- 2 days ago
Let them know with your wallet
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00:00Tech companies have, I think, reached peak levels of deception.
00:04You will see incredible headlines everywhere you look,
00:06but as soon as you peel back the clever wording,
00:09you take away the hidden asterisks
00:10and you remove the sneaky manipulation of data,
00:13you realize that never in history has such little change
00:17been sold to us as if it's so much.
00:19So I've teamed up with Marques from MKBHD
00:21to show you how they get you.
00:23And I feel like we have to start with the magic new
00:26catch-all term of the tech industry, up to.
00:29What we need to see and what we used to see a lot more of
00:32is this new product is X percent better than the last one.
00:36This very simple idea basically doesn't exist anymore.
00:40Practically every single tech company
00:41quotes every single change as up to.
00:44Up to two times faster gets up to eight more hours.
00:48Is up to two times faster.
00:50You'll notice they don't even write it as up to a lot of the time.
00:52They'll just like mutter it quickly under their breath,
00:54like it's some sort of pedantic footnote
00:56that you don't need to pay attention to.
00:58But if you think about it,
00:59any stat that starts with an up to doesn't mean anything.
01:03I can say this video is going to reach up to a billion people.
01:06And if it only ends up reaching my parents
01:09and then like one cousin in India, I was still right.
01:12And you could argue, well, you know,
01:14workloads are more complex now.
01:15It's harder to estimate exactly how much better something is.
01:19But the real reason this is being used is very clear.
01:22It's to be able to stick a massive number on your web page
01:25and not be sued for it.
01:26So if you see up to followed by a percentage improvement,
01:30honestly, just disregard it and go search up specifically
01:32how much better that product is in exactly what you're planning on doing with it.
01:36But I'll leave the next one up to you, Marquez.
01:40Okay. So in announcement keynotes and a lot of advertising specifically,
01:44a lot of companies like to do this thing where they combine a bunch of different specs
01:47from different versions of the same product into one page,
01:53creating what I like to call the imaginary spec.
01:56It's like one of the most common versions you'll see is a company will put
01:58like the maximum up to performance number alongside the minimum starting at price.
02:06And they'll put them next to each other in a product where you can't actually get
02:09the maximum performance for the minimum price.
02:11So here's Rivian, for example, on the R1T website, you'll see, wow, 420 miles of range
02:17and a zero to 60 in under 2.5 seconds, starting at under $74,000.
02:23But not exactly, because the one with 420 miles of range is the dual motor,
02:29which has a 3.4 seconds, zero to 60.
02:31Still quick, but the 2.5 second version costs $30,000 more and has 40 miles less range.
02:38And for $73,000, you don't get either of those things. So yeah, this here is an imaginary spec.
02:45Oh, and by the way, that's another one while we're at it, EV range claims.
02:50Now there are laws around how accurate your range claims actually have to be,
02:54just like with gas mileage, and some companies are a little more optimistic
02:58about that range claim than others, fine.
03:00But the fact is, we are still pretty early in this battery tech,
03:03and the tiniest, even seemingly insignificant things can make a pretty significant difference
03:08to your range. And so even when you break it all the way down to specific Rivian models,
03:13the one that does the 2.5 seconds, zero to 60, you can see that 374 mile range claim right
03:19here.
03:20Well, when you actually click in, that's when you realize that's on a specific wheel
03:23with a specially designed sticky Michelin tire. And then, oh, look at that.
03:27You're actually getting 338 miles of range. You'll have to switch down to the standard sport wheel
03:33and tire to get the 374 miles of estimated range. So yes, even this here was an imaginary spec.
03:40And I promise you Rivian is far from the only offender in the world of cars and in tech.
