It's much more focused on enthusiast computer hardware, but Gamers Nexus[0] is doing good things in this space too. Their style is much more dry and data-dense than LMG's though, which isn't everybody's cup of tea.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChIs72whgZI9w6d6FhwGGHA
(To be frank, I think LMG labs is very much inspired by what GN has been doing over the last year or two.)
I go with Gamer's Nexus if I want to know if a GPU used the wrong kind of thermal interface for their VRMs and what effect that has on core clocks second by second, backed by rigorous scientific benchmarks producing huge amounts of data, summarized in highly detailed graphs.
The visual size comparison tool is also extremely handy for comparing something you're about to buy, with something you already have access to. It gives you a much better sense of how much bigger/smaller this thing is.
For screens I use displaycheck.
It was DisplayMate, not DisplayCheck. https://www.displaymate.com/mobile.html#Latest
Their display "shootouts" are unparallelled in my opinion. For example they look at colour accuracy not only at high brightness but also at really low brightness, where displays often 'cheat' by reducing the contrast when they reach the limit of their backlight dimming. Which significantly impacts colour fidelity.
They also do many other types besides mobile displays, I just linked to that as an example.
PS: Sorry for calling out Linux for his showmanship but I just dislike this generation of Youtube "celebrity" that appeals to the mainstream over getting out of the way of high quality content. The only one I really have time for is Dave from EEVblog. Despite being quite the showman he really has the brains and doesn't hold back on technical info.
Thanks for linking DisplayMate, at first glance it's something I'll be needing to dive deeper into soon.
I don't think he outwardly lies (at least not in a way that matters), or anything, but he's got pretty good soft selling skills which he definitely uses for evil/to make money.
All LMG channels are great. But to me anyways, they're great because they're basically comedies.
Yes sir, very Atomic. I miss that era.
Just watched a video [0] where he clearly comes across as being pro workers rights, and against passing prop 22 in California. He seems to be generally pro-union while still trying to point out some general issues with them. He also says he would be "offended" if his employees unionized at LMG, which while maybe is a bit stupid to say, I don't think counts as anti-union.
He’s pro-union - he just hopes he is a good enough boss that his employees don’t feel like they need to unionize. He clarified his viewpoint in later videos. Offended was probably not the best choice of word - and he admits that too. I don’t recall the video but someone can find it. (I’m on mobile and on vacation - idk why I’m even here)
That's the kinda double speak I'm talking about.
As for unions, everyone should unionize. It's literally the only way to even out the power dynamic. Good companies, bad companies - it makes no difference. There goal is to pay you as little as they can, so yours should be to get paid as much as you can. Unions make that process easier for the majority of people.
This is absolutely untrue. A kind of propaganda talking point that paints unions like some kind of vicious weapon that you want workers to have if they absolutely need to defend themselves against assault, but you'd rather not have the assault take place at all.
Unions give workers concentrated power to balance against the concentrated power of corporations. That's it. They are one side of the scale.
Pro-choice means every pregnant woman should have the choice and a real chance to abort their pregnancy if they choose. It's kind of right there in the name.
In the same way people say pro-union - they mean "pro-choice" as in you should have the choice and freedom to form and be part of a union easily.
I hope you’re trolling — you’re comment made me lol when I first read it because it’s so misguided.
Someone saying they'd rather not have their workers form a union is not pro-union. That's like saying you support workers sharing information but you would be offended if your workers talked about their salaries because that would infer that they don't trust you to be fair.
Unions are a tool to give individual workers more leverage in negotiations that almost always favour employers / managers.
A side note: Linus could be a great day-to-day manager, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a bad “ceo” if that’s what he calls himself. He can be incredibly personable and kind and supportive, but also have unreasonable expectations about work hours, employee’s social media activities, compensation, etc.
As for not having a YouTube channel, i find that a reasonable demand for employees of a company running YouTube channels. They are allowed to do game streaming stream on Twitch and stuff like that.
In the end he's still a CEO and the others are his employees, not his friends. For that, he doesn't appear to be a terrible boss.
I like the show(s). They're fun. But I don't use them to determine which CPU to buy or whatever. Their opinion changes depending on who is sponsoring them, no?
No, to the extent humanly possible. They have reviews, which are not sponsored by anyone having anything to do with the product being reviewed. Those are their actual opinions and evaluations of products.
Separately they have sponsored showcase videos, or whatever they call them, where they won't say anything untrue, but they're just showing off whatever it is, not really evaluating it deeply. These videos are _very_ obviously different, and very obviously labelled.
LTT has top tier policies and openness about these issues compared to really anyone on youtube or anywhere.
