 There we go. That looks good again. Hey! Okay, so welcome to the WAN show. We have awesome topics that we can hopefully talk about on a microphone that is functional this week. Yeah. Two companies that start with V have been shut down, which will be two separate topics. One of them was Vine and the other one was Vessel. So if you're starting a company in 2016, maybe do not name it with a V at the beginning. See, Linus Media Group, perfect name for a company. Really a naming scheme. Doesn't start with a V. Perfect name for a company. There's actually no V in the whole name. Nope, nope. Which is probably what really shows your craftsmanship. Craftsmanship. Of that name. After that, there was also announcements from two different companies that sounded like they were announcements for products from the other company. There was a laptop and an all-in-one PC announced from Microsoft and Apple. And if you don't know which one was from who yet somehow, we'll just leave the guessing game to you until later. Intro. ["Spring Day"] ["Spring Day"] Sprint days. Flashboards. Cable mode. Cable mode. Cable mode. Cable mode. Cable mode. Huh. I'm actually listening to us yell out the sponsor names behind the music right now, because I'm actually monitoring the stream, which with the delay on Twitch is actually- That's gotta be a nightmare. Incredibly distracting. Oh, God. I thought you plugged into the computer. I was like, why are we delaying so much? It makes so much more sense now. No, I'm listening to it here, because I really, really need to know if this cable was the problem, and if it turns out that this USB cable was the problem, I will personally destroy it on stream before the show is over. So- I had a micro USB die in the car once, and Emma was sitting beside me, and I ripped it in half with my hands, because I was so mad. That's pretty good. I was so pissed off. They're like made of metal and stuff. I wrapped one around each hand and then pulled it apart. I was very upset. I can't remember what it did. It like failed me in some way. I'm gonna try. It's really difficult. This is like hard sleeved and stuff. Yeah, I'm gonna try anyway. I wouldn't. Mine was like thin and terrible. I'm still gonna try. Okay. I don't mind failing on camera. It's not a new thing for me. Is it still working? It's, oh yeah, oh yeah, it's still working right now. So it's probably the cable then. Yeah, probably the cable. I'd go ahead. I'm gonna turn our mic down a little bit here, cause I just grabbed another microphone without actually like checking any of the settings whatsoever. What is, isn't this the same mic? You just changed the cable, not the mic. This was a second, no, wait, this was a different mic though. Yeah, at the beginning of the day. And when you were testing, you put it over there. So that's probably why it's turned up a little higher than usual. Oh, okay, yeah, yeah. So we'll go ahead, we'll do that. Yeah. All right. So why don't we jump right into our first topic here? Oh, this is, am I on the wrong, am I on the wrong dock? No. Oh no, actually this is terrifying. It just, yeah. Okay, so the original article here is from The Verge. Oh, speaking of terrifying, I have not checked my screen share yet today. Let's see if it works. I'm excited. Oh, okay, no, it's fine. I thought, I thought it was shutting down. Oh, hey! First time's a charm. When a show. Something works. Always works all the time. It's nice. Yeah. AT&T to buy HBO, CNN, and the rest of Time Warner for more than 80 billion. So I've got a riddle for you. Okay. What's the only thing scarier than a ginormous corporation that owns all the media that you consume? An even more ginormous corporation that owns the delivery media through which you receive all the media you consume. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This might be one of the only things on planet Earth that I and you and Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump all agree on. This is terrible. This should not happen. It's the worst. I love the sub headline, deal includes Batman. Okay. Thanks. Deal includes the one still somewhat relevant superhero for Warner. Oh, for Warner, okay, yeah. I was like, what? No, no, no, no, no. There are many other ones. They're just all Marvel. Yeah, yeah. So we're not gonna go over a ton of details here, but news of the merger first surfaced last Friday. And actually there are almost no notes on this whatsoever. Thank you, Colton. Everything that I knew off the top of my head was more than what he had actually put into the dock here. But yeah. There's one kind of funny thing where the US government summoned the wrong Time Warner CEO to like talk about stuff. They summoned Robert Marcus, the former CEO of Time Warner instead of Jeff Buks, who is the current CEO of Time Warner. I can't imagine that that would be hard to figure out. So I'm kind of surprised that that happened, but either way. You would think. So this comes on the heels of other ISPs also looking to expand their digital media footprints. And I guess that leads us pretty well into what will be one of our biggest topics for today. Even though the list of people on earth who care is definitely less than the number of people who will watch this video, this has a significant impact on us and to a core group of our viewers that are legitimately paying a monthly subscription fee to view our content, which is pretty unbelievable to us. And there are many, many more of them than you guys likely realize. So Verizon is buying Jason Kilar's video startup Vessel and promptly shutting it down. So October 26th, which was on Wednesday, October 26th, the news broke. We found about it at found found about it. Found out about it. We found it. Thank you. This is why I like having you here because like sometimes I sense no make. So we found out about it on the 26th of October and the deal is done, not just done. Like vessel.com is shutting down on October 31st. One, two, three, four, five days, three of which are business days. It's gotta be one of the fastest shutdowns after announcement ever. And hold on a second, hold on. No, no, this was posted October 26th at 5.30 PM. So like, okay, one, wait, no, that's still right. I still had the numbers right. Numbers right still I had, makes sense, no. Yes. Excellent. So I'll- You should try to do a sponsor spot like that. That would be terrible for everyone. Yeah, yeah. Us, sponsored viewers, no one would win. Poor Nick, he'd have like a brain tumor by the way. All right, so vessel launched about 18 months ago. What else we got? It was helpful for us. Yeah, well here, why don't I kind of talk about pre-shutdown and then you can go through what's gonna happen post-shutdown. So pre-shutdown vessel launched with the promise of giving creators kind of like, how would I compare this to? Okay, so giving creators a way to provide some kind of benefit to what they called super fans. So some kind of benefit that would drive super fans to pay a monthly subscription for the content and effectively support the channels that they watch in a way that is much more financially beneficial, so more money per view, than ad-supported platforms like YouTube. Remember, YouTube Red was not a thing at the time. So the idea was that with a three, a five, or a seven day window, viewers who's paid three bucks a month for the entire vessel platform would get early access to all the content on the platform. And some things about this seemed like a pretty good idea to me at the time. And I'll run you through some of the reasons. So number one, is being able to monetize views more than the fraction of a cent that we get for a YouTube