Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - The Delorean is Back and so is Right to Repair

Episode Date: April 15, 2022

Before talking about iFixit, Apple, and Youtube spam comments, Marques and Andrew dig into some EV news. First, they talk about the hype of the new EV Delorean that was teased before getting into some of the new Lexus teasers as well. Electric cars, Youtube, and gadgets. Just your average episode of Waveform! Plus, there's more trivia! Hope you're well-versed on your tech history because these are a little more difficult. Links: Lexus teases its first electric vehicle Lexus RZ electric SUV iFixit article History of Samsung Twitters: https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganelli https://twitter.com/adamlukas17 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ Shop the merch: shop.mkbhd.com Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thumbtack presents the ins and outs of caring for your home. Out. Procrastination, putting it off, kicking the can down the road. In. Plans and guides that make it easy to get home projects done. Out. Carpet in the bathroom. Like, why? In. Knowing what to do, when to do it, and who to hire. Start caring for your home with confidence. Download Thumbtack today. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express.

Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. All right, welcome back, people of the internet, to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques. And I'm Andrew.

And this week, we've got a whole bunch of stuff. First of all, we want to talk about what happened to Apple's repair program, along with iFixit partnering with some big smartphone companies. Really interesting. And I also have some thoughts and some experiences to share with YouTube's comments section lately. We made a video about it, but there's a lot going on. And we also, of course, have our trivia questions at the end of every episode. This new little thing we've started

that I really enjoy already, maybe because I got the first ones right, but it's a fun time. When you're 2-0, it's easy to enjoy. It is a good time. Maybe I go 0-2, but first we got to talk about this new DeLorean teaser because I saw it.

Here's the thing. Nostalgia typically doesn't hit me. It just doesn't. I don't know what it is. We go through Retro Tech, and I see the Game Boy, and it's cool, but I never used one, so it doesn't hit me it just doesn't i don't know what it is like we go through retro tech and like i see the game boy and it's cool but i never used one so it doesn't hit me and like i see these older pieces of tech and people we just had the the analog pocket and like everyone loved that thing because it's very similar to the old game boy but it just didn't hit me but i saw this uh

this delorean ev teaser are we assuming it's an EV? I think we pretty much know. No, no, they said it's an EV, yeah. Okay, so we got a new teaser for the DeLorean Motor Company tweeted, let's clear things up a bit. The next generation of DeLorean is coming into focus August 18th, 2022. For more information, please read the press release here. And we got a little teaser image of it looks like, I mean, here and we got a little teaser image of it looks like i mean all it is is a back left quarter of what looks like a sick looking like lotus shaped sports car we got the tail light which

is bars i'm such a sucker for bar tail lights i love them they did this one really well too because it's like one bar all the way across the top and then a couple little bars to like round square out where the headlight should be i think it looks really good it's got a sleek mirror it's got the arrow i am fully going against all of the warnings that i've given people for so long about how like a prototype ev is easy to make but they better actually ship the thing i i'm in on nostalgia i want the delorean ev i want to talk about that a little later, but we'll go through this first.

There is one more teaser image. And when I was reading this at first, I was very confused because they called them, the other teaser image is like almost all black, but it shows the doors up in the air. And they called them goal doors. And I had no idea what that meant. The goal wing.

But like a seagull flapping. Oh. I'm assuming that's what that means that's why they're called that yeah because like yeah if you're unfamiliar with the delorean from back to the future which most people know about it's a car from the 80s and it's like uh looks like all metal scrappy like sports car coupe except that the doors rather than opening normally and rather than like uh lamborghini what do they call those those are suicide i thought suicide was when like oh no it's two and they both open from the same yeah uh some other bird just like wait there man yeah spider door i don't know whatever you've seen the doors you've seen the doors so these literally just like i guess kind of like the model x, right? They open like the Model X.

Yeah, Model X has goals. The hinge is on the roof of the car and they just open up and it looks like a bird flopping its wings. Yeah. That's like kind of what the like cool aspect of the car was back then or one of the cool aspects of the car.

So there is a teaser image that confirms that that is also one of the things. Nice. So this is going to be debuting at Pebble Beach in August. I believe it's August 18th. So the company is actually called DMC and DeLorean, I believe, is the model of the car. But DMC, the CEO of DMC has come back or has come onto a podcast and like mentioned some extra stuff because like the

teasers went kind of wild everybody obviously nostalgic wise wanted to know about this and said a couple things that i thought were kind of strange so i wanted to like go over them with you okay that's right so the first thing he says is this is it's gonna have the obvious benefits of an ev but it's not going to be like a hyper car ev with a zero to 60 in two seconds but then he also says he wants it to be extremely competitive in the market as a driver car and still be in the top five i don't know what that means i'm assuming still of like acceleration or speed or something like that like but it just feels like a weird way to say like we want this to be a fast ev by starting off with saying we're not going to be this which that at that point is

a ev that goes zero to sixteen under two seconds which the only one we know of right now is the roadster which isn't even out yet so the plaid is oh the plaid yeah yeah, okay. So like, cool, I guess. No one was expecting it to be that, but then to still say we're going to be in top five, so we're assuming under three seconds probably. Yeah, it's funny because when you go top five, the first thing I hear when I hear that is like, oh, is this like a sort of a translation error

