tech is becoming an expensive hobby what's a budding enthusiast to do
shop at the dollar store i'm gonna tell you what tech stuff is okay to buy at
the dollar store and what stuff you definitely want to get somewhere else
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going to start off with the batteries because i want to do this live i've
already tested these alkalines over here with my trusty
sega battery killer here and i've got a set of home depot alkalines that are
acting as our control why am i specifying alkaline so much because
these batteries well their brand name and proudly proclaim super heavy duty
power but they're carbon zinc batteries now
what are those they have similar voltages to alkaline but
they're a simpler kind of battery that's non-rechargeable and has about a third
of the energy density i am looking forward to seeing the game gear destroy
them it's a little frustrating these come in packs of five but this idiot
takes six because game gear that's why but
uh i will give it a shot hey okay
so i'm going to leave that there so i can see it while we keep going i expect
that this is not going to last very long i bought five pairs of headphones over
here and let's start off with these elektras here i got them for a
buck 25 and they come in this little tube and
these are bad they sound like absolute ass they have plastic spurs just coming
off of them and they only come with the one set of ear tips
they have no lows no mids and no highs like basically the
whole thing is just a fuzzy mess they don't even get very loud they're
uncomfortable they're impossible to get out of that stupid packaging they're
just bad like even voice content like youtube videos sound like they're coming
out of a cheap phone speaker they also don't have left or right indicators on
the stems let's uh let's forget these exist and just
move on with our lives these could not be any more different
the cable on these actually feels like it's made of something quality
even though it's probably not and they just like they feel like something
that's a little more premium you know you've got these extra ear tips you've
got a microphone built in that's pretty cool they don't make a good seal
but they sound perfectly fine they may cost three times as much as those like
those are a buck 25 these are four dollars they're just so so much better
now reviews do suggest that quality control is a bit hit or miss and given
that you can get legitimately good sounding earbuds from someone like kz
for less than 20 bucks you're probably safer giving the dollar store earbuds in
general a pass but you could do much worse in a pinch than these rexes like
they have a v-shaped audio curve so they're high on the bass the mids are a
little bit down and then the treble is a little bit high and what that gives them is a sound
signature that sounds very fun and normal i'll roll the rest of the
headphones up like so they're all cheaply made a big surprise
right but like they're sharp i hurt myself adjusting one of them
because the adjustment mechanisms are so crunchy and
they all sound like they're playing through a pillow especially the extra
bass one here like this one almost literally has like an l-shaped response
curve to my ears anyway with no mids or highs to speak of and the base is money
too
i i can't i'm trying to go one step trying to no all of them are
uncomfortable and only one of them the vortex here has any padding at all and
it doesn't help yes they make noise but they're all
terrible
just don't buy headphones from the dollar store we paid four dollars for
each of these and i feel cheated next up we have
the tech one bluetooth speaker now you would think that it's gonna be
blue but in fact is green
uh i i don't really hate it it's got the
smallest usb cable in existence but
it's got this little suction cup that's actually quite quite good
and it's supposed to be water resistant i don't know how much i would trust that
the buttons are horrible like it's literally just this like membrane here
stretched across it but there's tactile switches beneath that
so you can actually miss the buttons while pressing the buttons
like i'm pressing right now there's nothing being clicked i need to move
over there's where the button is
it's wonderful you turn it on it actually does have a
lithium-ion battery in it that's what the usb cable is for i might need to
read the manual that's in french but today we are going
to solve all of them at once this
so that sounds okay not great
but it sounds perfectly fine for like a voice call maybe which this seems to be
what it's designed for with this little call answer button here so i don't know
if i hate that necessarily like you could have this hanging next to your
shower not in your shower again i wouldn't recommend actually having this
in water let's try some crab ray real quick
okay so it's crunchy but it actually doesn't sound too bad like it's got more
bass than you'd expect it to have sounds like um just basically a generic laptop
speaker i certainly don't feel cheated like i feel with these
whatever you'd call these headphones
that that was the Windows 3.1 logoff sound
