The Lynx Routers: A Promise Unfulfilled

Apple's foray into wireless routers with their Lynx series has been met with mixed reviews from customers and critics alike. While some have praised the ease of setup and overall performance, others have criticized the lack of innovation and reliability in these products.

One of the main issues with Apple's routers is that they rely on the user to manually configure settings such as SSID and network names. Manufacturers recommend using a separate SSID for each node to ensure proper functionality, but Apple's instructions often lead users down this path, despite their own documentation suggesting otherwise. This can result in users getting stuck on a node with a weaker signal compared to their neighbors.

Another issue is the lack of security features in these routers. Many customers have reported that their Lynx routers are vulnerable to hacking and other security threats, which can put sensitive information at risk. In an era where companies like D-Link and others have made headlines for creating malware-ridden products that compromise users' personal data, it's surprising that Apple hasn't taken a stronger stance on security.

Setting up these routers is often described as a nightmare by many users. The process requires navigating through multiple menus and settings, which can be overwhelming for those who are not tech-savvy. However, once the setup is complete, the routers tend to work well and provide stable internet connectivity.

One of the most frustrating aspects of Apple's routers is that they often rely on the user to troubleshoot issues rather than providing clear instructions or support resources. This can lead to users spending hours trying to resolve problems with their router, only to discover that a simple restart or reboot would have resolved the issue in the first place.

Despite these criticisms, there are some redeeming qualities to Apple's Lynx routers. For example, they tend to be easy to use once set up, and many customers report being satisfied with their overall performance. Additionally, Apple has made efforts to simplify the setup process over time, making it easier for users to get started with their routers.

However, this raises an interesting question: why didn't Apple fix these issues sooner? The company has a reputation for making products that are simple, reliable, and trustworthy, so it's puzzling that they would release products that don't meet those standards. Perhaps the reason is that Apple was hesitant to enter the router market due to concerns about security and reliability.

In reality, many customers do need routers with robust security features, such as automatic updates and firewalls, to protect their devices from hacking and other threats. By not providing these features in their Lynx routers, Apple may be inadvertently putting users at risk of cybersecurity breaches.

The company's decision to abandon the router market is a missed opportunity, particularly given the current state of the industry. Many companies are creating products that prioritize security and reliability over ease of use, which can result in subpar performance and user experience. By stepping back from this market, Apple may be giving competitors an opening to fill the gap with better products.

However, it's worth noting that some users have reported positive experiences with their Lynx routers, particularly those who are already familiar with Macs and other Apple devices. For these users, the ease of setup and overall performance can make up for any limitations in terms of security or features.

In conclusion, while Apple's Lynx routers have their strengths, they also have several weaknesses that prevent them from being truly reliable and trustworthy products. By not addressing issues such as security and ease of use, Apple may be putting users at risk of cybersecurity breaches and frustrating them with complex setup processes. Ultimately, the company needs to take a stronger stance on these issues to regain the trust of its customers.

A Word of Caution: The Impact of Cable Modem Routers

One of the most significant challenges facing Apple's Lynx routers is the proliferation of junk cable modem routers created by manufacturers such as Motorola and Pace. These devices often come with insecure firmware that can be easily hacked, compromising users' personal data and putting them at risk of identity theft.

The issue with these cable modem routers is not unique to Apple, however. Many companies are creating products that prioritize profit over security and user experience. This can result in subpar performance and a host of other problems, including hacking and cybersecurity breaches.

As a result, it's essential for consumers to be vigilant when purchasing any device that connects to the internet. By choosing reputable manufacturers that prioritize security and reliability, users can reduce their risk of falling victim to hacking and other cyber threats.

The Impact of Apple's Absence from the Router Market

Apple's decision to abandon the router market has significant implications for the industry as a whole. By not participating in this market, Apple is giving competitors an opportunity to fill the gap with better products that prioritize security and reliability over ease of use.

This absence also highlights the need for greater regulation and oversight in the manufacturing of cable modem routers. Many companies are creating products that are vulnerable to hacking and other security threats, which can put users' personal data at risk.

As a result, it's essential for consumers to demand more from their device manufacturers. By choosing products with robust security features, such as automatic updates and firewalls, users can reduce their risk of falling victim to cybersecurity breaches.

The Future of Apple's Routers

While Apple's Lynx routers have their strengths, they also have several weaknesses that prevent them from being truly reliable and trustworthy products. To address these issues, the company needs to take a stronger stance on security and reliability in its router offerings.

One way to do this would be to provide automatic updates and firewalls for all Lynx routers, ensuring that users' devices are protected against hacking and other cyber threats. Additionally, Apple could prioritize ease of use and setup, making it easier for customers to get started with their routers.

