Name: What MKBHD Got Wrong
Uploaded: 2026-02-12T06:31:37.000Z
Duration: 15 min 20 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Who knew talking about battery technology could cause so much trouble?

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Guys, maybe you've missed it, maybe you've just not been paying attention to the tech world over the last few days.

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But biggest tech YouTuber in the galaxy, Marques Brownlee, otherwise known as MKBHD, posted a video just the other day about silicon carbon batteries.

And it has rather ironically set his comment section on fire.

At the risk of turning into a drama merchant, in this video, I'm going to be talking about his video and where it got him into trouble.

If there's one phrase that I know to be true in this reality that we all appear to share, it's that often it's not what you say, it's how you say it that actually matters.

Now, I'm sure that Marques was aware of that idea, I'm sure most of us are aware of that idea.

But if he wasn't, he is certainly aware of it now.

And that brings us to the first aspect of this video that I think needs to be looked at.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the thumbnail, or I should say was the thumbnail for the video that Marques posted over on his channel.

And this depicts a OnePlus device with sparks, smoke and flames ejecting from the charging port, the USB C port at the bottom of the device.

By using a picture of a OnePlus phone with flames shooting out of the bottom of the device, he effectively signaled to his audience that these devices are a fairly significant flash fire hazard.

People in the comment section went crazy and I think quite justifiably talking about how that seemed like he was just throwing oneplus under the bus.

Without any real reports of fires or explosions relating to not only OnePlus devices, but

to devices using silicon carbon batteries in general.

It's important to note that, yes, indeed, batteries do fail.

Across all brands, these sorts of things happen.

You can find reports online of devices that swell, devices that smoke, or even devices that explode.

But singling out oneplus in such a dramatic way felt like fear mongering to a lot of viewers.

It's important to note that the most famous exploding phone incident in recent history for OnePlus was a OnePlus Nord 2.

And that is not a silicon carbon battery using device.

So why use that kind of inflammatory pun very much intended imagery for this video.

I think that was, like I said, a major misstep.

And what it did was it primed the people watching this video to come in with A certain mindset.

Now, to his credit, or I guess the credit of his team, they did pretty quickly swap out this thumbnail.

So this is the original with the sparks and the flames and the smoke.

And then this is the new thumbnail, which has no sparks, flames or smoke.

Strangely enough, people, people got mad, of course, at the original thumbnail.

What's odd to me is that they also then got mad that he changed it.

Wow, I can't believe that he used such a dumb, misleading thumbnail.

Wow, I can't believe he took down that dumb, misleading thumbnail.

Like, there's no way to win once you make a mistake on the Internet.

Like, you can't fix it, you can't backtrack, you can't apologize.

This is an acknowledgement of, okay, yeah, that thumbnail was causing problems.

Maybe by the time I've posted this, he's posted something on, you know, Twitter or threads or something like that to kind of apologize for that really, really, really, really dumb, bad thumbnail.

All right, so that's quite a long time spent on the thumbnail.

But I think it really set the stage for the disaster that was about to unfold.

How does the video, though, actually unfold?

So Marquez starts off by talking about the obvious benefits of silicon carbon batteries.

He shows an iPhone and then an honor phone that looks just like an iPhone and it has a 10,000 milliamp hour battery.

It's like double the size of the iPhone battery.

And there's a reason that people are quite hyped up over these batteries.

He points out that while companies like Xiaomi, Honor OnePlus, Oppo, these are all companies who are shipping lots of phones with silicon carbon batteries.

The big players over here in North America, like Samsung, like Apple, like Google, are not.

And to try to explain why that's happening, he references some private emails that he received from industry insiders, people working at various companies, and

they claim there are major concerns regarding swelling and long term longevity.

Now, while he doesn't explicitly say who these emails come from, like where these people work, I think it's really safe to assume that these emails are probably coming from people working at the aforementioned company, Samsung, Apple and or Google.

Marques has A very prominent, very loud voice in the tech community.

And he has gone out of his way many times in the past to admonish these brands for not using this newer, much better battery technology.

I mean, to think that some of these people would then send him an email and say, hey MKBHD, biggest tech YouTuber in the universe.

Here's why our companies aren't using them.

The issue that I have with specifically this is that it feels like Marques is then acting as a PR arm of those companies in the interest of not being super repetitive, because there's a lot of overlap.

Back in July, I posted this article and an accompanying video where I talk about The Galaxy Z Fold 7 having a 4400 milliamp hour battery, not using silicon carbon.

I talk about charge cycle testing, how Samsung seems to have a higher 2000 cycle standard than Apple or Google.

I talk about silicon carbon batteries, how they swell by 3x and then contract back down.

Basically, I kind of lay out why I think these bigger brands aren't using silicon carbon batteries.

Now the difference there is that I'm putting things together from the available data.

I'm looking at things Samsung has said, I'm looking at their history, things like the Note 7 fiasco.

And I'm kind of giving you what I think is happening.

Marques is getting this from the horse's mouth and then just relaying it to you, which feels very different to me.

And that's despite the fact that much of what Marques says mirrors what I said back in July.

So the technical core of his argument is that silicon carbon batteries will expand.

They expand by about 300% when they are charging.

When lithium ions are injected into the battery, it swells and then it contracts.

He uses the analogy of a sponge that swells up by 3x and then contracts.

He talks about sidewalks cracking and things like that.

We all understand this, I think quite intuitively.

If you have a thing that is swelling and contracting over and over, physical degradation is going to occur.

Technically, there is nothing inaccurate with what he is saying.

The silicon in these batteries does swell by 3x when they are charging.

OEMs are using, in some applications, cages around these batteries to restrict the swelling and the swell.

Contract cycles over time will absolutely result in physical damage to the batteries.

And again, I talked about all of this half a year ago and Nobody got angry.

300% swelling when charging, the expansion and contraction leads to physical Damage to the battery and thus lower capacity.

Why did no one get mad when I talked about it, but

they were furious when MKBHD talked about it?

Well, I think the answer comes down to this term thermal runaway.

Whether it is uttered, physically speaking in the video or it is depicted in the thumbnail of the video.

In the video they show a thermal runaway.

This was the Pixel 10 Pro Fold being forcibly bent backwards by Zach from JerryRigEverything.

And of course the problem here is that this is a phone that doesn't use silicon carbon.

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What MKBHD Got Wrong

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