Technology

I'm legitimately shocked there are people defending the garbage Humane AI Pin, which leads me to think a lot of the criticism levied at MKBHD is made up by a PR firm working for the company. I already hated the god damn thing because it gave you hallucinations on demand. But watching his review and The Verge's review, its an overpriced gimmick that has a camera on all the time, and does nothing a smartphone can't already do. They didn't ask for bad reviews, they made a godawful MV--sorry, shitty product. Now they're gonna reap the whirlwind.

A smartphone is just better in every way imaginable. I also don't have my phone hallucinating all the time either, so I have that going for me.

I'm also gonna say the obvious quiet part out loud: He's black and they're targeting him first. Not The Verge, not Engadget, him.

prevent many people of

This actually stuck out more than the comma splices.

I hope they do I bought a nothing phone 1 after reading promises of how they wouldn't move to another phone until they had everything right etc.

Not only did they not keep it but after launching the 2 almost right after this claim they actively sabotaged the 1 the camera got worse the battery got way worse and thing is now super unstable and I really believe it's on purpose as custom roms make the phone great.

The company is dead to me but I am kinda enjoying seeing the phone 2 users now complain because they are starting to get the same treatment now.

What are we supposed to do? Give bad products good reviews so the poor little million dollar startup doesn't get its feelings hurt?

If we were talking about dishonest, malicious reviews, I'd understand.
That's not the case here though, not only is Marques' review honest, multiple reviewers reached the same conclusion as him.

Maybe try making a good product next time.

Good. Make better products and support them after you made them.

If your company sounds scammy and you say it can do things it can't, I hope your company burns before you burn customers who believed your lies

A plurality of negative reviews kill those companies that make bad products. And that's a good thing. Wheat from the proverbial chaff as it were.

In today's market, the perception or even the profitability of a product means nothing. All that actually matters is growth.

For a publicly traded company, or even one that just uses venture capital to start up; the product isn't the thing that they might sell to consumers, it's their brand. This is what gives them more capital to continue running the company and ultimately to profit.

This means that a company no longer needs to make good products, they don't need to keep customers happy, they don't even need to be profitable. All they need is to show growth opportunities to potential investors.

The baseline of this entire discussion is that not all companies deserve to survive. You make a good product - you grow. You don't make a good product - you adjust for the losses. There are no participation trophies there. Worst case scenario, someone will pick up on the same idea, and turn it into something actually good later on

“Git gud companies” -MKBHD

For anyone wondering, this is a response to a review Marques posted about Humane’s AI pin, which he called the worst product he’s ever reviewed. A member of the company complained he was going to kill their business:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/marques-brownlees-humane-ai-pin-review

The reviewer should be truthful and fair. If that means trashing a shitty product then that's how it should be. Not calling out shitty products hurts the consumer and means the reviewer is doing a bad job.

Entities like LTT have a very large audience and the opinion they put forward tends to influence a large crowd. Dishonest reviews about an emerging startup could ruin their customer basis.

I feel like in most cases if a product has such bad reviews that it kills the company that made it, there's a good reason for that.

Of course there are exceptions, and it is expected that a reviewer do their due diligence to make sure they're giving an honest, accurate, and reasonable review, but no company should be shielded for being told their product isn't good if it isn't.

I was saying this over on YouTube... it's his responsibility to report tech developments accurately and responsibly, because today's tech developments are tomorrow's history. Future nerds need to know the score! Scooty-Puff Junior suuuuuuuucks!

Product is an input, reviews are an output.

If your product can be killed by bad reviews you're either bad at making the product or bad at marketing the product. Managing a launch, including the relationships with reviewers, is part of shipping a product.

Now, that's for consumer goods. For artistic works it's a bit of a different beast and you can get a lot of other factors and definitely, by design, a lot more subjectivity. But if you're shipping cars and computing devices... yeah, no, this is a weird fixation to have. I'm guessing it's because it's the first time when whatever mismanagement happened becomes noticeable, so you can have the false impression that something was fine until the bad reviews told you it wasn't.

Although I'll say I've often owned and very much enjoyed products that don't review well. Computing device reviews in particular tend to focus on specific aspects, just because they're the easy A/B comparisons between the dozens of similar things they cover. The effect is sometimes only very general use devices get good reviews, so more specialized or targeted devices get worse marks just because they're not competing on the same areas. You see this a lot with gaming phones, and it stands out to me on a lot of the new PC handheld reviews, too. So if you ask me whether reviews can homogeneize a product and end up making every phone look the same? Maaaybe. Over time. Eventually. For most of the market, perhaps, but not all of the market.

Otherwise no, that premise is nonsense.

No single bad review ever killed a product. Because we all know that some things are just a matter of opinion, user error, etc. Opinions are like assholes: everyone’s got one. If I’m interested, I’ll read several positive and negative opinions.

But if your product is bad enough to warrant several bad reviews, that’s on you. Should’ve done better research, should’ve made a better product.

Ackchyually

This is the core of markets and markets have existed long before capitalism.