The WAN Show - Agent Janice SPEAKS - The WAN Show Jan 11 2019

Episode Date: January 14, 2019

Savage Jerky: Use offer code LTT to save 10% on Savage Jerky at https://lmg.gg/SavageSauce Freshbooks: For your unrestricted 30 days free trial, go to https://www.freshbooks.com/WAN and enter in “The WAN Show” in the how you heard about us section. Private Internet Access: Sign up for Private Internet Access VPN at https://lmg.gg/piawa Forum Link: https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/1020315-jan-11-2019-the-wan-show-document/ Apply to work at Floatplane Media: https://goo.gl/forms/5JViJJ7BhVj4xNy63 Floatplane Account Migration Details: https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/1011580-floatplane-subscriptions-migrating-to-floatplanecom/ Podcast Link: TBD Timestamps (Courtesy of Nightcore Prototype Zero) 0:00 starts to the JAN show 2:20 intro 3:02 ground rulez 3:26 Janice’s story 5:51 funny joke ( please laugh ) 8:16 Linus stops talking 9:06 best experience on pre-sale side 9:58 worst experience 12:37 tech support 16:36 new merch 18:00 what would Janice buy 25:33 floatplane questions 34:00 super chats 39:29 last question 42:27 last last question 47:00 Janice grabs Dennis and leaves (and her money) 47:45 SPONSORS WOO! (Denis runs in front of camera) 48:31 fresh books 49:18 PIA 49:38 SAVAGE jerky 51:54 CES talk 1:01:28 Denis on OLED 1:08:13 Linus shows new Hisense demo 1:12:16 end of JAN Show ( superchats ) 1:14:55 merch store and Luke is hiring 1:16:31 requirements 1:17:12 migration for floatplane 1:20:52 real end and Dennis waving underwear 1:21:01 outro Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

And theoretically we should be live now so this is wow this is a first also those headphones are making the sound of my voice so we're gonna put those away guess who is co-hosting the WAN show today well you don't have to guess she's right here so we are going to have a pretty different WAN show today for a couple of reasons. Number one is that we have actually covered the vast majority of the tech hardware news that has gone on this week over on TechLinked or on Linus Tech Tips or just on Twitter or YouTube stories because really it's been all about CES. Twitter or YouTube stories because really it's been all about CES. But something that we haven't touched on is something that you guys have been asking for a lot. And it's an update on Secret

Shopper. So as a lot of you will remember, it ended up being an incredibly popular series for us with each episode getting well over a million views. Agent Janice, who is, that's, okay, and you're gonna have to help the audience out here. Is that your real name? Absolutely. Are you actually from accounting? Yeah, I do accounting at Linus Media Group. It's not a joke, so do you know that that's a meme?

I do, well, after everyone blew up and said, what, a real Janice from accounting? Yes, what? A real Janice from accounting? Yes, there's the real Janice from accounting. So Janice, for those of you who didn't see it, secret shopped six different system integrators as someone who's not necessarily a hardcore gamer or hardcore tech enthusiast, and honestly got either treated really well or treated downright rudely. So you guys have kind of asked for an opportunity to talk to her about how the whole thing went. So we're going to talk about that. I'm going to go through some random floatplane stuff because Luke's not here to do it. And you guys, you know, you're not going to get through an entire WAN

show without some floatplane stuff. And then I might actually bring Dennis on to talk about some highlights from CES, because we were down there together, and he's the only other one who, for whatever reason, I don't know why either of us are here, but who decided to come in to work today. So let's go ahead and roll the intro, and let's get right into it. Thanks for watching! All right, so first of all, this is your first time on WAN Show. You know, everything's live, unedited, uncensored, so I just want to make sure that I lay down some ground rules here. I need you to keep your extremely foul potty mouth off of the land show. Do you think you can handle that? I'll do my best. I'm just giving Janice a hard time. She's like,

if anything, very, very sort of like... Not that. Yeah, the opposite of that. Why don't we go with that? So first of all, I want you to kind of share with the audience, what was your initial thought when you were told, okay, you're going to be our secret shopper. You're going to go buy, what was it? I think it was $1,000, $1,000 US, right? $2,000. $2,000?

Sorry, $1,500 US. $1,500. Okay, split the difference between our two answers. Accounting. At least we got there in the end. We got there in the end. So 1500 US dollars per system. And you were told, okay, go buy six gaming systems.

Yeah, I was very intimidated because I know nothing, next to nothing about computers, let alone gaming rigs. And talking on the phone is not my favorite thing to do. So a live show where you talk about the experience is even better, right? Absolutely, I'm loving this. Yeah, at least those videos got edited, fortunately. Yeah, I don't know. I was willing to help, willing to give it a try. I thought it was a cool concept and the feedback we got actually proved that more so than I was even anticipating. Cool. So that honestly is, all of that is actually exactly why we went with Janice for this project

because Janice isn't stupid. She just doesn't know anything about PCs. And I honestly think, as people who are immersed in this tech, like every day, it's so easy to forget that, oh wait, hold on a second. Oh, okay, nevermind, AJ's posted a thing there. So it's so easy for us to forget how overwhelming all the like speeds and feeds and specs. Acronyms, numbers, letters.

And how, if you're coming in as someone who actually doesn't have a lot of context for this stuff, honestly, in a lot of cases, it's not even as simple as like, well, higher number better, higher model number better, because you might get told something like, oh okay, well this processor is 5 gigahertz with 6 cores and this one is 4.6 gigahertz with 8 cores, and you'd go, what would be your reaction to that? Um, that would be my reaction. Exactly. And so the thing is, is that like Ivan and I will hear something like it's $1,500 and

it comes with a Core i3 and we'd be like, ah, and that's not a funny, that's not a funny joke to anyone who hasn't spent literally years keeping up with this stuff. So that was actually exactly why we chose Janice for this, because do you feel like you learned a lot? I probably have forgotten some of this stuff, but that first time I was ordering the actual computers, by the last one, I felt like, okay, I would know the very basics of what I'm actually looking for for a gaming PC, I guess. We've got BESN here saying Janice played her part very well. That's exactly because...

I didn't have to play a part. Exactly. So, okay. Now, not everything made it into the finished videos. Did you end up watching them, by the way? The finished videos, yeah. You did watch the finished videos. Did you end up watching them, by the way? The finished videos, yeah. You did watch the finished videos, okay. Was there, this is just before we kind of get into some of the specific experiences,

but was there anything that you felt like the finished videos didn't capture about your experience? And you can feel free to pick on individual brands. Like part of this whole thing has been about making it a really open experience for everyone watching. Right. Well, to be honest, that was an entire day on the phone. And by the end, Ivan would tell me something about one of the brands that we had called. And I'd be like, which one was that again? Was that the one with this or that?

I had no idea. He had it all in a spreadsheet to keep track. But after you spend an hour plus on the phone for each brand, it just kind of blurred together. And also, I knew I didn't have to keep track of it. So I just kind of like let that slide. Fair enough. I mean, I guess that's the only way you can survive, spending like four hours on the phone with tech support in one day. Well, yeah, the other thing, yeah, I just didn't keep track of those things. But the videos certainly didn't show how tedious it was.