now for tools and supplies i'll be honest with you right now i don't expect
these to be unusable will it last forever probably not but
you're also not paying a whole lot for them like stuff like these parts
organizers here these are pretty cool i actually had another one here and
this is totally fine you could fit flash drives you could fit mounting hardware
pretty much whatever you need into this thing this cost two dollars and fifty
cents this thing here this costs what was it like two dollars this magnetic
parts tray these things go for three dollars canadian at the dollar store
whereas like you'd spend ten dollars getting them in from amazon i don't see
any problem with this kind of thing at all i found it in the like the tools
hardware section but you can find stuff like this as well in the kitchen section
now they also had a pack of 60 zip ties for a buck 25 this is something that's
technically a worse value per tie than buying in bulk on amazon but if you
don't need like hundreds of them you're saving a buck or two now these aren't
very flexible but they are made of nylon and they're thick
enough to be sturdy and they're about the right size for cable management
inside of a pc chassis this eight piece pack of hook and loop
ties however not so much eight isn't a lot and
they're squared off with no anchor they do have a little pull tab on them but
they're too short for bundling more than a couple of cables together and too fat
to do cable management inside a pc what's worse you can get a hundred pack
of ties that are tapered and have an anchor for less than 10 bucks on amazon
these are a pass unless you're desperate i also got this two pack of long neck
magnetic screwdrivers for a dollar and they look alright
they feel every bit as cheap as they were but the phillips driver's got a nice
point to it it's pretty much ideal for working inside of
a computer it's probably not going to stand up to abuse but considering how
much screwdrivers go for on amazon it'll definitely do as a quick and dirty drive
the same can sort of be said for these precision drivers here they'll do
the job i don't know the the mechanism it feels gritty when you turn it
it's just got this little nut on the end here there's all kinds of like burrs
from the manufacturing process that are still on here that are going to cut up your fingers and they're not even held
in like in any way shape or form if you drop this case and it opens up or you
already had it open it's just gonna all go everywhere that being said it does have a decent
variety of bits so it's it's not amazing
then again i mean if you don't have an ifixit kit maybe this is what you reach for this
flashlight is an interesting case on the one hand it weighs nothing and it's like
really creaky plastic on the other it actually does put out more light than my
phone's flash does like visibly
you can focus the beam
is it worth a dollar and three triple a's objectively i guess so but i don't
think you'd be in too many situations where
this much light is enough but your smartphones isn't and one thing i think
is ridiculously useful is this here
six in one pen it's a pen it's a stylus it's a ruler
it's a level and it's even a pocket screwdriver with two slightly magnetic
bits pen just twists out like that stylus on the back there unscrew the stylus you've
got a screwdriver with two bits phillips and flathead which is actually super
handy legitimately think this is pretty cool like it's even
got yeah it's got the ruler it's got the level it's actually pretty cool and like for a
dollar it's super awesome they sell these on amazon for like a dollar a
piece too so this is actually a decent buy what else is there in these lovely
bags i got from ltdstore.com not supposed to talk too much about these
but they do have these little pockets in them that actually make it really nice
for keeping things organized two different colors and two different sizes
lttstore.com i picked up some chargers
big clive i am not but looking at the guts it seems pretty
similar to a poundland charger he took a look at a few years ago i'm not sure
that these things have what it takes to drive two usb ports simultaneously
though like maybe i'm just being a hater the car adapter should be fine like it's
a much simpler device though again i doubt it could reliably run the two
outputs that it claims to have simultaneously and while i'd normally
distrust any kind of power strips or
power devices at all from a dollar store this brand
from what i can tell is actually pretty reputable so as long as you're not
loading this up with way more than it can handle it says it can do
1875 watts i don't think you'll have a problem but it won't do surge protection
all it is is copper on the inside or brass even i think uh just conductive
metal that you're plugging into ah and oh you know what
this looks like a job for the okay
this looks like a job for the magnetic screw picker-upper
that works just fine it's actually really nice it's like
okay it's not really nice but like that's a nice length for one and it
works just fine it's a little bit gritty in the mechanism it's it's not bad for i think
that was actually literally a dollar of course batteries aren't the only thing