or is he not fluent? Maybe. Maybe he meant to say like under five seconds or something, but if you say top five, then I literally go, okay, well then Roadster's two seconds. we got like a couple going 2.5 seconds and then we got three seconds so maybe top five lands you at like 3.2 seconds or something i don't know if that's exactly what he meant to say but sure it's i don't i i like the realism i don't you'd go out and say like we're gonna make a delorean it's gonna go it's going to be the number one ev ever made because then immediately i put my ev skeptic hat back on where i go oh no this is never going to ship

so i like the realism i like the realism and another thing he said um that i really liked that he said this is he does not expect this to be an ipad on wheels that he's focused first priority is being a driver's car second priority is potentially autonomous than self-driving and stuff like that which is like i think more companies should do this i think there's way too many companies who are like here's our first ev it's going to have a bunch of these crazy self-driving things and it's going to have like great range and it's going to have a fast zero to 60 it's like we're going to have everything that evs have worked mostly tesla has worked on for 10 years they should this car they should tell us the 0 to 88 miles per hour time that they should

just tell us that marketing material yeah you're very right that's the only time that matters in the delorean isn't it i don't care how fast it gets to 60 i want to get to exactly 88 and then every single time a car has to um like fight it by saying it has a faster zero to 88 they're basically getting free marketing from yeah yeah that's that's a genius move they should hire you for their marketing team you're welcome delorean yeah and so there is one other thing here that i thought was kind of interesting so this the delorean hasn't been around for 40 years these people haven't made a car for 40 years so they mentioned that the e this delorean ev is going to kind of be their their launch and

their kickstarter into making more evs because they said they won't be able to survive on only making a coupe a coupe sports car yep which makes total sense but when i first saw this i was like i actually think this is going to do really well because the amount of people who want to buy a delorean are fairly small this feels like it's going to be pretty niche but like because of that you're not expecting to hit crazy numbers and stuff like that yeah so i was optimistic about this and maybe i'm naive by thinking somebody would want to make a small market car because everyone wants to make a big big market company well it kind of reminds me of tesla's master plan exactly which is we're going to start by making a really low volume really high cost car

which was for them it was the original roadster actually which was a sports car it was a hundred grand not a lot of sales but they can use the profits from all of that to develop and then make a slightly higher volume, slightly lower cost car for them. That was basically model S and then a higher volume, lower cost car model three. So if that's what DeLorean is admitting or DMC is admitting right off the top, we're going to make a low volume, high cost DeLorean. It's going to be our halo product, but then we're going to go from there. That makes sense to me. It makes sense.

But then I think because of that, we need to now think of this as how are we viewing DMC DeLorean as a company? And it's really strange because it is a legacy car manufacturer, but one that hasn't made a car in 40 years. So I kind of think i don't know enough looking onto this i need to look at it more of like feeling like this is a startup yeah feels like right this feels more startupy and as optimistic as i am about this because like let's be real the delorean is like one of the coolest cars ever it is 40 years old whether you've seen back to the future or not you've probably seen it in if you've seen it in real life you've taken a picture of it i

unfortunately i seen one in real life i was pulling in onto the street to go home this is like three or four years ago and i saw one come down the hill and drive by and i didn't even really process it i was like oh delorean wait what that delorean is driving by me right now i didn't get the chance to take a picture but there's definitely that moment that you know that's one of those cars that people go out and restore yeah and like might bring up the restomod f100 in a little bit but like it's cool to see one actually working and driving and like actually being used even though it's such an old car so yeah i do i'm rooting for it because that the nostalgia did hit me with this one yeah i did really like it so i i really hope it does

well i'll be interested to see where they go after that are there like cars after the delorean going to be as unique and kind of special because that's what this is right now it's like iconic it's different are are the cars that they say they say they want to do like a sedan or an suv afterwards because that's four-door family car something more people will buy than like the niche delorean so are those going to also be special or is the delorean going to show off some sort of technology that maybe they have i mean they're claiming they're going to show this off in august okay it's not that far away yeah a couple months away it also is probably just prototype probably just one rolling prototype classic yep yeah so i think we've got to throw the skeptic goggles on on this as much as i don't want to because i just i want

one and i want us to do a video where we somehow have an old one as well that's all i want right now reading this that'd be sick rose colored skeptic glasses yeah that's where i'm at um yeah but to segue this over um we have another ev that sort of made some kind of crazy claims oh you're talking about the you and i had a conversation about this the other day and i kind of want to like just hop back onto it for a quick minute um so we all know toyota's getting into the ev market the bz4x is coming out i actually think i just saw a tweet that austin evans has one or is doing a review on one right now or something so i'm really excited to see that um but lexus part of toyota

they just announced their first ev for april 20th um it's gonna be called the rz450e we have a few teaser images and we have a couple old prototype images. So we kind of have an idea of what it looks like. Yeah. The one that's making all the headlines is the shot of the steering wheel, which is, it apparently has an optional yoke. You can decide to get a yoke with this. Yeah.

