The WAN Show - Lies, Damned Lies, And Then MSRP - WAN Show March 7, 2025

Episode Date: March 8, 2025

Visit https://www.squarespace.com/WAN and use code WAN for 10% off From rainy streets to muddy trails, the Stormburst is built for whatever comes next—waterproof, ultra-grippy, and adventure-ready. Grab your pair now at https://vessi.com/wanshow and get 15% off your first pair! Check out the CORSAIR FRAME 4000D at: https://lmg.gg/4000D Buy something from dbrand so they have an excuse to keep messing with Linus. Visit http://dbrand.com/WAN Check out Dell laptops at: https://lmg.gg/dellprowan Pick up a Secretlab Titan Evo Ergonomic Gaming Chair today at: https://lmg.gg/secretlabwan Get a special deal on Private Internet Access VPN today at https://www.piavpn.com/LinusWan Purchases made through some store links may provide some compensation to Linus Media Group. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is up everyone? Another day, another launch where the MSRP cards are either nowhere to be found or very easy, very tiny few to be found. We're gonna be getting into that talking about both the launch of the RTX 5070 and Radeon 9070 and 9070 XT. We will also be talking about an article that is from last week, but I think still merits some discussion today. TechRadar says, pre-built are always superior. That is the honest truth, unless you are an IT god. What? Okay, what else we got for this week? What a week it's gonna be. For the seven people that care, Mozilla rewrites Firefox's terms of use after user backlash

and their brain back dig. Which, I mean, that might be good. I'm digging it. Get it? Maybe. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. by Squarespace, Vessi, Corsair, and of course, our rap partner Dbrand, our laptop partner Dell, and our chair partner, oh, there it is, oh, sorry. I gotta cover it up, cause it's a secret.

Secret lab. Ha ha ha, get it? All right, why don't we jump right into our first topic today, which is of course going to be the big launches this week. Adam put, darn it he put so much work into preparing this topic that I'm gonna do my very best to read as much of it as I can without getting exhausted. Nvidia and AMD have launched their 70 class cards and boy were they doozies. Here's a rundown from worst to less worst. The Nvidia RTX 5070.

Turns out no, it does not in fact have 4090 performance. Dude. What? Dude, you were there with me when I filmed that little clip where I like did the little quip to Austin, right? Or had you joined us yet? I don't think you had. Never mind, I lied. Because we were at the keynote together but Luke was sitting somewhere else. He had better seats. And then I just went where they shepherded us into the press area where we were like, oh, okay, so I guess we're like third class citizens after the investors and the analysts. Because that's what Nvidia's into these days.

Anywho, I didn't have great seats, but I was able to hear Jensen say that the upcoming RTX 5070 at 549 or 649 or whatever, 549, would match the performance of the 4090 and at the time my camera guy Andrew was like, do you want me like filming this? I'm like, buddy, we're at a press conference. A, everyone and their dog is already filming it, as you can see. So we are contributing literally nothing to the zeitgeist, or however you pronounce that. Zeitgeist. Thank you. Oh man, I got dunked on for my pronunciation of Wunderkind.

Anyway, it doesn't matter. the point is I said it wrong. Anywho we are contributing absolutely nothing literally anything we record here of the stage is redundant because everyone else and their dog has their cameras out recording it and number two what they're doing is completely redundant anyway because Nvidia is live streaming the whole thing and you could do you could get a way better quality version of it from YouTube the game or move seemed to be I know I know I think bit with Kyle did this and a few other people But I don't remember who where they just restreamed the broadcast and stayed home

Yeah, and they just commentated over. Yeah Tons of live viewers it was it was like very very I mean dude I told Nvidia I don't go to press conferences. The only reason I was there was because we were supposed to go get hands-on with the 5090. Anyway, the point is, I was there when Jensen said it, and in that moment, I was like, yo, Andrew, I know I told you that we're not filming anything, but get the camera out. Get the camera. I got mic'd up. Like, put on the mic, okay, and I got that clip. Dude, that clip has been, I'm gonna get so much mileage

out of that I'll believe it when I see it clip, because every time Nvidia says something that is just complete bulls**t, I'm gonna be able to pull out that clip. Just pull it out again. Of me at the press conference for the 5090 launch being like, I'll believe it when I see it. So yeah. Well, you would have been able to pull it out for every single Nvidia launch that I have personally seen so

It's about 20% faster than a 4070 barely nets a single digit percent increase over the 4070 Super It's 12 gigs of VRAM poses longevity concerns, especially at 4k And it is pretty much non-existent at retail. While those quick to the punch were able to get their hands on a card, most folks were unable to find them at MSRP and the more expensive partner cards, even those ones sold out shortly afterward. Adam included a picture from PC Part Picker where there is only one card in stock and this is a 5070, a card with a $549 MSRP and it is priced at $1029 as of 420pm March 6th.

Nice. Hashtag blaze it. Your money that is. Yeah, sweet. Just light it on fire. You have to do that fire light it all on fire Yeah, AMD Things went a bit better, but it looks like the story is

Complicated it was a much better received launch including by yours truly The 9070 has the same MSRP as the 5070 from Nvidia while being about 9% faster at 1440p and 4k raster. In ray tracing, the 9070 beats out the previous flagship 7900 XTX which launched at an MSRP of $1000, but actually fell behind the 5070 in our testing, though other outlets found that it was within 5 to 7 percent across their suite of ray traced games. We did notice that the worst performance for the 9070 was in Black Myth Wukong where it seems AMD is still struggling a little bit. It gets 16 gigs of GDDR6 though which gives us a little bit more confidence that it will continue to be able to keep up in the future without seeing lag spikes and was in stock for substantially longer, actually several hours rather than several minutes.

Meanwhile the 9070 XT competes in performance with the 5070 Ti and AMD 7900 XTX in raster and ray tracing it competes and even beats the 5070 in several titles. Great card, undercuts Nvidia's offerings and price brings ray tracing to a serviceable level and is generally pretty good. However, oh yeah, FSR4 looks pretty good. Image quality no more distracting than DLSS4 and outlets who have done deep dives into the image quality rated as matching the DLSS CNN model but legs behind in some areas compared to compared to Nvidia's latest transformer model.

However, it's not all sunshine and roses for AMD and there's going to be a number of sources that we're going to be talking about so stick with me for a little bit here guys because there's a lot of sides to this story. Videocards with a Z. Dot com. Oh that makes sense because video cards with an S wouldn't exist because you'd have to have like video cards. Hey I get it. They were planning for the future. They had a crystal ball when they bought that domain. Oh boy. Anyway, they got a quote from OCUK's Andrew Gibson who stated, MSRP is a capped quantity of a few hundred, so prices will jump once those are sold through.

They also received insight about rebates from Swedish retailer Inet.se who claimed that MSRP prices will apply to a limited number of cards. The prices only apply to the first shipment of each model. I have a note in here from Adam who prepared this topic. Linus, can you comment on this sort of rebate behavior? Is this commonplace? My experience in the grocery industry knows that this isn't out of the ordinary, but I also sold jam and shortening,

so not sure how that translates. What I will say is this. Back when I was working in retail, in retail. Demand for the latest GPU was not like it is today. I would say under normal circumstances, yes, there are elements of this launch that were that would seem pretty wild if you haven't worked in the industry before, but are kind of normal. Like the fact that pricing didn't seem to be finalized up until like the hours before the launch't seem to be finalized up until like the hours before the launch, and I'll talk a little bit more about that later, that's not unusual. We would reg- I'm not saying it's good. It's not good. It's absolute madness, but it's not unusual. We would regularly cut POs for literally like

hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of GPUs and have no idea what our cost was for them and what our MSRP was going to be for them. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of GPUs, like hundreds of top spec cards and we literally wouldn't have a price. EVGA wouldn't have a price and our Direct NVIDIA rep wouldn't have a price. They're just like, buy them. This is your allocation. Take them or someone else will take them. And you're like, okay because what else are you gonna do? You don't have any GPUs to sell. What your computer store with no GPUs is ridiculous, right? So you just take them and that's it. You've got a PO.

However, what I will say is that the idea of having a rebate like this, like an instant rebate, because there's different kinds of rebates, okay? So there's your mail-in rebates. Those are the ones that have the little form you fill out for the consumer and they mail in the form and they get some money back. The redemption rates on those are somewhere between 10 and 50 percent, depending on the size of the rebate. The smaller ones tend to have a very low redemption rate, and the higher ones tend to have a much higher redemption rate once you go past a certain number. Don't quote me on those exact numbers. It's been a minute and consumer behavior might have changed a little bit, but the point is

just that there's a wide range of redemption and the people who do redeem it are essentially being subsidized by the people who don't redeem it. That's the way the math works on the mail-in rebate. So there's your mail-in rebate, okay? Then there is your kind of point-of-sale rebate, POS rebate, and that's going to take place at the point of sale. And those are kind of like a commission or a spiff for like a salesperson, but it goes at the retailer level. So you're expected to kind of use it for a short-term promotion. And the idea is that you're driving sales during some kind

of an event, like March AMDness for March Madness. AMD usually does a basketball themed promo for March Madness, March AMDness. So that would usually have something like a POS rebate across bundles of AMD products or partner products in order to kind of push up the volumes during that time. The last kind would be like a price protection slash like instant rebate, instant rebate actually, that's more of a terminology for POS rebate, but like a price protection. So like a credit, essentially a credit, where they are taking your entire inventory that you have and they are

price protecting you down to a new, presumably permanent price. And that would happen in the event that you had something like a significant price drop. So I would say the only example of that that I remember seeing was when Nvidia launched the GTX 480, or 480 GTX, excuse me, I've got my prefixes and suffixes moved around because Nvidia moved them around. Nvidia launched that card thinking that it was gonna sell and it like didn't. I think that was probably the worst Nvidia card

launch that I saw in my in my years working at NCIX. Effectively they were dead in the water on launch day. And so what happened was we had our inventory that we had bought without knowing how much we were paying for it and we basically went look guys, guys, you fucked this. You need to deal with this. And so we got our stock price protected down, if I recall correctly, it may have also been a POS rebate, but one that was like, this is a POS rebate. But it the understanding was that it was perpetual to help us get rid of this stuff and and they effectively adjusted the price of that thing. So with all of that in mind the idea of a new card arriving and some portion of my

inventory being instant rebated as like an introductory promo, knowing that some of my inventory would jump back up to a higher price after the fact? No, I have never seen that before. And I consider that to be, if that is indeed what is happening, there is more to the story, which we'll get to, but if that is indeed what is happening, I consider that to be extremely disingenuous because that is not

reflective of what the long-term situation is going to be. That's an introductory promo. That is not an MSRP. And if you're not enabling, I can tell you again from working in retail and knowing that this hasn't changed, I can tell you that the margins are not there to support selling this thing at $599. So I'll use the XT as my example. The margins are not there to support selling this at $599. If you need an instant rebate to get there, you make like six points on a GPU, like get real as a retailer. That is unless you are, well, we'll get to the whole thing where you can have marketplaces sell the GPU and they can be at higher prices and you take a cut of that and well,

I mean it's not my fault I didn't price it at that. Anyway, that's a whole other conversation. This is very, very deep, very complicated and we're just getting started. So I would say the closest thing that I ever saw to the kind of fervor that is going on in the GPU market right now because I worked there pre AI boom, pre crypto boom, right? I would say the 8800 GT was the closest I ever saw and that that was a ripping launch. closest I ever saw. And that, that was a ripping launch. Like, it basically offered similar procedure. He remembers, this guy remembers.