Right. To just be like, I don't know, I think it was HP for tech support. I was just sitting there with like, are they still there? I don't know. Went and go check my phone. 15 minutes later, oh, yeah, they're still there. Great don't know. Went and go check my phone. Fifteen minutes later, oh yeah they're still there, great! And Del, okay, so we made fun of it a lot in the videos, but the thing with Del where they would just stop talking. Yeah,

you don't know if they're checking something or... haha. Just these awkward pauses. Like, how hard is it to... And the thing that was craziest about that to me was... Because for me, I was going, okay, their call center could be overseas. Or there could be a bad connection. Or something. There could be some explanation for why it's taking them a very long time to reply. But then when you were, were like going back and forth,

having a conversation, there didn't appear to be any delay on the line. Yeah. No, there was, I think the only technical problems we had, I think it showed in the first video, was one of the brands couldn't hear me properly. But I'm not even sure I believe that. Because I just wanted to send an email

instead of talk to me on the phone. Okay. Give me a highlight for the best experience that you had in the pre-sales side. Do you remember that sort of well enough? Uh, the highlight I remember, I just remember being, it was the end of the day. The last one we called was main gear and the salesperson just went through everything step by step they had it visually on their website so I could actually like read it as well as hear it because I need to see something in order to remember it or process it and he was just very patient and I just remember getting off that

call it wasn't 45 to an hour long I mean it's and it's like, oh, okay, I'm done. And I actually learned something about computers and I ordered it in under 15 minutes. And it was very relieving. So now tell me what was the worst experience that you had during the ordering process? I know who my, I know who my pick is, but I really would like you to go first here. I know who my pick is, but I really would like you to go first here. During the ordering process, I think the one that stands out is CyberPower, just because I felt like I was just dismissed and kind of like, well, you have to at least know what you're looking for to buy something.

I'm like, well, that's what I'm calling and asking. So not just because we didn't end up with anything, but just like emotionally it felt like it was just very dismissive. Yeah, no, that was really rude. I actually wasn't going to pick them because with cyber power, like their policy is whatever, and that's a stupid policy, and that's really rude. But the one that I— For our situation, maybe it didn't work out or something, but—

The one that I really didn't like, though, was the way that Dell kept, like, not listening to you. How many times— How many times— Thank you. How many times did you tell them you wanted a desktop? Oh, a laptop? And here's the craziest thing about it. Like, you guys didn't really get to experience some aspects of this

because you were watching the heavily edited down version of this. Like, you guys watched an 18 or 25 minute video or something like that. But Janice's call with Alienware alone was 45 minutes, an hour? At least. Something like that? Something like that. So you guys are watching this, heavily condensed version of it and so it's hard to get a feel for the time spans that existed between the events that took place. And the crazy thing about I'm looking for a gaming desktop.

Okay so would you like a laptop? No no a desktop. Right okay here's the laptop I've selected for you. No, no, a desktop. Right, okay, here's the laptop I've selected for you. That whole exchange happened within a very short span of time, did it not? I think so. It was just one part of the conversation. So they were basically just not listening at all. And then you could go, okay, well, the rep just wasn't paying attention. But if I recall correctly, weren't you talking to someone else when they kept hearing you say,

I would not like an extended warranty, and they kept asking you if you wanted one? I think I talked, I don't know how many different people it was, but I got switched back a couple times about the extended warranty, and then back to the same person, or I don't know who it was, but asked multiple, multiple times. Yeah, that's true. That was frustrating. All right. So let's move on to tech support.

What was your highlight for tech support? I'm trying to remember. Those ones blur together a little bit. And also I was, on the first call, I was super nervous because I've never touched the inside of a computer. And so I was just nervous, like, oh, I'm going to be filmed doing this brand new thing that I don't know how to do, guided by this company that I don't know that I trust to help me.

And people are just going to watch. Well, when you put it that way. So a highlight for that, nothing really stands out, to be honest. Really? Okay. Well, besides the end of the day, it was like, okay, we're done. Okay, what about a low light? Tech support. So this is when you're trying to swap the RAM.

Yep. And you get everything from them having sort of a pre-canned video to them giving you kind of time stamps to them having, like, sort of a really unprofessional video. And then to just being told if you don't know how to do it, then you should probably get like, you know, maybe a man. Is there a man in the house to do it for you? Was sort of the vibe I got from that one. But I don't know. Maybe you felt really differently about it.

To be honest, at the time, that one didn't bother me in the moment. Really? Like looking back on it, I realized, wow, that was incredibly rude. Okay. In the moment, I was just, I don't know, I just thought it was kind of funny. Probably because I wasn't an actual customer wanting actual support, which makes a huge difference if you're wasting your time, you're trying really hard to get them to help you.

Right, because in the context of a real-world situation, you've probably already burned an hour or two hours of your time Googling it or asking a friend or whatever else. So finally you've given up and you've gone, fine, I'll make that phone call. Fine. And they basically tell you, go Google it or ask a friend. You're like... Yeah.

No one likes an endless loop when they're trying to get help with something. No, and that's, I think, the other low light, besides realizing how much of a low light that was, I think it's HP at the... That was the last one we called, and it was just, like, this forever, never-ending loop of transferred

or being on hold for like 15 minutes while someone goes and researches something and it was just it took way too long the craziest thing about that is that wouldn't have had to take so long if we had just let them do their solution so it already would have taken a long time it would have taken like 45 minutes if we had just let them send you RAM right but then that was such a stupid solution we kind of wanted to give them a chance to like they were just gonna should be on par with the other they're just gonna ship her a stick of ram without ever making any attempt to diagnose it after

spending 45 minutes kicking her between uh u.s support canadian sales no canadian support appears to exist so whenever we tried to get transferred to that we ended up on U.S. support again I think we talked to U.S. sales at some point or another I'm pretty sure there are four different departments I talked to I think so um and so we had to kind of like prompt them well hey you know what if uh and they're like oh yeah that's pretty common that's the other thing is okay I got this stick of RAM in the mail what do i do with it do i have to call them again and go through the whole thing again like i wouldn't know how to put it in anyway okay so one of the toughest questions uh guys we're gonna we're gonna queue up a little bit of q a here so uh floatplane viewers go ahead and drop that in the chat i'm not sure how long um stuff

stays it might kick it away so maybe don, please try not to spam it too hard. But we want to, I want to do a little bit of Q&A with Janice, but first I just have like kind of a huge question for you. Hold on. So we're working on a new merch item. What do you think of these boxers? Really important question. Let's's see they're pretty cool have you tried them ten out of ten would wear four out of ten personally would not wear I want to know your opinion I actually I actually quite I actually quite like them. I think we might make the design printed a little bit bigger,

like a little more coarse, so that the LTTs are bigger, the lines are bigger, and there's fewer of them. I think it's a little bit busy right now. Yeah, I wouldn't have noticed the LTT, actually, just at first glance. But the Linus Tech Tips on the top is nice. Yeah. The band. So there you go.

