
I don't know.
People say as long as you own the majority, it's all good.
Could you do it for only say 30% of the company
so we could invest but you retain control.
But why would you do that, Commander Crazy?
I mean, you already subscribed to Floatplane,
so clearly you just like throwing money at me anyhow.
Yeah, like if you- By the way, thank you.
If you own the company, you can just be like,
nope, no dividends ever.
I mean, we could, that's not very nice.
No.
That's not like a nice thing to do.
Initial capital infusion,
ability to use stock as financial compensation
for employees, et cetera.
I mean, I think you can do that anyways.
LTT coin to the moon.
We were so like gonna do a coin
and then the whole thing just got like extremely,
we were like, this is terrible.
Forget it.
I even said on WAN Show,
there's some ancient clips of me being like,
LTT coin is coming, you better believe it.
And we had even come up with some pretty cool things
that we wanted to do with it.
But what we realized is that no cryptocurrency
was ever about there being something actually
usable to do with it.
So there you go.
You can buy us all drugs.
Sorry, what?
Cryptocurrencies.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, fair enough.
But that's not why anyone ever created one.
Like there's no drug, there's probably drug coin,
but people just use like regular cryptocurrencies for that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I know this one.
You were then beholden to share loaders,
share load, share loaders,
shareholders for Indian slip.
You either own 50% plus one and make a bunch of money
or stay private until you realize you've passed
the point of inflection where your ability
to make more money stops growing.
Yeah, okay.
I mean, if you blew up in 10 years,
early stockholders would make a profit.
Yeah, that's true.
I just don't know if I would see,
I just don't know if we'd see that kind of explosive growth.
We've always been slow and steady, slow and steady,
slow and steady wins the race.
It's just the only reason that I've been thinking
about it more lately is because we can't relocate.
I can't ask the team to do that.
We're realistically not gonna move to Kamloops
or somewhere affordable.
Our window for that is kind of gone.
And we've gotten to a point in lower mainland real estate
where we could lease,
but I don't like having an uncertain future.
So I would want to own whatever headquarters,
we own the headquarters we're in now.
That was the, oh man, by how much?
By a lot.
The largest investment that I had ever made in my life
when we bought this headquarters,
but boy has it ever paid off.
I mean, we would have already paid a landlord
what this place has cost us.
And they would have gained like three X
their initial investment in equity
because that's how much real estate is going up here.
So the problem with that is that as our company grows
and our revenues grow,
the real estate cost is growing alongside us.
So we can't afford anything big enough
that we could actually grow into.
And so that was something that made me think,
maybe this is the time that we do need
to actually raise cash.
Because I don't need it to like make more pillows
or print more shirts or even buy lab equipment.
That's gonna be a big investment, but it's manageable.
It's something that we can build up over time.
And as long as it's something you can build up over time
and it's one-time purchases, well, that's manageable.
You can plan for that, right?
But like, it would be a tens of millions of dollars
investment to get a new place to move into.
And I just don't have that kind of capital.
And that's something that I think would significantly
change our ability to grow over the years.
The problem is just that you create this,
DJ Spark says, I'd love to invest.
I would hope for dividends, but I'd be happy
with just carrying the stock until retirement.
But the problem is that unless we actually carry on,
unless we find a way to make the business sustainable,
beyond my prime years, I'm past them.
I'm gonna be 36, I guess.
Like I ain't getting younger at this point.
And so we'd have to find a way to make LMG sustainable
in the very long term for me to be able in good conscience
to take your money in exchange for shares in this company.
So yeah.
Jaden said, or relocate LMG,
so he probably wasn't listening to earlier.
I tried to convince Linus and Yvonne a long time ago
on a few different locations,
but that ship has definitely sailed.
There's way too many routes here.
Like the amount of people that have bought
or have leases on places,
the amount of people that we've had relocate here,
it's not exactly easy to just pick up
the amount of people and families
that are connected to the people that live here.
That would be spouses of the people that live here
needing to get a new job at another location.
Like that would be extremely destructive at this point.
And Linus Media Group is not a building.
It's people.
We wouldn't be us if we tried to be us somewhere else.
It just doesn't work that way.
And yeah, that's not how we roll.
Gremlin Injector says, to add to this,
a huge problem recently has been private equity
basically owning all the good companies.
There's a fraction as many publicly traded companies
as there were 20 years ago.
Yeah, that's another thing that I read
like one article about it and I was like, what is this?
SPACs, have you heard of SPACs?
S-P-A-Cs?