I got one of those. It was a good time. Anyone who was there for 8800 GT launch remembers because that thing was wild. It was based on the G92 die, if I recall correctly. so it was a process node shrink Compared to the G80 which was the 8800 GTX that was the the top spec card and This 8800 GT was on this new die that was on a new node was crazy power efficient It clocked crazy well. It was it was killer I think it had a little bit less RAM or something like that like it had less VRAM but it was available in two

different configs one with less and one with more and you didn't really need the extra VRAM for a lot of modern games at that time so a lot of people went with the lower priced lower VRAM one and it offered bloody near the same performance this 8800 GT like non GTX and it was like a mid-cycle refresh, the whole thing was bizarre. Near 8800 GTX performance at a fraction of the heat, therefore it was a single slot card and at like half the price. Like it was wild. And if you compared it to the 8800 Ultra, which was barely better than a GTX but cost way more, the value proposition was like unheard of.

Like people, and remember, SLI was a thing back then and scaled pretty okay across a lot of games that people actually played. So people were buying two of these for like the price of a single 8800 GTX and absolutely curb stomping the GTX in terms of performance. Nobody could keep these things in stock. It was a feeding frenzy. And what happened was over time, the 8800 GT did go up in price,

but it didn't happen like this. It didn't happen that your initial inventory would come in and they would basically have you pay a higher price and then instant rebate you down so you could sell a limited amount of them at a lower price. No, you paid the lower price. And the way that pricing went up was that your next shipment would be at a higher price. So it was up to the retailer to determine, you know, how much they were going to mark it up or whatever with the manufacturer's suggestions, right? It was up to the retailer how they were going to

market up, but no one was kind of exercising external control on that card by having you pay a higher price and then enabling the MSRP with a SPF or a discount or an instant rebate or a POS rebate or whatever these mechanisms are. So no, in conclusion, I have never seen what Andrew Gibson and the Swedish retailer are describing. No, I have not. So let's hear the other side of the story. The Verge asked AMD, can you confirm or deny that the best prices on the best priced cards are capped in this way? And what AMD said is,

it is inaccurate that the 549-599 MSRP is launch only pricing. We expect cards to be available from multiple vendors at 549-599 excluding region specific tariffs and or taxes based on the work we have done with our AIB partners and more are coming. At the same time, the AIBs have different premium configurations at higher price points, and those will also continue. Now that's another thing that is different these days. It used to be that a premium version, and I'm gonna use EVGA's lingo, okay? So a KO, or a SC, or a... okay, Kingpin's a bad example, those were a lot more expensive. But these premium versions of a card usually didn't encroach or barely encroached on the pricing of the card above them. Nowadays, dude, it feels like you can see like an overbuilt card, like a premium or an overclocked version of a card

that literally costs like 30% more. And you're looking at it going like, well, well, well, hold on, shouldn't I just be getting like a completely new class of GPU for this? This is ridiculous. But because the price bands have been so stretched out, like they used to have to fit like your 30 class GPU, your 50, your 50ti, your 60, your 60ti, your 70, your 80, your 90, or your Titan, but all of that fit within about $200 to $800, $1000, right? Well now, well I don't know, we've got price bands all the way from like $400 all the way to $2000. So all of a sudden, you can have a card that all the way to $2,000. So all of a sudden you can have a card that's supposed to be $400, you have an overbuilt version of it that's $550 or

$600, and you're still like $50, $100 bucks below the next up card. It's ridiculous. So it's really, it's really hard to put downward pressure on the pricing of a 5070 when 5070 Ti's are so much more expensive that jumping up to it isn't just a logical step. All right, what else do we have here? It's a long topic and that tangent took so long and it's still such a long topic. Oh dude, I mean is it interesting? Because you guys can tell me if you're bored and we can move on. People seem pretty engaged. Okay. Many folks have cried foul on AMD, claiming they are doing evil deeds.

Adam's guess is that it's mostly incompetence. I mean, of course, companies are trying to maximize profits. That's what they exist to do. But AMD doesn't sell GPUs out of the goodness of their hearts. But there does seem to be some incompetence, but also maybe some strategic incompetence, because I had another email hit my inbox that Adam didn't have access to that will add a little bit more context to what I'm about to say.

So strap in. The pricing was last minute. Hardware Unboxed noted in their 9000 series announcement video that they had prepared multiple conclusions to the announcement because AMD hadn't determined pricing yet. And we did the same thing. We prepared three different conclusions for our video depending on the announced pricing from AMD. That means that this information was likely provided last minute to retailers and even board partners who would have needed to prepare promotional materials, social media posts, signage, advertising, database entries, and more in an extremely short period of time. AMD would have had to communicate to all of their retail and manufacturing partners, provide compensation if prices were being adjusted in the form of rebates or payments,

board partners would have had to reprice all their products, communicate to retailers and SIs and the like, and this scramble leaves a lot of room for errors. Like Best Buy listing the MSRP cards as on sale at launch time. AMD has since confirmed this was an error on Best Buy's part because the availability date was supposed to be a day after. Whoopsie doodles. Board partners also deal with razor thin margins and have a big interest in making as much money as possible from pent up demand. So the question is, what can AMD do about this? And Adam's conclusion is, I mean, not much. Frank Azor from AMD says they will be encouraging AIBs to keep cards at MSRP. And we spoke,

and I think that's, I think that's a little bit disingenuous personally, because I do believe that AMD can do more than just suggest things. Here's an example of something that AMD can do more than just suggest things. Here's an example of something that AMD could do, is if board partners are not allocating enough of their cards to MSRP versions, they could not allocate them GPUs.

That is literally the lever. That is the way that GPU makers, and this drives me crazy because I Can be kind of pedantic sometimes and this is a distinction that actually does matter in my opinion GPU makers are named Intel AMD and Nvidia Graphics board or video card or graphics card or add-in board board partners Those are the sapphires Asus's MSI's, Power Colors of the world. Okay? So that's not a GPU, that's a graphics card. A GPU is the actual

silicon die. So that's the leverage that GPU makers traditionally have over their board partners, over the graphics card makers, is that they can basically say look, play by our rules, or you will either sell at the price that we dictate, or you will sell nothing. Now, there's a problem with that. The problem with that is that then they are exerting a kind of ridiculous level of control over their partners and really not treating them very well, especially if they don't give them enough margin to survive. See Exhibit A, EVGA,

who didn't survive in the graphics card market because they simply, and this is a little bit of conjecture on my part, but simply got squeezed out. There was just not enough margin for them to continue to make it. Now, here's where the story gets a little bit, where we get a little bit more color commentary on the story. We spoke with a system integrator who had a bit of a different, and I wouldn't say different take, but a more expanded upon take. Their take was basically that all AMD really cares about to call this launch a success is to see big lineups at Micro Center. And we did see some evidence that Micro Center got a huge allocation compared to what was available online. I don't know this for sure but it does seem like retail, I feel

like we're, I feel like we've gone back two decades. It does seem like retail Got the priority for the launch compared to e-tail compared to online Which again you want to talk about things that I don't remember seeing in my entire career Well, that's one of them That's wild, dude That the way to get these products on launch day is that you have you like go line up and buy something in person. So they were pretty frustrated. Their total allocation of 9070 XTs from one board partner that they were able to use in their systems was three units. Those units, their cost was over MSRP. So what that tells me, what

that tells me is that we are not getting the whole story from AMD because it's very clear from those retailers telling us, hey we only have pricing support on a limited number of these cards and AMD never actually said that the everyday MSRP will be, or the everyday price on these cards will be $549,599. All they said is that they'll continue to be available. They didn't say in what kinds of quantities, right? So what that tells us is that it takes some kind of SPIF, or POS rebate, or something something in order to hit these prices.

These are not everyday prices because if they were, then an SI would be able to buy a card at $570 and make a few points of margin selling it at $599. That would be possible. But what tends to happen when your pricing is controlled via SPF or via instant rebate is that only the large players will have access to that. And so when you go buy something at a mom and pop shop or from a small system integrator, it'll be at a much higher price because they don't have access to any of that. They just buy from a distributor and the prices, whatever the channel price is, whatever the market will bear. Another element that they brought up with us is that, curiously... Sorry, one sec.

Hover Ship said his 9070 XT from Micro Center was $1,100. Yeah, that doesn't surprise you. Okay, how do I say this in a nice way? He said 789. What? Oh, okay. Okay. He said 1100 and then he said 789. Okay. 789. Okay, that actually ties really well into the next point. This Si Contact, who we're not going to name just because we don't want them to get in trouble for giving us this inside baseball. This SI contact pointed out that it's

curious that a lot of the cards have ended up kind of, for the 9070 XT, have ended up in the kind of $720 range, kind of plus, depending on how overbuilt they are. Well, here's something to consider. $599 plus a 20% tariff equals what? $720. Gotcha. And here's the thing. Here's the thing. When Nvidia launched their newest generation cards, they didn't know what the tariffs would be. There is at least an argument to be made that Nvidia did not know that there would be tariffs on their cards impacting the pricing and don't kid yourself there are tariffs and they are impacting the pricing. AMD knew. Before AMD announced their retail MSRP they knew that there would be 20% tariffs on these

cards if they were shipping out of China. And many, many of them are manufactured there. So what it appears to me, and I can't say this for certain, but with all of the evidence that I've seen and with all the experience that I have. What it appears to me is happening here is AMD wanted to undercut Nvidia on their MSRP is selling these cards into the market with 20% tariffs on them knowing that realistically their partners will not be able to hit those prices across the entire inventory that they have, but that they could strategically trickle out a few of them at that price while selling

the rest at a much higher price that reflects the tariffs, which they expect customers to simply accept and absorb because GPU prices are so high in the market. It appears to me that AMD has no real intention of actually hitting those prices, but it may not be entirely their fault because AMD certainly didn't start a trade war. Question. Yeah. I don't think while you were working at NCX,

there was noticeable tariffs but no do you know anyone or have any experience with stores that operate during like I haven't seen this so far but would it be normal to display that like this is the base price and then it increases by this much because of the tariff like would you explain no to the user what would normally happen is if you were a Canadian store let's say or actually let is if you were a Canadian store, let's say, or actually, let's use a Chinese store as a better example. If you were a Chinese store, and by Chinese store, I don't mean Aliexpress.com.