This is also another thing. The, some of the articles we read about it all were mentioning the yoke, but there's like this little, little tidbit that Lexus threw in there at the end that i feel like caught our eyes rather than the yoke um yeah first off the suv looks nice it looks like a lexus it'll probably do great because lexus does great toyota sells a bunch of cars if as long as their ev stuff seems to be doing well i bet i'll do great yeah but then he also just threw out there toyota also noted that they plan to create a Lexus sports car with a range of 434 miles and be able to accelerate 0 to 60 in under two seconds.

That's it. What? Just toss that out there. What? Hold on. Okay. That's when I was like, all right, skeptic hat, right back on. Because I know the current car landscape decently well. Lexus has the LFA, like they have some performance cars,

but they are not the top of the line, period. Like they're nice, but they're not like bleeding edge performance. Today, 0-60 in under two seconds is literally world-class top of the line. So they're not saying when they're going to have a car that also has 434 miles of range and 0-60 in under 2 seconds. But I think

achieving that any time in the next 5 years would be unbelievable for them. I don't think it would. Zero chance it happens in the next 5 years.

Yeah. I think. Yeah. What are they saying? They didn't say anything. I think it's just a So they're saying eventually, someday? Yeah.

They're making a promise, but not really. Pretty much. So, and I think this is where we, I don't want to say butted heads, but like, I will agree with you, this is really weird to just toss out there. Yeah. I think this is a,

but I also think these are numbers that almost any ev manufacturer in the next 25 years will be able to hit right because of the way electric works yeah so like if we drew a curve of like the average uh acceleration for the price yeah it kind of goes like this and it evens out right now for gas cars you can get a five second car you can get a four second car but for zero to 60 you can get as low as like 2.3 seconds, and then they all kind of flatten out. You can spend $3 million, and it's still going 2.3 seconds.

But if you draw a new curve for electric cars, it goes faster for lower price, right? So as we draw this curve, we're going, wow, you can get a three-second car. You can get a 2.5-second car. You can get a truck that goes three seconds. A truck that goes three seconds as well. goes the hummer goes three seconds right but then as we keep going i think we might disagree on the the asymptote of that curve does it just keep going up are we going to get 1.4 second cars everywhere i think we both wound up agreeing that physics is what kills this eventually like tires road conditions like air like some of that stuff is what's going to

kill it um if you think about it though gas cars have spent how many years trying to get to 2.3 tesla's been around for 10 years and they're under two already so like they're unlocking something crazy with electric motors um i don't i don't even think toyota gets this in the next 10 years yeah but i think there's there's obviously a possibility of this happening i don't even think Toyota gets this in the next 10 years. Yeah, same. But I think there's obviously a possibility of this happening. I don't think it's that crazy. I think it's really weird to throw those numbers out there. I definitely think it's odd. But yeah, I guess the way I look at performance for these cars,

especially if we're just looking at straight lines 0 to 60s, it's like typically this would be limited by by power gear ratio and tires and when we got really really good electric motors like powerful like you have triple motors in these cars now quad motors and so they have all the power in the world and one extremely fast gear and so the limiting factor immediately became tires yeah and all of these cars with as much power as you give them will spin their tires if you try to go faster or accelerate harder and so then i'm looking at tire technology and like rubber compounds and how they've gotten better over the years and that curve looks nothing like the acceleration curve yeah but if we're talking under two seconds we have a car

that does it already right we have a car that does it currently and it is uh under perfect conditions on a prepped drag strip with the top of the line tire which i'm assuming that's what they're every car company who's gonna try and hit that number is going to do something like this you know uh yeah literally so i guess we're gonna give lexus credit for they will eventually have someday oh i don't need to give them credit i just think and not just because it's lexus or toyota whatever i just it's their bet on evs becoming a commodity at that level yeah and i think like because in 25 years the and the motors and electricity and batteries and stuff we're seeing in cars right now we're probably going to be making fun of about how terrible they were because of just the innovation that we're seeing in cars right now, we're probably going to be making fun of about how terrible they were

because of just the innovation that we're seeing. We're going to look back at cars with 250 miles and think that was, why would anyone buy that? I cannot believe, why didn't you ride a bicycle? Yeah, 250 miles is crazy. I think what, to me, a lot of this boils down to is I'm kind of terrified at how fast cars are going to be on the road in the next 25 years

when the majority of cars can do zero to 60 in even under three seconds all of them like let's not even go the two seconds that's yeah so is that is that the future where like all these motors all these materials get so good and so cheap with scale that like every car anyone can buy will do 2.5 seconds 0 to 60 is that real i guess maybe i think that's real oh it's so i guess the um the counterpoint to that is what is and we've talked about this before what will prevail specs pure driving specs or autonomy autonomy autonomy uh i think it's a it's a toss-up because it's a general it's a generational thing to me i think most people who drive cars today aren't really too concerned about their car eventually becoming a robo taxi or driving them everywhere but i think many younger

people are very open to like autonomous driving and totally comfortable with the tech. I would give up all the funds of driving to be able to sleep in my car on my commute. Yeah, I think you'll see a lot more younger people fall in that category and a lot older people. I'm young, I'm not 30. But the people with the buying power, buying all these cars are typically like, yeah, I want a driver's car.

