And we're live, I hope.
Hello. Welcome to the WAN Show.
Welcome to the WAN Show, ladies and gentlemen. We've got a fantastic show lined up for you
guys today. A lot of good topics. Microsoft has updated,
clarified whatever word you want to use to describe it. The Windows
11 recommended system requirements now allow you to
install it on an older PC. So we're going to talk through all the details
of that. In other news, Western Digital
appears to have pulled an ADATA swapping out components
on their solid state drives. Oh, by the way,
Samsung also got busted doing the same thing earlier this
week. So we're going to talk in more detail about that. What else we got here?
OnlyFans reverses their decision on banning adult content.
So, dodged that. Didn't waste a bunch of development time there.
Nice. Also, TSMC has raised their prices
by up to 20% and so has Global Foundries,
PSMC, SMIC, UMC, just everybody
raising prices across the board. Electronics are about to get even
more expensive, ladies and gentlemen. Let's go ahead and roll that intro. Hopefully there'll be
some good news as well. Oh, only bad.
Yeah.
Actually there is good news.
And the show is brought to y'all today by our sponsors
PDF Element, Secret Lab, and Green Man Gaming.
Alright, let's jump right into our first topic of the day.
Microsoft has updated the Windows 11 recommended system requirements.
This comes to us courtesy of Microsoft's own blog.
This is a little update on Windows 11 minimum system
requirements and the PC Health Check app. If you guys didn't remember,
the PC Health Check app was this super basic tool
that pretty much just said, hey, you're not eligible
without really telling you exactly why, which led to
a fair bit of confusion in the Windows community, which
is basically the PC user community, although
I actually hosted a Facebook live audio room earlier that ended up being
a fantastic discussion with the one and only Wendell from Level 1 Text
with the topic being Linux, then,
now, and the future. And he and I both
agreed for different reasons that
desktop computing in the future could
easily change over to Linux, or at least I think
I convinced him. I think I convinced him of my rationale behind it.
I don't know. Luke, if you want to throw that in the doc, we can talk about that a little bit more
later, but getting Wendell's contribution side is probably
really important. I think it's pinned on our Facebook page. It's a live audio room.
Anyway, Microsoft made a blog post today outlining their results
from a revisit to the Windows 11 system requirements, and there's some good
takeaways here, and there's also some ones that are going to be
really disappointing for a lot of people who bought computers not that
long ago. What they concluded is that the original list of
compatible 64-bit processors,
blah, blah, blah, is the right
minimum system requirements to deliver on the principles they established for
the best user support. So, they're basically saying
after further inspection, we were, we were
correct. They did, however, identify that there was a group of PC models
that met the principles while running on 7th gen
rather than 8th gen or higher CPUs. So, Intel's core
7820HQ, okay, but this is only
select devices that shipped with modern drivers based on declarative,
componentized, hardware-supported apps design principles, including
the Surface Studio 2, and Intel's core X series and
Xeon W series. So, those are the only 7th gen CPUs
that they found met the requirement. So, to summarize, this
means that if you have a 1st gen Ryzen CPU, which
last time I checked was really not that long ago,
I mean, when did the Ryzen 1600X launch? 2017.
That, that, that was only, is that right?
Yep, April
2017, just 4 years ago, Windows 11
is not for you, and if you have a 7th gen CPU
that isn't one of the ones that we just listed, so basically most of them,
you are plum out of luck. Specific
Ryzen 2000 series CPUs are unsupported as well, so
specifically this would be ones like the 2200G and
2400G. If I recall correctly, those are not
Zen 2 based, those are like Zen Plus or something like
that, are they Zen 1 or what type of Zen are they? Blah blah blah
based on the Zen architecture. So, they were named 2000 series
but effectively they weren't. I'm really glad that AMD is cleaning up
this problem with their processor naming scheme now, for a while they
had mobile CPUs that sounded like they were a generation further
along than they actually were, and it looks like as we move into 5000 and
6000 series, that should no longer be the case going forward,
I really hope they can keep that tidy, there was really no excuse for how stupid that was.
Now their reasoning for not adding more CPUs or older
ones to the list was due to reliability,
security and compatibility.
Sorry, what? They didn't provide any sort of
granularity to these results though, like do their
crash numbers apply to all 7th gen
CPUs or like, so here basically this is an Imgur
capture of what they mean by that. So, reliability means
devices that do not meet the minimum system requirements had 52% more
kernel-mode crashes. It sort of raises the question, who is that
on? Is that on Microsoft or is that on the
device? The person who didn't upgrade their computer. Devices that do meet the minimum
system requirements had a 99.8% crash-free experience.
Okay, security! Windows 11
raises the baseline, blah blah blah, etc. compatibility, people continue
to increasingly use their PCs for video conferencing, productivity and gaming,
and they set the minimum system requirements to align with some of the most
commonly used apps. Well, one issue I have with that is that basically just sounds like
Microsoft wants to hand over every user who only
needs to do basic word processing and email to Google.
Okay, Microsoft says, why don't you just buy a Chromebook then?
To which people might reply, I guess I will.
So, that's
interesting.
I have been trying so hard
to find this audio room, and I don't know
if I'm just too young for Facebook now or what,
but as far as I can tell it's just gone.
If you message Jono, maybe he can either fix that or link you to where to find it.
According to The Verge, Microsoft also clarified that they will only be enforcing
their system requirements if you are upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows
11. This will not be enforced on clean installations of Windows 11.
So, the good news from all of this is that Microsoft
is basically sticking to its guns saying,
for the best Windows 11 experience, you really should have a newer computer,
but if you install Windows 11 clean from a
USB thumb drive, nothing will prevent you from installing it on
an older machine. So, apparently this functionality is designed
primarily for businesses to evaluate Windows 11 and
they will allow people to upgrade to it at their own risk
in this fashion, but the company can't guarantee driver compatibility
and overall system reliability. Microsoft will not be recommending or
advertising this method of installing Windows 11 to consumers.