Apparently that's a way that people are raising money
without going through a lot of the due diligence
that's required for a formal IPO.
Special Purpose Acquisition Company?
Yeah.
So that's very, very interesting.
Cause it would be easier,
but it also is apparently rife with abuse.
Not surprised.
Black Cat Right says, my worry,
if you did take it public is that your investors
could sue you for any major bad things
happening to the company.
Yeah, that's something.
Being beholden to shareholders is like a scary,
that's like a nightmare for me.
It's an actual nightmare.
Yep.
And Sir Fluffica says, maybe a better option
would be some kind of merch subscription
where you pay monthly for exclusive merch.
So the reason we haven't done a subscription
for merch already is that I don't believe in people
just buying stuff sight unseen without thought.
I want purchases on lttstore.com to be driven
by clearly superior product quality and design
and not just a desire to support us
because the reality of it is producing
and shipping these products is extremely resource intensive,
carbon intensive, however you want to say it.
I don't want people just buying it for no reason.
I want us to earn it.
I want us to earn your business.
So a merch subscription doesn't sit well with me
and we will probably never do one.
The only way we would do one is if I had some reason
that you guys needed refills of something
on a recurring basis, say for example,
we had a consumable item that we would ship to you
every month or something along those lines.
I could see us doing that, but something like shirts,
no, you guys just, hey, if you're engaged with the content
and you're engaged with the brand and you love the quality
of the product, you come on the site,
you see a design, you like, you buy it.
Well, I'm just gonna send you stuff that you don't want.
A random t-shirt SKU is significantly different
than a merch subscription.
Those are wildly different things.
One of those is I like all the t-shirts
and I would like one cheaper, please.
And the other one is randomly receiving things
on a period basis that you probably don't need
or necessarily even want because a lot
of subscription things, people will forget about them
and or be too lazy to cancel them.
And then stuff's just showing up at your door
that you don't want anymore or whatever else is going on.
And, ah, shoot, what were you talking about again?
Oh yeah, mystery shirt.
And mystery shirt is actually a way for us
to avoid ever having to destroy anything.
Man, it just, it boils my blood when I see
whether it's like food being dumped into the dumpster
or shirts that have been spray painted
so that they can be disposed of.
Is it like Louis Vuitton or something
that lights their stuff on fire?
I don't know, but I hate it.
I hate it every time I see that stuff.
So mystery shirt is a way for us to get rid of
like the last seven triple XLs
and the last two smalls of this design.
And the seven mediums of this one.
You don't necessarily want to have a store entry
for a product that only has one size still in stock.
Exactly.
And there's only like four of them.
Like you don't really want to do that.
So it's better to just pull it down
and put it up differently.
Yeah.
What's going on here?
Oh my goodness, float plane chat
has just exploded talking about this.
I was trying to kind of look at the chat
but I don't think that's going to happen.
Contamination at Kioxia could cause
computer component costs to climb.
Analysts are expecting a five to 10% price increase
for flash storage after WD lost six and a half X bytes
of NAND due to contaminated materials
at its production facilities.
It was detected in late January
by joint venture partner Kioxia
who claims that the contamination only affects
it's Bix 3D NAND flash memory and has assured
that their 2D NAND products are unaffected.
It remains unclear when production
of the contaminated plants will resume
or if products on the market will need to be recalled.
Ooh, brutal.
This happens to NAND like all the time.
Every once in a while.
Yeah, it feels that way.
Very consistent.
WD and Kioxia primarily supply NAND and EMMC storage
and the partnership makes up about 30%
of the NAND flash market.
They have not been specific about the cause
but if the source of the contamination
was a chemical supplier, then other manufacturers
who share the supplier could be affected too.
Sadly, this news came right as Kioxia celebrated
the 35th anniversary of their invention
of NAND flash storage, a game-changing technology.
Bit of a lousy birthday.
Oof.
Really?
A discussion question here from,
I don't know if he's off probation yet,
but AS is how little 2D NAND is used these days?
Why do you think Kioxia mentioned it in their press release?
I suspect they're still using 2D NAND
for a lot of lower cost products.
I mean, if I was an enterprise customer of Kioxia
and I heard their NAND got screwed up,
I might assume all of it.
Yeah, that's fair.
And if I purchased 2D NAND,
I would like to know that the 2D NAND is okay.
In other news, Tap to Pay update might turn all iPhones
into mobile payment terminals.
This is actually crazy.
What?
There was some interesting feedback that I saw online
about how Apple is really not that great
at getting businesses to adopt
their new software technologies.
So we'll see how this goes.