I think it also might, it could even potentially be another generation because I think we're way farther from like full-blown robo-taxi. Farther than we think. We're really far away. Yeah, despite Elon saying next year, every year for the last 10 years. Yeah, so no, I think it's interesting.

It's kind of a random tidbit they threw in there. I'm rooting for more good EV options. So I think the sooner Lexus is able to deliver, I'm doing air quotes, audio listeners, the better, but that might not be for a while. I'm excited for Toyota in general just because of their sheer volume and scale. Compared to everyone else,

I think the sooner they jump on this, the better it is for everybody. But yeah. What happens first, the Lexus sub-two-second 0-60 car? Or the Roadster. Or the Roadster. The Roadster will come out two seconds. What happens first, the Lexus sub-two-second 0-60 car? Or the Roadster. Or the Roadster. The Roadster will come out before that. That might be the only thing I can solidify.

We just got another Tesla event, and Elon went on stage again and said next year again. Oh, he said that about the Roadster? Yeah, I watched the live stream. They did the Tesla Texas Gigafactory grand opening, and they had the Cybertruck on stage naturally, and and they said we're going to start production of this next year and i i replayed to specifically hear his language he said and then roadster so he didn't say roadster will also be 2023 but he said yeah we're going to start cybertruck production next year

and then roadster okay and then so that's that promise sounds about as good as this we'll have a 400 mile it might not be that's vague it's gonna be a while also can i quickly say about that cyber truck event i feel like tesla fans made that event seem worse than it was because everyone in tesla wants some grand scale event every time something happens and it was just opening a new gigafactory like you're allowed to have fun events to open a milestone of something without it being a huge announcement. To me, it made me,

I don't invest in any companies that I cover, but watching that event, I was like, Oh, I should buy Tesla stock. Wow. Like they, they talked about scale.

They talked about leveling up. How many gigafactories are we going to have five years from now? They're going to start having the ability to bring prices down because it's more economical to just make the car in the country where it will be delivered instead of shipping them all this stuff they talked a big talk but yeah there was no new products to announce or anything like that and that's totally fine companies are allowed to do that also there's not financial advice just because you mentioned stock okay trivia yeah let's do a trivia and then ad break trivia i'm ready so this episode we've been talking about the delorean yep the original

delorean from back to the future that was released in 1985 could famously travel through time what is the name of the fictional car part that made time travel possible i almost said it out loud we're waiting till the end yeah right until the end i kind of don't possible. I almost said it out loud. We're waiting till the end. Yeah, we're waiting till the end. I kind of don't know, but I'll figure it out by then. Be right back. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long from tip off to the final buzzer you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in vegas that's a feeling you

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With Uber Reserve, good things come to those who plan ahead. Family vacay? Reserve your ride as soon as you book your flights to all the planners now you can reserve your uber ride up to 90 days in advance see uber app for details all right welcome back let's talk about the state of right to repair we got a little bit of an update so you remember back in november when apple announced their self-service repair program they talked about making all these kits for you to be able to do what was it screen battery camera or something like that i forget if they said exactly what it was but it was like some i can only official parts yeah official parts screen

and battery are usually the main things i I'm still not sure about camera. That seems really complicated. Sort of like, yeah, the high level stuff. We haven't heard a lot about that since then. We were very excited. It seemed like a win for Right to Repair. But if you sort of follow up on that, it seems like it hasn't really made

a whole lot of progress maybe. Yeah, and there's a couple things that made us think about this. One is Brandon just cracked the back of his iPhone. This was a great, and then what happened? And then made us think about this one is brandon just cracked the back of his iphone this was a great and then what happened and then he asked them about the self-service repair and the person at the store had no idea what he was talking about it's an anecdote but it's kind of it's very anecdotal indicator but yes um yeah strange and then we also have seen recently in other news on the other side of the stage um that google and samsung have partnered

with ifixit recently to start offering ways to repair your phone i thought that was really interesting i like ifixit i love ifixit and what they do what they've already done is they've had like a certain set of like you can buy a tool set and you can buy the certain like a penelope screw or whatever other pent to something screws to be able to take apart whatever phone you have. You know, pry the screen off, get the glue open. But they're going to actually partner with iFixit to offer kits with official parts of older devices so you can buy the kit for your phone

and repair whatever's broken. Pretty cool. What do we see? It's going to be down to Google offering as old as pixel 2 parts that i love yeah google just jumped on samsung jumped on already google is going to go down to the pixel 2 samsung only says around s20 um we also have a little view into what this might entail because they weren't i don't know if they're official parts but i looked on ifix's website and they actually have old sa battery kits um or screen kits, I forget.

And it's kind of neat because the iFixit kit we have is they're like full-blown, like you can fix almost anything with this. Their old kits for the S8, it came with a couple, just the tools you needed for that specific repair. So you're not spending a bunch of extra money, you're getting the part

and you're getting the pieces you need. And then what i fix it is, is like a giant free manual repair instructions, I guess, and like videos and how to be able to do it to make you feel comfortable being able to do it. Yeah. So they're really awesome with that. It seems like we're not totally sure what we're going to be able to fix between both of them samsung apparently glues their batteries to screens so that's kind of weird um so people think if you have to replace one you're gonna have to replace both because of that or is it the part will most likely include a battery glued to a screen okay so somehow you manage to you know have a really bad battery and

then you also break the screen you're in luck that's probably gonna be way easier to uh economically to repair yeah but it's going to probably cost more interesting and then for pixel it looks like we have like battery and screens i mean i think most of these things are what we would want to fix at home. Yeah, typically you don't do the most complex part repairs solo, but the simpler ones, you don't want to have to rely on like, oh, I need to send my phone away for two weeks while someone just fixes a cracked screen. Like I can do that myself.