03:45And if you thought that companies exaggerating their specs to seem better than others is a problem,
03:50then how about when companies just invent entirely new specs so that you can't even compare them to
03:56others? When companies start to build loyalty, they want to be able to charge more for the same
04:00stuff. But how do you get away with that in a world where a comparison is just one quick chat
04:06GPT search away? Well, make it so confusing for customers to compare you that the easiest thing
04:12then becomes for them to just take your word for it that you're better. One of the most prolific examples
04:17of this right now is RAM. Any computer, any phone, any laptop, even your smartwatch needs RAM to be able
04:23to juggle tasks. And this is true no matter which company's product it is. But Apple now refers to
04:28their RAM almost exclusively as unified memory. They can say this because their RAM is actually
04:34part of their chip as opposed to a separate component, which does make that RAM a little
04:39more efficient in some ways. But it glosses over a very important detail that Windows laptops often have
04:45dedicated graphics cards that have their own additional pool of RAM. Whereas unified memory
04:51means that both the CPU and the GPU share from one small pool. So you're pretty much always getting
04:56less RAM. And yeah, I mean, Apple executives have famously boasted about how their unified memory is so
05:02efficient that just 8GB of it is equivalent to 16GB on Windows. But it's not really true. There just will
05:09be a hard cap on how much multitasking you're able to do because 8GB is 8GB. But even so, can
05:16you see how this
05:16whole concept of unified memory still helps Apple? It makes something as simple as RAM feel like some
05:22sort of grey area, which means they can give you a lot less of it and they can charge you
05:27more to
05:28upgrade it than any other company. I'd say to be honest though, the worst example of the invented spec
05:33is the TV market. TV makers will try absolutely everything to make you feel like you're getting the
05:38real deal apart from actually giving it to you. Like when Hisense tells you that a TV has a motion
05:43rate of
05:44120, it doesn't actually mean that the TV has a 120Hz refresh rate like you think. And like clearly,
05:51many other people have been led into believing. Motion rate is another invented spec that just
05:56means the TV is running Hisense's motion smoothing software. Or let's say that you tell your less
06:01tech savvy buddy to make sure you get a TV that has OLED tech. What are the chances that they
06:06accidentally
06:07end up buying a Hisense ULED or a Samsung QLED or a LG QNED? I'd say pretty high. Even though
06:15all of
06:16these are in fact invented specs designed, I think, to camouflage as OLED, even though they're actually
06:22much cheaper LCDs. Now, okay, maybe you're not convinced. Alright, maybe you're watching this
06:27thinking, you know, it's fine if they make up specs as long as they're technically true. But I'll do you
06:34one better. What if there is made up specs that are actually numerically factually false? I actually
06:41made an entire separate video all about this. But one inch camera sensors are not one inch in any dimension.
06:48And
06:491.5K displays are actually not 1500 pixels in any dimension either. How is that possible? Well, it's
06:58because the way we measure things has changed. Like something like this camera, for example. This is a
07:04Sony ZV-1. A lot of cameras like it. This camera has a one inch sensor. It says so on
07:09their website.
07:10And that sounds amazing. A one inch sensor in this little camera? Have you ever looked inside like a
07:16Pro DSLR or mirrorless camera at the size of that sensor? That looks like about a one inch sensor.
07:20So this must also have a huge sensor like that. But it's not. It's way smaller. Why is that? Well,
07:30turns out this is a one inch sensor because in 2026, that's what we call a one inch type sensor.
07:37See,
07:37before digital cameras, cameras didn't have sensors at all. They actually used vacuum tubes. And so the
07:42size of the tube was actually what they measured. So a one inch vacuum tube would create an image area
07:48inside it closer to about 16 millimeters diagonally. And that is actually about the size of the one inch
07:54type sensor in this camera. So it's 2026, but we're calling this a one inch sensor because that is the
08:02size of the theoretical vacuum tube that would be required to produce an image the size of this sensor.
08:12Why? Turns out one inch sensor is a marketing name more than it is an actual measurement.
08:19And I have the same beef with displays because you've probably already heard a lot of smartphones
08:23recently have like 1.5K displays. You've heard this. You've seen a lot of these floating around.
08:29But none of them have 1500 pixel measurements. So what's going on here? See, this is where it gets
08:33weird. Okay. So intuitively, we all agree that 4K, for example, is referring to the horizontal
08:39resolution, right? So this video is 4K, because it's 4000 pixels across, roughly, it's 4096 by 2048.
08:47Sometimes it's 3840 by 2160. But it's roughly 4000 pixels wide. And 8K would be 8000 pixels wide.
08:55But at some point, for some reason, we started calling 2560 by 1440,
09:022K, which is close, but a little bit off. And then for some reason, 1080p, which is now referring
09:09to the vertical resolution is 1K, which is weird because 1080p is actually 1920 by 1080. So it should
09:18be 2K. But now we're calling 1080p 1K. And so now smartphone companies are using 1.5K to refer to
09:26a
09:26measurement somewhere in between 1080p and 1440p. So it's not actually 1500 across or 1500 tall,
09:37it just means somewhere in between 1K and 2K. And that's super annoying to me. But it's how we talk
09:44now. And that's if there's even a hardware change at all with new products, what's becoming increasingly
09:51common these days is this focus on vaguely defined new software features. So if you're launching a
09:58new smartphone, let's say, you're holding a big event and a live stream to tell people what's new
10:02about it, then the thing that is useful to see is what specifically is new about that product.