ad. That was a big one. Number two, the ability to pull some of the content and some of the audience off YouTube, where we are reliant on the goodwill of Google for our continued existence was a huge one for us. Like actually really sketchy. Massive, because it was, I had already dismissed joining Vessel. I was done, I wasn't gonna look into it. And then Google pulled a thing where they were like, okay, we're gonna crack down on creators having native advertising that they bake into their videos. And like, it's gonna get real. And if they wanna have native ad, if they wanna show a brand logo in their video, that brand is gonna have to go through Google to buy out all of the different ad units on that video, which logistically, how does that even, like for how long? Like it didn't even make any sense. And so we were like, holy crap, we need something. So Vessel also offered us that. And for the first, the other thing they offered was one free year to our viewers. Which I thought was pretty cool because the way that I looked at it, this was a Silicon Valley startup. And I'm not gonna say that I saw the platform failing coming at the start, it actually, like I was like on board, I was like ready to do this thing. But it's a Silicon Valley startup that's signing a one year contract with us. Or sorry, it was an 18 month contract. 18 month contract, I think, with the potential to renew for another 18 months as long as no parties wanted out. So it was like a three year contract with an 18 month out, the first year of which would be free for all of our users. So I kind of looked at it and like, I mean. And we were allowed doing simultaneous content when it came to like show content or timely content like WAN show and stuff like that. So we didn't think it would hurt anyone. So we worked out a deal where, and we were at that time also looking at ways to make ourselves less reliant on the pace at which new technology was being released. So that was right around the time that we were developing concepts like Scrapyard Wars. Concepts like moving vlog, concepts that did not rely on Razer or Apple or Microsoft to deliver us some new shiny thing that would drive people's interest in our videos, trying to make it more personality driven, more project driven. Compensator 2 is right over there. It's gonna be a great video. And did not rely on any single hardware to be released so that we could like go viral by dunking it in water for an hour or whatever the case may be. So all of these things kind of aligned for us. And we went, oh yeah, not to mention that, wait, am I allowed to say that? Okay, so. What? I don't know. Can you hint? No. So, okay. Long story short, through Vessel, we were able to make a lot more money per video than we were without it. And right, this was the other thing. I had just signed the deal on the warehouse that we are sitting in today. I had just signed the deal, the mortgage deal on it. And YouTube came out with their thing that was going to significantly affect our ability to monetize our videos. This was a very scary time. And Vessel offered us the opportunity to better monetize our videos right at that moment. So I had like a down payment to make or I had a tenant improvement to do. I had to build an office inside this building. I don't know how much you guys know about leasing, renting, or buying commercial space, but you're lucky if it's an empty box because then you save the money that it would cost to rip out whatever stupid thing the previous person put in and get it hauled away to the landfill. So, there you go. And so now. In terms of what happens to people who are already subscribers, you will be provided complimentary access through the month of October, also known as a few days. Free bucks off. You were given a refund till the beginning of October if you bought an annual sub. So you will have hopefully been given some money back. Like a pro-rated thing. Yeah. If you were subscribed through iTunes, which I didn't even know was possible. But sure. Yeah. If you were subscribed through iTunes, you need to contact Apple customer support for a refund. Well, that's what you get for subscribing through iTunes. Yeah. And you will apparently be receiving an email with instructions and yada, yada, yada. So if you're a Vessel subscriber, check your email. Yeah. That's basically it. Got people asking, what does this mean for nerd sports? Great question. I don't think we know. Yeah. So we have a call with Go90 next week, which is a subsidiary of Verizon, also an online streaming platform, not an early access platform. And my understanding is that if Verizon owns Vessel but did not keep the content creator contracts, like ours, to produce early access content in place, but did keep the employee contracts, presumably, to move on to another project, because vessels.com is going away, then content creator contracts that are not the standard ones, like the exclusive content ones, seem to be in kind of a gray zone. Yeah. So we will have to find out. I'm not really sure how that works. What is going on with that? Yeah. Some people are asking what is going to happen in the future for viewers that weren't on Vessel. Honestly, probably nothing noticeable. No. So I'll tell you this much. We are not planning to take our seven days of buffered content and dump it onto YouTube in one day. This would be an enormous disservice to me, Luke, and all the other people who work on those videos, because however many of you go, yeah, that would be great. I'm going to binge watch the crap out of that, but the cold, hard truth is that due to the way the YouTube algorithm works, if we step on our own video releases with rapid fire video releases, it significantly decreases the propagation of those videos in people's sub boxes, suggested videos, suggested channels, and all that stuff. So we would basically be significantly, and I'm talking like we could get half as many, a third as many, a quarter as many views on those videos. We would be significantly damaging the impact of those videos by just dumping them all on YouTube at a time. And having a buffer is really helpful for us anyways, because that could afford us more time to work on really super cool stuff, like can I reveal a thing behind me? Yeah, yeah, sure you can. Like this thing, which you can't absolutely see that well. Yeah, that is Desk PC Part 2. So that's its current state. Yeah, and that kind of stuff can take a little bit. And you can just stand. It's fine. Ed's like crawling on the floor. And he's not even in the frame. He didn't even go in the frame. He didn't even go in the frame. Yeah, so I don't know. That kind of stuff could be awesome. So yeah, I guess. Should we take Twitter blitz questions? We've got a, we've got, no, I'm following it in Twitch chat. Yeah, we've got other people in Twitch chat asking if there's any possibility that we would look into creating our own early access platform. And I won't say no. I think there's, I think even with a fairly rudimentary system, maybe through our forum or something like that, I think there are tangible benefits that we could offer people for like a month, some kind of a monthly fee. And we haven't really talked about how much it would be. I was wondering if you're gonna give examples of the tangible benefits or not. I'm not sure if we should. I don't know. Okay, so on Vessel right now probably, or maybe shortly after Wanshow, there's a video where I talk about these things. So I guess I might as well just, it's just like me sitting at my desk. That's what I was recording when you came upstairs. Yeah, so- Are you just putting it on Vessel? Yeah, it's only going