**The Security Concerns of Smart Cameras**

In recent years, smart cameras have become increasingly popular as a way to enhance home security. However, there are some concerns about the security of these devices that need to be addressed. One of the biggest issues is the potential for hacking. With more and more devices connected to the internet, the risk of cyber attacks increases. This means that even if you take steps to secure your camera, such as changing the password or updating the software, there is still a risk that an outside user could gain access to the device.

Some people have taken it upon themselves to put tape over their cameras in order to deter potential hackers from targeting them. However, this may not be effective and could even make it easier for hackers to identify the camera as a target. Additionally, using a tape cover is not a foolproof solution and can actually make the device more vulnerable to hacking.

**The Benefits of HomeKit**

Despite the security concerns, many people still choose to use smart cameras in their homes because of the benefits they offer. One of the main advantages of HomeKit, which is Apple's smart home system, is its secure authentication chip. This chip prevents outside users from hacking into the device and accessing the camera feed. According to some reports, things are more secure with HomeKit than with other systems.

HomeKit also provides a way for users to control their cameras remotely, which can be useful in situations where someone needs to check on the camera while they are not at home. This feature is especially useful for people who live far away from their homes or have schedules that make it difficult to check on the camera manually.

**The Limitations of Smart Cameras**

While smart cameras offer many benefits, there are also some limitations to consider. One of the main drawbacks is that they can be expensive, especially if you factor in the cost of any additional features you may want, such as cloud storage or motion detection. Additionally, some people may not want to pay for these extra features, which can limit their effectiveness.

Another limitation of smart cameras is that they can be easily identified by potential intruders. If someone sees a camera in your home, they may assume that it is easy to access and may try to break in without hesitation. This is particularly true if the camera is not properly secured or if the user has left their password reset link exposed.

**The Future of Outdoor Cameras**

While there are concerns about the security of smart cameras, outdoor cameras may be a better option for some people. These cameras can provide a broader view of your property and may be more difficult to tamper with than indoor cameras. However, it's worth noting that outdoor cameras for HomeKit are not yet available.

However, many companies have announced plans to release outdoor cameras in the near future. This means that homeowners who want the added security and peace of mind that comes with a smart camera will soon be able to choose from a range of options. The availability of these cameras is still pending, but it's worth keeping an eye on for anyone interested in upgrading their home security.

**Warren Buffett and Apple**

In other news, Apple's stock has been making headlines recently due to its market capitalization. At one point, the company reached a value of over $1 trillion, making it the first publicly traded company to do so. The reason for this milestone is largely due to Warren Buffett, who has invested billions of dollars in Apple's shares.

Buffett's investment in Apple was part of a larger strategy to diversify his portfolio and increase his exposure to technology stocks. As one of the most successful investors in history, Buffett's endorsement of Apple's stock carries significant weight with investors on Wall Street. The company's market capitalization has been steadily increasing since then, and it continues to be one of the most valuable companies in the world.

**Apple Insider Podcast**

The Apple Insider podcast is a popular source of news and analysis about all things Apple. Hosted by Victor Marks and featuring interviews with industry experts and journalists, the podcast covers everything from new product releases to security concerns like those discussed above.

If you're interested in staying up-to-date on the latest Apple news and trends, be sure to check out the Apple Insider podcast. With its unique blend of analysis and commentary, it's a must-listen for anyone who loves Apple products or is simply curious about the world of tech. You can find the podcast at appleinsider.com, and Victor Marks can also be found on Twitter at @thisisNeilNE.

**Mara Virtual Running Assistant**

Finally, if you're looking for a new way to stay active and healthy while on the go, be sure to check out Mara, the virtual running assistant. Developed by a company called Mara.ai, this innovative app uses cutting-edge voice recognition technology to help coach users to better runs.

With features like personalized training plans, real-time pace tracking, and access to music playlists that can boost your workout, Mara is the perfect companion for anyone who wants to stay fit without having to lift a finger. And with its seamless integration with popular fitness trackers and smartwatches, it's easy to see why Mara has become a favorite among runners and non-runners alike.

