Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “When Tech Companies Lie to Us…”.
Hey, what’s up mkbhd here, you know tech companies straight up lie to us. Sometimes right like there’s now, there’s different types of lies and there’s definitely different levels to this honestly. Most of it is harmless, but it is fascinating and i think you might be surprised by how much stuff we might take for granted. That’S not actually real. So i and many other very optimistic people have been waiting for the new tesla roadster to be the first reasonable, two-door electric sports car ever since it was unveiled five years ago in 2017. Can you believe it’s been five years? They originally said it would come out in 2020 and then 2020 came and went and it was a bit of a weird year. So then 2021 happened still nothing.
Now it’s 20 22.. This car is probably not coming out until 2024, at least, but you know maybe that’s not a lie. You know that’s something they were actually trying and hoping to achieve, and then it got delayed a while fine, but there were a lot of other little things.
Elon said on stage that night that were, let’s just say, clever ways of framing certain information: the new tesla roadster will be the fastest car production part ever made period 0 to 60 in 1.9 seconds. This would be the first time that any car has broken two seconds at zero to 60., so that actually turned out to be untrue because plaid model s came out last year and it also has a sub two seconds zero to sixty. But these zero to sixties should have a little uh asterisk up in the corner next to it, because they are with something called roll out subtracted, so tesla’s triple motor plaid model.
S is listed at a 1.99 second 0-60 and at least that one does have an asterisk on the site with the asterisk meaning with rollout subtracted. So certain performance cars list their 0 to 60 time with a one foot of subtracted roll out which might sound a little weird. But this is a metric that comes from the drag racing world. Basically, when a car lines up to do the 0-60 test or a drag test, it’s measuring whether or not you’ve started by whether or not your tire has broken the light beams across the starting line. So there’s one pre-staging light and one staging light. Seven inches later.
The clock starts when the tires are no longer breaking that plane, but there is a small bit of speed gathered as the car launches before it stops blocking that first light and then the second light that is, the one foot roll out a fast car can reach Five to six miles an hour in that one foot roll out which cuts the reported 0 to 60 time anywhere from 0.2 to 0.3 seconds. That’S actually a a bigger gap, the harder the car launches. So every real world test of the model s of people on the street going from 0 to 60 or even on drag strip 0 to 60. It’S always been measured at like 2.15 to 2.25 seconds, which is still absolutely ridiculous, but by measuring with one foot rollout tesla was able to achieve 1.99 seconds. I assume they achieved it at least one time in order for them to put it on their website, because that’s a way, cooler headline and a way more impressive stat, but that should have that asterisk next to it – and i assume the tesla roadster’s time was also Measured with one foot roll out, but it doesn’t have the asterisk. So is that a lie? Well, no, but that number can be a little deceiving without the extra context. I said, turn killing our code, our battery pack, 10 000 newton meters of torque. If you know what that means, it’s just stupid so that 10 000 newton meters of torque is another one. That’S a pretty absurd number, not that people are buying sports cars just for the torque number, but that translates to about 7 400 pound feet of torque, which is just ridiculous for context. Here’S how that would line up with some cars.
You may recognize some of the most famous fastest cars ever made seems a little hard to believe they’re this far out in front right, but torque is one of those numbers and metrics that’s been around for a long time and it’s a little bit different in gas Cars versus electric cars, so as explained so eloquently by donut media, i’m going to link their video about that below the like button. Torque is a measurement of turning force and in this case the force being applied by the engine is turning the wheels. So when manufacturers list the horsepower and the torque of a car, they typically list the torque right at the engine crankshaft. But by the time it gets to the wheels with parasitic losses of the drivetrain. It’S a lower number same thing with torque, which also gets multiplied by the gear ratios in the drivetrain. But electric cars don’t have all those gears, they have what’s called direct drive, and so they make a lot of torque through one large gear. So after multiplication, the number is much more impressive from the wheels than from the crankshaft at the motors, so they’ve chosen to report wheel torque. So the 10 000 newton meter number that elon said for the roadster is likely perfectly legit very real.