More anecdotally, I've seen them give takes on previous or current sponsors that were _very_ not in their financial best interests. If sponsors are paying for easy coverage, they're not getting their money's worth.
> Well, no, it would work way better if he had no bias.
That would just be lying. There are no humans without biases.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-zt57TWkTF4 is probably a good summary on Linus's thoughts on sponsors/funding. If you trust what he says or not is up to you. I do though.
Edit: thanks for the link to the video.
Certainly feel free to evaluate differently for yourself.
I watch a lot of their content. Mostly it's just fun, but I do trust them to have pretty good takes on things when I'm considering buying something as well.
I do always check others though, mostly for the real gritty details that LTT doesn't usually focus on. I'm hoping that their Labs project starts providing a lot more of those too.
My fav part of the channel is the rest of the team. One thing you can't fault Linus for is his ability to hire entertaining characters and promote a fun environment. That is a great skill. There's at least 5 other people there who could be YouTube empires all on their own.
Yeah, agreed, it's a bit absurd to me how they've managed to collect so many actually talented, entertaining people.
He gives praise where praise is due, that isn't bias. Many times on the WAN show he's reminded viewers and especially Red/Green/Blue fanboys that none of these companies are your friend. And big deal if he's more productive using Windows than Linux.
I'm in no way defending Linus, there's a bunch of stuff him and another staffer get up to that's utterly cringeworthy. But as to the rest of your comment I think it's your own biases that are playing in your head.
Narcissist is probably the word.
Again, I like the shows (well until his rabid fanboyism or petulance comes out). I mostly just don't trust him to review things.
Every one of their videos clearly mention who the sponsors are i.e. the "sponsored showcase" videos. And when they're not those types of videos, but just have regular advertising, they say out loud and clear "and this segway's to our sponsor...".
I'm not shilling for the fella but their content is some of the best when it comes to being transparent about who's paying for their videos. He can't risk getting that wrong.
> Narcissist is probably the word.
He's clearly offended you somehow and sometime in the past so why continue to watch their content? If a content creator offended me this much then I'd just walk away.
Goodnight and good luck to you too.
Heck, even the Wirecutter, owned by the NYTs, is known to push products based on sponsorships...
This is a silly take. Tech evolves and companies release more than one product at a time. It would be weird if LTT /didn't/ have "flip-flopping" takes on various companies.
You can't just sling mud baselessly and expect people to take you seriously.
This mud-slinging idea you continue to push (with zero evidence) is contrary to their financials and directly contrary to their business model.
Why on earth would Linus leverage his entire business in debt to buy a huge facility to produce hardware reviews if that would mean "his sponsors" (your salacious claim) would abandon him or force him to change?
It literally doesn't make sense. If they were truly bought and paid for and producing faux-content that is actually advertising, they would have legitimately zero need to spend millions of dollars on hardware testing labs.
I get it. You disagree with me. I hope you are right because he's got quite a bit of power these days.
I don't "disagree with you", I dismiss you. I provided an accurate description of their financials and incentives and demonstrated that your salacious claims literally don't make sense.
This is good and normal! We should always dismiss peoples feelings especially when they directly contradict all available evidence. However, I happily await your evidence demonstrating that Linus has been corrupted by a hardware partner into producing devious advertising! We'd all love for you to back your claims up.
(See?)
Oh c'mon. The guy is just a YouTube celeb like hundreds of others and easily disposable, what is this "power" he wields?
If he wielded the power himself (encouraged that behavior) that's one thing, but fanbases of scale will eventually always have a subset of people that behave poorly like this despite even being directly told not to by the person they're supposedly a fan of...
In the recent video they did on their most profitable videos Linus explicitly said money from YouTube is only a small fraction of their revenue. I don't imagine Floatplane is much of a profit centre either...
It's kind of rediculous to claim he's a fanboy in one sentence then claim he's just a shill in the next when the evidence contradicts your first statement.
Because from what I see he's both called Intel on it's bullshit and still worked with them on a professional level.
Same for amd.
As for apple, they funded a whole new Apple channel without Linus precisely because he knows he couldn't be unbias.
Linus DOES hate a lot of what Apple does; cases where they make things more unrepairable for no real reason, or various socio-political causes (like opposing Right to Repair or unions or whatever).
Regardless of that though, I would trust a Linus review of a new iPhone or iPad a lot more than I would trust a lot of other sites, because I know he's not going in with Apple fanboyism (the way I would, for example), and he gives reasons for all his opinions.
Fundamentally, he always comes across as principled. If he has an opinion he'll tell you, and he'll give you a reason. He'll admit that he was wrong when he (believes he) was wrong. He'll contextualize his thoughts so you can decide if this or that opinion is really relevant to your situation.
