The WAN Show - Newegg... More Like Rotten Egg! - WAN Show February 11, 2022

Starting point is 00:00:00 yeah well there's a difference between scope and just like a successful product and iterating that you want to add more features to yeah it's kind of a different thing welcome to the win show ladies and gentlemen uh that was a little awkward we've got a great show for you guys today we have lots of good topics oh boy see i always want to see the worst in everyone. So I had taken the situation between Gamers Nexus and Newegg and kind of gone, okay, well, here's all the different ways it could have gone. Yeah, forget all of that. Gamers Nexus posted a follow-up video yesterday basically proving that this is 100% on Newegg.

Starting point is 00:00:42 So we're going to talk about that. Also, Best Buy is at it again, putting GPUs behind paywalls. So we'll be discussing that. What else have we got today? It keeps getting worse. There are some contaminated materials at Kioxia. Kioxia. Kioxia.

Starting point is 00:00:58 Kioxia. Which is going to cause the loss of 6.5 exabytes. Exabytes. Exabytes. Exabytes worth of NAND. So flash prices are going to go up. That's the order it goes in. You've got your petabytes and then you've got your exabytes. And when you lose 6.5 million exabytes, it's sad.

Starting point is 00:01:25 Yeah. So that's going to suck. Also, rip Square, potentially, if stores actually end up using it. But tap to pay makes it so all iPhones can be used as mobile payment terminals. Whoops. That's going to be a little awkward. That's a pretty big deal. Let's roll that intro i figure we better jump right into this newwegg thing right off the hop here.

Starting point is 00:02:06 Last week, Gamers Nexus revealed how bad Newegg's return system was with an open box motherboard that they bought that had a problem with it that Newegg blamed on them, even though Gamers Nexus said they hadn't even opened the box. They just tried to return it saying, look, we don't need it anymore. Newegg refused the refund saying the board was damaged and Gamers Nexus was at fault. Oh boy, it gets worse. Yesterday, they posted a new video where they investigated the RMA chain. Apparently, Newegg RMA'd the board themselves to Gigabyte under Magnel Associates Inc., a company they own, which was

Starting point is 00:02:46 confirmed through corporate filings. I'm surprised they were able to get the name that they filed the RMA under. That's some good detective work. Gigabyte said it would cost $100 to fix it, which is actually a pretty reasonable quote for a socket replacement. That's among the lowest I've heard, but I've been out of the game for a little while back when back when i was doing this stuff it was more in the neighborhood of 150 to 200 and typically motherboards weren't even worth that much then so i guess it's kind of a good thing that motherboards are way more expensive because it's worth it to repair them anyway this is machine done now it was probably hand done back then. Hard to say.

Starting point is 00:03:26 There's been a lot of... You'd need machines either way, but... Yeah, for sure. Newegg apparently rejected the offer to fix it for $100. So then Gigabyte returned the board to Newegg. After this, Newegg sold the known defective board to Steve, meaning that he was out $500 despite never opening the box.

Starting point is 00:03:49 Apparently they left the Magnell Associates sticker on the box, which is amazing. Genius. Gamers Nexus unboxed the board. So they did get it back. Initially, my understanding is that Newegg had refused

Starting point is 00:03:59 to send the damaged board back to them. But now they've got it and the socket is in very rough shape. The thermal paste mentioned previously by customer support, though, is markedly absent. That was one of Newegg's claims, that there was thermal paste on the socket. Steve says he's been getting calls from Newegg.

Starting point is 00:04:17 Lol. I'm not surprised. So, now what? At what point is at what point do we look at this and go this couldn't possibly have been an error this had to be malice yeah it's a scam there's there's got to be i don't know what there's got to be something in here that's illegal. Well, Oh, there's almost certainly something in here that's illegal because ripping people off is illegal, but whether or not you do known defective product is, as yeah,

Starting point is 00:04:53 whether or not that illegal thing that new egg did was caused by an actual policy or whether it was caused by a careless, sloppy employee is a little bit harder to tell. And sometimes the line between those things can be blurry indeed. So let's walk through three possible scenarios here. Scenario number one is that Newegg's internal policy is that they should take back merchandise that is known defective, box it back up, and try to sell it as new, even though they know it doesn't work. Then when someone gets it and sends it back in for RMA,

Starting point is 00:05:31 they say, ha ha, too bad. Now we've got the money and the product. We win. That's probably not it. If you put that in writing, you're in trouble. I said last week when we talked about this, that if they had any kind of procedure like that, that existed, there would almost certainly be a whistleblower that would have called them out on it. And we had people saying there are whistleblowers. There's people who have bought things from Newegg and gotten ripped up. That's not what a whistleblower is. Yeah. A whistleblower is someone who is on the inside, someone who's in the know, who exposes this type of policy or this type of practice.

Starting point is 00:06:05 So I think we can say with a fair degree of certainty that that's probably not it. Okay, let's go the other route. We've got someone who just out of absolute dunderheaded carelessness managed to take this board and like in a sleepwalking state pack it back up into the box carry it out to the shelf get it scanned back into the system under a change the status because i'm sure they have like an internal rma like ticket system kind of like we had at ncix get it transferred back to stock marked as brand new rather than as refurbished, and then manage to sleepwalk themselves back to their station where presumably they woke up having had no awareness that they ever did any of this.

Starting point is 00:06:53 So lunchtime. Yeah. I think that we can probably agree that that is equally unlikely. Yeah. Okay. So let me talk through what I think is the more likely third scenario. Okay. So let me talk through what I think is the more likely third scenario. What I think is that Newegg's policy is by and large to do things pretty much correctly. And I think that by and large, most Newegg employees are awake at work. I mean, I don't know. I can't actually prove this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:07:22 I can't actually prove this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What can happen sometimes is that in spite of the policy being whatever it is, there can be pressure on employees. Or benefit structures or whatever. That might incentivize them to cut corners in certain ways. Oh, yeah. Say, for example, as an RMA technician, I was incentivized to have a very low rate of discard, right? Because when something comes in for customer RMA, right, there's a number of different paths that it can follow through the system. So it could be defective at no fault,

Starting point is 00:08:01 and it goes back to the manufacturer and you get a new one. It could be defective at no fault and it goes back to the manufacturer and you get a new one it could be defective at fault and then it would go back to the customer and they get nothing or you just keep it and dispose of it and you keep their money right so those are two options new egg clearly has a favorite one here um it could be defective at fault and you do the repair like what apparently happened with this particular board. But basically, there's different paths that it can follow. Now, there are cases where it might be that it's not the customer's fault, and it's not the manufacturer's fault, and you might have to just eat it. Like, say, for example, it comes back, and in testing, you realize, oh, the board is working just fine. We could sell it as an open box, and then you uh realize oh the board is working just fine we could sell it as an

Starting point is 00:08:47 open box and then you drop it on the floor now that's your problem and and you need to eat it so it could be just one quick thing somebody in chat said it was marked as open box you should watch the content to report on it correctly my i i never said it wasn't marked as open box i said that internally in their system during your sleepwalking thing you said scanned in as new inbox it he knows yeah but i'm talking about like a upc yeah yeah so it because you got to remember like how do i say this not every person working in a warehouse like picking and packing product is looking closely at what they're doing, right? So just because the box was clearly labeled doesn't mean anything. If it was in a pile and the number matches the number, it is quite possible that regardless of what markings are on

Starting point is 00:09:41 it, someone could just grab it and put it in a box and it could get shipped out. Anyway, so, sorry, where was I saying? What was I saying? You were talking... Right, right, right, third possible outcome. So you might have incentives to avoid certain final outcomes for RMA experiences,

Starting point is 00:10:04 and that might lead you to do things that are unethical or outright illegal, that are destructive to the customer. Now, it's one of those things that's really frustrating for me because it gives Newegg a layer of sort of plausible deniability. If they can, and we haven't seen yet how they are going to how they're going to respond to this. To my knowledge, they haven't actually addressed it publicly yet. So I don't know what yarn they're going to spin, but it does give them a layer of plausible deniability if they can just pin it on an individual employee and say, oh, well, it's their fault. So we've seen this kind of thing before. and i'm not saying this is absolutely what happened i'm just saying it seems like the most plausible one and an instance of this would

Starting point is 00:10:50 be the experiences that we've had dealing with dell that's what i'm reminded of i think you could make the argument that dell has done things as we've gone through our secret shopper experience with them that are unethical, illegal, and in some cases, both. Whether it is pushing financing on us or whether it's adding extended warranties to our order that we never agreed to or whether it's arranging for us to ship our computer to their depot when we actually had an on-site warranty that we had paid for.

Starting point is 00:11:25 Like, there's plenty of things that they clearly did wrong. And my belief is that even though Dell has talked to me about these experiences and said, this is not the experience we want people to have, it is my belief that because of the way their representatives are incentivized, because of the way that they're compensated, there's basically no other way to survive. So they could say, well, our policy is to offer nicely. But clearly, clearly, if you're in the know, you get pushy about it, get them commissions and you manage to you know eat a nice dinner every day that month instead of scraping by or whatever that difference ends up

Starting point is 00:12:14 being but i suspect it's a big one based on the consistency with which we've seen that behavior from dell so apparently have you seen paul's video uh i haven't watched paul's video unfortunately so apparently paul was an rma tech at new egg i know he worked at new egg i didn't know he was an rma tech me neither um and apparently he posted a video on dig new egg scam gamers nexus a former rma inspector's opinion i have not watched it it's probably excellent that's what i would say uh all right yeah if anyone has kind of a somewhat tldr at all that would be amazing uh would love to know paul's perspective and we're not just gonna pull a uh just watching someone else's content and reacting to it on stream thing

Starting point is 00:13:00 right now just this time but yeah i'm i'll definitely go check out the whole thing when i have time yeah i didn't know this came out i'll definitely watch it too just not now at this point i mean what do we do because it's pretty clear that this has happened to an abnormally large amount of people. That whether it's through policy or whether it's through... Lack of resources, negligence. Yeah. It's almost impossible to paint a picture where Newegg comes out looking like anything but shady here. Yeah. So now what do we do?

Starting point is 00:13:39 We've got Amazon. Great. We got Newegg. Great. Where do Newegg. Great. Where do you buy your computer hardware? I mean, Micro Center technically does have an online presence, and they've been pretty good from what we've seen so far. We've worked with them a lot.