That's very much owned by Alibaba Group or whatever, right? But like it's very much a Chinese store, but it has an English storefront. Like it is a, you know, Western storefront for a Chinese company. So when I say Chinese store, I'm talking like Taobao, like an actual, like for Chinese people in China, Chinese store. So the way that I would expect them to handle it

is if you are ordering from a tariffed country, they would either have some kind of disclaimer that there may be certain that they're not responsible for any import duties, tariffs, whatever, and then you would be slapped with a tariff bill when it arrives. When it arrives. That's how I would expect that to happen. If you are a retailer and you are buying in bulk from a tariffed source, then I would expect that to simply be bundled into your cost the same way that anything else would be, whether it's freight or transaction fees or whatever else. When we were at NCIX, we had kind of like a cheat sheet for what the rough costs would

be. So on something like a power supply, I could basically say as long as I'm ordering in pallet quantities and not in just box quantities, somewhere in the neighborhood of around, over the time that I was there, freight costs went up a lot. So it started at around a dollar, a dollar fifty, and then went up to probably around two dollars to two dollars and fifty cents per power supply in terms of factoring in your freight cost. So you would just account for that import tariff as part of your of your import cost of the item And then you would mark up from there, and that would be transparent to the customer other than just that the prices suck

Okay Fair enough so in summary I Don't think that AMD I don't think that AMD had any intention of these cards being universally available at these prices. Or if they did have an intention, I think that it might have been kind of a misguided hope or I mean, I mean, things have gone of ping-pong back and forth on the whole tariff thing a fair bit. So maybe it was a naive hope then that the tariffs would not be there and that they would be able to hit them. But as it is now, I don't think they

did on China. I think they did on Canada and Mexico. Oh, actually, yeah, that's right. So as it is now, I think that the more, I think the more transparent thing for AMD to do would be to say there are outside factors impacting our costs. We are gonna do our best to make sure that there are cards available at these MSRPs. However, it is very clear from these external factors that are impacting our costs to import these cards

that not every card will be available at these prices and we are effectively going to be shifting margin from the buckets on the cards where we're making money down to these deeply discounted ones at MSRP. MSRP is a discounted price. It's a promotional price, as far as I can tell. And I am deeply disappointed. Scott is about to say I'm deeply discounted. Yeah. Speaking of you being deeply discounted, you can take off the hat. Oh yeah, thanks. No worries. There we go.

That is much more comfortable. Headphones over top of a toque is not my vibe. Yeah. Is there anything else? Questions or next topic? people bored of this conversation I can't I can't tell if they they were into it or not because I don't have all my chats open Yeah, it seems like people are with it so yeah good luck everybody The discussion questions are pretty good

What is the source of the supply shortage? How are board partners feeling? I'm sure they would much rather be selling more GPUs. And then, do you think Nvidia and AMD are indulging in scarcity marketing? No. Well, I don't think so. No, I don't think marketing is the primary driver. I think with AMD, I mean, their GPU launches have been low volume and then their post-launch sales have been even lower volume

for years and years and years at this point. Like I remember having like really silly conversation with a viewer at one point where they were like why don't you ever acknowledge Vega 56? I'm like what are you even talking about? I literally like I pulled up yeah I pulled up new egg and I was like there's one card and it's like an open box card like this this GPU effectively doesn't exist What are you even talking about? Well, I really know it wasn't Vega 56. It was radion 7 Vega miners bottle. Yeah, but no radion 7 was different radio on 7 just wasn't a card

It was this like weird launch thing AMD made like a few of them with their partners It was like repurposed dies from some workstation or compute card or something and then they dropped driver support like immediately for it like it was a complete clown show of a product it wasn't a real product and And people were like, oh, why don't you don't acknowledge? Do the reading it's like dude drop the drop your fanboy because I don't care that doesn't yeah, you're not making sense You don't make any sense right now. So that... But that's been AMD's situation for years and years and years.

I mean, even 7900 series kind of did okay, but that was it. It kind of did okay. I'm not convinced that they made any enormous volume of these cards. So if I was AMD and their partners, even if I thought I might have something good on my hands I'd have like PTSD from how many times I'd been given the smackdown from Nvidia every time I tried to launch something decent and Have them just like pull another ace out of their butt crack and be like boom guess you get to sell nothing So over building for them, and I, is risky. You got to think about the numbers involved here. Okay, guys, think about the numbers. If I'm AMD, okay, or let's

actually let's put ourselves in the in the in the situation of a board partner instead, because that's a much tougher one. AMD's margins are going to be better, and their their inventory holdings are going to be lower because AMD only holds GPUs. Or in some cases, don't quote me on this, but my understanding, at least on the Nvidia side, is that they will actually provide kits, like GPU kits, to board partners, and that will include the GPU and the memory. So they may take some margin there, they may actually take on some inventory risk there.

Don't quote me on that for AMD or even Nvidia for that matter. But what I'm saying is that they carry inventory for only part of the finished product. The board partner, they have to take on inventory for the GPU die itself, for the memory, for the power delivery components, the PC raw PCBs, any connectors and doodads, coolers, coolers are a very significant expense. So they are holding enormous inventory. There's lead time in terms of building them, packing them, shipping them. So by the time they're actually delivering this thing to a consumer, if all goes according to plan, they have paid all of their suppliers for this stuff. They are effectively probably not

able to utilize their net payment terms much. And that becomes even more true the longer this thing sits and rots. So if I'm a board partner and we're talking about a 599 product, I can assume that my bill of materials is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 to $450, at least.

So let's use 450. If I overbook, right, like if I overestimate, and I'm a global company, right, so for, I'm Sapphire, right, I got to supply, if I supply even one single GPU to every computer shop around the world, how many am I making? Right? Hundreds of thousands, millions, you know? We're talking about enormous amounts of money. So if I get it wrong by even 5,000 units, right? That's 2.25 million dollars. I can't get it wrong. And if I'm going to get it wrong, I'd rather get it wrong and if I'm gonna get it wrong I'd rather get it wrong on the low side especially if I've been burned time and time and time and time again on building a bunch of these stupid radion cards and then nobody freaking wanting them right so no I don't think this is scarcity marketing.

I think this is on the Nvidia side, them just much rather using these wafers to build AI products. And on the AMD side, I think this is as simple as not buying enough allocation, not buying enough wafer allocation from TSMC. I'm sure AMD would love to be selling more cards, but they've got a book wafers months in advance

They don't know that Nvidia's 50 series is gonna suck back when they're booking launch Allocation for production for 9070. They don't know that they might have That is awful. By the way, I Can pick you up loud and clear? Oh, yeah That is awful, by the way. I can pick you up loud and clear. Oh yeah. Alright, I'll stop.

Yeah, or just lean away, maybe. Anyway, the point is that I don't know. I don't know that Nvidia is going to lay a huge egg on their 50 series launch. I might have some sort of whispers and scuttlebutt, but I'm not going to know that their pricing is going to suck, because Nvidia probably hasn't even determined their pricing yet. They certainly haven't leaked it to anybody. We don't find out till the very last minute. So if I'm AMD, I'm going like, oh my god, I don't know how many wafers because 5080 might be, they might pull a 30 series

and just like, boom, try to go after the console market. You guys remember that, right? and just like, BOM, try to go after the console market. You guys remember that, right? That's how aggressive Nvidia can be when they want to be. Cause they were like, basically, fuck the PlayStation with this Radeon crap graphics hardware in it. Fuck the Xbox. 3080 is, I forget what the 3080 MSRP was, but I think it was like 600 bucks or something like that.

Like it was aggressive. And the 70 was so powerful. It such good pricing right Nvidia can be aggressive so I don't want to overplay my pathetic you know 9070 hand if I think I might be up against Nvidia's top tier GPU at that price I have no idea but then as it turned out AMD was going to be up against their like fourth tier down and they were super competitive. So yeah, they might ramp things up, but it's gonna take time. What else did we have for discussion here? I think that's it for the GPUs.

All right, good chat. Fascinate. What do you want to talk about today? Oh my god, are we supposed to do merch messages already Dan? Did I just take way too long to go through that yeah? I think you spoke for about 40 long 45 minutes. Oh, so very long. We better rush through the rest of this Okay, was it was it boring? Sorry? I'm feeling insecure. I think it was pretty good I would have cut you off, but yeah, it was I think it was good. It's just really long cool I think it was good. It was just really cool

Circumcision doctor says what It's probably up there for one of the longest topics we've ever done. Okay cool. Yes Dead anti-social and float-plane chat says you talk too much on your show All right merch Merch messages. The way to interact with the show is to send a merch message. We don't do twitch bits. We don't do whatever the other thing is.

Super chats. We do merch messages because the way we see it, if you're going to throw money at your screen, you should get some fine LTTStore.com merchandise in return. And we've got a great little launch for you guys this week, introducing... Da da da da da da! The Terminally Online pun very much intended.