There you go. Anyway, that's not actually what I wanted to ask you. Yeah. The band. So there you go. There you go. We're, anyway, that's not actually what I wanted to ask you. Yeah, I'm just, I'm just promoting our merch. No,

the real thing I wanted to ask you was knowing this, knowing that the top performing systems, the ones from iBuyPower and the ones from, and from HP. So those two

were the highest performance. So knowing that they outperform the main gear by a significant margin, like double digits, they're not twice as fast, but I think they're about 20 to 30% faster in games. honest to goodness, as a customer who cares about the entire experience, because that's the thing. As a customer, you will have more than just the experience of owning the final product. Do you value those other things, or do you just want the best thing for your dollar, and you'll put up with potentially a couple hours on the phone with tech support to resolve it um so i guess i feel like vetoing hp just because that like i said i don't like making phone calls and when you expect to spend an hour on the phone

every time you have to phone them, that would deter me greatly. However, it depends if it's my computer or if I'm giving it away. Hold that thought for one second. So it's interesting that you said that. So would you veto HP over Alienware? Because Alienware took a long time to solve your problem, but they just took a long time to solve your problem, but they just took a long time

to solve your problem. You didn't get bounced around the same way. So I think HP only ended up taking about another 15 minutes. So it was like an hour versus an hour 15 or something like that. Don't quote me on the exact numbers. But did Alienware stand out in your mind far less just because you didn't have this this endless loop of frustration and transfers apparently because interesting that's the one that stands out in my mind is hp um yeah i'm not sure how that all plays into what i would actually purchase yeah well why don't we why don't we say this then so i'll give you two scenarios scenario number one our our mock sort of premise is real so scenario number one is you're buying a system for your

brother you're a super nice sister who has 1500 US dollars to spend on her brother for some reason Wow good on you by the way heck yeah which one do you buy okay let, let me think about this. You're making me make these spot decisions with so many things to consider. That's the WAN show. Yeah. Okay. So if it was for my brother, I would definitely... Apparently he's an avid gamer. Not for real, but we're pretending.

Yeah, sure. So I think in the end, because it's a gift, I would just like, well, I went through the hard stuff for him. Now I can give him this really good computer. So I would probably go for like best bang for your buck. Really? so I would probably go for like uh best bang for your buck really so you'd go I buy power because okay the the research the pre-research essentially that you have to do in order to get the best thing and the but remembering though that I buy power I think did reasonably well on pre-sales and they only really screwed things up on tech support. If I'm giving this to my brother, who is an avid gamer,

then he'll probably be able to, you know, he won't need tech support as much, at least. I see. So you would just go the best hardware that fits inside the box that it fits in for the money that you have, and if the RAM is broken or whatever you just go well you know what I've kind of done most of my job here here's a free thing don't complain too hard if you have to invest a couple hours into making it work right to be honest I would

give it to him having no idea that anything was wrong because I would not think to start up the computer before giving it to him interesting nor would I know how to check those things. Ivan told me how to check that. Okay, I like that. Okay, okay, so then question number two. Now it's for you. Actually, no, no, I have a new question. Question number two, it's for your parents. So they are, I'm making assumptions here.

I'm making assumptions, forgive me. I'm assuming they are less tech savvy than you. Is that fair? I would say nowadays they are. My dad used to be all up on computers in the 90s. That was a while ago. And then he didn't keep up. Anyway, yes, as of now, they would probably greatly value tech support,

although my dad hates being on the phone even more than I do. So let's see. I would swallow the pre-sale phone support, just kind of like, okay, this is what I'm doing to get something for my parents. So it would come down to tech support and I guess like longevity? Sure. Just because then I don't have to do this all over again kind of thing?

Right. So that doesn't really help because we tested them, they're gaming PCs and they're, and we tested them for gaming. So I'm not sure which brand would be the best for this scenario. So, I mean, we can kind of draw parallels between, in general, we can draw parallels between the gaming performance of a system and its performance across a pretty wide range of tasks, actually. So, you know, if it's 20, 30% faster for gaming to get the iBuyPower or the HP compared to the main gear, then you can kind of assume it'll be that similar. Let's just say that for the sake of argument.

Okay. And is that the same for, like, how long something lasts or will continue to be faster? None of them really stood out as using very shoddy components. Um, it's a little bit complicated. So I would say origin actually probably had, I'm just trying to remember, um, who everyone even was. I think origin probably had the highest tier motherboard and power supply, which is generally something that affects the longevity of a system more than other things. Okay. But Origin's spec was much lower than both Alienware's and Main Gear's.

So you kind of had those three performance tiers. You had iBuyPower and HP, and then way down from there, for gaming anyway, you had your Alienware and your Main Gear, and and then down from there you had Origin. Down. Okay. So taking everything into consideration, I did appreciate MainGear's tech support as well as pre-sales. And it did feel like they just cared enough about you

to not even have any ounce of, like, you don't feel disqualified because you don't know much about computers or don't know what you're talking about. Cool. So, yeah. So probably them. And then would you do the same thing for yourself or would you have other considerations? I'm just, I'm curious. That's my last question. Last question. For now. There'll be more. I'm just going to go with probably the same. Kind of like a bit of bang for your buck,

but I want it to last long and then not knowing much. Or since I work here, I would probably rely on some people around here to help me out with tech support. But if I was completely on my own, tech support would be important for sure. Okay. So here come the questions from our floatplane peeps. Here's one. This one isn't first, but I just thought this was really good. A question for Janice. After this experience, if you had to buy a computer in real life,

and let's assume you didn't work here like just normal vanilla janice not lmg equipped janice um if you had to go buy a computer if you had to buy a computer in real life would you shop online again or would you go to a store oh um well as i was saying to ivan before we started all the first phone calls, I felt really nervous going in because when I did buy my laptop in 2008, my previous laptop. We've upgraded her since then, it's fine, chill everyone. I did all my research.

I actually knew a fair bit about computers by the time I was finished like hey what do I need and how much does it cost for this thing and like interesting okay upgraded whatever as they as you notice 10 years has done something to my memory um but so I would yeah personally I would be online i'd research about computers in general and then i'd research about prices and where to get things and how much shipping costs included in that because obviously that's a factor in the final price if you're having to pay for shipping as well um so i probably wouldn't call people if i didn't have to So I probably wouldn't call people if I didn't have to.

It'd be like an online experience. Got it. Okay. Now that's really interesting because I didn't even really think to include as a separate section of this sort of trying to shop on their sites before resorting to a phone call as part of the pre-shopping experience. sites before resorting to a phone call as part of the pre-shopping experience. Is that something that you did poke around at on your own, but that we just didn't include in the video? Or did you have any thoughts there? I didn't have time, nor was allowed to do that before the video, just to make it fair across the board.

Sure. So no, that was not part of this whole experience at all. It was just like, make a cold call and ask for a gaming PC for my brother with a budget. So that was... Yeah, I've done that personally, but it was not part of this experience. Interesting. All right. Let me have a look, see if i can get yeah i've got we've got a lot of people actually talking about uh getting phone anxiety and feeling exactly the same way as you where they wouldn't actually they wouldn't actually want to call into anywhere no in order to buy something

i would go into a store if i had uh, like, a really confusing question that I couldn't find out online by myself. Then I would probably just go into a store and ask a salesperson, pretend I'm looking at something to buy. Oh, this is a really great question from Anthony J. Campo over on Flowplane. Okay. So after this experience, knowing how difficult it is, because I mean if you were buying a computer for yourself, another sort of something you brought up is that it wouldn't necessarily be a gaming computer, right? So this question is great. PC manufacturers, be it through their websites or be it through talking to them directly on the phone, would you just say, you know what, forget it. I'm gonna buy a Mac. Answer honestly. Like it's fine. No one's gonna judge you

because even whatever you say, I kind of have a spiel that I'm gonna go into here for a little while anyway. So that was the actual question? That was the question. Would Janice just go and buy a Mac? Would you? Okay, I'll read you the exact wording. Okay. Janice, if you had to buy a new computer, would you consider buying an Apple product

because of the post-purchase support, or would you rather buy a more wallet-friendly device with equivalent specs that has worse support? And by support, I'm talking both pre- and post-sales. Okay. In general. Yeah. Okay. support I'm talking both pre and post sales okay because in general yeah okay um I am kind of a cheap person so I would probably go with the price the price point that's my final answer

okay um so the spiel that I was going to go into was it's actually a really great question because a lot of people in our community sort of marvel that because I mean okay because counterpoint to what you just said you did already acknowledge that you'd probably go with main gear even though that wasn't strictly speaking the best price to performance now Apple does take that difference to another level in some cases. So you're willing to compromise a little, but with the perception then that Apple is a tier above in terms of the price and then a tier or two below in terms of the performance, you kind of go, oh, well, that's my line. Is that kind of? Yeah, kind of taking an average of that.

