His spiel starting at 14 minutes in about how seemingly every tech product these days is a partially-baked, unfinished, barely even usable, yet full-priced product with a vague promise of "it'll receive updates and be better" rings very true, and is frustrating as hell.
Marques specifically mentions it happening in video games, cars (Tesla self-driving), smartphones, and these AI things as particular offenders. I've also seen it with SaaS. Even a lot of the things being released by the big cloud providers at their yearly conferences are mostly in some half-baked state.
We've taken the concept of a "minimum viable product" and turned it into "minimum hype-able product". It sucks.
It's unfortunate that the only reason this problem exists is because people buy into the marketing. But the amazingly ironic part about this is that MKBHD / Marques Brownlee has hocked this type of garbage (aka sponsorships) for years, propping up a lot of this bad behavior along the way. Personalities like him are "celebrities" from a lot of consumer's perspectives, and they trust what he says verbatim. From an objective stance his reviews are lackluster: they contain very little data and no fundamental framework that underscore his "reviews". He's a YouTuber with an opinion that is being influenced by sponsor marketing money. Yet his well crafted productions are pretty and easy to consume, which sells and Google puts it front and center. To say that he has a "core philosophy" is laughable. The entertainment I would watch is if people like him had to disclose all earned income along with these videos. I'd gather a lot of his loyal following would start putting those dollars to sense with respect to how his videos are positioned: call-out, hype generating, brand supremacy, etc...
I've seen interesting products, and either been curious or ready to buy. Unfortunately, the only available information to me is the marketing.
Seriously, look on amazon. You can see pictures of the product, read the description, and read the reviews. this leads to 2/3 of the information being by the marketing team, and quite possibly much of the final 1/3, the reviews.
Being able to view a video of the product by someone (anyone!) on youtube gives you a chance of critical information you need for a decision.
Who cares if he's lackluster. If he even in passing gives you an idea of what the product might actually be like, you've been helped.
By the way, even consumer reports, formerly the gold standard in unbiased reviews is part of the gravy train. When they switched from the magazine to online, they acted like a funnel to purchases. sigh.
If you actually watched his videos you would have seen the one where he actively calls out that a lot of his viewers aren't interested in the product at all and just want to see another high production value video from him just to kill time, with no intention of ever buying anything.
"The entertainment you would watch" would probably amount to nothing and you probably wouldn't even finish the video, because it would be too boring.
I'm not sure why I would want to watch his videos if he's basically telling people that he's an entertainer - and that he caters to that. I see why he would do that, but that seems to bolster my assertion that his focus is on production, not review.
Most review videos are entertainment- and that includes accounts that focus on performance and include metrics, too. The medium makes the message. Been that way since Will it Blend?
Tell me you’ve never seen a MKBHD video without saying you’ve never seen a MKBHD video. He’s probably the best tech reviewer on YouTube. I definitely trust him more than other reviewers who do it for the clicks/lols.
He doesn't hold a candle to people like Dave2D or Hardware Unboxed, the latter of which has extremely thorough testing for every single one of the products they review. MKBHD is often inaccurate about many things and certainly not exhaustive in his reviews like other reviewers are. His channel can be better classified as infotainment, much like Unbox Therapy and (for certain of their videos) Linus Tech Tips are.
He doesn't do it for the clicks? I can't tell if this is sarcasm, but I'm going to assume it's not - because if this is truly your perspective I'd implore you to install a few extensions that help weed out what YouTube knows you'll watch. Clearly the algorithms are working.
To sum this one up:
Tell me you can't tell the difference between an influencer and a reviewer without telling me you can't tell the difference between an influencer and a reviewer. The bar is really low with respect to quality (not production, but content) these days.
You really should watch some of his videos if you think this. Marques has been doing this for years at this point, he's a reviewer, not an influencer. The clickbait titles is purely a YouTube thing, that is only indicative of the video being on YT, unfortunately.
I don't believe we share the same barrier to entry for objectivity, is really what it comes down to. He's sponsored, he's an influencer.