Thank you. There we go. Hoodie and t-shirt. It is a brand new design that is an homage to 90s hardware and to your lifelong commitment to being online. It's available as both a hoodie and a t-shirt. And I got to say, man, I saw the hoodie on set the other day and I was like, yo, is that ours? Because I had forgotten that I greenlit this design. The hoodie looks flipping sick. It does. These are printed to order here in Canada for a long lasting vibrant print that was

very well reviewed by Project Farm on our classic cozy terry cotton hoodie, blanks, or our legendary t-shirt blanks. And like most of our sweatshirts, the hoodie also features a secure pocket for your phone, wallet, keys, or earbuds. Get it now at lmg.gg slash terminally online. And I would say our t-shirts are pretty well priced even with tariffs. Let's go. Yeah, they're putting a lot of pressure on me to increase our t-shirt pricing, by the way. So I'm not surprised. I've wanted to treat the t-shirts like the Costco hot dog. I even told someone in a meeting I'll kill you if you increase the price of the t-shirt. It's a reference. It's a reference It's a reference Did Ariana know that before now? Yeah, it was Nick. So it doesn't matter

I Can threaten to kill Nick? It's fine. The point is, the point is that it's a reference. It's a reference. He gets, he knows the reference. He'll kill him in Minecraft. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. However, that team has goals in terms of maintaining profitability under CEO Taron Tong, and they are telling me that our t-shirt pricing is becoming untenable. We have never adjusted it. It's funny, we take so much flack for our supposedly expensive products. And yeah, oh, here it is.

This is an extremely expensive hoodie. I get it. It is embroidered. This is not printed. Go find me an all over embroidered garment that is less than $150 US dollars. Go find it. It should it should probably be at least a sweater because someone's going to find like... Sure, find me pants or a hoodie. Find me pants or a hoodie, something big. It costs a fortune. What do you want from me? Not every product is for everybody.

All over embroidered, not just a little logo. Not every product is for every person. I know it's expensive, but what it isn't is overpriced. It's priced for what it is. Anyway, the point is our t-shirts, they're like 20 bucks. I can't think of a single other like creator merch that is $20 for a t-shirt for a printed tee, quality printed tee. So I don't even want to hear it. Anyway, the point is that we've also got the hoodie, which you guys can see here, which by the way,

also has printing on the back, which costs us us more and that's 60 US dollars for our fine terminally online hoodie this is a great shot by the way I love this there they are Gen Z not talking to each other on their phones it's perfect it's flawless great job Tatiana Sammy and I assume Artie was probably involved in that shoot as well. I'm trying to find a sweater because there's like there's probably one of them. What I'm finding is a lot of them will say embroidered design and it's printed but it looks like it's embroidered. Digitized D says I digitize embroidery and I promise that's cheap for a hoodie. Exactly. And I'm not okay it's not cheap but what it is is fair. It is fairly priced.

Yeah. We have a cost markup model for our stuff. We're not demanding some ridiculous margin. And if you think we are, hey, you don't have to buy anything. That's totally okay. Hey, any news on the, I left it alone for a while. I did. I was a good boy for a little bit. I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get one in there. What's coming? Any news on the talls? Oh, the tall blanks. I, I, I don't know. As far as I know, we're just ordering them. I was told, I was told we have no less than three million dollars of inventory incoming. So things are a little bare right

now on the store. We know we know and I have been told we have three million dollars of stuff on order. So hopefully there's some tall blanks in there. Well that's all I know. Sell a bunch of tall blanks immediately because I'm not waiting this time. Let's go. I'm just going to buy a bunch immediately. I was nice last time. I was like, I'll let the audience get some this time. Screw you guys. I'm tired of this. I don't want to wait like seven more months to be able to buy a shirt. I will sit on WAN Show and they're announced and I will order them live.

I will race all of you. Oh my goodness. Fight me now. Okay. Anyway, we have an announcement. If you were wondering about the tuque that I was wearing, I refuse to call it a beanie. That is my act of solidarity with my fellow Canadians in this trying time. If you're wondering about the tuque that I was wearing earlier, it's because of the Why Is Wan Late series, a fan-favorite floatplane exclusive series that shows you the behind the scenes of what Luke and I are up to each Friday.

We've been competing to see who is the one who makes a Wan Late, and as you can see, I lost most recently. To see all seven episodes in this monthly series, head to LMG.GG slash flow plane actually lose every time actually I think I have a new I think I have a new favorite exclusive over there I checked out a little bit of this and then Sammy told me I had to stop watching it because he wants to get me to react to it but it is so funny LMG team members share their first meeting with me so we've got Emily from the editing team, Mark from the editing team, Vance, the executive assistant,

and then Nicole from HR. And excuse me, what do they call, oh, bloody hell, what's the custodian version of HR? Culture and talent, culture and talent department. Custodian version? Yeah, like custodian versus janitor, receptionist versus secretary, culture and talent instead of HR, you know, like, yeah. Sure. Yeah. Sure. All right. Anyway, people are loving this one. Check it out at LMG.GG slash flow plane. Oh,

we haven't even done a merch message yet. Right. How do you send a merch message? You go on the store, pick up something nice, and in the cart you will see a little box to send a merch message to producer Dan. Who has been waiting, staged for this terminally online moment for Lord only knows how long, and will give us a, who will either reply to your message, pop it up down there or curate it for me and Luke to talk about. Give me Dan. I got one occasionally.

Why do you guys completely remove products from the website? I.e. the tech bro or the workshop jacket. It means there's no info and tech specs to reference for reselling or just product comparing in general. Because it was confusing and made the site really cluttered for people who were shopping for stuff that we do have for sale. However, when we I think there's a redesign coming up that will include an old product archive and we we are going to do that. It's taking longer than I would like, but.

I don't know what to say other than things take time sometimes and I'm really sorry for that. Hey DLL, on launch day I tried to buy a 9070 XT while watching stock vanish. I accidentally bought a 9070 for $650 US dollars on Newegg. Should I just cut my losses and return it or is this an okay price? Was it $650? $650. Man, I do not love that card. However... Dude, it's so hard to determine what an okay price is when nothing's in stock and all the price is just yo-yoing constantly. Like a big problem with the 9070 is the clock speed. Like yeah, it's got fewer CUs and all of that, but it has 16 gigs of RAM. And so a big part of the problem is the

clock speed. I actually, we didn't, there was, we don't have much time when it comes to launch, like launch embargo reviews. So I don't know if it overclocks like a bat out of hell. Like it's possible that that card could be a much more competent card than it reviewed as. I don't love that card at that price, and personally, I still have not actually pulled the trigger on my 50-90 upgrade for this cycle because I'm waiting to see if Plouffe actually doesn't go through with his order. He has a pre-order in at Best Buy, and he said he'd give it to me because he decided not to go through with it, but I think he might change his mind still, so I'm not going to hold him to it. But I'll take that. But I got to be honest with you guys on principle. And it's funny because I

often see people kind of getting on me about being rich and, sorry, how did you phrase it? being rich and sorry, how did you phrase it? Quite wealthy. Okay, yeah, you wanna talk shade, Mr. I'm gonna buy a plane. I'm not talking shade, I'm not talking shade. What I'm saying is, what I'm saying is, Sorry, you're good. Do you need a minute? You need a minute. So I'll often P I'll often see people kind of come at me because I'll say like, look, no, that's expensive. I'm not going to buy

it. Yeah, the reality of it is I could buy a 5090. I could buy a 5090 right now. I could go on eBay, I could buy a scalped 5090. But that I'm not going to because that's lame. Because I'm sitting here telling you guys, don't buy scalped GPUs, don't contribute to the crappiness of the GPU market by paying these prices. So what, because I'm in a position where I can just afford to just buy it, so then I just should? How hypocritical would that be?

And so I was looking at the comments on the MacBook announcement video, where I was like, yeah, oh, this sucks. I bought mine at a bad time. And half of it is people telling me to return it, because I'm within 10 days, but guys, movie magic. Our video came out 10 days ago. I bought it like three weeks ago almost,

so no, I can't return it. And then the other half was people telling me, you know, suck it up crybaby, you can afford to buy a new one anyway. And I can, but that's not the point. That doesn't change anything. That doesn't change the fact that I bought it at a bad time, because I got a last gen product days before Apple announced the new one. And that sucks. Nobody likes that. That likes that That sucks That's the whole point also I just needed a hook for the intro for the video and who cares like I literally When I was shopping for my MacBook bought a last last gen one

I bought an M2 because I knew that all I was gonna do was word process on it And it wasn't gonna matter anyway, so I'm not actually like I'm not actually mad. I just I just am saying a thing. I bought this at the wrong time and that blows. It blows for anyone regardless of the money. You got roasted recently at an event because people were like, well, why do you have the like crappy iPhone? Oh the 16 plus. Are you a tech guy? Yeah. Yeah, remember? Yeah, because I like I don't know I've always as much as as much as you are what did I say before fairly wealthy or whatever? I have always appreciated that like, you know, you'll sit in you'll sit in economy You'll you'll buy the lower-end thing. You'll not scalp stuff

Like there's most the principle of the thing suppose that you've stuck to yeah And the thing with this one is that this is the phone that I thought made the most sense in Apple's 16 series lineup Yeah, I can afford a pro. Of course I can don't be ridiculous Literally, I bought a pro and a pro max or whatever the top spec one is they're sitting in a warehouse I literally bought them but this is was the one that I wanted to review the platform on because I thought that in terms of what people should actually be spending their money on, this was one that made a lot more sense. Those

features on the Pro Series, yeah, I appreciate a higher refresh rate display. Of course I do. And I guess I'd love to be able to do a 3D scan of my room if the situation arises. And USB 3 transfer speeds are better for the once every couple months that I'll plug in and I'll do an over the cable backup of my photos or whatever. But that's it. I'm not going to pay hundreds of dollars more for that and I I'm not going to pay hundreds of dollars more for that, and I'm especially not going to recommend that someone else pay hundreds of dollars more for that. And I think that reviewing a product, the way that I would actually recommend buying it is more useful.

I think that's more meaningful. It's kind of like years ago, actually. Anytime we would order a laptop, Alex would ask that instead of ordering the starting at configuration, we order the minimum we would recommend configuration. So if starting at had four gigs of RAM or something, we basically don't acknowledge that. And we go, no, this is not a 999 laptop, this is a 1299 laptop, it has 16 gigs of RAM, etc. I think, philosophically, that that's something that I can get behind and it's something that I'm trying to Continue to be behind. Yeah, not pretending. I can't afford it. I mean you guys are you guys are gonna see some stuff over the next month or so of

Just stuff that we could do for the themes You're gonna see some stuff anyway. The point is we have our challenges, but we're still we're still doing okay. No, it is not going to be a tech yacht. I promise it will not be a tech yacht. Tech blimpimp tech blimp. Yeah, sure sure But one person and a laptop on it. Oh Thanks Dan, uh, oh right. I'm uh, did we ever do a second merge message? Yes. Oh wonderful. What am I supposed to do? Let's go straight into sponsor. Oh the show has brought you by Squarespace. You might not like my fashion sense right into sponsors. Oh, the show is brought to you by Squarespace.