Sounds right. But a lot of people in our community sort of marvel exactly the same way that Anthony here did. Not our Anthony, the Anthony who posed this question. Marvel that people buy Apple computers at all. Don't they see that it's a Core i5 instead of an i7 for the same price? How could they buy that? The OS isn't even that great. But the thing that people forget, the thing that you have to remember is that what Apple does so well, and you can crap on them for, you know, it's all marketing, all you want.

But at the end of the day, marketing is just another word for communicating proactively with your potential customers. And now if you think about it that way, that is a form of support. It is a pre-sales support. Now, deceptive marketing is bad. But when Apple says, okay, this thing is really light and has lots of battery life. If you carry it and use it a lot between charges, you should buy it. That's not necessarily deceptive. Now, they're not saying, well, okay, in some cases they do make performance claims that I kind of go, really, you guys? But they're not saying that this thing is going to edit 8K video or whatever. They're not getting specific like that. So there are many cases where Apple does market their products in a

way that I wouldn't consider deceptive. And so I guess I'm just trying to point out that that is something that is an actual value to an Apple product. Now for my, for my own part, I don't buy a lot of Apple products because I don't need someone to hold my hand and make a flashy commercial about like that sort of shows the kinds of users and the kinds of lifestyles that people have who should, you know, want this product. That doesn't mean anything to me. Like I actually do want to know the specs and then I want to know the price and the pros and cons and all that nitty-gritty stuff. But that's basically your answer, is in just the same way that Janice was like,

yeah, I'd probably go main gear, knowing that there's this, I mean, would you say there's a certain degree of trust? Yep. Trusting that you're going to get good information on the front end and that you're going to get good help on the back end. Yeah, I'm willing to compromise some raw performance in order to sort of have that certain degree of trust. And even

though Apple has made a ton of mistakes over the years, the reality of it is that many of their customers don't keep the products long enough to experience these kinds of longer-term failures, or they just simply aren't affected by them in the way that power users who make a lot of noise online are. So Apple still manages to hold on to this high degree of trust with its users. And it's something that I think a lot of people find baffling, but here we are. So I thought that was a really interesting question. Let me have a look here.

I always tried to make sure while I wasn't there. PC built in. OK. I can't. OK. Actually, yeah, there's not that many questions here. So that's pretty cool. I can actually have a look and see if anyone left a Super Chat

as well. OK, there's a bunch of stuff here. Are you an Android or iOS user, and why? I think I know the answer to this, but go ahead. Linus knows because I am an Android user, only because the phone came from LMG. Well, not only because, but that is why I am right now. We'll go with that.

I don't think, were you on the iPhone before? No, I've never. I owned an iPod Touch many moons ago. That's my only Apple product. So full context here, Janice only has a modern smartphone because back when she was still doing babysitting for us, her Christmas bonus was a new phone because I couldn't watch her use the thing she had anymore. My brother's old one.

I was just like, this is terrible. This is like... It's nice and small, though. I'll give it that. Okay, all right. It was small. That's wonderful. Solid benefit.

Yeah, I think... Oh, wow. there's actually a lot more. Okay. Actually, one last question for you, and then I'll probably have Dennis come in and talk about some of the stuff we saw at CES. This is from Aries C. Would Agent Janice ever consider going undercover in person? How's your in-person anxiety compared to your phone anxiety? Like running around and like secret shopping Best Buy, Memory Express. What are your thoughts? Hmm. I would say... okay I have two points. One is that sometimes in person is easier than the phone as far as like anxiety and that kind of stuff goes. Really? It's a little less unknown. You can read someone as like anxiety and that kind of stuff goes really it's a little less unknown you can read someone you can that kind of thing interesting that's uh okay so that's kind of

leaning towards in person but the other part was that Ivan was actually with me on the calls or in the same room while I was calling and to kind of navigate some of the stuff and provide reactions. That was very helpful. There were a few times where I'd just be like, uh, what do I need to do right now? What if we just had like, like actually like Agent Janice, like the little squiggly thing behind the ear and you had like the earpiece and just put your hair down? That'd probably make me nervous because i'd be like they can see what i'm doing whereas the phone would obviously hide more so i don't know pros and cons and remember with the phone when because the thing about in person is that and this this is i'll speak to my own experience first and you can tell

me if you feel the same way but in person i find one of the most difficult things about it is that it tends to be a really high pressure sales scenario because everyone knows if you're in sales, you've been trained on this. I guarantee it. Everyone knows that once the customer walks out the door, your chances of making the sale drop precipitously. Like when they're still in the door and you're still having a conversation, you are deep into double digits chance of making a sale. When they walk out the door, it falls to low single digits. If it's even all the way to 1%. When someone leaves, you're basically done because they're going to walk into the door somewhere else. And that person will be a better sales rep than you apparently, and will not let them out the door somewhere else and that person will be a better sales rep than you apparently and will not let them out the door without setting you up with the right deal.

So knowing that you would have to like decline people in person potentially. I mean, I guess you're buying a system every time. If I knew I was buying something anyway, then there's like a lot less pressure. However, if I was shopping personally for my own computer or whatever device that i don't know anything about um then yes there would be a lot more pressure and i don't know yeah in some ways the phone you can hide behind it, and in other ways it's still kind of an anxiety-producing type of thing. Yeah, I get more anxiety in person than over the phone for sure. But, I mean, it's all down to the individual, which is why, you know, we actually had a lot of people comment on the videos. I saw a handful of these where people were like,

why are you calling them anyway? Who does that? But that's the thing. It's like, that's why companies... Not everyone's the same as you. Sorry. And that's why companies are supposed to have chat, email, phone. As many possibilities.

Because that's how you provide a good customer experience. You have to allow for someone to prefer talking on the phone to someone. Like, I actually strongly prefer, when I, especially when I really don't understand something very well, I strongly prefer to talk to someone on the phone, because then I get a chance to explain what it is that I want rather than just hoping that the information is there and available for me to glean from their website or whatever the case may be. Also when you talk on the phone or when you talk in person there is the potential to negotiate. Now that is anxiety-producing for me. But to each his own. Okay I think that's pretty much it there's one last

question here that they just they just added uh casey asks would you ever be on camera again i am right now so okay i guess what i guess what. I'm going to put my own spin on the question then. Would you consider doing a secret shopper again? Uh, yeah. I just don't know what it would be for because agent Janice, her cover is blown. Yeah. I guess that's a, that's kind of a fair point actually, isn't it? Although I guess that kind of goes, I doubt like Best Buy and places like that. Oh, Matthew Swanger says Janice was awesome on the series. I doubt Best Buy and places like that. Oh.

Matthew Swanger says, Janice was awesome on the series, sent $5 and said, this is for her, not you. So there you go. Thanks, Matthew. Thanks, Matthew. By the way, that's not the way super chats normally work.