on Vessel. That's cool. So basically what we're asking people to do- Patreon? No, I don't think that's the- No, I don't think Patreon's the answer because Patreon, we've talked to them before about building like an API or working with the APIs that exist for other platforms to more tightly integrate. So if someone was a patron, we could offer them a coupon code on Teespring or something. And they have expressed zero interest in- Which seems insane. Developing those kinds of relationships and those kinds of benefits. Which to me is very frustrating because right now Patreon is basically a money collection platform and not much more in my mind. Because everything that the creator does as a benefit to their patrons has to be manually done. Like yes, you can upload a small video or photo or a post. But other than that- But if you wanted to do like a merch reward or a coupon- We're not huge fans of exclusive, actually constantly exclusive stuff. We like share, if we're gonna make something, we generally like sharing it with everybody. And- Generally. And even if you were to do stuff that you can't do for everyone, like if you wanted to do at a certain tier, like a signed thing, Patreon doesn't have a fulfillment center partner that we could just fill an entire box full of signed shirts with and send it to them. They don't really facilitate your ability to actually execute these rewards. And it's an inherent problem with the platform because most of the creators on it are small time creators for whom the burden of signing 200 hats and then packing them, addressing them- Remember, international shipping is a bitch, okay? Actually shipping them, paying for all that. It's overwhelming. It hurts their ability to create content, which is one of the main reasons that Linus Tech Tips does not have a Patreon. It's something that we tried for Channel Superfund and that in my mind has largely fallen flat. Given that- Like if Patreon had the infrastructure so that you could more easily provide meaningful rewards, like something like a free vessel membership at a certain patron level, that would have been really cool. One thing that I really liked was the Teespring discount idea. Yeah. I actually loved that idea. It made tons of sense. Because if you're gonna contribute to a Patreon, in my opinion, one of my favorite things to buy is like a shirt. Or like one thing that I've been interested in is like the CGP Grey sweater. Sure. Because CGP Grey is great and his sweater looks cool. And I was like, maybe. And I might, I'm not sure. But like that, I like that kind of stuff because I like being able to- Such commitment. Show support. I mean, all the women in the audience have wet panties over your commitment level right now. Yeah, my bad. I'm thinking about it. I own like literally 15 sweaters. And I really, really don't need any more. I just love sweaters. Anyways. I like the one you're wearing right now. Thank you, yeah. I actually do like this one. I've been wearing videos more. Because it's becoming wintertime slowly. Anyways. But I'm also wearing shorts. So I don't know what's up with that. I don't know who you are. But yeah, being able to give something like that would be cool. Yeah. Like we actually genuinely tried really hard to get the whole Vessel subscription thing going. Yeah. And like doing things. And the other thing too is doing things that are part of a workflow. Yeah. Where you could do an exception thing. Like a signed hat once in a while. Yeah. But if you have things that are automatic. Like if I just create my videos and I upload them here and then a few days later I upload them there and just automatically my patrons get this stuff early. Things that happen automatically help small time creators. So they didn't really get any of that done. And I think if Vessel had managed to figure out partnerships like that. Or if they had managed to figure out how to get their creators really on board with what they were doing. Maybe they would have had success. They had a lot of big creator partners. Yeah. But it didn't seem like they had a lot of big creator follow through. And yeah, there. I think that's perfect. I think a lot of the big creators saw the immediate knee jerk reaction of viewers not liking the idea of having to pay for something that they used to get for free and went whoa, whoa, whoa, I'm not touching that with a 10 foot pole. When the reality of it is, viewers are now paying for something early that everyone can still get for free. And I think most of our audience eventually did understand that. Like it didn't change almost anything. You still got embargo date reviews exactly when they were supposed to go up. You still got a video a day. Nothing ever actually changed on the platform. There's stuff that people think is due to the Vessel exclusivity period. Like the fact that we tweet about projects that don't get released for a month. But the reality of it is that you were gonna complain if I tweeted about it and then it didn't come out for three weeks, the same as you were gonna complain as if it's four weeks. We do work a fair bit ahead. We have a one week buffer in addition to the Vessel one week buffer. For where we expect to be at for filming videos. There's projects that I will finish and I don't see go up on Vessel for like a while later. Cause they'll just get pushed back if they're not timely. If they're a review of something like the, like I think it was the Nintendo controllers. I did that review, that's not timely. Those have existed for a while. That doesn't need to come out at any specific point in time. So I think those kind of sat around. We shuffle the schedule a lot. So we'll prioritize new stuff coming in that's more important. We do it all the time. And sometimes things just take a long time. So the water cooled PlayStation 4. My first email to Dbrand, sorry. My first email to Dbrand saying, yo, this is like a dope AF idea. You wanna sponsor it? Was on January 25th of 2015 or 2016 rather. 10 months, no, nine months, whatever that works out to. Many months before the release of the video. So like, I'm sorry for that, but some of the projects we do are larger longer-term projects and it just does take some time. And some of them like, like I'm currently, I've had a lot of questions about this lately because, and like I looked at my last personal rig update and looked at the comments and there's a comment on there from like two weeks ago being like, so where's part three? It's been like so many months, like over a year. I was like, ah, yeah, it's very close. I have all the computer hardware parts, but in part two, I just did like a theory crafting thing where I like showed people what I was thinking of doing and everyone hated that for very good reasons because nothing actually like really happened in the video. So this time I wanted to be really- And you've thrown out many of those theories at this point anyway. Oh, they're like gone, yeah. That test bench is literally in the garbage can right now. I'm not kidding. It's being taken out like next week. I don't want it anymore. It's gone. It's going to be gone, I guess. But I have all the new computer hardware, including the case and everything. Everything's ready to go. What I'm waiting on is amethyst points and I'm not gonna explain why. Do you know why? I don't know why, but I know I should. Squarespace.com. Squarespace is the place to go if you wanna build yourself a sick dope AF sleek website that looks great on any device, whether it's a laptop, a cell phone, or a big ginormous projector screen. I don't know that too many people, I don't know that there are too many people who