By taking a more proactive approach to security and reliability, Apple can regain the trust of its customers and establish itself as a leader in the router market. However, this will require significant changes to the company's product strategy and development process.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to this the 127th episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm your host Victor marks and joining me is Neil Hughes Victor how are you I you know I am amazing today I'm a little for Clint today is a very special anniversary for us here Apple Insider it is today is the 6th anniversary of Google+ oh man I am I'm choked up because well you know Google was revolutionary go+ took all of these disperate Google offerings it took it took photos it took uh it it took Google Plus The Social Network which came out of of the ashes of Google buzz it took YouTube it took Hangouts it took everything and it combined every Gmail account into this one one platform across all the services of and all of the offerings it really it it revolutionized what a digital Hub that Google has been for for us and this this June 29th where we're recording this is the 6th anniversary and Vic gutra brought it all forward for us I I realize you're being factious because for those listening this is actually the 10th anniversary of the first iPhone but before we get to that I will say ruin everything I was going to have fun with that I I will say that uh Google uh plus uh does have a special place in my heart and not ironically um because uh about 5 years ago when I gotri married um at the wedding we used Google+ for people to share and upload photos so you could have a collection of photos privately in the same place and so um this was before Facebook events was like really a big thing or now everybody uses like hashtags on Instagram to be able to find all the pictures so uh what we did was we printed up uh cards that were at everybody's uh place at setting at the um uh at the reception but also like went out in a email that went out prior to the ceremony as well and it was like here are the instructions and what was funny was I wrote Google+ is kind of like Facebook except nobody uses it cuz I was explaining you know to a bunch of people that have no idea what any of what what is the concept of go+ right and so you know basically um we we used it um there and it worked out great we got thousands of photos from you know all the people that were in attendance at the wedding and uh it was a really great and now you know like I said everybody's just got Instagram hashtags and stuff like that but this wasn't um that wasn't much of a as much of a thing back then and Google photos uh in um go+ was actually kind of ahead of its time it was the one feature of Google+ that was actually very good so go+ set out to become the better than Facebook and that was their actual stated intention was we're going to be like Facebook but better and the better part was that they said in in Facebook you're one person and all of your friends are all equal friends and they can all see what each other sees which doesn't work and their their their example was this really sort of embarrassing example right they said what if you're a school teacher and you're friends with your students but you're also friends with your your friends from the bar mhm and you want to and you don't want your students seeing your friends from the bar because you'd like to stay employed and Facebook eventually added all these features anyhow and the truth the truth of a social network is it the features don't matter if there's nobody there yes yeah the well that's that's uh literally called the network effect right yes and and so Google Plus's standpoint was that you You' separate your your lives into these different circles and you'd have your circle of bar friends and your circle of students and they would never meet and of course it it totally worked out for them because no one put anyone into circles and therefore they absolutely never met but uh photos still does this cool thing where they do the the remember when the throwback pictures and they'll assemble neat montages for you out of the picture that you have to the point where if you had a bunch of pictures taken in Rapid succession they'll even turn that into an animated gif right and the inventor of it calls it gif I don't care I know you don't the uh well let's talk about something that people actually do use and that's the iPhone right so you know this this is interesting and I was we've had 10 years of iPhone mhm today and you and I both used and both still have the the original iPhone mhm it for me it's no surprise because I I have all kinds of old technology that no one cares about and it's defunct including of all things would you believe that I have the Pearl backup camera license PL frame frame plate thing that was done by Form op Engineers oh well there you go I have one of those things boy yeah very cool product by the way it's it's too bad that it hasn't worked out for them but uh the iPhone did work out so the iPhone set a number of different Revolutions in motion the iPhone was was based on things that existed before it obviously but at the same time it put them together in a way that was unique that we hadn't had before you know we'd had we'd had touch screens before we'd had capacitive touch surfaces before which Apple bought in order to make the touch screen the uh the touchworks guys made keyboard replacements for Macs that uh used capacitance touch and could do 10 fingers at a time the we had app stores before I had Nokia phone with an app store on it um but none of these things were actually human approachable they they weren't very good and and at the introduction of the iPhone I knew I had to have it when when I was at Mac R when it launched it was clear that it was it was absolutely the next phone I was going to have at the same time I I had a manager that I worked for back then who insisted that he was never going to get an iPhone that it wasn't ready for consumption because it didn't have picture messaging it didn't have MMS therefore it wasn't okay right and he he eventually came around but to to my great uh great embarrassment he put up a blog post on the company blog stating why he was not going to get an iPhone well it's important to remember for people too that that first iPhone as as revolutionary as it was was not exactly a breakout success it took a few years really for Apple to get to the point where uh it was a phenomenon I think they sold 1 million iPhones in the first year um that that first design was only ran on 2G networks it was slow internet it didn't have uh messaging uh picture messaging capabilities it didn't record video no stop stop right there you say slow internet but you have to remember that before that we were on GPRS my Nokia with an app store was on a GPRS Network that was slow internet the the 2G network was fast for the time well that was actually what I used my and that was my 10-year piece that I published today that people can see on Apple Insider my first experience with the iPhone was I was on uh T-mobile I had been a customer since the voice stream days because it was cheap and so I waited until the iPhone not only dropped in price by $200 because they had overpriced it when they launched but I also um waited till the hackers had jail broken it and so it was probably that September I think after it came out that I bought my first iPhone um and I used that thing for 4 years I guess it was until I replaced it um but I used it on T-Mobile's uh GPRS WAP Network which was basically a hack for port forwarding where it was taking um HTTP data uh and foring it was running everything through Port 80 essentially so um uh any apps or any services that were using another Port that the phone was hacked to run it through there and the reason I did that is because on T-Mobile uh that internet service the base bone barebones internet service was $5 a month and that was all I could afford and and WAP for readers for listeners who don't know WAP and wml were a a sort of uh web application way of providing the internet to feature phones and flip phones yes the the goal was to be able to reformat web pages for flip phones and be able to use the two yes no kind of buttons at the top of the flip phone pad and the way that the carriers the way the carriers got away with with offering that barebone service was they only allowed one port to go through and so when you wanted to access services that were something other than a website they didn't work right but the the traffic was so limited anyway because all you were doing was loading straight HTML and all of it was machine processed by uh websphere oh it was it was web websphere machine translation because web spere Mach machine translation ran in the background on a server somewhere at the carrier mhm and would take the big real web page for the desktop and realize that the requesting device was a flip phone that could only handle monochrome jpeg at the very most right and it would suck it in and reformat everything for that tiny device right and uh so I I was at IBM in 20002 2001 and worked on websphere and that's what was running in the background to support WAP for all of those things and so you only had open port 80 because that's all of the HTTP traffic right but non HTTP Services worked when I when I jailbroke my phone because it fored all traffic through it yeah that was unintentional that was well that was that was unethical is what it was really it was not what te- intended when they were selling me a $5 service but you know at the time I was I was a year out of college I had I wasn't making very much money that's for sure I couldn't afford you know these data plans it's easy to forget now because everybody just pays for them and that's it but like you know there was a time where you didn't pay uh 50 plus doar a month to have a phone with a data plan you you right right but back then data was was cheap but voice and SMS were exorbitantly expensive no data wasn't cheap back then no way it was it was like $35 a month to add a data plan on okay but you were you were doing you know your $5 plan yes I was that was something I could that I could swallow but your voice and your SMS were ridiculous Yeah well yeah you had limited minutes um but if you were calling another T-Mobile customer for example then you know they had all these like gimmics and stuff but yeah back then you paid for the minutes and you paid for the text messages now well we we should clarify in America you played paid for the text messages in Europe we are talking about the Ione launch it launched first in America so yeah but so there's there's all the whole different Market kind of thing right in in the US voice was cheap and SMS was exorbitant right relatively let's say and in Europe voice was very expensive and SMS was cheap and so there were a number of of European users who got very good at T9 texting input and Americans never did because the econ you know the economics never forced us to right yeah and that's why Twitter is limited to 140 characters is because Twitter initially launched as a service that you would use by posting through SMS which is the limitation on SMS messages MH and so there were a number of Europeans in in 2007 2006 and 2007 tweeting using SMS using T9 text input to do it and you know that's that's the iPhone changed all of this because the iPhone made text messaging easier for Americans you have a real keyboard you have a keyboard that adjusts to your input because it's a graphical keyboard instead of a fixed keyboard you have you know and before that if you an American and you were doing text messages you were a Blackberry user how long long did you keep your first iPhone as your primary phone uh not very long and that was by virtue of my next employer uh I worked for Griffin maker of fine iPhone cases everywhere at the time and at Griffin I I cobbled together a iPhone 3G out of parts that had been dissected to to you know evaluate what was going on inside with the antenna mhm cuz one of the products back then was a case that you put on your your first iPhone and it passively coupled to the antenna in the original iPhone and gave you better signal strength I remember it sounds it sounds like Voodoo I know but because they mirrored the exact shape of the antenna in the case as was on the inside of the phone they passively coupled and they were able to boost the signal reception of the uh the iPhone so you're saying it's better than those stickers that used to get a that a gas station that put under the battery on your on your kind of theory except that those stickers don't match the size and shape of the antenna that's in your phone so they don't actually work when you copy the shape properly it does make a difference all right well we don't need to get into antenna gate but uh but but never mind that so so you know we had we had they had taken AP part on the bench an iPhone 3G to make decide if it was worth evaluating and making the product for the 3G and the result was that it commercially didn't make sense because people didn't buy it exactly because of the gas station Commercial and so they left the iPhone in Parts on the bench and I I got crafty one afternoon and went and reassembled it and used that phone as my primary phone for reassembled iPhone 3G yes got it so did you at any point I mean I know you've dabbled with uh Android phones for work and stuff over the years at any point since getting the first iPhone have you um switch your primary phone to be anything other than an iPhone I have used an Android phone when traveling mhm you know I I was in Israel for a month last December and a couple of weeks last summer and uh I used the the Huawei Nexus 6p as the primary phone while traveling and was that because it was unlocked and it was easier to get service internationally what was what was the justification behind that uh the justification behind that was I could drop a Sim in it and have it work without taking the Sim out of my iPhone MH um I could have used the Sim in the iPhone but then I wouldn't have gotten calls or messages or iMessages on the American number got it so it was a matter of of not losing the US communication at the same time the because see you don't have this because you're a T-Mobile customer but if you're a Verizon no no but as a Verizon user in the US all Verizon handsets are unlocked by by default there are no sim locks on Verizon handsets so I could have dropped the Sim in without question uh T-mobile customers in the US the handsets are locked T-Mobile and there are a number of conditions that have to be met for them to consider unlocking them well when the iPhone first launched it was it was locked down I mean oh yeah they were all lock well the iPhone initially launched on AT&T and Singular Wireless singular or Wireless at the announcement but AT&T by the time it Chang The Branding yes by the time it launched well they got bought they they changed the branding and then all of the baby bells started getting swallowed up again right even though the new AT&T is not the original AT&T they're actually different companies well yes but AT&T what are you going to do the uh but you know it's no longer Bell South Bell South begat singular begat AT&T right right there's there's no uh Mid-Atlantic Bell or Bell Atlantic as it were uh there is there's no South Pacific Bell or or SBC right X yeah you know all all of these things they all changed well it's important that for people to remember that the first iPhone the reason that it was locked down and was on AT&T was because Apple was new to the smartphone business they were they had never done anything like this before and they had a very different approach carriers have always had the power they have the power to put apps on your phone to put their logo on it to all that kind of stuff and Steve Jobs wasn't going to take any of that crap that that just wasn't his style right and so in order to get the Leverage to be able to do what they wanted with the iPhone which was ship it without any apps being forced on it nothing being shoved down the customer's throat no logos on it from anything other than Apple they