From a recent article [0]:
"The 30-year-old YouTube kingpin makes money from sponsorship deals with brands, merchandise sales, and a whole lot of ad revenue from YouTube."
Where do you draw the line between his format and his sponsorships? And how do you know that he's "reviewing" without monetary bias? As an example he put out this [1] video with Buick a few years ago. Let's try to be honest for a second - he wouldn't be caught dead driving that car unless Buick paid him to. And that is my point. There's no boundary between his "reviews" and his "ads". They look, they feel and they are the same format. He's excited about this Buick, "reviewing" it on his channel, it does say that it's sponsored, but is it his actual opinion? Very doubtful. And that, right there, is the difference between a reviewer and an influencer. Is he a charlatan? Maybe not quite that far - but he is being dishonest by making the sponsor video in, basically, the same format as anything else he does. Does he have relevant points? Sure - but there are other reviewers that have much deeper knowledge of the reviewed product. Case in point is his car reviews - he's not a true car enthusiast. His car "review" videos clearly reflect that when you compare it to someone who knows the car market in-depth (there are a lot of great car reviewers on YouTube, MKBHD isn't one of them). Is it good enough? For most people, probably. But again - I don't trust anyone to do a full spot on a car that's not even close to being on his want-to-have list and then expect him to be unbiased when "reviewing" a competitor. He puts out ads for his own brand, and anyone willing to pay him. He's an influencer. And now, he's hocking wallets that are $125+ [2][3].
Looking at the comments to the Buick video, that seems to be the exception to the rule- commenters dislike it but express they like his other ones. Of course, perhaps he’s had more sponsored videos since then, but again, maybe they’re exceptions to the rule.
I think the mindset is like, we've done a bunch of development, let's sell it to deliver some value now rather than wait for it to be perfect. It makes sense from that agile manifesto perspective but I miss the days of buying something like a game boy advance cartridge that ships once and mostly just works.
I'm seeing this play out at my workplace. Going down the wrong path just because we couldn't add an extra week to think things through and go down the right path from the beginning.
The trap here is thinking that starting fast is also the way to reach the goal the fastest. That doesn't always work and is especially true the more complex a project is.
The problem is with the lack of transparency and expectation setting. If you sell something with lots of hype and then deliver half of it, you've failed.
I agree. I wonder if the AI-aspect muddled things, like engineers saying "we just need more data for <x feature>, let's push for a cheap product and iterate fast"...
That only works if you are doing something unique enough to ignore its imperfections, otherwise people will use a full-featured competitor. The alternative to the Rabbit is your phone, I suppose.
I laughed at the big cloud providers comment because my job these days is filing support tickets with AWS when their ancillary services don’t work properly for some reason.
While I don’t think maturity has improved or got worse really, considering the general state of things 20 years ago, it should have by now.
As someone who likes to solve a problem rather than create two new ones, I will always go for a mature solution these days.
I love this rant of his. This trend towards selling unfinished products at full price is corporations exploiting yet another lever to squeeze more money out of people. And that lever is to treat customers not as customers but as investors. Whenever you purchase an unfinished product on the promise of a more complete product in the future, you are taking on the risk that that future product will not be delivered. You are being used as leverage and even worse, you receive no share of profit for any future success because you’ve already paid full price. You are an interest free loan that does not need to be paid back! I wish that more influential people would call this practice out for what it is and try to stop people from being exploited in this manner.
I love how people compare products like this or Apple Vision Pro to the original iPhone to make the point that products with limited appeal can flourish into something incredibly useful. The comparison is bad. The iPhone promised to be three things: a phone, an iPod, and a web browser. And it performed these tasks well! It didn’t oversell what it was, and it was a revelation. I owned the first gen shortly after it came out, and I fell in love.
None of these products fit that bill. Hell, Apple Watch still doesn’t, nearly a decade later.
The Apple Watch is a useful device. It integrates seamlessly with my phone, has various fitness tracking features including water activities, delivers important notifications without making noise, and gives me access to use voice commands on my phone. Its overnight charging gives me a nightstand alarm clock.