browse the web on a projector screen, but I feel like I wouldn't be doing my due diligence if I didn't find out just how much of our audience browses the web on a projector screen. How many of them browse it on a turnip? Browse web on projector. Yes, no. And- Nope, nope, aw. What do I do? You can just do create poll, it's actually fine. Okay, cool. So you guys, you gotta hit us. You gotta hit us in the Twitch chat. Let us know sup. Sup. Sup, you know, sup. That should've been the third option. Sup. Sup. They've got 24 seven support via live chat and email. It's only 12 bucks a month to start and you get a free domain if you buy Squarespace for the year. And they've got lots of great features that take building a website and make it so that normal people can do it. And this is awesome. So my dad has been here helping me with DeskPC and they're involved in this construction company project or shareholders or something. Anyway, so the guy who runs the company is taking advice from a bad IT guy. Okay. So my dad convinced the guy running it that they should be in charge of the outward marketing. Okay. So the website is kind of under my dad, which like my dad's not an expert by any stretch of the imagination when it comes to like CSS. Yeah, no. Frickin' no. Okay. So. The woodworking looks great. So. Other than your. With that said, yeah. My dad would have no trouble with it if it was a Squarespace site for sure. Like he could handle that no problem. My mom made a beautiful website on Squarespace. The salty IT guy that has the ear of the owner is like real men have scratch coded websites. So basically he's one of those IT guys that creates work to keep himself important. You know what I'm talking about? Like, okay, okay. I can understand Squarespace is a wonderful platform, but they don't claim to be a wonderful platform for everything. They're a wonderful platform for most things. Why don't I explain what the website needs to do? Okay. It's a simple company website. Who are we? What do we do? Here are some sample floor plans and some pictures of some homes. And here's how you get in touch with us. Okay. So he either should have been done that website in like an hour or two or should probably just use Squarespace. Just like. So. So. So yeah. One of the great things about Squarespace is that if you don't have a dedicated IT guy to go in and update your website for the ever evolving web standards or new browsers or whatever else the case may be, Squarespace deals with all that crap for you. Our linusmediagroup.com website has sort of, this is sort of embarrassing. Speaking of issues with updating. We should be putting some of the new employees on it and stuff, but like basically hasn't been touched since we put it up and it still works exactly the way it did when we first did. So when you decide to sign up for Squarespace, which my dad should, make sure to use offer code when to save 10%. Mine still says AKA slick PC. I know. As if anyone. Mine still says CEO. Wait, no, that's right. Sometimes I'm not sure. I thought janitor was more accurate. Yeah. We have John, we have Dennis. We do not have, we do not have the latest three issues to our staff. Yeah. Wait. Four. Four. One. Two. Wait, is my wife even on there? Is Yvonne on there? Five. That was pretty bad. That was pretty bad. The other four, there is actually four more. I'm glad she doesn't watch WAN Show. There, there, there and there. Right. Yeah. Oh yeah. FreshBooks. So FreshBooks is the easy use invoicing software that helps small businesses use the time that they save, not dinking around in complicated accounting software to update their websites. And do the actual work that they need to be doing. It also helps you look more professional when you send like sleek professional invoices in a timely manner. And you've got like all your expenses tracked and you've got all your hours together and you've got all your like mileage and it's all, it all like looks so pro. They've got lots of great functionality including the ability to accept payment on your terms. So you can take deposits. You can accept credit card payments through the platform. You can even see when your customers, when your clients receive bills. So when you are, whether you're running a small debt studio, plumbing service, a small time IT repair, I'm sure I'm talking right to many of you guys in our audience. FreshBooks is a way to make your accounting life easier even if you're not a numbers person, especially if you are not a numbers person. What else is there? Oh yeah. Gave a lot of discussions, this is fantastic. You can reach out to their support staff where you will speak to a real human like immediately. No return calls, no phone tree, no nothing. You talk to someone, they help you. Which like honestly, for someone who doesn't have a background in accounting, trying to run a small business is probably worth the cost of admission right there. Just having someone to talk to about how to use accounting platforms and software. So if all that sounds pretty good, you can try FreshBooks completely for free over at freshbooks.com slash when, and make sure you type when in the how did you hear about us section. For our last featured spot, we've got Cable Mod. Apparently Cable Mod wasn't disappointed in our last featured spot on the WAN show, and they have decided to show off some of their dank AF cables again. So Cable Mod, you may know them as the guys that offer custom individually sleeved, like cloth style, so you can't even see the colors of the wires at all, cabling for PCs, but they also have a bunch of other stuff these days. So they are one of the leading guys when it comes to RGB lighting strips. They've got adhesive backed ones, they've got magnetic backed ones, which are superior by the way, as long as you have a case with any steel in it. Even if you don't, I think you'd probably be better off taking little metal stickers, and like permanently gluing those, because the problem with sticking adhesive to the material that lighting strips are made out of is that it doesn't stick very well, yes, in heat. So if you just put metal on and stuck the magnetic ones on, it's awesome. And it's nice, they're just, I don't know. They've got RGB, they've got RGBW, so they have actual white LEDs on the strips, so you don't get that weird rainbow effect. They've got RGBUV, so you can have UV as well as RGB lighting. But they've got a new product, and that is their sleeved external cables. So now you can get like SICK, like Razer edition, only I could plug this into my laptop. Like SICK power cables, ethernet cables, go check them out. They do custom length SATA cables, they do custom lengths of all their different sleeved cables, they've got a configurator that lets you individually choose what color every individual wire is, and they're like super nice guys. I've known the guy who runs it for a really long time, going back to my days at NCIX, so he's just like a super, super good salt of the earth guy. So if you wanna just feel nice about supporting a company that's like cool people, then go use offer code LTT to get 20% off over at cablemod.com. That's actually a pretty substantial discount on like a $100 set of cables. Yeah, yeah. Cool. All right. Vine. Vine is gone. Also shut down. Also shut down. Whomp, whomp. So Twitter has decided that they now agree with me. Why did we create a video sharing platform for six second videos when we already had Twitter? They bought it like just before it was launched. So more or less, yes. But I've never understood or liked Vine. I've always had tons of problems because for some reason the videos just wouldn't play most