To learn more about Mara and how you can start using it today, be sure to visit the company website at mara.ai.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to this the 110th episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm your host Victor marks and joining me today is Neil Hughes hey Victor how's it going fantastic so we've got a big show today we've got a lot of stuff to get through and we're going to try and do it really quickly right great here here we go so the first thing that I want to talk about is it's sort of two different related topics first of all it's it's the iPad and the vision for post PC Computing and it's also uh sort of a comment about what's going on with apple and pro users mhm right so I'm going to start there uh we had reader email listener email from a fellow named John and I want to thank you for writing and it says I'm not sure if this is a matter of of attention to Quality but Apple Engineers are trying really hard to make quality software and yet we're suffering from it he says what's going on with apple and pro users is is there a shift away from the pro user the high-end user um you know historically Apple used to live and die with the success of print quality on Laser Printers that's now eras old decades old they used to make a laser printer they used to make beautiful monitors now they have the one that's LG made that that got recalled because it had Wi-Fi interference so you know he's he says the iPad Pro doesn't have basic features like drag and drop between Windows that uh it's it's really difficult he points out Swift right you can you can write Swift on iOS but you can't actually compile it on iOS and and my own comment would be that Swift itself is clunky because um you know the thing that Apple ships as code samples don't even run now old code samples from WWDC don't even compile because they've changed the language so much right um so you know first of all what's the meaning of pro and second of all that that you know his point was using the iPad to do anything like toishan sand painting where you have to do everything by uh by hand file by file so the the difficulty is is you know who's championing what here and what are what's what's really going on with apple and their focus on users and pro users and and what what's how do we make sense of all this well I mean uh Tim Cook uh spoke a little bit about this uh to some extent uh at Apple's annual shareholder meeting this week um and our own Dan was there and uh put together report just with some notes of interest on it and uh he basically gave it you know depending on how you look at it I'm sure critics would call it Li lip service where he said uh that you will see us do more with Max and professional software is what he said to shareholders um I I this is one of those things where I I think that Apple's definition of pro uh and especially old school Mac Pros that have been doing this for a while their definition of pro is very very very different um many professionals especially been doing it for 10 15 20 30 years you're setting your ways right uh and as you should be I mean it works for you you you've cultivated a business a living that way um why would you want to change everything that you're doing uh Apple's focus is a little different um and they think that you know in the case of you know an iMac for example or even an iPad Pro that's enough power for most professional users uh I think the vocal whether they're a minority or not I don't know but there's a vocal subset of Mac users and certainly our audience and our listeners uh who would say that uh an iMac for example is not good enough you need a Mac Pro uh a MacBook Pro that that cuts Corners is not good enough you need something that offers a little bit more uh and and a lot of these debates fade away but some people will will hang on to them uh to their dying breath things like upgradable RAM and uh replaceable hard drives and things like that okay so that's the speeds and feeds side of it right I really need a quad core processor I really need an eight core processor whatever right but but the other part of this is software quality and software availability aperture is dead in favor of using Adobe solution Final Cut Pro or just Final Cut at 10 Final Cut X however you want to call it right that Final Cut Pro used to be the bread and butter of Hollywood and TV and everything was edited and and you could tell because there a credit role it would say Final Cut Pro MH and now a large number of those professionals have have moved to using a Windows machine with adobe's premiere on it so Apple has seated that market I mean obviously not all have there are certainly many many Productions still done with Final Cut uh I I said a large number without having raw numbers behind it so bad on me but you know that's me slapping my hand the uh you see it happening it's not something that that is is made up it's it's happening in number yeah and and this is a question of whether Apple wants to stay in that business you know like we talk about routers and other things um does Apple want to stay in the high-end Pro business do they want to stay in the router business do they want to stay in the portable media player business is it worth it to them is it worth it to their bottom line is it where they see the future of computing going is it something that lets them stay relevant these are all questions that Apple has to weigh um I mean clearly it's not a priority for them I don't think anybody can disagree with that no matter what Apple says uh you know the Mac Pro is is the best example of that whether we're talking about speeds and feeds or software the fact that they haven't really done anything to embrace uh that platform uh is is all you really need to know yeah and when it comes to wireless Hardware I can kind of understand it from the standpoint of apple has proven what they needed to prove at the time that they introduced the first AirPort Base Station Wireless technology was in a really rough state if you wanted a Wi-Fi router that time you got something from Buffalo or uh early early early lynxis but really at that time when I was 80211 B I had a Buffalo router and Airport was the only other game in town really and the Apple AirPort showed people that you could do it you could do it nicely you could have software support that made it easy as opposed to having to send people to go to Cy Cisco networking school to figure out how to use it you know I have a Cisco aeronet 801b card and I had an aeronet router from back then and it was nearly impossible to configure and Airport showed the way not to mention that the connections were terrible you were better off having a wired connection well right but but you know people don't run ethernet because it's not fun to run ethernet right but the early days of Wi-Fi were pretty bad it was it was horrific and apple showed people that it was possible to make this easier to configure and then Lynx has followed suit and and we had Wireless that was fairly easy to configure here we are uh not Nally about 15 or 16 years later right I had I had a1b in 2000 here we are nearly 17 years later everyone makes Wireless easy to configure at this point so does Apple need to stay in the market probably not I think they should but clearly they at the time think think back at the time they sold an iMac and the iMac had uh not in its very first generation but in its later second generation it had ethernet am modem and Wi-Fi and the idea that you could buy the computer you could buy the router and call it a day and have wireless internet was pretty huge and the wireless routers at that time had a 56k modem in them yeah that's how far we've come it's it's a big deal that we we don't really what's left to prove in this space setup is easy coverage is fairly easy what what's the problem coming from the company that can't even get air Dro to work consistently there's a lot to prove well there's a lot for them to prove that they can live up to it but I mean do do they have to solve Wireless networking for people at this stage I think that if they were to tie things into their ecosystem with their routers you make your routers Windows compatible as they've always done but give more features uh to Mac users and iOS users and those sorts of things um I don't see why not I mean you know it's it's one of those it's one of those things where there's a lot of untapped potential there I think that they could go to if they were interested in it uh but even then even without doing that they still deliver a quality product right so one of the things that we wrote about was that the the campaign showing that an iPad Pro is better than a computer in many ways it is yeah okay so the campaign has things like uh an iPad Pro doesn't get viruses mhm an iPad Pro is better than a computer in response to a tweet that says an iPad Pro is not even close to being a computer um an iPad Pro that has LTE support says you can get internet pretty much anywhere right or you can have Microsoft Word on an iPad which of course you can if you have the uh Office 365 subscription going on uh you know and you can do printing you don't have to have a a computer connected to get a printer working you can print wirelessly over air print so an iPad is is suitable in a number of ways for that kind of thing and Apple's running this ad campaign to show it it's interesting because I was watching tweets this morning and you know we know that that uh federic over at Max stories has been going iPad only for years so he's he's always been the the early leading on that one but um Neil cybart who runs above Avalon which is a newsletter and he's an analyst um tweeted his frustrations with Mac OS he said I should start counting all the times that Mac OS crashes and simply go to iPad Pro and you know his work is is some word processing because obviously he's writing the newsletter but at the same time he's also doing uh publishing through a Blog he's doing uh Excel spreadsheets and and not insignificant stuff in those spreadsheets and you're going to do that on iPad which is a little interesting because I've I've mostly seen people viewing spreadsheets on the iPad rather than tapping in the individual cells and things like that it's always been kind of cumbersome for me to navigate a spreadsheet on an iPad I think that the strength of the iPad is its weaknesses and that's by Design it's essentially a single task device made maybe if you want to do two at once but anything more than that and it becomes kind of cumbersome but in some ways that's freeing uh it is more enjoyable to use your iPad for many daily Computing tasks um whether it's media consumption or even Creation in some ways uh because you don't have all the distractions and all of the stuff that you ordinarily have on your computer and you can't have it it it's designed that way so by having a completely different operating system a different interface and this one task at a time type of thing um that is always going to turn away power users but to some people you can find Freedom and constraint um you know you have to define the the boundaries of the sandbox before you can play in it and if you uh Let it Go free then it can kill productivity so in many ways switching to an iPad for some people depending on your Computing style your needs your personality uh your Tendencies uh going on an iPad could actually make you more productive yeah now I've been using my MacBook Pro in a slightly different way for these past week uh and I was telling you about this before we started recording what I've been doing is I've been using full screen or split screen on almost every application I've been using full screen and split screen on my on my email I've been using full screen on my other email account so I've got I've got a Gmail window using a fluid window to make it a browser kind of thing as full screen I've got air mail which I'm using for exchange servers uh as full screen I've got Fantastical which we wrote a review about this week uh I think Mike Mike published that one um I've been using Fantastical as my calendar for ages and I love it and I'm using that in full screen uh I've got the uh IIA writer and Mark 2 as my editor for doing stories in full screen I've got keynote with four different presentations open it in full screen uh numbers because I've got some charts going into those and that was also where I did the uh the Wi-Fi string start for that I used for the EO review that we did so I've got all these applications running in full screen and I've just been using the four-finger swipe on the trackpad gesture to switch between them and it's been really nice do you find it cumbersome when you have uh you know this reminds me of early days of Apple watch almost when you have uh a bunch of uh uh apps in whatever they call it the glances View and you have to scroll through like a million of them to get to it like do you find that switching trying to get from your first app to your last app is a is a tedious process uh if I were using the four finger swipe to get there it might be but since I use command tab to application switch frequently M it's the same experience as always having had to command tab do you find it cumbersome pressing holding down command and pressing tab three times not really sometimes when I use full screen mode I rarely do it on my Mac it's just not the way I like to do it but I I find myself wishing that I could still access the dock while in full screen mode I agree that would be helpful just because so one of the things that I end up doing a lot is dragging files into applications whether it's you know uploading an image or um launching something or whatever right there are reasons to drag and drop a file onto a Target to drop it right and so if I have a folder in the doc that I can click and have it fan up and then grab the image from that folder and then drop it on the application I wouldn't have to switch back to a desktop that has the finder application on it yeah and think the most telling thing about this at least in terms of Apple's vision is when you go into an Apple store now and they have those promo videos they show uh and they'll show off you know like a 12-in Macbook or whatever um it's always being used with the apps in full screen and switched between them with the forefinger gesture as though you're on an iPad um this is really this continuity uh between platforms that Apple's been pushing for a while and I think that they view the future of computing as this super simple one task at a time kind of focus thing because that will be that will cover the needs of you know 95% of computer users um and that is not to say