So offering the simple ones is a good step. If I do crack my screen, I do have a bit of a crack on my, I don't have it here, the Pixel 6 Pro. It's not a crack actually it's a deep scratch that is dangerously close to being a crack but it's a deep scratch right now so i'm keeping an eye on it but that's the type of thing you want to be able to do yourself so and batteries and screens are clearly the most common as well so it's lucky that those are the ones um they did say that they won't be offering like

full-blown boards to uh not change things in there which yeah that's not something we're gonna really be expecting because those are super complicated and obviously not as it's hard to even diagnose whether that's the issue with the phone or not true where a screen is obviously a broken screen and a battery is an issue with turning it on or holding a charge so that's much easier and on top of this microsoft and valve are also apparently in working with ifixit to offer spare parts as well for things like the steam deck which we just covered yep which is awesome and steam has been really good about talking about how like this will be repairable this will be something that you can dive into and get into the innards of it and then surface laptops as well um nice yeah you see the story i had a tidbit

about this in the review but apparently the steam deck if you open it up i mean there's it's weighted pretty well and they filled up like the grips with a lot of stuff but there's enough room in one of the grips to fit an entire air tag i did see that actually yeah you can open it up put an air tag in there and close it and use it like normal it might feel a little off balance by the weight of an air tag not so bad but that is your lost and found feature if you happen to want to do that i'm rant side here now because we're up but like i'm so excited for what people are going to do with the steam deck i think we had a ton of fun with it but neither of us are really handheld gamers yeah so like i don't think we got to even

get close to seeing what people are going to unlock in like two years the modding community behind this thing especially when the doc comes out. It's going to be really, really cool. It's already getting started. I still wish the USB-C port was on the bottom, but I get, because you've seen the dock, what the renders are. It's just going to be like a cable up to the top to plug it in and then you dock it, whatever. It's a stand with a fancy right angle cable.

Exactly. But it's got a lot, you're right, it's got a lot going for it right at the beginning already, sort of what I talked about at the end of the video. But yeah, the Steam Deck has a future ahead of it, which is really exciting for that. Yeah, right to repair is sort of on the, like, come up all the time.

I feel like we always have something new we're looking forward to seeing from some company. But yeah, those two specifically, with Google and Samsung, I really like like and i hope i actually get to like use one i i mean i it's really awesome we've also talked about an idea for like a studio channel video where we potentially like race to fix a phone because i don't think any of us have fully like replaced a screen or a battery right it's tough to get well i have i have only because only for a video but yes like the when we took about we took apart the red iphone put it back together to work though it works yes oh also just sorry uh interrupt on here one of the things

they will also include is the the like oem rubber gaskets for waterproofing and stuff like that which is huge because when you do stuff by yourself without oem parts that's basically you're basically turning your phone into not being IP rated unless you're very good at it. And some of the companies even said, you should probably replace those every couple years because they get worn out. So that's also really, really cool.

We have talked about rights to repair in the past, and I think a couple things actually moving forward in terms of lawmaking is what might be finally pushing this we saw the we talked about repairability scores in france that's a really big thing and they actually did a report out there that said like 60 to 80 percent of people if they saw repairability scores they would pick the phone whether they were part of that phone ecosystem or not would pick the one with the better repairability so all other things equal they'd pick the phone whether they were part of that phone ecosystem or not would pick the one with the better repairability score so all other things equal they'd pick the phone with the better

repairability score because that's not always true about like you can't always apples to apples phones like that i think it was a little better than that i think it was the the survey question was if you had been using one phone for a long time but in the option of picking a new phone you saw the better repairability score then the phone you were used to they would pick the one with the better repairability score sure so still probably similar price ranges and stuff like that there's obviously reasons to potentially buy something yeah just because i remember you know when i talked about repairability like we noticed that the more repairable something is it's built different like you can go you can go all the way the top 10 out of 10 and you get a fair phone but are people going to go to the 10 out of 10 and get a fair

phone are they going to go to the 5 out of 10 and get something that they like yeah or so that's there's there's all sorts of sliders to play with for these companies making phones but i like that that's being highlighted and i think the u.s is also they've been recently adding some bills that have right to repair things inside of them because we also here have a lot of stuff with tractors and stuff as well and a lot of fights for right-to-repair there. So I'm sure some of these companies are starting to see the writing on the wall

that this might happen. So get ahead of the game while you can. Good for all of us. Great for iFixit, not because they're partnering, but just because they've been fighting for this for so long. Does fix it need competition i mean i love i fix it but every everyone needs competition right maybe yeah everyone needs competition i wonder if there is some i i'm more giving them credit because they've been fighting this fight for a really absolutely really long time absolutely and we appreciate that sick all right i think we've got one more

trivia question before we hit another break. And then we'll talk about YouTube comments. Okay. So we've been talking about Apple, Samsung, Google, everything like that. We know Steve Jobs founded Apple and Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google. But who founded Samsung? Who founded Samsung? Think on it.