But I mean, not needing to work with Square
would be pretty interesting.
A lot of it's gonna depend on their financial stuff.
Apple is a huge fan of taking as much money
as they possibly can in every scenario.
So we'll see how that goes.
But this could be a massive game changer to Square
who really, I don't think has had,
I could be very uneducated on this,
but I don't think they've had a huge amount of competition.
Square's been the one
kind of every time we've looked into it, yeah.
Like there's been a few different options,
but Square's been the king for sure.
And anytime Apple or Google or Microsoft,
whatever enters the ring, that gets questioned, right?
So we'll see how this goes.
It's interesting.
It's also a new thing in the space
that I think people would trust, you know, so.
Apparently it's only an API for other people to use.
Companies like Square can now include that functionality
in their app says Snow Skeleton.
Interesting.
Very interesting.
So it'll offer the same security and privacy of Apple Pay,
i.e. Apple doesn't know or collect data
on what is being purchased or who the buyer is
and tap to pay will be made available to iOS developers
and other payment platforms,
starting with apps that use Stripe
with other platforms to follow later this year.
So you will have to see if it poses a threat
to products like Square's $1,200
plus full cash register systems.
That's more what I was talking about.
The fact that they can integrate it is like neat
or whatever, but yeah, it's the fact
that it's just your phone versus needing to buy like,
cause at the very least you have to have that thing
that plugs into your phone from Square.
So yeah, I don't know.
Apple Sherlocked Square.
Yeah, they sort of did.
Yeah.
Apple, I mean, they sort of are the origin
of the term Sherlocking.
So that shouldn't surprise anyone.
That's kind of how Apple rolls.
All right, we should do a few more merch messages here.
Yes.
Hi Linus and Luke,
do you have any suggestions for gaming focused universities?
For example, with gaming design production, et cetera,
types of majors.
You're not gonna find a ton of great advice
about post-secondary education from either of us.
From two dropouts.
But maybe the rest of the chat could pipe up
and let you know if they have any thoughts.
Dan asks, hey Linus and Luke,
I was wondering what are your thoughts
on everything needing to be app-based?
It was very frustrating to have to use the home app
to set up Chromecast when it was possible by PC in the past.
PC is the best.
I mean, it's just the way, it's just the way.
I don't make the rules anymore.
Everything is app-based and I mean, frankly,
it's way better than it used to be.
Do you remember setting up stuff like,
remember that old parrot drone, the AR drone?
Like what a nightmare it was
to go through the pairing process back in the day?
These days, man, I paired a pair of Sony earphones today
where I literally opened up the app and it was like,
I just had them in my ears.
I didn't press a pairing button or anything.
And it was like, hold your phone near the earphones.
And I was like, what, like this?
And I looked back at my phone and it's like, we found them.
Well, that's really nice.
Basically like magic.
Andrew, are you still making the 3090 Ti, like the Ti?
And are you considering making a case
or travel pouch of some kind for the screwdriver?
Okay, okay, hold on a second.
So first of all, the Ti, yeah,
we definitely wanna do a GPU Ti, we think it's funny.
Second, hear me out.
Get a whole backpack?
Holster.
No way, are you actually doing one?
I want to.
Leather, like primo.
Oh man.
Primo holster for the screwdriver.
Would you wear your screwdriver in a holster?
I'm talking with the snap, the snap button.
If I like.
Fewer tech?
If I was a tech, exactly, I was gonna say,
if I worked on the job site
where I used my screwdriver all the time,
I might be the type of person that would do that
as like a flare thing.
I'm talking like the old cell phone holsters, okay?
Clip on the belt, flap style holster
for the LTT screwdriver.
You do it so the point's down, yeah?
I would think so, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Huh, huh?
Yeah, yeah.
All right.
Oh man.
I want to do it.
Jumping the shark.
No, no, it's awesome.
It's awesome, it's gonna be amazing.
And yes, it will just hold a single screwdriver.
Other than that.
You should have like almost like a bandolier on it
that has like extra bit storage.
I'd be into that.
Like a little, I don't know how to describe it properly,
but I think I know.
No, I understand what you mean.
We could have a magnet behind it
so they don't come out by accident or something like that.
Yeah, yeah, we could totally do something like that.
Bum says, I'm an electrician.
I would wear at work.
We wouldn't make it specific to our screwdriver.
We could definitely do some work to make it not universally,
but more broadly compatible.
You know, work best with yours.
Yes, best with ours.
Yeah, I think that'd be fricking awesome.
Man, I'm so excited for it.