So, that was a lot of doom and gloom and bad sounding stuff at the
beginning of this segment, but overall I think this
is about
the best we could have expected. Now, this
is probably my tin foil hat, kind of coming out here
a little bit, but I think the big
takeaway here is not the method by
which Microsoft is allowing Windows 11 to be installed on older hardware,
but rather the specific users
that Microsoft is locking out of Windows 11.
And that would be people that are taking advantage of
loopholes in the Microsoft free upgrade from older
operating systems system that allow them
to sort of launder a pirated copy
of Windows by just upgrading it through multiple
versions of Windows. With that said,
so it sounds like they're trying to shed a lot of that dead weight
that upgraded their cracked versions of Windows 7
to Windows 10, because that would be
a group of users that is running older hardware. With that said,
I can't see how anything would prevent you from taking that
drive, either installing it in a newer system or cloning
it over to a newer system, and then performing the
upgrades. So, there will still be ways to work around it, but maybe it's just
going to be a little more difficult. Overall, because
Windows 11 is a bit of a nothing-burger in terms of performance upgrades
from what we saw, at least for gaming, there's no real reason
for you to be worried about this in any way, because you can still install
it clean if you really want to, and probably the best
way to pirate Windows is the official way, which is to
just say, no, I don't have a license key when you're installing it,
and then just run it forever and not be able to change your desktop background. Oh,
except you can if you just right-click on a picture and set its desktop
background. That's probably the easiest way to
pirate Windows these days, so nothing prevents you from continuing
to do that, it's just that Microsoft isn't going to
condone you running older hardware. So, alright,
sounds good, and I guess I don't have to worry too much
about any of it. Also, because I
actually, I finally activated the Windows install on my home desktop, Luke.
I did too, I don't know if you know about that. Oh, did you
really? I don't remember why, I honestly don't remember.
It was quite a while ago, though. I think I was watching a movie full screen, and I
was just kind of tired of looking at the watermark, and I was just like, how much does this cost?
You know what, fine. I feel like I
needed to for some reason or something.
Oh, okay, I was on a
call, I was on a work call, not with an employee.
It was an external, I don't remember who it was, but it was an external person,
and I was screen sharing, and they mentioned it, and I was like, yep,
that doesn't sound very pro.
So I fixed it. Yep, that makes sense. Jake Hever
in Floatplane Chat says, DIY Upgraders are such a small segment of the market, they don't
care about us. They're drawing a line to maximize the amount of average users
they can sell a new OEM license to. Honestly, I don't even think Microsoft is after
selling new OEM licenses. No, I don't think so.
It's not that many. I mean, it's a
lot, to be clear. Like, here, let's pull up Windows 10
on Newegg, okay? Here we go, here we go.
Windows 10, this one right here, is the
number one best seller in operating systems, that makes sense.
Whoa. 1382 reviews.
Now, that's a lot. You know, like,
if I were to use, if I were to extrapolate those numbers based on
the, based on the
numbers that I see for, like, the ABCs of gaming on Amazon, how many we sold
versus how many reviews those are. I mean, that's tens of thousands
maybe into hundreds of thousands of units, probably. Especially
when you factor in that there's other avenues by which Microsoft can directly sell Windows
to users, and there's other stores other than Newegg.
But in the grand scheme of things, okay, let's go look for a Ryzen
5600X CPU, okay? So, let's go take
probably the most popular, yep, there it is, the most popular desktop
CPU. Holy smokes.
1766 reviews for this thing.
Something here doesn't compute. There's only, like,
what? Maybe, so we got
which Windows 10? So, we got 64-bit OEM, we got
the retail one with the thumb drive, that's got another 300 reviews. Okay, there's
Pro, so that's another 13, oh wow, no, these are combined.
Home and Pro here, 1382. Here's another boxed one.
Here's, like, a retail one. This is combined with this
one, though. Oh, that's hilarious. 376, those are the same. This 285
here, oh, whoops, you guys can't see what I'm looking at here. Whoops, sorry.
These two both have 285, so those appear to be a combined one as well.
Something doesn't compute. Clearly, a lot of people are buying the most popular
CPU and then not buying Windows.
So,
even the OEM market, what I'm trying to say, is not as big of a
deal as you might think. What Microsoft is trying to do is they're
trying to drive overall sales of new
computers forward, because that's something that Microsoft stands to benefit
from in the long term. They want people, when people buy a new
computer, they want them buying a new Windows computer, and they want that happening on a
reasonably frequent basis, because it's good for their partners. What's good for the
goose is good for the ganders. And Microsoft has taken that approach for a
very, very, very long time. So,
yeah, I'm glad
they're leaving us the capability to do it. I mean, I suspect
they realize that people would have found a hacky way around
it anyway, so I'm glad they're just kind of accepting it, but
I also understand why they want people to have a good experience on
Windows 11, especially if a lot of their branding around Windows 11 is going to be, you know,
this is the most reliable Windows ever, this is the most secure Windows ever.
In other news, speaking of reliability, Western
Digital has apparently pulled an ADATA,
which is not a good thing. We did a video recently
outlining how ADATA has, over the years,
played basically a component roulette
with the components that might end up in your, what was it, the SX8100
or 8200? I can't remember exactly the model.
Yeah, the model of SSD. But we had our community submit, and we actually
paid them for them, we bought them for, I think it was like, twice the market rate
to make it worth people's time to reformat their machine, but we
bought these ADATA SSDs from our community and we
compared them, we benchmarked them. We used a tool that allowed us to see exactly
what components made them up, and we got five different drives
that had almost nothing in common with each other, and when you
consider that an SSD is just a controller,
a DRAM cache, assuming you get a decent one, and NAND
Flash, if you change even one, let
alone two, or all three of those components, you are
completely changing it to a different product.