I will think about that. We'll be right back. The Paramount Plus exclusive series, The Agency. The CIA sends us out to behave in a dangerous way. Starring Michael Fassbender and Richard Gere. Whatever it takes, make it invisible. The Agency, new series now streaming exclusively on Paramount+. Support for the show today comes from NetSuite. Anxious about where the economy is headed? You're not alone. If you ask nine experts, you're likely to get 10 different

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All right, we're back. And we're back on YouTube to talk about YouTube comments. So we've talked about this for a while, inevitably with like tweets and other random videos and people have talked about it between creators before but youtube's comments go through like this ebb and flow of like lots of spam not that much spam lots of spam lots of not not that much spam and basically what that comes down to is there is always going to be bad actors on YouTube that are going to try to use the YouTube comments or use YouTube in some way to scam people to go try to deceive people into going to Telegram or WhatsApp or like leaving the site and getting money from these people etc there's

always going to be those people and so YouTube's always chasing those people around the site adding rules adjusting auto auto-moderation, things like that to try to hide those comments and to try to make it harder for bad actors to operate. But if you're chasing, you're always going to have them find something new before you catch it. And it feels like the latest wave

has been like five months of lots and lots of comments of specifically it'll be a bot. This is what I've noticed on my own channel. I've talked about this in the video on the main channel, but it'll be a bot that has my profile picture and then has a name that says like, Marques Brownlee, message me on Telegram here. And maybe even a number.

And then it'll say like, congrats, you're the winner of the giveaway or something like that. And to me, that's obviously a scam. Like, why would you click that? It's dumb. But I started getting emails from people who'd send me a screenshot saying,

hey, is this you? And I'd be like, no, you can ignore that. It's spam. And then I get a couple more emails saying, hey, is this you? I message them. It says it's you. I'm like, no, it's not. And then more and more emails from people saying, hey, is this you? I message them. It says it's you. I'm like, no, it's not.

And then more and more emails from people saying, hey, I sent the payment. Am I going to get the thing? Hey, this is you, is this you? And it would get to the point where like, I think maybe two, three weeks ago, it was like I'd wake up and my inbox would have like seven, eight, nine new emails from people who'd sent money to people. I got screenshots of conversations and things like that. emails from people who sent money to people. I got screenshots of conversations and things like that. And so, you know, not that there was like a certain tipping point, but I just made a video

talking about it because this is clearly something that we need to see a YouTube end fix for. I say YouTube end fix because we have other tools that have been made by people. Theo Joe being the primary example of he made a tool that will allow a creator to run a script that will automatically delete a bunch of comments. It'll actually detect, much better than YouTube's own system, a bunch of these specific types of spams.

On my latest video, if you ran the tool, there was like 40 accounts that left like 1,700 comments. That's 30% of the comments. comments it was 30 of the total comments on the video 6 000 total comments on this video and it was just covered i mean because they just go to the latest comments and just reply to every single one with a different account and they've gotten around the latest tools which would be like if you hide a user from channel that will automatically remove all of that user's comments from the channel, but they just make so many different accounts that you haven't hidden any of the

other messages. So all that to say, uh, you know, I've had, I've had conversations with YouTube plenty of times and I've had conversations with them since then they've been working on this. Um, and since that video, they've actually rolled out a new tool which is a little check box you can enable on your videos which i like when it's a user side thing i don't want it to just be like a huge youtube update rolls out that you have no control over i can check this box that says increased strictness yeah it's the sub it's like a sub box to the um to the auto moderation already yeah yes so if i feel like this is something that's happening on my videos which it is on my latest video i enabled this box and i clicked increase

strictness yeah seems like this should solve or help the problem um we did upload a video as of our recording maybe like 15 hours ago or something like that so i've been going back through our recording maybe like 15 hours ago or something like that so i've been going back through and i'm still seeing a lot of these bot comments i haven't gotten as many emails i don't think i've gotten any since the new video any but i do still see a lot of these comments and so we'll see over time if this new stricter automod actually makes a difference but generally like i like to see that youtube is actually responsive to this stuff it just seemed like this one took forever and you say that you just saw this on your channel but like we've seen around linus made a video on this this is not just a just our channel thing

this is all over youtube i started seeing a bunch of different creators that i do james hoffman was saying he's not in tech at all i think. Beast has ones who are just like offering money. And they're even going on other channels, channels that are like semi-related to Mr. Beast or that Mr. Beast viewers might watch. And being Mr. Beast, I think I had someone email us saying they got a you comment on somebody else's tech channel. Yeah.

So like it's happening absolutely everywhere um and it's it's really a bummer to see it happen um i didn't see as many on this latest video when i checked comments this morning um so maybe it's helping a little bit so now it's not straight up deleting them it's holding them in the like potentially inappropriate comments which means they don't show up on the channel yes Yes, which is the most important thing. Yeah. Yeah, I think my, the way I kind of thought about this was like,

anytime I, you know, I talk about this stuff, I like hear from YouTube about how they're approaching the problem. And I can't even shed too much light on it. Obviously, when they're chasing bad actors, they need to keep their methods confidential. Otherwise, bad actors can see the way they're being chased and adapt.

