I can’t believe some of the points Linus made against the Fairphone, especially given he’s onboard with the same compromises for the Framework laptop. 🤭
I can’t believe some of the points Linus made against the Fairphone, especially given he’s onboard with the same compromises for the Framework laptop. 🤭
Yeah. He took flack. It was more about the completeness and accuracy of the reviews rather than being unfair… at least from what I recall.
They did a whole show of the matter, suspended uploads for a week or so, did some internal restructuring, hired a new CEO. Linus is now chief vision officer or some such nonsense.
Bluntly, I liked LTT videos more when they were a scrappy bunch of nerds working out of a house, putting out a couple videos a week…
You knew the information wasn’t perfect and that was fine. It was enough to give you an impression of what to expect. They did a recent comparison that confirmed something I already knew, by taking a smattering of the “same” CPU and testing them against eachother. They found that some were quantifiably better than others. To me this was proof that all reviews are skewed. You never know which way they’ll be skewed, and it really doesn’t matter. The fact remains that all tech reviews are going to be different than personal experience. They’re also going to differ from reviewer to reviewer since, even if they’re using the “same” hardware, that hardware might be slightly faster or slower than other reviewers by a small margin. Once upon a time the hardware was so similar and the differences were so small you could effectively ignore this variance. Modern hardware is so fast that even a small variance can make a pretty significant difference to benchmark performance.
So you have to take literally everything posted as a review with a grain of salt. It’s not accurate to what you would experience buying the exact same stuff off a shelf. As lithography gets smaller and smaller the relatively minor variance will have a larger and larger impact to the final products performance.
It’s the way of things. All things. Whether it’s a car or a computer, some just roll off the line different.
I seem to recall something to the effect of “theft of a prototype:” like a custom water block or something like that he was supposed to review, and then gave a rushed, improper review, and then misplaced or in some way failed to return the prototype. IIRC.
They were sent some form of prototype cooler from a startup for a specific GPU, I believe it was LTT used a different GPU that the cooler wasn’t meant for
LTT complained the cooler was shit and didn’t work up to standard, which is to be expected when using it on something it wasn’t meant for.
And then sold the cooler at some kind of expo or show when the startup specifically asked for it.
This is mostly right, I remember this part clearly:
The water block was a custom block for both a CPU and GPU combined into one mass. It was supposed to sandwich a specific CPU series chip and a specific GPU. They used the right CPU series with it, but used the next GPU up in the series… I think it was built for a 3080 or something and they put a 4000 series on it.
They realized their mistake, even during the shoot, but Linus didn’t want to spend the time, effort and money into retesting it with the proper components, and just steamrolled ahead with the video.
After all that, their team neglected to return the prototype promptly, and took months to even properly communicate with the manufacturer. During those months they held some kind of gathering, either LTX or one of their LANs, and during the event someone suggested the prototype water block for the silent auction, and Linus agreed, so they auctioned it off and gave the money to charity.
There was some drama about it, and Linus did his usual thing of speaking before thinking and digging his grave even further, then eventually made a public apology. They committed to paying the full price for the prototype, well above $20k, if I recall, so that the company could have a new one created.
Much of the recent criticism relates specifically to toxic/bro culture and a work culture that encouraged cutting corners, mistakes, and burnout. I’m not sure what was going on in the house behind the scenes was a model of a professional workplace.
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