agreed to basically sell their soul to AT&T and so the irony of it is I it's a story before that story actually okay so F first of all at one point they were considering building their own network they were considering doing you know whether or not to do an mvno and and like you know L's bandwidth leas service from other people or to just literally build their own network and roll out that's impractical it was totally impractical and at the time in their history they didn't have the bank that they do now that was never going to happen ever there there was no practical way to pull that off they went to Verizon and they rocked up at Verizon and at this time all they had was you know barely a prototype it didn't have an iOS as such on it they had the motor rocker well no never mind the motor rocker the the motor roer was one of the things that convinced them they had to do this if you look back at the Apple Insider archives going back to this time frame you will find that there are a number of rumors back then about touchscreen tablets right CU that's what they were working on and and you know people talked about well there were there were tablets available that were modified MacBooks that instead of uh traditional MacBook they flipped the screen over and put a Wacom surface on it yeah and turned it into something called a mod book this was not what Apple was bu building Apple was working on building the first iPad and after the the disappointment of the Moto rocker they shifted gears and were convinced to build the phone instead right but we had the rumors way back then about what this was becoming so they they they showed up at Verizon and when the problem is this right you show up for a meeting at at the cell phone company and you're meeting these Executives and trying to talk to them about taking your handset and it's not just like talking to the buyers who who shop access and and stock accessories into the stores you're meeting you know High powerered people M and they wear suits and you're from Southern California and you show up in t-shirt and jeans there's already a culture clash and and the ability to not be taken seriously especially when your phone prototype isn't running your final OS so you don't have a whole lot to really demonstrate tels are the worst this wasn't just a culture Clash this is this is a uh a culture of crummy companies that's what it is fair enough but so they they showed up at Verizon and Verizon said um first of all your stuff doesn't even work right second of all you've got nothing to demonstrate to us that we can actually see and third of all you know you're not taking us seriously you're in t-shirts you know there's just you're and fourth of all you're not going to give us any kind of control or branding on the phone every Verizon phone sold had the Verizon branding on it and we're not going to put that on there take a hike get out of here so they went to AT&T and AT&T despite them rocking up in t-shirts despite them showing up without anything to demonstrate because even as recently as December before the January keynote they did not have enough iOS built to demonstrate for the carrier it was it was that down to the wire the um you know they they were still showing I think the uh the the sort of testing kind of M thing and saying look it's going to be a phone you know and they got AT&T to agree to no branding they got singular rather to agree to no branding but uh by the time the phone had launched singular was gone and the executive that had been on stage for the keynote in January was no longer even at singular he didn't make it to the n&t transa transition it it happened kind of accidentally but everything worked out for the best for Apple because not only did they get control of the platform and really get to stand out in a certain way that other companies just didn't have the leverage to do and of course they had to sell their soul in order to do that and they were stuck with AT&T for forever uh but also because they were with AT&T it was a GSM phone which meant that as they did their International expansion it worked well because if they had started out partnering with Verizon they would have had to completely redo the the architecture of the phone in order to do International expansion because Verizon runs on CDMA and that's not really a very popular uh Wireless form factor frequency whatever you want to call it inter countries that use that kind it's uh so that's code division multiplexing right is is what CDMA stands for and so Verizon is unique in that way that they run something that almost nobody else runs and so by actually partnering with AT&T that allowed Apple to very uh easily roll out internationally as they started to launch the iPhone in more countries as the years went on and so that's why it was a big deal when the when the iPhone first launched uh on Verizon not until 2011 uh that was is the first time that you could actually use an iPhone on Verizon because unlike myself jailbreaking and running on T-Mobile because T-Mobile was a GSM network there was no version of the iPhone that had Hardware compatibility with Verizon Apple had to make and redesign the entire internal of the phone to have a CDMA uh radio in it so um that that had to go to Qualcomm because Qualcomm owns a lot of the patents around CDMA right so the the irony of it is by by partnering with AT&T it worked out very well for Apple because all the carriers internationally that run a GSM it was very simple for them to get the right frequencies and to and to launch on their networks and if they had gone with Verizon you know who knows revision is history but things could have gone very differently it could have been a major technical hurdle for them to uh expand internationally and to make two models of the iPhone especially the position the company was in and and you got to remember the first year of the iPhone that first generation model they only sold like a million in that first year it didn't really take off so uh you know if they had to uh to make more aggressive moves at the start there it could have been a very different picture and you could be we could be having a very different conversation right now yeah so the the thing to know I mean there there's two things I want to do first I want to ask you what were your your core applications and core uses of the iPhone as it first launched well um for me uh there was a lot of tinkering with it because I bought it the day that the jailbreak and um uh T-mobile hack were announced so I went to the T&T Store I brought it home and there was no they hadn't like uh streamlined the process so I had to SSH from a Windows computer they didn't even have it available for Mac at that point I had s from Windows computer uh type in some terminal commands to to hack it break it open and so a lot of my experience um with the first year the iPhone um because you got to remember the App Store didn't launch until the summer of 2008 when the 3G launched so there was no app store for that first year so a lot of my experience with the iPhone was actually uh messing around as developers started to create their own unofficial third party apps I know that jailbreaking years later developed a reputation for people just stealing apps from the App Store but in the beginning it was a very exciting time um and one of the first apps that I installed on my phone that I would show to people and was really impressive was uh uh and this is going to get really confusing because there's a different version of the Microsoft Surface now but back then Microsoft announced a product called the surface that was a big table coffee table and uh one of the demos that they had that people were really excited about was a use of multi-touch where they had had photos on the table and they were like showing them off and you could resize them and slide them around and so some very enterprising developer uh that was you know early on in the iPhone and in the jailbreak Community made an app uh before the App Store was out that replicated what they did on the Microsoft Surface table and it was simple I mean now you think about it it's like well that's stupid but at the time it was like mind-blowing and so I had photos that I had taken and they were all just kind of laid out on the screen like they were on a table and you could slide them around and then pinch and expand and make them bigger or smaller and I mean it was such a small thing but it was just so cool and then um another one was somebody made one of those you know those Labyrinth games where you got like a marble and you got to roll it around somebody did that with the gyroscope on the phone and it was like it was a very rudimentary thing but uh you know and so not only did I have an iPhone but I was doing things with an iPhone that other people couldn't do so I had a lot of fun um you know modifying things you know adding wallpaper uh you know even like putting the T-Mobile logo up in the corner and stuff like that things things that you weren't supposed to be able to do yeah and that's that's what people did so back then there was a time when people liked to add ring tones or liked to create ring tones and and apple even created a ringtone maker within iTunes that honestly I wish they'd kept I wish they'd never taken that out of iTunes because that was pretty cool um they they sort of later shoehorned into Garage Band and it got worse they they had um this was a time when people liked to theme and customize things my phones before the iPhone were an Ericson a Sony Ericson t616 which I bought because it said it worked with isync and it did and I was able to change the wallpaper to look like the OS 10 10.3 uh wallpaper but that kind of Novel stuff was exciting at the time because all this technology was new it was like um you never be able to do anything like that people downloaded the big boss repo or Cydia for for uh iPhone jailbreak just to be able to load theme right now what I wanted to get to was that the the iPhone deserves some credit for another point and people don't really think of this a whole lot people don't really say this out loud a whole lot and that is we've had 10 years of this thing right and in 10 years ignoring jailbreaking there has been no widespread malware that has affected this thing mhm there there they have been exploits right there have been uh there there have been some exploits that we've talked about that law enforcement for example likes to use against specific phones but they have to have physical access to the phone so right but there there have there there have been occasional thing right there's been a worm here or or one there but there been apps that have been compromised mhm but there's been no widespread crippling malware vulnerability yeah I mean the worst thing that you have on on the iPhone that happened and it was really just sort of something that people did as a joke was there was a string of characters that you could send via text message that would crash the phone and that was you know three or four years ago or whatever it was and that went around and it was patched almost immediately but it was like something people did to like prank their friends like haha going to crash your phone here but I mean that's really the worst of it that I can think of I mean we talk about computers and and we talk about computers we talk about traditional computers and there's you know there's there's been viruses for years worms and Trojans for years years the latest thing has been this this terrible uh thing where where you know like wan to cry or the the other one where they encrypt your data right and then ransomware it back right and the the iPhone and other iOS devices have not been Afflicted with anything like that in 10 years of History that's kind of that's that's incredibly noteworthy isn't it absolutely yeah you know we we've talked in the past about how this is the future of computing and how Apple sees it as the future of Computing and the idea that your device is you know not not to make too much of it but let's say nearly impervious right so far is pretty incredible I I mean I think that that alone is I mean you can talk about all the things that the iPhone changed and it changed a lot of things but I think that the security of the platform and the ease of use it is something that we will feel for decades to come because you know we've talked about uh you know like how I I want to get more on the iPad I want to be exclusively Computing on the iPad I've been pushing my parents to just use their iPad because I know it's a secure platform when I go on their Windows computers I don't know what they've installed and I got to fix things and they end up with you know all kinds of junk on there even to this day you know with with as as much better as Windows has gotten compared to the XP days and stuff and it's still like I tell my parents I got my dad the the new $330 iPad and I got him a keyboard it's like please just stick on this I know you can't screw it up you're not going to install anything that bad you're not going to you're not going to break anything you're not going to get hacked you're not going to have it really it's a game Cher for if you put them on Windows 10 on the the whatever starter version they call it that only allows them to install applications from the Microsoft store yeah great won't they won't they similarly be okay I think they're still on Windows 7 I told them not to upgrade because I didn't feel like explain to them how Windows 10 worked because they don't do very well with change so yeah I mean okay so you can hand them an iPad instead I got it so I my dad has an iPad and I keep telling my mom to get an iPad I'm like Mom your life would be so much easier with an iPad cuz they just don't like cuz they don't you know you think about what computers are for now right the the Mac the PC whatever it's power user stuff right and you wonder how many people are on a computer using keyboard shortcuts I use them you know I'm command tabbing uh and I'm you know command T to open a new tab in a window and I'm you know you know whatever else you're doing right you got all these keyboard shortcuts uh uh copy paste type stuff whatever how many people use computers and don't even know that that exists many most of them probably and those are the kind of people who for them an iPhone and iPad um is is a better computer and even for somebody like meit stop the train for a second aren you concerned about iOS 11 and the changes that brings to iPad for your parents who don't like change uh no because it's still operates generally the same way so I think that the intuitive sure of iOS makes it so it's not there's not a lot I'm thinking specifically about the doc yeah so the doc is just I mean think about it right so if you have a doc now it still operates the same way the apps stay down there in iOS 11 the dock is there you can swipe up to access it and you can do these multitasking features but if you don't use any of that you just press the home screen and there's apps in the dock just tap on them and they open all right I I don't I don't see it being that big of a deal but that's what I like about the growth of I and you see you see these features coming out now let me take the same question I asked you about you know copy and paste and command tabbing and all that how many people on an iPhone know about the for example uh control center swiping up from the bottom of the screen do you think most people use that or do you think most people do not I feel like that is a 7030 split yeah because there are a number of people that I've seen use it that I I would have been that I was Tech honestly surprised yeah and they were using it for do not disturb for rotation lock flashlight music flashlight is a popular one flashlights a popular one but yeah the thing is and and I agree with you I think more people are using it on an iPhone and even an iPad because it's more intuitive uh than a keyboard shortcut however uh there are probably a significant I would love to see Apple's internal data on this CU you know they've got stuff on this right I would love to see how many of these power user features nobody's using because for us as power users we love this stuff