Starting point is 00:13:55 And typically, especially when someone shows up in a sponsor spot with us, we will get people crawling out of the woodwork to tell us about their bad experiences with them. And by and large, everything that has come out about micro center has been very positive if i was american my reaction to this would probably be to go to micro center as a canadian my reaction to this would be like i don't know canada computers memory express something like that yeah but that's you're in canada yeah so that doesn't help our american friends yeah it's a micro center oh i haven't personally heard notable bad things about micro center i i have heard people say that they're like and someone literally just said this in floatplane chat but i have heard this elsewhere as well where they're like upset when they move

Starting point is 00:14:39 away from a micro center that type of stuff but like i don't know bnh also has some things yeah bnh though for component selection it's not amazing uh hey you're live on the wan show is that chill sure my daughter's in the car too though hey hi say hi okay she's shy yeah it was worth a shot i know how how it goes. Can you guys hear Paul? All right. Okay. Hopefully the chat's going to let us know. All right. So Paul, um, I actually did not know about your video before we came on stream and we wanted to talk about the gamers Nexus thing. And I figured, Hey, if, uh, since I've got you on speed dial anyway, can you, can you tell us a little bit about your experiences as an RMA tech? We already told people to go watch your video for the whole story,

Starting point is 00:15:29 but I need a TLDR and I didn't know where else to turn. Sure, yeah, and thank you. I mean, it was my job for about a year. It was within the first year that I joined Newegg. It was part of customer service, but I worked out in the RMA warehouse, which was attached to the same building. It was all in the same warehouse facility. Interesting. So at New Egg, sorry, at New Egg, the structure then is that RMA technicians also replied directly to customer tickets?

Starting point is 00:15:59 I can't speak to how they do it now. and I think it might be different now than it was then. Like, the point of my job at the time was to have someone who could talk to a customer and communicate and be like, oh, okay, take special circumstances into account. But, you know, I was also a customer service agent, not a warehouse worker. CS agents, I think think get paid more. So I'm not sure if at some point they decided that they should separate that and now there's a different team who looks at special RMAs in the warehouse versus the CS agents who are actually in direct contact with the customer. But at the time I had that ability. So I was there physically holding your return and also emailing back and forth with you. So it was a pretty, you know, there wasn't a, there wasn't any communication gap there.

Starting point is 00:16:49 Got it. Okay. And so from your experience working at Newegg, what are the odds that they could have accidentally sold this motherboard again, knowing that it was damaged? I mean, that's another good question. And also, it could also be something that is two separate departments at this point. There could be returns that go to one facility, and then there could be another facility that has actual open box products or other stuff like that. Um, that they, Hey, I'm live on the land ship. Hi.

Starting point is 00:17:32 Let me switch to my phone because I just got home. Okay. Can you still hear me? Oh yeah, absolutely. Okay. Um, so yeah. What was it? What was I talking about? It's entirely possible that wherever that open box, like whatever route that product took, as far as Newegg getting it, returning it back to Gigabyte, Gigabyte being like, no, we can't accept it, so you have to pay for it. so you have to pay for it. And then I don't know how it got back to Newegg and then how it got back into Newegg's inventory. That's the big mystery. And whether that was intentional or not, I mean, that's not necessarily a question mark.

Starting point is 00:18:13 Is there someone there who's like, oh, I'm going to take this product that was otherwise a loss and try to make something of it? Yeah. But, oh, and he's dead. Let's see if he comes back so one interesting thing and this was brought up on last one so i believe is that liaison interactive purchased out new egg in 2016 so paul would have worked for them before that hi you're back i'm back so so yeah so the so you kind of pitched the maybe

Starting point is 00:18:48 an enterprising employee who was trying to you know make some extra money for the company by selling a defective motherboard to someone or whatever could have conceivably done this and you know what that might have been one of my possible hypotheses

Starting point is 00:19:04 as well because I remember back at ncix the ebay department um and this was honestly what i felt probably happened with that uh that fiasco where msi was caught scalping gpus supposedly um and my understanding is this ultimately was what happened is that the ebay department is not necessarily involved in every strategic business meeting and will sometimes just go and do very random rogue stuff so I can tell you from my experience at NCIX once something made its way into eBay land the odds of something sketchy happening went up exponentially like they were much higher but the problem for me is that this is a product that was just not bought on ebay like it was just bought on newegg.com

Starting point is 00:19:54 yeah that combined with you know how they're labeling the open box stuff a lot less obviously now um that's a concern because it isn't it it's not the kind of product that should have been sold as a new product like that should be completely separate inventory but once you get into the stuff that has already been handled or returned or you know damaged in shipping or something like that all of that i will say that when i worked in the rma warehouse stuff piled up like there was stuff that arrived that even i was like well it's not you know i'm not responsible for it or whatever things would just get shoved off into the corner because there was nothing else to do with it and eventually you might have someone come along who's like

Starting point is 00:20:32 let's try to make more profit out of that of this stuff regardless of its condition um but but yeah i think if you want to give new benefits of the doubt and assume that there is maybe a problem here that could be fixed, if there is someone at the company who is making shady decisions and deciding to take products like that and try to resell them and be like, aha, the customer is just going to get screwed over but will make some money, like if that person gets rooted out, then cool. Right. then cool right you know if there's someone who has oversight over this who is also aware of it and it's you know a bigger problem that then obviously that's a bigger problem and people should hold them accountable for how they're treating customers the most unbelievable one to me because i don't even i don't even actually necessarily mind that the label is not super obvious i mean going back to ncix our systems weren't particularly advanced, but I can tell you that our internal label would say refurbished on it if it was anything other than brand new. And it wasn't super obvious, but what would happen is we tracked it electronically.

Starting point is 00:21:47 manually move this thing out of the rma pool into not an open box and not a refurbished pool but into a brand new inventory pool because and i'm assuming new egg has to have at least this level of sophistication there was absolutely no way that on a customer invoice because the way it worked is you'd get the bin the bin would roll down the conveyor and then we had the scanning station that would verify the contents of the bin against the physical invoice at the time of uh before it would go on to the next conveyor where it would be boxed and shipped and so the way that process worked was every single item in the bin would be scanned against the physical invoice and then we would check electronically in the system to make sure that the electronic version of the invoice matched the physical one and that that matched the contents of the bin. And there was no way to scan an open box item onto a brand new purchase because they

Starting point is 00:22:41 were separate inventory pools. And there is just no conceivable way for me that even if you could miss the label, right? You can miss a label, okay? You can miss a piece of text or a piece of tape or even a big piece of paper taped onto something. You can miss that conceivably if you were sleepwalking. But there's no way... The sticker on the motherboard was massive, unsteeped. Yeah, but there's no way that you can miss. There's no way you can miss a misscan

Starting point is 00:23:10 where it says, hey, this order is not complete. Like, we had a sound that played. Like, it wouldn't let you do it. It can't be that bad. And that should be to prevent the wrong item getting put in the box and shipped to the customer. So I guess you're questioning whether he even got the proper item that was supposed to be sent to him or if just somehow oopsie in the warehouse they tossed in this random crappy open box motherboard

Starting point is 00:23:35 with pins versus the one that they were actually supposed to ship. So the chat's clarifying that it was marked open box. So that's fine. But either way, guys, inventory pools at an organization like an NCIX or like a Newegg are going to be tracked separately. Your RMA pool of inventory, like when you're, okay, when you're a product manager, because that's what I did. When you're a product manager going through your inventory report for gigabyte motherboards,

Starting point is 00:24:03 right? I don't see inventory on that report that is in our RMA pool. How would that be useful to me in my job, right? I see open box and I see brand new inbox, but I don't see RMA. When you move something from one place to another, a decision has to be made to do that. And there's no way that you could scan something on a brand new invoice that is open box. And there should be no way that you can scan something from an RMA pool that is supposed to be open box. Do you kind of get what I mean? So how the heck could this possibly happen?

Starting point is 00:24:40 And that's maybe why it deserves a lot more scrutiny. And that's maybe why it deserves a lot more scrutiny, because I would be curious to know what agreements are in place between manufacturers, such as an MSI or a Gigabyte, and a retailer, when it comes to the resale of products that have been returned or that are open box or something like that. And here's the other thing. It's a Z590 motherboard, right was it's not a new motherboard no like how many open box versions of how many open box of that motherboard do they have i would bet it's a very very small amount yeah i'd wager it's not very many but somebody has you know created it maybe aed SKU or something like that for open box versions of the same product and then listed it for sale. So that's why to me it doesn't seem like the wrong product was tossed in the box. It seemed like they intentionally listed this motherboard specifically for sale on the website.

Starting point is 00:25:40 And obviously they shouldn't have. But how did it get there And who's job is it currently To take products like this And list them for sale And are they being very very very horrible At their job Or potentially even You know

Starting point is 00:25:58 Going over that line to the point where they're Scamming customers I gotta tell you I have a big problem with open box motherboards in the first place because the motherboard, I'd say right up there with memory, is the component, is probably the most likely component to have some kind of problem with it that isn't obvious immediately.

Starting point is 00:26:20 If you kind of get what I mean? Yeah. And so... Like a NIC not working or something like that exactly or like an instability issue that only pops up once every six hours or something like that like it's far more likely to encounter something like that on a motherboard or on a stick of memory compared to a cpu for example yeah or a case obviously obviously, like it's just, it's what, or a GPU. GPUs are typically broken or they're not broken. And it's relatively obvious. You know what I mean? And so even just

Starting point is 00:26:55 the practice of selling a motherboard that has already been returned should be, should be should be approached so cautiously and so carefully that never mind if it has a mangled socket right you should be double checking and triple checking that there was actually nothing wrong with this board that it was only returned because they exchanged it for a different one with better on board graphics or a different color scheme or whatever the case may be and that you know for a fact that it's working so to play devil's advocates as i know you like to do sometimes and come at it from the manufacturer's perspective because you know how slim the margins are in in this industry i do should all motherboards cost a few more dollars well to absorb the impact of having to eat the cost of returns and not sell them as open box or, you know, handle it in that sort of way.

Starting point is 00:27:50 It's funny you mentioned that. We actually talked about the race to zero. I mean, I'm sure you've heard the term a thousand times being in this industry. Two percent more. And we talked about this on the WAN show last week where we, Luke and I talked about how we should turn LTTstore.com into an electronics retailer and that'll be our model we'll just mark everything up like literally two two and a half percent more would probably be all that you would need to have industry leading customer service compared to everybody else because those that is how slim it was do you

Starting point is 00:28:23 remember when new egg tried to go IPO? Yeah, oh yeah, I remember that. They were supposed to have some stock options that never really went up to anything. Well, they would have been pretty poopy stocks because, I don't know, did you look at the financials? Neweggs? Yeah, Neweggs. it's a long time ago the net profit was somewhere in the neighborhood of like one percent and on on like i think it was on like about a billion

Starting point is 00:28:58 dollars annually in sales like it was a freaking lot of money in sales. And so 1% of a billion dollars is still a freaking lot of money, right? It's all about that volume, right? But nobody is going to invest in a company that is making 1% net profit. So I think that's something a lot of viewers don't really understand when I do tend to come at things from a manufacturer's or from a retailer's perspective is that there's no free lunch. If you want cheap as chips electronics, it comes from somewhere. Now, that's not an excuse. You still have to abide by the law.