I just thought it was really funny that it was specifically not for me. You guys don't send super chats that are like, this is for Dennis, this is for Nick, and this is for Luke. We guys don't send super chats that are like this is for Dennis This is for Nick and this is for Luke that we don't that we don't audit them that way But but they think you go Matt Matt Matthew hooked you up. So get a coffee and Thank you very much. I know that this is not necessarily your comfort zone Really appreciate it

honestly I felt like What we what we did as a team and you were an integral part of it, was a huge community service for the gaming community. Not necessarily the technology community as much, because I think those guys and gals are comfortable just ordering parts off Newegg and assembling it themselves for the most part.

But for the people who aren't happy doing that, yeah, our audience is the techie people, but they don't want to build everyone in their family's computer. So this way, they can have the confidence to recommend an experience that those people are going to be happy with in the longer term. I actually have no idea how – oh, no, I'm not letting you go yet. Right. I had a whole other thing I wanted to talk to you about. Okay. So I actually have no idea how – yeah, sorry idea how this has affected the sales of those companies,

but I do know that policies are already changing. So for one thing, I spoke with Dell back at CES. Or not back at. I literally flew in last night at like midnight. Yeah. So I actually spoke with Dell two days ago, and they said they have already made changes to their policies Based on watching these videos these videos are now mandatory viewing for all of their support centers, which is

Wow pretty cool. You actually made a difference so one of the biggest problems They said was that instead of talking to their gaming team because we were in Canada problems they said was that instead of talking to their gaming team because we were in canada you were forwarded to like a generic sales team that doesn't know anything specialized especially about the gaming hardware okay and so that doesn't excuse how bad their script was to be very clear delalian where people who are watching this show um but that was a difference that was made there um how did you feel about the responses that you got from the companies you heard from? That was the last thing I wanted to ask you.

Okay, funny story. So I actually, I got the email from, a personal email from iBuyPower apologizing for the technical support experience that I received and assuring me that you know things were going to change and thanks for the feedback kind of thing at the time I had not watched that video yet and so I was a little bit confused because I thought he was referring to the first video experience

which was not bad I actually rewatched it and thought I don't know what he's talking about anyway all that aside so that was a personal email I received from I buy power they also publicly acknowledged that they screwed up they were they were like sitting there on their f5 buttons like waiting for that video to drop on youtube so they could have the first comment on it saying like okay we done goofed like we're working on this sorry janice so i thought that was a really that was a really cool way that they owned it um i don't believe we've gotten any response from hp whatsoever i have not heard anything um so i haven't heard anything there main gearingear put out a press release.

I have... Basically stroking their own... I don't know anything else. Stroking their own egos. Oh, Maingear, you're so great. I just love myself so much right now. So, I mean, in fairness to them, they actually did do...

They did pretty well. They did do a pretty good job. They declared victory in their press release, if I recall correctly. Despite the conclusion that we came to? Despite the conclusion we came to where we said, well, we did say it's a gaming computer, but then they were like, well, they also record, and Ryzen was good for CPU encoding.

So, okay, you can slice that pie either way. I'm just trying to think who else was involved. I don't know if CyberPower responded at all about their complete bung up. Yeah, maybe I haven't received as many responses about it as I thought. So you had your Dell, who did respond. Well, to you. And they actually, yeah, that's interesting too.

So Dell reached out to me partway through the series, but specifically said, I'm not going to say anything because I don't want to affect the rest of the outcome and it wouldn't have anyway. But thank you. We are watching this very closely. HP didn't say anything. And then we had Main Gear and who was our other boutique? Origin. Yeah. I don't think we heard from, I don't think we really heard from Origin about it. Although they did want to meet with me at CES and I really wanted to meet with the CEO, and I unfortunately wasn't able to make it over there.

So I guess we don't have their response, but that's because I wasn't able to get there. Okay, so yeah, I just wanted to kind of get your thoughts on, do you feel better now that I, by power, apologized? Do you forgive them? I forgive them. Took me a while, but. You're very gracious.

Yeah. No, it wasn't, as I was saying to Linus, I did this for this purpose. It wasn't like I was actually purchasing the computer. And so some parts I just kind of laughed it off. I didn't feel personally attacked or anything. Right. But looking back on. Your didn't feel personally attacked or anything. Right.

But looking back on it. Your emotional investment is like less. Yes. Looking back at the video, yeah, that's not a way to treat a customer. Well, it's just not a way to treat anybody. Treat a person, yeah, that's true. That's not nice. Okay. All right.

So I'll stop lying to you about actually being allowed to go now. Really, though, thank you for coming on. I felt like this was such a cool and important thing we did, and I'd love to do more of it. Agent Genesis cover is kind of blown because I'm pretty sure she is mega famous now within the system integrator space because don't kid yourself.

Main Gear, Origin, iBUYPOWER, CyberPower, HP, and Delalianware are not the only ones who are aware of this series. I had more than one system builder kind of go... Whew. Made out of that one.

Not because they don't try to do a very good job, but just because the thing with the Secret Shopper setup is one bad rep can make your whole company look really bad so it's it's a it's a high risk reward and remember we were down in vegas everybody's gambling but that is a well high risk reward kind of proposition there um do you mind grabbing dennis on your way on your way over here we'll do and don't don't forget your five bucks from matt

or whatever yeah matthew swanger. Look, this is like Janice was awesome on the series. This is for her. Not you. Linus. All caps. You'll just drop it anyways. So there you go. And we don't normally do that, but Janice deserves, if nothing else, a coffee break on

account of what she went through for that thing. She was awesome. Ivan was awesome. Pella deserves mad props because those videos were not easy to edit, you know, taking three hours of, like, phone calls. Like, he probably had to sit on the phone longer than Janice did.

Oh, that's actually an interesting way of thinking about it. Alright, while I'm waiting for Dennis, and we'll talk about some CES recap stuff, I'm gonna go ahead and... Sponsors! Woo! Dennis, why would you run right in front of the camera, dude? I heard you, Ashley. You're killing me here. I was gonna do sponsors before you got here.

There was no particular hurry. I was running. I can't breathe. I use all my energy at CES, so no more walking, running this year for me. This year? Yes. You know it's like January 11th. Okay, I'm just throwing that out there.

Why are you even at work today? Because I'm editing. I have one more CES. Yeah, presumably if you're at work, you're doing work. Yeah. Oh, but like... There's one more CES video I have to finish. Oh, all right. Okay. And

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a weird arrangement so I don't actually have a lot of talking points that I have to go through for them. Get PIA. It's's a good VPN it's affordable and it helps support Linus tech tips all right just we've we were like really late in the show to do sponsors so I want to I want to get through these and I want to save oh man I have a jerky yeah so um yeah you get the ghost pepper you ready so don't wait, wait. You didn't tell me that.

I found my waters. This is really hot. I tried the... Savage jerky. Their goal is to make a delicious snack without nitrates or preservatives that's full of flavor but not bad for you. And they don't just sell jerky. Oh, man, my mouth's watering.

They've got hot sauces like the Mojo jalapeno right there. They've got spice rubs. So this sauce here contains a blend of jalapeno, garlic, lime, and cilantro that provides an amazing zip at the right amount of heat in a 5 ounce bottle. Do you dip this with your jerky? No, no, no. Most people do not dip their jerky in hot sauce. No, the jerky is an independent product. Okay, hold on, hold on. Wait to eat that. Is this the hottest one?

No, that's not the hottest one. I believe the Carolina Reaper is the hottest one. I remember when I was dying last time. I can't promise that I won't die again. Wait, I don't want to dip on your... I haven't dip on you, okay?

