As an old cuber, my favorite innovation is center caps that stay on without superglue, allowing us to adjust cube tensions more than once. I also love stickerless puzzles. It's funny that spring swaps are one of the oldest things you talked about, but I spring swapped my MGC 4x4 just last week to the included weaker "-" springs to speed it up a bit. Big cube tech really lags behind.
As much as I appreciate your attempt with explaining the advancements of cubing technology through the years, there are a lot of inaccuracies as well as a lot of absolutely crucial pieces of information that you left out completely that should be important to know as well. I'll list and explain it in around the same order as how you did in this video. 2000's - early 2010's: (most important section imo) Right off the bat you practically leaped from Rubik's brand to Gan immediately without mentionin a lot of other companies as well failing to mention at all around 3 or 4 crucial innovations to cubing hardware within that time period. (Piece design, torpedoes, cube lube, plastic quality). You mentioned about how ppl would get a Rubik's cube around this time period, but in the cubing community, there have been revolutionary cubes that ppl bought instead of a Rubik's brand one Some other brands would be Guojin, YJ (before Moyu existed), ShengEn, Witeden, Cube4You just to name a few. By far the most notable ones were the Dayan Zhanchi and Dayan Guhong. Speedcubing really didn't take off till around the early 2000's mainly because the Rubik's cube's piece design which limited its speedcubing capabilities. There were a few "good" speedcubes that came out like the Alpha V and GhostHand but even then, they were limiting a speedcuber's potential because like a Rubik's brand, the first speedcubes still had a very blocky design and caused a lot of friction among the pieces when turning. However, with the Zhanchi and Guhong, it skyrocketed the potential of better times and performance because of its piece design. There was less plastic to plastic contact between the edge corner pieces. The pieces themselves were rounder both internally and externally. The florian mod (the 4 rounded holes surrounding the center) helped with better corner cutting. And most importantly, although the Dayan Lunhui was the first mass produced puzzle that implemented a torpedo, the torpedo of the Dayan Zhanchi was a much more perfect design. Cubes back then popped like crazy however, the torpedo helped prevent that from happening much more often. Practically every speedcube has that design today. Countless world records were then possible because of that. Feliks Zemdegs is famous because he was the 1st speedcuber back then to break certain barriers that seemed impossible before. I would say 1/3 of his 3x3 records in his early years were because he used a Dayan Zhanchi. Another thing to note is that there was a dedicated speedcube mod store called LubixCubes that did a lot of amazing things back then. They created custom torpedoes called "Lubix Torpedoes" that were able to be put into certain cubes to help with its popping issues as well. But what Lubix was mostly known for was their lube. Not once did you mention about lubes in your video. They were crucial to the performance of a speedcube back then as they are now. However, there was not such thing as Cubicle Labs back then. In fact there were no cube stores that really sold official cube lube. Cubers back then used household products like vaseline, WD40 and other items in an attempt to lubricate a cube to make it turn smoother. Of course, vaseline would eat plastic away and WD40 would make the cube stiff if applied wrong. Lubix was the 1st to come up with a massed produced cube lube. Also, plastic quality is another thing to consider. As preferred as stickerless cubes are over black plastic cubes today, stickerless cubes were banned from WCA competitions and weren't legal till July 1, 2015. Cubers though, did something to bypass that rule during its prohibition. This comes back to Dayan Zhanchis. Like today, Zhanchis had a stickerless option aside from black plastic. Cubers however noticed that Dayan used a softer plastic on their stickerless cubes than on their black plastic ones. This was unfortunate because they wanted to use a speedcube that was WCA legal while having that soft plastic feel (ABS) while black plastic was a combination of ABS and PVC. To solve this dilemma, it was the RU-vidr, The AL60RI7HMIS7, created the Force Cube. Cubers today know what a force cube is. Although there are many current videos on it, they've made those force cubes just for visual appeal since its uncommon seeing a 3x3 with a body color other than black or stickerless. But the force cube had an actual purpose. It was created to bypass the prohibition of using stickerless cubes in a competition. The AL60RI7HMIS7 sent CrazyBadCuber one to review. His video about it is still up on his channel if you want to check it out. 2016 While you are correct about The Cubicle providing a service with magentizing cubes, you failed to a few things. Magnetizing cubes was actually a thing as early as 2013. There are quite a handful of threads on the SpeedSolvingForum from that time where ppl were thinking magnetizing their Zhanchis. It didn't gain much traction though. The person who made it mainstream however is Chris Tran. He was hired by The Cubicle to be creative with innovations in enhancing cubing performance. With his educational background (I believe a Masters in Chemistry), he did a lot of experimental things, primarily attempting to do different coatings to a speedcube, (ex. boron treated). However, he is mostly known for popularizing the concept of magentizing cubes despite it being talked about from around 2013 as mentioned earlier. LazerM0nkey has a video where Chris gives a seminar at CubingUSA Nationals 2017 and gave a very detailed talk about it. You also failed to mention that The Cubicle created the world's first magnetic 3x3 with the Moyu Weilong GTS M in 2016. The Gan Air UM was actually the 1st factory magnetized cube. Thank you though for mentioning that the Valk Elite M was the 1st to have center/edge magnets. 