But when I look at YouTube comments, the thing that I noticed about this particular version of the spam is they find like this, this nice, like middle zone of timing where they can get away with a lot of comments. So when I first upload a video and the first hour has 1200 comments or something like that, I'm hanging out in the comments. I'm replying'm talking to people liking things pinning things replying and all that stuff and so I'm in the comment section and people expect to see me and if there's any sort of spam it's quickly either blocked by a bunch of people because they'll report it and there's a lot of activity or I'll see it and I'll remove it then in the long long tail

this is on the total opposite end of like a five day old video, there's not enough activity for those bots leaving all those comments to actually get any sort of ROI. Maybe some people have notifications on and they'll see it and they'll think it's me. But like, why would I be replying on a five day old video?

So what these bots do is they find this nice little Goldilocks zone of like a 12-hour to 36-hour old video where it's still getting a fair amount of activity, but it's no longer me in the comments the whole time like it would be if it was brand new. And they've swarmed in and replaced what looks like would be me in the comments section and are just replying to everyone so there's a good amount of activity still but not enough for people to be like flagging it and getting them removed and there is enough for them to get a lot of engagement and feedback and get

people to fall for it to feel believable that you could still be in the comments i could still be on a 36 hour old video telling yeah i mean it could be like the next day you're checking something like that um Yeah. And one other thing that they did do, which you mentioned, they added the being able to ban a whole channel from all of your videos. The issue with that is when you look at Theo Joe's, like

when he ran the script on our thing, it's like 40 plus accounts, and all of them can just make new accounts. So it kind of feels like here's a way of doing it, but you almost have to have someone full-time on your videos finding these channels every single time and banning them manually, only for them to probably come back. That's like hours and hours of work to be able to stop it.

Before they adjusted that feature to actually hide all previous activity, I would have had to have manually removed 2,000 comments, which is never going to happen. Now with this, with the new tool, at least it will remove all activity from one account. I think the top one left 110 comments on one video, how that doesn't get picked up as spam. I don't know, but you can at least go through and start to pick off like this one left 50 comments, remove all of them. This one left 40 comments, remove all of them. This one left 90 comments, remove all of them. And you can make a little bit all of them. This one left 90 comments, remove all of them. And you can make a little bit more of a dent that way.

But it's just, it's so much work to do that, that you just want YouTube's auto-moderation to take care of it. I think in an ideal world, the increased strictness and auto-moderation can take care of all of these very obvious to my eye spam accounts. But the feature i suggested which

would be don't let people use the word telegram in their username or just let me block my own name from usernames on my channel um would take a long time to implement and it's just not an option right now so we are hoping that this increased strictness tool which i think can also evolve over time can eventually make a dent in the spam. I'm keeping an eye on it because I'm in the comments section all the time. I'm seeing this stuff happening in real time. But so far, no emails of people getting tricked so far. So far, yeah.

And in case you haven't heard this before, don't respond. If it doesn't have a verified check mark like we will only ever contact you through verified means it's usually going to be a twitter dm instagram dm or an email from our official mkbhd yeah email account like those are the only ways we're never going to contact you on a text message or telegram or whatsapp yeah like sorry just keep an eye on that out on that it's the smart thing to do on the internet. If you think something might be a scam, it's a scam. That's what I always think when I'm on the internet. It's a pretty good rule of thumb.

It's probably a scam. That was the thing. I'm getting all these emails from people who are like, hey, this seems a little suspicious that you're on Telegram and I just figured I'd send this to your official email. Imagine how many people didn't get that far. Yeah. The people who thought enough to send me an email probably didn't get scammed or if they did they at least

thought about this is probably a scam there's lots of people who most likely didn't get that far and just thought the whole time without ever emailing me that they were going to get a prize if they just send 150 shipping fee to some random telegram account. It's really unfortunate. It sounds really dumb to fall for, but like one thing we kind of thought they were targeting us for was because we were in the middle of a giveaway as well. Right, right.

But I even see it on like a bunch of other tech channels. It wasn't even because of that. It just happened to coincide with it really well. But like if you're just getting a a random dm or message from something that looks legit and you know you don't have the means to be able to get a new iphone or whatever and it pops up you're enthusiastic about it and you can really easily be blinded by that and it's a shame but yeah there's scammers out there because it works yeah i've seen this on mr mobile's channel i've seen this on jerry everything's channel i've seen this on i think danny winget's channel I've seen this on Mr. Mobile's channel. I've seen this on Jerry Rig Everything's channel. I've seen this on, I think, Danny Winget's channel.

I've seen this on Linus's channel. I've seen this, obviously, on Jimmy's channel. And just a bunch of channels in between. Even just this specific version of impersonating you and getting you on Telegram. I've seen that one on all these channels. And then there's the classic other ones that are like, don't click my profile, and it's just some lewd picture.

