I wish Steve stopped doing tabloid journalism and went back to what he does best, which is pushing in-depth charts of technical reviews. He published like three videos about the Artesian Build issues, 2 or 3 videos about Newegg's mishandling of RMAs, one video about Linus's pre-launch wording of his product warranty, 2 or 3 videos about Gigabyte's exploding PSU, and now two or three videos about Asus and AMD's BIOS issues, even using the word "Scumbag" in his video thumbnail. If that's not tabloid behaviour, I don't know what is.
He often complains when companies refuse to discuss these issues with him while having the whole discussion recorded. Steve's been in this industry long enough by now, he should know that company officials will regularly say things that have to be "off the record" either because this is information covered under NDA, because this is information that comes from another department and they aren't legally allowed to discuss it, or because anything they say may be used against them in a lawsuit if they misspoke or accidentally provided invalid information because they were trying to answer a face-to-face question. This is just how journalism works, we regularly get reports from "sources that cannot be named because they aren't allowed to discuss the matter" in articles about politics, finance or sports.
Jay's video seemed more relevant to me, because he provided first hand experiences to explain his position, and he won't be publishing two more rant videos with the sole goal of gathering more views.
Personally, I think the issue is industry-wide.
- Asus' motherboard went up in price and down in quality over the years.
- MSI had some X570 motherboard whose VRMs were running at around 100C, a good 20C higher than all other X570 board manufacturers.
- Gigabyte has had extensive RMA handling and QA issues, and exploding PSUs
- Intel's i225-V and i226-V NICs have been plagued with countless issues despite silicon revisions and driver workarounds (I'm still struggling with the i225-V version 3 NIC on my own motherboard, and starting to consider dropping a Realtek PCI-E NIC in there. Yes, Realtek is starting to be more reliable than Intel in the networking NIC department).
- NVIDIA drawing 450W of power through a small plastic connector that can be mishandled by customers, and tolerance margins at manufacturing can lead to a fire hazard
- AMD had some issues as well with their RX7000 GPU series (I can't remember what it was)
- How often is Microsoft pushing Windows updates that break stuff in a pretty significant way these days? It used to be very rare. Now, two borked update a year seems to be their norm, following them reducing the size of their QA team after the launch of the WIndows Insiders program.
While COVID-19 was often blamed as the reason for the drop in QA, I haven't seen things get any better as the COVID issues started to recede, and it all started before COVID. It's all about shipping products with as high a profit margin as possible (because if you don't have a Y2Y growth in the double digits, investors consider your business to be a failure), and shipping it as fast as possible (because you need to be first to market - software issues can always be fixed with a latter patch, right?). If anything, QA should be more important than ever, now that we are dealing with products drawing 200-500W of power, and doing all of this with transistors that are a few atoms wide only, numbering in millions on a small piece of silicon.
I love technology. But these past few years, I also started to hate technology. Because we're pushing too hard, too fast, with little concern about quality or potential issues.
/rant off
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