this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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It's been clear for quite a while that they've focused only on growth/expansion with more channels, the lab, so many new employees, etc and at the same time you can see the sloppiness getting worse with lack of preparation, lack of quality control to meet deadlines, etc.
The Billet Labs thing is absolutely inexcusable. Shitting on the product despite LMG being the one responsible for not even having the correct GPU for it, giving it a bad review, then doubling down when called out over a couple hundred bucks of time? The auctioned off prototype is so much worse as well. Not sure of the Canadian terms but in the US it'd potentially be theft by conversion. Literally sold someone else's property. Even if you give them the benefit of the doubt and accept it as an accident, it seems like more evidence of whoever is running their logistics department being incompetent IMO.
One thing that bothers me about the billets stuff is they stand by their core point, which is that it’s a useless product.
But that’s not the only thing they’ve claimed. They also said it’s a bad product that doesn’t work properly, thus damaging the company’s reputation.
To most people that’s a significant difference for how they view the company:
“Useless” product that works well at what it does = hopefully this company will make something more relevant in future
“Useless” product that doesn’t even work properly = I’ll avoid this company in future
I would disagree. Linus has a tendency to put his foot in his mouth or probably say he phrases many of these discussions in very bad ways. You see this with him talking about "Is using adblocking piracy" or "Warranties are only trustworthy as the company you buy them for" (Trust me bro) or the many other controversial views he has had. Where at the face of it it looks pretty incendiary but if you ignore what he said initially and look at what he is actually meaning to say. I think the whole Billet labs' cooler thing was a stupid video and they should have done it with a 3090 TI FE as it was meant for but Linus meant it was a "bad product" because its a $900 cooler for a last gen cooler on a 1800+ GPU. Anyone willing to spend that amount of money is probably going to spend it on the newest thing, that being the 4090. Now where this comes to bite Linus in the ass is they have a preorder for a 4090 fe (for the same price as the 3090 ti one) here Which is set to release around next month or November. Now its clear many things weren't discussed but off the broken concepts that Linus was presented/or at least absorbed he isn't wrong that noone would want a exotic cooler with a last gen gpu but its clear there was a major breakdown in the communication pipeline here.
Edit: Haven't had any comments yet but I will say LTT really done fucked up with the whole auctioning off the prototype and its clear there is some issues with the organization of LTT. I don't think they did this out of malice more they had a contact who didn't talk to the logistics team or the team handling LTX. So out of mistake the prototype got sold even though they said they would send it back. That is pretty god damn egregious. I can understand why there was a fuck up but man they really screwed the pooch on this one.
I think needing to write a wall of text to say Linus said this but he actually meant... shows a need for Linus to move away from off the cuff segments, and stick to scripted content.
It's not just a Linus thing, but for those who are strongly associated with a company brand it's the better move to start distancing personal opinion pieces from what can be associated with the company. He's not just some random employee of LTT who can have their thoughts hand waived away as not representing the views of the company. LTT has a way to go before everything stops being associated with Linus when it comes to the good or the bad.
How do they know it's a bad product if they didn't bother to test it under the conditions it was designed for? It was a prototype, not a final product. In the original video, Linus is surprised (and maybe a bit upset) that the other guy didn't grab the right card or even notice that he didn't get the right card.
And to the point of the comment you replied to: it doesn't matter what the cost of the cooler was. If it was the best of the best then it was worth showing that. LTT does not seem to have a consistent viewpoint of "practicality". Even if we ignore that, saying "this product isn't worth the cost" is very different than the "useless" comment they ended up with.
The whole situation is what I like to refer to as "fractally wrong". No matter the perspective, how close or far away, it's always wrong.
Again if you are charging 800+ dollars and again to Linus' point of view he wasn't aware of the 4090 FE edition of this cooler, doesn't make sense for buyers. Most of the video they are complimenting the machining of the piece.
I don't think they ever say useless in the original video. Could you provide me a link of them doing so but gave it a quick scan via transcript and not seeing it. To me they just say its a bad product (with Linus' limited knowledge of said product).
Yes he was, he commented on it in the original video, which the GN video included.
My bad, I should not have quoted a word that they didn't use directly. But still, his final conclusion, as included in the GN video, is that nobody should buy it, and not just because of cost.
maybe I'm blind deaf and stupid but the link for that say nothing about Linus knowing about the 4090 FE edition of the cooler. Just that they used a 4090 in the original video and that was bad, which I again agree with and said he probably should have used a 3090TI.
Because its a 800+ dollar of copper for a gpu and cpu cooling. Even if it was 20 degrees lower, you are spending half of what you spent on a fucking GPU on copper (that is magnificently manufactured/milled). This is so niche its just a bad product since the tolerances are so tight as shown in the video it only works on one type of gpu and/or cpu. Like its clear Billet labs is doing fantastic work on the machining but no reasonable consumer should ever buy this. This is so unreasonable and that is the point Linus is making. Its a cool project that Billet labs is making but there is almost no practical purpose for it.
Edit: Like their business model is so niche. If anything this feels like a way to spin the company in the direction of making custom milled part for commercial entities that need custom solutions. The consumer market isn't a good market for them.
The problem I have with this is that if he's known for these things and he knows it, why not hire someone to do the communication for him instead of making the same mistakes every time. Or is he too stubborn or not smart enough to realise the damage he is doing to his brand?
Now, selling a prototype that was sent to you to make a video on is not good obviously, but as long as they get compensated for it, it should be no big deal. Logistical fuck ups happen and this isn't new or uncommon. The whole idea of Linus ruining their public image based on a "bad faith" representation of the product has little standing in my mind. The crux of his assessment of the product is spot on and you also touched on this. There's like 4 people willing to spend as much on a cooling block made from billet copper as their GPU. Regardless of current Gen or last Gen. Most people are just going to save that money to buy the next generation graphics card or upgrade elsewhere in their build where the price/performance is much more reasonable.
They might have sold it to a competitor so this could be a big deal. Not to mention this was one of Billet Lab's only prototypes and could've set them back months in terms of R&D.
Stealing and selling their best prototype also means they couldn't send it to a better reviewer to demonstrate it isn't a bad product.
Honestly atrocious behaviour from them over this. Any 1 bit of this would be bad, but all of them together could absolutely ruin a start-up. And all because Linus didn't want to spend "up to" $500 worth of people's time.