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Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

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Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#361

Post by rat9988 »

screye wrote: post #349

Wirecutter is like Leetcode interviews. The goal is not to find the 'best' option, but minimize false positives under intense time-pressure. Their recommendation is usually the 8/10 solid option that you can blindly buy and be moderately satisfied with. In the process, they drop out or misrepresent other comparable options, but their final recommendation is never shoddy. This is in stark contrast to other reviewers l…

I'm not sure why you would trust them to have a good false positive ratio when the claim is thay their review is influence by their partnerships.

Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#362

Post by lifeisstillgood »

hypersoar wrote: post #51

The Wirecutter is a highly flawed review site, but at least it's a real one. There are vanishingly few left for general consumer products. There's WC, Consumer Reports, and what else? They've seem to have all been killed off. When I'm researching some category of product, I feel lucky if I find any professional reviews written by people who have actually touched the thing they're reviewing. I know we've all had the e…

I actually subscribe to Which a UK consumer reports guide. And mostly it's kind of like subscribing to the Guardian newspaper - putting a few quid where my shrivelled liberal conscience used to sit.

Oddly there is a episode on this on BBC podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-bottom-line/id2643...

This podcast is not the best (it's often too lightweight and too frightened to dig deep, or the format is wrong or something). But anyway this week was particularly terrible - hardly any teeth at all. But in amoung at all the annoying self serving justifications of the guests, it did try to raise the fundamental problem - truth, trust, and a sea of opinions, mendacious or not. How do we deal with it all?

Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#363

Post by wly_cdgr »

hypersoar wrote: post #51

The Wirecutter is a highly flawed review site, but at least it's a real one. There are vanishingly few left for general consumer products. There's WC, Consumer Reports, and what else? They've seem to have all been killed off. When I'm researching some category of product, I feel lucky if I find any professional reviews written by people who have actually touched the thing they're reviewing. I know we've all had the e…

I think all the good reviewers have moved to YT

Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#364

Post by closewith »

bityard wrote: post #312
underhill wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the crowd-sourcing / SEOing / optimization of reviews on the internet has, for all its benefits, made everything too noisy and untrustworthy. I know myself and a lot of other people first search reddit now instead of google because it's impossible to get anything written by a real nonbiased human otherwise. For similar reasons I've used things like Yelp less and less and tried to use professionally editor…

Heh. The biggest problem I have with Amazon isn't even the fake reviews, it's the people who leave reviews and don't even know what a review is, which is almost all of them. "My gadget just arrived today and I haven't even used it yet but it looks well-made and I'm sure it will last forever. Five stars!"

A five star preview.

Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#365

Post by simias »

Opinions about Wirecutter notwithstanding, I thoroughly enjoyed this article. I basically believed every singe "myth" exposed here, and especially that a better grade of filter was really important when in fact if you recirculate the air constantly it's really not a big deal.

Also the fact air filters don't work like sieves is pretty mind blowing to me, I must confess.

Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#366

Post by p1necone »

fartcannon wrote: post #329
mrkwse wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be interesting if LMG can pull off what Linus is aiming for with the massive investment in a laboratory environment. There are huge parts of the tech market where the most critical reviewing you can find is anecdotal accounts of if the reviewer liked a product or not (or the more clinical reviews are drowned out by the anecdotal noise).

Do you trust Linus, though? He often promotes himself as without bias, but he very clearly hates Apple (except the watch). He also loves things he already understands (anything Microsoft). He's got heavy duty fanboyitis. And he's clearly someone you can buy demonstrated by his flip flopping AMD/Intel/NVidia praise. I don't think he outwardly lies (at least not in a way that matters), or anything, but he's got pretty…

Not having bias doesn't mean not having an opinion on things. It's a review channel, it doesn't work unless he "likes" some things and "hates" others, as long as he elaborates on the /reasons/ for those opinions.

Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#367

Post by Someone1234 »

rossmohax wrote: post #253
Someone1234 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To monitor what (e.g. what particular size, VOX, radon, etc)? And do you need logging? Because that almost entirely determines which one. For simple, cheap, PM2.5 and above, the Ikea "VINDRIKTNING" is a good choice. It only offers a simple traffic-light system though, no logging and numeric readout. USB-C powered (cable and power-brick sold separately). Around $25~ including buying the USB-C cable and power-brick, $1…

Mainly to know when to open windows (CO2 monitor?) and to vacuum and its effect (PM2.5?) and maybe some generic stuff because why not (temperature, humidity, pressure). I probably want something more precise, that just a traffic light system, but don't plan to plot readings in Grafana either.

CO2 can be a little expensive, AirThings sell one but $200(!).

Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#368

Post by nighthawk454 »

fnimick wrote: post #334
fartcannon wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you trust Linus, though? He often promotes himself as without bias, but he very clearly hates Apple (except the watch). He also loves things he already understands (anything Microsoft). He's got heavy duty fanboyitis. And he's clearly someone you can buy demonstrated by his flip flopping AMD/Intel/NVidia praise. I don't think he outwardly lies (at least not in a way that matters), or anything, but he's got pretty…

He's also vocally anti-union and actively tried to stop his employees from marketing themselves on personal social media (to stop them from building a following and then leaving, I'm guessing), so I refuse to watch any of his content or support his business in any way now.

a lot of LMG employees have personal social media and either YouTube or Twitch streams, often getting viewers from fans of their persona on LMG videos. I think the issue is only with competing content and/or leveraging the LMG platform. For example, if an employee started a GPU review channel and called it out in an LMG video, like ok yeah probably not. More like non-compete than some draconian restrictions

Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#369

Post by csours »

rcoveson wrote: post #356
csours wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That difference is from his comments on the toy model of 1000 cubic feet room and 100 cubic feet per minute recirculating air. In an operating room or chip fab, the room would be over pressure and the new air coming into the room would be filtered. The cleanliness of that air would be determined by the quality of the filter. Also, if you need air that clean, you need to have strategies for all sorts of things besides…

Yes, the numbers are from a toy example, one that the author used to make one uncontroversial point in one section of the post. Those are the numbers we are discussing in this subthread, which began with: > The idea that the difference between 0.9005 and 0.90005 is "small" is … weird. We aren't talking about a situation where both filters are processing all the air in the room. We're talking about a situation where t…

I did a poor job of being explicit in my first reply to etchalon.

Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#370

Post by daenz »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #299
daenz wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The low-income people are often the most impacted when an emergency hits. I'm sure if someone had $1000 for an air purifier, they could get one the next day, in most circumstances. Though I'm not low income (now), I got a reminder of it when local materials were totally gone and I would have had to pay through the nose to keep my place breathable. It was bad. The hallways in our apartment building had a haze of smoke…

> The low-income people are often the most impacted when an emergency hits. Yes, but it's not relevant to low-income people in general. For someone getting an air purifier in a normal situation, they can go for an ikea model about as well as any other solution. Especially considering the box fan uses a ton of power, costing money.

>Especially considering the box fan uses a ton of power, costing money.

  box fan: $40
  ikea: $70

  box fan electricity: 73W x 24 x 365 x $0.11kWh = $70/year
  ikea electricity: 14W x 24 x 365 x $0.11kWh = $13/year
Assuming 24/7 usage, in the first year you'd save $27, and in subsequent years, $57.

But this isn't counting filters. You can get a much higher range of standard filters for a box fan, meaning you can run it much less and filter more. And when IKEA discontinues the product, you're SOL finding filters, so you have to buy something new, whereas you'll never have that problem with a box fan. All things considered, I think box fan would win on cost.

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