that because you're doing one task at a time or two at a time that they are simple tasks they can be extremely complex um but this you know over inundation with multitasking and all that um seems to be a Computing philosophy that apple is at least in terms of its marketing and how it's positioning its products and pushing the future of iOS it seems to be looking to get away from yeah so personally I know two people that have gone from Mac to iPad full-time um my my wife had a Macbook from late 2008 one of the aluminum ones um and it was giving her a little bit of trouble it was on a snow leopard and so I gave her an iPad Mini with a bridge keyboard to use and she's been using that for months now happily I gave the MacBook which I formatted and put Al Capitan on to my daughter who goes to school with it because her school wrote and said every student this year will take a a laptop or a Chromebook or something to school we recommend against iPads because kids break them was their initial letter home they break it more than they would a laptop that for whatever reason they said people who bring expensive tablets iPads to uh School tend to drop them and the screens are broken and everyone's unhappy about that so I mean like your like your laptop's going to do any better if you drop that they for whatever reason they were big fans of the $120 Chrome books because if you drop them no one cares as much as if you break a $500 iPad um but I sent her with this with the MacBook and she was you know she was the coolest kid because she had a Mac and the other kids had junky Chromebooks and um she came home the other week and she said it's it's just too heavy it's just too heavy cuz it's well yeah course because it's a Macbook right it weighs four pounds and um plus another pound for the stupid power brick so she was she was upset about it and she said dad can I can I take my iPad to school well can you do everything you need to do at school on it yeah I think so so you know she no longer has to carry the charger because it's got much longer battery life mm she uses the Google Docs apps that they use for the Chrome K Chromebook kids in school anyway on her iPad so she's got slides stocks and uh sheets on there and it's working for her and you know she came home and she's loving it no problem she's got a 64 gig iPad Mini too that's uh that's in there doing the job so she doesn't even open the MacBook any longer I I I I think that the iPad is the perfect computer for many people uh I I realize that a lot of pro users or whatever traditionalists on the Mac will cry blasphemy to that but I think it's absolutely true and I think that your wife and your daughter are two great Prime use cases there somebody who needs a computer that's going to last all day that's super light that's versatile that can be whatever you need when you want that has more apps than any other platform available uh that that's an iPad I I wonder why we don't have iBooks author for iPad yet why don't we have xcode for iPad well we totally should have xcode for iPad especially since we were talking about compiling Swift code on the iPad yeah I I I don't think that that Apple should turn iOS into Mac OS I know a lot of people want that I but I think they should take the training wheels off a lot of the apps uh some of the apps feel like they're they're close or not you know but they're not quite there some of the apps aren't even available like xcode or Final Cut or whatever let's do it let's go let's go all in let's get xcode on the iPad let's get Final Cut you want to call it a pro platform let's make it professional and find use cases that are superior on a touchscreen on a tablet on a super light portable in the field format uh I can see many use cases where professional users developers film makers whatever would prefer an iPad over a Mac they may not be able to use it to replace their Mac entirely but they could replace a lot of what they do on a Mac with the current hardware and software I think it's capable I'm going to take what you said and go one step further all of those apps that you named bring them to iOS like you said and add the sharing that we got in the latest edition of ior absolutely the sharing that we have across notes the sharing that we have across pages and all of those things put that into xcode for iOS put that into ibook's author for iOS put that into Final Cut for iOS make all of those projects that people can work on collaboratively I think that would be huge start your work on one device finish it on another they kind of have that on iMovie a little bit um you know obviously start your work on one device finish it on another start your work and invite people to collaborate with you on your work so they can make changes and you can work together on it Leverage The Power of multiple platforms and of the cloud um and you could really see these devices take off in ways that you wouldn't expect it doesn't mean that it's going to replace a Mac but there are use cases where these applications are better served on a tablet period I I don't know that it has to replace a Mac I think it could I don't think it has to no I I think it comp it's just about what's the best computer to use for the job you need to do yeah I I uh heard and I think we've talked about this before Phil Schiller said in an interview once that apple philosophy on their products is you start with the smallest screen they offer on iPhone and then you continually go up to a bigger screen for the task that you need at that moment so ideally they want you to be able to get everything done on your iPhone if you need something a little bigger than you go to an iPad if you need something a little bigger than you go to a Macbook and then maybe if you need something a little bigger than that you go to an iMac and that's kind of how they are viewing this this Computing platform and now if you start to throw in uh the Apple watch you know maybe you could do some very basic tasks on there before switching to your phone now you have these you know five six different screen sizes that you can go through um as needed and I think for most people they could stop at the iPad and be done yeah I got to say something about the Apple watch though so Target for example just updated their app for the for iOS and in their latest update they actually removed support for the Apple watch why cuz cuz no one wants it cuz no one know what what thirdparty watch apps really do watch well yeah I well that's that's a good question because what do you need on your watch right um Venture that most people don't don't really care about thirdparty watch apps I would say that most watch wearers and I'm going out on a limb here I'm prepared to get listener email telling me I'm wrong um are are using notifications are using the the Apple pay obviously are using things that Apple provides out of the box that that Target building an Apple Watch app was because they could and they thought it'd be something big and it turned out not to be maybe I mean I could see some uh retail applications for it for some users you know uh Store card kind of stuff um have it easily scannable assuming that there's scanners in the store work with it don't have to pull out your phone uh that sort of stuff um I I don't know how big of a market there is for it um but I don't think that that's necessarily A condemnation of of of the Apple watch as much as it is what do you really need to have on your wrist you know um just because people make apps for platform uh doesn't mean that that we need them you know there's a lot well doesn't mean that they've made the right app for example right true that's true but also you know in a sense it is a small condemnation of Apple because they made this thing and then opened it up to developers and presumably you know well I mean I I know there are games for Apple watch and people play games on their watch I don't really understand go made it there right and and that's one that but that's one that makes some sense to me uh because of the nature of the game and walking around and not wanting to stare at your phone while you walk around and getting those kind of subtle notifications it makes a lot of sense to me in that way and you you kind of have to deal with it on a Case by case basis obviously the killer apps for your Apple watch most of them are built in uh which is the way it should be but it's basically notifications uh which you can get for all apps on iOS um it is fitness apps which there are there's one builtin and there's a number of other options that you can download um and then other than that uh you know I would say Apple pay is your is your killer app uh being able to pay for stuff on your wrist beyond that you know your mileage may vary um I really uh have been enjoying I've talked about the carrot watch uh carrots watch app uh for weather um the notifications that it has the the custom uh complications and stuff I think that's a huge success I think they knocked it out of the park um and that's not a category where I would have thought that I needed to play Apple's weather app but I haven't looked back since I did all right so let's let's talk about iPhone there's there's a rumor here that says that we're going to get you know there there's a competing rumor right one well there's been some noise about getting USBC on iOS devices and the you know that the Twitter sphere has been a buzz with that the the news has talked about it a little bit we wrote a story saying that that Ming quo says that we're not going to get USBC on um well no what he said he said he said we're we're we're going to get expected to use typc power delivery technology in this year's iPhones but in a lightning connector I I'll lay the story out for you here's what happened help me out earlier this week the Wall Street Journal which has a history of being pretty good on Apple rumors published a story that uh I won't name any names uh and this is not to pick on the Wall Street Journal I mean hey we all mess stuff up sometimes right but we at Apple Insider took this with a grain of salt from the start if you look at our headline it says questionable rumor is the first two words of the headline because uh that's what this is I don't I just don't buy it alternative fact I don't know about that but um basically what happened was the Wall Street Journal ran a story in which they very poorly worded way suggested that Apple would replace the lightning port on the iPhone with USBC the way it was worded which should have been done more clear you could potentially interpret as them saying that they were going to get rid of not the uh lightning Port but the fullsize USB connector on the other side of the cable to plug it into the wall that makes sense to me however they said that Apple was going to get rid of the lightning cable is what they said which made it sound like they're going to get rid of the lightning Port what the Wall Street Journal meant in their report I don't really know taking it face value it sounds like they were going to get rid of the lightning port and that's why we presented as a questionable rumor there were some other websites that kind of Ram with it and there were some people that were excited because they're all in on USBC and stuff but I'll be honest with you folks it's not happening um well so there are a couple good reasons first of all when you tell someone when when you tell a regular consumer by the way they're going to change the port again they're like holy crap I have all these cables and they just did it 5 years ago why are we doing it again they're ready to kill somebody when you tell them yeah and the second part of it is that Apple collects a license fee called mfi or made for iPod or made for iPhone from every one of those ports sold and so they're not going to be that quick to give up those licenses right know and and the the mo the most telling thing to me uh beyond the licensing because I think at the end of the day Apple would walk away from the licensing if they felt it was best for the consumer um I I think that really what it comes down to is Apple has doubled down on Lightning the last couple years it used to just be that you would get lightning on your iPhone your iPad or your iPod and that was it but now now you got a pencil now you have a pencil now you have a Seri remote now you have the Beats X headphones you have the Beats Solo 3 headphones you have the power uh or the Beats pill is recharged through lightning you have the magic keyboard and Magic Mouse recharged through lightning it has become Apple's default accessory Port um for devices that tie into its ecosystem for smaller devices for recharging and apple is not going to keep releasing a bunch of Beats headphones and other accessories that connect through lightning and then ditch the lightning connector that would be absolutely insane and by the way if you wanted to put a USBC port on a device You' put on an iPad first before an iPhone because iPad it you're trying to position as more of a traditional Computing device that way you could connect more accessories to it so it it doesn't make any sense to put it on the iPhone first I I think the Wall Street Journal blew it on this one and that's why we called it as such and so kind of backing that up uh a report came out uh as we recorded this on Thursday uh from everybody's favorite analyst mingch quo with KGI Securities saying that apple is going to use Quick Charge capabilities from the USB type-c specification however the uh phone itself is still going to ship with a lightning Port which it goes in line like I said earlier with what I would expect I think that this year's phone will ship with the lightning port and probably a new power brick with USBC on it and a USBC to lightning cable yeah now the fun reason for doing all this USBC stuff the reason why it makes sense from a a nerd standpoint is that when you have one cable with the two ends being exactly the same and you can flip them over because they're symmetric then you you no longer have to think that hard right the cable plugs into the laptop the cable plugs into the phone all job done right so it it makes it's appealing from that one standpoint but it's broken in terms of all of the peripherals that already use lightning like you named and one of the things that I didn't even consider until I reviewed the latest MacBook Pro was I have had just about every mag safe cable I've ever owned Fray completely just like completely disintegrate and if I ever want to replace a uh magsafe adapter it's going to cost me 80 bucks um if I have a new Macbook Pro while I don't have mag safe which is a I consider a bad thing um the switching to the USBC