There wonāt be a big WAN Show segment about this or anything. Most of what I have to say, Iāve already said, and Iāve done so privately.
To Steve, I expressed my disappointment that he didnāt go through proper journalistic practices in creating this piece. He has my email and number (along with numerous other members of our team) and could have asked me for context that may have proven to be valuable (like the fact that we didnāt āsellā the monoblock, but rather auctioned it for charity due to a miscommunicationā¦ AND the fact that while we havenāt sent payment yet, we have already agreed to compensate Billet Labs for the cost of their prototype). There are other issues, but Iāve told him that I wonāt be drawn into a public sniping match over this and that Iāll be continuing to move forward in good faith as part of āTeam Mediaā. When/if heās ready to do so again Iāll be ready.
To my team (and my CEOās team, but realistically I was at the helm for all of these errors, so I need to own it), I stressed the importance of diligence in our work because there are so many eyes on us. We are going through some growing pains - weāve been very public about them in the interest of transparency - and itās clear we have some work to do on internal processes and communication. We have already been doing a lot of work internally to clean up our processes, but these things take time. Rome wasnāt built in a day, but thatās no excuse for sloppiness.
Now, for my community, all I can say is the same things I always say. We know that weāre not perfect. We wear our imperfection on our sleeves in the interest of ensuring that we stay accountable to you. But itās sad and unfortunate when this transparency gets warped into a bad thing. The Labs team is hard at work hard creating processes and tools to generate data that will benefit all consumers - a work in progress that is very much not done and that weāve communicated needs to be treated as such. Do we have notes under some videos? Yes. Is it because we are striving for transparency/improvement? Yeahā¦ What weāre doing hasnāt been in many years, if everā¦ and we would make a much larger correction if the circumstances merited it. Listing the wrong amount of cache on a table for a CPU review is sloppy, but given that our conclusions are drawn based on our testing, not the spec sheet, it doesnāt materially change the recommendation. That doesnāt mean these things donāt matter. Weāve set KPIs for our writing/labs team around accuracy, and we are continually installing new checks and balances to ensure that things continue to get better. If you havenāt seen the improvement, frankly I wonder if youāre really looking for itā¦ The thoroughness that we managed on our last handful of GPU videos is getting really incredible given the limited time we have for these embargoes. Iām REALLY excited about what the future will hold.
With all of that said, I still disagree that the Billet Labs video (not the situation with the return, which Iāve already addressed above) is an āaccuracyā issue. Itās more like I just read the room wrong. We COULD have re-tested it with perfect accuracy, but to do so PROPERLY - accounting for which cases it could be installed in (none) and which radiators it would be plumbed with (againā¦ mystery) would have been impossibleā¦ and also didnāt affect the conclusion of the videoā¦ OR SO I THOUGHTā¦
I wanted to evaluate it as a product, and as a product, IF it could manage to compete with the temperatures of the highest end blocks on the planet, it still wouldnāt make sense to buyā¦ so from my point of view, re-testing it and finding out that yes, it did in fact run cooler made no difference to the conclusion, so it didnāt really make a difference.
Adam and I were talking about this today. He advocated for re-testing it regardless of how non-viable it was as a product at the time and I think he expressed really well today why it mattered. It was like making a video about a supercar. It doesnāt mater if no one watching will buy it. They just wanna see it rip. I missed that, but it wasnāt because I didnāt care about the consumerā¦ it was because I was so focused on how this product impacted a potential buyer. Either way, clearly my bad, but my intention was never to harm Billet Labs. I specifically called out their incredible machining skills because I wanted to see them create something with a viable market for it and was hoping others would appreciate the fineness of the craftsmanship even if the product was impractical. I still hope they move forward building something else because they obviously have talent and Iāve watched countless niche water cooling vendors come and go. Itās an astonishingly unforgiving market.
Either way, Iām sorry I got the communityās priorities mixed-up on this one, and that we didnāt show the Billet in the best light. Our intention wasnāt to hurt anyone. We wanted no one to buy it (because itās an egregious waste of money no matter what temps it runs at) and we wanted Billet to make something marketable (so they can, yāknow, eat).
With all of this in mind, it saddens me how quickly the pitchforks were raised over this. It also comes across a touch hypocritical when some basic due diligence could have helped clarify much of it. I have a LONG history of meeting issues head on and Iāve never been afraid to answer questions, which lands me in hot water regularly, but helps keep me in tune with my peers and with the community. The only reason I can think of not to ask me is because my honest response might be inconvenient.
We can test thatā¦ with this post. Will the āIt was a mistake (a bad one, but a mistake) and theyāre taking care of itā reality manage to have the same reach? Letās see if anyone actually wants to know what happened. I hope so, but itās been disheartening seeing how many people were willing to jump on us here. Believe it or not, Iām a real person and so is the rest of my team. We are trying our best, and if what we were doing was easy, everyone would do it. Today sucks.
Thanks for reading this.[1]
Check LinusTechās profile for further discussion and comments heās had.[2]
In a video on a different channel (not from Linus media group) a LTT employee criticized other YouTubers like gamers Nexus saying theyāre not as thorough as them, so gamers Nexus made a 40 minutes video (not monetized, Linus wouldnāt have done that) with a compilation of some of the biggest errors LTT made in the last year.
Mostly the issues that were pointed out is that
After being sent a prototype of a water-cooling block that will be on sale in November 2023, he didnāt follow the instructions and attempted to install it on a wrong GPU, and that meant there would be a 1 mm gap between the die and the block and wouldnāt work at all. The conclusion of that video was that it was a shitty product and nobody should buy it. For a start-up with 2 people is a death sentence. Later in his hours long wan show (that I never see because too long) he doubles down saying āwhy I should spend $500 in salaries to test it with the right equipment, itās a shitty product and nobody should buy itā. The sample was not returned even if it was requested back and instead they sold it at an auction
For a mouse review they said it had terrible gliding and it was awful, but they didnāt RTFM and didnāt remove a protective film on the bottom (but IMHO it should arrive to the customer without protective films)
Various instances of the hosts that says something but then itās corrected by just an asterisk on the screen
Various instances of clearly wrong tests (coolers that suddenly in a single test perform significantly worse than the average, newer GPU models that run much faster than the average)
And he didnāt point another problem with a video published a few hours earlier: LTT reviewed a virus removal Stick and the conclusion was that even if the ads are misleading and the website is scammy, the product itself isnāt that bad. But he tested on a diy computer. Any prebuilt computer released in the last two years has secureboot and automatic bitlocker encryption with keys in the Microsoft account, meaning that this antivirus removal USB drive wouldnāt even boot, and if it could, it couldnāt access any file on the computer
I was disappointed this issue was not addressed at all during its review. The type of person this product is aimed at wouldnāt have a clue this was potentially the case.
Thank you for your detailed reply! I personally view LMG videos as purely entertaining, they shouldnāt trash other people for data quality or accuracy, since they are rather weak in that field as well. Rather they should focus on entertainment for entertainmentās sake, where they are - at least in my opinion - stronger than a lot of the rest.