10:08A good example of this is the privacy display on Samsung's Galaxy S26 Ultra. It's a software feature,
10:14but it's one that actually required them to physically change the way they built the display
10:18to work. So it's made for this phone. But unfortunately, the vast majority of new features
10:23that we actually see marketed here are not that. Like if we pull up the Galaxy S24 event,
10:29they spent this much time talking about the new Samsung AI features, and then literally just as
10:34long talking about circle to search. They talked about it like it's this revolutionary new feature
10:39that's only made possible thanks to Samsung's deep partnership with Google.
10:43Our partnership continues to go strong as we create new ways to do more with Google on Galaxy devices.
10:50But circle to search is also on Google phones. It's on Xiaomi phones. It's not really got anything
10:56to do with Samsung apart from just them being the first to show it. And they do this every year
11:01to
11:01buff out their presentations and try to make you associate those Google features with Samsung. And it's
11:07not just confusing which features are also coming to other brands. Where I think it gets really
11:13intentionally confusing at these launch events is which features that you're talking about
11:17are also coming to your own older phones. Don't get me wrong. It's a good thing that big companies
11:23support their older models. I mean, they kind of have to they did promise you when you bought them.
11:27But the thing that's misleading is spending 60% of the next phone's launch event talking about how it's
11:32the coolest phone in the world. And you should upgrade because it has all these next gen features,
11:37but they're never mentioning that those features are also coming to the phone that
11:40you're watching the event on. We added a brand new capability that goes beyond device control.
11:47Now Bixby can bring you up-to-date information directly in the conversation.
11:53So you see how this new Bixby is being positioned as one of the perks of the Galaxy S26 series,
11:57but actually it can run on even a Galaxy S23. And this kind of stuff is genuinely most of these
12:04launch events now. And speaking of older products, what's with companies now who launch a new product,
12:09but then only compare it to another product that came out like three plus years ago.
12:14Apple is the worst for this. Like take the latest MacBook Pros. So we go to the performance section
12:19and the headline number is, oh, would you look at that, up to eight times faster AI performance.
12:26So they've got the up to in there. They've got the specific use case all to make sure that they
12:30have
12:30this super impressive quotable eight times number. But then also it's eight times faster than the M1 family.
12:37What? These are the M5 generation chips released in 2026. And they're comparing them to the M1s
12:45released across 2020 and 2021. Five to six years apart. And what they would say is, well, you know,
12:53many users will be upgrading from an M1. We're just being helpful. To which I would say, if I was
12:59using a
13:00worn down, slightly busted six year old M1 laptop, my decision is not, do I upgrade? It's actually,
13:07upgrade to the M5 or do I instead buy the last gen M4 and save a bunch of money? How
13:13much difference
13:14is there between those two choices? I don't know. Apple won't tell me. All this is, is a thinly veiled
13:20tactic to help take what is in most instances like five to 10% of real world improvement all the
13:27way
13:27into these astonishing sounding numbers like eight times. But let's be honest, this is a joke. It's a bit
13:36that you prove you're a world class runner is by comparing your speed to when you were eight years
13:40old. Now, there's another funny way companies compare to their previous selves, specifically
13:46smartphone companies when talking about the glass and how tough the glass is. Surely you've heard
13:51this before. This new smartphone or this new glass is twice as shatter resistant as the previous year.
13:59Wow. And then the next year it'll come out and say this new glass is now twice as scratch resistant
14:05as last year. That is amazing. How are they making such massive improvements in the quality of the
14:11glass every time? But it's not as insane when you realize that scratch resistance and shatter resistance
14:19are inversely related. So the more of one you have, the less of the other you have. Think of it
14:24like this.
14:24If you want something to be super, super scratch resistant and super, super hard,
14:28that makes it more likely to be a little bit brittle and shatter. But if you want it to be
14:33less likely to shatter, you make it a little bit softer, which makes it more likely to scratch.
14:38So instead of making some huge improvement every single year, like the headlines might have you think,
14:43it's actually more two different graphs, one for scratch resistance and one for shatter resistance.
