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Tech companies have, I think, reached peak levels of deception. You will see incredible headlines everywhere you look. But as soon as you peel back the clever wording, you take away the hidden asterisks and you remove the sneaky manipulation of data, you realize that never in history has such little change been sold to us as if it's so much. So, I've teamed up with Marquez from MKBHD to show you how they get you. And I feel like we have to start with the magic new catch all term of the tech industry up to what we need to see and what we used to see a lot more of is this new product is x% better than the last one. This very simple idea basically doesn't exist anymore. Practically every single tech
company quotes every single change as up to two times faster gets up to eight more hours is up to two times faster. You'll notice they don't even write it as up two. A lot of the time they'll just like mutter it quickly under their breath like it's some sort of pedantic footnote that you don't need to pay attention to. But if you think about it, any stat that starts with an upto doesn't mean anything. I can say this video is going to reach up to a billion people. And if it only ends up reaching my parents and then like one cousin in India, I was still right. And you could
argue, well, you know, workloads are more complex now. It's harder to estimate exactly how much better something is. But the real reason this is being used is very clear. It's to be able to stick a massive number on your web page and not be sued for it. So if you see up to followed by a percentage improvement, honestly just disregard it and go search up specifically how much better that product is in exactly what you're planning on doing with it. But I'll leave the next one up to you, Marquez. Okay. So, in announcement keynotes and a lot of advertising specifically, a lot of companies like to do this thing where they combine a bunch of different specs from different versions of the same product into one
page, creating what I like to call the imaginary spec. So, like one of the most common versions you'll see is a company will put uh like the maximum up to performance number alongside the minimum starting at price and they'll put them next to each other in a product where you can't actually get the maximum performance for the minimum price. Here's Rivian for example on the R1T website. You'll see, wow, 420 mi of range and a 0 to 60 in under 2.5 seconds starting at under $74,000. but not exactly because the one with 420 mi of range is the dual motor which has a 3.4 seconds 0 to 60. Still quick, but the 2.5 second version costs $30,000 more and has 40 mi less range. And for $73,000, you don't get either of those
things. So, yeah, this here is an imaginary spec. Oh, and by the way, that's another one while we're at it. EV range claims. Now, there are laws around how accurate your range claims actually have to be, just like with gas mileage. And some companies are a little more optimistic about that range claim than others. Fine. But the fact is, we are still pretty early in this battery tech. And the tiniest, even seemingly insignificant things can make a pretty significant difference to your range. And so even when you break it all the way down to specific Rivian models, the one that does the 2.5 second 0 to 60, you can see that 374 mile range claim right here. Well, when you actually
click in, that's when you realize that's on a specific wheel with a specially designed sticky Michelin tire. And then, oh, look at that. You're actually getting 338 mi of range. You'll have to switch down to the standard sport wheel and tire to get the 374 mi of estimated range. So yes, even this here was an imaginary spec. And I promise you, Rivian is far from the only offender in the world of cars and in tech. And if you thought that companies exaggerating their specs to seem better than others is a problem, then how about when companies just invent entirely new specs so that you can't even compare them to others? When companies start to build loyalty, they want to be able to charge
more for the same stuff. But how do you get away with that in a world where a comparison is just one quick chat GBT search away? Well, make it so confusing for customers to compare you that the easiest thing then becomes for them to just take your word for it that you're better. One of the most prolific examples of this right now is RAM. Any computer, any phone, any laptop, even your smartwatch needs RAM to be able to juggle tasks. And this is true no matter which company's product it is. But Apple now refers to their RAM almost exclusively as unified memory. They can say this because their RAM is actually part of their chip as opposed to a separate component, which does make that
RAM a little more efficient in some ways. But it glosses over a very important detail that Windows laptops often have dedicated graphics cards that have their own additional pool of RAM. Whereas unified memory means that both the CPU and the GPU share from one small pool. So, you're pretty much always getting less RAM. And yeah, I mean, Apple executives have famously boasted about how their unified memory is so efficient that just 8 GB of it is equivalent to 16 gigs on Windows, but it's not really true. There just will be a hard cap on how much multitasking you're able to do, cuz 8 gigs is 8 gigs. But even so, can you see how this whole
concept of unified memory still helps Apple? It makes something as simple as RAM feel like some sort of gray area, which means they can give you a lot less of it and they can charge you more to upgrade it than any other company. I'd say to be honest though, the worst example of the invented spec is the TV market. TV makers will try absolutely everything to make you feel like you're getting the real deal apart from actually giving it to you. Like when Highense tells you that a TV has a motion rate of 120, it doesn't actually mean that the TV has a 120 Hz refresh rate like you'd think. And like clearly many other people have been led into believing, motion rate is another invented spec that just means the TV is
running High Senses motion smoothing software. Or let's say that you tell your less techsavvy buddy to make sure you get a TV that has OLED tech. What are the chances that they accidentally end up buying a Highense ULED or a Samsung QLED or a LG QED? I'd say pretty high. Even though all of these are in fact invented specs designed, I think to camouflage as OLED, even though they're actually much cheaper LCDs. Now, okay, maybe you're not convinced. All right, maybe you're watching this thinking, you know, it's fine if they make up specs as long as they're technically true. But I'll do you one better. What if there's madeup specs that are actually numerically factually false? I actually
made an entire separate video all about this, but 1 in camera sensors are not 1 in any dimension. And 1.5K displays are actually not 1500 pixels in any dimension either. How is that possible? Well, it's because the way we measure things has changed. Like something like this camera, for example. This is a Sony ZV1. A lot of cameras like it. This camera has a 1 in sensor. It says so on their website. And that sounds amazing. A 1 in sensor in this little camera. Have you ever looked inside like a pro DSLR or mirrorless camera at the size of that sensor? That looks like about a 1 in sensor. So this must also have a huge sensor like that. But it's not. It's way smaller.