2021 Maglev was a concept well before 2021. the WRM 2021 was just the first to factory produce the concept. In fact, from what I am able to recall, there is a moderator from Reddit named MinariCu from the r/Cubers reddit group, who made a post talking about it literally from 2017. He explains in great detail about how to maglev your cubes if you wish to do so. In fact, aside from The Cubicle and SpeedCubeShop, there used to be a cubing store called CubeDepot. Back when they were operational, they also customized cubes like the Cubicle and SpeedCubeShop. However, between those 3 shops, CubeDepot was the only cube store that would maglev your cubes through their Rocket Cubes lineup. It didn't gain a lot of attention at the time though since from around that time, magnetizing edges/corner of cubes was the craze thanks to Chris Tran as mentioned earlier. This isn't an attack by any means. I've been cubing since around 2006. I've seen these changes myself through the last 18 years. I'm happy to see how much the speedcubing community has grown however i'm sure a lot of modern day speedcubers don't know a lot about the history behind cubing innovations. You've made an attempt with this video but as I mentioned right from the beginning, I wouldn't want today's speedcubers to be misinformed about certain things as well as not be told about other key factors. Plus, you seemed to highly emphasize throughout most of the video that Gan has been one to be behind almost all of the advancements that you mentioned. While I agree completely with the more modern form of advancements, not mentioning at all a lot of the earlier ones would cause some ppl might find that to be biased but that's why I mentioned all that I did for clarification. If still in doubt I am more than happy to provide all the resouces of everything that I mentioned. I just don't know if commenting all of them as comments on this video is something RU-vid would allow me to do.
Thanks for including so much information! That was a really interesting read. You should make a video breaking it all down. The cubing community is growing larger and larger every day, and there are bound to be other nerds out there like me who want to know the full history of cubing hardware innovations
Hey thank you for your comment. I admit I probably could have done some more research. I didn’t want to make the video too long and specific, but I suppose one could acknowledge my personal interpretation of the evolution of speedcubing tech. I started at around 2014, so what I found revolutionary may be different, and may disclose other things. In either case, there probably are things that I didn’t pay attention to in this video, or could have clarified. But thank you for the information and the knowledge! Maybe part two?
@@alisyed294 thank you. I would like to make a video elaborating about it however there's a few things that might not be possible. 1) I'm not a well known speedcuber so even if I make a proper channel, i'll most likely be ignored since a lot of speedcubers are judgemental towards how fast you are. The faster you are, the higher your credibility. 2) because of social media platforms such as IG shorts, youtube shorts, and TikTok, the attention span of viewers has become very small. If i were to make a video saying everything I wrote earlier, it would be a lengthy video and i'm sure most viewers wouldn't be patient enough to sit to watch the whole thing. Pretty sure most would prefer to see a 30 second video of mayo being put into a 3x3 to see if it lubes. I prefer to just comment for now lol but I appreciate your interest!
@@kadthecuber no I think you made a great introduction into the recent innovations! Your videos are always informative, entertaining and well put together, so I admire that :) Do you edit them yourself? P.s. Part two would be cool ;)
@@Brutal_Slam_ I agree, and that’s probably why Kad decided to keep it short. A 10-15 minute video is easy to watch whilst you’re eating food for example, whereas I’d hesitate to click on a 30-40 minute one. It’s true that peoples’ attention spans have decreased massively, so yeah you might not get many views. But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be appreciated by the few people like myself who would watch it :) Don’t put mayo in your 3x3 😭 it’s not worth it Also I relate to your point, but you can share your knowledge of speedcubing history without actually being a pro speedcuber yourself! Nobody would even know that you’re not super fast, unless you say so. It’s understandable if you’d rather keep it to the comments, as making a video can take a lot of time, money and effort. Plus idk how you’d get enough exposure to ensure people actually find your video. But I’m sure Kad has some tips on that topic
When I first started cubing (maybe 13-15 years ago) I had all the latest and greatest 2x2-7x7 from various brands (later also 8x8-11x11, Gigaminx, Teraminx, etc). I still have all of them. The difference between those, and the most recent cubes, is RIDICULOUS! My main 3x3x3 atm is the Tornado V3 Pioneer, it's bonkers how much better it is than my first high-end 3x3s!
@@kadthecuber I believe that rumours about GAN releasing a maglev cube hit the audience before the release of wrm 2021 maglev. And more on this ….supposedly, The Cubicle and its elite sponsored cubers had a rumour called ‘The Thing’ which is just wrm 2019 with maglev instead of springs.