connector means that I can use any certified cable and they're much cheaper and as long as I have my power brick I'm good to go so if my cable frays or gets lost or whatever uh it's much cheaper to fix and replace without having to go and buy an entirely new mag saave connector so uh in that respect it's actually much more consumer friendly yes and you can use any of the third party solutions for a MAG safe like experience and if that cable like you say fails on you you go back to a regular cable without a whole lot of frustration yep exactly and you can plug it into any port on the device so there there are reasons to do it and that's a great example of you know Apple's patents and Licensing and whatever where they see a situation they're not afraid to walk away from it for something that is ultimately better from the consumer uh if if there was a compelling reason for Apple to ditch lightning I think that they would probably do it uh just because I think they want to get rid of ports entirely for starters but they also realize that while this year's phone is probably going to have wireless charging in it um it's not ideal in many ways and probably won't be as fast as a wired connection and so that's why you're going to get the best of both worlds and you're get a new faster charge capability with the iPhone 8 and the iPhone 7S and 7s plus uh via a lightning cable that's going to come in the box right and it will probably also necessitate coming with a uh a proper adapter that's supplied enough wattage for that that quick charge capability right and hopefully we don't have another note 7 on our hands right well I don't think that's the case I mean this so in in the usb3 spec in the USBC spec there's a thing called PD or power delivery MH where it specifies being able to supply up to a ridiculous number of Watts for the ability to charge laptops and things like that but you can also use it to charge the phone faster and that's what I would bet is being used here yeah absolutely but I think that it before the spec existed there's a Qualcomm power Quick Charge technology but this is this is the Quick Charge that's part of power delivery from USBC and supposedly a poor implementation of Quick Charge and or battery uh constraints in the Note 7 is what led to that disaster so um I don't think we'll see that disaster anytime soon from any phone manufacture because no one wants to be the next Samsung on that right I think you know everyone's watching their their you know their their charge circuit their battery Engineers everyone's paying attention to this one it's not going to happen for a while yeah and anytime you do see it you know for listeners out there who sometimes see these things passed around of iPhones blowing up or whatever every time that has ever come out ever it's always somebody using some knockoff Chinese charger or something like that stick to the charger cable you get out of the box or stick to known Brands and buy from known vendors the the other thing is that the these are relatively rare incidents right the thing that was a Hallmark of the Samsung one is that there were a number of cases reported in a short period of time yeah and they hadn't sold that many phones yet and it was it was repeated it wasn't it wasn't just a one-off experience that Samsung had to look into it was it was something that they had one and then you heard three more reports and then another report and then another report and then the one that burned the hole through the airplane floor and all this right with apple we every phone generation you hear of maybe one case where it's happened yeah and apple does their du jillan know they they contact the owner they look into it in every news story you read yes Apple has contacted the owner and it's resolved and I'm sure that they learn something from it whether it's people sitting on their phones and the increase the rigidity of the phone case or it's the knockoff power adapter or or what but they figure out what the problem is and it's usually a very limited problem it's not like there's an epidemic right um you know B batteries they require space to expand and contract because heat causes things to expand and contract um you have to manage heat you have to manage overcharging you may have to manage discharging you have to not puncture them you have to not Flex them so there are a number of constraints around battery design and they've taken many of these into account it doesn't mean something bad can't happen but they're pretty much always on the ball into looking into it and figuring out why mhm it's not like the Samsung example where we went months with Samsung shrugging their shoulders and saying we don't know we think it's that factory oh but what happening from the other Factory too we don't know we don't know it it took until January to get an answer as to to why this thing had happened mhm right and even then it wasn't the most clear answer it wasn't a conclusive answer so I I would not be concerned about Apple and batteries at this time no I not I want to take a moment and talk about Mara so Mara . a is an application and it it can change the way you run thanks to smartphones even casual Runners can map their routes create playlists track their progress things like that but but all of it's always meant you had to stop and look at your phone now you Neil you know me I I like voice first Technologies you know I have the Amazon Echo devices I have the Google home devices I like being able to issue voice commands and have things happen and Mara is a handsfree running assistant that uses voice recognition and the microphone in your earbuds to help you do these things for your runs so you can say what kind of run you'd like to do you can ask questions about your speed and your pace you can have her play albums and playlists from your music library and she can tell you how you're doing in comparison to your past runs and warn you about changes in weather so you know no one wants to be caught out running in the rain right no you don't run in the rain I did the other night it was very cold no one likes that right no no so wouldn't it be nice if your phone told you when you were about to run in the rain yes you're about to get caught out okay so Mara can do that and Mara can also connect to Amazon Alexa enabled devices and you can ask her about lifetime Statistics and Records you've set while you're getting ready for your next run so visit mara. to download your free virtual running assistant today that's m.ai you know I'm noticing more and more devices that I have are able to integrate with the Amazon Echo devices mhm you know you you and I both have automatic in our car automatic is the little dongle that plugs into the OBD2 connector yeah and the other day I realized that I could sit in here and ask the uh the Amazon Echo and I'm intentionally avoiding saying the name of the V the assistant so I don't do you the Wake word um and have it respond I could ask how much fuel I have in the car that's cool so I'm sitting here in my house and I'm getting ready to go somewhere hey do I have gas yes yes you do you have this much range perfect that's great news right it was kind of cool because that's one of the things that happens in my house is my wife will look at me and say do I have gas in the car well shoot I don't know I don't what the needle said when I got out of the car but I can ask the echo device and it'll tell me now so these things are cool I'm I'm very appreciative of things like Mara and automatic integrating with Alexa now I reviewed the Euro Wi-Fi base stations because we were talking about earlier the uh notion that Apple was potentially getting out of making airports yeah so the these were sent to me to review and they arrive in a box of three I think they're sold in ones and threes um but it makes sense if you're trying to cover area to to think about how many you need um they recommend that for uh you know what 700 ft you only need one of them for for 1,800 to 2,000 squ fet you can use two of them and you'll reach full coverage and if you have a bigger house then you need the three or more and what they are is a mesh Network right because what happens is people have homes that have low signal spots in them and invariably it's somewhere you actually like to sit right the way our homes are constructed is that Wi-Fi is is a radio wave and it bounces off the surfaces in the house and then reflects and so you can sometimes get great signal coverage that way but sometimes you can get areas that just don't get coverage at all and it makes radio waves kind of a Dark Art right it's it's it's magic that's hard to understand and people go to school for it there are people who have doctorates in understanding Wireless technology and and radio science so what they're doing here is they're creating a network that instead of having an extension which has its own network name and you have to join that extenders Network which is a little clunky they're making a mesh where each router joins and extends the initial R the initial router settings so you don't have to know is it a network name is it this is it that you just know you've joined the network and you're getting full signal so EO attempts to make this very simple right they have a very simple base the base is got two Network ports on it one that connects to your main Internet modem and one that then connects to a downstream switch if you have it or other accessories uh a USB port that is completely not useful at all is for you as a consumer right we're used to airport expresses where you can plug in a printer or uh plug in a you know some people have routers that you can plug in hard drives things like that no ero doesn't do that the USB port is reserved to them for Diagnostic use only they say but um you know you put one in your main modem and then you can go ahead and put one elsewhere where you need signal um they recommended it be about 40 ft away at the furthest I was was experimenting with this and I had one in the bottom floor in one corner of the house and I had one in the upstairs on the second story in the opposite corner of the house so that I could cover the furthest area from the uh the router and I went around and measured my my signal strength throughout the house and found where the weak spots were and none of them were too weak that it really necessitated having a second mesh router but you know for the purposes of this experiment I had to put one somewhere so I put it upstairs and interestingly my signal got worse in some areas it's weird it really was it got better in a few places but it got worse in others what was neat was that doing this experiment really revealed that places that I thought I had the worst signal in the house I actually had really strong signal so it was cool that I did this but um but I the truth is using the single EOB base for me in in this 1800t place would have worked better than adding the second one one in some ways yeah it is interesting it is what I will say is that ero app is pretty cool if you liked the Apple AirPort utility app EOS is better and it's not easy to put Apple to shame right they did a good job on this application it's very smooth it's very easy to use it's very easy to reserve addresses it's very easy to set up uh static IPS it's very easy to do port forwarding it's really well thought out they did a good job on the app yeah I feel like that's kind of the key to taking the place of an airport router is that ease of use um you know signal design whatever aside uh anybody who's ever had to do the admin admin login on a lynus wrrt router or some piece of crap dlink or something knows exactly what a nightmare it is to to manage those things to navigate them I mean God now every cable company forces to have a built-in Wi-Fi modem router into the modem and so I have to go in and like manually disable their Wi-Fi so it's not broadcasting alongside my Wi-Fi and all and it's just like and you have to go into this like archaic just just nightmares of menus and and confusing things that even for somebody who's computer literate like me um just it's not a fun thing to do so that that ease of use is is definitely a big selling point yeah and it's it's the the EAS use is great but um it's there there were problems with the network and and not for me necessarily because I didn't have so much trying to go on with it but for other people that I've talked to about it um when you connect a switch to it for example because you do have wired devices and and it's true right if I talk about the wired devices we have here if you have a Lutron setup for a homekit you have to have a wired Bridge so you have to wire that somewhere right right and so then if you have that device and a couple of other bridges for homekit stuff well then you need to have a switch plugged into the router so that you can connect all of them so you're going to end up with a situation where many people who are doing homekit are going to have wired devices you know the Philips hridge you have to plug it in with the wire right um there there were a number of people that I talked to that said that when they had switches like that or they tried to have reserved addresses um that it all fell apart for them that that it simply was not working nearly as well what if you I mean yeah I mean I guess you could if you had an old router laying around you could disable the wireless function of it and use that to give yourself more wired ports would that break it um well getting do a little more esoteric stuff right you can do that then you put ero into bridge mode and let the router handle the assigning of IP addresses but there were people had trouble with that too now but how does that work with multiple earos like do you let one of the Heros assign IP addresses and then what if a device connects to it like that you can do that way but in your scenario where you're saying you've got an old router and you turn the wireless off on it and let it handle the wired you're best if you have that assign the IP addresses and let the ear act let that do the DHCP and then yeah yeah but there were people that had trouble with it doing that too so I I would say and that's why I gave this kind of a a three and a half star review from me because it it functioned and it functioned reasonably well with some caveats for me but we're aware of other problems people are having with it so it's not a fourstar review it's not a five-star review it's something that that did function but there's definitely room for improvement so if you're this new breed of computing person that we talked about who is perfectly happy with an iPad uh perfectly happy with a MacBook Pro with