Why is that? Well, turns out this is a 1 in sensor because in 2026 that's what we call a 1 in type sensor. See, before digital cameras, cameras didn't have sensors at all. They actually used vacuum tubes. And so, the size of the tube was actually what they measured. So, a 1-in vacuum tube would create an image area inside it closer to about 16 mm diagonally. And that is actually about the size of the 1-in type sensor in this camera. So, it's 2026, but we're calling this a 1-in sensor because that is the size of the theoretical vacuum tube that would be required to produce an image the size of this sensor.
Why? Turns out 1 in sensor is a marketing name more than it is an actual measurement. And I have the same beef with uh displays because you've probably already heard a lot of smartphones recently have uh like 1.5K displays. You've heard this. You've seen a lot of these floating around. But none of them have 1500 pixel measurements. So what's going on here? See, this is where it gets weird. Okay, so intuitively we all agree that 4K, for example, is referring to the horizontal resolution, right? So this video is 4K because it's 4,000 pixels across roughly. It's 4096 x 2048. Sometimes it's 3840 x 2160, but it's roughly 4,000 pixels wide. And 8K would be 8,000 pixels wide. But at some point,
for some reason, we started calling 2560x440 2K, which is close but a little bit off. And then for some reason 1080p, which is now referring to the vertical resolution, is 1K, which is weird because 1080p is actually 1920x 1080. So it should be 2K, but now we're calling 1080p 1K. And so now smartphone companies are using 1.5K to refer to a measurement somewhere in between 1080p and 1440p. So, it's not actually 1500 across or 1500 tall. It just means somewhere in between 1K and 2K. And that's super annoying to me, but it's how we talk now. And that's if there's even a hardware change at all with new products. What's becoming increasingly common these days is this focus on vaguely defined new software features. So, if you're
launching a new smartphone, let's say you're holding a big event and a live stream to tell people what's new about it, then the thing that is useful to see is what specifically is new about that product. A good example of this is the privacy display on Samsung's Galaxy S26 Ultra. It's a software feature, but it's one that actually required them to physically change the way they built the display to work. So, it's made for this phone. But unfortunately, the vast majority of new features that we actually see marketed here are not that. Like if we pull up the Galaxy S24 event, they spent this much time talking about the new Samsung AI features and then literally just as long talking about
Circle to Search. They talked about it like it's this revolutionary new feature that's only made possible thanks to Samsung's deep partnership with Google. Our partnership continues to go strong as we create new ways to do more with Google on Galaxy devices. But Circle to Search is also on Google phones. It's on Xiaomi phones. It's not really got anything to do with Samsung apart from just them being the first to show it. And they do this every year to buff out their presentations and try to make you associate those Google features with Samsung. And it's not just confusing which features are also coming to other brands. Where I think it gets
really intentionally confusing at these launch events is which features that you're talking about are also coming to your own older phones. Don't get me wrong, it's a good thing that big companies support their older models. I mean, they kind of have to. They did promise you when you bought them. But the thing that's misleading is spending 60% of the next phone's launch event talking about how it's the coolest phone in the world and you should upgrade because it has all these nextgen features, but then never mentioning that those features are also coming to the phone that you're watching the event on.