It’S not a lie. It’S just this new number is a little deceiving without the context that it’s a different measurement of torque from what we’ve gotten from every other gas car for decades. Just a little extra word there, wheel, torque makes a big difference and this isn’t just tesla by the way. This is the same thing happened with the hummer ev, which got announced that it would have 11 500 pound-feet of torque.
But as engineering explained also pointed this out, when you divide by the gear ratios of each of the motors, you end up at about a thousand pound feet of torque at the motors. The way it’s normally reported, but let’s shift gears a bit pun intended because you know at least we’re talking about real products. What teslas and hummers are gon na ship they’re, eventually real and that’s great and on the other side of that spectrum is vaporware. So vaporware is defined as a product.
That’S been advertised but is not yet available to buy either because it’s only a concept or because it’s still being written or designed or built so is vaporware a lie. I mean there’s, there’s lots of vaporware everywhere i mean from sony’s concept car at ces that i’m telling you is never going to ship, as is to uh bmw’s color, changing ix from ces with the e-ink exterior. It looks so sick, but i think we all know. That’S not going to be a real car that we can buy, but then there are also some real products that companies announce with the intention of making them, and then things go a little sideways like do you remember, samsung’s bixby enabled speaker called galaxy home that looked Like a barbecue grill that was announced in 2018, then a year went by nothing shipped in 2019. There are people that started poking samsung and they had to come out and confirm with a statement that it wasn’t canceled yet they’re still working on it. But then in 2020 samsung quietly removed all the coming soon verbiage from their site and wouldn’t respond with any official statements about it. So they’re, probably hoping we forgot about that one or how about air power apple, spent a few minutes on stage raving about this new product, a charging mat that would charge your phone and your watch and your airpods all at once, and it was to be the Future of charging. This is not possible with current standards, but our team knows how to do this. Yeah they didn’t. They didn’t. Probably the biggest red flag was that at the actual event, they had a single non-working dummy unit in the hands-on area, and then everybody left and went home and air power just kind of quietly disappeared. Nobody ever saw or heard about airpower again.
Eventually, the airpower project was officially cancelled by apple. I explained why that disappeared with the video up here, that you can click or it’s linked below if you want to watch that. But i think the strangest tech company lies, though, come from industry standards or terms that are just straight up outdated, because that’s just the way they are they’re, not even lying on purpose and most of these come from the photo video industry – and i don’t just mean How someone might say, oh we’re, filming something when really there’s no film anymore, we’re recording or if somebody doesn’t know, because they’re too young, that the save button is based on a real physical floppy drive. It used to be an actual thing you could carry.
It goes deeper than that, for example, the one inch sensor might have heard a lot about it. It’S not one inch, it’s not one inch vertically. It’S not one inch horizontally, it’s not one inch. Diagonally, no part of a one inch sensor is actually one inch. Now you might have seen that point and shoots like sony’s, rx100, famously use a one-inch sensor or that there’s even a couple new smartphones popping up like the sharp aquos or leica smartphone or the sony xperia pro.
I that have huge one-inch sensors. But despite all the headlines and all the articles and titles and captions and tweets and anything else, you might read if you’re thinking that a one-inch sensor refers to a one-inch measurement in any way, then you’d be wrong. Just like i was when i first found this. So it turns out a one-inch. Sensors dimensions are about 13.2 millimeters by 8.8 millimeters.
Now, if you’re, not already annoyed by switching between imperial and metric you’ve realized that that’s less than an inch in both directions. But what about the diagonal? Well, with a little pythagorean theorem that calculates out to 15.9 millimeters, which is also not one inch, so how did we get here? How is this a one inch sensor? Well, if you go back to the beginnings of video recording, these earliest cameras were vacuum tube cameras. So just like old crt tvs use, cathode ray tubes, the earliest tv cameras, instead of a digital sensor, had physical tubes with a lens at the front and electronics inside them to capture photons to capture light. So the bigger the tube, the more light it could capture it would redirect all that light to a sensitive piece inside the tube and at the time people would refer to the size of the tube by the diameter of the tube.