USBC ports on it perfectly happy with your iPhone no need to go wired on anything who deals with that crap I just want it to be as simple as possible which again I think is a majority of computer users out there does that person have any issues with EO uh the only issue that they may have with it is that some people have noticed that Network speeds uh for file transfers on the landan are slower with an ero than they are with some of the others out there got it so if you have a network attached storage device you may find an issue but if you're talking about internet speeds no if you're the iPad user and you've got wireless printing and that's about it going on on your Network and and maybe a home ENT payment device like a Roker or an Apple TV May some dead spots in your home yeah this is the device that's fine cool will totally work for you I've stumped you you're thinking what to say next no I I think you I think you cover it pretty well all right we're going to be covering some more of these if you have a favorite one that you like and and are listening out there uh we're going to do the lynx's velop next we've got a signology piece that's not a uh not a mesh router but if you want us to cover the network or net gear Orbeez or some of these others like plume or Luma or you know any of these other that's out there please go ahead and send send us an email and tell us which one you'd like to hear more about because that'll help us select what we decide to cover next great yeah so Neil you reviewed a homekit connected camera I did uh it's the dlink Omni 180 camera um interesting product um I was generally pretty happy with it I think that wait wait you scare me when you say it's an interesting product it's not a good product it's not it's what what's wrong here I mean I I think it's fine I don't personally another ringing endorsement from Neil Hughes my friends well it's one of these things where you know sometimes you get assigned a product by you know my publisher or whatever to review and this this is not something that I personally have a use for uh my wife didn't really want anything to do with it in fact she started when she was around at night putting a cup over it so that it couldn't record us she needed a teac cozy to stick over the top of it yeah I mean I think that you know as I said in in the uh uh headline on this review I think it's a great pet baby or nanny cam I don't have a baby or a nanny I do have a cat but um she doesn't really leave bed much uh she's 18 years old so uh not really much of a need for a webcam myself however if you fall in one of those categories and you're looking for something you can set up that you don't need to be discreet uh and you don't mind the lack of cloud storage I don't think that this is a a bad product to get I think you'll be pretty happy with it uh it's plug-and-play simple the software works the iOS and home integration is good um the feature I like the most is uh the screen is divided into a bunch of uh sections essentially and you can choose which ones you want to activate the motion detection sensor uh capabilities of it um and then when you turn that on you can get push notifications for it you can um uh have it uh record automatically a 20 second period before and after the motion was detected so you could see what's going on um it is not a discret camera and it does not have Cloud backup so you somebody robs your house and they see it laying there and they pick it up and steal it uh they're going to have all the footage and the SD card and everything else so yeah but this is this is not a terrible compromise either right I mean the problem with these cameras that are cloud storage is that you have to pay for the cloud storage so you subscribe for for so many dollars a month for the rest of your life to pay for cloud storage and here you just drop in a 64 gig SD card and and Bob's your uncle mhm right you're very happily not paying for cloud storage and you've got all the storage you want so so you just have to make sure your camera doesn't get stolen yeah I I think that uh I think that there's a market for this product I think that people that are security conscious would want something that offers cloud storage I think it would be nice I would like them to put like a klock slot on there so you could lock it down exactly I think that it would be nice if dlink offered both options because I think that certainly like you said the lack of cloud storage is appealing to some people just because they don't want to pay for something um and I would certainly be one of those people I would never pay for cloud storage well if you if you paid 200 bucks for the camera right and you're you're agreeing to pay however many bucks a month for the rest of your life for the it's a huge C cost yeah no absolutely I think that this would be a great opportunity for dlink to offer iCloud integration um and have the video files that you record back up to iCloud Drive o that would be way Char for it NE well what do they care they they're not charging for it any dude but they're not charging for right now anyhow so well there you go you know this is uh I think one of the standout features of this product is uh the fact that the camera on it is a true 180° view so I actually was testing it out in my kitchen looking out in the rest of my apartment and I had to put it up right to the edge of the counter because uh everything to the left and right gets picked up so it has to be have a clear 180 degree view otherwise some of it's going to get blocked off uh works at night uh in black and white uh the biggest limitations beyond the cloud storage issue is IOS uh limitations which would be um the Apple uh home app does not allow you to tap into the video files that are saved on it cuz that's not one of the capabilities of of the home app um if if you get an alert that uh there was motion detected it will show you a small thumbnail of what happened on your lock screen but then as soon as you open it uh it goes away and just takes you to a live view so if you see it 10 minutes later it's kind of pointless so you have to open up an Uma app intentionally instead of yeah you have to open the omna app to uh uh I'm not I'm sorry to uh to view it um and you know things like it would be nice to be able to say in home kit or in the home app um only alert me of motion when I'm not at home like give me a location based alert type thing or when I set a scene for or something like that it's kind of All or Nothing at the moment you have to go in and say Yes alert me um in the home app and then you'll get alerts or you turn it off and say don't alert me uh this should really be a customizable trigger um for automation false positives from walking around your apartment basically right exactly I had mine set up when I was testing it um to go uh trigger when the front door opens so in that sense it worked the door open the problem was if I went out to check the mail if I open the refrigerator which is right next to the front door it triggered it every single time so I'd go through and check all the videos and it's like there I am getting a snack there I am going to check the mail you know like it's not particularly interesting footage but that's to be expected when I wasn't really expecting anyone to rob my place either so yeah you just moved in right so you know I mean if you need something to keep an eye on a b and it has like a two-way microphone so um you can hear stuff but also you know speak to the person there and all that so if you wanted to like Comfort a baby or a pet or something uh that would be something you could do with it as well freak out your wife when you're not home that is true I tested that feature out too so how that work out for you she was like where's that coming from what is going on but I always have weird gadgets here so she's always just kind of like you know I I did that same thing to to my poor wife my longsuffering wife when was away on business and I started whispering through the the speaker of the camera at at the kids and she thought the house was haunted because she couldn't really hear it but the kids kept going over to the camera and and talking Whispering back at me and then I cranked it up a little bit and and and started whispering and she was sure the place was haunted she texted me saying we have to move in other news I'm terrible but uh yeah these These are good gadgets so the one of the problems that people worry about a little bit is these Internet of Things devices getting hacked and you know what what happens if someone gains access to it and can whisper horrible things at your sleeping child right yeah yeah and that's that's happened before with other devices yeah uh it makes me think of the episode from the latest uh season of uh of uh Black Mirror and why people put tape on their camera on their computer um um I think that um you know supposedly things are more secure with homekit um and Apple's secure authentication chip prevents uh you know outside nefarious users from hacking in uh time will always tell if that's true or not if you're paranoid about these kind of things you probably shouldn't have a camera in your home well one of the things that I've thought is that cameras in the home are one thing that cameras outside the home may be more useful and there aren't any of those yet for kit they're coming but they're not here yet the outdoor cameras for homekit are coming we saw some of the things that hinted at that at CES but they're not here yet um but it just it seems to me that that you know if you're worried about people coming and robbing you seeing suspicious people outside your house is just as good as seeing Subs people inside your house at least for the notification something's up um and it also makes people inside the home like like our wives who put t cozies on top of the cameras feel more comfortable mhm I I I I that doesn't really personally bother me I feel pretty secure with it but you can never really vouch for any of these kind of platforms because anything is possible um and time will tell you know how reliable or secure anything is um I think that if you're on the market for a homekit connected camera and you don't mind the limitations of this um and in some ways I think the limitations are are uh make it better uh some folks don't want to pay for cloud storage so uh I I think it's a good product if you know what you're getting um and you're happy with that but as as a camera the camera itself the 180° view night vision um uh microphone speaker all that kind of stuff I think it's great plug- andplay hom kit I mean I had the thing up and running in like two seconds it's it's good cool and and what rating did you give this I give it three and a half out of five all right why because I I think that uh if you are a security conscious user this is pretty useless to you it looks obvious that you have a camera there and so somebody if comes in robs your house all they got to do is just pick it up and unplug it and you're screwed and now they've got all the footage of them robbing your house and you have nothing okay cool I appreciate you explaining that for me sure so uh what else would you like to discuss this afternoon I think we covered it all pretty well didn't we tell tell me about Warren Buffett is there anything we can talk about Warren Buffett for uh he um he has purched 17 billion doll worth of steak Apple um he sees uh the company uh getting to a a uh uh market capitalization of more than a trillion dollars uh which would be the first of a uh publicly traded company so uh the stock because of that news and a number of other factors on the market has been inching higher closed above 140 for the first time this week um and if they uh get as high as uh 147 I believe uh then they will set a new record for market capitalization of about 775 billion uh inching their way closer to a trillion dollars uh the stock is already at an all-time high um and has been going that way for a few weeks now um the the reason that the stock is an all-time high but the market cap is not is because of the share buyback and and uh various uh uh the 7 to1 split they did a few years ago um kind of changes the value of the shares as as it relates to to uh the overall value of the company but uh Shares are trading right now at or near an all-time high um and they're getting near their all-time high for market capitalization and a big reason for that is because uh investors on Wall Street really admire Warren Buffett they think he knows what he's talking about fair enough thank you for summarizing that for us it so this has been the Apple Insider podcast fantastic episode 110 Neil where can people find you on the internet you can read my amings at appleinsider.com and you can find me on Twitter at thisis Neil NE I'm your host Victor marks I'm at V marks on Twitter we'd like to thank again Mara for sponsoring today's episode Mara is a handsfree virtual running assistant that uses Cutting Edge voice recognition to help coach you to better runs play music get updates on your location Pace or the weather and compare your current speed with past runs without ever stopping to look at your phone using your earbuds Mara can hear your commands and put them into action download your new running partner for free at mara. a today ohyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to this the 110th episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm your host Victor marks and joining me today is Neil Hughes hey Victor how's it going fantastic so we've got a big show today we've got a lot of stuff to get through and we're going to try and do it really quickly right great here here we go so the first thing that I want to talk about is it's sort of two different related topics first of all it's it's the iPad and the vision for post PC Computing and it's also uh sort of a comment about what's going on with apple and pro users mhm right so I'm going to start there uh we had reader email listener email from a fellow named John and I want to thank you for writing and it says I'm not sure if this is a matter of of attention to Quality but Apple Engineers are trying really hard to make quality software and yet we're suffering from it he says what's going on with apple and pro users is is there a shift away from the pro user the high-end user um you know historically Apple used to live and die with the success of print quality on Laser Printers that's now eras old decades old they used to make a laser printer they used to make beautiful monitors now they have the one that's LG made that that got recalled because it had Wi-Fi interference so you know he's he says the iPad Pro doesn't have basic