we like it when iOS 11s coming they have a dock and the multitasking all that it's great but the number of people that use it as they get more of these power user features is going to be you know as diminishing returns in many ways um so I I find that very fascinating and I find it uh exciting as as they as they grow this but for a lot of people I don't even think it matters yeah you know this is the you know that they have data on this right that's why dashboard has kind of Gone by the wayside on the Mac right no no one was using it but me yeah and I I have to say you know we we've sort of been talking around all of this but for me this this particular episode is kind of a a love letter to Andy grian Andy ggan was on the first iPhone team M he was he he played a huge role in the first iPhone um he spoke recently uh with a bunch of of other people who developed the iPhone about the development of the original one he the one he related the story about the drinking game at the original iPhone keynote where every time a feature worked and it didn't crash they took a drink in the front row um and he was also the guy that was behind dashboard on the Mac so so everything we're talking around here I mean Andy was at the center of that and uh I I think he said recently that the first iPhone was the reason that his marriage failed it's it's a huge thing trying to push out a revolutionary product like that and um you know we shouldn't forget the developers that were behind it the the people that really gave serious parts of their lives to this whole kind of thing we're we're benefiting from this as users but it's um there there is definitely a large number of of humans making it come together and it's not just the software it's the hardware I mean there were so many different pieces that had to come together to make this the game Cher that it was and still is in so many ways I think the irony of it is after 10 years uh the the feature that is now less important than ever on the iPhone is the fact that it's a phone oh yeah and you know that was the when I asked you which features caused you to purchase the the original thing the visual voicemail was my see I didn't get that I I I couldn't get that because that was AT&T yeah yeah but visual voicemail I took one look at that and realized that I could fast forward through messages and that I could listen to them asynchronously I would never have to press four S or nine again in my life four was delete message seven was reverse message or rewind and nine was fast forward to the next message to not have to ever deal with that again and be able to see who had called and take them in the order that I wanted to was hugely important to me I had never even owned a smartphone before the iPhone so for me just the ability to text people without having to do the T9 texting was pretty awesome um and and obviously the ability to browse the web from wherever was incredible oh I had two different Nokia Symbian I yeah i' I'd been doing you know the the first iPhone the first iPhone didn't even have GPS but it could triangulate your location uh through cell towers so I remember I uh was visiting New York and I didn't know how to navigate the Subways and it still knew exactly where I was even though it didn't even have GPS in it I mean it was it was it was gamechanging oh I used that to navigate from the middle of nowhere in Virginia so I went on a road trip I had two weddings in the same week um not my own obviously I I went to a wedding in Ohio and then while I was in Ohio a friend from high school said hey I'm getting married can you come and so I I'd driven up there carped so I rented a car on the way back and drove into the middle of nowhere in Virginia literally I I miles away from any major road and I I you know it was the directions for for getting there were you know go down this road then turn on this dirt road then turn on this this Trail and cross a railroad track and you'll know when you've gone 2 miles you've gone too far kind of thing mhm and I got there and they had the wedding and we all went to out to dinner and that was kind of it it was it was a very small thing very on the Fly and so then I'm driving back in the middle of the night no earthly idea where I am and the only things got in the car for tools are the iPhone the iPhone's compass and the maps and there's no signal and so I a blue dot in a in a sea of graph paper trying to navigate Country Roads that aren't very well marked and you know County Road this and and State Road that and state roads are nice because state roads are bigger but but County Road that you have no idea where it goes right mhm and I just kept turning south and east south and east and occasionally a map would load on the screen and I'd be holding on to it for dear life by about like 2:00 a.m. I hit a road that I recognized the numon and I just stayed on that thing the whole way and it was it was one lane each way with you know people's mailboxes right up to the side of the road and eventually I got back to civilization but it was it was uh a lifesaver oh yeah I I don't know you know map Reading is a skill that I think is gone by the wayside right we used to have paper maps and we used to know how to look at them and navigate them and to be able to do that in the car as a co-pilot or when I was in when I lived in Israel I drove a scooter and I would drive to Jerusalem or hia or you know all all these places on the scooter and I had a map and I would pull it out and read and and then you know navigate and go and now no one reads the map we just have turn-by-turn directions that tell us where to be could you go back to navigating with a paper map uh I could but I I think there's a whole generation of people that will have no idea so there there's you know we talk about all the the industries that were shaken up and and things that are gone because the iPhone there's one I never thought of the companies that would print paper maps for AAA well Maps like the AAA Maps or or you know Rand MCN remember Rand MCN you know the these companies were were map makers but I don't know that they were other ever considered especially valuable right right but companies like navon uh um you know TomTom uh Nokia who had all that map data mhm that became hugely valuable Google didn't want to pay for any of that map data so they went out and they mapped the world on their own right MH yeah apple still licenses from TomTom and companies like that for their Maps Apple still licenses from TomTom even though they're also now driving the world the the value of maps went up immensely you know Nokia's Maps sold to that conglomerate of car owners right manufacturers mhm I think Mercedes was among that list uh you know who Whoever thought that Maps would become that important but it has I've got my first iPhone in my hand here and when I pull up maps uh aside from being astonished that it can actually get my location even though it doesn't have a GPS and by the way I charged this thing like 4 days ago and it's still at 60% so that's pretty impressive I mean it's not like I've been doing much with it but the one thing is if you zoom a 10e battery too so yeah if you if you zoom at just the right level where it's out enough but in that they have enough like landmarks and whatever the the low resolution screen is so bad and like you can't you literally cannot read these fonts they're so bad you zoom in a little gets bigger and then it's fine but there's a certain size that it just doesn't work but you know pinching and zooming and and loading the data and all that I mean it still works I mean it's still the same basic experience here we are 10 years later and you know it's just as impressive when you think about it compared to what was there before as it was then I mean it's it's here it is all on this first device right in my hand yeah and you're using the Google Maps data there too which eventually Apple went to war with Google over yeah but it's got It's got my actual location down to it even has the Privacy thing I just tap to get my location it says Google Maps would like to access your location and it's like it's got me right on my street corner it's it's got everything here it's it's uh all it's it's really impressive what you ought to do Neil you ought to put a SIM card in that thing and use it as your primary phone for a week so that's the problem first of all I think that AT&T stopped supporting the first iPhone like with um whatever data it was connecting to networ but also um the SIM cards are no longer that full size they're they're micro SIM they're adapters come on I'm sure that they're adapters I would what I could do is bring it with me and keep my phone in my my primary iPhone in my pocket and then just tether this to it I could do it like um uh fancy iPod Touch yeah exactly but I mean that's all you really need is is just a data connection for it and you can do whatever you want well it won't get SMS because it doesn't have iMessage that's true that is true I would lose all my text messages that would be very difficult to do I'm saying cool well let's let's keep going here I'm going to do a quick ad read I want to let you all know about Shutterstock support for today's show comes from Shutterstock every business needs highquality images to attract and keep customers and whether you're making brochures or advertisements or putting the final touch on your next tweet the visuals that you choose are proven to make a big difference get started today with a 20% discount at shutterstock.com appleinsider we should talk a little bit about qualcom okay so Qualcomm has demonstrated an underd display ultrasonic fingerprint sensor that they are saying will be ready for Consumer devices for use in the summer of 2018 that is next summer yeah and so these These are fingerprint sensing devices that work under the display on the front they work under aluminum and glass on the back they can be used in in you know any kind of orientation there that the the the the details are that it has to be through either 650 micrometers of aluminum or 800 microm of glass and will work under 1200 microm of OLED display each use of material gets a slightly different sensor but the thickness of the material matters in order for it to be read through um it can also detect heartbeat and blood flow so you can see is the fingerprint real is it a live fingerprint and also you could pick up you know medical information out of it if you needed to um Qualcomm says that they're using a trusted execution environment which sounds a lot like apple secure Enclave but however it doesn't have to necessarily be encrypted into to end um they're going to work with Snapdragon 630 and 660 processors and Qualcomm has stated that it will support non- Snapdragon platforms as well we've seen this before how many countless times have we seen this Apple's rumored to be working on something and everybody's rushing to Market to get it out before Apple so they can beat it that's really all this is um they've pre-announced something that is going to come in the summer of 2018 there were some Hands-On impressions of this thing this week that said it's very slow um and really all this is is Qualcomm reading the te leaves and just knowing where the where things are heading and trying to get a jump on it that's all it is we've seen this with wearables we saw it when there was a false alarm with TVs when people thought that Apple was going to make a TV we saw it with smartphones after the iPhone was anounced and people saw what it was and Android completely changed Direction and what it was doing we saw it with tablets when Apple was rumored of getting into the tablet business everybody was pushing out these tablets you know we've seen it over and over and over again now now you see it with you know wireless headphones and stuff too this is no different this is the same song and dance that's happened before the difference is this thing isn't even shipping until 2018 summer of 2018 Apple's rumored to be doing their version of this this fall and none of us know how well it's going to work or what it is until Apple announces it not even let's take a different spin on this quickly okay different spin is that people follow apple and people jump where they think Apple's going to go next and we end up getting product categories that are totally different than than we would have had if people hadn't suspected Apple were going to do this right and I think this is a good thing no it's a very good thing it's just it's funny how transparent it is okay so is Apple dictating things without Apple's name even being mentioned great let's move on to the next one you have a public service announcement you want to talk about external GPU compatibility yeah so I was looking into I I I would like to get a new Macbook Pro I would like to mess around with Apple's egpu capabilities for those of you who don't know external graphics cards are going to be supported in High Sierra but it requires an external monitor uh because it doesn't have the bandwidth in Thunderbolt to Loop it back into the the screen on your iMac or your MacBook Pro or what have you so you have to have this external graphics card powered by Thunderbolt 3 but then you have to have a monitor there are only two monitors on the market right now that are in Mass availability that uh qualify as retina caliber uh monitors uh and those are the LG ultrafine monitors the 21.5 in uh 4K and the 27 in 5K they're the exact same resolution and size as the iMac the problem with that is the 21.5 in is driven by USBC and the 27 in is driven by Thunderbolt 3 and you need to have mini display port for any those are display port or HDMI yep so if you actually want to use an external monitor uh you're actually going to with the egpu you're going to be stuck with a lower uh pixel density than you would have on the built-in monitor on your MacBook Pro which seems kind of silly to me to have this gorgeous screen and then not use it right so what you need is a graphics adapter that has mini display port on it which yeah or or hold up hold up do any of the other adapters have regular display port on them there is there is no way to get any display port signal into either of the LG ultrafine monitors you can't you can't do display port to mini display port they they only have USBC or Thunderbolt 3 input there is no display port input on them all right I'm just ah it's frustrating so you know hopefully this is something that the Market is going to address going forward there is a graphics card uh that was announced by one company that is going to offer USBC out but it is not yeah the Micro Star One MSI but that is the only one that's been announced nobody else has shown much interest in it because it's not the default for monitors and the ones that uh that are compatible that do um you know uh mini display port or whatever are 24in 4K monitors which have a pixel density of around 180 uh pixels per inch which is considerably lower than uh the 200 20 pixels per inch that is Apple's retina standard on a Mac okay so the point is wait until this comes together correct it's it's in beta um until early or spring 2018 the egpu feature wait till there are more graphics cards available wait till there are better monitors available Apple's going to be making their own external monitors they're getting back into that business so if you want to dabble right now you know I mean it's there are some nice monitors out there that you could use but uh it's not going to be that great of an experience um and it's going to be expensive you're better off waiting until next spring okay Logitech slim combo SMART connector keyboard uh I we talked about this a little last week just to touch on it very briefly published our review I you know I don't hate it it's not a product for me if you like to turn your iPad into a laptop um and you don't really mind the bulk that's fine I don't understand why they have this like lip around the outside of the case that goes on the iPad itself um I think they kind of messed up with that I gave it three out of five stars I think that there's a market of people out there that will really really like this keyboard and be very happy with it and if you know those flaws going