PS, charger slash audio cable pass-through hole
on the backpack would be convenient.
There is one.
Is LTT store gonna do a backpack ever?
Yes, absolutely, that's it, by the way.
Yeah, this is it.
There's one right here.
So if you wanna put something in this mesh pocket here,
which is zippered, there you go.
Then you can run it to somewhere else if you need to.
By the way, this is a new revision.
Oh.
Still a few more changes.
So that pushes it back another probably couple of months.
What changed?
Well, we came up with an idea for how to make it,
you know how people ask to have it be luggage compatible?
So you could slide it over the luggage.
So we came up with an idea for how to do that.
We created a strap that would go on the back
that would clip onto these loops.
These are like metal, they're super, super nice.
We don't like it though.
These, actually, I kind of stopped noticing them.
It probably would have been fine, but-
You feel them on your back?
Yeah, we wanted a better way to do this.
And yeah, I could feel them on my back sometimes.
So what we've decided to do is we're actually going
to take some inspiration from, here we go, these guys.
So you see these little clip-on spots that we've got here.
Not actually, but MOLLE style?
Yeah.
And we're gonna do probably three loops here, here, and here
and it'll just kind of come down here.
So then you could use them for anything.
You could just hang stuff off the side of your bag
or you could put your back piece
that will act as that sleeve.
You could clip it into that.
It'll probably be Velcro.
I think it'll be Velcro or hook and loop fastener.
I don't know if it'll be brand name Velcro
or something comparable, but not Velcro brand.
There's lots of good hook and loop fasteners out there.
So anyway, it'll probably be like that.
And then it will, for storage,
I think we're gonna aim to have it be foldable
in quarters and then slippable
into the enlarged passport pocket down here.
Cool.
So the idea is that when you are not traveling,
you will have that thing in here.
Right, okay.
And when you are traveling,
you will have your passport in here.
Yeah.
So that's where we're at on that.
We added these on the front.
So more little loop things.
And this was from when I was doing a video with Colin
and I needed to have a walkie.
Oh, you wanted somewhere to put it.
And I wanted somewhere to put it.
And so we added them on both sides.
We still have the little, these are now removable.
So you can completely remove the chest strap
and just, you can chuck it in your passport pocket
or chuck it somewhere else if you want.
What else did we change?
We changed the pocket layout in the front.
I'm not sure if I'm 100% happy with it,
but it's definitely better than before.
So it has a long boy pocket for the screwdriver now.
So it's fully screwdriver compatible.
It has just a little pocket down here now.
It doesn't go across the whole way anymore.
Sorry, you guys can't see.
It doesn't go all the way across anymore.
This, put my mask in there, there's your pen pocket,
just a mesh pocket here.
I got a, this is a more of a between us thing,
but I got a nostalgia trip seeing what was in that pocket.
Oh, the SteelSeries little like headphone case.
Yeah, yeah.
It's my little bag of tricks.
Yeah.
Got good stuff in it.
We expanded this pocket on the side
cause I like to use it for a mouse and my cable.
So we wanted to make it both bulgy enough
that you can actually put a mouse in there.
Yeah.
So that's, that's what we did there.
We finally have the proper microfiber on the inside.
This broke.
It's just an early sample,
but we've got the microfiber on the inside
so you can feel what that's going to be like.
Not on that one.
The screen pockets.
Yep. That one.
Oh, nice. Okay.
Yep.
Yeah, yeah.
And the pocket layout in the main pouch.
Sorry, this is turning into a backpack, a backpack showcase.
Hold on one sec.
So this is cool.
All three sleeves are now on the backside.
So there's your laptop, your tablet,
and then something else.
The intention was a game console, like a steam deck.
And then we got the steam deck and it's like this thick.
And we're like, no, we cannot build a sleeve for that.
So the intention now is that your steam deck,
you can actually see the shape of the bottom pocket.
Your steam deck is going to be joysticks toward that way.
And then you're going to kind of have a bit
of a recess here for the handholds.
And it kind of sits in the bottom really nicely.
And then we're going to change.
This is using the self fabric,
which is like the main fabric right now.
But we're going to put a screen fabric down
at the bottom of that pocket.
It makes the cleanability not as good,
but that's a trade-off we're willing to take
so that you could put a screen device down
in the bottom if you want to.
There's only two spots to hold chargers.
They're up here and it's like one big, one small.
But for me, I only need one charger
because everything in my life is type C now anyway.
So I use it for a charger and a battery bank.
And then, oh, here's the thing.
So here's the strap thing for the back.
Oh, okay, gotcha.
