No, he’s not, he’s just a good reviewer. Marques Brownlee always gives his honest take, some biased crowds just don’t like it.
After some discourse online, as always, people started pointing fingers at Marques Brownlee for giving savagely bad reviews of products online. Better known online through his 18 million subscribers YouTube Channel named after himself, sometimes shortened to MKBHD. He’s quite famous for reviewing tech products, such as the new iPhone and Samsung flagship phones every year. After starting his channel while in middle school, he successfully turned it into his large-scale business. Check out my article here on How YouTubers Make Money Posting Their Hobbies.
It’s been his career ever since he graduated college, but what makes him so qualified to be an online tech reviewer? It’s not like there’s a shortage of them by any means. He started out early, and stuck to his word. Brownlee has always been pretty open about how he runs his business as a creator. He doesn’t do sponsored reviews, as in he won’t take money for reviewing a product. He often times receives a product for free on the basis that he would put out a review of it, and that’s the farthest it goes.
Other times, and in the case with the Humane AI pin (MKBHD Review Here) He receives a product and doesn’t like it, and it’s not a bad take. He claims in this video that people sometimes claim he’s too positive and doesn’t give things a negative review. I’m here to dispel that a little bit. Marques Brownlee is a good critic and mostly reviews good products. There’s a little bit to this
It’s not often that a company with the means to make a smartphone, which Marques Brownlee mostly reviews, makes it poorly. It’s not cheap to make a smartphone, and so when companies do, they typically make sure to do it right. Another fun thing to remember is that these people reviewing smartphones are online a lot, and therefore share their opinions en mass. Most tech reviewers are going to have similar takes on things. So, gathering feedback to improve your product’s next iteration is also quite common.
This is how we get to the Humane AI pin review. Aptly titled “The Worst Product I’ve Ever Reviewed“, Marques Brownlee does just what you think. His positives were that it has nice build quality, but that’s it. This tech startup with $240 million in capital wanted to create some cool engineering and then had to find a use for it. He called them out for this and displayed how slow and poor the pin was. The loading times take forever, the battery is bad and inefficient, and smartphones can do everything better. Not to mention the $700+ price tag and monthly subscription required to use it, and he points out how bad it is. It is very safe to say that the Humane AI pin is a bad product.
He posted the video, and now some tech enthusiasts on X, or Twitter, see the review. They mention how Marques Brownlee doesn’t see the vision and needs to wait. Which is where the discussion starts. Is Marques Brownlee responsible for a company’s failure if the bad product he reviews, is bad? Sure, it might get better later, but the product is released, and real consumers are buying it. So why should they need to wait for the product to be finished?
This issue is much larger than products from startup companies, and most of you reading this can probably think of an example. So why should Humane receive any different treatment? I, and it appears most of the internet, is on Marques’s side here. He cant sugarcoat a product like this, or it’ll hurt his reputation. It’s not like he enjoys watching companies fail, but he doesn’t want to hold them up for more than what’s there. Take some to think about this and observe in the future when unfinished products get pushed into the marketplace.
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