So Western Digital has performed a nearly silent NAND
swap on the WD Blue SN550, much like
the recent incidents with ADATA and Crucial. This new
NAND on the SN550 has significantly slower write speeds
once the cache becomes exhausted. According to ExtremeTech, the average
write speed when the static 12 gig SLC cache is exhausted
is as low as 394 megabytes per second on the new drive.
Previous iterations of the drive would average around
610 after exhausting the cache. That is a huge difference.
And the problem, actually I see a couple of problems
here. One of them is that this is on a drive
that advertises write speeds of up to 2400
megabytes per second, and the other is that the average
user would have no way of knowing that a change like this has been made
until all of a sudden they go to do something demanding with their drive,
and it's just slow, and they don't understand why.
With a 12 gigabyte SLC cache, so if you guys
aren't familiar, an SLC cache basically takes a component of your
MLC or TLC or QLC NAND,
so that's how many bits per cell are being stored, and it operates
it in SLC or single bit per cell mode. What that
does is it effectively cuts in half or a third or even a
quarter how much data you can store on that cache component,
but it makes it perform way better, especially for writes
and endurance as well, actually, for that matter.
Alright, so that SLC cache, super fast, but
and it's great for, you know, if you're installing Photoshop
or something like that. That's going to happen real fast, as fast as your CPU can keep
up with decompressing the files and feeding the
SSD with data to write. The problem is that as soon as you go to do
something heavy, 12 gigs is actually not that much in the context
of, let's say, for example, installing a vidya game.
Like, Luke, off the top of your head,
can you think of any games that are larger than 12 gigabytes?
Hit me with one. I can think of a game that's
over 10 times bigger than that. Call of Duty.
Call of Duty is notoriously massive. The last few Call of Duty
games have been well over 100 gigs each.
So, the way these SLC caches work is
as long as everything you're doing fits within them, everything
is hunky-dory, everything's fast, but once you
and then, once the drive is idle, it'll
flush that cache slowly, over time, right?
Out to the less performant TLC or QLC
operating mode NAND. Alright, so if you were to go and
install a massive game, for example, it is very conceivable that
after a short period of time, your performance would absolutely tank.
And now we're talking as low as about two-thirds of the
performance that you would have had before the NAND swap in the real world.
Probably won't work out that way. It probably won't affect it to that degree, because
there are other bottlenecks when you're installing a program, unless you're just doing
a raw file copy. But, it's not a
good look. So, here is the statement they made to
Tom's hardware, though. In June 2021, we replaced the NAND in the
WD Blue SN550 NVMe SSD and updated the firmware.
At the time, we updated the product data sheet. For greater transparency going forward,
if we make a change to an existing internal SSD, we commit to introducing
a new model number whenever any related published specifications are impacted.
We value our customers and are committed to providing the best possible solutions for their data storage needs.
The issue is that this isn't the first time that WD has
ever had egg on their face for not...
for improperly labeling a drive. I mean, do you guys remember that whole
shingled magnetic recording scandal?
Didn't WD issue a previous statement? WD statement, shingled drives.
Let's see if I can find it.
WD admits two to six terabyte WD Red NAS drives use
shingled magnetic recording, which is really bad for NAS operation.
Let's see if we can find their statement.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. SMR issue, blah, blah.
WD comment. Here we go.
Okay, blah, blah, blah. Workloads tend to be not found.
Okay.
Here we go. Alright, I got it. You are correct that
we do not specify the recording technology in our WD Red hard drive
documentation. We strive to make the experience for our NAS customers seamless.
And recording technology typically does not impact small business
slash home NAS based use cases. So, okay. In fairness,
they did not commit, at least in this statement, to
more accurately label their products.
So, I guess that's
something.
So, this is, at least they didn't break their promise since they didn't
make a promise last time.
Yeah, the issue though is that if they truly value
their customers, it shouldn't have taken backlash from news outlets to make a statement
on this and this should never have happened in the first place. I mean, barely anybody reads data
sheets because marketing material is what, you're supposed to be able to
rely on it. And I know, I know people like us will say
don't, you know, don't read in, don't buy the marketing, you know, don't
read into the marketing. But also, when the marketing
is just a specification, you're not supposed
to have to go find the separate list of specifications. That's
not fair. And like, I don't want to be that guy, but it's a fairly
boring product that I think a lot of people
want to be able to buy off of recommendation. And recommendation
could be out of date compared to your product sheet. So, it should
really be a new model. You do not want to read a hundred
reviews of like a hundred dollar SSD.
You want to be able to trust that if you're buying from a company
like Western Digital, that it's just what it's supposed
to be. It's exactly the grade of product that you expect it to
be. Like, people buy based on a brand and, of course,
WD has fantastic products like their, what is it,
SN850 Black SSD. It's
really, really, really fast drive. And so, a lot of the time, that's how Halo
marketing works, right? You have the best product on the market and so people just
kind of go, oh yeah, they make good stuff, but I can't afford their
best, but so I'll buy this knowing that I can trust it. When you pull a move
like this, you erode that trust.
Oh, right. And in other news, Samsung actually
pulled a similar move. So, the legendary
970 EVO Plus. Fantastic drive for the money.
Samsung actually went and this is really
complicated. It looks like my notes here don't cover all the details
about this, but basically what Samsung did
was because of the silicon shortage and because of
the COVID restrictions, the factory that makes
the controller in the 970 EVO Plus has apparently been offline
since about February. So, due to shortages, they're actually apparently
using the same controller from the 980 Pro. This is all
out of memory for me because this is not in my notes, but if I recall
correctly, that is the case. That sounds on paper
like an upgrade, right? Except
that one of the key functions of the controller in the 980 Pro
is PCI Express Gen 4 compatibility.