It's not a world-changing device, but it's a very useful accessory.
50/50. I wore one for nearly 4 years. Then one day I took it off because I was travelling somewhere really dangerous. And I never put it back on again. Turned out it was more ritual than utility for me.
More or less same with me. I wore mine for years, and upgraded a couple of times. But interacting with it is awkward, and my Apple Watches have easily been the most glitchy Apple products I’ve ever owned. I stopped wearing mine about 6 months ago and I don’t miss it. In fact, I starting buying watches I like - vintage digital watches and mechanical watches, and I’m much happier.
This probably isn’t true for everyone, but being able to pause and rewind audio (podcasts or books on tape) without pulling out my phone is a big quality of life improvement for me.
That's a bit too charitable to the first iPhone. I had one too, and it was heavily lambasted for being virtually unusable with an Edge connection as well as being attached to AT&T... and unsubsidised. Even on wifi it was fairly stuttery, but yes, it had a real web browser which was remarkable.
It was a great product though if you wanted to be future-shocked and to draw a ton of attention in public. But the 3g is where it took off as a consumer device.
Of course something like this product is on the verge of snake oil in comparison.
Also, by the time the iPhone came out, mobile phones had already been ubiquitous for a while. People were already used to carry a slab of electronics in their pocket, so it was easy to rationalize the purchase of an iPhone as a replacement. At the very least, it was still a phone, with a sleek design and a futuristic touchscreen.
Plus Apple had already been very successful with the iPod line, so they weren't new in portable electronics and people were willing to trust them.
This is why I don't understand LLM sales pitches. Why isn't it
We built a system that (lossy) compresses all text on the internet and is able to be (fuzzy) searched with a human language interface. Storage size: under a few hundred gigs (depending on precision).
I have to say, it is a pretty impressive feat. Why upsell to AGI when that's only going to leave a bad taste in peoples' mouths when they find out it doesn't have basic reasoning abilities? I mean really, does everyone not realize they are drawing the same exact ascii unicorn?
When I see such things I immediately ask myself a question, why is this not an app? There’s no good answer to that question in this case. IDK why they even bothered with the hardware side. It’d seem to me that you could do it later if app gets sufficient traction
There are multiple problems this could solve, actually. I can think up of at least one every day that a sufficiently advanced agentic AI could do for me, freeing me up from mundane bullshit. Imagine having a secretary onto whom you could offload bullshit tasks using freeform human language without any accommodations needed for the AI, and with near perfect contextual knowledge of what you’re currently dealing with. That’s the promise. But that promise is years away and in the meanwhile I’d be inclined to conserve my runway a bit more, especially when entering the era where borrowing costs are relatively high.
I had a human one of them. I spent more time interacting with it and dealing with misunderstandings and corrections than I gained from not solving the problems myself.
As pointed out elsewhere I was gaslit into changing the subject by an LLM the other day and then it got stuff wrong. End game is it created more work than not using it.
And that’s what we need to be careful of. The promise versus benefits of technology are not always obviously swayed towards the benefit end.
These AI assistants (Rabbit R1, Humane AI Pin), as they exist now, probably can be replaced by apps. However, if you give them the benefit of the doubt and think about what they're supposed to be (or eventually will be), owning the platform is a must.
An example: Google/Apple doesn't allow third-party apps access to call audio. So you couldn't implement live translation/transcription, by just being an app.
Google/Apple will jealously guard their turf in their ecosystems (to make space for their own AI assistants probably), so this level of third-party access is unlikely to be forthcoming.
I agree as someone who's wanted to develop an iOS app for years but can't get over the App Store monopoly risk.
But, from a business sense, doesn't it seem like they're doing it backwards? Why not make a best-in-class AI assistant app, build a big userbase, and take the money to research hardware and harass Apple concurrently? Why start with hardware first?
Ya, my hope is that this device pushes Apple and Google to bake some of these features into our phones. For example, I should be able to tell my phone to email or text the photo I'm looking at to <a list of people> and it just does it.