Starting point is 00:29:42 And it appears as though new egg whether intentionally or unintentionally clearly did not do that here you're putting it in pretty stark terms there and yeah i mean it's are we ever going to find out for sure whether it was intentional or unintentional? Is there ever going to be any sort of like direct addressing of this by Newegg on some level? Not unless there's a whistleblower. So if anyone from Newegg is watching, I implore you now, blow the whistle. Get in touch with us. We want to see the internal tickets that have been sent around about this case

Starting point is 00:30:21 because I guarantee you they've made it to the VP level at this point. Yeah. I want to hear from you. What happened made it to the VP level at this point. Yeah. I want to hear from you. What happened? Someone blow the whistle. I'm ready. Or better yet, reach out to Steve from Gamers Nexus because he's the one who should be breaking

Starting point is 00:30:32 this story. All right. All right. Thanks, Paul. Yeah, thanks for calling and have a great rest of the way and show. And what's up, Luke? That's Luke, right? Hi, Paul.

Starting point is 00:30:42 Thanks. Better believe it. Hi, Luke. Man man it's been so long yeah we'll have to are you going to computex this year i'm i'm currently that is like my intent yeah okay i will i want to go so uh if there's computex man we gotta have like a reunion dinner or something i haven't seen you in forever yeah that would be awesome all right all right later dude all right thanks guys bye so there you have it um paul with the very unusual for him balanced take just kidding obviously paul is a very balanced and level person he really is um new egg stalker the last year has gone whof by the way um yeah

Starting point is 00:31:26 i mean it's terrible terrible but if i was an investor it's the last bit i mean i've had every opportunity guys i have had every opportunity do you know how easy it is to sign up for a distributor account with like bell micro or ingram or whatever uh and start just like drop shipping selling electronics do you guys have any idea how easy that is we could probably be set up in a matter of hours there's a reason that i got better stuff to do like selling these wonderful thread ripper edition you want to have a good customer service experience we do have good customer service being serious because we shamelessly charge enough for

Starting point is 00:32:06 our products that we can afford to have okay it's a little slow right now we are hiring more people but it's good we will get you taken care of uh but yeah we charge enough that we can actually afford to provide you know proper solutions when people have a problem and so we've got a number of new products we announced the abc book character plushes last week. And this week, we've got the Couch Ripper. It's available in three different sizes. So Luke's got the big one. It's huge.

Starting point is 00:32:36 It's massive. He's got that big one. And I'm holding the medium one. And this is the itty bitty little small one. So you guys can check them out. They are significantly more expensive than the medium one. And this is the itty bitty little small one. So you guys can check them out. They are significantly more expensive than the Intel version, but let's, you know, they're better. What do you want me to say?

Starting point is 00:32:52 No, no, no. It's because they're bigger. It's just because they're Threadripper shaped and sized. So they just are stuffed with a lot more stuff. But it starts at just $19.99 for the cute little couch ripper one that you can just you know put on a shelf or whatever as a little decorative piece all right so new egg there's no way for them to come out of this looking good i don't think we'll ever get a clear answer as to what exactly

Starting point is 00:33:14 happened which leaves us finally back to the question i asked probably like 20 minutes ago at this point what do we do is this boycott worthy i would personally you would just not shop there anymore yeah you're done at least for a period of time send a message yeah okay we've we've said for the entirety of the length of the land show has been live to vote with your wallet right absolutely even if it's a temporary thing you can can do that. Send a message. If I was a consistent Newegg customer, I would pause my Newegg customer-ness for at least a temporary period of time. What do you think is fair?

Starting point is 00:33:53 What do they deserve? A quarter? Six months? A year? I'd do at least six months. You'd say six months. Yeah. But that's on like a personal level, right?

Starting point is 00:34:01 I was feeling like six months was a pretty good length of time as well. What is my level of impact here? I mean, tell you right now we've paused working with new egg um from a sponsor standpoint like as a canadian um new egg isn't my go-to for buying electronics anyway they do have a store up here but they're not necessarily as competitive with you know canadian first retail outlets so i would just go to Memex or I'd go to Canada Computers or whatever. I've been going to Memex. I like that they have a very local place.

Starting point is 00:34:30 I like picking up my stuff. I don't really know why. I've just always, it was always a ritual for me to go pick up my stuff from NCX. And now I do that still from Memex. Yeah, for sure. So for me, I don't really have a way of,

Starting point is 00:34:43 I don't really have a way of pushing I don't really have a way of pushing back on new egg from a customer standpoint, but from a, and this is sort of ironic, um, from a sponsorship standpoint, which is actually me, them being the customer, uh, they, they like, they pay me for sponsorships. I could stop taking their money. And because presumably when they pay me money, there's a greater return for them. So, so it's sort of like, it's very ass backwards, but I think you guys get the point. So I'm with you. Let's say six months of not working with Newegg, at which time we're going to reevaluate it. And this is a great opportunity for me to show you guys that we've actually started a new

Starting point is 00:35:22 initiative here to give you guys an opportunity to weigh in not just on Newegg when we revisit this in six months, but also our other sponsors. There's actually a whole new section of the forum here called LMG Sponsor Discussion, where we are going to be posting new sponsorship opportunities that come up. Obviously, we're going to do our own due diligence on sponsors. That's something that we have been working consistently to improve over the last few years as we've grown our business team. But we want to hear from you guys because a lot of the time our experience won't necessarily mirror the same or the experiences that consumers might have had. And it also doesn't allow us to look back in time. We might go and

Starting point is 00:36:05 order something from some new sponsor and we might have a fantastic experience. They might have our address flagged. You never know. I wouldn't put it past. That's not even that sophisticated these days. We've literally said if we were working at these companies, we would do it. Absolutely. They might have our address flagged. They might have recently cleaned up their act. And maybe they were really shady six months ago. And there would be no way for us to know that other than hearing from the community. So we want you guys to start really being an active participant in the brands that we should be working with that you feel are complementary to our brand. So that's where we're at on that. We want to hear from you guys.

Starting point is 00:36:47 But Newegg, I think we've heard the message loud and clear. Six-month pause on working with Newegg, so we'll revisit it sometime in August, I guess. Yeah, yeah. All right, that means they're going to miss out on the back-to-school period. Should we jump on a few curated messages? Yeah, let's do that.

Starting point is 00:37:04 Just see if there's any like specifically about that or anything else absolutely oh shoot i don't have it open what happened to my tab oh balls uh well you're on it then okay uh never mind i have it it has a new um favicon so i got oh yeah i don't know why it's a bike but okay it's a bike linus bike that's a thing yeah actually yeah true and it's orange so you know whatever uh hold on mt hammer says i legit can't think of a company that was shady and no longer is um there are companies that have rehabbed their images in significant ways here's one lucky gold star really lucky gold star was known for being absolute garbage back in like the 80s early 90s nowadays, you know them as... I don't remember, actually.

Starting point is 00:38:12 Lucky Gold Star. Lucky Gold Star. LG? Yeah. It's just LG? Interesting. Okay. For me, personally, Zotac.

Starting point is 00:38:24 Okay. Yeah, i'll take it yeah because when when i was first getting into computer stuff it was like i don't know i didn't know them as like bad for customer service or anything but generally i knew them as like generally lower quality products cheaper stuff and whatnot and then as the years have gone on quality's gone up um their their like attention to detail on different things like they seem very legit they've really innovated they've done some really cool like ultra compact cards and stuff like that over the years they drove a lot of those ultra compact cards for a while there so like yeah i've seen them on the come up quite a bit uh people who are like lmao i literally thought lg stood for life's good

Starting point is 00:39:06 well it does now but it's good for lucky gold star back then a lot of a lot of particularly asian companies started out with um sort of more uh names that were more culturally appropriate over there and then rebranded to more western sounding names to yeah microstar international uh dfi remember dfi motherboards diamond flower international like that's just a thing that's like a very taiwanese way of branding i mean asus was pegasus yeah that's where the asus pegasus pegasus and so they when they split uh into Pegatron which is their manufacturing arm and Asus which is their consumer electronics arm Pega and Asus yeah that's cute all right yeah uh one of the merch messages from Maria M is hey Luke any advice on Hyundai Kia

Starting point is 00:40:02 that's another one I didn't know that Hyundai and Kia no no no just like that they sucked and now they're great oh okay yeah like oh man Kia whoa yeah weren't they just like super trash yeah yeah I don't know as much now you're like you look at the key like damn sweet look at that Kia uh Maria M. Merch Message says, Hey Luke, any advice for a first custom keyboard build? Do lots of research. And I think one of the biggest gap makers in custom keyboards is whether you actually use Lube or not. You should really do it.

Starting point is 00:40:39 A lot of people don't, and it's a big detractor in the overall feel of your board. You should use Lube. Luke 2022. Yeah, it's a big detractor in the overall feel of your of your board you should use lube luke 2022 yeah it's a good idea just makes you know just it all works a little bit better a little bit smoother um it feels better david says i'm pleasurable experience i'm struggling to balance working toward my dream career and family troubles at home during your career grind has there ever been a time when you felt overwhelmed okay so at risk of tmi here uh my wife and i have a dual head shower and we often shower together and we've actually found that when we're in the shower together is one of the few times that we can like really talk because you're not doing anything else when you're in the shower right like there's no kids bothering well

Starting point is 00:41:33 okay we're married so clearly clearly that doesn't happen anymore so when you're in the shower your your, your, your, your attention is focused entirely on each other other than, you know, some absent minded soap in the pits, if you know what I'm saying. So, um, we've had a lot of like big talks in the shower.

Starting point is 00:41:57 Yeah. And one of the times that really stands out to me is a time that we were having like quite an emotional talk and like she was well quite quite emotional and talking about how i keep saying we got to reach this next milestone and then we reach the milestone whether it's moving into the Langley house that we used as an office or paying off the Langley house or getting moved into the office or paying off the office or hiring this next set of writers. After we get this round of writer hires, it'll be fine and I'll have more time. And she's like, you keep pushing, you keep kicking this can down the road. You keep saying, okay, when we have kids,

Starting point is 00:42:47 I'll be family first. When the kid's old enough to remember anything, I'll be family first. When this, family first. Well, when is it going to happen? And, you know, when am I going to be, when am I going to be first? When are you going to focus on doing stuff with me, with us? And what we both ultimately came around to, what we realized, is that even though our life is consumed by work and by taking care of kids and by, you know, things that, you know, I think a lot of people would consider to be chores, right? And even though we didn't't we never took a break like we went straight from dating to marriage we took a two-week honeymoon that was that was it and then we got we buckled right down into it i mean we got we got married in april and we had our first baby in april all right and it was not shotgun wedding not not the same April, the following April. But we basically got back from our honeymoon and got down to it. Right. So we never really like took a break. And, you know, I think that's been really hard.

