MKBHDs for Everything

If "I can’t think of anyone to whom I’d recommend spending the $699 for the device and the $24 monthly subscription" is a 4/10, I would hate to see the chaos that a Verge 1/10 would wreak across society.

Thanks to the character limit (no longer technical, but still cultural) and the algorithmic feeds, the "discourse" on Twitter is entirely synthetic. In real life, the equivalent would be like if somebody were to interrupt you every five seconds, then take the various sentence fragments you managed to get out in between, and stitched that together with random other sentence fragments from hundreds of strangers in a grotesque attempt to manufacture a coherent interaction. Oh, and everybody's screaming all the time, all at once, of course, and the messages you try to say about the Blottinghamville Games Club keep being sent to members of Bunny Murderers for National Unity, and vice versa… All while the giant blue bird-thing keeps trying to tell you about its sponsors.

And yet, this mutilation of human thought and conversation itself is presented as if it's just a venue for normal discussions. It's not; The "interactions" on Twitter are interrupted, chopped up, and stitched together. I think it preys, basically on our social instincts, on the desire to assume good faith and perceive an organic conversation happening because it tries really hard to make that seem like the case.

Especially given that I'm not sure there's really any comparable dynamic that's ever existed before in all of human history, I don't know how useful it is to blame individuals for falling for that. Twitter monetized a random message and amplified it as if it's important, so the author of the linked article responded, because that's what you do if you assume good faith when somebody else presents something as important… Though at this point we should probably know better.

If Apple gave this demo, they would have received the same backlash.

Theranos' Holmes also successfully copied the plain black turtleneck part.

VCs got bamboozled into this whole unicorn hunt during the big SaaS boom (when everything was the Uber of some sector), but the low hanging fruits are mostly gone.

But it's their (mostly the limited partners') money, and there's usually enough fools to offload stuff so that even the clueless funds survive a decade.

The only person who won here is Daniel Vassallo, whose low effort post went viral because people kept sharing it to show how stupid it was, thus drawing more eyeballs to his $400 "I will teach you how to be a successful entrepreneur" course on X (because of course he has one).

MKBHD posted an IMO unnecessarily clickbaity title to his review. I watched the review and thought that he was mostly on the ball except for the once again exaggeration that it's the worst product ever (for the views). In a way, it seems that the recent scathing review for Fisker and the views generated might have gone to his head somewhat.

Given that the Rabbit R1 is coming out soon (which he will likely review), I am curious to see if his reviews becomes a pattern of rage farming.

You cannot just slap together a bunch of tech for no reason and then price it like Apple and pretend you're Apple. The fact that they received $240 million funding needs to be investigated in itself. Such terrible VCs need to be publicly humiliated.

> I find it distasteful, almost unethical, to say this when you have 18 million subscribers.

> Hard to explain why, but with great reach comes great responsibility. Potentially killing someone else’s nascent project reeks of carelessness.

> First, do no harm.

It's pretty clear they're not referring to JUST the headline/title of the YT video.

I find it silly that people are pointing at MKBHD for the downfall of a company, instead of the people who ran the company and decided to launch when the experience wasn’t good and the value proposition was poor. Releasing early to ride the AI hype train was a risk, and this time it didn’t pay off.

People are also still free to try it for themselves if they were excited for the product and think MKBHD is wrong. While Marques doesn’t call the iPhone a bad product, he is very clear that he prefers Android, yet the iPhone is still outselling Android in the US, his prime market. That’s at least some proof that the market doesn’t blindly follow him and appreciates the perspective, without taking it as gospel.

On what specific basis?

People were also begging Apple to make an iPhone for years before it was even announced. There were fan mockups.

Apple only made it when the engineering had caught up with the vision.

The problem with this AI pin is that the entire concept seems bad and unfixable. Their whole product is just “your phone, but the only interface is Siri”. For one, you can already do exactly that with a smart watch or phone.

He is and he isn't. If he feels something is not worth it, he'll tell you.

Like the crypto phone: "This is a Crypto Phone. Don’t Buy It." with a photo of him face palming: https://youtu.be/hRSMJGs0YMg?si=_sD9MA7JLeDbI0f1

And who can forgot the famous "Escobar Folding Phone"? https://youtu.be/O8FJSjy3bXA?si=nfAe9tZniafBwDmc

And the follow up video when the company responded to his original video: "Escobar Responds! A PSA" https://youtu.be/Ns8ydpZ5-4o?si=3tppQYwiMbSVMfb7

If you filter through his videos, there are plenty of reviews of stuff that he rips that aren't Apple products. Even his review of the Cyber Truck was brutal. And there very clearly are reviews of emerging products they rip like the crypto phone.

But when you have a $700 device, with hundreds of millions in funding, and a ton of marketing about it being the smartphone killer and the future of computing, yet the device is total junk, that makes it worse in a way than other junk marketed as junk.

The problem isn’t that a reviewer called it junk. The problem is the product is junk.

But let’s talk about the clickbait. The full title of the video is, “The Worst Product I Have Ever Reviewed…For Now”. If it was just “The Worst Product I Have Ever Reviewed”, that would be a perfectly fair summary—maybe a little clickbaity, though it doesn’t seem like MKBHD’s style to go on a rant and completely tear a product apart for the amusement of the audience, and that’s not what he does in the video, either. The “…For Now” vaguely implies that maybe, somehow, in the future, it will improve to the point where it is no longer quite so terrible, and there is some sort of hidden nuance to the otherwise strident tone of the first part of the title, that maybe there is some hope of the product one day, in the future, having some redeeming quality perhaps delivered via OTA update. You don’t know! It’s a mystery! And that mystery—the hope that maybe this piece of junk isn’t totally pointless after all—that’s the clickbait. You want to know what he means by “for now”! The most sensational, clickbaity part of the video title isn’t the negative part, but instead the part that implies the product might be of any value!

And even wilder to me was this bit: "If a single person can affect the stock price of a company, we usually restrict what they can say or when. MK should be cognizant of the unconstrained power he has (for now)."

That's just wildly untrue. For example, John Carreyrou absolutely destroyed Theranos. Nobody restricts what he says in the sense Vassallo appears to mean here. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal is successful as a business precisely because their journalists see getting the truth to their readers as core to their jobs.

That is not a personal attack on someone’s character. And it leaves the door open for the product to improve in the future, which he also suggests in the video.

The worst you can say is that it’s clickbait-y but mkbhd doesn’t usually use such extreme titles.

"The worst product I ever reviewed", even for MKBHD, is drawing from a pretty small set. Big deal, Humane. Take your lumps, fix the criticisms, and move on.

The main takeaway I had was "who the hell is this guy telling Marques what he can or cannot think about this product?"

The video was not a bait-and-switch. He was generous with criticism but fair in describing how it was supposed to work and what he wanted from it. So for this random Tweeter to suggest that Marques was being either dishonest in his "unofficial mental ranking (the worst)" or should have been dishonest in minimizing his critique is so patronizing and itself dishonest.

Heh. "Hypocratic"… Appropriate.

A person that never heard of him would not be able to equate MKBHD with the name Brownlee.

Not everyone lives on social media like you or I.

Oh man you're right. It's a NEW CATEGORY which means the product deserves softball reviews if not just thinly veiled advertisements. Since it's a NEW CATEGORY everyone should buy maybe two or three of them, you know since it's a NEW CATEGORY. We want to support NEW CATEGORIES because reasons.

You first.

If there’s a new product category to be had here, Humane aren’t the ones building it right now.