That's turned off. So, what Samsung has
done is they have increased the cache from
45 gigs to 112 gigs. They've changed the packaging
and the write speed when you're not using that
SLC cache. So, theoretically, you might not notice this change because you've got a larger cache,
but the write speed when you're not using the cache has gone from about
1500 megabytes per second to just 800.
So, what sounds on the surface like
an upgrade does not actually
appear to be an upgrade, which
I would say is unfortunate, but this is unfortunate. This is intentional.
They knew it. They knew they did it. They changed the packaging.
And they expected us to just keep buying the 970
EVO Plus thinking that it's still the same drive we loved.
Samsung, come on, you're the vertically integrated one. You're the one that I'm
supposed to be able to just recommend without worrying about it at all.
You know who I don't think has ever been embroiled
in one of these controversies? I don't think Intel has.
I've had my own issues with Intel SSDs, but...
Crucial? Has Crucial ever pulled an SSD?
You know what, I think they have. That kind of
rings a bell. I think Crucial has probably
changed NAND, although I don't know if they've ever been caught
with a clear downgrade. I'll have to count on the chat to let me know.
Buyer beware, Crucial swaps P2 SSDs
with TLC NAND for slower chips. R.I.P.
R.I.P. Crucial. I tried.
I just kind of thought, like, I haven't heard any news about Crucial in a long time.
So maybe they're okay, but apparently not.
BlackDarkStorm asks, what about Sabrent? I don't think Sabrent has managed to
attract any controversy yet, but Sabrent, unlike a lot of these other
companies, WD, Crucial,
Intel, to a lesser extent now, but at least before, Samsung
for sure, these guys are all, to some extent, vertically
integrated, which is to say that they manufacture the components that
make up the finished product.
This news is from this month. Oh, Crucial?
Yeah, this was August 16th. Oh, well that's awkward.
Yeah. Okay, Gremlin Injector says SK Hynix,
but nobody cares about them, and most of their customers are system integrators.
So for all we know, they have swapped things, but that would have been something they would have coordinated with the
system integrator, because no one cares about the spec of an SK Hynix drive.
They care about the spec of the computer, so as long as that's maintained, then
I guess it doesn't matter. With that said, SK Hynix has some really
solid drives these days. Like, if I recall correctly, they have, it's not
one of the most performant drives, but their P31, this is off the top of
my head, sorry, their P31 is super power efficient. So in terms
of performance per watt, if I recall correctly, that's a really outstanding drive.
They don't get enough credit, because they've been around a long time
making OEM drives, as you alluded to, but
they just don't have the recognition in the consumer space.
Maxtheeverything7 on Floatplane
says, I mean Samsung had literally been pushing their 980 DRAM
SSDs on Amazon as equal to their EVO and Pro lines.
Yeah, that's fair. Askopti says,
Kyoxia. I don't think Kyoxia has been nailed.
I don't think so.
Or even Toshiba, pre-Kyoxia. I mean,
one of the companies they acquired definitely ran afoul of these kinds
of guidelines we're providing.
They don't change products without telling the consumer that Kyoxia or Toshiba
acquired OCZ way back in the day, and they definitely
had issues with that. Yep, just a few.
SK Hynix, is their public popularity
more of a North American thing?
Like their lack of it, you mean? Yeah. That could be.
I know that they've been...
I remember when I was trying to get my RAM and drives for my
previous Geodude system, the problem was that they didn't have availability
in North America, not that they didn't have availability.
Got it. I don't know, but I think
they're... I'm not sure. Might be more
popular elsewhere, might just completely not be. I don't know.
Newegg has almost no reviews for pretty much anything
SK Hynix, but the gold P31 that SSDI alluded to before
has almost a thousand ratings on Amazon.
So it seems like that's something that they
are addressing at least to a degree.
Yeah, wow. Their 500 gig version on newegg.com
has over 4,000 reviews.
Five stars. So it's funny because these fortunes
always come and go, right? Like SK Hynix
for many years, like way back in the day, I'm talking like 15
years ago, right? Like SK Hynix had a reputation for being like the crappy
RAM on your GPU. That was kind of the only context
that you'd have for SK Hynix is like, oh, you better hope you get
Samsung chips because if you get the SK Hynix version, your RAM won't overclock
as well. Stuff like that. But nowadays, they're actually building a
reputation around power efficiency and
solid performance, even if it's not industry-leading performance.
Like I don't even think they have a Gen 4 drive yet. They're going
slow and steady wins the race, I guess.
Not that slow and steady will win the race to
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Cool. Alright, what else have we got today? Oh,
actually, one more thing, since I'm kind of on a roll here. Did you do PDF element?
I did. Since I'm kind of on a roll, we just
launched a new product over on LTT Store. Hey! Hey! The
Linus Selfie Mouse Pad and the Sad Linus Desk Pad. These are
kind of meme products, so they're actually coming in at a lower price than
the Northern Lights Desk Pad. This is our premium product. This is our, you guys
asked for it, so here it is product. They only come in one
size each, but they're there. They're for a limited time.
Go check them out. This is what Sad Linus will look like
looking at you over top of your keyboard and mouse. There he
is next to a computer. There's his empty, soulless eyes.
Thank you very much, Hoffman, for the fantastic photography you've done.
And then, the original. The original
selfie meme face thing. I mean, it's the same high-quality construction.
Just, we're memeing it up, guys. Enjoy.
Enjoy. Limited time only. At the same time, if you want
the original mouse pad, the Northern Lights Desk Pad, there are
a ton of sizes. A ton of new sizes. Really small
ones, really big ones. There's one that's 1,500 by 900. It's basically
a yoga mat, almost.