Starting point is 00:43:56 I think that's been really hard on both of us and especially Yvonne. And what we ultimately came around to and what I think has given us both a lot more peace is that we have to see those choices that we made as things that we do together. Yeah. It can't be like, oh, all we did, all we talked about this week was work and parenting. It has to be work and parenting is what we do. For better or for worse, those are the life choices we've made. Those are our hobbies those are you know maybe we don't build model ships and bottles together maybe what we do is

Starting point is 00:44:31 we parent three amazing children together that's what we do that's what we do together and so ever since we reframed work and we reframed child care in that manner it's been far less of an issue for us i mean obviously you have to set aside couple time you have to yeah uh you have to spend one-on-one time together doing nothing but just looking at each other and talking to each other because otherwise you will not make it um you could i guess i i told myself i wasn going to have any hot takes today, but I guess that's one. And I, uh, man, I forget where I was really going with this, but the point is, where did this even go? Did you ever feel like there was time when you felt overwhelmed? Yeah, absolutely. How'd you stay positive and focused? I mean, working on things together was a big part of it. And, and that was, that was a big part of that conversation too, is that, yeah, we're doing this thing.

Starting point is 00:45:26 And, you know, okay, it's called Linus Media Group. And that's not always easy for you because you're in the background a lot of the time. But you got to understand, like, I can't do it without you. And I know a lot of people don't appreciate properly what you do. But a lot of them do. The ones that were there from the beginning know what you do and i know what you do but i mean that's still like got to be hard for her right because it's like i think it still is linus media group linus tech tips uh she almost never gets that that

Starting point is 00:45:56 face time um and a lot of the time and this is really frustrating even internally she's working on things that are not um not for not for employee consumption like you know she'll be working on something like back okay back when we were at the langley house she was the one who did everything oh yeah getting this place arranged and set up and like a huge spectrum whoa my headphones just popped in and out um a huge spectrum of work too because not only did she do a the leg work on acquiring the place which is extremely difficult on its own um but also going every like setting the whole place up all the way through like architectural design to actual just like room design very hands-on extremely hands-on yeah so spend time together um as for as for staying positive i mean setting small goals um try not to trying to make them realistic you know

Starting point is 00:46:53 when i would set small goals and be like okay let's get to this milestone but then you just like keep going you keep going 100 no matter what um take breaks i mean these are all things that are you're gonna find in any sort of general life advice book or article but they're true don't ignore them i guess would be would be my summary i think the the thing that i've been most concerned about your guys aside from is the vacations and i can't speak very well for this because I burn most of my vacation time. Yeah, you're stupid. Yeah. He's like, honestly, like I say that in the most affectionate possible way, but you're an idiot. He has vacation time.

Starting point is 00:47:33 I tell him, go away. Stop working. Goodbye. And then he's like replying to emails and stuff and i'm like goodbye yeah and he just does because we only we only allow vacation time to accrue for so long because we can't have people just like taking six months off all of a sudden in a row like like you know i think we let you carry it over one extra year i know. I don't remember the policy anymore. But the point is that taking vacation time is healthy. Yes.

Starting point is 00:48:08 And so our policy is that you have to use it because you are supposed to use it. I did before COVID lockdowns. I did. Sort of. Yeah. Sort of. Yeah. I want to go travel.

Starting point is 00:48:21 The only thing I really like to take vacation time to do is go travel. So it's hard to do that when that's been mostly shut down. But a lot of your vacation time that you've taken, and again, I'm not the right person to criticize on this, but a lot of the vacation time that you've taken has had to be things that are akin to work. It's not been particularly restful. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah so i've always kind of been concerned about that because everybody needs that battery recharge time right yeah i mean for me honestly speaking there's there's different things that recharge me more sure like i'd say i got more recharged from that intel trip checking out the fabs than i would have from a vacation dude i totally see that actually i uh

Starting point is 00:49:05 i i really miss like work trips i worked the brandon and luke bottom trips were were huge battery rechargers for me even though it was like gas gas gas 100 of the time yeah it was yeah it's it's a change of pace like i was freaking going oh yeah but but it feels good it's like a yeah but yeah i was on my way out of there one night and one of the intel employees asked me oh are you gonna do any sightseeing while you're here and i was like no are you kidding me i already saw the coolest thing that's what we're doing all day in this whole country yeah wait what did you think i was here for yeah i don't have to do this anymore yeah i don't travel anymore like that's something i actually haven't really talked about that publicly but i think viewers have probably noticed that i don't go

Starting point is 00:49:49 anywhere anymore i went down to i went down to seattle for valve because that was like an hour and a half drive and it was the freaking steam deck yeah okay going to valve is kind of so in the last two years i have gone to valve and I have gone to the Intel Fab. That is it. I'm out. And I'll do Computex because I love Computex. I love Taipei. I love getting together with all the other tech nerds.

Starting point is 00:50:15 They're my people. For some reason, especially good at that. Yeah, it's great. The meetups, yeah. I just want to go walk around with Wendell again. I know, right? I hope he goes That would be great

Starting point is 00:50:26 We were literally talking about it not that long ago I hope he goes too I'm going Am I paying for it? Yeah Interesting Okay anyway I forget what we were talking about there

Starting point is 00:50:43 He's on float plane. Okay. Yeah. So you got to meet with Wendell and you have to do it in Taipei. That makes perfect sense. Yep. Well, why don't we go ahead and actually we should get through our sponsor spots real quick here. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:50:56 Because we talked about like nothing. Thanks to DigitalOcean for sponsoring today's WAN show. Cloud computing can be complex to say the least, but reliable and affordable cloud infrastructure really doesn't have to be. And that's where DigitalOcean comes in. With DigitalOcean, you can enjoy a comprehensive portfolio of compute, storage, database, and networking products that put your cloud infrastructure in capable hands so you and your teams can get back to doing what matters most, building world-changing apps that grow your business. With predictable pricing, robust product docs, and services that developers love, DigitalOcean has you covered.

Starting point is 00:51:27 Get support at every stage of growth from teams of one to teams of 1,000 with simple, powerful cloud computing. So get growing with DigitalOcean. Go to do.co.wanshow2022 to get started for free. Again, that's do.co.wanshow2022 to get started with DigitalOcean for free. Thanks to ShipStation for sponsoring today's WANSHOW. The new year's off to a solid start, but things aren't getting any less crazy.

Starting point is 00:51:56 Between growing your business, managing inventory, and juggling orders, you've got a lot going on. Make the switch to ShipStation, the solution that handles all of your shipping needs quickly, affordably, and painlessly. You can easily track orders from any sales channel, find the best shipping carrier with deeply discounted rates, and automate just about any shipping task. This means you can spend less time sorting through orders and more time doing what you do best. On top of all this, ShipStation integrates all selling channels into one simple dashboard, so you can seamlessly connect carriers, print shipping labels, and get products out the door fast. Over 100,000 e-commerce sellers use ShipStation for their business. Use our offer code WAN to get a 60-day free trial. That's two months of stress-free shipping for free. Save time, save money, and save your sanity by heading over to ShipStation.com, clicking on the microphone at the top of the page and typing in WAN.

Starting point is 00:52:48 Shipstation, make ship happen. All right. What's our next big topic today? I'm just looking at these merch messages, but we do have a few things. There's the Best Buy thing. Oh, yeah. Best Buy's at it again. Okay.

Starting point is 00:53:03 So tell me this. What is the difference between Best Buy's controversial Total Tech membership, which has already been used to block off access to PlayStation 5s and Xboxes? What is the difference between their Total Tech membership and, say, for example, a members-only store in the first place like Costco? Tell me. Because now GPUs are behind the Total Tech paywall. example a members only store in the first place like costco costco um tell me because now gpus are behind the total tech paywall and there's been a whole lot of shenanigans around this because some people didn't have it already and they went to get it so they could buy a gpu but they were

Starting point is 00:53:37 all gone and then it's like 200 a year for a total tech membership and they're like uh where's my gpu at yo i think one of the big differences is that the costco membership i believe is like 40 bucks a year for a total tech membership? And they're like, uh, where's my GPU at, yo? I think one of the big differences is that the Costco membership, I believe, is like 40 bucks a year. And you get money back and stuff. Only with the credit card, I think. Or is that with the, no, with the executive membership. But that one's cost more.

Starting point is 00:53:59 That one's way more. Right. So what's the difference? Why are people so upset? I'm playing devil's advocate to be very clear i don't actually think it's all that different um there's there's a difference because you can still shop at some of the store um you just can't buy the the like highly desired items um but the total tech membership comes with other stuff as well i don't remember everything in it uh extended warranty and i think you like automatically get whatever it's called i don't

Starting point is 00:54:29 remember but the best buy exclusive extended warranty thing i think you automatically get some amount of geek squad coverage and some other stuff i don't remember chat's good chat's going right now they're going right now it's great the difference is price it's 200 for a chance yeah yeah okay you guys are right just let me play devil's advocate okay you yeah the price is super brutal the the fact that it's a chance is super brutal yeah um the fact that costco's membership gives you access to everything in the entire store at a deal instead of just the opportunity to buy something at MSRP. It's not even a deal. Yeah. It's basically a reseller program that you enroll in disguised as a consumer program. It's sort of my take on it. Now, something I don't know. I'm not American. I don't shop at

Starting point is 00:55:17 American Best Buy. So I have no idea. I've never actually looked into buying this for myself. But can you buy more than one GPU if you have a membership? If there's anyone who's got a membership, let me know. Or do they use the membership as a way of validating that you are just one person to make it difficult to justify buying a new membership for every time you buy a GPU, like eating into your scalper margins? Tell me that. The fact that it's paying for a chance, I find actually rather hilarious. Tell me that. The fact that it's paying for a chance, I find actually rather hilarious.

Starting point is 00:55:55 I honestly think the inclusion of the other benefits under the Total Tech program is mostly so that it doesn't just look like you're paying to enter a lottery. Yes. But as a reseller, you would certainly benefit from extended warranties. Oh, for sure. Why not? Yeah, it sure is interesting. Blame it on dev says there's no limit zerfel says you can as long as it's a different brand and medav van says i have no idea what buying a gpu feels like in any capacity oh that's sad to be frank it's not that great they're very expensive even when they weren't like this, they were still pretty expensive.

Starting point is 00:56:27 Have you started your Steam Deck exclusive? I haven't. I'm not going to do that until after I do the review, because I want the switch to the Steam Deck to be on final software. And I mean, final is a very funny word in this case. That's fair enough, though. Yeah. I want to have the customer experience.

Starting point is 00:56:46 Release software. Using exclusively the Steam Deck for a month. Yeah. That's my goal. Sure. Because I was going to say, like, honestly, at certain prices, like, I have heard people that didn't know you were going to do that mention, like, huh, a reasonable upgrade path might be buying a Steam Deck as my new computer.