You might not like my fashion sense, but you gotta admit, our website built with our sponsor, Squarespace, actually pretty tasteful. They make building a website ridiculously easy. So easy that our HR team, that is talent and culture team, can quickly post job listings

without bugging the IT department. Applicants can fill out their info and upload resumes and cover letters directly on the site. And Squarespace has tons of stunning layouts and styling options that look amazing on any device. Not much of a writer? Well, Squarespace also offers AI tools to help you craft product descriptions

with just a simple prompt. They also support all major credit cards and other popular payment methods, making it effortless to set up your online store. Need help? You can message them through live chat, browse their video guides, or even hire a Squarespace expert. So start building your website today and get 10% off your first purchase by visiting squarespace.com

slash when. The show is also brought to you by Vessi. If you're running out to grab a new graphics card this week, okay, I get where you're going with this, Dennis, but why am I holding a GPU already as I run to get a graphics card? Fail, absolute fail. You might as well run in a pair of Vessi's from our sponsor. Vessi keeps your socks dry while staying breathable,

lightweight, and stretchy. And thanks to their versatility, I even wore them to Disneyland last week. Of course, Dennis would get me in the Vessies. They're comfortable and fantastic for long walks. It's the, it's the light-weightness that makes the biggest difference for me, honestly. I'm going off script here. Check out their Stormbursts. They combine sneaker-like comfort with boot-level protection. Great for spontaneous weekend adventures, especially hiking. I mean, you'd hate to get your socks muddy, or worse, slip on the trail. The Stormbursts feature a rugged outsole

designed for superior traction on wet, slippery or uneven surfaces and Stormburst offers both high top and low top options. They have tons of positive reviews and many of our team members wear Vessi's every day. So step boldly into any weather with Vessi Stormburst. You can get your pair now at vessi.com slash wanshow to make every step an adventure and get an instant 15% off your first purchase at checkout.

Finally, the show is brought to you by Corsair. Not too pleased with the PC case you've got? Our sponsor, Corsair's Frame 4000D, might be the case that'll make you happy. Its modular design and InfiniRail fan mounting system make building or upgrading your PC easier than ever, offering you the flexibility to support up to 12 120mm fans and even dual 360mm radiators. Got one of them uber-chonky GPUs? Well, first of all, lucky you. And second of all, the Frame 4000D is larger than its predecessor with plenty of room to fit your

graphics card. Plus, it features reverse connection motherboard support and removable internal panels to keep everything looking clean. Built for easy IQ link integration, this case lets you manage all your components seamlessly. So check out the Corsair Frame 4000D today, link in the video description. Lies, damned lies, and then MSRP. Bamboozled. That was the guidance for the title and thumbnail, I was just reading. Dan put it at the bottom of the doc, sponsors. Okay, Dan. What do you want to talk about next Mr. Luke? Let's, let's cover the Firefox terms rewrite because we were we were a little kind of unsure about it last time. I was pretty sure that's not what they meant at the very least. So

I'm happy that they have done this, although I haven't actually reviewed it. I'm assuming it's fine. Mozilla has responded to user backlash over new Firefox terms of use introduced last week, rewriting the policy to address the overly broad language. That's one way of saying it, used in the original version, which, you know, critics said the language implied that Mozilla was asking for rights to any data input or uploaded or anything uploaded through Firefox, which is literally what it said, so, yep,

which raised concerns about data being sold to advertisers or used to train AI. Mozilla claimed that the new terms didn't represent a change in the way that the company used data and that the company's ability to use collected data was still limited by a separate Firefox privacy notice. Two days after the initial uproar, Firefox product chief Ajit Varma Varma, yeah, announced that the terms of use have been rewritten to more clearly reflect the limited scope of how Firefox interacts with user data and the new

terms explicitly state that Mozilla does not gain ownership of inputted content. Discussion question, how diligent are you about reading terms and licenses for the apps you use? Not very. I think it depends. Completely honest. I actually read an entire contract today for the first time in a while. Oh I read contracts all the time. Oh. I don't read... Well it included terms of service so I guess yeah but okay yeah it was more of a sales sale contract So yeah, I read those for sure. I read every single one of those I don't when I'm signing stuff on behalf of the company. I'm a lot more careful if I'm using like like

Discord I Should because they're almost certainly like selling everything but yeah I don't I don't know I'll have probably not even selling it I mean I think I think they have significant company ownership in China yeah so they're just giving it to the Chinese government you know don't even worry about them selling it yeah I don't know now I want to know who does on this field by co-founders I could be super wrong I thought there was a significant chance oh ten cents in there well it says most

likely has a majority stake what does that. Can you just tell me if it actually does or not? Nice. I'm not a hundred percent certain because multiple sources say most likely. I don't know what that means. Is it banned in China? Oh, it's blocked in China. So it's not funneling information that also doesn't mean that it's not owned by Company, it looks like there hasn't been a lot of conversation about this recently. So you know what? I'm just gonna I'm just gonna Allegedly there I said, yeah, I don't know

Well, they have some amount of stake tencent seems to have some amount of stake in the company But it's it's not very clear how much I Don't know anyways either way. Yeah, I I Read and have raised issues with actually many times Contracts that the company has has signed including one very intense one with Yeah, I'll say it, one with a sponsor where they were trying to give us information early, which would have been very helpful.

But I don't even know if you know about this, but the contract included a line like three quarters through it that said that we couldn't say any disparaging comments about them ever. And I was like, no, there's no way we're signing this. No, I think I did hear this one. I think I did hear this one. You did? That would have been hilarious.

We would have just, we would have just un- batted. Oh, we would have had to. Yeah, we would have had to just say whatever we want because that's not how this works. We would have had to break contract. That's hilarious. Yeah, I sent it back to them and they're like,

oh, like we're never going to do anything. Yeah. I was like, no, you're removing this. Like. Then you'll have no to break contract. That's hilarious. Yeah, I sent it back to them and they're like, oh, like we're never going to do anything. Yeah. I was like, no, you're removing this. Like. Then you'll have no problem removing it. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, that's great. Which, if I remember correctly, I don't know that they did. No, they didn't. I don't think they removed it ultimately. Yeah. So we never signed it. Yeah. Now, man, there's been all kinds of stuff like that.

That's like stuff that we'd love to do that would be beneficial, mutually beneficial. Like we had a, we had a laptop company. Framework disclosure, but it wasn't framework. So whatever. But we had a laptop company come to us recently and say, hey, like we'd love to integrate more deeply with you guys, get feedback on branding and product design,

and give you guys early looks at stuff so that you can kind of help guide us because realistically we really do appreciate your feedback as independent media, but the reality of it is by the time we get it, the product's done. So there's not really anything we can do about it. How about this? And I had the business team bring it to me

and I basically was like, I don't see what planet this can work on because, I'm making the exact same gesture as my doppelganger here. Blah, blah. I don't see what planet this can work on because either we do this for free, which is a complete fucking waste of our time because we're busy and we have a lot to do.

You know, it's not that we don't want to be helpful or whatever. It's just that like we can't make it a habit to just do consulting for free for everybody. That's ridiculous. Um, so that's not an option and we can't take money for it because even if they gave us a contract that was like, oh yeah, you could totally say whatever you want, we actually wouldn't be able to because anything that we were bound by that didn't make it into the final product, right? Like any of that decision making process that we're privy to, now because we're privy to it, we wouldn't be able to speculate on it without sort of violating the,

I mean, at least the spirit of the agreement. Like you can't, like we couldn't, man, imagine if we were doing a review of this MacBook, and I'm gonna use a far-fetched example so that I'm really not giving any hints because I promise you it wasn't Apple talking to us about this. Apple doesn't talk to me.

If I was doing a review of this MacBook, like imagine me knowing that I advised them that, I do actually like the keyboard. So again, I'm gonna use an example that is not real. Imagine if I advised them that the keyboard sucked and they shipped that sucky keyboard in spite of me saying that I didn't like it So now I'm sitting here doing my editorial review and I'm like, yeah, I told them this keyboard sucked

But they shipped this anyway, so they're especially stupid imagine the strain that that would put on the relationship even if I was allowed to say that that's like You're just in a position where things are like, bizarre, you know? Like it's not even like, it's not even conflict of interest. It's just conflict. That's just, that just doesn't work. So I think that's come up probably half a dozen times over the years and every time I just kind of kick it back

and just kind of go like, how does this make any sense? It doesn't make any sense. In the particular example that I laid out as well, the thing that was kind of funny to me was that they were, it was clearly more, if we ignored the thing that I had to sign, it was clearly more beneficial to them. Like the thing that we would have been doing would have been better for them

than it would have been for us. So it was just kind of stupid. But I think, you know, they're just a pretty big company and they have one boilerplate thing and their lawyers just didn't want to change it. So like the person I was talking to understood. I get it. But they they couldn't get the legal team to change it. It probably would have cost 20 grand because they probably would have had to take the entire agreement back to the law firm. And like, this is why I don't like involving lawyers and things. And if you're a lawyer whatever like nothing personal you got you got your expertise You got to be paid for that. You got a job to do I get it

But I don't like talking to you. I don't like talking to you either. Yeah Sorry, you know, I'm sorry nothing personal. What do we want to talk about next? Should we do the dig thing? Yeah, let's do the dig thing digs coming back. What? dig founder Kevin Rose and reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian Sure have acquired dig with the intent of reviving the platform with a fresh vision to restore the spirit of discovery and genuine community that made the early web a fun and exciting place to be. Good luck with that.

I would love it if you can accomplish it. Dig launched in 2004 with its innovative user curated content system and quickly became the homepage of the internet for more than 40 million unique visitors a month. After a very poorly received redesign in 2010, users abandoned the site in favor of Reddit. And by 2012, Dig's unique visitor count was down 90% from its peak and the site and assets were sold off for less than $16 million. Isn't that crazy? And a press release.

Absolutely crazy considering the heights that it was at. Nothing and Dig was everything and practically overnight That was it. That's how fast platforms used to come and go and now I mean you've talked about this extensively we don't have to reopen this can of worms, but it feels like Things are so permanent There the momentum is enormous for platforms now Anyway carry on sorry the motes are huge. Like anyone attempting to attack YouTube is going to lose.

Like it just, I don't know what it is, what it is. Even TikTok, like they're winning in a space, but they didn't win like YouTube style VODs. No, and- Or shorts. And even then, YouTube shorts are taking off. More importantly, they didn't win the profitability of traditional VOD. Yep.