into it then you know I saw some people in the comments were very happy with this product uh and then it's the perfect keyboard for them that's fine but I think a lot of people will be upset that it adds so much bulk to their iPad and kind of defeats the purpose of the slimness of the device okay the 2017 MacBook Pro yeah that just kind of Loops back into what we were talking about with the external graphics cards we published our review this week uh Dan tested out the new Macbook Pro um and Max uh our video guy also did some benchmarks and tested them out uh the new processors are more powerful than expected from Intel and they do a pretty good job of boosting and really justifying the uh the redesign Thunderbolt 3 and all that sort of stuff so pretty exciting uh time for the MacBook um you know especially these higher-end touch bar models uh and a good time to buy if if you're looking for a new Mac okay the hover drone yeah uh so Mike did a review for us I had tested this product out uh last year as well um it's portable it folds up it's cool it's got a 4k camera um it's good for like taking selfies or something that you want to take with you like you know you're going hiking or something and you don't want to carry a big drone with you but uh it's a little pricey at 500 bucks I can't really justify at that price and Mike felt kind of the same way especially with the DJI spark available now uh that's so portable and priced the same and and so much more powerful uh I think between hover and DJI you're going to buy DJI yeah I think if they drop if they could if they could drop this thing to three even $400 it' be a much better value Apple's pushing this thing hard it's a Apple Store exclusive I was the Soho Apple store the other day and they had a big display for it it was right next to the DJI ones I I think it's a really cool product it launched at like 600 bucks um and it's just too much money um it's more of a toy um but it's cool um and I think that you know if if you can get one on discount it's definitely worth checking out yeah I want to talk a little bit about the lyus velop we've talked about mesh routing before and you know the Linkus velop is one of the best Mesh networking products from a networking standpoint in terms of signal dispersion and signal strength and speed uh Mesh networking is the idea that you have two Wi-Fi radios in each node one to talk to the other nodes to make sure that that the signal is distributed properly and then one side for client radios Network extenders work by having one radio and switching between talking upstream and talking Downstream and the problem with a network extender is that you can both you're you're cutting your speed in half for all of your clients because of this and and also you end up in situations where you have to manually switch between ssids because you have to name them with different ssids in order to make sure you're associating with the one nearest to you if you don't do that if you name them all with the same SSID then you end up in situations where you're associated with one that has weak signal instead of switching to the one that has stronger signal with Mesh networking like Link's velop you keep yourself connected to the strongest one and you don't lose speed in the process uh lyx has had some early teething problems with fir back in January but here in June it's a better product it's it's a refined product the firmware is all fixed and honestly I was very impressed with it what I note is that a lot of our readers go back and forth either not understanding what Mesh networking is not understanding the problems with network extenders or insisting that they're doing it right when all of the manufacturers recommend settings that say you must really use a separate SSID to make this work properly cuz they all know now Apple did extending but Apple always set it the same SSID when they did extend networks and you just lived with the fact that you might get stuck on the one with weaker signal yeah I do that with airport expresses yeah and did you ever find you get stuck on a node that has slightly weak signal compared to your near one yeah each one that you add actually Hales your total um uhand bandwidth but the the truth of that is it doesn't really affect your internet speed it just affects transfer between devices at home because your internet speed is never as fast as the total bandwidth capability of your router so well you you say that that but when you have gigabit it does well I don't have gigabit so ah there you go if you're lucky enough to have gigabit then yeah don't do that but you know for most people it's not going to be an issue there you go so my my summary of ly's velop is good product um slightly clunky to set up and I wish I had had a few more options they wish they could have done a few things better like for instance when you have a provider for your ISP that says You must use their modem end router and they won't let you turn off DHCP on theirs then lynxes should have smartly turned off DHCP on their product and they ask the question and then fail to turn it off so there's a couple of wrinkles but for the most part it's really good so I'll just chime in here and say this is a perfect opportunity Apple I know that you screwed up a littleit with the Mac Pro I know that you're getting back into the game there I know that you're getting back into the monitor game let's get you back in the router game come on baby you know let's let's get let's get a new let's get a new airport express 80211 AC um uh AirPlay 2 come on come on how how is making again going to help their stock value Oh please how how is making monitors going to help their stock value fair enough how is making a Mac Pro going to help their stock value make itter what do they have to prove about making wireless routers again uh here's what they have to prove they don't want companies like dlink making junk that gets people's information stolen or has a a a you know botn net created that takes down a third of the internet let's have reliable products that we can trust in our homes okay fair enough Apple got into Wireless because because Cisco was making it too hard they got out of it because everyone else had made it easy enough your proposition is they get back into it to make security better they never left it they still sell these products they're just not updating them they got to they have to maintain a certain level of quality that you expect setting up routers is a nightmare it still is for most people people go buy these lynxis routers that are Jun the setup the setup on these is not that hard if you follow the steps in the app it takes a few minutes and you end up with a setup that works okay but the the ease has been solved for the most part it's the security that you're right about how many people do you think are running the junk router built into their cable modem provided by Comcast or Time Warner uh unfortunately everyone exactly fix that you're letting crap you got to fix that by by no longer providing by buying the providers of those modems to the cable companies I'm just saying there's you end buying you end up buying Motorola and pace and and oh God all right I'm just saying there's a problem in that market and it needs to be fixed and that is where Apple could step in don't abandon the router Market it's a junk market right now with junk companies pushing their crap on people and people are having bad experiences Apple should stay in the market because they are in the business of making things simple and reliable and trustworthy all right on that note I I want to thank Neil junk Hughes for being on the uh episode 127 to the Apple Insider podcast sir Neil where can we find your junk on the internet you can hopefully my junk isn't on the internet but uh uh you can uh find you can find my musings on appleinsider.com and you can follow me on Twitter at thisis Neil NE L there will be no junk pictures on there ladies I am so sorry hate to disappoint I am so so sorry that's all right I'm I'm Victor Mars and uh you you should check out tapit.com Scout or Scout Tech podcast on iTunes it's a very cool one Neil and iron it you should listen this has been Apple Insider episode 127 and we will see you back next weekyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to this the 127th episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm your host Victor marks and joining me is Neil Hughes Victor how are you I you know I am amazing today I'm a little for Clint today is a very special anniversary for us here Apple Insider it is today is the 6th anniversary of Google+ oh man I am I'm choked up because well you know Google was revolutionary go+ took all of these disperate Google offerings it took it took photos it took uh it it took Google Plus The Social Network which came out of of the ashes of Google buzz it took YouTube it took Hangouts it took everything and it combined every Gmail account into this one one platform across all the services of and all of the offerings it really it it revolutionized what a digital Hub that Google has been for for us and this this June 29th where we're recording this is the 6th anniversary and Vic gutra brought it all forward for us I I realize you're being factious because for those listening this is actually the 10th anniversary of the first iPhone but before we get to that I will say ruin everything I was going to have fun with that I I will say that uh Google uh plus uh does have a special place in my heart and not ironically um because uh about 5 years ago when I gotri married um at the wedding we used Google+ for people to share and upload photos so you could have a collection of photos privately in the same place and so um this was before Facebook events was like really a big thing or now everybody uses like hashtags on Instagram to be able to find all the pictures so uh what we did was we printed up uh cards that were at everybody's uh place at setting at the um uh at the reception but also like went out in a email that went out prior to the ceremony as well and it was like here are the instructions and what was funny was I wrote Google+ is kind of like Facebook except nobody uses it cuz I was explaining you know to a bunch of people that have no idea what any of what what is the concept of go+ right and so you know basically um we we used it um there and it worked out great we got thousands of photos from you know all the people that were in attendance at the wedding and uh it was a really great and now you know like I said everybody's just got Instagram hashtags and stuff like that but this wasn't um that wasn't much of a as much of a thing back then and Google photos uh in um go+ was actually kind of ahead of its time it was the one feature of Google+ that was actually very good so go+ set out to become the better than Facebook and that was their actual stated intention was we're going to be like Facebook but better and the better part was that they said in in Facebook you're one person and all of your friends are all equal friends and they can all see what each other sees which doesn't work and their their their example was this really sort of embarrassing example right they said what if you're a school teacher and you're friends with your students but you're also friends with your your friends from the bar mhm and you want to and you don't want your students seeing your friends from the bar because you'd like to stay employed and Facebook eventually added all these features anyhow and the truth the truth of a social network is it the features don't matter if there's nobody there yes yeah the well that's that's uh literally called the network effect right yes and and so Google Plus's standpoint was that you You' separate your your lives into these different circles and you'd have your circle of bar friends and your circle of students and they would never meet and of course it it totally worked out for them because no one put anyone into circles and therefore they absolutely never met but uh photos still does this cool thing where they do the the remember when the throwback pictures and they'll assemble neat montages for you out of the picture that you have to the point where if you had a bunch of pictures taken in Rapid succession they'll even turn that into an animated gif right and the inventor of it calls it gif I don't care I know you don't the uh well let's talk about something that people actually do use and that's the iPhone right so you know this this is interesting and I was we've had 10 years of iPhone mhm today and you and I both used and both still have the the original iPhone mhm it for me it's no surprise because I I have all kinds of old technology that no one cares about and it's defunct including of all things would you believe that I have the Pearl backup camera license PL frame frame plate thing that was done by Form op Engineers oh well there you go I have one of those things boy yeah very cool product by the way it's it's too bad that it hasn't worked out for them but uh the iPhone did work out so the iPhone set a number of different Revolutions in motion the iPhone was was based on things that existed before it obviously but at the same time it put them together in a way that was unique that we hadn't had before you know we'd had we'd had touch screens before we'd had capacitive touch surfaces before which Apple bought in order to make the touch screen the uh the touchworks guys made keyboard replacements for Macs that uh used capacitance touch and could do 10 fingers at a time the we had app stores before I had Nokia phone with an app store on it um but none of these things were actually human approachable they they weren't very good and and at the introduction of the iPhone I knew I had to have it when when I was at Mac R when it launched it was clear that it was it was absolutely the next phone I was going to have at the same time I I had a manager that I worked for back then who insisted that he was never going to get an iPhone that it wasn't ready for consumption because it didn't have picture messaging it didn't have MMS therefore it wasn't okay right and he he eventually came around but to to my great uh great embarrassment he put up a blog post on the company blog stating why he was not going to get an iPhone well it's important to remember for people too that that first iPhone as as revolutionary as it was was not exactly a breakout success it took a few years really for Apple to get to the point where uh it was a phenomenon I think they sold 1 million iPhones in the first year um that that first design was only ran on 2G networks it was slow internet it didn't have uh messaging uh picture messaging capabilities it didn't record video no stop stop right there you say slow internet but you have to remember that before that we were on GPRS my Nokia with an app store was on a GPRS Network that was slow internet the the 2G network was fast for the time well that was actually what I used my and that was my 10-year piece that I published today that people can see on Apple Insider my first experience with the iPhone was I was on uh T-mobile I had been a customer since the voice stream days because it was cheap and so I waited until the iPhone not only dropped in price by $200 because they had overpriced it when they launched but I also um waited till the hackers had jail broken it and so it was probably that September I think after it came out that I bought my first iPhone um and I used that thing for 4 years I guess it was until I replaced it um but I used it on T-Mobile's uh GPRS WAP Network which was basically a hack for port forwarding where it was taking um HTTP data uh and foring it was running everything through Port 80 essentially so um uh any apps or any services that were using another Port that the phone was hacked to run it through there and the reason I did that is because on T-Mobile uh that internet service the base bone barebones internet service was $5 a month and that was all I could afford and and WAP for readers for listeners who don't know WAP and wml were a a sort of uh web application way of providing the internet to feature phones and flip phones yes the the goal was to be able to reformat web pages for flip phones and be