We added a brand new capability that goes beyond device control. Now Bixby can bring you up-to-date information directly in the conversation. So, you see how this new Bixby is being positioned as one of the perks of the Galaxy S26 series, but actually it can run on even a Galaxy S23. And this kind of stuff is genuinely most of these launch events now. And speaking of older products, what's with companies now who launch a new product, but then only compare it to another product that came out like 3 plus years ago? Apple is the worst for this. Like, take the latest MacBook Pros. So we go to the performance section and the headline number is oh would you look at that up to eight times faster AI
performance. So they got the up to in there. They've got the specific use case all to make sure that they have this super impressive quotable eight times number but then also it's eight times faster than the M1 family. What? These are the M5 generation chips released in 2026 and they're comparing them to the M1s released across 2020 and 5 to 6 years apart. And what they would say is, well, you know, many users will be upgrading from an M1. We're just being helpful. To which I would say, if I was using a worn down, slightly busted 6-year-old M1 laptop, my decision is not do I upgrade. It's actually do I upgrade to the M5 or do I instead buy the last gen M4 and save a bunch of money? How
much difference is there between those two choices? I don't know. Apple won't tell me. All this is a thinly veiled tactic to help take what is in most instances like 5 to 10% of real world improvement all the way into these astonishing sounding numbers like eight times. But let's be honest, this is a joke. It's a bit like if you were a world class runner, but then the way that you prove you're a world-class runner is by comparing your speed to when you were 8 years old. Now, there's another funny way companies compare to their previous selves. Specifically, smartphone companies when talking about the glass and how tough the glass is. Surely you've heard this before. This new smartphone or this new
glass is twice as shatter resistant as the previous year. Wow. and then the next year it'll come out and say this new glass is now twice as scratch resistant as last year. That is amazing. How are they making such massive improvements in the quality of the glass every time? But it's not as insane when you realize that scratch resistance and shatter resistance are inversely related. So the more of one you have, the less of the other you have. Think of it like this. If you want something to be super scratch resistant and super hard, that makes it more likely to be a little bit brittle and shatter. But if you want it to be less likely to shatter, you make it a little
bit softer, which makes it more likely to scratch. So instead of making some huge improvement every single year, like the headlines might have you think. It's actually more two different graphs, one for scratch resistance and one for shatter resistance. And they kind of do this. you know, scratch resistance does this every single year and shatter resistance does this every single year but in the opposite phase because they're not able to do huge improvements of both at the same time. There is some material science and they're both getting slightly better, but that's an easier way to understand that it's not as crazy as it sounds. It's no coincidence that, you know, the first generation of this dramatic new ceramic
shield for the iPhone was four times better in drop resistance than any previous iPhone. And then when they finally got to ceramic shield generation 2, it was three times more scratch resistant. Specifically, every single one scratches at level six, deeper grooves at a level seven because it's still glass. But hey, at least tech companies are generous enough to upgrade the storage on our phones and laptops every few years. The new iPad Pro comes with double the storage, which is now 256 GB. Oh, thanks, Apple. so we got $200 more expensive. So they position it to you like they're doing you some kind of massive favor when in fact all they've really done is stopped
selling the cheaper, lower storage model. And so you have to pay more. But at least that one's kind of easy to see through. The one that I find much tougher is what I would call the efficiency improvement trap. And it's a specific problem with the way that performance improvements are sold to us. Every year we hear a very similar story. Performance-wise, we're seeing a 23% boost and 20% more efficiency, too. So, even just ignoring for a second how they slipped in that little OP up two behind him, even though he didn't actually say it, this guy is very clearly implying that this chip lets you game with about 20% faster performance while your battery lasts 20% longer. So, not only you're getting smoother
gameplay, but you're also getting better battery life while doing it. But the important thing to understand is you don't get both. If your efficiency goes up by 20%, but then you're using all of that extra efficiency to get this 20% extra performance, then what you're actually getting is the same battery life. So when you then bundle that back in with the fact that the entire thing is only up to 23% faster and up to 20% more efficient and what we're really often talking about in these kinds of situations is an average expected improvement of like 5% to your performance and your end battery life.
Surgical grade stainless steel aircraft aluminum military toughness. Tech companies feel like they're always super excited to sell you something that has maybe the most premium materials on planet Earth forged in an oven at a million degrees that only the most exacting customer could possibly accept. But you know what's funny about that? There's actually nothing super special about any of those things. In fact, they're actually quite common. Like most airplanes, it's true. They use a whole bunch of 6,000 and 7,000 series aluminum because those alloys are super strong and light and cheap enough for mass production and good quality. But that does also mean that when your phone uses aerospace grade aluminum, you know, it's technically true, but
that's also true about a Razer scooter. And a whole lot of the stainless steel you'll come across in life is just 316L steel, which is an alloy that is one of many that is pure enough and high quality enough to be used in surgical tools and in the iPhone 14 Pros rails and in most kitchen sinks that you come across, which technically means the kitchen sink is also surgical grade stainless steel. It's not lying technically, but now you know. The truth is the specs of tech products are chosen around how those products are going to be marketed. And that's kind of a given. It's just business. But the issue is that very often in today's world, the specs that make a product the
most marketable are not the specs that are most useful to a user. Take thickness. The spec that matters here really is the maximum thickness. You want to know how thick the new phone or laptop is at its thickest point because that's going to determine what bags or pockets you can fit it inside of. But the spec that companies talk about is thickness at a product's thinnest point. And as soon as that genies out the bottle, you can call it whatever you want to. Like Apple calls the iPhone Air the thinnest iPhone ever. And while that's true for this section of the body here, it's not true for the whole phone.