Like I'm sure TikTok makes money, but the creators sure as heck don't. Yep. In a press release, Ohanian summed up the plans for the new site, stating, Kevin and I are here to build something better than what social platforms are offering today. AI should handle the grunt work in the background while humans focus on what they do best, building real connections. No one dreams of spending their day hunting down spam or AI should handle the grunt work in the background while humans focus on what they do best, building real connections. No one dreams of spending their day hunting down spam or playing content police. They want to create, connect, and build thriving communities.

And I'm all in on this chapter. Interesting. So like AI content curation with humans just commenting on it maybe? I don't know. It sounds like from that description that humans aren't even posting the links. I should handle the grunt work in the background while he... I don't know what that means. ...building real connections. No one dreams of spending their day hunting down spam or playing content police.

So no active moderation. Yeah, I don't know what that means. I don't know what that means either. And because I didn't know what that meant, I went to their website, and I learned nothing at all. It is it is completely useless. I mean, that makes sense. Because it's not like they've had time to work on anything yet It's just an announcement of an intent to work on something No explainer of you know what it is. I don't know they have a little button that every time you click it

It iterates by one. I mean I'd be down to give it a shot, but I just There's so much there's so much of why I use reddit It's because of what's already there, not because of what I want to be there in the future. And that's true of YouTube as well, which was another great example you gave of just like a platform with enormous inertia. Yeah.

Conceptually, what is the difference between inertia and momentum? I guess momentum has to actually have, well, momentum, but inertia is always an innate quality, quantity. Anyway, doesn't matter. Different side, same coin. Momentum is defined as a tendency of a body to remain in motion. Inertia is defined as a tendency for a body to oppose the change in its position. So they're the same thing?

No. No. I mean, they sound like the same value once you calculate. In simple words, momentum is your force or speed of movement Mm-hmm, and inertia is what keeps you going Mm-hmm What wouldn't your speed of movement and your mass be what keeps you going? No, because if you had an elephant that was stationary, mm-hmm, it would have enormous inertia, but no moment of inertia

but then if I wanted to... I guess we could... Okay, so only if it's completely stationary, inert-ness, then it's inertia. I guess that kind of... I've got to get behind that. If you had a very tiny thing that was moving very fast, it would have a high inertia. I don't think that's right. I'm not gonna worry about it. I'm bored. The best subscription ever just got more affordable.

YouTube premium Lite. On March 5th, YouTube announced that they are adding a cheaper tier to the YouTube Premium lineup called Premium Lite. It will cost $8 a month instead of $14, but there are some differences. You will not get access to downloading or background play on mobile. No background play? Okay. YouTube music, music videos, shorts, and the home page will still get ads. And they also have a footnote saying that most videos are ad free such as gaming, fashion, beauty, news, and more more so what am I actually getting well you get no in video like mid-roll and pre-roll ads it sounds like in most videos but that does

not include music videos shorts or the home page and you don't get YouTube music this actually sounds like a terrible deal and you should just get the regular premium. I also hate that it's it's unclear. So it feels like they can change it on me without even updating the terms. Well, this basically sounds like they just can't afford the music licensing, because that's why you can't have background play. Like that's why background play costs because it's instead of Spotify, right, you can just have YouTube music videos playing in the background. So like I get it. But also, it just seems like not that compelling a value add because I don't know if I know a single adult working person in my life that doesn't have a Spotify or YouTube music or Apple Music or title or whatever, like a music subscription, I really don't think I do. So if you're going to have one anyway, then you should just get YouTube music

because at this price difference of $6, it's basically nothing. And if you sign up as a family with some family, then honestly, the difference in price is even smaller to just get the full YouTube premium. Next up. Correction for placebos. Correction for the discussion about placebos on February 14th WAN show, Oh, sure. This is pretty sure. The skeptics guide featuring Yale associate professor and neurology doctor Steven Novella reacted to our discussion about the placebo effect

on the WAN show a couple of weeks ago. Dr. Novella pointed out a misleading, uh, where'd it go? A misleading sentence. We said about the placebo effect and cancer survival rates and we'd like to issue a corrective statement. Believe me, you'll survive cancer and lose your quality of life, but it hasn't been shown

to extend survival in cancer patients. You can find more information at links. We unequivocally do not endorse companies and individuals who use placebo effect to push scams, obviously, scam products and earn a profit from each other's unfortunate situations. You guys know we hate scams. Did people think we did that? I don't know. Not acting in good faith, but maybe.

Yeah. We encourage you to always contact your healthcare professional if you have a medical situation. Also I'll say this now and I don't know if we said this then or not, we're not a medical podcast. We talk for four and a half hours sometimes. So sometimes we're going to say some stuff about other things in our lives that aren't tech. But yeah, maybe go listen to the Yale doctor guy and, and not so much us.

And something that we do know is that having a good outlook can absolutely increase patient compliance and better patient compliance can absolutely impact outcomes, no matter what the disease is. So yeah, maybe not directly, but the main point of our conversation was just that if people maintain a positive outlook and if they think that things are working,

it can have a positive outcome. The very, very specifics, my apologies if we were not correct there, and we were never, obviously, never endorsing people selling placebos as real remedies and saying that like that's okay. I think our main point was just that like, it's a thing and that's why they get away with it, because they sell you a placebo and then it is actually quite likely depending on what ails you that you might feel better. And that's why it's so hard to nail these guys. Microsoft Microsoft is testing free Office desktop ads, sorry, apps. Wow, I actually didn't mean to do that,

but that was one heck of a Freudian slip. Wow. Microsoft is testing a free desktop version, Microsoft 365. When installing the productivity suite formerly known as Office, users that opt to skip signing in with a Microsoft account will be presented with the option to use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for free. Of course, there's a catch or three. It is ad-supported with a persistent ad banner on the right side of the screen

and every few hours. This is great. A 15-second video ad will play, although at least it can be muted. It can only save to OneDrive and includes up to five gigabytes of storage as part of the free package. Many features are missing.

These are listed on Bbomb, but the basics are there. I've been warned Bbomb has lots of ads. Oh wow, boy do they ever. That is a lot of ads. My goodness. What are the limitations? What parts of this are article and what parts of it are ads?

Good Lord, I can earn Roblox gift cards. How to install free editing. Features missing, oh my goodness. Dictation, line spacing okay text box spacing pivot charts okay pivot table oh boy okay so they're quite cut down okay so basically use Google's product I guess yeah yeah Jordan prepared this he goes is this gonna result in enough paid subs to be viable? And also asks, is this for the seven people that are not aware of Google Docs?

It is kind of feeling that way a little bit. Kind of feeling that way a little bit. Yeah, Ann M. White in Floatplane Chat says, literally just get LibreOffice at that point. Like, what are we even talking about here? This is a fun one. Wacky foldables and other stuff at Mobile World Congress. MWC ran this week from March 3rd to March 6th in... I'm going to say this wrong. Bartholona.

I think you're supposed to do it with a TH sound, right? I wish they would just spell things the way that they're supposed to be said because If you're gonna have an anglicized spelling anyway Why not in good faith try to spell it in a way that makes it spelled like it sounds Bartholona, I don't know. I don't think that is dude. I think it's just spelt the same way in Spanish Which is probably why it sounds different than it's spelled. Well, then give me an anglicized spelling like everything else Anyway, we're supposed to rapid-fire react to each device and Give it a one to ten score. All right. So first up is the Lenovo ThinkBook Flip AI

prototype Omega 2 in 1. Oh My gosh, this is from PCmeg.com Whoa, okay, we should decide we should decide what our scale means So is this out of ten in terms of like Would I buy it or would I use it because those? Definitely are not the same thing in this case like if somebody gave this to me for free I feel like I might consider using it

It looks like a joke It looks like a it looks like it's photoshopped. It looks it looks like a meme Okay The outer display can flip up to become a large Vertical display so it kind of goes in it looks yeah there you go. There's a there's a better shot of it Wow also, this is like the ugliest hotel room But great job PC mag for making it work. It kind of works Luke. What's your rating? So again, sorry, what are we doing it based on if we would use it or if we would buy it

You wouldn't buy anything, so let's go with if we use it. I might buy something, we'll see. How about if you would use it for work? If this was our standardized laptop. I would. I would use this. Out of 10. I would unfold it.

Would I use it out of 10? I would definitely use it. Like you wouldn't ask for something else, because we could give you something else. Would I use it out of 10? I would definitely use it. Like you wouldn't ask for something else because we could give you something else. Would you prefer it? I wouldn't. This is sounding like a six. Yeah. I think it might be a six or a seven because I travel with an extra screen. Okay. And this is just an extra screen but slightly less cool because it's up. And how are you going to use this on a plane?

Like, I just don't think you would do. Buddy behind you is going to lean their seat back. I mean, I guess it wouldn't break it, though, because it's bendable. I think it bends the other way. So absolutely. Oh, yeah. Right. Yeah. Well, to be fair, though, it wouldn't crunch under because it would go all the way to the top of the seats. You'd have to like pull their hair off

of it. Yeah, yeah, I'd give it a six. I think I don't think I can go higher than a four. I would definitely use it in like hotel rooms and stuff. I would use it. I would use it. All right, let's go. Let's move on to our next one. 16 by nine windows on it basically. Next up is the Lenovo Magic Bay dual display concept. Here we go.

This is from digital trends. Oh, this looks more like your style, Luke. It sure does. Two screens or one. It's up to you. I'm going to go with the this looks more like your style Luke. It sure does. Two screens or one it's up to you. The thing that gets me with this stuff is it's really not much harder to just have an external display and a normal laptop. External so this uses

special external displays that use Lenovo's Magic Bay connection to add either two 13-inch screens or a single vertical 8-inch screen. It uses pogo pins and magnets. Yeah, also known as a proprietary connector, so you can't just carry it to the next one. And I've been using the same external screen for two different laptops so far. You won't be doing that here. I've been using the same external screen for two different laptops so far. You won't be doing that here. Exactly. So like the buying of this, very low.

The using of this, at least one of the external displays, probably like a seven. How much do you think that drives the design of these products? Because if I'm a Lenovo and I'm targeting businesses, do I care at all if Luke the individual would buy this? Maybe not, because I don't need to buy it. But you care a lot that you might get lock-in to the IT team because of this... Because Luke's company bought it for him and Luke likes it and will complain to IT if he doesn't get one again or whatever, right? Or if the new laptop doesn't have those screens oh boy Lenovo yoga solar PC concept solar it's

a solar PC cut solar panels on the lid oh well do they work when they have horrible line of sight? They claim. Or it's covered in stickers. They claim that even in low light conditions, the panel can generate enough power to sustain the battery charge when the PC is idle. They also claim that with enough direct sunlight, 20 minutes of exposure can power up to one hour of video playback with a long disclaimer on this claim.