Off topic but all these LLM-pin/tool/device keep building around chat. Chat is a genuinely horrible interface for conveying information to users, but it provides a nice layer of polite plausible deniability when the response is total garbage.
Not only is chat a poor UX, I don't want to talk to shit to use it. In a pinch I'll use Siri to set a timer or alarm but in general I just don't want to talk to things. I also don't really want my things talking to me most of the time.
I can read faster than the computer can talk and type/touch faster (and more clearly) than I can talk. Unless the voice output is really finely tuned a lot of stuff I usually search for sounds like gibberish when read back with TTS. I've yet to find even AI TTS that recognizes source code or technical abbreviations and reads them correctly.
Then there's of course the privacy aspect, or complete lack of privacy.
Likewise, after mastering how to find answers by typing in the correct few keywords, why go backwards and use slow/ambiguous written or spoken conversation as a query language?
Not sure if I understand this complaint, since you can still use just a few keywords if you want, and it works fine, but you can also now be much more precise and it works even better.
Because frankly Google and the open web is so bogged down by ads that it’s become unusable. Try visiting any news site or a site like Fandom. Some sites I can’t even read because the ads take up the whole page on mobile and I can’t close them. Ads just totally ruin it. Meanwhile, with ChatGPT, I can ask it questions and it just gives me an answer. It’s not perfect, but neither are search results.
Yes the chat interface is terrible. I actually had an LLM try and gaslight me into changing the subject a couple of weeks back. I’m not sure how I managed to get down that hole but it was frustrating. And eventually the information was wrong.
is this a rush to market of a half baked product or a product that doesn't need to exist except to show investors "something"? the fact it gets answers wrong and makes you double check its work sorta defeats the purpose.
It's a product class that's racing against the clock of Google and Apple baking basically the same functionality into their operating systems and making these dedicated widgets (even more) pointless. I'm not optimistic that Google and Apples take will be significantly more useful than these half-baked attempts, but at least they won't require you to pay for and then juggle an extra device.
Google and Apple already have the same if not better functionality via Google assistant and Siri. The AI pin thingy is totally just a gimmick product to get funding. Just like all the other "wearables" companies out there. And teenage engineering just likes weird quirky products.
No, Google assistant and Siri are barely usable beyond setting a timer or adding a reminder. Even that does not work 100% of the time. They absolutely cannot come close to a proper LLM at all.
They can do everything (and more) than what was in the video. Sure it they can't compose a email, but at least they will give you accurate information.
Apple does >1B queries per week on siri. Likely greater than 4B assuming minimal growth since 2016. I would bet >10B. I'm not saying it is equivalent to an LLM. It is getting real, serious usage. I have no dog in the fight.
The current iteration of wearable tech (beyond smartwatches) might be half-baked and riding on the AI wave, but wearable computing as a field is promising.
The technology has only recently reached a point where it could rival traditional mobile computing. Dismissing the entire field based on these early attempts would be a mistake.
If anything, current smartphone leaders would be foolish to not jump at the opportunity to introduce standalone devices themselves. They eventually likely will, and will market their versions as the real innovations.
Why would Google and Apple even want something like this built into the core experience of using their phones? Like MKBHD has shown, they are slow, inaccurate, and of limited utility—the actual “useful” features are all speculative at the moment. So, thank you, Apple and Google, for not rushing something underbaked into your phones!
Maybe that is their hope but Siri actually developed things that Apple wanted, their speech recognition was licensed from Nuance but IIRC the natural language parsing and speech synthesis was done in-house. OTOH Rabbit and Humane seem to mostly just be haphazardly gluing third party APIs together to assemble a product that barely works. What exactly would they bring to the table in an acquisition?
Rabbit is promising their Large Action Model (LAM) software, their "rotational eye" and associated software, and maybe an AI trained on actual user conversations.
Sure. But they have promised a lot and delivered very little.
And from people who have used the Rabbit the LAM concept as they have done it is unusable e.g. it was ordering from DoorDash to the wrong address / incorrect tip and they had no way to change it.