Space I haven't actually tried this one before oh, that's actually really nice. Can I have a little bit? Yeah, what what? You know I want to try it. Why would you do that? Why would you dip jerky in hot sauce? I mean yeah, go ahead, but like that's stupid Who does that that's stupid. Who does that? That's like freak show. It's mine. You know, why did that insult go away?

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at savagejerky.com. We've got something for everyone It's good though. We got a new shipment of maple buffalo bacon. I am so happy right now. Oh This is this is not as hot as the one I tried last time No my Ghost pepper one is really hot. It takes a little while to kick in there. All right. Let's talk CES.

How do I talk now? Too much fun. What was your highlight from the show? To be honest, this year is kind of like a blur to me. I've been just walking around we have like to find stuff but I found there a lot of like foldable displays everywhere. I saw a display foldable purse. Yeah that one was cool. Yeah so like we tweeted about it earlier this week, but the top

of the purse had a curved display. You could open it and close it, right? I didn't touch it. What was showing on the display? It's just some text. I think that would be cool if you could change the texture of your purse or you can put your phone

info. You like foldable displays as a fashion accessory? Yeah. If you could wear a bracelet that's like not just... Because obviously the idea of decorating yourself with glowing stuff is not exactly new. No, I like those ones. They use those paper...

What's that called? E-ink. E-ink. E-ink. That kind of material. That would look cool because it's not, like, too shiny. But would you like, like, the next level where it's actually bright and, like, high resolution, like a screen? Yeah. Yeah, but I don't wear anything, though.

But I think that would be cool. Okay, cool. Or, like, glasses. If the size is like that, you can change different things every day. Yep, I could see that being something that would be popular. Oh, this is dying. See, I could have given him the maple buffalo bacon. Can I have one maple?

You can. You probably won't even be able to like, taste it though. Oh, it's like a giant one. Oh, my maple buffalo bacon. Oh, this is good. This is too spicy. That one's really good. Yeah, this one's really good. I really like this one.

So, okay. What did you think of the foldable TV? Or the rolling, rollable TV? I didn't actually get to stop there to see. Did you watch the video? I'm sorry. But I saw you post some stuff. I didn't see it.

Dang it, Dennis. Alright, tell you what. This is pretty cool. Alright, you don't... What are you even talking about? Which video? The one where it rolls up. Yeah, I know that, but I didn't watch it. I'm just gonna bring it up.

Alright, how does a rollable TV work? Okay, didn't watch it. I'm just gonna bring it up All right. How does the rollable TV work? Let's play it Okay, so this is one of our this is one of our videos from the show here There's our epic shilling for dbrand. All right. Oh, so here's how it works So you got this like speaker base here? Okay, and it's about kind of yay big by yay big So maybe like a foot by a foot. Maybe a little more. Maybe like 18 inches, 16 inches, something along those lines. So you press one button and boom. It opens up at the back and the screen just raises out of it.

How thin is this? I don't know. Like less than a centimeter for sure, like it's quite thin. Is it like wobbly? Nope. So there's these two arms at the back that kind of like come down like this and like they support it at the back. Now I saw one viewer mention that there was a little bit of kind of rippliness to the screen. Honestly, seeing it in person, I think the camera picks that up more than your eyes do. To me, in anything but a very extreme situation where I have a hard light

and I'm looking directly at the angle of incidence, I think it's called. I don't remember. Anyway, the angle of reflection. Like if I'm looking directly at a hard light using the TV as a mirror, it's noticeable. But in person,

looking at actual content, it is not noticeable. They say it'll do it 50,000 times up and down. Oh. But it's only 65 inches. And if previous pricing They say it'll do it 50,000 times, up and down. But it's only 65 inches, and if previous pricing of Signature Series models is anything to go on,

I would expect it to cost anywhere in the neighborhood of 15 to $15,000 US. That's OLED, right? You betcha. There, that's how thin it is. Oh, I think that's like, it's just I think it's the one we saw in in Korea, right one of the yeah. Yeah. Oh That's really cool

So that was one of the big highlights for me Anything else down to you I Just okay, there's a thing every year I see. It's not computer stuff. Yeah. You know those things that you step on it and those things that the thing just move around? Yeah, I know the ones. Like a pad thing?

Yeah. Every year, it's just there. And like, a bunch of people are lining up to try that. I think that's really funny. Okay, okay, okay, why don't we talk about some of the other seemingly off-topic stuff. Did you notice how many massage chairs there are? I was gonna say that there are so many so many of them Who is buying these my parents? They did they bought one 20 years ago. Okay, your parents also own this weird like

Okay, yes, they they bought it like 25 years ago and never used it. It's just like a giant garbage there sitting there. It's just so big and you don't really sit on that thing. But the one I saw at the CES is even bigger, but it looks really comfy. But I kind of, I want to try it, but I wouldn't buy it. Remember I did try it in Computex,

the food massage one. It was so tight, it was like breaking my legs. But I don't know, it's like everywhere. What did you think of the AI laptop demo? Because you edited that one, right? I did. So Gigabyte showed off. They've partnered with Microsoft,

and they're using Azure, like Azure Cloud AI something or other. And the idea is that they've got a laptop that uses AI technology to intelligently manage its power distribution between the CPU and the GPU in order to optimize certain workloads. They claim that they can get measurable performance gains out of it, but when we went to the booth,

their demo was awful. So their gaming demo had two video playback side by side with an FPS counter on it, instead of actually having the game running. And I asked why, and they said, oh, well, it's because the RTX performance embargo hasn't lifted yet. I kind of went, okay. Fine. And then on the other side,

they had Adobe Premiere CS5, which is like... Yeah, I don't... Yeah, that's like the first demo I saw they used really old Premiere version. Do you know why I think they used it why I bet it's pirated I Bet the demo team just didn't have a CC license But why CS5

Like I have a pirated copy of cs6 at the very least I'm pretty sure it's still on the server somewhere like to to be clear, we pay for Adobe Premiere, a lot of money to Adobe. But like, I will confess that in our very early days when we had no money, we had a pirated copy of CS6. I never used it. No, I don't think you ever used it. We were Creative Cloud by the time you joined, weren't you? Yeah. We always have the latest version. But yeah, I don't know, I don't get it. And the demo they finished, the rendering, I think the one without AI finished earlier. Like a fraction of a second or something.

Like ever so marginally. And to be clear, this was like a five or 10 minute render or something like that, wasn't it? I don't really remember, I have to see that. But it was a little bit. I don't know remember i have to see that but it was it was a little bit i don't know they asked me to come back and run it again and i was like guys i'm like i've moved on i've moved the world has moved on um but they are so confident that their ai technology is going to work and i'm like i'm like i'm kind of baffled here i don't really understand

how like the cloud is going to help with power state switching on microprocessors, which happens on a microsecond scale. I don't really understand how it's going to help with that. But they insist that their AI technology works, and we're going to do a review of that laptop. It's the Aero 15, and we're going to kind of see how that goes. Stay tuned for the video. We go through the Aero arrow 15 a little bit more Detail so funny so the fact that the computer fell apart when I picked it up that is not staged

That was it was just not screw. Yeah. Oh, it just it was just on the show floor Just sitting there with no screws in it whatsoever And it just I picked it up and it just came apart and I checked the other ones and they were all fine They were all put together It just happened to be that the one that I had them unlock so I could hold it up while I was Talking about it just completely fell apart in my hands. Oh, that's hilarious. So yeah, maybe they just their demo just not Not like good set up. Yeah, maybe they need to Re-evaluate how they set those things up. Okay. I want to go through one more thing that I thought was really cool and I want to

get your thoughts on this okay so OLED you've seen OLED screens before oh yeah yay or nay yeah I like that I know like the darkness, like true dark and like it's really thin. Yeah. Okay. What if I said that you can have the benefits of LCD, so that's very high brightness, but you can get very near to the true darkness that OLED has with an LCD? Yeah, I think you told me about that. Did I?