What do you think? This feels like this feels like a three to me. A two like they know battery banks exist, right? Like if I wanted to carry like solar panels, they're gonna add weight to this thing. I have to carry them around all the time and I'm gonna use them sometimes. How often do you use it outside? Being involved with it also adds more weight. How often do you use it outside is a big question. How often do you use it outside in direct line of sight of the Sun when you're not like putting it so far folded back that it's not gonna see the Sun at all anyways? Yeah exactly. And

then you can't put stickers on the back like Dan said. Okay I don't know if that's a major consideration but that matters a lot in my field, Linus, okay? How will they know I use Arch? This needs to be taken seriously. Okay, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Have you ever been to an IT conference? Everyone's, the back of their laptops are covered in stickers. I'm sorry I brought it up.

See? The chat. You also sell stickers. Oh goodness. More from Lenovo, this time from Tom's Hardware. See the chat. You also sell stickers. Oh, goodness. More from Lenovo, this time from Tom's Hardware. A USB-C connected 32 TOPS NPU. That's right, my friends. Instead of purchasing an AI laptop,

you could get a regular laptop and add AI by USB C. I think this is a zero for me. Wow, at least for my laptop. Like if I had like, like I think I actually have a similar little USB AI dongle in my server right now because we're using it for training for a like a machine vision project or something like that. But in terms of the pitch of this, it's Thunderbolt. Oh my God. Okay, so you're not plugging into anything that matters. What's going to have Thunderbolt? Okay. It's gonna have Thunderbolt?

Okay. It's too anemic. 32 tops, not enough for you, huh? Yeah, yeah. All right. Okay, here we go. Infinix Zero Series Mini Tri-Fold Concept. This is on TechRadar.

No. Really? Zero. Just straight up no. No. You're not even gonna give me a number. Zero. Zero. Oh man this is like a four. Maybe a one. I can see this being like a four. You're gonna deal with the glee of unfolding this the whole way? Because it's not just a flip. It's not one movement. I think you have to like pull the thing apart. It looks super annoying But look I could clip it to my backpack That's from LTT store calm. That's Yeah

Yeah, look, I'm just saying I could I'm treating a five like a neutral Okay, so I I'm like a five like a neutral, okay? So I'm like below neutral. Like I don't want it, I don't want it. I would actively dislike this. If I was given a new one of these, I would use my old Pixel that I don't like over it. All right, next up.

It just looks very annoying to use. Most of the time when I'm looking something on my phone, I want it fast and then I want to put the phone away. I don't want to just like, oh, let me unfold this twice so I can get a full actual phone and then go through and check things and then fold it two more times to put it back down and then it's a massive brick in my pocket and I can put it away. That's so annoying. I don't want to.

Okay. This time from The Verge. Infinix Zero Series, oh wait, shoot, so no, Infinix solar energy reserving technology uses perovskite solar cells, which are thinner and cheaper than traditional silicon solar cells. Its current iteration was able to deliver two watts of charging. Its current iteration was able to deliver two watts of charging being able to just like huck your phone onto like a like a Car mount or something and get charged with the Sun coming through the dash I mean, I yeah, I could see that became kind of useful why you don't use Meg safe and just plug in a cable

I don't know but That's something It's cool if you're cute Outside somewhere and you put your phone face down on a table and it charges it. I think it's cool if you're outside somewhere and you put your phone face down on a table and it charges it. I think it's pretty sweet. Yeah, I'd be into this. I mentioned overheating problems I would be interested to see how that goes. Alright, next up. I like it though. Xiaomi Buds 5 Pro. Now they might look like just regular, you know, AirPods clones, but they can stream music over WiFi. They utilize Qualcomm's expanded personal area network

to provide audio at up to 96 kilohertz, 24 bit, up to 4.2 megabit per second, exceeding Bluetooth's bandwidth and if Wi-Fi is not available they switch back to Bluetooth mode that's pretty cool they look bulky though I don't care okay as a dub said on flow plane no solar panels on them two out of ten. Okay. I just like, I don't know. If I'm at home, it's not like I don't have my phone on me. If I'm not at home, I'm pretty much not using Wi-Fi. I don't know, do they use Wi-Fi direct though? Because if they could do that, then that's

cool. I think it means that they're using Wi-Fi to the phone. Yeah, I think so. I think that's what it means. Not all devices handle Wi-Fi to multiple points very well, though. Like I realized using the Mac as my daily driver, that you can't internet connection share your Wi-Fi connection on this. So I use that feature on Windows for flights. I'll buy one in-flight pass and then I'll share it with everyone that I'm with or with my phone,

like with my multiple devices. And I can't do that on the Mac, which kind of blows. Like it can share, it can internet connection share if you plug in a wired connection and then you share over Wi-Fi, it can do that. But it can't Wi-Fi share its Wi-Fi connection as far as I can tell. Here's another one. This is... wait where is it? Ah here we go. Yes the Samsung Flex gaming concept. Hold on, yes, you can over Bluetooth. Well, what am I connecting to it via Bluetooth? Might be able to with a USB wifi. Yeah, I'm not doing that. Bluetooth wifi sharing.

Man, I swear, I Googled this and I did not find it. And I went into, I had to like go deep into the settings and enable internet connection sharing in some sub menu somewhere. And then it just didn't offer me the option. Well, what I will say then at the very least is it's much easier in Windows. You just click a button

just like you would on your phone or whatever. Okay, so looking at this next device, have you brought it up yet?. Okay. So looking at this next device, have you, have you brought it up yet? There you go. Looking at this next device, it looks like the thumb sticks have to go into the holes on the other side and the ABXY and left, right up, down, are like the slanted sides of the holes, which is horrible. Yeah. This is just a concept. This is not a real product. It's a cool idea it's a cool concept. I don't want to use the

arrow keys or ABXY at all ever but it's a cool concept. So you have to thumb the holes yeah I think I think you like put your thumb in the hole and then have to like hit the side of the button. Yeah, I'm not into that at all. I don't think so, yeah. It might end up being okay, but I don't think I would like it. Yeah, no. I think I would dislike it so much that I would not use it. I wouldn't buy it. However, if you could give me something where like the thumbsticks are like a poppet or something and I can like push them in and I can just fold it flat and have decent buttons or something I could I

could maybe get into that. I would like to be able to fold my my handheld gaming device because I do get sketched out about them when traveling and if I could avoid having like a big carrying case for it and could just fold it and then the like if I had a nice case on the back of it, I'd be pretty sick. A d dub and float plane chat says now I can rage quit like I'm hanging up on my boss. Yeah sweet. I love it. Okay. Our last one is the Samsung trifold smartphone concept called the asymmetric flip for

now, similar to the galaxy z flip but with two full points like why oh god why hmm okay why Well, that's something that someone... Why not just fold it in half? I mean, it's a concept. These are concepts and like concept cars, they're gonna include things that don't make it to market. And that's the things we looked at. That's all of them. Cool. Nice. Last week, TechRadar said, built or published an article titled Built vs. Bought, Why Prebuilt Systems Are Always Superior to Custom Gaming PCs.

Starts by giving some background on Zach as someone who loves to build rigs and even encourages people to keep building them before immediately one-aidying and saying the following. The honest truth is that, unless you're an IT god who's spent years pruning over every little detail of system building, with intimate knowledge of all the latest and greatest hardware and its caveats, you're just not going to be able to compete with a consummate professional whose day job it is to build gaming PCs. It's like comparing your dad's famous chili con carne recipe

to Gordon Ramsey's. The article does highlight some real issues from building your own PC, such as that it can be tough to get stock of the latest and greatest if that's what you're after, especially because SIs can often have deals that guarantee them better stock on those parts, although as we discussed earlier, not always.

It also talks about QC from system integrators, which yes, can be a big advantage to making sure that your computer arrives in working conditions. But if you've ever seen our Secret Shopper series, you'll know that QC can miss things, including things that Zach highlights that you won't have to worry about, like BIOS updates, cable management,

cooling and overclocking. There is one more comparison at the end of the article, and I quote, It's like your car, right? You're always going to get the folk who go around and build their own, tweak the ones they've got, and get ridiculous horsepower out of an engine in ways that shouldn't be possible, usually for some ridiculous investment of time or sum of money along the way. Or alternatively, you could save the drama and just buy a 400 horsepower EV or whatever your engine of choice is,

straight off the shop floor with few issues of any and do 100 miles per hour in less than five seconds." End quote. Elijah puts in here, "'I found this quote funny because Jake T and I looked and there's no such thing as a 400 horsepower EV that can do that.'" Our discussion question here is, as easy as it is to see the headline and

possibly get upset, can you think of any other reasons that pre-builds are better? I would say the main one for me comes down to support after the fact. Like if their support sucks, then I see no reason to buy a pre-built whatsoever, but if their support is good or offers types of support that you need, like if their support sucks, then I see no reason to buy a pre-built whatsoever. But if their support is good or offers types of support that you need, like if you're buying it as a business and you need on-site service, you know, I could see a pre-built making sense for that. Otherwise, I don't know, man. I do think things can be very confusing and we do rail against sort of the misleading naming schemes that manufacturers use and the way that specs get obfuscated. It's not like that doesn't happen with pre-builds.

But yeah, that's the thing is I think I don't see the difference between talking to an SI and asking them to advise me on buying a pre-built PC or talking to a sales rep at a computer parts store and asking them to advise me on building a pre-built PC or talking to a sales rep at a computer parts store and asking them to advise me on building a computer. And honestly, I think comparing, you know, as someone who builds computers to Gordon Ramsay is like kind of ridiculous.