Yeah, I just had it sitting in there.
This color's not quite right, by the way.
I like it, it's super vivid,
but we're going to go with a slightly less
eye searing orange for the inside.
It's more in line with our regular Pantone orange.
Right.
And finally, you've got the main pocket of holding,
which just has the one kind of zipper pocket right here.
And then the sleeve for the 40 ounce water bottle.
Oh, I have a steam deck in here.
Oh, that's convenient.
Okay, hold on.
I'm going to show you guys how the steam deck goes in then.
There's a question saying,
would this fit a weekend getaway worth of underwear?
Hold on.
Absolutely.
Worth of underwear with all the electronics.
I think absolutely.
I think if you wanted to fit everything in there
and you had pants every day,
it might be a slight issue.
But about 40 liters.
I think, I think so.
Don't quote me on that.
So here, there you can, oh man, the lights.
You can't really see it.
Okay, whatever.
Luke, you describe it.
Describe what?
How it kind of fits in there.
Like look at it.
I mean.
Oh, I can just feel it.
Yeah.
I mean the width wise,
it's almost exactly the width of this.
Yeah, it fits really snugly.
For sure.
So I still have concerns about the joysticks,
but we're, we've got,
we've got a few ideas for how we can tweak it
to make that work.
There's probably going to be cases for.
There are, it comes with one.
Yeah.
So if it comes with its own case,
if you drop the case in there,
how should it be perfect?
Absolutely.
Or you could drop the case in the main like
bag of holding pocket.
Yeah.
The last thing that I wanted to show you is these.
So the last revision didn't have the proper zipper pulls
and this one does.
Oh, cool.
So they're little carabiners.
You can click them into each other.
And you can click them into each other
just to help a little bit with theft resistance,
as well as if you just, I like,
I ride my motorbike with my backpack a lot of the time.
Jiggle open.
And so I'll have like a badminton racket
sticking out of it.
And if it accidentally comes open,
that's sort of a problem.
We see it.
I've gone to a lot of conventions in my day
and something you'll spot very often
is someone's backpack hanging open.
And I don't know if they just forgot to zip it up
or whatever.
Or someone opened it.
Or, but someone might've opened it
or it might've jiggled itself open
and being able to just click it closed like that
creates a barrier of difficulty.
Of course, if you just like abandon your bag somewhere,
it's not gonna save you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We should do an air tag pocket.
Shoot.
I didn't think of that.
Oh, I didn't show the sunglass pocket.
By the way, that's our material for the sunglass pocket.
Super nice.
You could probably just have a little
You should touch it.
In the, is this the same as the
I think so.
Yeah.
I think it's the same as the last one.
Now, something that Brigid and I
went back and forth on a lot
and I will listen to your feedback,
but I think my decision is final,
is the color of the hardware.
Oh.
We both love this matte black
that we have right now.
Matte black everything.
Except, look at the base of this one.
See how it's wearing?
Yes.
So, the debate was,
do we go with something that looks
flipping amazing out of the box
and looks beat up in six months?
Or do we go with something
that doesn't look as good out of the box,
but will look exactly the same in six months?
I think, I would argue exactly the same.
Yeah.
So that's what we're going to do.
We're going to change the hardware to like a gunmetal,
not black, but a dark gray.
All of these have that same sign of wear.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's, there's just,
there's just nothing you can,
there's nothing you can do about that.
I think gray would still look really good.
It'll still look really sharp.
Just maybe not, you know.
But LTC19801, have it anodized.
It doesn't matter what you treat it with.
It will, also, they're not going to be made of aluminum,
I don't think.
I don't think you'd want something
like this made of aluminum.
I don't know how terrible that would be.
Depends on the aluminum.
They might be aluminum.
I don't know.
The point is, no matter what you coat it with,
it's going to wear.
It's something you're touching, right?
So I just, I just don't think it's feasible.
Greenofoton, what do you think of the rumors
Valve will release a new VR headset next year
with a Steam Deck-like APU combined with an XR2
using the same 4K by 4K micro OLED display
as the Apple's rumored headset?
I don't know anything about that is what I'll say.
For me, I tend to treat,
yeah, I tend to treat things that aren't out yet
as things that don't exist.
I will say there was rumors
that Nintendo was going to do a VR headset
because they made a powerful handheld console.
There were also rumors
that Nintendo was going to make a second generation Switch
that was actually more powerful and then they didn't.
Yep.
Joke's on you.
Yep.
I've been watching you guys for years.
Hey, thanks, Bradley.