Dangerously close. It's actually pretty close to the limit for weight
that we can ship internationally without incurring, like, enormous
shipping fees. Wow. So,
yeah, it's really big and really heavy. Alright, let's move on to
another topic. What else we got, Luke? Hit me. There's some
interesting ones in the rapid-fire section. We can talk about OnlyFans.
OnlyFans reverses their decision to ban adult content. So, if you watched
the last WAN Show, we talked about it extensively. OnlyFans was like,
no more porn is allowed on OnlyFans. Some
lewd content is going to be allowed. We'll tell you more about it later. And then, just kind of dropped the whole
conversation and has now come back and said, psych, never mind.
Everything's fine. This change is coming, yeah,
less than a week after their initial announcement that they were planning to end adult
hosted content. Not all of it, but yeah. They've now secured
assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community and have
suspended the planned October 1 policy change.
They're now preaching inclusion and saying they will provide a home for all creators.
I'm sure this comes off the back of probably a lot of creators
jumping ship. Yeah, a little bit.
Considering the porn industry is worth billions of dollars, estimates say
6 to 97 billion?
That's a big range. That's a massive range. There's
clearly someone out there willing to pocket transaction fees. Yeah, of course.
I mean, this is something that we know from research that we've done on this
topic. I mean, Luke, you've looked into alternate
payment processing platforms. When I say alternate, I mean
ones that are willing to process your payments
regardless of what type of content you have on your site. Can you
talk a little bit about what that looks like? They're really expensive.
And they always have been really expensive because they kind of know
they're in a weird spot because they seem to understand
that if you are talking to them, you have to be talking to them.
I don't know how many market segments are like
that, where you're the not-as-good product, but you know that
because you're the not-as-good product, if someone is talking to you, they don't have the option
of using the better products. You can actually charge them more.
What makes the payment processor not as good, though? Help me out here.
User experience can be pretty bad. The support on the
back end, the developer friendliness
of it, compliance of different browser things.
There's a lot that can be very annoying. So you gloss over that stuff
but that's really interesting stuff that I think the average person would not know
about. Yeah, and the average person
basically never has to run into it because pretty much the whole internet
doesn't run on those types of payment processors. Most
payment processors that people use are from a very small grouping of payment
processors that are very clean. You generally only
deal with Amazon payments, Google payments, Apple payments
Shopify is actually really massive
Stripe and PayPal, or PayPal trading
as Braintree, and there isn't a
ton outside of that. There's some Xsolla stuff. If you did
Twitch back in the day, and there was problems with that, and that's part of the reason why that's
being phased out as far as I can tell, and some other things.
It's really annoying for everyone involved
if the payment process is not basically perfect.
So if it's not pretty much perfect, people don't want to
use it, and they're going to file down into these major
payment processors. We've got people in the Floatplane chat that are talking about
crappy payment processors and just the bad experiences they've had with them.
So Mills Jonas says, I've had experiences with payment processors
just not registering that I cancelled a subscription, and then I had to
fight for a refund. Let's see here
Panbeech says implementation
bugs poorly documented API. HappyRollCake says
Epoch apparently wouldn't remove their
card details from their server. Apparently Shopify payments is built
on Stripe, so that's even more of like, yeah, why
deal with difficult things? A lot of consolidation has happened
in the payment space over the years. Right, that makes sense.
And to be clear, I personally do not believe that this
move was ever anything to do with OnlyFans not having any way to
process payments. I mean, the porn industry has been around as long
as the internet has existed. I mean,
I wonder if there's actually like a historical
sort of record of this, like first nude picture
on the internet. That was probably really early, I'm suspecting.
There's got to be. There's got to be. What is this
useless page here? What am I looking at?
Okay, brief history of... While you look for that,
I just... Something we're actually quite happy about is that we decided not to pursue
creating an alternative, because psych
probably most people that are on there are going to stay. I do think
a very significant amount of people have probably left, and
just as someone who kind of used to be, I guess, a creator
to other potential creators, I would highly
recommend diversifying your platforms. Hopefully this was enough of
a kick in the butt to get you to do that, but even if you're
still on that platform and you're like, oh, my livelihood
isn't being ripped out from under me, that's great and I'm happy
for you about that, but you should also definitely diversify your
platforms. I don't have an offering for you, so this is not even
self-pandering, but you should still do it. Try to find somewhere else that you can set up
shop as well. Even if you're just mirroring your uploads on both platforms,
whatever, having a base somewhere
is very valuable.
Really, it appears that it had everything to do with raising funds
and taking on investors. The thing is that OnlyFans
appeared to have overplayed their hand a little bit. It seems like
more than Luke and I anticipated, there must be safe-for-work
content on OnlyFans. It's just that
maybe what they felt was that the safe-for-work content
had this momentum that would carry them through this transition, but
maybe what they didn't realize was that the only reason
safe-for-work content creators were surviving on the platform was that
so many users were being driven to it by not safe-for-work
content, because once you're in the habit of using a platform, it's
I mean, how do I put this? There's only so
many hours a day that you could comfortably
enjoy pornography, I think.
I think. Okay, look, don't quote me on this.
I actually really would prefer not to be quoted on this.
But then, at some point, you'll be done, so to speak.
Someone watching was just like, challenge accepted.
At some point, you'll be done, and you'll want to do something else.
If OnlyFans played their cards right, they could easily entice you to go
do something safe-for-work at the same time. So, it seems like
they misinterpreted that momentum in safe-for-work
content as sort of a change in their
identity as a platform, but what it actually was is just
a break, so to speak.
So, I think if they're
smart, they will just keep making their ludicrous amounts
of money, 600 million dollars a year or whatever, not bother taking
on investors, buy mega-yachts for all of their founders
because that's the kind of freaking money that they're making right now, and just
chillax with the whole investor thing, or create a sister site, you know?