for powering tech that you can get at the dollar store they also have
usb cables and HDMI cables too look at
all these i got this here transparent one i got this here blue one that lights
up and i have this one that's pretty long and has a braided cable but of
course we need to know whether or not these are going to pass the tests that
we're going to throw at them that's why i have the cable tester although we
don't need the cable tester to see that this one is not going to pass because it has no shielding whatsoever and usb 2.0
requires shielding uh let's make some room here
oh yeah let's try the one that we know won't pass first into the usb type a
port and into the micro usb port
yeah of course if we look at the details on this one
no shielding it's probably gonna work but this one might be prettier actually it
does have that clear motif but it lights up so let's see if we can make that
happen no
also it's like blinking
fail no shield once again everything else looks good
actually the ground wire on this guy here wasn't good either but that's uh
that's working correctly in this one so that's better oh well it looks like it
again would probably work but why chance it
now this guy looks a lot better like it looks like one of those cables that
you'd want to carry around
micro usb in and
you had high hopes so did i actually but again it doesn't have the shield
and it's failing on all of these in the resistance test which
yeah this this one's not so good you can even see in this in the eye here
it is pretty lopsided so unfortunately the highest quality
looking cable out of the entire bunch is the lowest quality cable of the entire
bunch even this guy is a little bit better in terms of how
its test results went this thing costs 3.50 canadian but it
says that it's a high speed with Ethernet which means that it's got to be HDMI 1.4 compliant 5 feet 3d ready all
right so let's get it out of the package here at least it looks like it's gold
plated i guess uh HDMI
high speed with Ethernet that's what this purports to be
moment of truth
oh it failed everything okay so these pins are just not connected
uh all the all the shields and the power wires as well
holy cow oh Ethernet what happened to you oh
no okay maybe maybe we're pushing it a little bit too hard let's let's go back
to like HDMI like regular speed or something the the lowest standard of
HDMI that is just HDMI just just HDMI
at least signal integrity looks good this time that impedance is just way too
high and yeah signal integrity looks okay it's probably no surprise that all
of the usb and HDMI cables i picked up literally failed when i fired up the
total phase tester and the reason why is none of them are shielded like they're
supposed to be and in the case of the HDMI cable that lack of shielding
basically mangles the signal it should conform to the spec if it says that it's
the spec but no now does that mean it's not going to work absolutely not i mean it might work
fine but it also might not be this is why we need LTT Labs get
subscribed because we're going to have more updates on that as we continue to
build it out okay 100 worth of dollar store tech items is obviously a little
more than i thought there would be here because we ran out of time on friday and
now here we are actually a week later because the batteries in the game gear
were so bad that they drained me for a week
okay here we go let's talk about the game gear first our control which was
the home depot batteries lasted a little over six hours which is more than i
expected and these alkalines actually lasted pretty much exactly the
same time yeah that actually is kind of interesting because those are the e-circuit branded like dollar store
batteries as for these name brand panasonic zinc carbon batteries they are
like an hour and 14 minutes or something like that while i was waiting for my ride on
friday it died in my pocket that should tell you something about the difference
between zinc carbon and alkaline batteries those batteries are still in
there so there's still a little bit of charge in there but they're mostly used
just like andy and me yeah what does that leave us with it's a
yes on most of the tools and supplies the parts organizers one of the pairs of
headphones and the bluetooth speaker the alkaline batteries and the usb chargers
with asterisks on both of those last ones in the maybe pile we've got the
flashlight the precision drivers the carbon zinc batteries and the hook and
loop straps and in the no pile we've got literally
all the other headphones and all of the usb and HDMI cables not that that's a
huge surprise to anyone do you guys have any dollar store tech that you swear by
and want us to check out who knows maybe i can convince Linus to give me the
company card for another shopping spree gotta admit it was actually kind of fun
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at storyblocks.com Linus tech tips thanks for watching guys this one's a
really different so if you go check out our recent video on why everyone's
buying the logitech g502 hero spoiler it turns out it's a great mouse
for the price who knew