of the time. I never wanted to have the app because I don't care. So I'd try to load the videos in like a browser which was supported and then they'd error out. And then just, why does it need to be six seconds? I don't understand. And I'm just happy it's gone. Screw it. I don't care. So you'll still be able to access and download your Vines. The website will continue to be online. Creators will be notified before the company makes any additional changes to the website or app. But yeah, that is pretty much it. You know what? On the subject of you saying that you didn't want to install the app, do you think that part of this is due to, and okay, I am going to, I'm gonna make something up because it's possible that someone out there has talked about this or even used the same terminology that I'm about to use, but I haven't looked into it at all. But do you think that it's due to something that I'm gonna call app fatigue? Okay. Like it used to be in the early days of the iPhone. You get excited to just download everything. Yes. It was like, holy crap, there's an accelerometer. I want a Compass app. Or like, oh, now I can use my phone as a level. Like there was an app for every stupid thing. And your phone was just like, I remember my first iPhone, my iPhone 4, I had like pages and pages of apps. That sounds like a product. What does? My first iPhone. My first iPhone. I don't know why, it just does. Whereas now, every phone gets exactly the same load up, load out of one home screen worth of stuff so that everything is close together and organized. I've always been very extreme on that. I could only have one page of icons thing. And I usually don't even like it being my home screen because I like my home screen just being clean. I just have it off to the side and it's only one page. So for me, a big part of it comes from, especially on Android, especially on Android, random apps crushing your battery life. And not even like due to all the amazing cool stuff they're doing in the background, just due to shoddy coding practices and Google's complete inability to prevent developers from sucking up all the power of your device and especially prevent them from reporting that they are, or not prevent them, but not require them to report that they're sucking the power. Do you know how many times I've had an Android phone just be hot in my pocket, hot in my pocket, pull it out. I've lost 30% battery in the last few hours. I'm looking at it going, I go into battery and it's like Android system or Android OS, having consumed everything. And like the screen's like 2%. Like I've hardly touched my phone that day. Drives me fricking crazy. So do you think that part of the motivation for this is Twitter's question of, do we need what is already a weaker brand to distribute social media crap? Do we need to try to get past the friction that users have with installing more app, more freaking apps on their phones? And finally, there was another reason. One interesting thing is that almost no one even downloads any apps. If you look at like overall actual statistics in terms of smartphone usage. Yeah, the majority of people don't download any apps. I've got a straw poll for you guys though. In the meantime, while he keeps talking, it's gonna be, are you app fatigued? I wanna hear from you guys. And then getting up to, I've been doing way too much research because I'm currently working on my review for the Pixel. I know the back doesn't look normal, it's because I have a skin on it. And yeah, the majority of people that have smartphones don't download any apps. You have to realize that this is the majority of people. And now the majority of people have smartphones. So like this is everyone. This isn't just you guys. I'm sure the majority of people watching the show download plenty apps. But like we are probably not even necessarily getting fatigued, but we're probably getting to a point where we don't want any more. We're down to download apps. We just wanna download the ones that we know. That's a type of fatigue. I would argue that's fatigue. So new experience fatigue kind of deal. Cause I don't want any new apps. No, I just want the apps that I have to work the way that I expect them to. And I'm down for them to gain functionality. Yep. And every once in a while I'll throw something unusual on like, oh, I need to do a screen recording or something. I'll grab an AZ screen recorder. But I'll like delete it when I'm done. Yeah, I'll clean it up afterwards. Exactly. Like when Periscope came out, I loved the idea. So I downloaded the app, but I didn't really want to. And I never really used it cause I was like, eh. I'd love to see Periscope go next. Well, it's integrated now. Yeah. If you Periscope stream it, like does it through Twitter anyways. I know, but I'd love to see the Periscope app just go away. No, completely because it's unnecessary. It's extraneous. That's what I'm talking about. I'm down with Twitter gaining functionality. I don't want to download a new app for the same fricking thing. So this is something, this is another thing that drives me crazy. And this was the other point that I made when I was wondering about the motivation and why dilute a brand? Yeah. You see this over and over and over again. Do I, I think with cars, I kind of get it because an automobile purchase- You're trying to section things out a little bit. Is such a large purchase. And the way you appeal emotionally to a car buyer is very different from the way that you appeal to, oh, I don't know, someone who's buying in my mind, like a wireless access point. That's a very specific reference. And the thing about car brands is that whether we're talking Toyota or Lexus, they don't seem to, okay. So for the most part, for better or for worse, going back to your Acura with that horrible airbag recall, the actual quality of a Honda engine is pretty much regarded as equal, whether you're buying an Acura or a Honda. And the same goes for a Toyota. Like they don't differentiate based on the core functionality A to B don't break down. They seem to be trying to deliver a pretty consistent experience, regardless of whether we're talking about one of the more premium or a sub-brand. The one that drives me crazy is the brands that try to differentiate on quality by having like a main brand, like a known brand, and then like a sub-brand. So a perfect example of this, back to wireless access points, is Ruckus. If you know enterprise Wi-Fi, you know Ruckus. Ruckus is like bomb. It's probably what you're using if you have good Wi-Fi reception in an airport or something. And then they introduced like a lower end brand in its small businesses called Xclaim. I opened up the access point and it is a Ruckus access point with like one small difference. Like PCB is the same. Most of the internal components are the same. It's basically a firmware difference. And I'm kind of looking at it going, why not just have a lower, why try to build a brand from scratch, from nothing? Why not just have a lower line, like a 100 series, and still use the same brand? Because you're clearly not differentiating on quality, even if you're trying to have like a perceived difference. Because it's the same product. Why do this? Can you give me any other examples? I know you're gonna be able to answer this, but Sploosh16 says, why dilute brands LOL, but you have three YouTube channels. Okay, so that is more to do with YouTube than it is to do with us. If I could have one channel called Linus Media Group that people could subscribe to in one click, or I could have three shows called Linus Tech Tips, Tech Quickie, and Channel Super Fun that people