Lunchtime. Oh, okay. Well, then I guess, fine. Imagine I haven you told me about that. Did I lunchtime? Oh Okay, well then I guess fine imagine. I haven't told you that before I'm gonna talk to the viewers. Okay, okay, okay, so okay Would you think that there's a way for LCD to achieve that level of darkness without compromising its brightness Because that's the problem for LCD All you have to do to get brighter is crank the backlight. But then your blacks become grays, like it doesn't look good. And you can turn the backlight way down,

but then white is gray. There's really no way around it, unfortunately. And there's mitigation strategies. So you can have TVs that have zones that can be individually brightened or dimmed So if you have like a highly reflective white spacecraft flying by on this side, and then you've got You know like the the pitch blackness of space behind it over here Though these zones can be brighter and these zones can be darker

But you get this ugly like staircase II looking in some cases like halo effect get this ugly like staircase-y looking in some cases like halo effect around the bright objects because those zones are square okay and there's nothing that you can really do to make them perfectly align with the shape of the object because they're just sort of modules of leds at the back that can be individually adjusted all right so high sense All right, so Hisense. Have you ever even heard of Hisense? See, and the funny thing about Hisense is for so many years, every year I've gone to CES, every year they've had the booth right across from Intel. And I've always been like, who exactly are these guys?

Why are they right across from, the giant booth, like primo space, so are they right across from, the giant booth, like primo space. So we're talking center hall, right at the entrance. You got Intel, Hisense, walk right in. And I'm like, what even are these guys doing here? Because their booth was just always, and maybe I missed a couple things here and there, but I didn't think so.

Their booth seemed to be always kind of dead, with them trying desperation tactics to get people to come in and look at it, having people, like, shouters, be like, oh, come in and see, Hisense, the future of displays. And then very mediocre displays. Super mediocre.

A gen or two behind, or showing the latest cool thing, like, 4K! But it looks bad, you know So so high sense of all people and I thought well, maybe they're just like huge in like Asia or something but like none of your friends had a high sense TV like I Probably I need to know what what's calling Chinese. Oh, okay. Well, we can probably do that. I'm sure the high sense It's from China, Chinese? Oh, okay. Well, we can probably do that. I'm sure they're both saying. It's from China, right? I believe so.

They apparently have a U.S. site. Hisense. Here we go. There. Native name. No, I don't know. Never heard of that. No.

So they were founded in 1969. Like, they're a 50-year-old company. $15 billion of revenue in 2013, so they've probably grown since then. They're also an OEM. So they sell to other manufacturers. Oh, they have several brand names. Combine, Keylon, Ronshen. Does that sound familiar?

Nope. Nope? Okay. So anyway, I'm just like, who are these guys? But James said, okay, Linus, you've got to go look at this. They've got an LCD that achieves near-perfect black without that halo effect of a full-array local dimming backlight. And so what they've done is basically they've got a normal backlight. Yeah. Full backlight and so what they've done is basically they've got a normal backlight yeah full backlight

then they've taken two lcd modules and they were very clear uh that it is two modules not two panels because if you put two panels together you end up with all kinds of weird artifacting in fact i remember using a display that had two l LCD panels, one on top of the other one, probably around eight or nine years ago. It was from a company called, oh man, what were they called? Stereo 3D Monitor. So anyway, the idea was that it was for... Oh, man.

Stereo display? I feel like it had like an X in it or something like that. Yeah, it was a stereo display. And so they were polarized vertically and horizontally. And then you wore polarized glasses. So it was passive instead of using active shutter glasses like NVIDIA's tech. And it was supposed to be for gaming. But it barely worked. And that thing looked like garbage when you weren't looking at 3D content.

Actually, it kind of looked like garbage when you were looking at 3D content. Anyway, they said that having two panels next to each other would introduce all kinds of visual anomalies. And I believe them. But having two modules and sharing some of the components that would make up a full panel assembly between them, things like light filters or polarization filters, they could work with. So what they've done is they've taken a full backlight. We're going to have a video on this that's quite a bit more detailed as part of our CES coverage that's going to roll out over the rest of tonight and then I believe tomorrow, and then regularly scheduled content is coming back on

I believe Sunday But they've got this light and they've taken a first panel and it's grayscale So it's black and white well not black and white because that wouldn't work very well, but grayscale so you actually see an image of The of the of like their demo has like a soccer player. Have you seen the demo? No. Okay. Unfortunately, it's in YouTube Stories that I did the thing, and there's absolutely no way to access Stories. I just like, I don't get the whole, like the whole thing.

You know how Instagram is like you can't post from not your phone, or at least for a long time you couldn't, and for a long time you couldn't even like browse it from not your phone like it would just tell you to load it up in mobile that was a long time ago yeah I wasn't born yet but I just hate like I just hate like intentionally locking things down so oh okay yeah so I can hold this up for you guys so that's normal multi zone and then this is what Hisense is doing. Oh, you can actually make out So the first clip was the LCD regular display regular like multi-zone backlighting

Okay, that was like local dimming change. Sorry. So that's that's the first one. That's local dimming So you see there's not much granularity to it. And then when we move over to the other side This is what Hisense is doing. So this is an LCD panel with a backlight behind it that is grayscale. So what happens is you've got bright where the image is bright, and then you've got dark where it's dark, but there's still quite a lot of bleed from those bright areas to the dark areas. But get this, in front of that module is an additional module that is 4K color. So what happens is in those areas,

in those halos around where the first one is letting light through, you get to apply another darkening layer on it. That second module can go full black as well. So you end up with an effect. You're just blocking those bleeding. You're, you're, you're blocking out the bleeding with an additional layer. So you end up with a multiplier effect. So the way that it stacks together is if you could block out one thousandth,

let's say, cause that's like a typical contrast, native contrast ratio, at least a couple of years ago. So if you could block one thousandth of the light that comes through, or sorry, 99 thousandths, if it was one thousandth the level, then instead of it being half of one thousandth for having two, you can block 99 thousandths again. So you end up with like.0003 nits of brightness on the black. Like I took my hands and I cupped them on the screen and like tried to see the backlight through it and it was really impressive really cool and No one else is showing anything like this and the whole thing is being in my opinion

Grossly underreported like I haven't seen any major publications like like beating the drum about this because it's really cool And so there's a cost benefit too, because instead of using expensive OLED panels, it uses two cheaper LCD modules to make a single panel. And it's very mature technology. The hard part was the algorithmic splitting of the incoming image into monochrome or excuse me, grayscale and full color, and then recombining it together, but maintaining the color tonality, which I mean, I've only seen demo content on it so far, but it looked pretty darn good. How thick is the display?

You know what? I didn't even think to check. I mean, tell me this. Okay, you've asked me this now twice. Why do you care how thick a TV is? I don't know. In the living room, you don't want a too thick TV. I don't know.

For me, thickness is really important for me. One of the reasons is to show off. Look at the TV, it's so thick. Why? Who cares? I cares. I cares about the thickness of the TV. Okay. Alright. Like...