able to use the two yes no kind of buttons at the top of the flip phone pad and the way that the carriers the way the carriers got away with with offering that barebone service was they only allowed one port to go through and so when you wanted to access services that were something other than a website they didn't work right but the the traffic was so limited anyway because all you were doing was loading straight HTML and all of it was machine processed by uh websphere oh it was it was web websphere machine translation because web spere Mach machine translation ran in the background on a server somewhere at the carrier mhm and would take the big real web page for the desktop and realize that the requesting device was a flip phone that could only handle monochrome jpeg at the very most right and it would suck it in and reformat everything for that tiny device right and uh so I I was at IBM in 20002 2001 and worked on websphere and that's what was running in the background to support WAP for all of those things and so you only had open port 80 because that's all of the HTTP traffic right but non HTTP Services worked when I when I jailbroke my phone because it fored all traffic through it yeah that was unintentional that was well that was that was unethical is what it was really it was not what te- intended when they were selling me a $5 service but you know at the time I was I was a year out of college I had I wasn't making very much money that's for sure I couldn't afford you know these data plans it's easy to forget now because everybody just pays for them and that's it but like you know there was a time where you didn't pay uh 50 plus doar a month to have a phone with a data plan you you right right but back then data was was cheap but voice and SMS were exorbitantly expensive no data wasn't cheap back then no way it was it was like $35 a month to add a data plan on okay but you were you were doing you know your $5 plan yes I was that was something I could that I could swallow but your voice and your SMS were ridiculous Yeah well yeah you had limited minutes um but if you were calling another T-Mobile customer for example then you know they had all these like gimmics and stuff but yeah back then you paid for the minutes and you paid for the text messages now well we we should clarify in America you played paid for the text messages in Europe we are talking about the Ione launch it launched first in America so yeah but so there's there's all the whole different Market kind of thing right in in the US voice was cheap and SMS was exorbitant right relatively let's say and in Europe voice was very expensive and SMS was cheap and so there were a number of of European users who got very good at T9 texting input and Americans never did because the econ you know the economics never forced us to right yeah and that's why Twitter is limited to 140 characters is because Twitter initially launched as a service that you would use by posting through SMS which is the limitation on SMS messages MH and so there were a number of Europeans in in 2007 2006 and 2007 tweeting using SMS using T9 text input to do it and you know that's that's the iPhone changed all of this because the iPhone made text messaging easier for Americans you have a real keyboard you have a keyboard that adjusts to your input because it's a graphical keyboard instead of a fixed keyboard you have you know and before that if you an American and you were doing text messages you were a Blackberry user how long long did you keep your first iPhone as your primary phone uh not very long and that was by virtue of my next employer uh I worked for Griffin maker of fine iPhone cases everywhere at the time and at Griffin I I cobbled together a iPhone 3G out of parts that had been dissected to to you know evaluate what was going on inside with the antenna mhm cuz one of the products back then was a case that you put on your your first iPhone and it passively coupled to the antenna in the original iPhone and gave you better signal strength I remember it sounds it sounds like Voodoo I know but because they mirrored the exact shape of the antenna in the case as was on the inside of the phone they passively coupled and they were able to boost the signal reception of the uh the iPhone so you're saying it's better than those stickers that used to get a that a gas station that put under the battery on your on your kind of theory except that those stickers don't match the size and shape of the antenna that's in your phone so they don't actually work when you copy the shape properly it does make a difference all right well we don't need to get into antenna gate but uh but but never mind that so so you know we had we had they had taken AP part on the bench an iPhone 3G to make decide if it was worth evaluating and making the product for the 3G and the result was that it commercially didn't make sense because people didn't buy it exactly because of the gas station Commercial and so they left the iPhone in Parts on the bench and I I got crafty one afternoon and went and reassembled it and used that phone as my primary phone for reassembled iPhone 3G yes got it so did you at any point I mean I know you've dabbled with uh Android phones for work and stuff over the years at any point since getting the first iPhone have you um switch your primary phone to be anything other than an iPhone I have used an Android phone when traveling mhm you know I I was in Israel for a month last December and a couple of weeks last summer and uh I used the the Huawei Nexus 6p as the primary phone while traveling and was that because it was unlocked and it was easier to get service internationally what was what was the justification behind that uh the justification behind that was I could drop a Sim in it and have it work without taking the Sim out of my iPhone MH um I could have used the Sim in the iPhone but then I wouldn't have gotten calls or messages or iMessages on the American number got it so it was a matter of of not losing the US communication at the same time the because see you don't have this because you're a T-Mobile customer but if you're a Verizon no no but as a Verizon user in the US all Verizon handsets are unlocked by by default there are no sim locks on Verizon handsets so I could have dropped the Sim in without question uh T-mobile customers in the US the handsets are locked T-Mobile and there are a number of conditions that have to be met for them to consider unlocking them well when the iPhone first launched it was it was locked down I mean oh yeah they were all lock well the iPhone initially launched on AT&T and Singular Wireless singular or Wireless at the announcement but AT&T by the time it Chang The Branding yes by the time it launched well they got bought they they changed the branding and then all of the baby bells started getting swallowed up again right even though the new AT&T is not the original AT&T they're actually different companies well yes but AT&T what are you going to do the uh but you know it's no longer Bell South Bell South begat singular begat AT&T right right there's there's no uh Mid-Atlantic Bell or Bell Atlantic as it were uh there is there's no South Pacific Bell or or SBC right X yeah you know all all of these things they all changed well it's important that for people to remember that the first iPhone the reason that it was locked down and was on AT&T was because Apple was new to the smartphone business they were they had never done anything like this before and they had a very different approach carriers have always had the power they have the power to put apps on your phone to put their logo on it to all that kind of stuff and Steve Jobs wasn't going to take any of that crap that that just wasn't his style right and so in order to get the Leverage to be able to do what they wanted with the iPhone which was ship it without any apps being forced on it nothing being shoved down the customer's throat no logos on it from anything other than Apple they agreed to basically sell their soul to AT&T and so the irony of it is I it's a story before that story actually okay so F first of all at one point they were considering building their own network they were considering doing you know whether or not to do an mvno and and like you know L's bandwidth leas service from other people or to just literally build their own network and roll out that's impractical it was totally impractical and at the time in their history they didn't have the bank that they do now that was never going to happen ever there there was no practical way to pull that off they went to Verizon and they rocked up at Verizon and at this time all they had was you know barely a prototype it didn't have an iOS as such on it they had the motor rocker well no never mind the motor rocker the the motor roer was one of the things that convinced them they had to do this if you look back at the Apple Insider archives going back to this time frame you will find that there are a number of rumors back then about touchscreen tablets right CU that's what they were working on and and you know people talked about well there were there were tablets available that were modified MacBooks that instead of uh traditional MacBook they flipped the screen over and put a Wacom surface on it yeah and turned it into something called a mod book this was not what Apple was bu building Apple was working on building the first iPad and after the the disappointment of the Moto rocker they shifted gears and were convinced to build the phone instead right but we had the rumors way back then about what this was becoming so they they they showed up at Verizon and when the problem is this right you show up for a meeting at at the cell phone company and you're meeting these Executives and trying to talk to them about taking your handset and it's not just like talking to the buyers who who shop access and and stock accessories into the stores you're meeting you know High powerered people M and they wear suits and you're from Southern California and you show up in t-shirt and jeans there's already a culture clash and and the ability to not be taken seriously especially when your phone prototype isn't running your final OS so you don't have a whole lot to really demonstrate tels are the worst this wasn't just a culture Clash this is this is a uh a culture of crummy companies that's what it is fair enough but so they they showed up at Verizon and Verizon said um first of all your stuff doesn't even work right second of all you've got nothing to demonstrate to us that we can actually see and third of all you know you're not taking us seriously you're in t-shirts you know there's just you're and fourth of all you're not going to give us any kind of control or branding on the phone every Verizon phone sold had the Verizon branding on it and we're not going to put that on there take a hike get out of here so they went to AT&T and AT&T despite them rocking up in t-shirts despite them showing up without anything to demonstrate because even as recently as December before the January keynote they did not have enough iOS built to demonstrate for the carrier it was it was that down to the wire the um you know they they were still showing I think the uh the the sort of testing kind of M thing and saying look it's going to be a phone you know and they got AT&T to agree to no branding they got singular rather to agree to no branding but uh by the time the phone had launched singular was gone and the executive that had been on stage for the keynote in January was no longer even at singular he didn't make it to the n&t transa transition it it happened kind of accidentally but everything worked out for the best for Apple because not only did they get control of the platform and really get to stand out in a certain way that other companies just didn't have the leverage to do and of course they had to sell their soul in order to do that and they were stuck with AT&T for forever uh but also because they were with AT&T it was a GSM phone which meant that as they did their International expansion it worked well because if they had started out partnering with Verizon they would have had to completely redo the the architecture of the phone in order to do International expansion because Verizon runs on CDMA and that's not really a very popular uh Wireless form factor frequency whatever you want to call it inter countries that use that kind it's uh so that's code division multiplexing right is is what CDMA stands for and so Verizon is unique in that way that they run something that almost nobody else runs and so by actually partnering with AT&T that allowed Apple to very uh easily roll out internationally as they started to launch the iPhone in more countries as the years went on and so that's why it was a big deal when the when the iPhone first launched uh on Verizon not until 2011 uh that was is the first time that you could actually use an iPhone on Verizon because unlike myself jailbreaking and running on T-Mobile because T-Mobile was a GSM network there was no version of the iPhone that had Hardware compatibility with Verizon Apple had to make and redesign the entire internal of the phone to have a CDMA uh radio in it so um that that had to go to Qualcomm because Qualcomm owns a lot of the patents around CDMA right so the the irony of it is by by partnering with AT&T it worked out very well for Apple because all the carriers internationally that run a GSM it was very simple for them to get the right frequencies and to and to launch on their networks and if they had gone with Verizon you know who knows revision is history but things could have gone very differently it could have been a major technical hurdle for them to uh expand internationally and to make two models of the iPhone especially the position the company was in and and you got to remember the first year of the iPhone that first generation model they only sold like a million in that first year it didn't really take off so uh you know if they had to uh to make more aggressive moves at the start there it could have been a very different picture and you could be we could be having a very different conversation right now yeah so the the thing to know I mean there there's two things I want to do first I want to ask you what were your your core applications and core uses of the iPhone as it first launched well um for me uh there was a lot of tinkering with it because I bought it the day that the jailbreak and um uh T-mobile hack were announced so I went to the T&T Store I brought it home and there was no they hadn't like uh streamlined the process so I had to SSH from a Windows computer they didn't even have it available for Mac at that point I had s from Windows computer uh type in some terminal commands to to hack it break it open and so a lot of my experience um with the first year the iPhone um because you got to remember the App Store didn't launch until the summer of 2008 when the 3G launched so there was no app store for that first year so a lot of my experience with the iPhone was actually uh messing around as developers started to create their own unofficial third party apps I know that jailbreaking years later developed a reputation for people just stealing apps from the App Store but in the beginning it was a very exciting time um and one of the first apps that I installed on my phone that I would show to people and was really impressive was uh uh and this is going to get really confusing because there's a different version of the Microsoft Surface now but back then Microsoft announced a product called the surface that was a big table coffee table and uh one of the demos that they had that people were really excited about was a use of multi-touch where they had had photos on the table and they were like showing them off and you could resize them and slide them around and so some very enterprising developer uh that was you know early on in the iPhone and in the jailbreak Community made an app uh before the App Store was out that replicated what they did on the Microsoft Surface table and it was simple I mean now you think about it it's like well that's stupid but at the time it was like mind-blowing and so I had photos that I had taken and they were all just