Marques Brownlee, known as MKBHD, faced backlash over his new wallpaper app, Panels, due to its high subscription cost ($49.99/year) and concerns over excessive data permissions.
Brownlee acknowledged user feedback, promising to adjust ad frequency for free users and address privacy concerns, clarifying that the app’s data disclosures were broader than intended.
The app, which offers curated wallpapers and shares profits with artists, aims to improve over time, despite criticisms of its design and monetization approach.
No sane individual is going to pay for a subscription for phone backgrounds.
That is absolutely a stupid business idea and the people who came up with it should be publicly shamed.
This guy is no different than every other smarmy “Tech Reviewer” on YT. His reviews have been borderline useless for the last few years. This is just the next logical step that these guys take - hitch themselves onto a tech accessory or app and charge their followers predatory prices - fuck this guy.
It’s kind of a paradox when you think about it. Good reviewers are often just regular people with a passion for tech but as they become more popular and prolific they become part of the industry itself. Once that happens even if they try to stay objective and critical their perspective is so different from regular people that reviews are just part of the sales and marketing strategy rather than pro tips from an enthusiast.
Apparently one of the wallpapers is just solid orange. It’s called “Orange”, is labeled as “abstract”, and is labeled with a copyright.
It’s a solid orange rectangle.
The artist spent a lot of time on that!
Months to get that perfect shade of orange.
And just the effort of painting every one of those pixels one by one, it’s not like we have some magic tool to fill an image with the same color and call it a day.
Perhaps more likely years of work with colour and colour theory preceding a quick output of some content? Why the sarcastic tone?
The sarcastic tone is likely because of the price. There is something jarring about such a simple product, even if it was made by an artist with a good eye for color, being behind such a large paywall. Most people find this app, even forgetting “Orange,” to be overpriced, myself included. It should be expected for people to use the most extreme examples to point out the absurdity and to laugh at it, especially when it’s being marketed to the public.
Had this been an app you buy for $10 once, still there would be people like this, but much less. And if it were free, for example, nobody would bat an eye. The outrage is caused by price.
I’m not invested in this debacle at all, really. I just found your lack of understanding interesting. Not trying to offend you by that.
My phone has a camera… i can set photos as wallpapers…
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$50 a year for wallpapers or I could go to wallhaven and get millions for free?
The “shares its profits with the artists” part is relevant here.
It would almost be cheaper to commission an artist frankly.
For a single piece sure.
I presume the idea here is that you have access to their full library. Personally, I fail to see why I would change my wallpaper enough to warrant even a free app to change it, let alone 50 bucks.
I’ve never liked this guy, he just always felt like a smarmy asshole each time I tried to watch him and he shilled Apple stuff way too hard for my liking. Blocked his channel and several channels that collabed with him and was mostly able to ignore his existence. Doing something shitty like this kinda adds confirmation to my perceptions of him. What an out of touch douche move.