I mean, that was the way that we were planning to address adult content,
so there's no reason they couldn't do the same thing.
Use your adult content platform to get that sister site off the ground.
Absolutely. Instead of driving people
to a creator on OnlyFans that's safe-for-work, you could
drive a creator to this sister site. I mean, since OnlyFans,
most of the interactions, remember we started one recently, most of the interactions
are done through the website, like just the mobile browser rather than an app
because of just prudish app store policies.
So, nothing would prevent you from just having that
link open on a completely different site. You could probably even
maintain login credentials, Luke. Is that something you could do from
a user privacy, user security? I think there's some issues there.
There's probably some issues. I'm not 100% certain, but I'm pretty sure there's some issues
there because you have different agreements on both sites.
Oh, that makes sense. In other, like,
and really bad news, how about we just put it that way? TSMC will be
raising their prices by up to 20%. This comes
courtesy of Tom's Hardware and the Wall Street Journal.
Yes, my friends, that is how mainstream
this bad news is getting. World's largest chip maker
to raise prices threatening costly electronics. This is not a threat.
This is reality. This is just happening.
So, 7nm and smaller wafers
will increase as much as 10%, while 16nm
and larger nodes will increase by 20%
for all orders set to be fulfilled starting in December.
Real quick. Yeah, go ahead. I just had real, like, it's coming up
basically now. Yep. By the time, if you were hoping
that, you know, the shortage would go away and prices
would fall, it looks like by the time that would have any
hope of happening whatsoever, the raw prices of the materials
will be going up. Although, maybe
that'll help with the shortage if fewer people can afford to buy
anything. That's not the solution we want.
I also don't think it will because everything's just getting scalped anyways, right?
TSMC's N5 and N7 fabrication was 49%
of their $13.29 billion in revenue in the second quarter
of 2021, while N16 and N28 accounted for
25% of Q2 revenue. So, companies like AMD
and Qualcomm could see increased prices in the near future, as well as
ASIC manufacturers like Bitmain. TSMC isn't the only
one though. GlobalFoundries, PSMC, SMIC and UMC have all increased
production prices recently, and you can bet that Intel with
the investments that they're making in new fabs right now is going to be following
suit, even as they get into the fabrication business and
try to increase competition in that space. And the worst part of this
guys, is these numbers we're quoting you, 10%, 20%,
you will be lucky if that's all you see
in terms of end sticker price increase, because
that ain't the way it works. Typically, just
rough ballpark numbers. Typically, for every 1%
that you increase the basic bill of materials cost of a product,
you can expect to see about a 2% increase in the
final end product. Once all the middlemen
and stakeholders and packaging and marketing and blah blah blah blah blah, that's kind of
your basic guideline for how much you can expect
an increase in materials cost to affect the finished product. So that's
rough, because a 10% increase in the cost of the chip
that goes at the heart of your GPU means that you could probably
end up spending, I would say on a high-end GPU, easily another
$5,200. Don't underestimate how much this is
going to suck. I think it could be more than that.
You said high-end GPU? I think it could be more than that for sure. Well remember too though, that a lot of the
cost of a high-end GPU is in memory as well. A lot of the
cost is in power delivery. So I'm talking
just the chip.
Kind of crazy that it's across the board. This also, we saw
the GPU shortage kind of, barely, but
we saw it kind of showing signs of going away, but this
I have a feeling is not going to be reversed.
This is probably here to stay. And the thing is that prices
are whatever the market will bear, and Nvidia had for a long
time been playing a game of, let's just quietly increase
prices each generation. One of the most egregious ones
was when the GTX 680 came out. If you guys recall
the GTX 680, it was actually priced very competitively compared to
its predecessor, the GTX 580, or was it 580 GTX.
I can't remember when they moved the things around, but it doesn't matter. The 680
sounded like a deal compared to the 580, except for one small
detail. The 680 used their, what
was 680, Maxwell?
Fermi, then Kepler? I don't remember. The point is, it used
their next tier down. It didn't even use their largest chip.
Whereas previously, eight class GPUs had
always used their largest chip. So they were effectively selling you
like a high end rather than enthusiast end GPU
for the same price that the previous generation enthusiast one went
for. It wasn't until we got the, I want to say 780,
because the higher end 6 was 690, that was a dual GPU chip.
It wasn't until we got the 780 that that large chip finally made its
way into a consumer product, and by then they had managed to increase the price compared to
the 580. So Nvidia has been playing this game for a long time, but this
pandemic situation, this shortage situation, has given them an excuse
to just, you know, skip a bunch of steps
and when things settle down, they will settle, but I would be very
surprised if we ever see another top tier GPU for, you know,
699, 749. I think those
days are over. Yep, agreed. Do you want to talk about the
Linux desktop future thing? I want to talk about the Apple
settling their developer class action lawsuit thing, because this has huge implications
and I'd like to kick it off, you can run through the
topic because this is something you're a little bit better versed in than me, but I want to
kick it off by saying to everyone who
defended Apple's behaviour and said that Apple is not a
monopoly and the App Store is just their playground,
their rules, this is Apple's
admissions, essentially, that you're wrong.
Their behaviour was bad and you are actually wrong
and you need to go read. Go read. Go read about
antitrust. Go read about anti-monopoly laws.
Go read, please. Because I am really, I have gotten so many frustrating,
stupid tweets about this. Every time
I talk about it, I just get these horrendously bad takes.
Apple's behaviour is bad. It's really bad. And the fact
that they're settling this, the fact that they're settling this to the tune
of $100 million in a
small developer fund tells you how bad it is
and how badly they want this to go away and not
continue to be a problem. This is not the epic lawsuit. No, this isn't
even the epic lawsuit yet. Okay, so Luke, why don't you run us through this?