kind of laid out on the screen like they were on a table and you could slide them around and then pinch and expand and make them bigger or smaller and I mean it was such a small thing but it was just so cool and then um another one was somebody made one of those you know those Labyrinth games where you got like a marble and you got to roll it around somebody did that with the gyroscope on the phone and it was like it was a very rudimentary thing but uh you know and so not only did I have an iPhone but I was doing things with an iPhone that other people couldn't do so I had a lot of fun um you know modifying things you know adding wallpaper uh you know even like putting the T-Mobile logo up in the corner and stuff like that things things that you weren't supposed to be able to do yeah and that's that's what people did so back then there was a time when people liked to add ring tones or liked to create ring tones and and apple even created a ringtone maker within iTunes that honestly I wish they'd kept I wish they'd never taken that out of iTunes because that was pretty cool um they they sort of later shoehorned into Garage Band and it got worse they they had um this was a time when people liked to theme and customize things my phones before the iPhone were an Ericson a Sony Ericson t616 which I bought because it said it worked with isync and it did and I was able to change the wallpaper to look like the OS 10 10.3 uh wallpaper but that kind of Novel stuff was exciting at the time because all this technology was new it was like um you never be able to do anything like that people downloaded the big boss repo or Cydia for for uh iPhone jailbreak just to be able to load theme right now what I wanted to get to was that the the iPhone deserves some credit for another point and people don't really think of this a whole lot people don't really say this out loud a whole lot and that is we've had 10 years of this thing right and in 10 years ignoring jailbreaking there has been no widespread malware that has affected this thing mhm there there they have been exploits right there have been uh there there have been some exploits that we've talked about that law enforcement for example likes to use against specific phones but they have to have physical access to the phone so right but there there have there there have been occasional thing right there's been a worm here or or one there but there been apps that have been compromised mhm but there's been no widespread crippling malware vulnerability yeah I mean the worst thing that you have on on the iPhone that happened and it was really just sort of something that people did as a joke was there was a string of characters that you could send via text message that would crash the phone and that was you know three or four years ago or whatever it was and that went around and it was patched almost immediately but it was like something people did to like prank their friends like haha going to crash your phone here but I mean that's really the worst of it that I can think of I mean we talk about computers and and we talk about computers we talk about traditional computers and there's you know there's there's been viruses for years worms and Trojans for years years the latest thing has been this this terrible uh thing where where you know like wan to cry or the the other one where they encrypt your data right and then ransomware it back right and the the iPhone and other iOS devices have not been Afflicted with anything like that in 10 years of History that's kind of that's that's incredibly noteworthy isn't it absolutely yeah you know we we've talked in the past about how this is the future of computing and how Apple sees it as the future of Computing and the idea that your device is you know not not to make too much of it but let's say nearly impervious right so far is pretty incredible I I mean I think that that alone is I mean you can talk about all the things that the iPhone changed and it changed a lot of things but I think that the security of the platform and the ease of use it is something that we will feel for decades to come because you know we've talked about uh you know like how I I want to get more on the iPad I want to be exclusively Computing on the iPad I've been pushing my parents to just use their iPad because I know it's a secure platform when I go on their Windows computers I don't know what they've installed and I got to fix things and they end up with you know all kinds of junk on there even to this day you know with with as as much better as Windows has gotten compared to the XP days and stuff and it's still like I tell my parents I got my dad the the new $330 iPad and I got him a keyboard it's like please just stick on this I know you can't screw it up you're not going to install anything that bad you're not going to you're not going to break anything you're not going to get hacked you're not going to have it really it's a game Cher for if you put them on Windows 10 on the the whatever starter version they call it that only allows them to install applications from the Microsoft store yeah great won't they won't they similarly be okay I think they're still on Windows 7 I told them not to upgrade because I didn't feel like explain to them how Windows 10 worked because they don't do very well with change so yeah I mean okay so you can hand them an iPad instead I got it so I my dad has an iPad and I keep telling my mom to get an iPad I'm like Mom your life would be so much easier with an iPad cuz they just don't like cuz they don't you know you think about what computers are for now right the the Mac the PC whatever it's power user stuff right and you wonder how many people are on a computer using keyboard shortcuts I use them you know I'm command tabbing uh and I'm you know command T to open a new tab in a window and I'm you know you know whatever else you're doing right you got all these keyboard shortcuts uh uh copy paste type stuff whatever how many people use computers and don't even know that that exists many most of them probably and those are the kind of people who for them an iPhone and iPad um is is a better computer and even for somebody like meit stop the train for a second aren you concerned about iOS 11 and the changes that brings to iPad for your parents who don't like change uh no because it's still operates generally the same way so I think that the intuitive sure of iOS makes it so it's not there's not a lot I'm thinking specifically about the doc yeah so the doc is just I mean think about it right so if you have a doc now it still operates the same way the apps stay down there in iOS 11 the dock is there you can swipe up to access it and you can do these multitasking features but if you don't use any of that you just press the home screen and there's apps in the dock just tap on them and they open all right I I don't I don't see it being that big of a deal but that's what I like about the growth of I and you see you see these features coming out now let me take the same question I asked you about you know copy and paste and command tabbing and all that how many people on an iPhone know about the for example uh control center swiping up from the bottom of the screen do you think most people use that or do you think most people do not I feel like that is a 7030 split yeah because there are a number of people that I've seen use it that I I would have been that I was Tech honestly surprised yeah and they were using it for do not disturb for rotation lock flashlight music flashlight is a popular one flashlights a popular one but yeah the thing is and and I agree with you I think more people are using it on an iPhone and even an iPad because it's more intuitive uh than a keyboard shortcut however uh there are probably a significant I would love to see Apple's internal data on this CU you know they've got stuff on this right I would love to see how many of these power user features nobody's using because for us as power users we love this stuff we like it when iOS 11s coming they have a dock and the multitasking all that it's great but the number of people that use it as they get more of these power user features is going to be you know as diminishing returns in many ways um so I I find that very fascinating and I find it uh exciting as as they as they grow this but for a lot of people I don't even think it matters yeah you know this is the you know that they have data on this right that's why dashboard has kind of Gone by the wayside on the Mac right no no one was using it but me yeah and I I have to say you know we we've sort of been talking around all of this but for me this this particular episode is kind of a a love letter to Andy grian Andy ggan was on the first iPhone team M he was he he played a huge role in the first iPhone um he spoke recently uh with a bunch of of other people who developed the iPhone about the development of the original one he the one he related the story about the drinking game at the original iPhone keynote where every time a feature worked and it didn't crash they took a drink in the front row um and he was also the guy that was behind dashboard on the Mac so so everything we're talking around here I mean Andy was at the center of that and uh I I think he said recently that the first iPhone was the reason that his marriage failed it's it's a huge thing trying to push out a revolutionary product like that and um you know we shouldn't forget the developers that were behind it the the people that really gave serious parts of their lives to this whole kind of thing we're we're benefiting from this as users but it's um there there is definitely a large number of of humans making it come together and it's not just the software it's the hardware I mean there were so many different pieces that had to come together to make this the game Cher that it was and still is in so many ways I think the irony of it is after 10 years uh the the feature that is now less important than ever on the iPhone is the fact that it's a phone oh yeah and you know that was the when I asked you which features caused you to purchase the the original thing the visual voicemail was my see I didn't get that I I I couldn't get that because that was AT&T yeah yeah but visual voicemail I took one look at that and realized that I could fast forward through messages and that I could listen to them asynchronously I would never have to press four S or nine again in my life four was delete message seven was reverse message or rewind and nine was fast forward to the next message to not have to ever deal with that again and be able to see who had called and take them in the order that I wanted to was hugely important to me I had never even owned a smartphone before the iPhone so for me just the ability to text people without having to do the T9 texting was pretty awesome um and and obviously the ability to browse the web from wherever was incredible oh I had two different Nokia Symbian I yeah i' I'd been doing you know the the first iPhone the first iPhone didn't even have GPS but it could triangulate your location uh through cell towers so I remember I uh was visiting New York and I didn't know how to navigate the Subways and it still knew exactly where I was even though it didn't even have GPS in it I mean it was it was it was gamechanging oh I used that to navigate from the middle of nowhere in Virginia so I went on a road trip I had two weddings in the same week um not my own obviously I I went to a wedding in Ohio and then while I was in Ohio a friend from high school said hey I'm getting married can you come and so I I'd driven up there carped so I rented a car on the way back and drove into the middle of nowhere in Virginia literally I I miles away from any major road and I I you know it was the directions for for getting there were you know go down this road then turn on this dirt road then turn on this this Trail and cross a railroad track and you'll know when you've gone 2 miles you've gone too far kind of thing mhm and I got there and they had the wedding and we all went to out to dinner and that was kind of it it was it was a very small thing very on the Fly and so then I'm driving back in the middle of the night no earthly idea where I am and the only things got in the car for tools are the iPhone the iPhone's compass and the maps and there's no signal and so I a blue dot in a in a sea of graph paper trying to navigate Country Roads that aren't very well marked and you know County Road this and and State Road that and state roads are nice because state roads are bigger but but County Road that you have no idea where it goes right mhm and I just kept turning south and east south and east and occasionally a map would load on the screen and I'd be holding on to it for dear life by about like 2:00 a.m. I hit a road that I recognized the numon and I just stayed on that thing the whole way and it was it was one lane each way with you know people's mailboxes right up to the side of the road and eventually I got back to civilization but it was it was uh a lifesaver oh yeah I I don't know you know map Reading is a skill that I think is gone by the wayside right we used to have paper maps and we used to know how to look at them and navigate them and to be able to do that in the car as a co-pilot or when I was in when I lived in Israel I drove a scooter and I would drive to Jerusalem or hia or you know all all these places on the scooter and I had a map and I would pull it out and read and and then you know navigate and go and now no one reads the map we just have turn-by-turn directions that tell us where to be could you go back to navigating with a paper map uh I could but I I think there's a whole generation of people that will have no idea so there there's you know we talk about all the the industries that were shaken up and and things that are gone because the iPhone there's one I never thought of the companies that would print paper maps for AAA well Maps like the AAA Maps or or you know Rand MCN remember Rand MCN you know the these companies were were map makers but I don't know that they were other ever considered especially valuable right right but companies like navon uh um you know TomTom uh Nokia who had all that map data mhm that became hugely valuable Google didn't want to pay for any of that map data so they went out and they mapped the world on their own right MH yeah apple still licenses from TomTom and companies like that for their Maps Apple still licenses from TomTom even though they're also now driving the world the the value of maps went up immensely you know Nokia's Maps sold to that conglomerate of car owners right manufacturers mhm I think Mercedes was among that list uh you know who Whoever thought that Maps would become that important but it has I've got my first iPhone in my hand here and when I pull up maps uh aside from being astonished that it can actually get my location even though it doesn't have a GPS and by the way I charged this thing like 4 days ago and it's still at 60% so that's pretty impressive I mean it's not like I've been doing much with it but the one thing is if you zoom a 10e battery too so yeah if you if you zoom at just the right level where it's out enough but in that they have enough like landmarks and whatever the the low resolution screen is so bad and like you can't you literally cannot read these fonts they're so bad you zoom in a little gets bigger and then it's fine but there's a certain size that it just doesn't work but you know pinching and zooming and and loading the data and all that I mean it still works I mean it's still the same basic experience here we are 10 years later and you know it's just as impressive when you think about it compared to what was there before as it was then I mean it's it's here it is all on this first device right in my hand yeah and you're using the Google Maps data there too which eventually Apple went to war with Google over yeah but it's got It's got my actual location down to it even has the Privacy thing I just tap to get my location it says Google Maps would like to access your location and it's like it's got me right on my street corner it's it's got everything here it's it's uh all it's it's really impressive what you ought