Linus, what's your favorite Beat Saber song?
Ooh, that's a good question.
You know what?
I'm going to go with, oh man,
was it Song Saber or Score Saber song?
Score, Score Saber.
Camera dancing was huge for me.
Oh yeah, that one's so catchy.
Big recommend.
There's definitely ones I like better now.
I just don't find that one as engaging to play these days.
Linus is really good.
I would try caramel dancing.
What's it called?
Is it called Turn It Up or Turn The Music Up?
There's just a really, a really fun Nightcore turn up.
I don't know.
I think all you need to hear is Nightcore
to know that's probably going to be pretty tough.
I don't know.
It's good though.
Looking for new maps to play.
I don't know, maybe I'll stream.
Maybe I'll stream this weekend.
Brandon says, I know you guys are making specialized caps
for the screwdriver for your fellow YouTubers.
Any chance you would sell this to the public
so we can color code our screwdrivers
based on different bit sets in case we made by multiple?
Oh, well, I didn't think of that.
That's an interesting idea.
That's a really cool idea.
I mean, obviously I like the idea of anyone buying more
than one of the screwdriver,
but I had not considered this particular reason
for doing it.
Huh.
Interesting.
You could have your screwdriver holster on one side
and then you're like different,
your different load outs on the other side.
Okay.
It's not too late.
So at least I don't think it's too late.
It might be too late.
I'll get back to you on that one.
I will.
You talk a lot about quality,
but I see nothing on location.
These items are on the website were made
or any sort of stance on ethical treatment
of people making the items.
You should be more transparent.
You're right.
So I will, you know what?
I'll talk to Nick about what we can do about that.
I will say that we do have our own internal standards
for the factory conditions,
for everything that we are selling on the store.
We are also moving almost all of our stuff now
is either recyclable or recycled material in the packaging.
These aren't things that we talk about a ton,
but they're things that we just care about.
So we have third-party inspectors
that go to our factories now,
both for QC as well as for factory conditions.
One of the things that we are,
have not reached a scale yet
where we can really conceivably do it
is going upstream to our suppliers.
Suppliers, and that's something
that we'd like to continue to work towards,
but that's kind of where we're at on it today.
Peter says, do you think the development of SteamOS
for the Steam Deck will make DIY Steam Machines
for couch gaming a viable option?
Absolutely.
Well, yeah, I mean, it does by default.
Absolutely.
Joshua Carroll says,
why do OLED TVs show signs of burn in within months
whereas OLED phones don't show any kind of image retention
after a couple of years of use?
Okay, so for one thing,
they actually use fundamentally different OLED technologies.
Fun fact, you ever noticed that for phone screens,
Samsung is the absolute king when it comes to OLEDs
and where have they been on OLEDs for TVs
for the last five years?
Nowhere, right?
And then do you remember when LG had all those issues
with their OLEDs in the Pixel,
crap, what was it?
Was it the three generation or two generation?
I think it was three.
I can't remember, but the point is
that they are actually more different
than you would probably imagine.
So other than to say that they are very different,
I don't know the specifics.
Also, why does my iMac show signs of image retention?
Ah, so that is a different kind of image retention
that's not burned in.
That can actually be fixed by like refreshing them
in some way.
I can't remember.
There's articles about it.
We've never really done a video about that though,
I don't think.
Zachary says, can you share any details
about the follow-up between you and Dell
or other integrators in Secret Shopper?
There just wasn't really anything.
So we're just gonna hit them again
when we do another Secret Shopper
and they'll probably be, still be terrible.
Aaron M, do you believe the APU in the Steam Deck
would issue a response from Intel
to make something similar?
Well, no, because it's a custom skew for Valve.
So unless someone's gonna book, you know,
2 million units or whatever with Intel,
I don't think they're gonna get out of bed,
assuming driver support gets better
or for Nvidia and Intel to make a handheld
like the Razor Edge years ago.
I think that really it's gonna come down to partners.
Intel always likes doing things through partners.
So they'll try and work with a Dell
to make an Alienware competitor
or whatever the case may be.
And Intel is so deep into Xe graphics
that I wouldn't see them working with Nvidia
because nobody likes working with Nvidia.
I've never seen a company push partners
as hard as Intel has.
Intel has sponsored me at shows to not cover them.
Yeah, they do do that though.
Yeah.
Brett, thanks for making another tote.
Still use my cloth one from a while ago.
Any plans for another attempt at whole room water cooling?
Oh yeah, you better believe it.
My new house is plumbed for whole house water cooling.
So it's gonna be awesome.