Yeah. Maybe you're comparing it to like the Gordon Ramsay restaurant in the airport. Building computers like it's not as easy as some people make it out to be if you have never done it or you don't do it on the regular, but

it isn't rocket science. And I've gotten the kick out of like SIs over the years that will introduce their like their system builders as like PC engineers or like system building engineers or whatever. Like here in Canada, engineer is a protected term. You actually have to like have an education up to a standard to call yourself an engineer. But in other places, it's not necessarily the case and there is nothing engineer about configuring a computer and putting it together. That's not engineering. So yeah, it can be a little bit challenging when you're just getting your feet wet, but

no, I don't think I can agree with this headline and I, yeah, it's not engineering. I think it's time for us to move on to after dark because I have a place that I need to be that I kind of like get away from me. Seven minutes. Time wise. So what do we got in the curated birch messages? Oh, Dan didn't curate too many this week. So. Let's go. Good work. Yeah, we had a lighter week than last week. I'll put it that way. Although

I think every week is light compared to last week. I have to do the magenta. Let's see. What do we got? What do we got? To Linus, what's the deal with not reviewing 12 gig cards on 4k? Developers should be able to add uncompressed textures without meaning 12 gigs is not enough for 4k. I play at 12 gigs and it looks great. I can't hear, I can't hear, he's muted, he's muted. We discussed this in our 9070 and 9070 XT review, and I forget what the game was. Was it Last of Us or Crud?

I really don't remember. But basically we, we highlighted some lag spikes that we were getting on the the RTX 5070, the 12 gig card that were not present on any of our 16 gig cards, regardless of how much raw horsepower they had. And so for us, the fact that that's a problem right now, today, now, today, indicates to us that these cards are not in the midterm even going to be suitable for 4K AAA gaming. And if we're talking about running League of Legends at 4K or whatever, then yeah, sure, but was it really a question if you're buying a 12 gig card if League of Legends was gonna run?

Probably not. So, for us, the point of a review is not necessarily to show you exactly what FPS every game under the sun will run at. That's not what we're trying to achieve. What we are trying to achieve is to contextualize the relative performance of these cards and their relative price so you can make an informed decision. It's not the be all

and end all. If you want to know how that card runs an exact game, there's lots of channels out there that will upload like gameplay footage with FPS counters or there's lots of other reviewers out there that will have a different test suite and you should absolutely go out and seek out those additional resources. We're just trying to give you the thousand foot view of how these cards compete with each other and in general, no, I don't think that moving forward, we can recommend 12 gig cards for 4k gaming. Hi guys, wondering what your favorite tape to take characters and perks are.

I'm hooked on the game. Luke Sinclair Oh, I had, oh dude, I had one run that I was using Gawain Garetsky, who is, yeah, he's this knight character that levels up as you make your way through the different bosses. And we basically put every perk on him so that as he got bigger and slower He was still fast and he was a you were you in that run Luke? Yeah, he was Comically tanky And then he also has the headshot redirect ability which is by far the most broken ability in the game because you just you slap shot to one of your allies and they just like

you just you slap shot to one of your allies and they just like header like in soccer, they header the puck into the net. And so you can just be racing up the wing, have one of your allies go up the other wing. He was completely tanky, no one could even touch him. We had the body check while skating with the puck ability. And I think we had the body armor on him. So if anyone even tried to check him,

they would get knocked over. So I could just basically charge up the ice, whack it off of Luke's head. What do we get, like 20 goals on the final boss? We got 12 goals in the first period on the final boss. We ended with over 20. It was not even close. That's the most broken run that we've done so far, I think. Yeah. I have a super broken run

that I'm in the middle of right now and I'm not finishing it on my own I'm just on the first world but dude it is completely broken. I have fossilized star for plus 20 speed on all my bench warmers. I got growth serum, so everyone's big and I got like a couple other things, basically. My bench warmers all have superstar stats. The team is cracked. It's going to be a great run. So I was going to wait till some humans can come and help me finish it. I think it's a record-breaking run.

Nice. I really like researching PC parts and building PCs, so I take every opportunity to build a PC for a family member. Linus, do you still enjoy building PCs. So I take every opportunity to build a PC for a family member. Linus, do you still enjoy building PCs for yourself? I enjoy it as long as I'm doing something different. I don't really like doing the same thing over and over again. Nice. So probably, I think I probably had the most fun building a PC than I've had in Definitely weeks, probably months, working on the machine that's on the other side of that wall over there. I'm so excited for that video. Oh, dude. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, it's very different. Anything that we've done in a while, I don't know if it's practical, but it's so cool. It's a Kickstarter project that took eight years to finally be delivered and we got one. It looks absolutely nothing like what they promised in their original Kickstarter. It is so much better and I'm so excited. I'm so excited. And yeah, I had a blast. Alex and I built it together and it was so much fun

And so yeah, I love I still love building PCs, but I don't really I Don't really love just like You know upgrading my motherboard Like I kind of get locked into like trouble troubleshooting I would say I still maybe enjoy more than just like building a PC. I like- I like problem solving. Free dopamine. Free dopamine. Hello LLD. Question for Luke. It looks like he's leaving so maybe not. No no no I'm here. Okay. Where is a place you want to check out that you've never been to? We live in Flathead Valley in Montana. Please come check us out. Flathead Valley. Isn't Montana what they call a wonderful state that everyone

visits? Is a region known for its stunning natural beauty. Wow! These pictures look amazing! This place looks amazing! Look at this! Oh my goodness, I was like, why is there a picture of Dan in my Google image results? And then I moved it. Look at the third picture in the results. That's incredible. SteveJ3D says Montana is our Canada. Yeah, okay. That checks out. That's gorgeous. It looks like I would like it there. That's gorgeous. I don't actually, I don't have any North American travel booked

over the next little bit here. So we'll see how, we'll see, we'll see, but it looks beautiful. Looks really beautiful. I've never been to Banff. I'd really like to go to Banff. That'd be pretty sweet. There's a bunch of Asian countries I've never been to. That would be awesome. I was in Iceland for like a very extended layover. I would like to actually go there for real. like to actually go there for real. I also want to go to like some less common destination countries though like I'd like to go to Greenland I'd like to go to some lakes yeah you mean America commoners oh it becomes that maybe not Oz is on my list I really never been there need to go to Oz Yeah, I go on to go scuba diving in Australia. That's that's gonna say the next thing. I actually want to do

That's a sad thing to hear Yeah, I'm just saying though Last one boss. Yeah, well that's what I got people call it Oz don't they yeah that don't they? That's a thing people in the comments work.. Oh yeah. You're not wrong. I mean Australia. Yeah yeah. Yes. Last one. Hey LLD, Linus you've noted you're a fan of Final Fantasy Tactics. Have you tried any of the mods or total conversions for the game? I'd recommend Final Fantasy Tactics 1.3. Thanks for all the cool vids. Did I try one? No, I tried a Final Fantasy 6 mod that I really enjoyed. That I actually think you might have enjoyed better than the Pixel Remaster.

I'm honestly, I'm kind of over the Pixel Remaster. Um, no, but I- I did burn on it. I played it a little bit more too, but like, I was really into it when I first got into the game, and it feels like it tapers off pretty hard. Would you like me to explain why? Yes. Yeah. The game was supposed to end on the floating continent. And then they like realized that they had more room on the cart. This is what I've heard. This is what I've heard.

They like realized that they had more room on the cart and that they like had more time and budget and they like Made another like half of the game That honestly makes a lot of sense because it feels like there's a pretty notable quality shift right around that time Because I was like genuinely like really into it for a while time. Because I was like genuinely like really into it for a while. And then it's it's just it feels like it's kind of over. And I'm at that point. So at this point, it's a little bit of a slog. I'll finish it. But it's a it's a little bit of a slog. But the the the first let's call it first half because I didn't know how far I know I was in the world of

balance. Let's call it the first half. The world of balance is what it's called. Was fantastic. It is super good. Super, super super good like a worth just playing that even Even if you're not gonna play the whole thing yeah, you can just pretend the game ends there and honestly you get you get most of it Yeah, I should probably try a total conversion for Final Fantasy tactics or like a cool mod Man, I feel like I feel like I did try a mod at some point. Like this, it rings such a bell for me. Thank you for that. I missed one at the front, so now I'm like jumping at it. For me at this point though, I think a big part of what I love about...

Oh no, I did! I tried War of the Lions 1.3. That's like a different mod or something. Or wait, no? Original project changes and content, unique features. Okay, no, I don't know. I don't know. I feel like I tried to try something at some point, but maybe I didn't get into it.

But yeah, I'd like to try something. But for me, going back to Final Fantasy Tactics, a big part of it, and honestly, just the familiarity at this point. Like if I was gonna dive into a new game, there's so many other games that I feel like I should play first. Like what's that other,

what's that Tactics's that tactics series that got So many games and is supposed to be so good Oh No, it's for PC Games like games like this. Oh, no, this is terrible. I feel so bad. I think it's a Western game Someone helped me no not fire emblem XCOM that's the one. Yeah, Like I've never played an XCOM game. Like, how can I say I'm a- And to be unknown was sick.

How can I say I'm a fan of the genre if I've never played an XCOM game? Like that's ridiculous. So if I'm gonna jump into a new game, I should probably like, play something I've never played before, rather than a mod. Yeah, people are like, it's different but it's good. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, people like it's different, but it's good. Yeah, exactly exactly Next time is fun. I was 99% is a miss is real with that series I mean, yeah, you're gonna get that with any kind of tactics game and it kids. It's always at the worst possible moment That's why dude anytime an ability is like it hits super hard, but low percentage. I'm like fuck it You're on the bench. You are seeing zero combat. I literally will not take anything that is not a guaranteed hit. Like I think my first

couple playthroughs of Final Fantasy Tactics, I didn't even figure out that the Archer like has evolutions because I literally just never used them because they missed so much. I was like, forget it, you're done, you're out. Enemy Unknown, I loved Enemy Unknown. I played it on, I think it's called Iron Man, where there's like permadeath and you only have one save, like you can't go back ever. And I got to the very end of the game. And if I remember correctly, it's like, I had beat the actually challenging part, I just needed to go into like one more room and the game was just going to end. But it glitched, and I couldn't get through the wall. So I had like beat the actually challenging part. I just needed to go into like one more room and the game was just going to end. But it glitched and I couldn't get through the wall. So I had like beat the game, but I couldn't see the ending. So I had beat the game, but had to like YouTube the ending.

It was so disappointing. I YouTube to the ending of Fantasian and I still feel icky about it, but the final boss was just so tedious and such a slog. Like I made it through the first stage of it and then I googled it and apparently there's two more like evolutions of the final boss and I'm just like, forget this, I'm done. That's good enough. Speaking of forget this, do you need to go? I do. So I'll see you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel. Bye! Bye.

but Linus is leaving okay yeah I'm bye I'm bye, I'm goodbye, I'm bye bye, bye, goodbye I'm alone I'm alone