On the Bloatware Video

Hey, congrats on meeting your patreon goal, keep up the great work!

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P.S. I thoroughly enjoy your passionate rants! haha

Steve, this is actually probably my all-time favorite video you've made since I've started following your content! haha I'm so glad you don't pull punches and are honestly critical of businesses that deserve to have critical reviews like this. I've basically sworn off MSI after they started vomiting all manner of misleading product advertisement, so it's great to see influential people like you holding tech businesses' feet to the fire in and effort to get them to clean up their business practice. As one of your Patreon backers I fully support you making more content like this! (I posted this on the YouTube video as well, but I wanted to make sure that you see it. Love your content! This is why I back you! Keep up the great work. :) )

We haven't received the others, but they would and will be criticized in a fair capacity if they feature comparable pre-installed software. We have criticized MSI of this in the past -- about a year ago -- and there's been no change, so they are aware of this issue. It mostly comes down to us having an MSI unit, not the others, and also that no one was talking about this. Keep in mind that it takes time to build a database of tests. If you've seen our GPU reviews, you know that we iterate on each one: The previous builds the charts for the current test, which means that criticism and analysis scale with each added part. The same will happen with laptops, but we're starting from a smaller pool of test hardware than with GPUs, for instance.

GamersNexus

I'm fairly certain it went down like this: MSI sends Steve bloatware filled laptop to test. Steve tests it. Steve does not like bloatware. I think he was as tactful as can be about it too. Maybe those others do the same thing but have yet to send him a laptop to test. This particular MSI laptop seems to be making the rounds of the tech channels. Did any of them mention it? None that I've seen. He also pointed out that MSI has in the past asked Gamers Nexus to change the title of a video that was critical of them. They were clearly trying to censor a tech reviewer.

New Moon

Hi Steve! The video was really good, and I completely agree, but honestly, singling out MSI like this while Asus and Lenovo do the exact same thing didn't exactly seem fair to me. Is MSI really that much worse than the others? Because I was under the assumption those two brands do the exact same thing. Other than that though, I couldn't agree more. I have an MSI laptop and first thing I did was remove 80% of the bloatware.It was almost unusable without spending a good hour removing all those unnecessary applications and services.