could individually subscribe to, that would be perfect. But YouTube wasn't designed for that. We don't own the distribution of the videos, therefore we need to try to control how we can distribute them as much as we possibly can. And the best way for us to do that is to co-integrate as much as we can. If you go to the Linus Tech Tips channel and you scroll down a little bit, Tech Quickie is right there. Right there, you can watch the videos right there. But the reality is that the way that YouTube distributes video to your subscribers is heavily algorithm based, such that if half of our viewers weren't interested in Channel Super Fun, let's say, every time this Linus Media Group channel dumped a Channel Super Fun video out, it would increase viewer fatigue and YouTube would stop distributing our videos and recommending them to people across the platform as much. The more focused your channel is, the more likely you are to be picked up by the algorithm and shared and skyrocket. Perfect examples of this that we've seen in the last year are guys like What's Inside. Every video is the same formula. Or the pneumatic thing. Yes. The crushing thing. Or someone like TechRax, okay? You watch a TechRax video, you watch a What's Inside video, you know what you're gonna get. A guy destroying an iPhone in some kind of creative manner and a guy and his kid cutting something open and looking at what's inside it. And that allows channels like that to experience the kind of explosive growth that we, for better or for worse, never will because we try to tackle a broad, broad variety. But even then, we're limited. If we tried to start doing like pet videos online as Tech Tips, it would hurt us in a huge way. I mean, we experienced recently a big drop in per video viewership that turned out to be due to us just having kind of a run of about five days of videos that were below viewer expectations in terms of the interest level. And all of a sudden, our new videos, as far as we could tell, were getting delivered to maybe 60% as many people. And so that's why, that's why we do what we do because we have to. It's the game we're playing. What else? Okay. Lots of questions. Lots of people asking about Dennis. So... I got you. I don't know. I don't know how much to say or not say. I guess now that it's over, should I just like be upfront? Like what happened with Dennis? Yeah. Okay, so Dennis wasn't working here for a long period of time, actually. Basically what happened, and it comes back to my first conversation with Dennis where I interviewed him, and I asked him if he had a Canadian work permit, and he said yes, and didn't clarify exactly how long his Canadian work permit was valid for. And anyway, so his Canadian work permit expired. So he had, fortunately, he still had visitor visa status, so he didn't actually have to permanently leave the country and go back to Taiwan, but Dennis has been gone while we've been going through a very, very long, tedious process that anyone who wants to hire a foreign national who doesn't have a work visa has to go through, and it's called an LMIA, it's a labor market impact assessment, and so what we have to do is we have to demonstrate that for the position that we want to hire, in this case we want to hire Dennis, that it will not affect Canadians who are equally qualified who are also looking for that job, or that those applicants would not be suitable for us. So that whole process took about six months, because we actually began it long before Dennis's work permit expired, and as of, I believe it was, as of Friday last week, I had, was it Friday? Last week, last week I had an interview with an agent who was reviewing, finally, like it took months after it was submitted for anyone to even look at it, but I had an interview with the agent, and it really did not look very good, but thanks to Yvonne's diligence, because she documented fricking everything, like the agent was like, why didn't you hire this guy who applied? And Yvonne was like, okay, we emailed him on this date, he emailed back on this date, he got a job somewhere else. And the agent's like, okay, moving on to the next one. Like, they dug deep. And thanks to Yvonne's diligence, effective November 1st, I believe, Dennis is back at Linus Media Group. So there you have it, it has been extraordinarily stressful for us, because Dennis is, as you guys know, and I'm sure can appreciate, an extremely valuable member of our team here. We take a very, you know, no man left behind sort of approach to things. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna like, I'm not bragging or anything, but like, to me, this kind of thing is very important. It cost us many thousands of dollars to go through this process in order to make sure that Dennis could not only get his work permit to work here, but it's also probably the last, one of the last steps for him to get his permanent residence and officially become a Canadian. So that's been really exciting for me. And for him. So there you go. That is what we have been. The journey of Dennis has been very interesting. Very quiet about. And that's actually, it feels good to get it out there. Yeah. Cause like, oh. I've addressed on like my thing, but the only thing I've said the whole time is that he's not working here right now. Yeah. That's all we're allowed to really say. So there you go. It was really close. Oh man, was it close. What else we got for topics today? I'm sure there's something. Wow. Microsoft and Apple. Oh yeah. We haven't even talked about the Microsoft and Apple things. And it's six. Anyways. Pornhub offers to buy Vine. Six seconds is more than enough. And you know what? Considering Vines auto loop, that might be true. Yeah. There could be some pretty creative, pretty creative X-rated Vines, I'm sure. Yeah. I mean, many banner ads for pornographic sites are basically Vines. To really think about it. Pornhub has promised to restore Vine to its not safe for work glory. Was there like not safe for work stuff on Vine? Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. And then they tried to clean it up and make it advertiser friendly. And then now they're closing it. So that's the history of Vine in 10 seconds or less. Oh man, that's funny. All right. Let's talk about the MacBook Pro. So the original source here is, oh, hold on, no, I wanna do those straw poles before I totally forget. Yeah. So browse web on projector. You guys are full of crap. Yeah, 22% of you. 22% of you. Projector sales go through the roof. That is a load. Everyone starts making them. Gigantic load of garbage. Everyone watches my dorm room tech video and they're like, wow, yeah, everything in this video makes sense now. Okay, are you app fatigued? 