There won’t be a big WAN Show segment about this or anything. Most of what I have to say, I’ve already said, and I’ve done so privately.
To Steve, I expressed my disappointment that he didn’t go through proper journalistic practices in creating this piece. He has my email and number (along with numerous other members of our team) and could have asked me for context that may have proven to be valuable (like the fact that we didn’t ‘sell’ the monoblock, but rather auctioned it for charity due to a miscommunication… AND the fact that while we haven’t sent payment yet, we have already agreed to compensate Billet Labs for the cost of their prototype). There are other issues, but I’ve told him that I won’t be drawn into a public sniping match over this and that I’ll be continuing to move forward in good faith as part of ‘Team Media’. When/if he’s ready to do so again I’ll be ready.
To my team (and my CEO’s team, but realistically I was at the helm for all of these errors, so I need to own it), I stressed the importance of diligence in our work because there are so many eyes on us. We are going through some growing pains - we’ve been very public about them in the interest of transparency - and it’s clear we have some work to do on internal processes and communication. We have already been doing a lot of work internally to clean up our processes, but these things take time. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but that’s no excuse for sloppiness.
Now, for my community, all I can say is the same things I always say. We know that we’re not perfect. We wear our imperfection on our sleeves in the interest of ensuring that we stay accountable to you. But it’s sad and unfortunate when this transparency gets warped into a bad thing. The Labs team is hard at work hard creating processes and tools to generate data that will benefit all consumers - a work in progress that is very much not done and that we’ve communicated needs to be treated as such. Do we have notes under some videos? Yes. Is it because we are striving for transparency/improvement? Yeah… What we’re doing hasn’t been in many years, if ever… and we would make a much larger correction if the circumstances merited it. Listing the wrong amount of cache on a table for a CPU review is sloppy, but given that our conclusions are drawn based on our testing, not the spec sheet, it doesn’t materially change the recommendation. That doesn’t mean these things don’t matter. We’ve set KPIs for our writing/labs team around accuracy, and we are continually installing new checks and balances to ensure that things continue to get better. If you haven’t seen the improvement, frankly I wonder if you’re really looking for it… The thoroughness that we managed on our last handful of GPU videos is getting really incredible given the limited time we have for these embargoes. I’m REALLY excited about what the future will hold.
With all of that said, I still disagree that the Billet Labs video (not the situation with the return, which I’ve already addressed above) is an ‘accuracy’ issue. It’s more like I just read the room wrong. We COULD have re-tested it with perfect accuracy, but to do so PROPERLY - accounting for which cases it could be installed in (none) and which radiators it would be plumbed with (again… mystery) would have been impossible… and also didn’t affect the conclusion of the video… OR SO I THOUGHT…
I wanted to evaluate it as a product, and as a product, IF it could manage to compete with the temperatures of the highest end blocks on the planet, it still wouldn’t make sense to buy… so from my point of view, re-testing it and finding out that yes, it did in fact run cooler made no difference to the conclusion, so it didn’t really make a difference.
Adam and I were talking about this today. He advocated for re-testing it regardless of how non-viable it was as a product at the time and I think he expressed really well today why it mattered. It was like making a video about a supercar. It doesn’t mater if no one watching will buy it. They just wanna see it rip. I missed that, but it wasn’t because I didn’t care about the consumer… it was because I was so focused on how this product impacted a potential buyer. Either way, clearly my bad, but my intention was never to harm Billet Labs. I specifically called out their incredible machining skills because I wanted to see them create something with a viable market for it and was hoping others would appreciate the fineness of the craftsmanship even if the product was impractical. I still hope they move forward building something else because they obviously have talent and I’ve watched countless niche water cooling vendors come and go. It’s an astonishingly unforgiving market.
Either way, I’m sorry I got the community’s priorities mixed-up on this one, and that we didn’t show the Billet in the best light. Our intention wasn’t to hurt anyone. We wanted no one to buy it (because it’s an egregious waste of money no matter what temps it runs at) and we wanted Billet to make something marketable (so they can, y’know, eat).
With all of this in mind, it saddens me how quickly the pitchforks were raised over this. It also comes across a touch hypocritical when some basic due diligence could have helped clarify much of it. I have a LONG history of meeting issues head on and I’ve never been afraid to answer questions, which lands me in hot water regularly, but helps keep me in tune with my peers and with the community. The only reason I can think of not to ask me is because my honest response might be inconvenient.
We can test that… with this post. Will the “It was a mistake (a bad one, but a mistake) and they’re taking care of it” reality manage to have the same reach? Let’s see if anyone actually wants to know what happened. I hope so, but it’s been disheartening seeing how many people were willing to jump on us here. Believe it or not, I’m a real person and so is the rest of my team. We are trying our best, and if what we were doing was easy, everyone would do it. Today sucks.
Thanks for reading this.[1]
Check LinusTech’s profile for further discussion and comments he’s had.[2]
Yeah I mean it’s kind of wish fulfillment innit? Like Scrapyard Wars, or Whole Room Watercooling, or building 5-figure rigs, or his tech’ed out data collection mansion, that’s all stuff most people won’t be able to do themselves, but they want to watch someone do it.
His fame, like most fame, is the duality of a carefully curated persona as cool and hip, and an arrogant micromanaging back half. Most people are only going to see Wish Fulfillment Linus, and Egomaniac Linus only comes up rarely (and mostly on his podcast).
Not really, most of the crap they build is completely impractical and gets disassembled after they are done with the videos anyway, including this water cooling block. No reasonable person would spend $800 on that thing, but it might still be fun to see what it can or can’t do. It’s just messing around with tech and having some fun, just sometimes they overstretch the fun part and the review side of things suffers.
Wish fulfillment is what I’d call something like MKBHD, as that’s has all the latest hottest tech gadget nicely presented, just like an ad.
Yes, the impracticality is one of the major points of wish fulfillment. It’s fantasy and most reasonable people don’t actually want the crap Linus builds. They just want to see it, it’s make-believe.
And I wouldn’t call destroying a startup’s intellectual property, ignoring their requests to return it, and then selling the detritus as “merch” at an auction “just having some fun.” That’s what I would call negligent and unprofessional.
Intellectual property doesn’t get stored in copper blocks. They can load up their CAD files and machine a new one. That thing might have sentimental value, but that’s about it.
With respect, whether it can properly be called “intellectual property” or not, is not the point.
It was a one-of-a-kind engineering sample that LTT agreed to send back when they were done with it. LTT did not fulfill their obligation, and when Billet Labs asked about it, they got stonewalled.
Billet has those blocks on preorder, shipping in Sep-Nov, yet somehow has only a single prototype one of them in existence? Sound rather sketchy to me. Also next time maybe put a label on the thing “Prototype Not for Sale. Property of Billet”, like every other prototype.
The thing worth criticizing is that LTT “reviewed” a water block that didn’t even exist as a pre-production run.
They mailed at the end of the week, got a reply on monday.
Look at the timeline. LTT went silent for weeks until GN called them out.
Gimme a break; LTT knew it wasn’t for sale, that’s 100% clear from the emails before they auctioned it off.
“IP” or not, this is costing them money to manufacture a new prototype.