Or just copying and pasting a previously high upvoted comment and then bot farming that one to be highly upvoted so it looks legit. All that stuff we've seen before. But like this, the video that I posted was because of this new wave of impersonating us, which I think should be relatively

easy to kill. But the point is, YouTube's hopefully working on it hopefully hopefully hopefully steps forward yeah verified check marks actually mean something though so don't for sure don't ignore them yeah yeah we'll keep an eye on that but i think this is probably the point at the end of the podcast where we can uh attempt to answer the trivia questions from the beginning to outbreak you're undefeated you got to keep it going well i'm two and oh so no you know i'll try to keep two i'll try to keep the percentage so we'll try to keep it high uh let's revisit those adam which which are we doing first

this was uh the delorean right first yeah so the first question back to the future was released in 1985 the delorean in that movie could famously travel through time what is the name of the fictional car part that made that that made time travel possible right i'm gonna let you i know this yeah i'm gonna let you go though to make sure that people believe you're still on a streak the flux capacitor ding ding ding is that correct yep that's right now there's a number here I want to, because there's a number I associate with this, and I believe it's the power needed for the flux capacitor, right? 1.91 gigawatts?

Gigawatts? Gigawatts or gigawatts? It's probably gigawatts. Is 9-1 the correct number? No. 1.9. I mean, poop. 1-4-1?

Close. It's 1-something-1, right? 1.21 poop 141 close it's one one something one right 1.21 2 1.21 gigawatts wow needed for the flux capacitor there's just lines in the movie that just like you can't forget them like the image is seared in my head you can forget some of them well i mean the flux capacitor part is like seared in for sure that's hilarious's hilarious. Like I said, the new DeLorean needs to have some sort of a reference to the flux capacitor. It has to have a reference to it. There's no way it doesn't.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Next one that I have no idea about. Andrew, you're, to be clear,

your answer for that was also flux capacitor. Yeah. We're just trusting that he knew it. I don't have a streak to defend here. That's fair.

It's about to end so next question we know steve jobs and wozniak and the third guy anonymous guy yeah founded apple yeah and larry page and sergey brim founded google but who founded samsung samsung so i mean samsung is a korean company right i assume that's where it was founded that would be my assumption I assume but all I really know as far as like this is the funny thing we see who goes on stage

for like Samsung events and those are the CEO and like the chief of marketing and I don't know if those are founders like the people who go on stage now for Apple aren't founders. I mean Samsung's been around for long enough that I would kind of guess probably not anymore people people treat dj co like like a legend but i don't know if he's a founder but that's the only person i can think i mean that that's probably as good of a guess as we're gonna i can't think of anyone else so uh and but that's

just mobile though there's samsung is huge samsung is tvs screens they make everything i'm gonna guess it was bixby uh i can give you a hint that's not really a hint because it's not gonna help go for it it was founded in 1938 yeah well holy that's a long time ago so it's not dj coat um dang 1938 that's like when you ask like well did you know that i'm just interested now do you know what their first product was oh i could find out i don't know i'm really because i just i know samsung makes everything but in our niche we're just so focused on phones so when i think of samsung i think of phone first yeah Even though I also have a Samsung television, there's Samsung washing machines and refrigerators and sound bars and everything.

Not smart speakers, unfortunately. I'm stalling, but I found out when shooting Retro Tech that Nintendo was a card company and started in 1889, which was like... With the name Nintendo? Yeah. Oh. Yeah, way before the Game Boy.

They made some old stuff. So that was... Now you know. Yeah. It is. Samsung began as a grocery store. What? Yep.

What? This is what I mean by they make everything. Okay, so... Really? Was it in Korea? Samsung Electronics started in 1969, according to this, and their first product was black and white televisions. Okay.

That was after a little more time. That could be considerably. They're connected? The grocery store is connected? That's 30 years apart, though. Samsung began as a grocery store, trading and exporting goods produced in and around the city. It sold dried Korean fish and vegetables,

as well as its own noodles. I'm going to guess his name was Sam. I like Big Sam. Final answer. Forgive my pronunciation. Lee Byung-chul was the founder. Okay. Learned something new every day. It was floating around there. I just

couldn't quite. I have to give you guys a hard one. Are they still around? Like influencing Samsung at all? No. No? No grocery store is happening? There might still be. Are there still Samsung groceries? So I'm assuming that they start selling TVs in the grocery store and then it turned into an electronic section and then... That's a very reasonable

evolution and I guarantee that's not how it went. Yeah, probably. Yeah, Samsung currently makes everything. There's a whole history. I'm looking at this article now. They were involved in life insurance. There's a whole bunch of stuff. They were everywhere. Wow.

Awesome. Samsung continuing the trend of being part of basically everything. I'm at 75% but I feel pretty good about my 3 out of 4. 3 out of 4. I'm 1 for 4. If you even count the 1. I'll count it.

That's been it for this week. Stay tuned. Next week we'll probably have a whole bunch more I guess. I'll count it. I'll count it. All right. Well, that's been it for this week. Stay tuned. Next week, we'll probably have a whole bunch more, I guess. Well, I don't want to tease it too much, but we've got some interesting stuff planned. So definitely stay tuned here. And we'll be back then. Catch you guys in the next one. Peace.

Waveform is produced by Adam Molino. We are partnered with Vox Media. And our intro outro music was created by Vane Silk. Vane Silk.