Starting point is 00:57:04 I know, right right which is just crazy um but kale fess and floatplane chat says you can buy different skews but not more than one of each so a friend managed to get the entire founders edition series other than a 60 ti um with the tech tech whatever it's called uh total tech membership in the drop the other day. So there you go. Thank you. Thank you for clarifying that for us. If you're a kid or a teenager or whatever, and you really can't find a card,

Starting point is 00:57:32 you don't want to try to support scalpers, you buy this thing, and then your opportunity doesn't really come up, like that's got to burn so much. Oh, that sucks. That sucks. 200 bucks is a lot. Hey, at least you've got an extended warranty

Starting point is 00:57:45 didn't buy thanks dell oh wait sorry i yeah that's that's brutal because like what i remember back in the like what was it ps4 um i don't even remember what they call the xbox of that generation but whatever xbox one xbox one yeah the ps4 and xbox one launch we had a conversation topic talking about how like 300 was the like monthly extra spend for a household price point target thing yeah like just talking about how why is it that you know your your entry level consumer electronics but still premium so you know like why is it that you know an ipod uh you know the base model ipod is 300 bucks and a game console is like 300 to 400 bucks and like like all this stuff is around that price and we

Starting point is 00:58:39 were kind of talking about how that's that threshold between I can't, like I can spend this money without thinking about it at all. And I have to save up for multiple months. It's like riding that. It hits a lot of people within that column. Yeah. So the fact that it's $200 and that's such a significant portion of that amount of money. Yes, it's been a decent amount of time since then inflation has happened that number has probably gone up a little bit but still 200 bucks is like that's a very considerable amount of money oh it's a ton of money for a chance it's a ton of money what the heck that's brutal man have you ever tried to look at the youtube chat it goes so fast i can't even Yeah, it doesn't like buffer send like Twitch does. Sir Flufficus had a really good point here. The Steam Deck CAD files are a big deal.

Starting point is 00:59:29 Valve released CAD files for the Steam Deck housing. You know, it's funny. I asked them for them prior to launch because we were considering working on a case before we found out that Valve was going to make their own case and just include it with this. We're like, oh, okay, well, that's pointless. But we were going to do a case that would like fit inside the backpack for the Steam Deck. Oh, okay. I think the Steam Deck's going to be just such it with this. Okay, well, that's pointless. But we were going to do a case that would fit inside the backpack for the Steam Deck. I think the Steam Deck's going to be such a game changer. They're going to sell so freaking many of these things.

Starting point is 00:59:51 Anyway. If I can make enough. Yeah, well, that's a thing. So I actually asked them. I was like, hey, can we get the file? Can we either get an early one, an earlier one, so that we can start working on this, or can you send us the file so we can 3D print it?

Starting point is 01:00:06 And they just like, we're like, no. And then they never mentioned it again. And then suddenly they just dropped the CAD files, which is amazing. So that means that basically anyone, at least I think, can use those to develop accessories for the Steam Deck or their own personal. Little 3D printed case.

Starting point is 01:00:27 Say, for example, you know, a full size SSD adapter dude out of the jig. Because there's so much space, like it's thick on the sides, but it's actually quite skinny in the middle. So if you made a new back piece, right? You wouldn't even really notice. That had like a little. You gotta dodge the buttons. Carve out for it. You gotta dodge the buttons.

Starting point is 01:00:44 That'd be super awesome. right yeah uh cosmos says everyone i talk to thinks it's overhyped it won't be a game changer it's just a handheld gaming device i guess by that logic the nintendo switch wasn't a game changer it was just a handheld gaming device right yeah who cares yeah how many nintendo switches did they move uh i think it was like uh dozens was it dozens i think it's at least a few dozen uh yeah total total switch sales uh oh sorry uh hold on i i gotta run some numbers here uh calculator uh here let me just do it. How many dozens is this? Mm-hmm. Divided by 12. Okay, so it was 7,583,333 dozens.

Starting point is 01:01:32 That's a few dozens. That's a few dozens. That's a few dozen switches. And not only that, but look at this sales curve. It's barely even flattening. Handheld gaming is a thing, ladies and gentlemen. That's kind of and gentlemen and what's so cool about the steam deck is the library a it's enormous and b it's cheap yeah it's so cheap how much does it cost to buy a game on the switch compared to the steam deck in a lot of cases double triple even yeah it's ridiculous even the same same games and

Starting point is 01:02:06 and here's the coolest thing moore's law might be dead but there are other laws and computers are definitely still getting faster so at the rate that nintendo iterates which is slow conceivably we could see new steam decks year over year with spec improvements that yeah right now okay you're right battery life bit of a bit of a fly in the ointment unless you're playing pretty casual games over time i expect that to improve i am freaking excited because it's going to be an extremely big deal there i've said it once again and i'll probably say it again another person in chat brought up a really good point too is that you can buy a steam deck and then you automatically if you're a pc gamer you automatically have a library of games for the new device now you don't

Starting point is 01:02:58 have to buy new games that's right there that's right very cool freaking amazing i don't necessarily think the steam deck is going to have the uh amount of sales that the switch had um no because the switch is more compatible with normies yes um i don't think they're going to move 91 million but they will sure as heck move a million and And like the fact that people are strongly considering using them as computer replacers is like, that should tell you a lot. We'll see how well that works. It's so cool. Like there's so many things that are great about it, right?

Starting point is 01:03:36 Because like controller compatibility. Oh yeah. Literally anything with a Bluetooth connection, I'm sure Valve's going to be working on. Whereas Nintendo's like, you only need to use our expensive controller that's not even that great. No!

Starting point is 01:03:51 No, Nintendo! No! Bam. Someone in chat was like, it doesn't have arms, that, like, weird Switch game. That, like, weird boxing Switch game with the, like, spring arms.

Starting point is 01:04:05 Okay. Yeah, true. or a cardboard fishing rod probably shouldn't pick it up then to be clear i'm not down on the switch yeah i know i think he's just joking i got a switch love the switch which is great it's certainly lighter and smaller and it runs nintendo games which is absolutely a benefit i picked up a ring fit adventure for the kids it's cool my daughters were couch potatoes like my son is he's super i don't know where he got it from he's like super athletic but my daughters are like you know playing with their little horsies like they don't like to really they don't really run i guess would be my way of putting it. They are super into Ring Fit Adventure.

Starting point is 01:04:47 Ring Fit's cool. And I'll go and I'll check on them. You know, hey, how you doing? I don't count Ring Fit Adventure as screen time because it actually does. Have you tried it? I own it. Oh, okay. Yeah, you go.

Starting point is 01:04:58 Oh yeah. Like you go pretty good. It's pretty awesome. So that's one of the deals is that Ring Fit Adventure doesn't count as screen time. So if you ask to play video games if it's ring fit adventure it's basically 100 chance unless it's like bedtime that i'm gonna say yes so they're super into it and uh i'll go check on them it's like oh yeah they're sweating my daughter's never sweat it'll make you burned yeah it's good it's good it's amazing yeah the time I tried it, I put it on like the maximum difficulty

Starting point is 01:05:25 because it's like, oh, whatever. And by the time I was done, I was like, oh, okay. I might need to relax this down next time. But yeah, it's a cool game. I find the old Wii Sports to be more fun. Oh yeah, Wii Sports was a blast. I put so many hours in Wii Sports.

Starting point is 01:05:41 But it doesn't burn you anywhere near as much as Ring Fit does. Oh, not even close. Boxing got you pretty good. Yeah. Especially if you're like my son, who would play the boxing games like this and always beat me.

Starting point is 01:05:52 It was so frustrating. Because the motion controls were so janky back then. Oh, it's so bad. There was like almost no actual strategy. It was just luck, whether you would hit or not. Yeah. So annoying. Conrad says Ring Fit is still like 80 dollars

Starting point is 01:06:05 otherwise i would get it but that's that's the nintendo way yeah i mean breath of the wild is still like 60 canadian dollars or something stupid like that yeah the ring ring fit was really really difficult to get a long time ago as well i don't know if it still is or not but in other big news nvidia and arm ain't getting together The deal is officially cancelled after pretty much everyone objected to it. SoftBank will instead take Arm public in an IPO, which was their original plan to begin with. They are leaning towards listing on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange. However, they remain embroiled in a legal fight with the head of their Chinese joint venture, Ellen Wu, after the board tried to remove him arm warrant,

Starting point is 01:06:47 they had been stopped from auditing the accounts last month with month, which their CFO in their saying admitted they will need to fix in China to proceed with their plans. Ruh, Ruh, that's a little awkward. Yeah, man.

Starting point is 01:07:01 If I was, if I was like really, you know what i want to know is what would prevent us from taking linus media group public like i think people would buy shares in linus media group yeah but you don't want them to right aside from that though okay okay aside from me what would prevent i actually know so little about the process because my understanding is the main benefits of being a public company are a when you do your initial sale of stock you get a cash infusion because people just give you money and then you have that to spend on expanding your business and then beyond that my understanding is somehow your market cap affects how much you can borrow.

Starting point is 01:07:47 Like it's some kind of indicator that financial institutions will look at to determine your level of credit worthiness. Yeah. So beyond that, what's the point? I don't really get it. Why would I go public? I don't really get it why would i go public i don't know people say as long as you own the majority it's all good could you do it for only say 30 of the companies so we could invest but you retain control but why would you do that commander crazy i mean you already subscribed to float plane so clearly you just like throwing money at me anyhow yeah by the way thank you

Starting point is 01:08:22 if you own the company you can just be like nope no dividends ever i mean we could that's not very nice no that's not like a nice thing to do initial capital infusion ability to use stock as financial compensation for employees etc um i mean i think you can do that anyways ltd coin to the moon we were so like gonna do a coin and then the whole thing just got like extremely we were like this is terrible forget it i even said on wan show there's some there's there's some ancient clips of me being like ltc coin is coming you better believe it and we had even come up with some pretty cool things that we wanted to do with it yeah but what we realized is that no cryptocurrency was ever about there being something actually usable to do with it.

Starting point is 01:09:08 So there you go. You can buy and sell drugs. Sorry, what? Cryptocurrencies. Oh, okay. Yeah, fair enough. But that's not why anyone ever created one. Like there's no drug, there's probably drug coin, but people just use like regular cryptocurrencies

Starting point is 01:09:26 for that. Yeah, yeah. I know this one. You are then beholden to shareholders, shareholders, shareholders, Freudian slip. You either own 50% plus one and make a bunch of money or stay private until you realize you've passed the point of inflection where your ability to make more money stops growing. Yeah, okay. I mean, if you blew up in 10 years, early stockholders would make a profit. Yeah, that's true. I just don't know if I would see, I just don't know if we'd see that

Starting point is 01:09:56 kind of explosive growth. We've always been slow and steady, slow and steady, slow and steady wins the race. It's just the only reason that i've been thinking about it more lately is because we can't relocate i can't i can't ask the team to do that we're realistically not going to move to cam loops or some somewhere affordable our window for that is kind of gone and we've gotten to a point in lower mainland real estate where we could lease but i don't like having an uncertain future yeah so I would want to own whatever headquarters, we own the headquarters we're in now. That was the, oh man, by how much? By a lot.