14:48And they kind of do this, you know, scratch resistance does this every single year
14:52and shatter resistance does this every single year, but in the opposite phase because they're not able
14:58to do huge improvements of both at the same time. There is some material science and they're both
15:03getting slightly better, but that's an easier way to understand that it's not as crazy as it sounds.
15:08It's no coincidence that, you know, the first generation of this dramatic new ceramic shield for
15:13the iPhone was four times better in drop resistance than any previous iPhone. And then when they finally got
15:19to ceramic shield generation two, it was three times more scratch resistant specifically. Every single
15:26one scratches at level six with deeper grooves at a level seven because it's still glass.
15:34But hey, at least tech companies are generous enough to upgrade the storage on our phones and
15:38laptops every few years. The new iPad Pro comes with double the storage, which is now 256 gigabytes.
15:44Oh, thanks Apple. Oh, so we got $200 more expensive. So they position it to you like they're doing you
15:53some kind of massive favor, when in fact, all they've really done is stopped selling the cheaper,
15:58lower storage model. And so you have to pay more. But at least that one's kind of easy to see
16:03through.
16:03The one that I find much tougher is what I would call the efficiency improvement trap. And it's a specific
16:10problem with the way that performance improvements are sold to us. Every year, we hear a very similar
16:16story performance wise, we're seeing a 23% boost and 20% more efficiency too. So even just ignoring
16:25for a second how they've slipped in that little up to behind him, even though he didn't actually say it.
16:29This guy is very clearly implying that this chip lets you gain with about 20% faster performance,
16:35while your battery lasts 20% longer. So not only you're getting smoother gameplay,
16:41but you're also getting better battery life while doing it. But the important thing to understand
16:46is you don't get both. If your efficiency goes up by 20%, but then you're using all of that extra
16:53efficiency to get this 20% extra performance, then what you're actually getting is the same battery life.
16:59So when you then bundle that back in with the fact that the entire thing is only up to 23
17:05% faster and
17:05up to 20% more efficient. And what we're really often talking about in these kinds of situations is
17:11an average expected improvement of like 5% to your performance and your end battery life.
17:18Surgical grade stainless steel, aircraft grade aluminum, military toughness. Tech companies feel like
17:27they're always super excited to sell you something that has maybe the most premium materials on
17:31planet earth forged in an oven at a million degrees that only the most exacting customer could
17:37possibly accept. But you know what's funny about that? There's actually nothing super special about
17:42any of those things. In fact, they're actually quite common. Like most airplanes, it's true,
17:46they use a whole bunch of 6,000 and 7,000 series aluminum because those alloys are super strong and
17:53light
17:53and cheap enough for mass production and good quality. But that does also mean that when your
17:59phone uses aerospace grade aluminum, you know, it's technically true, but that's also true about a
18:08razor scooter. And a whole lot of the stainless steel you'll come across in life is just 316L steel,
18:13which is an alloy that is one of many that is pure enough and high quality enough to be used
18:18in
18:18surgical tools, and in the iPhone 14 Pro's rails, and in most kitchen sinks that you come across,
18:27which technically means the kitchen sink is also surgical grade stainless steel. It's not lying
18:34technically, but now you know. The truth is the specs of tech products are chosen around how those products
18:42are going to be marketed. And that's kind of a given, it's just business. But the issue is that very
18:47often
18:47in today's world, the specs that make a product the most marketable are not the specs that are
18:52most useful to a user. Take thickness. The spec that matters here really is the maximum thickness.
18:59You want to know how thick the new phone or laptop is at its thickest point, because that's going to
19:04determine what bags or pockets you can fit inside of. But the spec that companies talk about is thickness
19:10at a product's thinnest point. And as soon as that genie's out of the bottle, you can call it
19:16whatever you want to. Like Apple calls the iPhone Air the thinnest iPhone ever. And while that's true
19:21for this section of the body here, it's not true for the whole phone. I've got an iPhone 7 here,
19:27which is thicker than the iPhone 6, by the way. But still, this is thinner than the iPhone Air when
19:32you
19:32factor in the cameras. And it's not like you can take them off. It's just such dumb logic. Like,
19:38if we carry on this train of thought, then what's to stop Apple at the next iPhone launch event,
19:42taking all the rest of the components in the body and shoving them into one massive block at the end
19:48that you have to hold like a camera grip, but then calling the phone five times thinner than the last
19:53iPhone, because all that's left in this part is the display. And then you've got Honor, who marketed
19:59their Magic V5 as world's slimmest foldable. But then people got it in their hands, put it side by side
20:05with Samsung's foldable, and found that that was actually slimmer. Want to know why? Because Honor,
20:10in their measurements, excluded not just the camera bump, but also the outer and the inner
20:16screen protector. You know, the one that you're not actually even allowed to take off yourself.