I've got an iPhone 7 here, which is thicker than the iPhone 6, by the way, but still, this is thinner than the iPhone Air when you factor in the cameras. And it's not like you can take them off. It's just such dumb logic. Like if we carry on this train of thought, then what's to stop Apple at the next iPhone launch event taking all the rest of the components in the body and shoving them into one massive block at the end that you have to hold like a camera grip, but then calling the phone five times thinner than the last iPhone because all that's left in this part is the display. And then you've got Honor, who marketed their Magic V5 as world's slimmest foldable, but then people got
it in their hands, put it side by side with Samsung's foldable, and found that was actually slimmer. Want to know why? Cuz Honor in their measurements excluded not just the camera bump, but also the outer and the inner screen protector. You know, the one that you're not actually even allowed to take off yourself. That's not the only pointless spec, though, like screen brightness. It's become an arms race to just be the one quoting the highest number of knits possible. But the more the companies focus on just reaching a really high peak knit number, the less that number actually tells you about how bright the
screen is dayto-day. They could literally be describing how bright one pixel on the screen could go while playing HDR content in direct sunlight for like 3 seconds. So this, for example, is an Honor Magic 8 Pro. The company makes a pretty big deal about how this has a 6,000nit peak brightness. That's the figure that's marketed. But if we pull up a plain white image on this phone and put it next to a Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, which only advertises a 2,600 nit peak brightness, you can't actually tell the difference at all in this day-to-day scenario. These are both on max, by the way. So, when you're looking at brightness numbers, just get rid of peak brightness. Look at typical brightness. And when it comes to phone
cameras, what mostly matters is sensor size. The bigger the sensor, the more light and the more real detail that your shots have. What most companies spend far more time talking about is resolution, which beyond a certain point doesn't matter at all on a phone. Like the last four generations of Samsung phones have had a 200 megap resolution. They're still shooting their actual photos in 12. And don't even get me started on maximum zoom magnification. Look at this page for the Nothing Phone 4a Pro. The headline feature, the number one thing being used to sell this phone is world's first 140 times ultra zoom.
Oh my goodness. I mean, my iPhone only has 40 times max zoom. So, it's going to get cooked, right? Okay. Zoom all the way to 40 times on the iPhone, 40 times on the Nothing. Oh my god. Right. Yeah. So, it's exactly what we expected. The nothing phone, regardless of whether you use the AI enhancement or not, just looks worse. It's just not capturing as much information as the iPhone. And AI can't help you there. Let me make something very clear. How far your phone can digital zoom has literally zero correlation with how good of a camera it is. What it actually does correlate with, though, is how low a company's standards are for what counts as a photo. Damn. Cuz I could literally go back to the first smartphone I ever
owned if I wanted, take a photo, and just keep cropping in till all I can see is a single brown smudge. And technically, that could be 300 times digital zoom. Best zoom camera in the world, everyone. Oh my god, I can't do this anymore. All right, so speaking of phone cameras, last but not least is the classic shot on a smartphone trope. First of all, several companies have already been caught lying about like sample images that were supposed to be shot on that smartphone that were just licensed from some professional photo shoot somewhere on a random DSLR, which is already crazy. But even the ones that aren't lying do feel like they're kind of
stretching the truth with the amount of extra hardware that's being added to shoot it on a smartphone. Like the whole point I feel like of this, you know, awesome piece of content was shot on a smartphone is to sort of inspire and empower you to shoot your own awesome photos and videos with that tiny sensor and lens that fits in your pocket everywhere you go. But when there's a massive external stabilization rig and huge lenses and filters and all sorts of other things added to the phone and millions of dollars of lighting and set design to make that all possible, I guess it's still impressive, but it also kind of defeats the purpose a little bit. I can almost guarantee there are
features disabled on those phones to make those accessories work. Like if I'm shooting with all that stuff, I'm disabling the built-in stabilization if I have a five figure jib to shoot with. Like if the only thing from the original phone that you're still using to shoot is just the sensor technically, then is it still shot on a smartphone? I guess technically yes. But I'm now actually way less impressed. So treat everything that these tech companies tell you with a heavy dose of salt. You don't need to upgrade every other year. Nothing's actually getting eight times better. And when you see a company bragging about their maximum zoom, run for the hills. If they can
spot you, at least you'll be super low resolution. Thanks to Marquez for joining forces with me here.