As far as I've seen, his AMD/Intel/nvidia opinion changes follow along with the facts. He's pretty PO'ed at Intel for basically just sitting around with their fingers up their asses for however many years, and only actually trying to make good products at good prices (and largely failing) when AMD suddenly stepped everything up.
nvidia makes great video cards, the best on the market, but he's not going to avoid calling them out for shady or anti-consumer business practices. AMD makes great CPUs and good video cards, but if they have a disingenuous benchmark or claim he's going to say something about it.
I dunno, no one is entirely unbiased, but from what I've seen over the years, I can trust Linus more than most other people.
Welcome to the age of misinformation.
Though I do find it amusing that Linus has often commented negatively on companies that don't want their employes to unionise, when Linus does much the same thing. In the case of LMG, Linus employs emotional threats, publicly warning his employees that forming a union would represent a declaration of "personal failure". Don't get me wrong, I agree 100% with Linus here. Unionising is what you do in response to exploitation, not as a default state of affairs. I just wish he could see the parallel when commenting on other companies which aren't currently unionised.
[Edit: just noticed that this exact point was already discussed to death elsewhere in this sub-thread.]
Mostly in the US, it seems. Unions in Europe are healthy and effective. The key difference IMO is the interest people show in democracy and holding delegates accountable.
But unfortunately the Netherlands is the country with the most Anglo-Saxon model that is still in the EU. So it was bound to happen.
I think it's reasonable to argue against corruption but if you're argument against almost any human institution is just that it is corrupt, then you are arguing against the majority of human institutions ever. Which simply isn't practical.
You're not from France I can tell ;)
But yeah if people in such a small company start organising it means stuff is wrong
He is not without flaws, but I think he is fair, balanced and very well-intentioned.
I really hope LMG does videos in these styles with their lab
There really are brands out there that charge 200% more for a shittier product to just get carried by brand recognition alone.
Audio Science Review was posting deep-dive technical reviews of amps, dacs, daps, iems, and headphones, years before crinacle made a post on headfi, and I say that as a member of the latter since ‘02. Many audio engineers and enthusiasts have attempted to remove the “reality distortion field” that permeates the prominent audiophile communities (headfi, audiogon) for years; ASR was one of the first to successfully to so (excluding sites dedicated to specialized equipment).
i.e. this came up when he was talking about the wall tv. he couldn't just bill it to lmb and store it at home, he would have to pay for it out of pocket and then charge LMG for every time they used it.
I actually came across a "why I'm shutting down my channel" video a while back in which the host showed emails from the company whose product she was reviewing (it was a drawing tablet or something like that) pressuring her to show the product in a more favorable light.
It's so hard to tell who's actually objective in those review videos and who's censoring themselves at the request of a vendor.
I'm sure Linus does just fine in this regard, but the underlying problem still stands: if my Youtube channel's success is dependent on getting that kind of access to products early (as most top-tier reviewers do), I'm always going to have to decide between being as objective as possible and not biting the hand that feeds me.
If you've watched a handful of review videos on YT at this point, there's a pretty good chance at least one of them was pre-approved by the vendor of the product being reviewed and you just don't know it.
If you go by what LMG says on their podcast it sounds like the intent is for the lab to give them credibility and to act as an eyeball funnel, even if it needs to be subsidized by the entertainment side of the business. They've already shown that it's possible to make entertaining reviews if you keep the technical details light, so what they really need is hard data to back them up when they trash a product or get accused of being a corporate puppet.
I personally find their videos to be entertaining, so if I'm looking to buy something and I know they evaluate tech products, I'll go to their labs site, look for entertainment videos that are produced from that data, and watch those videos. Then when I find something I think looks like a good fit for me I'll jump back to the labs side to look at the details.
IMO the thing that might make LMG's effort different is that they're going into the space as a new participant. I think they realize the technical aspect of the lab is basically going to be content that needs to exist, but that no one reads (enough to be profitable) and their monetization is set up to accommodate that scenario. Compare that to traditional reviewers (and SEO spammers) that rely on page views for their revenue.
The whole review industry is going to keep shifting towards video and the low cost, low value SEO spam sites are a big part of that. Any existing review businesses that aren't shifting towards a hybrid model like the LMG / Labs plan are going to get crushed IMO. Even if it's not LMG doing it, it's going to happen eventually.
Their coverage of the Nvidia cooler design change was really interesting to watch, and they went into depth on their testing methodology with both its strengths and weaknesses.
Their channel really convinced me to take a more critical look at other “reviews” and how they conduct them with either lazily held thermal camera or smoke machines.
In LMG videos the graphs could be really crazy, though I haven't watched them for a while now.