to do Neil you ought to put a SIM card in that thing and use it as your primary phone for a week so that's the problem first of all I think that AT&T stopped supporting the first iPhone like with um whatever data it was connecting to networ but also um the SIM cards are no longer that full size they're they're micro SIM they're adapters come on I'm sure that they're adapters I would what I could do is bring it with me and keep my phone in my my primary iPhone in my pocket and then just tether this to it I could do it like um uh fancy iPod Touch yeah exactly but I mean that's all you really need is is just a data connection for it and you can do whatever you want well it won't get SMS because it doesn't have iMessage that's true that is true I would lose all my text messages that would be very difficult to do I'm saying cool well let's let's keep going here I'm going to do a quick ad read I want to let you all know about Shutterstock support for today's show comes from Shutterstock every business needs highquality images to attract and keep customers and whether you're making brochures or advertisements or putting the final touch on your next tweet the visuals that you choose are proven to make a big difference get started today with a 20% discount at shutterstock.com appleinsider we should talk a little bit about qualcom okay so Qualcomm has demonstrated an underd display ultrasonic fingerprint sensor that they are saying will be ready for Consumer devices for use in the summer of 2018 that is next summer yeah and so these These are fingerprint sensing devices that work under the display on the front they work under aluminum and glass on the back they can be used in in you know any kind of orientation there that the the the the details are that it has to be through either 650 micrometers of aluminum or 800 microm of glass and will work under 1200 microm of OLED display each use of material gets a slightly different sensor but the thickness of the material matters in order for it to be read through um it can also detect heartbeat and blood flow so you can see is the fingerprint real is it a live fingerprint and also you could pick up you know medical information out of it if you needed to um Qualcomm says that they're using a trusted execution environment which sounds a lot like apple secure Enclave but however it doesn't have to necessarily be encrypted into to end um they're going to work with Snapdragon 630 and 660 processors and Qualcomm has stated that it will support non- Snapdragon platforms as well we've seen this before how many countless times have we seen this Apple's rumored to be working on something and everybody's rushing to Market to get it out before Apple so they can beat it that's really all this is um they've pre-announced something that is going to come in the summer of 2018 there were some Hands-On impressions of this thing this week that said it's very slow um and really all this is is Qualcomm reading the te leaves and just knowing where the where things are heading and trying to get a jump on it that's all it is we've seen this with wearables we saw it when there was a false alarm with TVs when people thought that Apple was going to make a TV we saw it with smartphones after the iPhone was anounced and people saw what it was and Android completely changed Direction and what it was doing we saw it with tablets when Apple was rumored of getting into the tablet business everybody was pushing out these tablets you know we've seen it over and over and over again now now you see it with you know wireless headphones and stuff too this is no different this is the same song and dance that's happened before the difference is this thing isn't even shipping until 2018 summer of 2018 Apple's rumored to be doing their version of this this fall and none of us know how well it's going to work or what it is until Apple announces it not even let's take a different spin on this quickly okay different spin is that people follow apple and people jump where they think Apple's going to go next and we end up getting product categories that are totally different than than we would have had if people hadn't suspected Apple were going to do this right and I think this is a good thing no it's a very good thing it's just it's funny how transparent it is okay so is Apple dictating things without Apple's name even being mentioned great let's move on to the next one you have a public service announcement you want to talk about external GPU compatibility yeah so I was looking into I I I would like to get a new Macbook Pro I would like to mess around with Apple's egpu capabilities for those of you who don't know external graphics cards are going to be supported in High Sierra but it requires an external monitor uh because it doesn't have the bandwidth in Thunderbolt to Loop it back into the the screen on your iMac or your MacBook Pro or what have you so you have to have this external graphics card powered by Thunderbolt 3 but then you have to have a monitor there are only two monitors on the market right now that are in Mass availability that uh qualify as retina caliber uh monitors uh and those are the LG ultrafine monitors the 21.5 in uh 4K and the 27 in 5K they're the exact same resolution and size as the iMac the problem with that is the 21.5 in is driven by USBC and the 27 in is driven by Thunderbolt 3 and you need to have mini display port for any those are display port or HDMI yep so if you actually want to use an external monitor uh you're actually going to with the egpu you're going to be stuck with a lower uh pixel density than you would have on the built-in monitor on your MacBook Pro which seems kind of silly to me to have this gorgeous screen and then not use it right so what you need is a graphics adapter that has mini display port on it which yeah or or hold up hold up do any of the other adapters have regular display port on them there is there is no way to get any display port signal into either of the LG ultrafine monitors you can't you can't do display port to mini display port they they only have USBC or Thunderbolt 3 input there is no display port input on them all right I'm just ah it's frustrating so you know hopefully this is something that the Market is going to address going forward there is a graphics card uh that was announced by one company that is going to offer USBC out but it is not yeah the Micro Star One MSI but that is the only one that's been announced nobody else has shown much interest in it because it's not the default for monitors and the ones that uh that are compatible that do um you know uh mini display port or whatever are 24in 4K monitors which have a pixel density of around 180 uh pixels per inch which is considerably lower than uh the 200 20 pixels per inch that is Apple's retina standard on a Mac okay so the point is wait until this comes together correct it's it's in beta um until early or spring 2018 the egpu feature wait till there are more graphics cards available wait till there are better monitors available Apple's going to be making their own external monitors they're getting back into that business so if you want to dabble right now you know I mean it's there are some nice monitors out there that you could use but uh it's not going to be that great of an experience um and it's going to be expensive you're better off waiting until next spring okay Logitech slim combo SMART connector keyboard uh I we talked about this a little last week just to touch on it very briefly published our review I you know I don't hate it it's not a product for me if you like to turn your iPad into a laptop um and you don't really mind the bulk that's fine I don't understand why they have this like lip around the outside of the case that goes on the iPad itself um I think they kind of messed up with that I gave it three out of five stars I think that there's a market of people out there that will really really like this keyboard and be very happy with it and if you know those flaws going into it then you know I saw some people in the comments were very happy with this product uh and then it's the perfect keyboard for them that's fine but I think a lot of people will be upset that it adds so much bulk to their iPad and kind of defeats the purpose of the slimness of the device okay the 2017 MacBook Pro yeah that just kind of Loops back into what we were talking about with the external graphics cards we published our review this week uh Dan tested out the new Macbook Pro um and Max uh our video guy also did some benchmarks and tested them out uh the new processors are more powerful than expected from Intel and they do a pretty good job of boosting and really justifying the uh the redesign Thunderbolt 3 and all that sort of stuff so pretty exciting uh time for the MacBook um you know especially these higher-end touch bar models uh and a good time to buy if if you're looking for a new Mac okay the hover drone yeah uh so Mike did a review for us I had tested this product out uh last year as well um it's portable it folds up it's cool it's got a 4k camera um it's good for like taking selfies or something that you want to take with you like you know you're going hiking or something and you don't want to carry a big drone with you but uh it's a little pricey at 500 bucks I can't really justify at that price and Mike felt kind of the same way especially with the DJI spark available now uh that's so portable and priced the same and and so much more powerful uh I think between hover and DJI you're going to buy DJI yeah I think if they drop if they could if they could drop this thing to three even $400 it' be a much better value Apple's pushing this thing hard it's a Apple Store exclusive I was the Soho Apple store the other day and they had a big display for it it was right next to the DJI ones I I think it's a really cool product it launched at like 600 bucks um and it's just too much money um it's more of a toy um but it's cool um and I think that you know if if you can get one on discount it's definitely worth checking out yeah I want to talk a little bit about the lyus velop we've talked about mesh routing before and you know the Linkus velop is one of the best Mesh networking products from a networking standpoint in terms of signal dispersion and signal strength and speed uh Mesh networking is the idea that you have two Wi-Fi radios in each node one to talk to the other nodes to make sure that that the signal is distributed properly and then one side for client radios Network extenders work by having one radio and switching between talking upstream and talking Downstream and the problem with a network extender is that you can both you're you're cutting your speed in half for all of your clients because of this and and also you end up in situations where you have to manually switch between ssids because you have to name them with different ssids in order to make sure you're associating with the one nearest to you if you don't do that if you name them all with the same SSID then you end up in situations where you're associated with one that has weak signal instead of switching to the one that has stronger signal with Mesh networking like Link's velop you keep yourself connected to the strongest one and you don't lose speed in the process uh lyx has had some early teething problems with fir back in January but here in June it's a better product it's it's a refined product the firmware is all fixed and honestly I was very impressed with it what I note is that a lot of our readers go back and forth either not understanding what Mesh networking is not understanding the problems with network extenders or insisting that they're doing it right when all of the manufacturers recommend settings that say you must really use a separate SSID to make this work properly cuz they all know now Apple did extending but Apple always set it the same SSID when they did extend networks and you just lived with the fact that you might get stuck on the one with weaker signal yeah I do that with airport expresses yeah and did you ever find you get stuck on a node that has slightly weak signal compared to your near one yeah each one that you add actually Hales your total um uhand bandwidth but the the truth of that is it doesn't really affect your internet speed it just affects transfer between devices at home because your internet speed is never as fast as the total bandwidth capability of your router so well you you say that that but when you have gigabit it does well I don't have gigabit so ah there you go if you're lucky enough to have gigabit then yeah don't do that but you know for most people it's not going to be an issue there you go so my my summary of ly's velop is good product um slightly clunky to set up and I wish I had had a few more options they wish they could have done a few things better like for instance when you have a provider for your ISP that says You must use their modem end router and they won't let you turn off DHCP on theirs then lynxes should have smartly turned off DHCP on their product and they ask the question and then fail to turn it off so there's a couple of wrinkles but for the most part it's really good so I'll just chime in here and say this is a perfect opportunity Apple I know that you screwed up a littleit with the Mac Pro I know that you're getting back into the game there I know that you're getting back into the monitor game let's get you back in the router game come on baby you know let's let's get let's get a new let's get a new airport express 80211 AC um uh AirPlay 2 come on come on how how is making again going to help their stock value Oh please how how is making monitors going to help their stock value fair enough how is making a Mac Pro going to help their stock value make itter what do they have to prove about making wireless routers again uh here's what they have to prove they don't want companies like dlink making junk that gets people's information stolen or has a a a you know botn net created that takes down a third of the internet let's have reliable products that we can trust in our homes okay fair enough Apple got into Wireless because because Cisco was making it too hard they got out of it because everyone else had made it easy enough your proposition is they get back into it to make security better they never left it they still sell these products they're just not updating them they got to they have to maintain a certain level of quality that you expect setting up routers is a nightmare it still is for most people people go buy these lynxis routers that are Jun the setup the setup on these is not that hard if you follow the steps in the app it takes a few minutes and you end up with a setup that works okay but the the ease has been solved for the most part it's the security that you're right about how many people do you think are running the junk router built into their cable modem provided by Comcast or Time Warner uh unfortunately everyone exactly fix that you're letting crap you got to fix that by by no longer providing by buying the providers of those modems to the cable companies I'm just saying there's you end buying you end up buying Motorola and pace and and oh God all right I'm just saying there's a problem in that market and it needs to be fixed and that is where Apple could step in don't abandon the router Market it's a junk market right now with junk companies pushing their crap on people and people are having bad experiences Apple should stay in the market because they are in the business of making things simple and reliable and trustworthy all right on that note I I want to thank Neil junk Hughes for being on the uh episode 127 to the Apple Insider podcast sir Neil where can we find your junk on the internet you can hopefully my junk isn't on the internet but uh uh you can uh find you can find my musings on appleinsider.com and you can follow me on Twitter at thisis Neil NE L there will be no junk pictures on there ladies I am so sorry hate to disappoint I am so so sorry that's all right I'm I'm Victor Mars and uh you you should check out tapit.com Scout or Scout Tech podcast on iTunes it's a very cool one Neil and iron it you should listen this has been Apple Insider episode 127 and we will see you back next week\n"