Starting point is 01:10:33 The largest investment that I had ever made in my life when we bought this headquarters, but boy, has it ever paid off. I mean, we would have already paid a landlord what this place has cost us, and they would have gained like 3x their initial investment in equity because that's how much real estate is going up here. So the problem with that is that as our company grows and our revenues grow, the real estate cost is growing alongside us. So we can't afford anything big enough that we could actually

Starting point is 01:11:06 grow into. And so that was something that made me think maybe this is the time that we do need to actually raise cash. Because I don't need it to like, make more pillows, or print more shirts, or even buy lab equipment, that's going to be a big investment, but it's manageable. It's something that we can build up over time. And as long as it's something you can build up over time and it's one-time purchases, well, that's manageable. You can plan for that, right? But it would be a tens of millions of dollars investment to get a new place to move into. And I just don't have that kind of capital. And that's something that I think would significantly change our ability to grow over the

Starting point is 01:11:51 years. The problem is just that you create this DJ spark says I'd love to invest, I would hope for dividends, but I'd be happy with just carrying the stock until retirement. But the problem is that unless we unless we actually carry on unless we find a way to make the business sustainable beyond my prime years, I'm past them. I'm going to be 36, I guess. I ain't getting younger at this point. And so we'd have to find a way to make LMG sustainable in the very long term for me to be able in good conscience to take your money in exchange for shares in this company so yeah uh Jaden said or relocate LMG so he probably wasn't listening to earlier that I I tried to convince Linus and Yvonne a long time ago on a

Starting point is 01:12:41 on a few different locations but that that ship has definitely sailed there's way too many routes here like the amount of people that have bought or have leases on places the amount of people that we've had relocate here it's not exactly easy to just pick up the amount of people and families that are connected to the people that live here that would be spouses of the people that live here needing to get a new job at another location here that would be spouses of the people that live here needing to get a new job at another location like that would be extremely destructive at this point and linus media group is not a building yeah it's people yeah we we wouldn't be us if we tried to be us somewhere else it just doesn't work that way and uh yeah we we just that's not, that's not, yeah, that's not how we, that's not how we roll. Gremlin Injector says, to add to this, a huge problem recently has been private equity,

Starting point is 01:13:32 basically owning all the good companies. There's a fraction as many publicly traded companies as there were 20 years ago. Yeah, that's another thing that I read like one article about it. And I was like, what is this? SPACs. Have you heard of SPACs? SPACs? Apparently that's a way that people are raising money

Starting point is 01:13:47 without going through a lot of the due diligence that's required for a formal IPO. Special Purpose Acquisition Company? Yeah. So that's very, very interesting. Because it would be easier. But it also

Starting point is 01:14:03 is apparently rife with abuse not surprised uh black cat right says my worry if you did take it public is that your investors could sue you for any major bad things happening to the company yeah that's something being beholden to shareholders is like a scary that's like a nightmare that's for me it's an actual nightmare yep um and Fluffica says, maybe a better option would be some kind of merch subscription where you pay monthly for exclusive merch. So the reason we haven't done a subscription

Starting point is 01:14:30 for merch already is that I don't believe in people just buying stuff sight unseen without thought. I want purchases on lttstore.com to be driven by clearly superior product quality and design and not just a desire to support us because the reality of it is producing and shipping these products is extremely resource intensive carbon intensive however you want to however you want to say it i don't want people

Starting point is 01:14:58 just buying it for no reason i want us to earn it i want us to earn your business so uh a merch subscription doesn't sit well with me and we will probably never do one the only way we would do one is if i if i had some reason that you guys needed refills of something on a recurring basis uh say for example we had a consumable item that we would ship to you every month or something along those lines. I could see us doing that, but something like shirts, no, you guys just, Hey, if you're engaged with the content and you're engaged with the brand and you love the quality of the product, you come on the site, you see a design, you like, you buy it. We're not just going to send you stuff that you don't want. A random t-shirt SKU is significantly different than a, than a merch subscription. Those are wildly different things. One of those is i'm i like all

Starting point is 01:15:45 the t-shirts and i would like one cheaper please and the other one is randomly receiving things on a on a period basis that you probably don't need or necessarily even want because a lot of subscription things people will forget about them and or be too lazy to cancel them and then stuff's just showing up at your door that you don't want anymore or whatever else is going on and um oh shoot what were you what were you talking about again oh yeah mystery shirt and mystery shirt is actually a way for us to avoid ever having to destroy anything man it just it boils my blood when i see whether it's like food being dumped into the dumpster or shirts that have been spray painted uh so that they can be disposed of like louis vuitton or something that lights

Starting point is 01:16:31 their stuff on fire i don't know but i hate it i hate it every time i see that stuff so mystery shirt is a way for us to get rid of like the last seven triple xls and the last two smalls of this design you don't necessarily want the mediums of this one you don't necessarily want to have a a store entry for a product that only has one size still in stock exactly and there's only like four of them like you don't really want to do that so it's better to just pull it down and put it up differently yeah uh what's going on here oh my goodness floatplane chat has just exploded talking about this. I was trying to kind of look at the chat, but I don't think that's going to happen.

Starting point is 01:17:12 Contamination at Keoxia could cause computer component costs to climb. Analysts are expecting a 5% to 10% price increase for flash storage after WD lost 6.5 exabytes of NAND due to contaminated materials at its production facilities. It was detected in late January by joint venture partner Kioxia, who claims that the contamination only affects its Bix 3D NAND flash memory and has assured that their 2D NAND products are unaffected. It remains unclear when production of the contaminated plants will resume or if products on the market will need to be recalled. Oof. Brutal.

Starting point is 01:17:48 This happens to NAND, like, all the time. Every once in a while, yeah. It feels that way. Very consistent. WD and Kioxia primarily supply NAND and EMMC storage, and the partnership makes up about 30% of the NAND flash market. They have not been specific about the cause, but if the source of the contamination was a chemical supplier, then other manufacturers who share the supplier could be affected too sadly this news came right as kioxia celebrated the 35th anniversary of their invention of nand

Starting point is 01:18:13 flash storage a game-changing technology bit of a lousy birthday really uh discussion question here from um i don't know if he's off probation yet but as is how little 2d nand is used these days why do you think kyoxia mentioned it in their press release i suspect they're still using 2d nand for a lot of lower cost products i mean if i was a if i was an enterprise customer of kyoxia and i heard their nand got screwed up i might assume all of it yeah Yeah, that's fair. And if I purchase 2D NAND, I would like to know that the 2D NAND is okay. In other news, tap-to-pay update might turn all iPhones into mobile payment terminals. This is actually crazy. There was some interesting feedback that I saw online about how Apple is really not that great at getting businesses to adopt their new software technologies. So we'll see how this goes.

Starting point is 01:19:10 But, I mean, not needing to work with Square would be pretty interesting. A lot of it's going to depend on their financial stuff. Apple is a huge fan of taking as much money as they possibly can in every scenario. So we'll see how that goes. of taking as much money as they possibly can in every scenario so we'll see how that goes but this could be a massive game changer to square who really i don't think has had i could be very uneducated on this but i don't think they've had a huge amount of competition uh square's been the one kind of every time we've looked into it yeah yeah like there's been a few different options but square's been the king for sure. And anytime Apple or Google or Microsoft,

Starting point is 01:19:47 whatever enters the ring, that gets questioned, right? So we'll see how this goes. It's interesting. It's also a new thing in the space that I think people would trust. You know, so. Apparently it's only an API for other people to use.

Starting point is 01:20:04 Companies like Square can now include that functionality in their app says snow skeleton interesting very interesting so it'll offer the same security and privacy of apple pay i.e apple doesn't know or collect data on what is being purchased or who the buyer is and tap to pay will be made available to ios developers and other payment platforms starting with apps that usepe with other platforms to follow later this year. We will have to see if it poses a threat to products like Square's $1,200 plus full cash register systems.

Starting point is 01:20:35 That's more what I was talking about. The fact that they can integrate it is like neat or whatever. But yeah, it's the fact that it's just your phone versus needing to buy like, because at the very least, you have to have that thing that plugs into your phone from square um so yeah i don't know apple sherlocked square yeah they they sort of did yeah apple i mean they they sort of are the origin of the term Sherlocking.

Starting point is 01:21:05 So that shouldn't surprise anyone. That's kind of how Apple rolls. All right. We should do a few more merch messages here. Yes. Hi, Linus and Luke. Do you have any suggestions for gaming-focused universities? For example, with gaming design, production, et cetera, types of majors.

Starting point is 01:21:24 You're not going to find a ton of great advice about post-secondary education from either of us. From two dropouts. But maybe the rest of the chat could pipe up and let you know if they have any thoughts. Dan asks, hey, Linus and Luke, I was wondering what are your thoughts on everything needing to be app-based?

Starting point is 01:21:41 It was very frustrating to have to use the home app to set up Chromecast when it was possible by PC in the past. PC is the best. I mean, it's just the way. It's just the way. I don't make the rules anymore. Everything is app-based. And I mean, frankly, it's way better than it used to be.

Starting point is 01:22:00 Do you remember setting up stuff? Like, remember that old Parrot drone, the AR drone? Like, what a nightmare it was to go through the pairing process back in the day. do you remember setting up stuff like remember that old parrot drone the ar drone yeah like what a nightmare it was to go through the pairing process back in the day yeah these days man i paired a pair of sony uh earphones today where i literally opened up the app and it was like i just had them in my ears i didn't press a pairing button or anything and it was like hold your phone near the earphones and i was like what like this and i look back at my phone and it's like we found them oh that's really nice basically like magic um andrew are you still making the 3090 tie like the the tie uh yes uh and are you considering making a case or travel

Starting point is 01:22:42 pouch of some kind for the screwdriver? Okay. Okay. Hold on a second. So first of all, the tie. Yeah, we definitely want to do a GPU tie. We think it's funny. Second, hear me out. Get a whole backpack?

Starting point is 01:22:55 Holster. Oh, no way. Are you actually doing one? I want to. Leather, like primo. Oh, man. Primo holster for the screwdriver would you wear your screwdriver in a holster i'm talking with the snap the snap button if i like if you were a tech if i was a tech exactly i was gonna say if i worked on a job site where i used my screwdriver all the time

Starting point is 01:23:22 i might be the type of person that would do that as like a flare thing i'm talking like the old cell phone holsters okay clip on the belt flap style holster for the ltt screwdriver you do it so the points down yeah i would think so yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah all right oh man i want to do it. Jumping the shark. No, no, it's awesome. It's awesome. It's going to be amazing. And yes, it will just hold a single screwdriver. Other than that.

Starting point is 01:23:55 You should have like a, like almost like a bandolier on it that has like extra bit storage. I'd be into that. Like a little, I don't know how to describe it properly, but I think. No, I understand what you mean. We could have a magnet behind it so they don't come out by accident or something like that yeah yeah we could totally do something like that uh bum says i'm an electrician i would wear at work we wouldn't make it specific to our screwdriver we could definitely do some work to make it um not universally but more broadly compatible. You know, we're best with yours. Yes, best with ours. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:24:26 Yeah, I think that would be freaking awesome. Man, I'm so excited for it. P.S., charger slash audio cable pass-through hole on the backpack would be convenient. There is one. Is LCD Store going to do a backpack ever? Yes, absolutely. That's it, by the way.