You don't care about thickness? I mean, it's easy for me to say because I have like a W7 at home that's super thin. But like, before that, no. My TV at home right now is like this thick yeah it's probably because you didn't steal one from the office yet not yet but yeah I bought the second use use second hands like yeah I don't know 55 inch I think it's LCD as well I don't remember it probably is really old

probably yes all right well I think that's pretty much it for WAN Show today. We've actually kind of run over time. So thank you Dennis. Thank you. Dennis ended up lasting a lot longer than I thought and thanks to you guys for watching. We will see you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel! Bye-bye! Oh wait, hold on. Oh, I haven't done any super chats. Oh, hold on. Oh, I haven't done any super chats. Um, Mikkel says, Hey Linus, just want to say your coffee came in yesterday. I might do a video of me drinking it and to let you know how it tastes. Uh, I have to find a small grinder somewhere. Other than that, I managed to get two GTX 1080 TIs for 550 bucks. How's that for a

price? That's actually really good. That's awesome. Elliot, any microLED TVs demoed at CES? Actually, there were microLED demos, but I didn't end up getting a close look at any of them, so I'll have to get back to you on that one. Harris says, Linus, you don't understand machine learning. Azure slash AWS uses tons of data to make predictions. The vendor probably didn't have large data set to train. Right. But how do you make a prediction about, like, the GPU rendering frames in PUBG? I just, I'm ready to be proven wrong.

But they're saying that it's power allocation. But the issue that i have with this is that a well-designed laptop already like today doesn't power throttle when gaming so if we're not throttling if everything's going full full chooch as jake would say, then why do we need AI power distribution and reallocation? So, I mean, hey, I'm ready to be wrong here, but their demo didn't work either. So I also have the only evidence that I have yet to observe with my own eyes backing me up on this, but we shall see. Kyle says, did you get the gift my fiance sent you? She thought your sandals needed

extra style. You got a new one during Christmas. New socks? Oh, you didn't get a new sandal? I'm assuming it's the unicorn socks that arrived today. I was kind of wondering what was up with that. Robitron says, there's no wrong way to eat hot sauce.

No, yes, there is. The way to eat hot sauce was wrong. No, no, you put hot sauce on anything. Aldermere says just received my first edition LTT cable ties on the East Coast. Woo! Happy to hear that. Oh, yeah, I guess I should probably, like, pimp the store. Oh! I also want to see the unboxer. Can I see that?

Oh yeah, yeah, here's the unboxers. And, uh, oh yeah, Luke is hiring. So I have a couple of details about that as well. So guys, check out the store. It's actually doing really well. Um, I'm kind of impressed. So there's cable ties, there's a couple shirt designs. We're gonna have new shirt designs, uh, hopefully fairly soon.

And then, the stuff that, like, the reason we have a full-time person. So there's cable ties, there's a couple shirt designs. We're going to have new shirt designs hopefully fairly soon. And then the stuff that like the reason we have a full-time person, because I'm sure anyone looking at sort of like nine months of work and going, okay, so you've got what, like two new shirt designs and like a Velcro tie would probably go, that person really doesn't do a lot, do they? But no, we're actually hard at work on much more custom stuff because honestly, for my own part, I'm really not as into the stuff that like anyone can do. Like shirts are great and people love wearing shirts and like, you know, repping us and helping support us and all that stuff. But I want to also do highly customized stuff like what we did with the WAN hoodie,

but like more modern design, obviously, like we're not what we did with the WAN hoodie, but more modern design, obviously. We're not just gonna reprint WAN hoodie. And stuff that's really good. This uses- This box is really nice material. Yeah, we're not cheaping out on any aspect of it that we're aware of. Oh yeah, also this shirt, I got two, and it's really-

These are really nice, aren't they? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was, I mean, I guess I haven't really talked about this on WAN Show. I'm going to do Luke's thing first, and then I can kind of talk about why we revamped the merch store. So Luke is hiring. I'm going to link this in the chat here over on YouTube, because that's where the vast majority of you are watching. There we go.

Oh, we had a big drop off. Oops. Right, wrong keyboard. We had a big drop off when I said this show was over and now it's picking up again because people realize that I'm not actually done. So we're searching for a developer that has strong aptitudes in Linux, R hell, experience with orchestration tools like Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Teamform, excuse me, Terraform, sorry this text is really small. Terraform, Kubernetes, and has an understanding of virtualization and networking.

I put a link in the video description. Actually, there's a link in the description as well on all platforms as far as I know. There's a blurb there, reposting the infraposition and with more. Okay, we're also reposting our infrastructure position with more. Okay, we're also re-posting our infrastructure position with more clarification of what we're looking for. And also just a reminder about the migration. If you are still paying for Floatplane through the LTT forum, that is not going to be a thing anymore.

Check out the sticky on the forum for details on how to move over to floatplane.com. We know floatplane.com doesn't really have a homepage. Chill, we're working on it, but the payment system works. Okay, so now we can go through the merch store. So basically the idea was that we were selling shirts that were like printed to order. So they were like direct to garment printing. And I just really wasn't happy.

People would walk up to me at a show and I would, like, part of me was like, I know that they bought this to, like, support us, at least partially, but, like, I'd look at the quality of the printing on it and I'd be really unhappy because I want everyone who buys stuff from us to feel like they had a really great experience and I want like

anything with our brand on it to be really nice and what kept happening was we would get with merch companies and initially the quality would be great and then it wouldn't be until so our samples are all great and then it wouldn't be until i run into someone at a trade show and be like okay it might be a rip-off one they one. You can buy rip-off LTG merch. Somewhere. Stupid. Anyway, it might be a rip-off, but I know there were at least a couple of them that were real and were just representative of the degrading quality of both.

We've seen shirts swapped on us after the fact. We've seen printing processes swapped on us after the fact. I just wasn't happy with it. So we've taken complete control back in-house of all of our merch. And so we're only using American Apparel shirts. We're only using a nice high quality printing process. So you can see this shirt is really vibrant. That's all we'll accept now. This is probably not going to be quite so vibrant because this sample has a white inside, which we realized is probably not going to be quite so vibrant because this sample has a white inside which we realized is probably not a great idea For underwear, so we're going to do a black inside and then we're going to do a screen printed thing on it

But we're working on water bottles. We're working on some really cool custom hoodies We did we pulled a couple of the designs in the past and people seemed pretty amped on them and the boxers So these so right so not cheaping out on materials these use um it's like for sport like exercising no they just kind of feel like it because this material is like super like it's kind of stretchy and it's super soft I forget what it's called Lloyd would be able to tell me but like what do you think I it's really nice Like I I will like this. I think this is like for if you go exercising will be no those are they not just like cotton cotton ones, this is more stretchy and More air can go through this. Yeah, I forget I think I forget what the material is called. No, well, there's no tag. It's a sample

Yeah, this is just like a pre-production sample of it. The stitching looks nice. I think this is the third company that we've had samples arrive from. But yeah, we've got a lot more work to do. Oh, Madow. Madow. That's what the material is called. Who's watching? Nick. Yeah.

So yeah, we just want to take it up to a completely new level, and the stuff's not going to be super cheap, and it's going to take a long time for us to figure out international shipping because we're sort of new at this being an e-tailer thing. But stay tuned, guys, because we've been hard at work on a lot of iterations of things in order to finally reach final product stage and we want everything that we sell through the store from now on to be really, really good. So that's it you guys. We will see you again for real this time.

Next week, same bad time, same bad channel. They're still watching you. What? It's ending. Can you hear me now? Yeah, I can. This one's so good. This one's so good.

The other one I hit was way too easy.