features like drag and drop between Windows that uh it's it's really difficult he points out Swift right you can you can write Swift on iOS but you can't actually compile it on iOS and and my own comment would be that Swift itself is clunky because um you know the thing that Apple ships as code samples don't even run now old code samples from WWDC don't even compile because they've changed the language so much right um so you know first of all what's the meaning of pro and second of all that that you know his point was using the iPad to do anything like toishan sand painting where you have to do everything by uh by hand file by file so the the difficulty is is you know who's championing what here and what are what's what's really going on with apple and their focus on users and pro users and and what what's how do we make sense of all this well I mean uh Tim Cook uh spoke a little bit about this uh to some extent uh at Apple's annual shareholder meeting this week um and our own Dan was there and uh put together report just with some notes of interest on it and uh he basically gave it you know depending on how you look at it I'm sure critics would call it Li lip service where he said uh that you will see us do more with Max and professional software is what he said to shareholders um I I this is one of those things where I I think that Apple's definition of pro uh and especially old school Mac Pros that have been doing this for a while their definition of pro is very very very different um many professionals especially been doing it for 10 15 20 30 years you're setting your ways right uh and as you should be I mean it works for you you you've cultivated a business a living that way um why would you want to change everything that you're doing uh Apple's focus is a little different um and they think that you know in the case of you know an iMac for example or even an iPad Pro that's enough power for most professional users uh I think the vocal whether they're a minority or not I don't know but there's a vocal subset of Mac users and certainly our audience and our listeners uh who would say that uh an iMac for example is not good enough you need a Mac Pro uh a MacBook Pro that that cuts Corners is not good enough you need something that offers a little bit more uh and and a lot of these debates fade away but some people will will hang on to them uh to their dying breath things like upgradable RAM and uh replaceable hard drives and things like that okay so that's the speeds and feeds side of it right I really need a quad core processor I really need an eight core processor whatever right but but the other part of this is software quality and software availability aperture is dead in favor of using Adobe solution Final Cut Pro or just Final Cut at 10 Final Cut X however you want to call it right that Final Cut Pro used to be the bread and butter of Hollywood and TV and everything was edited and and you could tell because there a credit role it would say Final Cut Pro MH and now a large number of those professionals have have moved to using a Windows machine with adobe's premiere on it so Apple has seated that market I mean obviously not all have there are certainly many many Productions still done with Final Cut uh I I said a large number without having raw numbers behind it so bad on me but you know that's me slapping my hand the uh you see it happening it's not something that that is is made up it's it's happening in number yeah and and this is a question of whether Apple wants to stay in that business you know like we talk about routers and other things um does Apple want to stay in the high-end Pro business do they want to stay in the router business do they want to stay in the portable media player business is it worth it to them is it worth it to their bottom line is it where they see the future of computing going is it something that lets them stay relevant these are all questions that Apple has to weigh um I mean clearly it's not a priority for them I don't think anybody can disagree with that no matter what Apple says uh you know the Mac Pro is is the best example of that whether we're talking about speeds and feeds or software the fact that they haven't really done anything to embrace uh that platform uh is is all you really need to know yeah and when it comes to wireless Hardware I can kind of understand it from the standpoint of apple has proven what they needed to prove at the time that they introduced the first AirPort Base Station Wireless technology was in a really rough state if you wanted a Wi-Fi router that time you got something from Buffalo or uh early early early lynxis but really at that time when I was 80211 B I had a Buffalo router and Airport was the only other game in town really and the Apple AirPort showed people that you could do it you could do it nicely you could have software support that made it easy as opposed to having to send people to go to Cy Cisco networking school to figure out how to use it you know I have a Cisco aeronet 801b card and I had an aeronet router from back then and it was nearly impossible to configure and Airport showed the way not to mention that the connections were terrible you were better off having a wired connection well right but but you know people don't run ethernet because it's not fun to run ethernet right but the early days of Wi-Fi were pretty bad it was it was horrific and apple showed people that it was possible to make this easier to configure and then Lynx has followed suit and and we had Wireless that was fairly easy to configure here we are uh not Nally about 15 or 16 years later right I had I had a1b in 2000 here we are nearly 17 years later everyone makes Wireless easy to configure at this point so does Apple need to stay in the market probably not I think they should but clearly they at the time think think back at the time they sold an iMac and the iMac had uh not in its very first generation but in its later second generation it had ethernet am modem and Wi-Fi and the idea that you could buy the computer you could buy the router and call it a day and have wireless internet was pretty huge and the wireless routers at that time had a 56k modem in them yeah that's how far we've come it's it's a big deal that we we don't really what's left to prove in this space setup is easy coverage is fairly easy what what's the problem coming from the company that can't even get air Dro to work consistently there's a lot to prove well there's a lot for them to prove that they can live up to it but I mean do do they have to solve Wireless networking for people at this stage I think that if they were to tie things into their ecosystem with their routers you make your routers Windows compatible as they've always done but give more features uh to Mac users and iOS users and those sorts of things um I don't see why not I mean you know it's it's one of those it's one of those things where there's a lot of untapped potential there I think that they could go to if they were interested in it uh but even then even without doing that they still deliver a quality product right so one of the things that we wrote about was that the the campaign showing that an iPad Pro is better than a computer in many ways it is yeah okay so the campaign has things like uh an iPad Pro doesn't get viruses mhm an iPad Pro is better than a computer in response to a tweet that says an iPad Pro is not even close to being a computer um an iPad Pro that has LTE support says you can get internet pretty much anywhere right or you can have Microsoft Word on an iPad which of course you can if you have the uh Office 365 subscription going on uh you know and you can do printing you don't have to have a a computer connected to get a printer working you can print wirelessly over air print so an iPad is is suitable in a number of ways for that kind of thing and Apple's running this ad campaign to show it it's interesting because I was watching tweets this morning and you know we know that that uh federic over at Max stories has been going iPad only for years so he's he's always been the the early leading on that one but um Neil cybart who runs above Avalon which is a newsletter and he's an analyst um tweeted his frustrations with Mac OS he said I should start counting all the times that Mac OS crashes and simply go to iPad Pro and you know his work is is some word processing because obviously he's writing the newsletter but at the same time he's also doing uh publishing through a Blog he's doing uh Excel spreadsheets and and not insignificant stuff in those spreadsheets and you're going to do that on iPad which is a little interesting because I've I've mostly seen people viewing spreadsheets on the iPad rather than tapping in the individual cells and things like that it's always been kind of cumbersome for me to navigate a spreadsheet on an iPad I think that the strength of the iPad is its weaknesses and that's by Design it's essentially a single task device made maybe if you want to do two at once but anything more than that and it becomes kind of cumbersome but in some ways that's freeing uh it is more enjoyable to use your iPad for many daily Computing tasks um whether it's media consumption or even Creation in some ways uh because you don't have all the distractions and all of the stuff that you ordinarily have on your computer and you can't have it it it's designed that way so by having a completely different operating system a different interface and this one task at a time type of thing um that is always going to turn away power users but to some people you can find Freedom and constraint um you know you have to define the the boundaries of the sandbox before you can play in it and if you uh Let it Go free then it can kill productivity so in many ways switching to an iPad for some people depending on your Computing style your needs your personality uh your Tendencies uh going on an iPad could actually make you more productive yeah now I've been using my MacBook Pro in a slightly different way for these past week uh and I was telling you about this before we started recording what I've been doing is I've been using full screen or split screen on almost every application I've been using full screen and split screen on my on my email I've been using full screen on my other email account so I've got I've got a Gmail window using a fluid window to make it a browser kind of thing as full screen I've got air mail which I'm using for exchange servers uh as full screen I've got Fantastical which we wrote a review about this week uh I think Mike Mike published that one um I've been using Fantastical as my calendar for ages and I love it and I'm using that in full screen uh I've got the uh IIA writer and Mark 2 as my editor for doing stories in full screen I've got keynote with four different presentations open it in full screen uh numbers because I've got some charts going into those and that was also where I did the uh the Wi-Fi string start for that I used for the EO review that we did so I've got all these applications running in full screen and I've just been using the four-finger swipe on the trackpad gesture to switch between them and it's been really nice do you find it cumbersome when you have uh you know this reminds me of early days of Apple watch almost when you have uh a bunch of uh uh apps in whatever they call it the glances View and you have to scroll through like a million of them to get to it like do you find that switching trying to get from your first app to your last app is a is a tedious process uh if I were using the four finger swipe to get there it might be but since I use command tab to application switch frequently M it's the same experience as always having had to command tab do you find it cumbersome pressing holding down command and pressing tab three times not really sometimes when I use full screen mode I rarely do it on my Mac it's just not the way I like to do it but I I find myself wishing that I could still access the dock while in full screen mode I agree that would be helpful just because so one of the things that I end up doing a lot is dragging files into applications whether it's you know uploading an image or um launching something or whatever right there are reasons to drag and drop a file onto a Target to drop it right and so if I have a folder in the doc that I can click and have it fan up and then grab the image from that folder and then drop it on the application I wouldn't have to switch back to a desktop that has the finder application on it yeah and think the most telling thing about this at least in terms of Apple's vision is when you go into an Apple store now and they have those promo videos they show uh and they'll show off you know like a 12-in Macbook or whatever um it's always being used with the apps in full screen and switched between them with the forefinger gesture as though you're on an iPad um this is really this continuity uh between platforms that Apple's been pushing for a while and I think that they view the future of computing as this super simple one task at a time kind of focus thing because that will be that will cover the needs of you know 95% of computer users um and that is not to say that because you're doing one task at a time or two at a time that they are simple tasks they can be extremely complex um but this you know over inundation with multitasking and all that um seems to be a Computing philosophy that apple is at least in terms of its marketing and how it's positioning its products and pushing the future of iOS it seems to be looking to get away from yeah so personally I know two people that have gone from Mac to iPad full-time um my my wife had a Macbook from late 2008 one of the aluminum ones um and it was giving her a little bit of trouble it was on a snow leopard and so I gave her an iPad Mini with a bridge keyboard to use and she's been using that for months now happily I gave the MacBook which I formatted and put Al Capitan on to my daughter who goes to school with it because her school wrote and said every student this year will take a a laptop or a Chromebook or something to school we recommend against iPads because kids break them was their initial letter home they break it more than they would a laptop that for whatever reason they said people who bring expensive tablets iPads to uh School tend to drop them and the screens are broken and everyone's unhappy about that so I mean like your like your laptop's going to do any better if you drop that they for whatever reason they were big fans of the $120 Chrome books because if you drop them no one cares as much as if you break a $500 iPad um but I sent her with this with the MacBook and she