Okay, so this one's a little weird and I haven't
fully dove into it because it's not the epic one, but
in a settlement pending court approval, Apple agrees to
a bunch of different terms. Clarify that developers can communicate
directly with customers about alternative payment options outside of the app.
This is very good. Very happy about that. That's like the core thing for us.
That's the main thing we're excited about. They can, however, use
contact information gleaned from the app now with permission, whatever.
They are also establishing, this is the part that's a little odd for me
and I haven't dove far enough into. They're establishing a $100 million small
developer fund ranging between $250 to $30,000
to developers based on their size. That, I'm not 100% certain how
that's supposed to work. Also, it's not really $100 million.
It's closer to $70, but we'll get more into that in a moment. Also,
they are going to keep the small business program for another three years,
expand price points, clarify that developers can appeal rejections, commit to
develop search and discovery to drive high quality apps.
That one's a little interesting. I'm not 100% certain how that actually ties into the rest of it, but
whatever. And issue a transparency report about apps that are
rejected and customer and developer accounts that are also rejected. That part
is nice as well. I like that one too. Because sometimes it's really hard to tell
why the heck your thing actually got rejected. And if you guys remember,
we got stuck in a many month long
rejection loop that they eventually just admitted like
oh yeah, we just actually never really reviewed it. And it
has been fine for a long time. And all these revisions of the app that
you guys made trying to be more and more compliant was actually useless because you guys were fine
from many months ago. That was incredibly frustrating. Something
kind of funny, kind of awkward, kind of annoying. I don't know enough
about the legal space to actually understand
how off base or on base this is, to be completely honest.
Like this might be totally normal. It doesn't sound
normal to me. But that $100 million small developer assistance
fund, the lawyers that won this suit, so we're
happy about the fact that... Or reached a settlement with Apple. Right, yes.
We're happy that this is happening. We're happy that they got there.
But the lawyers are planning on taking...
I don't think it's planning. I believe they just are taking $30 million
of the $100 million small developer
assistance fund. I know there's a lot of
different weird ways that lawyers are compensated for their work.
So I don't know how normal this is. I don't know how normal this would be.
Yeah. That's not unusual for a lawyer to work
for a very low rate with the goal of
winning the case with as large a settlement as possible
and then getting paid out of that settlement. And in fact, it's one of
the biggest problems with class action suits in general, is that the only
real beneficiary is lawyers. So there's this constant incentive
for lawyers to just file more and more and more
of these suits because they basically get to go after a nice
juicy vein to suck on
to. That company gets to pay a whack of money because probably
they did something wrong. Or maybe not. I don't know. Whatever.
The lawyers managed to win the lawsuit. And then the actual end users
who were affected by this in some meaningful way in a lot of
cases... I mean, I've seen settlements as small as like $5.
Like it's not an amount of money that is... Almost not even worth filing
for. Yeah. That is meaningful in any way.
So let's say you had a million dollar settlement. 30% of it goes
to the lawyer or the law firm. So that's like $300,000.
And then $2 each to the
$5 each to the... what would that work out
to? Like 100,000 people, 120,000 people affected.
So basically the only purpose it
served was getting the company to admit that they were wrong
and then lawyers get money. It's a big problem. I don't know how to
fix it. People in FlowPlane Chat are saying that it's extremely normal for
attorneys to take like 30-40%. I saw someone else say it's normally 20%.
Who knows? Either way, I think this is... As outrageous as it
sounds, I think it's not technically out to lunch, which is
kind of nuts. And while some people are
trying to style on the lawyers for doing this and the fact that they have
four pages of reasons why they should get the $30 million, which just sounds
funny, I'm just happy that we're moving
forward. I'm not super concerned about the small developer fund.
There is a huge amount of developers. I suspect we would
probably be considered under that and we would probably get next to nothing and it's not
going to matter. What does matter is we're moving
towards better payment solutions for the app store and we're moving
towards Apple kind of admitting faults.
I feel like them losing this one
might help the Epic case, which is more
the one that we're actually hoping to go through.
That's going to take a long time though, because Epic is asking for
a lot more than these developers were. There are some really
funny stories in Floatplane Chat. Alana Ketion
I think I got $6 out of a class action suit against Google. Computer Whisperer
says I got $1.95 from a PayPal lawsuit.
This is great. CMD Underscore says I still have the never cashed
check for $1.25 or something from a class action about
a company using robo dialers. This is great.
And so West T27
says admits they were wrong. Most of the settlements usually
say something to the effect of claims no fault. That's a lot of the time
part of the payout is
you're right. They're going to say no we didn't do anything wrong because if they do
then it could open themselves up to more lawsuits
because obviously if they did something wrong once they probably did it wrong twice.
So yeah, you're probably right, but I still think
that this will add fuel. The fact that Apple settled
whatever they legally said or not does say something
about how vulnerable they think
that they are right now. And the fact that they settled for so much would
seem to indicate that they're trying to buy a lot of goodwill
right now. Yeah, they have not gotten a lot
of good press for the way they've treated app developers.
I would have liked more stuff in there that helps
the app developers in real ways instead of this
small developer fund thing which is not actually going to really
help very many small app developers in the long run
and was just looted for $30 million from the lawyers.
I wish there was more actual stuff coming through, but at least there's
some stuff coming through and hopefully it sets precedent
but I don't know. Yeah, I don't know what to tell you.
In other news, what did I want to talk about here?
Ah yes, Samsung is bricking the Z Fold and
Z Flip 3's cameras if you unlock the bootloader.
Oh, that sucks.
Pretty annoying. They already make it really
difficult to get root file system access. It's also
very intentional. It's not like, oh, we overlooked
this thing and it happens to brick it when you unlock the thing.
It's definitely on purpose.