Brian M, I have an S9 that's getting long in the tooth.
Would you recommend upgrading to one of the S22 variants?
Actually S22 is looking pretty good
from my hands on time with it.
I haven't daily driven one.
It's a whole thing.
Samsung sent a loaner device,
which from my perspective is,
like if I only have it for a week,
I'm gonna do my short circuit video with it.
And then if I have to send it back,
like I'm not gonna bother setting it up,
getting all my accounts logged in,
getting everything dialed in exactly the way I like it
so that like,
cause realistically it takes me a matter of days
to get everything actually all set up
and migrated over and then what?
I'm gonna send it back to them?
It's like, okay, forget it.
So I'll just wait until I can get a keeper device
whether from DRAND or buy one or something.
And then I'll see if I,
and before I do that,
I'll see if I even care about reviewing it.
I did like them from my initial impressions,
but I haven't daily driven them
cause I'm just, I'm not gonna do that.
I have stuff to do.
Nick Hill says, getting a 40 ounce
to tide me over till the 64 ounce drops.
When and red design when?
I don't think we have any red coming.
White and red, he said.
Oh, white and red.
Oh, we should totally do it.
Oh, Canada water bottle.
That'd be sweet.
Okay, I will make it so.
Oh, Canada.
If you guys should launch it on Canada day.
Water bottle, red slash white.
We could probably even hit Canada day.
What do you think?
The Canada day launch.
Would you non Canadians out there
buy a Canada themed water bottle?
Just cause?
Man, okay, here's a question.
Am I allowed to use the maple leaf
or is it like trademarked by the government?
I think you can.
I don't know.
I'm pretty sure you can.
Okay, can you?
Like, I know there's.
What if I wasn't Canadian
and I like put maple leafs on stuff?
Am I allowed to do that?
I think you can put flags on things.
Oh, okay.
Like I know a lot of American companies
put American flags on things.
I don't, I'm not a hundred percent certain
how the Canadian version works.
People are like, yeah.
Oh, oh no, nevermind.
They're like, yeah, we'll do it.
All right, heck yeah.
Heck yeah, float plane.
Yeah.
I'm pretty sure you can put the Canadian flag on it.
Yeah, okay, I haven't thought.
Just, it just occurred to me.
I was like, I didn't do that.
That's kind of.
And then default.
Also.
People found it.
People found the like government page.
Commercial use.
Oh, interesting.
Use of the national flag of Canada
and the stylized 11 point maple leaf for commercial use.
No person shall adopt in connection with a business
as a trademark or otherwise any mark consisting of
or nearly resembling so as likely to be mistaken
for the arms crest or flag adopted
and used at any time by Canada.
Okay.
You have to request to be allowed to use it.
I have a feeling this is one of those things
that doesn't like actually get enforced though.
Yeah.
Well, all right then.
Okay, Nikhil also asks,
how can I use my GPU to live upscale USB
or PCIE capture card output like the Framemeister
and upscaling TVs do?
Is it possible?
My understanding is that could be possible,
but I'm not aware of any software that does it.
Don't flip that over.
Sure.
It looks better.
Sure.
It's hard to prefer.
Nice.
Ethan.
Low plane chat agreed pre-show
that you should do an LTT version
of Dr. Horrible's sing-along blog with Luke as Captain Hammer
Riley as Moist, Sarah Butt as Penny
and James doing the bad horse chorus.
I don't even know what Dr. Horrible's sing-along blog is.
Oh, it's good.
It's all, it's pretty old.
It's been a long time.
All I know is that I would be honored to be Captain Hammer.
Okay.
Hey Lionel, with your issues with the float plane app
on the Play Store and Apple's App Store,
why not explore other options like F-Droid?
Is F-Droid relevant?
I mean, being in the official store is where you want to be.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's gotten better.
For some reason, both app stores went completely haywire
at almost the exact same time.
And then since then,
both app stores have been completely fine.
So who knows?
I never got a response back on that flag that they sent,
by the way.
I don't know if I really talked about that
on the show too much.
They just removed it silently again,
as they often seem to do.
Okay, cool.
Cool. All right.
Felidaze TV says,
if I plan on upgrading my current GPU 30 series to 40 series,
do you think the PCIe 3.0 in my 10900K
will be a problem going forward?
Well, you can wait and see.
That's the good news.
You don't actually have to upgrade now.
And no, I probably wouldn't go 11th gen
to get PCIe Gen 4.
I would probably flip my 10th gen
and I would jump to 12th
or upcoming Zen 4 processors from AMD,
because that tends to be the better bang for the buck.
