GamersNexus donating to archive.org so they can keep checking how websites quietly change what they say after they've been called out đź¤
Has NZXT always been this shady? I bought a PC from them like 5 years ago and it's been going strong since the start. I'm sure as hell never buying one again, that's for sure.
I think they became more shady after the investment from Francisco Partners, who are likely trying to squeeze more value from the company. I think Gamers Nexus mentioned this in the previous video.
That investment occurred Dec 2021, just to give frame of reference.
Francisco Partners ran my previous employer into the ground with a lot of shady shit too. Not surprised to hear their name involved with this.
Private equity swooped in and started the enshittification process as quickly as possible.
They used to have a good reputation, at least a few years ago. Their stuff was a decent value. I don't know what it's like now, but it seems more like terrible business practices rather than poor quality products are the issue.
Yup, and Steve said as much in the original video. They said they'll continue to review NZXT products because they're generally pretty good (except the RGB fan thing that caught on fire), but they refuse to accept sponsorship money because they don't want to be associated with them.
This is the second major issue from them, and the way they handled it is exactly the same: deny the problem until they're forced to, and then do the bare minimum to fix it.
He alluded to it in the first video, and I think it's spot on.
They ended up with an "inventory problem". Which is to say, some business major in the company somewhere, or a consultant or whatever saw that they were spending money to store it all, and said "A company's assets should never cost money, they should MAKE money" or some such business speak. Ultimately that translated into every layer of the business being instructed to prioritize using that that old inventory, somehow, or pushing it to customers.
"People don't really want to buy all this older hardware off of us, but we can convince people who don't know any better to rent it."
"We don't have enough 4090s to keep up with demand for these high-end rentals, but we're sure as hell not buying more when we have all these perfectly-good 4080s lying around."
It’s hard to say. They put out some great stuff that filled some genuine gaps in the market… then the whole thing with the one case happened. It’s very possible they’ve always been shady creeps and we just didn’t notice right away.
I bought a kraken 240 a few years ago, since it was one of, if not the only 240mm aio cooler available at the time. A genuine gap in the market.
Then I learned that its pump speed is not set by the motherboard, but via usb and a proprietary (and infamously buggy and resource hoggy) windows app. At startup it is set to a default slow pump speed, and will not speed up unless you have their application bloatware running. On linux youre just fucked.
I will not be buying NZXT again.
Apparently I can't watch this video with the original audio. Instead some robotic female voice speaks in my language. Some dude at youtube really thought it's a good idea to not only make this default, but also don't provide the option to deactivate it. And it's probably just the beginning. I am so excited for all the unwanted AI features that will be forced down my throat in the future
Youtube gets worse every day. You might try an alternative front-end, and you can use something like LibRedirect (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/) to automatically change youtube links to the other front-end. It works for other services too, but you can easily disable redirecting them if you don't want that.
It's not perfect, but it's an option. Good luck!
At least in Freetube, there is an option to change to the normal audio. But yeah, the fact that it is on by default is annoying. The other sad thing is that the titles of the videos will be translated into your language if available, making you confused about whether the channel is originally in English or in your native language. Also losing some originally present puns in the process, which is just sad.
I hate this "feature" but there is always a way to deactivate it in both the web version and the app: you can change the audio track on the settings of the video (e.g. behind the cog icon on mobile)
Nope. I've just checked it again, I can only set subtitles, quality, etc. but not the audio track. (m.youtube.com in firefox on android)
Funny though that today I'm getting the original audio by default. Someone got a backlash it seems
NZXT says: "Back to you, Steve."