20:20That's not the only pointless spec though, like screen brightness. It's become an arms race to just
20:25be the one quoting the highest number of nits possible. But the more the companies focus on just
20:30reaching a really high peak nit number, the less that number actually tells you about how bright the
20:36screen is day to day. They could literally be describing how bright one pixel on the screen
20:42could go while playing HDR content in direct sunlight for like three seconds. So this, for example,
20:49is an Honor Magic 8 Pro. The company makes a pretty big deal about how this has a 6,000
20:54nit peak
20:55brightness. That's the figure that's marketed. But if we pull up a plain white image on this phone,
20:59and put it next to a Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, which only advertises a 2,600 nit peak brightness,
21:07you can't actually tell the difference at all in this day to day scenario. These are both on Macs,
21:12by the way. So when you're looking at brightness numbers, just get rid of peak brightness. Look at
21:17typical brightness. And when it comes to phone cameras, what mostly matters is sensor size. The bigger
21:22the sensor, the more light and the more real detail that your shots have. What most companies spend far
21:28more time talking about is resolution, which beyond a certain point doesn't matter at all on a phone.
21:34Like the last four generations of Samsung phones have had a 200 megapixel resolution. They're still
21:40shooting their actual photos in 12. And don't even get me started on maximum zoom magnification. Look
21:45at this page for the Nothing Phone 4A Pro. The headline feature, the number one thing being used to sell
21:51this phone is world's first 140 times ultra zoom. Oh my goodness. I mean, my iPhone only has 40 times
21:59max zoom, so it's gonna get cooked, right? Okay, zoom all the way to 40 times on the iPhone, 40
22:07times on
22:08the Nothing. Oh my god. Right. Yeah. So it's exactly what we expected. The Nothing Phone, regardless of
22:15whether you use the AI enhancement or not, just looks worse. It's just not capturing as much information as the
22:20iPhone. And AI can't help you there. Let me make something very clear. How far your phone can digital
22:27zoom has literally zero correlation with how good of a camera it is. What it actually does correlate
22:33with though, is how low a company's standards are for what counts as a photo. Damn. Because I could
22:39literally go back to the first smartphone I ever owned if I wanted to take a photo and just keep
22:44cropping
22:44in until all I can see is a single brown smudge. And technically, that could be 300 times digital
22:50zoom. Best zoom camera in the world, everyone. Oh my god. I can't do this anymore.
22:58Alright, so speaking of phone cameras, last but not least is the classic shot on a smartphone trope.
23:04First of all, several companies have already been caught lying about like sample images that were
23:07supposed to be shot on that smartphone that were just licensed from some professional photo shoot
23:13somewhere on a random DSLR, which is already crazy. But even the ones that aren't lying do feel like
23:19they're kind of stretching the truth with the amount of extra hardware that's being added to shoot it on
23:27a smartphone. Like the whole point I feel like of this, you know, awesome piece of content was shot on
23:32a
23:33smartphone is to sort of inspire and empower you to shoot your own awesome photos and videos with that
23:39tiny sensor and lens that fits in your pocket everywhere you go. But when there's a massive
23:44external stabilization rig and huge lenses and filters and all sorts of other things added to the
23:50phone and millions of dollars of lighting and set design to make that all possible, I guess it's still
23:56impressive but it also kind of defeats the purpose a little bit. I can almost guarantee there are features
24:00disabled on those phones to make those accessories work. Like if I'm shooting with all that stuff,
24:05I'm disabling the built-in stabilization if I have a five-figure jib to shoot with. Like if the only
24:11thing from the original phone that you're still using to shoot is just the sensor technically,
24:16then is it still shot on a smartphone? I guess technically yes, but I'm now actually way less impressed.
24:25So treat everything that these tech companies tell you with a heavy dose of salt.
24:30You don't need to upgrade every other year. Nothing's actually getting eight times better.
24:34And when you see a company bragging about their maximum zoom, run for the hills. If they can spot
24:40you, at least you'll be super low resolution. Thanks to Marques for joining forces with me here
24:44and catch you in the next one.
24:46Bye.
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