Or it tends to not cost that much more,
like changing out one more component.
E&D, how has your experience been with the Fold 3?
I got mine at the end of December
and I already got a stuck Pixel.
Ooh, interesting.
I do not have any stuck Pixels or anything like that.
I overall find myself using the front display
a lot more than I expected,
but I have not switched off of it,
which I guess is as strong an endorsement as I can give,
because I can use any phone I want.
I have literally a bin of phones like 20 feet from here.
And yeah, I like it.
I wouldn't pay for it.
I wouldn't and didn't.
I wouldn't pay two grand for it.
That's tough.
That's kind of crazy.
There's still software things that are not perfect,
but I do like it.
It's a pain in the butt to do app dev for.
And I think everyone agrees.
Like this is not a just us thing.
So any app problems that you have,
I'm very not surprised.
Yeah.
Do you think you'll switch to the S22 Ultra?
I was thinking of using it for a bit.
It kind of reminds me of my old note.
I hate the hole punch display.
I need it to go away in a fire,
but the bezels are otherwise so slim.
Maybe I'll just set it to have just blank pixels
at the top.
I don't know.
I'll see how I feel about it.
Chase says I want to buy a steam deck,
but I'm worried about the lower RGB coverage.
I was wondering if it could be caused
by the etched glass screen.
Would I be better off getting the cheaper one
for deeper color?
I suspect it will be the same.
It's just valve said that our results
were within their expectations.
So that's how the screen looks.
But the thing you got to understand is that like 65
or whatever it works out to,
I think it was around there,
percent coverage of SRGB is not the end of the world.
You would never use it for any kind
of professional work, certainly.
But just like sitting and gaming,
it's fine.
We got by on worse.
Hunter L says celebrating my raise with some lttstore.com.
Would you consider doing a video
on different accessibility features and devices?
For example, the Humanware brail note,
a Android tablet with a refreshing braille display.
Had that come across my desk at work.
Wow.
Did we ever actually do a video on the Microsoft,
like accessibility controller or whatever it's called?
Yeah, we did.
That thing's freaking sweet.
Braille note.
I mean, this sounds super cool.
The thing though is that we're just not the market for it.
So it's kind of tough.
It's a tough thing for us to cover.
And I don't think we have anyone here that speaks braille.
We could hire someone who does.
They wouldn't have experience in making videos.
So we could like collaborate with them on it.
And it's like, it's super cool.
But I don't know.
I kind of feel like the people
for whom these products are made know about it.
They have their own media outlets that cover this stuff.
Yeah.
Like sometimes it's kind of like a stay in our lane thing.
Yeah.
Do you expect valve asks James or third parties
to make DIY upgrade kits for the steam deck?
It'd be awesome if I could get an OLED screen
in like six months.
I doubt it, but I would love it.
I would love it so much.
Man, that'd be awesome.
I'd put an OLED on it like that.
Might I use this subject
to mention Alana Pierce's accessibility awards
and collab with others next month,
says Ducky Lewis over on Twitch chat.
Awesome.
Cool.
Jake's talking about the I4 M50 in the chat.
Whatever Jake, whatever Jake.
Taycan or go home.
What a fan boy.
Such a BMW fan.
It does actually look really, really good though.
I'm sure it does.
But the Taycan's the big flex.
Does it have turn signals?
Now that Hassan has one,
it's clearly okay.
Cause you can be as left-wing as you want
and you can go full Taycan.
He not only went Taycan, like Canadian.
I think it was like 200 plus US for the trim that he got.
Oh man.
People are saying he's gonna like do it up to hilarious.
Nice.
All right.
Capitalism car.
Jake says, I don't see you in a Taycan nerd.
That's cause it, I didn't order one.
Oh man.
Have you seen his house dog?
No.
No, you, yours.
What mine?
Yeah.
Cool.
Why?
You can stunt with a house more than you can stunt
with a car in my opinion.
I mean.
I think it's a cooler stunt as well.
Look, all I'll say is you got your,
you got your like sunglasses and chains.
Yeah.
You just like shoes.
Sure.
Okay.
Then you got your cars and watches, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
Then you got your like house.
Yeah.
Bitch, I own a warehouse.
Where's yacht?
Is yacht like just the little tip?
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, the point is thanks for watching the land show.
We'll see you again next week.
Same bad time.
Same bad channel.
Ladies and gentlemen.
Bye.
Did you even bleep it?
Nope.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha oh man, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Jet caught up.
Jet's no longer at the top.
It's