Starting point is 01:24:42 Yeah, this is it. There's one right here. Boop. So if you want to put something in this mesh pocket here which is zippered there you go then you can run it to somewhere else if you need to um by the way this is a new revision oh still a few more changes so that pushes it back another probably couple of months. What changed? Well, we came up with an idea for how to make it. You know how people ask to have it be luggage compatible?

Starting point is 01:25:14 So you could slide it over the luggage? So we came up with an idea for how to do that. We created a strap that would go on the back that would clip onto these loops. These are like metal. They're super, super nice. We don't like it, though. These, actually, I kind of stopped noticing them. It probably would have been fine.

Starting point is 01:25:36 You feel them on your back? Yeah, we wanted a better way to do this. And yeah, I could feel them on my back sometimes. So what we've decided to do is we're actually going to take some inspiration from, here we go, these guys. So you see these little like, little like clip-ons that we've got here. Yeah. Not actually, but MOLLE style. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:25:56 And we're going to do, uh, probably three loops here, here, and here, and it'll just kind of come down here. So then you can use them for anything you could just hang stuff off the side of your bag or you could put your your back piece that will act as that sleeve uh you could clip it into that it'll probably be velcro i think it'll be velcro uh or hook and loop fastener i don't know if it'll be brand name velcro or something comparable but um not velcro brand. There's lots of good Hook and loop fasteners out there. Uh, so anyway, it'll probably be like that and then it will for storage

Starting point is 01:26:31 I think we're going to aim to have it be foldable In in quarters and then slippable into the enlarged passport pocket down here cool So the idea is that when you are not traveling You will have that thing in here, right? Okay is that when you are not traveling, you will have that thing in here. Right. Okay. And when you are traveling, you will have your passport in here.

Starting point is 01:26:49 Yeah. So that's where we're at on that. We added these on the front. So more little loop things. And this was from when I was doing a video with Colin and I needed to have a walkie. Oh, you wanted somewhere to put it. And I wanted somewhere to put it. And so we somewhere to put it and so we added them on both

Starting point is 01:27:06 sides. We still have the little these are now removable so you can completely remove the chest strap and just you can chuck it in your passport pocket or chuck it somewhere else if you want. What else did we change? We changed the pocket layout in the front. I'm not sure if I'm 100%

Starting point is 01:27:21 happy with it but it's definitely better than before. So it has a long boy pocket for the screwdriver now. So it's fully screwdriver compatible. It has just a little pocket down here now. It doesn't go across the whole way anymore. I'm sorry, you guys can't see. It doesn't go all the way across anymore. This, put my mask in there.

Starting point is 01:27:39 There's your pen pocket, just a mesh pocket here. I got it. I got it. This is a more of a between us thing, but I got a nostalgia trip seeing what was in that pocket oh the steel series little like headphone case yeah yeah it's my little bag of tricks yeah got good stuff in it uh we expanded this pocket on the side because i like to use it for a mouse and my cable so we we wanted to make it both bulgy enough that you can

Starting point is 01:28:01 actually put a mouse in there yeah um so that's that's what we did there we finally have the proper microfiber on the inside this broke it's just an early sample but we've got the microfiber on the inside so you can feel what that's going to be like uh not on that one uh the screen pockets yep that one oh nice okay yep yeah yeah and the pocket layout in the main pouch sorry this, this is turning into a backpack. A backpack showcase. Hold on one sec. So this is cool.

Starting point is 01:28:31 All three sleeves are now on the backside. So there's your laptop, your tablet, and then something else. The intention was a game console, like a Steam Deck. And then we got the Steam Deck and it's like this thick. And we're like, no, we cannot build a sleeve for that. So the intention now is that a Steam Deck and then we got the Steam Deck and it's like this thick and we're like no we we cannot build a sleeve for that so the intention now is that your Steam Deck you can actually see the shape of the bottom pocket your Steam Deck is going to be um uh joysticks toward that way and then you're going to kind of have a bit of a recess here for the handholds and it kind of sits in the bottom really nicely and then we're going to change this is using the self fabric which is like the main fabric right now but we're going to put

Starting point is 01:29:09 a screen fabric down at the bottom of that pocket it makes the cleanability not as good but that's a trade-off we're willing to take so that you could put a screen device down in the bottom if you want to um there's only two spots to hold chargers. They're up here. And it's like one big, one small. But for me, I only need one charger because everything in my life is type C now anyway. So I use it for a charger and a battery bank. And then, oh, here's the thing. So here's the strap thing for the back. Okay, gotcha.

Starting point is 01:29:40 Yeah, I just had it sitting in there. This color is not quite right, by the way. I like it. It's super vivid, but we're going to go with a slightly less eye-searing orange for the inside. It's more in line with our regular, like, Pantone orange. Right. And finally, you've got the main pocket of holding, which just has the one kind of zipper pocket right here, and then the sleeve for the 40 ounce

Starting point is 01:30:06 water bottle oh i have a steam deck in here oh that's convenient okay hold on i'm going to show you guys how the steam deck goes in then there's a question saying uh would this would this fit a weekend getaway worth of underwear uh hold on absolutely underwear with all the electronics i think absolutely i think if you wanted to fit everything in there and you had pants every day it might be a slight issue but about 40 liters um i think 40 i think so don't quote me on that uh so here uh there you can oh man the lights you can't really see it okay whatever luke you describe it describe what how it kind of fits in there like look at it i mean i can just feel it yeah i mean the width wise it's it's almost exactly the width of this yeah it fits really snugly for sure so i

Starting point is 01:30:53 still have concerns about the joysticks but we're uh we've got we've got a few ideas for how we can tweak it to make that work there's probably going to be cases for there are it comes with one yeah so if it comes with one yeah so if it comes with its own case if you drop the case in there i'll show it'll be perfect absolutely or you could drop the case in the main like bag of holding pocket yeah uh the last thing that i wanted to show you is these so the last revision didn't have the proper zipper pulls and this one does oh cool so they're little carabiners you can click them into each other and you can click them into each other just to help a little bit with theft resistance.

Starting point is 01:31:26 As well as if you just, like, I ride my motorbike with my backpack a lot of the time. And so I'll have, like, a badminton racket sticking out of it. And if it accidentally comes open, that's sort of a problem. We see it. I've gone to a lot of conventions in my day. And something you'll spot very often is someone's backpack hanging open. And I don't know if they just forgot to zip it up or someone opened it or but someone might have opened it or it might have jiggled itself open and being able to just click it close like that creates a barrier of difficulty

Starting point is 01:31:56 of course if you just like abandon your bag somewhere it's not going to save you yeah yeah we should do an air tag pocket shoot i didn't that. Oh, I didn't show the sunglass pocket. By the way, that's our material for the sunglass pocket. Super nice. You could probably just have a little... You should touch it. Is this the same as the... I think so.

Starting point is 01:32:14 Yeah. Yeah, I think it's the same as the last one. Now, something that Bridget and I went back and forth on a lot, and I will listen to your feedback, but I think my decision is final, is the color of the hardware. Oh. We both love this matte black that we have right now map like everything except look at the base of this one see how it's wearing yes so the debate was do we go with something that looks flipping amazing out of the box

Starting point is 01:32:46 and looks beat up in six months? Or do we go with something that doesn't look as good out of the box, but will look exactly the same in six months? I think I would argue exactly the same. Yep. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to change the hardware to like a gun metal, not black, but a dark gray. All of these have that same sign of wear. Yeah. Yeah. And it's,

Starting point is 01:33:09 there's just, there's just nothing you can, there's nothing you can do about that. I think gray would still look really good. It'll still look really sharp. Just maybe not, you know, but LTC,

Starting point is 01:33:20 uh, 19, 801, have it anodized. It doesn't matter what you treat it with. It will also, they're not going to be made of aluminum, I don't think. I don't think you'd want something like this made of aluminum. I don't know how durable that would be.

Starting point is 01:33:31 Depends on the aluminum. They might be aluminum. I don't know. The point is, no matter what you coat it with, it's going to wear. It's something you're touching, right? So I just don't think it's feasible. Green O-Photon. it's something you're touching right so i just i just don't think it's feasible um green o photon what do you think of the rumors valva releasing new vr headset next year with a steam deck like apu combined with an xr2 using the same 4k by 4k micro oled display as the apples as apple's rumored headset i don't know anything about that that's what i'll say for me i tend to treat yeah i tend

Starting point is 01:34:06 to treat things that aren't out yet as things that don't exist i will say there was rumors that nintendo was going to do a vr headset because they made a powerful handheld console there were also rumors that nintendo was going to make a second generation switch that was actually more powerful and then they didn't yep jokes on you yep i've been watching you guys for years hey thanks bradley uh linus what's your favorite beat saber song oh that's a good question you know what i'm gonna go with um oh man was it song saver or score saver song score score saver criminal dancing was huge for me oh yeah that one's so catchy big recommend uh there's definitely ones i like better now i just don't find that one as engaging to play these days

Starting point is 01:34:50 why this is really good i would try caramel dancing uh what's it called is it called turn it up or turn the music up there's just a really uh a really fun uh night core turn up i don't know i uh i think all you need to hear is night core to know that's probably going to be pretty tough i don't know it's it's good though uh looking for new maps to play i don't know maybe i'll stream maybe i'll stream this weekend uh brandon says i know you guys are making specialized caps for the screwdriver for your fellow youtubers any chance you would sell this to the public so we can color code our screwdrivers based on different bit sets in case we may buy multiple oh well i didn't think of that that's an interesting idea that's a really cool idea i mean obviously i like the idea of anyone buying more than one of the screwdriver but i had not considered this particular reason for doing it huh um

Starting point is 01:35:47 interesting you could have your your screwdriver holster on one side then you're like different your different loadouts on the other side hmm okay it's not too late so at least i don't think it's too late it's not too late. So at least I don't think it's too late. It might be too late. I'll get back to you on that one. I will. You talk a lot about quality, but I see nothing on location. These items are on the website were made or any sort of stance on ethical treatment of people making the items. You should be more transparent. items. You should be more transparent. You're right. So I will, you know what, I'll talk to Nick about what we can what we can do about that. I will say that we do have our own internal standards for the factory conditions for everything that we are selling on the store. We're also moving almost all of our stuff now is either recyclable or recycled material in the packaging. These aren't things that we talk about a ton, but they're things that we just care about. So we have third party inspectors that go

Starting point is 01:36:52 to our factories now both for QC as well as for factory conditions. One of the things that we are have not reached a scale yet where we can really conceivably do it is going upstream to our suppliers suppliers and that's something that we'd like to continue to work towards but that's kind of where we're at on it today peter says do you think the development of steam os for the steam deck will make diy steam machines for couch gaming a viable option absolutely well yeah i mean it does by default absolutely joshua carroll says why do led tv show signs of burn in within months whereas oled phones Well, yeah. I mean, it does by default. Absolutely. Joshua Carroll says, why do OLED TVs show signs of burn-in within months, whereas OLED phones don't show any kind of image retention

Starting point is 01:37:29 after a couple of years of use? Okay, so for one thing, they actually use fundamentally different OLED technologies. Fun fact, you ever notice that for phone screens, Samsung is the absolute king when it comes to OLEDs? And where have they been on OLEDs for TVs for the last five years? Nowhere?