was you know she was the coolest kid because she had a Mac and the other kids had junky Chromebooks and um she came home the other week and she said it's it's just too heavy it's just too heavy cuz it's well yeah course because it's a Macbook right it weighs four pounds and um plus another pound for the stupid power brick so she was she was upset about it and she said dad can I can I take my iPad to school well can you do everything you need to do at school on it yeah I think so so you know she no longer has to carry the charger because it's got much longer battery life mm she uses the Google Docs apps that they use for the Chrome K Chromebook kids in school anyway on her iPad so she's got slides stocks and uh sheets on there and it's working for her and you know she came home and she's loving it no problem she's got a 64 gig iPad Mini too that's uh that's in there doing the job so she doesn't even open the MacBook any longer I I I I think that the iPad is the perfect computer for many people uh I I realize that a lot of pro users or whatever traditionalists on the Mac will cry blasphemy to that but I think it's absolutely true and I think that your wife and your daughter are two great Prime use cases there somebody who needs a computer that's going to last all day that's super light that's versatile that can be whatever you need when you want that has more apps than any other platform available uh that that's an iPad I I wonder why we don't have iBooks author for iPad yet why don't we have xcode for iPad well we totally should have xcode for iPad especially since we were talking about compiling Swift code on the iPad yeah I I I don't think that that Apple should turn iOS into Mac OS I know a lot of people want that I but I think they should take the training wheels off a lot of the apps uh some of the apps feel like they're they're close or not you know but they're not quite there some of the apps aren't even available like xcode or Final Cut or whatever let's do it let's go let's go all in let's get xcode on the iPad let's get Final Cut you want to call it a pro platform let's make it professional and find use cases that are superior on a touchscreen on a tablet on a super light portable in the field format uh I can see many use cases where professional users developers film makers whatever would prefer an iPad over a Mac they may not be able to use it to replace their Mac entirely but they could replace a lot of what they do on a Mac with the current hardware and software I think it's capable I'm going to take what you said and go one step further all of those apps that you named bring them to iOS like you said and add the sharing that we got in the latest edition of ior absolutely the sharing that we have across notes the sharing that we have across pages and all of those things put that into xcode for iOS put that into ibook's author for iOS put that into Final Cut for iOS make all of those projects that people can work on collaboratively I think that would be huge start your work on one device finish it on another they kind of have that on iMovie a little bit um you know obviously start your work on one device finish it on another start your work and invite people to collaborate with you on your work so they can make changes and you can work together on it Leverage The Power of multiple platforms and of the cloud um and you could really see these devices take off in ways that you wouldn't expect it doesn't mean that it's going to replace a Mac but there are use cases where these applications are better served on a tablet period I I don't know that it has to replace a Mac I think it could I don't think it has to no I I think it comp it's just about what's the best computer to use for the job you need to do yeah I I uh heard and I think we've talked about this before Phil Schiller said in an interview once that apple philosophy on their products is you start with the smallest screen they offer on iPhone and then you continually go up to a bigger screen for the task that you need at that moment so ideally they want you to be able to get everything done on your iPhone if you need something a little bigger than you go to an iPad if you need something a little bigger than you go to a Macbook and then maybe if you need something a little bigger than that you go to an iMac and that's kind of how they are viewing this this Computing platform and now if you start to throw in uh the Apple watch you know maybe you could do some very basic tasks on there before switching to your phone now you have these you know five six different screen sizes that you can go through um as needed and I think for most people they could stop at the iPad and be done yeah I got to say something about the Apple watch though so Target for example just updated their app for the for iOS and in their latest update they actually removed support for the Apple watch why cuz cuz no one wants it cuz no one know what what thirdparty watch apps really do watch well yeah I well that's that's a good question because what do you need on your watch right um Venture that most people don't don't really care about thirdparty watch apps I would say that most watch wearers and I'm going out on a limb here I'm prepared to get listener email telling me I'm wrong um are are using notifications are using the the Apple pay obviously are using things that Apple provides out of the box that that Target building an Apple Watch app was because they could and they thought it'd be something big and it turned out not to be maybe I mean I could see some uh retail applications for it for some users you know uh Store card kind of stuff um have it easily scannable assuming that there's scanners in the store work with it don't have to pull out your phone uh that sort of stuff um I I don't know how big of a market there is for it um but I don't think that that's necessarily A condemnation of of of the Apple watch as much as it is what do you really need to have on your wrist you know um just because people make apps for platform uh doesn't mean that that we need them you know there's a lot well doesn't mean that they've made the right app for example right true that's true but also you know in a sense it is a small condemnation of Apple because they made this thing and then opened it up to developers and presumably you know well I mean I I know there are games for Apple watch and people play games on their watch I don't really understand go made it there right and and that's one that but that's one that makes some sense to me uh because of the nature of the game and walking around and not wanting to stare at your phone while you walk around and getting those kind of subtle notifications it makes a lot of sense to me in that way and you you kind of have to deal with it on a Case by case basis obviously the killer apps for your Apple watch most of them are built in uh which is the way it should be but it's basically notifications uh which you can get for all apps on iOS um it is fitness apps which there are there's one builtin and there's a number of other options that you can download um and then other than that uh you know I would say Apple pay is your is your killer app uh being able to pay for stuff on your wrist beyond that you know your mileage may vary um I really uh have been enjoying I've talked about the carrot watch uh carrots watch app uh for weather um the notifications that it has the the custom uh complications and stuff I think that's a huge success I think they knocked it out of the park um and that's not a category where I would have thought that I needed to play Apple's weather app but I haven't looked back since I did all right so let's let's talk about iPhone there's there's a rumor here that says that we're going to get you know there there's a competing rumor right one well there's been some noise about getting USBC on iOS devices and the you know that the Twitter sphere has been a buzz with that the the news has talked about it a little bit we wrote a story saying that that Ming quo says that we're not going to get USBC on um well no what he said he said he said we're we're we're going to get expected to use typc power delivery technology in this year's iPhones but in a lightning connector I I'll lay the story out for you here's what happened help me out earlier this week the Wall Street Journal which has a history of being pretty good on Apple rumors published a story that uh I won't name any names uh and this is not to pick on the Wall Street Journal I mean hey we all mess stuff up sometimes right but we at Apple Insider took this with a grain of salt from the start if you look at our headline it says questionable rumor is the first two words of the headline because uh that's what this is I don't I just don't buy it alternative fact I don't know about that but um basically what happened was the Wall Street Journal ran a story in which they very poorly worded way suggested that Apple would replace the lightning port on the iPhone with USBC the way it was worded which should have been done more clear you could potentially interpret as them saying that they were going to get rid of not the uh lightning Port but the fullsize USB connector on the other side of the cable to plug it into the wall that makes sense to me however they said that Apple was going to get rid of the lightning cable is what they said which made it sound like they're going to get rid of the lightning Port what the Wall Street Journal meant in their report I don't really know taking it face value it sounds like they were going to get rid of the lightning port and that's why we presented as a questionable rumor there were some other websites that kind of Ram with it and there were some people that were excited because they're all in on USBC and stuff but I'll be honest with you folks it's not happening um well so there are a couple good reasons first of all when you tell someone when when you tell a regular consumer by the way they're going to change the port again they're like holy crap I have all these cables and they just did it 5 years ago why are we doing it again they're ready to kill somebody when you tell them yeah and the second part of it is that Apple collects a license fee called mfi or made for iPod or made for iPhone from every one of those ports sold and so they're not going to be that quick to give up those licenses right know and and the the mo the most telling thing to me uh beyond the licensing because I think at the end of the day Apple would walk away from the licensing if they felt it was best for the consumer um I I think that really what it comes down to is Apple has doubled down on Lightning the last couple years it used to just be that you would get lightning on your iPhone your iPad or your iPod and that was it but now now you got a pencil now you have a pencil now you have a Seri remote now you have the Beats X headphones you have the Beats Solo 3 headphones you have the power uh or the Beats pill is recharged through lightning you have the magic keyboard and Magic Mouse recharged through lightning it has become Apple's default accessory Port um for devices that tie into its ecosystem for smaller devices for recharging and apple is not going to keep releasing a bunch of Beats headphones and other accessories that connect through lightning and then ditch the lightning connector that would be absolutely insane and by the way if you wanted to put a USBC port on a device You' put on an iPad first before an iPhone because iPad it you're trying to position as more of a traditional Computing device that way you could connect more accessories to it so it it doesn't make any sense to put it on the iPhone first I I think the Wall Street Journal blew it on this one and that's why we called it as such and so kind of backing that up uh a report came out uh as we recorded this on Thursday uh from everybody's favorite analyst mingch quo with KGI Securities saying that apple is going to use Quick Charge capabilities from the USB type-c specification however the uh phone itself is still going to ship with a lightning Port which it goes in line like I said earlier with what I would expect I think that this year's phone will ship with the lightning port and probably a new power brick with USBC on it and a USBC to lightning cable yeah now the fun reason for doing all this USBC stuff the reason why it makes sense from a a nerd standpoint is that when you have one cable with the two ends being exactly the same and you can flip them over because they're symmetric then you you no longer have to think that hard right the cable plugs into the laptop the cable plugs into the phone all job done right so it it makes it's appealing from that one standpoint but it's broken in terms of all of the peripherals that already use lightning like you named and one of the things that I didn't even consider until I reviewed the latest MacBook Pro was I have had just about every mag safe cable I've ever owned Fray completely just like completely disintegrate and if I ever want to replace a uh magsafe adapter it's going to cost me 80 bucks um if I have a new Macbook Pro while I don't have mag safe which is a I consider a bad thing um the switching to the USBC connector means that I can use any certified cable and they're much cheaper and as long as I have my power brick I'm good to go so if my cable frays or gets lost or whatever uh it's much cheaper to fix and replace without having to go and buy an entirely new mag saave connector so uh in that respect it's actually much more consumer friendly yes and you can use any of the third party solutions for a MAG safe like experience and if that cable like you say fails on you you go back to a regular cable without a whole lot of frustration yep exactly and you can plug it into any port on the device so there there are reasons to do it and that's a great example of you know Apple's patents and Licensing and whatever where they see a situation they're not afraid to walk away from it for something that is ultimately better from the consumer uh if if there was a compelling reason for Apple to ditch lightning I think that they would probably do it uh just because I think they want to get rid of ports entirely for starters but they also realize that while this year's phone is probably going to have wireless charging in it um it's not ideal in many ways and probably won't be as fast as a wired connection and so that's why you're going to get the best of both worlds and you're get a new faster charge capability with the iPhone 8 and the iPhone 7S and 7s plus uh via a lightning cable that's going to come in the box right and it will probably also necessitate coming with a uh a proper adapter