User experience is just as important as the technology.
These devices should be apps on your phone. Google and Apple will won't open their devices enough for these assistants to useful cause they want to roll their own. So their only hope is to create a stand alone device.. But yeah they're dead in the water.
Another point from Dave2D: they rush to launch the devices now because they might become obsolete after Google's I/O and Apple's WWDC when/if they introduce on-device AI-assistants.
A: Because people wouldn't pay $200 for an app. Because there is ChatGPT as an app. Because people love buying tangible stuff. Because VC see this as "a new category" they want to dominate.
Rabbit's UX use cases are not novel enough. AI Pin seems to be a little less complete, but at least the innovation in the direction of combining software and hardware is worthy of recognition. As for Rabbit, it completely imitates the ideas of Google Assistant and Lens. From an industrial perspective,
look at Apple's headset, even if the experience is not there yet, the entire industrial design and integration level are very amazing. But Rabbit, which looks like a college student's graduation project, is actually very easy to complete with ESP32 at its core. If this esp32 is combined with groq, maybe the experience will be even better.
I think this project itself has a lot to do with teenage engineering. The success of TE (low tech, high marketing) gave them inspiration. In terms of musicality, TE is far behind, for example, Elektron, which is also from Sweden, not to mention the master of analog sound by companies such as Moog. TE may only have a very impressive hardware innovation in TP7 (which is not so popular). As for other popular pocket operators, KO2, and OP1, there are too few hardcore innovations, and hype and trend culture have the upper hand.
With that being said, looking at the sales of Moog and the outcome of its acquisition, it must be admitted that marketing is still very important. But musical instruments are different from mass-market commodities. After all, the former can be collected and one does not have to consider their practicality too much.
Now the easy access of AI service at the backend will obviously lead to more and more low tech, which is normal and just a phenomenon. But I will give more praise to hard-core innovation. If there is hard-core innovation and excellent UX use cases, it will be icing on the cake.
There are two things about this I am looking forward do.
Generative UI, and teach mode as mentioned in this video. If they manage to get these to work, I believe a future iteration of this product can seriously challenge smartphones.
I doubt the science is there yet though. It's easy to over promise here.
People are developing hardware like "web 2.0" beta software to compete with Google and Apple, but I'm not sure it will work. Yeah, the fear of the walled-guarded world of phones is fair and we can see it.
It should be called the MINECRAPIFICATION of EVERYTHING!
Who knows if Notch was the first to herald in this new paradigm of half-finished products? It's the first thing that comes to mind every time I experience, read about or witness a product, service or idea that isn't quite fully baked. I say, "Self, they are just cashing in while they iterate and extend... or not."
Am I missing something? What does Minecraft have to do with half-baked products? It seems like they went with an approach of having a free alpa/beta release until they had a release ready game, then have spent a decade adding more content to it?
Minecraft sold over 850,000 copies before even exiting alpha. (though these labels are really kindof arbitrary in the end) I think this was fine for that game: the game was fun, $10, and largely bought on its own merits. Sandbox gameplay + procgen exploration + multiplayer + modding can wring an incredible amount of life out of relatively few assets. It definitely led to a trend of over-promised and commercialized early-access though. When you can get a big chunk of the bag for pre-selling based on a small chunk of the work with minimal risk, the incentives are obvious.
Ah I see, I was reading through the wikipedia page and misinterpreted a line about updates being free during alpha/beta to be implying that the game itself was free.
I think the difference is that Minecraft alpha/beta was fun and actually promised very little. I paid for the beta (used cracked clients before then, when I was 12) and enjoyed it for what it was, I couldn't have cared less about "future updates". There was never any mention of "future features" in Minecraft (then-guerilla) marketing.
Marques specifically mentions it happening in video games, cars (Tesla self-driving), smartphones, and these AI things as particular offenders. I've also seen it with SaaS. Even a lot of the things being released by the big cloud providers at their yearly conferences are mostly in some half-baked state.
We've taken the concept of a "minimum viable product" and turned it into "minimum hype-able product". It sucks.