78% of you saying yes. So I have to take these results with a grain of salt because you guys are a bunch of fricking liars. No, dude, 22% are not app fatigued and are watching this on a projector. Well, projectors, you can't install apps on projectors. Bogus. Unless you had an LG Smart projector. Oh dang. All right, so moving on to the new MacBook Pro. Yes. With a touch strip along the top that replaces the function bar. I gotta say, good move. I mean, it's not the first time this idea has ever come up. The Art Lebedev Optimus keyboard was the first one to have this idea. OLED displays behind every key and you could pro, I mean, did anyone ever get one? I don't think I ever saw it outside of concept art, but that's like what got me interested in keyboards. Yeah, so- I think that's what got a lot of people interested in keyboards. So they officially give a crap about laptops again, but they don't seem to know who they're making them for because it says right here, MacBook Pro. And it's not for professionals as far as I can tell. But this raises a lot of questions for me, this here, because the 13 inch model- Unless you dock it. The 13 inch model, I'm docking Marks from Apple. That's what's getting docked right now, son. Oh dang, dang. My scroll isn't working. A laptop dock. Why is my scroll not working? Considering the USB-C ports that this thing has. Woo, those are expensive. Oh man. Every 13 inch MacBook Pro has no dedicated GPU. I'm sorry, are you kidding me? 20, 2550 for no daddy GPU. No, I'm down, I get it. So you got to- I'm sold. I mean, this is the thing. I'm all in them now. Apple is the company- Pre-order. That whips out the GPU performance slide- Pre-order for them. Every time they release a new iPad or an iPhone and talks about the importance of GPU, heterogeneous compute for the performance of future computing devices. I mean, this can produce graphics. And then- Intel Iris graphics 550. And then builds a professional product- Bring it. That goes all the way up to $2,500 US dollars. Hold on. No, we're on.ca. We're on.ca, so let's be cognizant of that. Let's try to go to US and see if that works. Okay, so let's bring it up with the US prices. All the way up to- Two grand. $2,000 US dollars with eight gigs of RAM and no graphics card and not a single Type-A USB port. I'm sold. No one will ever need more than eight gigs of RAM. I mean, to be clear, you can configure it with more memory. Oh, but you wouldn't need to. So let's look at the 15 inch, which you could make the argument is more of a professional grade. Do they even have quad cores? Holy crap. No, I've missed that. They don't even have quad- They're dual cores. They don't even have quad core processors. No one needs more than two cores. Two cores, eight gigs of RAM. Anything above that is, you're just compensating. I don't even understand what this product is. Compensator call out. Watch the video. It's coming out at some point. This is like MacBook Pro for students. And I understand that it's like lots of students go buy a MacBook Pro. So basically, Apple's given up on, because my whole thing with Apple is that so much of their marketing in the past has been around selling what people wanna be and selling what people wanna do versus what they are and what they can do. So like an Apple commercial is full of all the amazing videos that you create, when the reality of it is, is it's a very small subset of the population that creates any kind of video that anyone anywhere would wanna watch. Austin Evans. I'm sorry? Austin Evans. Yeah, sure. I'm actually looking for, I guess, are you doing a review? Of? Yes, I am. You are? Okay, yeah. I'll look forward to your video too. Wow. I'm interested to see what you guys say about it. Cause the USB type C stuff, it's actually kind of interesting. Losing type A is gonna suck, but I like seeing how many type Cs they had. I'm disappointed with the fact that there's no type A's. What I'll tell you right now is that I, without really realizing what I had done, because I didn't watch the event and I didn't look that closely at the specs. Did you order a dual core? I ordered a dual core 13 inch MacBook Pro. So I can tell you right now, my review will contain a concise, but spirited rant about how Apple could possibly believe that dual core is pro for anything. Yeah. So there's that. I forget where I was going with whatever I was talking about before. But four Thunderbolt 3 ports, man. What could I possibly need four Thunderbolt 3 ports for that I can run with a dual core? You could charge four pixels at a time. Not an iPhone. You can't plug that in. Don't buy one of those. That's my favorite thing. Oh man. They don't have a first party cable. I don't think, well, okay. There's probably an adapter or something like that, but you'd have to buy it after the fact. I do not believe the iPhone comes with a lightning to USB-C connector. No, it doesn't. So you could literally walk out of an Apple store without being able to plug your iPhone into your iPhone. But remember Apple's vision. Apple has the courage to do away with wires, but not the courage to have wireless charging. Or the ability to plug their own products into each other. What happened to like the insanely cohesive, hard to get out of Mac ecosystem? I've heard it's still hard to get out of, but like they don't even work well properly. You have to get an adapter to plug your phone into your own Mac laptop. It's wireless. Wireless is the future. But it's not. Airport. Why do they call it airport? I don't know. Are there planes? Do you, no, I don't know. I was gonna say do you dock? And then I was like, wait, nope. That's Star Citizen or Eve. Nope, nope, Nope. What are we even talking about right now? Okay, so. Macbook consumer. Right, right, I wanted to talk about the specs of the 15 inch. I'm like, I'm screwed. I can't believe I just ordered a dual core laptop for like $3,000. Can you cancel it? Dbrand ordered it. Oh. They're sending it skinned. Like I might have to get in touch with Dbrand. Be like, yo, whoa, hold on, hold on. Can you cancel that? Hold on. Hold on. Okay, so. Dude, you could get 16 gigs of memory. That's two times the amount that you need. It gets even worse, okay? So the 15 inch has whopping Radeon Pro 450 graphics. Oh, dang. For 2400 to 2800 US dollars. Dang. Two gigs of VRAM? Hell yeah. I mean, this is one of those things where. You don't even get any more ports? I thought they'd give you, you know, five, at least. Five Thunderbolt 3 ports. Thunderbolt 3 ports. You need that fifth one, dude. You gotta have it. I. I wonder if you could, okay. Nah, I'm not even gonna bring that up. Could you like, okay, no, I'm interested now. Fioret, I doubt it because the power, there's no way the power supply would be able to take this. But could you like, plug it in through all of those ports to charge? This has gotta be the stupidest thing I've ever said. But like, does it dynamically know if one of them is receiving power and it'll turn receiving power off on all the other ports? I'll be perfectly honest with you. Like I said, I did not watch the keynote. So it's possible that there's actually a dedicated charging port. I'm not sure. I'll have to look. Again, like I don't. I. I was wondering if you plug in a bunch of type C devices and put them all to like, charge the other devices, is that gonna like, screw the MacBook up? Or how does that even work? I don't think so. I've never tried that. It should be correctly managed. So yeah, Color Me not impressed. I do not agree that it's a touch of genius. I love the huge track pad. I love the idea of the dynamically reconfigurable function row. I think that is a step forward and is a great move. I am not a fan of the IO, but hey. Oh yeah, no, they do charge via the USB type C port. So there you go. Oh, I knew it charged through that. I was wondering how they deal with the multiple ports. Yeah. So it does have a headphone jack. At least it has that going for it. Yeah. It looks great. It's really thin, but I don't, I can't think of a reason why it should be this thin and give up having a decent GPU. And in the case of the 13 inch, a GPU at all and a proper CPU. Can I help you? We were talking about Dennis and he said that the Macbook doesn't have a single Taipei USB. A Taipei, oh, Taipei. Type A. Type A. I know. Oh. Thanks. That's the joke. Thanks. Thank you. Single Taipei, Taipei number one. Have you seen his hair? Whose? Have you seen his hair? His hair. I don't think he even noticed after he told me to cut my hair. Did you notice his beard? No, I don't, I don't, I don't