(upbeat music)
- 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 will 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 2022, 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 production car ever made, period.
Zero to 60 in 1.9 seconds.
This will be the first time that any car
has broken two seconds at 0 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 0 to 60.
But these 0 to 60s
should have a little asterisk up in the corner next to it,
because they are with something called rollout subtracted.
So Tesla's triple motor Plaid Model S,
is listed at a 1.99 seconds, 0 to 60.
And at least that one does have an asterisk on the side,
with the asterisk meaning with rollout subtracted.
So certain performance cars list those 0 to 60 time
with a one foot of subtracted rollout,
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 to 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 lights 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 rollout.
A fast car can reach five to six miles an hour
in that one foot rollout,
which cuts through reported 0 to 60 time
anywhere from 0.2 to 0.3 seconds.
That's actually 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 the asterisk next to it.
And I assume the Tesla Roadster's time
was also measured with one foot rollout,
but it doesn't have the asterisk.
So is that a lie?
Well, no, but they also don't do that with their other cars.
Like the Model 3 and Model Y are listed
with honest 0 to 60 times, no rollout subtracted.
So that number can be a little deceiving
without the extra context.
- As I said, torque coming out of our battery pack,
10,000 Newton-meters of torque.
If you know what that means, it's 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
that 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 it was explained so eloquently by Donut Media.
I'm gonna 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 drive train,
it's a lower number.
Same thing with torque,
which also gets multiplied by the gear ratios
in the drive train.
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 look, let's shift gears a bit, pun intended.
Because you know, at least we're talking about
real products.
What Teslas and Hummers are gonna 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 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 a BMW's color-changing iX from CES with the 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 of 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 AirPower?
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 AirPower just kind of quietly disappeared.
Nobody ever saw or heard about AirPower again.
Eventually the AirPower project was officially canceled
by Apple.
I explained why that disappeared with the video up here
that you can click or it's linked below
if you wanna 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.
And you might've seen that point and shoots
like Sony's RX 100
famously use a one inch sensor,
or that there's even a couple of 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 0.63 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.
So is it a lie when these companies say that their products,
their cameras have a one inch sensor?
Yes and no, and no, if you know what they're talking about.
Even if it is a lie though, it is a pretty harmless lie,
because one inch sensor is still 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 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 Insta360 One R.
You can pay extra money for a one inch edition,
which is a 5K capable, 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.
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 emission.
I don't know, how do you feel about that?
Part of my job as a reviewer, I think,
is to sort through all of 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'd 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, Walway,
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 is potentially harmful
to a customer that thinks they're gonna 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 in the next one.
Peace.