So when we started using one inch, diameter tubes, the sensitive piece inside those had gotten to about 13 by 8 millimeters, so fast forward, 50 plus years here, we are today with these amazing digital sensors and all this new equipment. But today still we refer to the size of the sensor, not by the actual measurement of the sensor, but by the measurement of the hypothetical tube diameter that would be needed to fit the sensor of today’s current size wow. So today we have one inch: sensors, they’re called one inch sensors, because the diameter of the tube that would fit a sensor – that’s .63 inches diagonally would be a one-inch tube, but it’s a 0.63 inch sensor. So that actually means all of the other sensor.
Measurements that you have relative to one inch are also relative to this hypothetical inch. So the half inch sensor isn’t half an inch, it’s half of the hypothetical one inch sensor. Ah, so is it a lie when these companies say that their products, their cameras, have a one inch sensor? Yes, and no i mean no, if you know what they’re talking about, even if it is a lie, though it is a pretty harmless slide, because a one-inch sensor is still a pretty big sensor yeah, but there are all kinds of products that have come out where The big selling feature is the one-inch sensor, like you might remember the dji air 2s drone when it was unveiled the spec sheet on hasselblad’s site and on dji site and all the articles.
It all says one inch sensor like that’s a one inch sensor, guys or maybe take the insta 360 one r. You can pay extra money for a one inch addition, which is a 5k capable one inch sensor. One inch sensor, one inch sensor like every headline.
I can remember seeing about the sony xperia pro i, this crazy new smartphone mentioned the one-inch sensor and even my video guilty talks about how they’re using a one-inch sensor, which at no point actually says the real dimensions of the sensor. Now sony makes most of these actual sensors we’re talking about and sony’s own website. For this phone says it has a one-inch sensor, but wait there’s a little asterisk and if you scroll all the way down and read into what that actually stands for it turns out. It’S a one inch 1.0 type sony image sensor ah see it is a pretty big ask to ask the entire photography industry to redefine sensor sizes, but that is probably how we should be referring to these sensors as 1.0 type sensors, because they’re not actually one inch. Sensors, but you know, sony’s own website uses both terms at any given point interchangeably to refer to the size of the sensor, and i think, if you ask these companies they’d probably like to have you believe that they’re one-inch diagonal sensors, if they never clarify, then maybe That’S a lie by a mission. I don’t know how do you feel about that part of my job as a reviewer, i think, is to sort through all these statements from companies that get made all the time and one figure out how real they are and then two, if they’re, not real, find Out how harmless or harmful is that lie because it’s definitely a spectrum. I remember when there was this huge uproar about transparent, backed phones where you could kind of see through the back of the phone and some of the components inside and it was this really cool. Nerdy design, but it turned out. This was just a sticker and the components that you were looking at, weren’t, really the working parts of the phone. They led you to believe they were so is that a lie yeah totally, but it did feel pretty harmless like the whole point of having the transparent back. Look is just to look kind of cool and nerdy, and it still did accomplish that. So i felt like that wasn’t something that was a huge deal, but on the other side of the spectrum, companies will actively try to trick you and there is harmful versions of lies.
There’S stuff like vaporware, there’s stuff, like i don’t know huawei when they started lying about photos to claim that they were taken with their newest smartphone, but then they were caught multiple times, taking it with a dslr or a bigger camera. That is misleading, that that is potentially harmful to a customer that thinks they’re going to get one thing, but then doesn’t so i point that out and hopefully we can all make more informed decisions together. That way, and everybody wins thanks for watching catch. You guys the next one peace .