Starting point is 01:37:49 Right. And then do you remember when LG had all those issues with their OLEDs in the Pixel... Crap, what was it? Was it the 3 generation or 2 generation? I think it was 3. I can't remember. But the point is that they are actually more different

Starting point is 01:38:04 than you would probably imagine. So other than to say that they are very different, I don't know the specifics. Also, why does my iMac show signs of image retention? Ah, so that is a different kind of image retention. That's not burn-in. That can actually be fixed by like refreshing them in some way. I can't remember. There's articles about it. Um, we've never really done a video about that. I don't think Zachary says, can you share any details about the followup between you and Dell or other integrators and secret shopper? There just wasn't really anything. So we're just going to hit them again when we do another secret shopper and they'll probably be, still be terrible. Aaron M.

Starting point is 01:38:43 Do you believe the APU and the steam deck would issue a response from intel to make something similar well no because it's a custom skew for valve so uh unless someone's gonna book you know two million units or whatever with intel i don't think they're gonna get out of bed assuming driver support gets better or for nvidia and intel to make a handheld like the razor edge years ago i think that really it's going to come down to partners intel always likes doing things through partners. So they'll try and work with Adele to make an Alienware competitor, whatever the case may be. And Intel is so deep into XE graphics that I wouldn't see them working with NVIDIA

Starting point is 01:39:15 because nobody likes working with NVIDIA. I've never seen a company push partners as hard as Intel has. Intel has sponsored me at shows to not cover them. Yeah, they do do that though. Brett, thanks for making another tote. Still use my cloth one from a while ago. Any plans for another attempt at whole room water cooling? Oh yeah, you better believe it.

Starting point is 01:39:40 My new house is plumbed for whole house water cooling. So it's going to be awesome. Brian M. I have an S9 that's getting long in the tooth. Would you recommend upgrading to one of the S22 variants? Actually, S22 is looking pretty good from my hands on time with it. I haven't daily driven one. It's a whole thing.

Starting point is 01:40:00 Samsung sent a loaner device, which from my perspective is, um, like if I only have it for a week, I'm going to do my short circuit video with it. And then if I have to send it back, like, I'm not going to bother setting it up, getting all my accounts logged in, getting everything dialed in exactly the way I like it. So that like, cause realistically it takes me a matter of days to get everything actually all set up and migrated over. And then what I'm going to send it back to them. It's like, okay, forget it. So I'll just wait until I can get a keeper device, whether from D brand or buy one or something. And then I'll, I'll see if I, and before I do that, I'll see if I even care about reviewing it.

Starting point is 01:40:38 Um, I did like them from my initial impressions, but I haven't, I haven't daily driven them. Cause I'm just, I'm not gonna because I'm not going to do that. I have stuff to do. Nick Hill says, getting a 40 ounce to tide me over until the 64 ounce drops. When and red design when? I don't think we have any red coming.

Starting point is 01:40:56 White and red, he said. Oh, white and red. Oh, we should totally do an Oh Canada water bottle. That'd be sweet. Okay, I will make it so. Oh Canada. You guys should launch it on canada day water bottle red slash white we could probably even hit canada what do you think um for canada day launch uh would you non-canadians out there buy a canada themed water bottle just cuz man okay here's a question am i allowed to use the maple leaf or is it like

Starting point is 01:41:27 trademarked by the government i think you can i don't know i'm pretty sure you can okay can you like i i know there's what if i wasn't canadian and i like put maple leaves on stuff am i allowed to do i think you can put flags on things. Oh, okay. I don't know. I know a lot of American companies put American flags on things. I'm not 100% certain how the Canadian version works. People are like, yeah. Oh, no, never mind. They're like, yeah, we'll do it. All right.

Starting point is 01:41:56 Heck yeah. Heck yeah, float plane. Yeah. I'm pretty sure you can put the Canadian flag on it. Yeah, okay. I don't know. It just occurred to me. I was like, I didn't do that.

Starting point is 01:42:04 It's kind of... And then default... People found it. People found the government page. Commercial use. Oh, interesting. Use of the national flag of Canada and the stylized 11-point maple leaf for commercial use.

Starting point is 01:42:19 No person shall adopt in connection with a business as a trademark or otherwise any mark consisting of or nearly resembling so as likely to be mistaken for the arms crest or flag adopted and used at any time by Canada. Okay. You have to request to be allowed to use it. I have a feeling this is one of those things that doesn't actually get enforced, though. Yeah. Well, all right, then.

Starting point is 01:42:44 Okay. Nikhil also asks How can I use my GPU To live upscale USB or PCIe capture card output Like the Framemeister and upscaling TVs do Is it possible My understanding is that Could be possible but I'm not aware of any

Starting point is 01:43:00 Software that does it Don't flip that over Sure I think it looks better Sure but I'm not aware of any software that does it. Do you want to flip that over? Sure. I think it looks better. Sure. I prefer. Nice.

Starting point is 01:43:11 Ethan. Floatplane chat agreed pre-show that you should do an LTT version of Dr. Horrible's sing-along blog with Luke as Captain Hammer, Riley as Moist, Sarah Butt as Penny, and James doing the Bad Horse chorus. I don't even know what Dr. Horrible's sing-along blog is.

Starting point is 01:43:28 Oh, it's good. It's pretty old. It's been a long time. All I know is that I would be honored to be Captain Hammer. Okay. Brian L. With your issues with the floatplane app on the Play Store and Apple's App Store, why not explore other options like F-Droid?

Starting point is 01:43:50 Is F-Droid relevant? I mean, being in the official store is where you want to be. Yeah. And it's gotten better. For some reason, both app stores went completely haywire at almost the exact same time, and then since then both app stores have been completelywire at almost the exact same time and then since then both app

Starting point is 01:44:05 stores have been completely fine so who knows i never got a response back on that flag that they sent by the way i don't know if i really talked about that on the show too much they just removed it silently again as they often seem to do okay cool cool all right uh fella days tv says if i plan on upgrading my current gpu 30 series to 40 series do you think the pcie 3.0 in my 10 900k will be a problem going forward well you can wait and see that's the good news you don't actually have to upgrade now um and no i probably wouldn't go 11th gen to get pcie gen 4 i would probably flip my 10th gen and i would jump to 12th or uh upcoming zen 4 processors from amd because that tends to be the better bang for the buck or it tends to not cost that much more like changing out one more component

Starting point is 01:45:04 uh end how has your experience been with the fold 3 i got mine at the end of december to not cost that much more, like changing out one more component. E&D, how has your experience been with the Fold 3? I got mine at the end of December and I already got a stuck pixel. Ooh, interesting. I do not have any stuck pixels or anything like that. I overall find myself using the front display a lot more than I expected, but I have not switched off of it, which I guess is as strong an endorsement as i can give because i can use any phone i want i have literally a bin of phones like 20 feet from here uh and i yeah i i like it i wouldn't pay for it i wouldn't and didn't um i wouldn't pay two grand for it that's that's tough that's

Starting point is 01:45:39 kind of crazy uh there's still software things that are not perfect but i do like it um it's a pain in the butt to do app dev for and i think everyone agrees like not this is not a just us thing so any app problems that you have i'm very not surprised yeah uh do you think you'll switch to the s22 ultra i was thinking of uh using it for a bit it kind of reminds me of my old note i hate the hole punch display i need it to go away in a fire but the bezels are otherwise so slim maybe i'll just set it to have just blank pixels at the top i don't know i'll see how i feel about it chase says i want to buy a steam deck but i'm worried about the low rgb coverage i was wondering if it could be caused by the etched glass screen would i be better off getting the cheaper one for deeper color i suspect it'll be the same it's just Valve said that our results were within their expectations.

Starting point is 01:46:28 So that's how the screen looks. But the thing you got to understand is that like 65 or whatever it works out to, I think it was around there, percent coverage of sRGB is not the end of the world. You would never use it for any kind of professional work, certainly. But just like sitting and gaming it's fine we got by on worse uh hunter l says celebrating my raise with some ltd store.com would you consider doing a video on different accessibility features and devices for example the humanware braille note a android tablet with a refreshing Braille display.

Starting point is 01:47:07 Had that come across my desk at work. Wow. Did we ever actually do a video on the Microsoft, like, accessibility controller or whatever it's called? Yeah. We did. That thing's freaking sweet. BrailleNote.

Starting point is 01:47:22 I mean, this sounds super cool. The thing, though, is that we're just not the market for it so it's kind of tough um it's a tough thing for us to cover and i don't think we have anyone here that speaks braille we could we could hire someone who does um they wouldn't have experience in making videos so we could like collaborate with them on it um and it's like it's super cool but i i don't know i kind of feel like the people for whom these products are made know about it. They have their own media outlets that cover this stuff. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:47:51 Sometimes it's kind of like a stay in our lane thing. Yeah. Do you expect Valve, asks James, or third parties to make DIY upgrade kits for the Steam Deck? It would be awesome if I could get an OLED screen in like six months. I doubt it. But I would love it. I would love it so much. Man, that'd be

Starting point is 01:48:12 awesome. I'd put an OLED on it like that. Might I use this subject to mention Alanna Pierce's Accessibility Awards and collab with others next month, says Ducky Lewitsnwis over on uh twitch chat awesome cool jake's talking about the i4 m50 in the chat whatever jake whatever jake tycan or go home what a fanboy such a bmw fan it does actually look really really good though i'm

Starting point is 01:48:42 sure it does but the the Taycan's the big flex. Does it have turn signals? Now that Hassan has one, it's clearly okay. Because you can be as left wing as you want and you can go full Taycan. He not only went Taycan. $300,000 car? Like Canadian. I think it was like 200 plus US for the trim that he got.

Starting point is 01:49:03 Oh, man. People are saying he's going like do it up too hilarious nice all right capitalism car jake says i don't see you in a taikan nerd that's because it i didn't order one oh man have you seen his house dog no no you yours what mine yeah oh why you can stunt with a house more than you can stunt with a car in my opinion i mean i think it's a cooler stunt as well look all i'll say is you got your you got your like sunglasses and chains Yeah You just like shoes Sure Okay

Starting point is 01:49:45 Then you got your cars and watches Yeah Right Yeah Okay Then you got your like house Yeah Bitch I own a warehouse

Starting point is 01:49:56 Where's yacht? Is yacht like just the little tip? Oh yacht's somewhere Yeah yeah yeah Yeah yeah Anyway The point is Thanks for watching the land show

Starting point is 01:50:05 we'll see you again next week same bad time same bad channel ladies and gentlemen bye did you even bleep it nope oh man Jad caught up Jad's no longer the top It's Sparrow

The WAN Show - Newegg... More Like Rotten Egg! - WAN Show February 11, 2022

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.