I understand blah blah, Samsung knocks, blah blah, security
but the fact is that this is a feature that
turns perfectly working hardware into a brick once you
stop supporting it with your software updates, which you're Samsung.
You're going to do that at some point. So XDA senior
members, oh boy, White Bear is I think the direct
translation from the Chinese name and Ian Mac D
showed the final confirmation
screen during the bootloader unlock process on the Z Fold 3 that
mentions that completing the operation will cause the camera to be disabled.
So this isn't without precedent. Sony pulled this with their Xperia devices.
If you unlocked the bootloader of
any Sony Xperia device, it would result in nothing but green pictures.
Other software features like Sony's video and audio enhancements were similarly borked.
I would have to assume that this is to prevent anyone from reverse engineering
the way that their enhancements work. That would be
the only good reason I could think of for Sony to implement it in that particular
way. But the big problem here is that if Samsung becomes
as locked down as Apple, a lot of the benefits of
going Android with a Samsung device go away compared to
just buying an iPhone in the first place.
Yeah, I'm not that into that.
What I am into though...
Apparently there have been some workarounds already found. That's good to know.
My favorite though is reading some Superchats.
Now I didn't get all of them because I specifically
intentionally didn't click the viewer activity tab at the beginning of
the WAN show. My apologies to anyone who sent one. You were sacrificed
for the greater good because Google asked me to screen record the
problem that I've been having and I did manage to record it.
So I have a screen recording of Superchats coming in
from that on the right and then the viewer activity tab being empty
and then I click the viewer activity tab and they start populating
which is really stupid and not supposed to happen. So hopefully they'll be able to fix it.
So like I said, your sacrifice was for
the greater good. Lilith Gaming says, I want to build my first ever PC.
What should I go for for a good experience? Well, you should watch
one of our build guides and then you should post on the Linus Tech Tips
forum in the new build section. People will help you
find the right components for your budget and for what you're trying to do.
Like the best part of the forum.
Johnny, can we use lightly
overclocked AMD FX9590s as a loophole for California's
electricity bill? It's pretty much a good idea to build a PC
with that processor when you think about it. I have no
idea what you're trying to get at. As far as my understanding goes
those laws only apply to systems sold, not custom built.
New systems sold, which you will not be putting
an AMD FX9590 in and number two
an overclocked FX9590
that is one of the most
inefficient modern era processors.
You just, like, I don't get it. You shouldn't buy
one, I guess is what I'm trying to say.
No, I would not recommend that. I would not recommend that.
Tech Kev says, I just watched your video on a customizable laptop. Very good
showing what you could do with it. Did you or did you not invest in their company? I did. I have a video coming
soon. So I'm going to kind of talk about why I made that decision.
Matt Shattuck says, I've
built several e-commerce sites and developer friendliness is definitely a significant factor
for choosing a payment processor. Both Stripe and Square have been awesome. I can't
say I share your experience with Stripe, but
has that changed, Luke? Are they better now? No, Stripe's been good.
Stripe's been pretty good the whole time. I thought they were a pain in the butt at the beginning.
Braintree and PayPal. Oh, alright. I want to buy PayPal. Good old PayPal.
Alex and Simba says, Linus, do you have any
plans to do another verified actual gamer drop?
I'm sure there's several of us still waiting for a decent price. Yes.
We actually have a hundred, if I recall correctly, they are
3080 TIs coming from, I think it's
MSI. Don't quote me on that. Yeah, pretty sure. Oh, do you know that?
Yeah. Is that right? OK. Yeah. So it's not dead, ladies and
gentlemen. It's coming back. This one's been
planned and ready for so long.
It's actually been forever. Yeah, I know. NorthernRebel27
says, we're in a bad spot right now with the chip shortage, but is it reasonable to assume that the reactive
investments that have been made will reshape the chip maker landscape and make the future brighter as a whole?
It's possible. But the thing is that I don't think these
investments are being made with the intention of driving prices down.
They're being made with a
keen eye toward how much demand there will be
once these fabs go online. I don't think the intention is to
overproduce and drive down prices. Sorry.
Yeah.
Mike Levin says, thanks Linus. Finally catching a live show from New Zealand. Wanted to say thanks for the videos.
Hey, thank you, Michael. And
John says, did you know the woman who invented one of the foundational technologies for Wi-Fi
also starred in one of the most famous erotic films of all time?
No, I can't say I did. Thanks, Arim Paladian.
And Zero Two says, hey guys, I need some more ports on my router.
It only has four. What do you recommend to add more? That is such a simple tech tip. How have we never
done a video on that? How to add more ports to your router? Buy yourself
a network switch. Are you sure you have it? I'm sure. I'm sure. I have never done...
Have you done Tech Quickie or Linus Tech Tips? Nope, I have never done that.
Like, I just glossed right over that.
Wow. Yeah.
How have I never done that?
To be fair, these videos... Oh, no.
Tech with Brett from eight months ago.
That is totally the kind of thing that people would search for and that I have never
addressed. So what you need to do is you need to buy a network switch. So one of these
is going to do you just nicely. If you only need a few more ports, this Netgear 5 port
on managed switch will do just fine for $17. You plug one
of your ports on your existing router into one of the
ports on this little switch here, and then you plug all your other devices into
the rest of them. They will share that uplink
bandwidth. So all those devices will now share the
one gigabit probably that the one port on
your upstream device is connected to it with. But probably
that is fine because they probably all won't be going full bore
at the same time. And what's nice is that if you have devices that are
all connected to the little 5 port switch, they can communicate
with each other at full gigabit speed. It's only if they have to cross over to devices on the
other switch. So as long as you lay things out in a way that's kind of
sensible, you can minimize the amount of traffic on that
potentially bottlenecked link.
And that's it! It's the end of the WAN Show.
We will see you again next week. Same bad time, same
bad channel.
Bye!