notice. I don't notice if you get a haircut. I notice if you haven't had one in like four months. Yeah, I get my money's worth when I get a haircut. Yeah. Oh, is it? Are you bald? No. Oh. But it's like mostly bald. Yeah. That's good. That's good. Thank you. Yeah. Taiwan number one. Taiwan number one. Taiwan number one. So, well, by the way, you guys were right. We haven't even made it through the four topics yet. I told you. Oh, four topic Wensho. Four topic Wensho. Okay. I'm not helping right now. Let's talk Surface Studio. All right. We didn't get to see this. Dang. So we wanted to go to the launch for this, but we had what, like three days notice? No, no, no, no, no, no. No, to be fair to them, they gave us way more notice than that. Oh, okay. But we were just in a situation where you were like, oh, wait. Right. You were out, I had pneumonia. Yeah. We didn't know what was happening. So we didn't have someone to send to the event. And we didn't know what it was gonna be about. And we didn't know that it was gonna be like a ballin' like machine. This was like super NDA, I'm sure. It was. And they weren't allowed to say anything. They were like, you should really go. It's like right up your alley. But then the only picture that I had about it said like an update for Windows or something. Or like the future of Windows. I think it was the future of Windows. The rumor was that it was gonna be about Windows. And then, yeah. And then there was a rumor at the exact same time that was about another just software update to Windows. So I was like, ah. Okay. So evidence that Microsoft understands what the word professional means. Yeah. Even though they didn't even use it. But they have Pro in creative process. So there's that. Okay. This is a ballin' machine. This thing is super cool. It's expensive. Yeah. I wasn't complaining about the price. Is it more expensive than the MacBook Pro? Of the MacBook Pro, yeah. I wasn't complaining about the price of the MacBook Pro. What I was complaining about was that it has the word pro in the name. If you just called it MacBook and you just made it like a MacBook for like people who like MacBooks, then sure, great. MacBook Lite. Charge as much as you want for it. What I don't like is calling it Pro when it doesn't even have a discrete GPU in it. And it has eight gigs of RAM and a dual core. That is not Pro. That is consumer. That is very consumer grade. So anyway, the Surface Studio. 28 inch, high resolution display, quad core, Core i7 processor. Comes with a pen so you can draw, which is freaking cool. You can have up to a four gig GTX 980M GPU, which I'm guessing is only because of the long development cycle for a product like this. I would expect a refresh at some point with some kind of Pascal based GPU. They could get a 1060 in there. TDP wise, no problem. Up to 32 gigs of RAM. Thank you. 980M, I think they could fit a TDP wise 1070, couldn't they? No, not quite. I'm pretty sure we'd be looking at 1060. Cause that's what we got on Blade 14, which had a 970M. But I think 1070 is too much more kind of thing. Like it's. Okay, cause the understanding I had was that it was one down. You might be right. Maybe. I'm not sure though, but then like you also said the configurability of the TDPs and those things is insane. So like, who knows? Yeah. So 4,500 by 3,000 resolution display. It can handle sRGB, DCI-P3 and vivid color profiles. It's a 10 point multi-touch. It's a three by two aspect ratio. Like again, people who understand pro know that the square display is actually pretty bad ass. I would like to see them have an accompanying display so that I could have a dual display set up. That you can use in the same way? Yeah. So I could have two three by two displays. That's something you can't expand the displays with something else, but you can't do the same format and you can't get the same, there's some special functionality that comes with it. One thing that is missing that I would have liked to see and I know that it's like not the hugest thing on for PC is I would have liked to see Thunderbolt because it is becoming more of a thing on especially mobile PCs. But I still feel pretty darn good about this. And I love that at least if they're gonna- It's the dial thing. At least if they're gonna charge a bunch of money for a professional device. Do something really cool. They've got this really cool like full down, fantastic, beautiful display, powerful thing that kind of excites me. Xbox wireless built in. The fact that it doesn't include Office is kind of frustrating. I think that that's an opportunity that Microsoft has to offer value on their hardware products that in my mind shouldn't cannibalize, shouldn't cannibalize stand alone Office sales really that much. They did it with the Surface RT for example, where they were like, this is an awful product. What could we possibly do to move a few units? You get Office. You get Office. The one app that was ever made for like ARM windows that matters. Yay. So yeah, I'm really looking forward to checking this out. Have we like ordered one? Is the dial thing here? Are we getting one? We haven't ordered one, but we are getting one. Okay, good. All right, just making sure. I had a like panic moment there for a minute. The dial thing? Oh, sorry. Does it show the dial thing anywhere? Where's the dial thing? How does it not show the dial thing? Yay, this thing is so cool. Have you seen it in the video? So like they put it on the screen, straight up on the screen. I don't know how it fixes itself there. I'm assuming there's a type of like rubbery something on the bottom, because I'm sure it's not magnets through the screen. I don't know how it works. I mean, magnets don't affect LCDs the way that they did affect CRTs. Like I don't know. Yeah, but I just, I just. I doubt it. Yeah, I don't think so. Anyways, and it can be used for different things. So in one situation, they turn the dial and it rotates the image. Another situation, it's a color wheel and you're able to turn and change the color wheel with one hand while you like stroke paint with the other hand. So they had gradient paint going through as the person's changing it. That's really cool. Very cool. I don't do the art stuff, but I like physical control of things. So being able to turn that to select your color would actually be pretty awesome. I don't do the art stuff. Luc LaFreniere 2016. Yeah, yeah. It's probably pretty accurate. Have you seen me trying to do anything that's artistic? Yes. It's pretty bad. I know. I can manage cables pretty well. That's good. Yeah. All right, so speaking of things that we do well, ending the show by rolling the intro. Okay, we don't do that well, but we've had a pretty good track record lately. Yeah, watch it not work this time. Thanks for watching guys. See you again next week. Bye. Hey. Oh. We have to destroy the cable. It will come back after the outro. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. I just want this cable. I'm gonna make this cable my b-atch. Is it stuck on something? Hold on. Hold on. No, no, I think I unplugged it. Unless I didn't. In which case I would not have. Oh no, I did not unplug it. Okay. Okay. So it appears as though the cable was indeed the problem. So here we go. Hulk edition Linus Sebastian. Hold on. Good luck, because this is gonna be a pretty intense cable to. You think so? Yeah. Pretty intense cable to break? Yeah. What are you grabbing? All right, ready? Hulk edition Linus. Oh yeah, okay. Here we go. Ah! Ah! Ah! Yeah! Boom! I went and got these and everything. Just, I hid these behind my back. Didn't even need them. See you next week, guys. Good job.