that's supplied enough wattage for that that quick charge capability right and hopefully we don't have another note 7 on our hands right well I don't think that's the case I mean this so in in the usb3 spec in the USBC spec there's a thing called PD or power delivery MH where it specifies being able to supply up to a ridiculous number of Watts for the ability to charge laptops and things like that but you can also use it to charge the phone faster and that's what I would bet is being used here yeah absolutely but I think that it before the spec existed there's a Qualcomm power Quick Charge technology but this is this is the Quick Charge that's part of power delivery from USBC and supposedly a poor implementation of Quick Charge and or battery uh constraints in the Note 7 is what led to that disaster so um I don't think we'll see that disaster anytime soon from any phone manufacture because no one wants to be the next Samsung on that right I think you know everyone's watching their their you know their their charge circuit their battery Engineers everyone's paying attention to this one it's not going to happen for a while yeah and anytime you do see it you know for listeners out there who sometimes see these things passed around of iPhones blowing up or whatever every time that has ever come out ever it's always somebody using some knockoff Chinese charger or something like that stick to the charger cable you get out of the box or stick to known Brands and buy from known vendors the the other thing is that the these are relatively rare incidents right the thing that was a Hallmark of the Samsung one is that there were a number of cases reported in a short period of time yeah and they hadn't sold that many phones yet and it was it was repeated it wasn't it wasn't just a one-off experience that Samsung had to look into it was it was something that they had one and then you heard three more reports and then another report and then another report and then the one that burned the hole through the airplane floor and all this right with apple we every phone generation you hear of maybe one case where it's happened yeah and apple does their du jillan know they they contact the owner they look into it in every news story you read yes Apple has contacted the owner and it's resolved and I'm sure that they learn something from it whether it's people sitting on their phones and the increase the rigidity of the phone case or it's the knockoff power adapter or or what but they figure out what the problem is and it's usually a very limited problem it's not like there's an epidemic right um you know B batteries they require space to expand and contract because heat causes things to expand and contract um you have to manage heat you have to manage overcharging you may have to manage discharging you have to not puncture them you have to not Flex them so there are a number of constraints around battery design and they've taken many of these into account it doesn't mean something bad can't happen but they're pretty much always on the ball into looking into it and figuring out why mhm it's not like the Samsung example where we went months with Samsung shrugging their shoulders and saying we don't know we think it's that factory oh but what happening from the other Factory too we don't know we don't know it it took until January to get an answer as to to why this thing had happened mhm right and even then it wasn't the most clear answer it wasn't a conclusive answer so I I would not be concerned about Apple and batteries at this time no I not I want to take a moment and talk about Mara so Mara . a is an application and it it can change the way you run thanks to smartphones even casual Runners can map their routes create playlists track their progress things like that but but all of it's always meant you had to stop and look at your phone now you Neil you know me I I like voice first Technologies you know I have the Amazon Echo devices I have the Google home devices I like being able to issue voice commands and have things happen and Mara is a handsfree running assistant that uses voice recognition and the microphone in your earbuds to help you do these things for your runs so you can say what kind of run you'd like to do you can ask questions about your speed and your pace you can have her play albums and playlists from your music library and she can tell you how you're doing in comparison to your past runs and warn you about changes in weather so you know no one wants to be caught out running in the rain right no you don't run in the rain I did the other night it was very cold no one likes that right no no so wouldn't it be nice if your phone told you when you were about to run in the rain yes you're about to get caught out okay so Mara can do that and Mara can also connect to Amazon Alexa enabled devices and you can ask her about lifetime Statistics and Records you've set while you're getting ready for your next run so visit mara. to download your free virtual running assistant today that's m.ai you know I'm noticing more and more devices that I have are able to integrate with the Amazon Echo devices mhm you know you you and I both have automatic in our car automatic is the little dongle that plugs into the OBD2 connector yeah and the other day I realized that I could sit in here and ask the uh the Amazon Echo and I'm intentionally avoiding saying the name of the V the assistant so I don't do you the Wake word um and have it respond I could ask how much fuel I have in the car that's cool so I'm sitting here in my house and I'm getting ready to go somewhere hey do I have gas yes yes you do you have this much range perfect that's great news right it was kind of cool because that's one of the things that happens in my house is my wife will look at me and say do I have gas in the car well shoot I don't know I don't what the needle said when I got out of the car but I can ask the echo device and it'll tell me now so these things are cool I'm I'm very appreciative of things like Mara and automatic integrating with Alexa now I reviewed the Euro Wi-Fi base stations because we were talking about earlier the uh notion that Apple was potentially getting out of making airports yeah so the these were sent to me to review and they arrive in a box of three I think they're sold in ones and threes um but it makes sense if you're trying to cover area to to think about how many you need um they recommend that for uh you know what 700 ft you only need one of them for for 1,800 to 2,000 squ fet you can use two of them and you'll reach full coverage and if you have a bigger house then you need the three or more and what they are is a mesh Network right because what happens is people have homes that have low signal spots in them and invariably it's somewhere you actually like to sit right the way our homes are constructed is that Wi-Fi is is a radio wave and it bounces off the surfaces in the house and then reflects and so you can sometimes get great signal coverage that way but sometimes you can get areas that just don't get coverage at all and it makes radio waves kind of a Dark Art right it's it's it's magic that's hard to understand and people go to school for it there are people who have doctorates in understanding Wireless technology and and radio science so what they're doing here is they're creating a network that instead of having an extension which has its own network name and you have to join that extenders Network which is a little clunky they're making a mesh where each router joins and extends the initial R the initial router settings so you don't have to know is it a network name is it this is it that you just know you've joined the network and you're getting full signal so EO attempts to make this very simple right they have a very simple base the base is got two Network ports on it one that connects to your main Internet modem and one that then connects to a downstream switch if you have it or other accessories uh a USB port that is completely not useful at all is for you as a consumer right we're used to airport expresses where you can plug in a printer or uh plug in a you know some people have routers that you can plug in hard drives things like that no ero doesn't do that the USB port is reserved to them for Diagnostic use only they say but um you know you put one in your main modem and then you can go ahead and put one elsewhere where you need signal um they recommended it be about 40 ft away at the furthest I was was experimenting with this and I had one in the bottom floor in one corner of the house and I had one in the upstairs on the second story in the opposite corner of the house so that I could cover the furthest area from the uh the router and I went around and measured my my signal strength throughout the house and found where the weak spots were and none of them were too weak that it really necessitated having a second mesh router but you know for the purposes of this experiment I had to put one somewhere so I put it upstairs and interestingly my signal got worse in some areas it's weird it really was it got better in a few places but it got worse in others what was neat was that doing this experiment really revealed that places that I thought I had the worst signal in the house I actually had really strong signal so it was cool that I did this but um but I the truth is using the single EOB base for me in in this 1800t place would have worked better than adding the second one one in some ways yeah it is interesting it is what I will say is that ero app is pretty cool if you liked the Apple AirPort utility app EOS is better and it's not easy to put Apple to shame right they did a good job on this application it's very smooth it's very easy to use it's very easy to reserve addresses it's very easy to set up uh static IPS it's very easy to do port forwarding it's really well thought out they did a good job on the app yeah I feel like that's kind of the key to taking the place of an airport router is that ease of use um you know signal design whatever aside uh anybody who's ever had to do the admin admin login on a lynus wrrt router or some piece of crap dlink or something knows exactly what a nightmare it is to to manage those things to navigate them I mean God now every cable company forces to have a built-in Wi-Fi modem router into the modem and so I have to go in and like manually disable their Wi-Fi so it's not broadcasting alongside my Wi-Fi and all and it's just like and you have to go into this like archaic just just nightmares of menus and and confusing things that even for somebody who's computer literate like me um just it's not a fun thing to do so that that ease of use is is definitely a big selling point yeah and it's it's the the EAS use is great but um it's there there were problems with the network and and not for me necessarily because I didn't have so much trying to go on with it but for other people that I've talked to about it um when you connect a switch to it for example because you do have wired devices and and it's true right if I talk about the wired devices we have here if you have a Lutron setup for a homekit you have to have a wired Bridge so you have to wire that somewhere right right and so then if you have that device and a couple of other bridges for homekit stuff well then you need to have a switch plugged into the router so that you can connect all of them so you're going to end up with a situation where many people who are doing homekit are going to have wired devices you know the Philips hridge you have to plug it in with the wire right um there there were a number of people that I talked to that said that when they had switches like that or they tried to have reserved addresses um that it all fell apart for them that that it simply was not working nearly as well what if you I mean yeah I mean I guess you could if you had an old router laying around you could disable the wireless function of it and use that to give yourself more wired ports would that break it um well getting do a little more esoteric stuff right you can do that then you put ero into bridge mode and let the router handle the assigning of IP addresses but there were people had trouble with that too now but how does that work with multiple earos like do you let one of the Heros assign IP addresses and then what if a device connects to it like that you can do that way but in your scenario where you're saying you've got an old router and you turn the wireless off on it and let it handle the wired you're best if you have that assign the IP addresses and let the ear act let that do the DHCP and then yeah yeah but there were people that had trouble with it doing that too so I I would say and that's why I gave this kind of a a three and a half star review from me because it it functioned and it functioned reasonably well with some caveats for me but we're aware of other problems people are having with it so it's not a fourstar review it's not a five-star review it's something that that did function but there's definitely room for improvement so if you're this new breed of computing person that we talked about who is perfectly happy with an iPad uh perfectly happy with a MacBook Pro with USBC ports on it perfectly happy with your iPhone no need to go wired on anything who deals with that crap I just want it to be as simple as possible which again I think is a majority of computer users out there does that person have any issues with EO uh the only issue that they may have with it is that some people have noticed that Network speeds uh for file transfers on the landan are slower with an ero than they are with some of the others out there got it so if you have a network attached storage device you may find an issue but if you're talking about internet speeds no if you're the iPad user and you've got wireless printing and that's about it going on on your Network and and maybe a home ENT payment device like a Roker or an Apple TV May some dead spots in your home yeah this is the device that's fine cool will totally work for you I've stumped you you're thinking what to say next no I I think you I think you cover it pretty well all right we're going to be covering some more of these if you have a favorite one that you like and and are listening out there uh we're going to do the lynx's velop next we've got a signology piece that's not a uh not a mesh router but if you want us to cover the network or net gear Orbeez or some of these others like plume or Luma or you know any of these other that's out there please go ahead and send send us an email and tell us which one you'd like to hear more about because that'll help us select what we decide to cover next great yeah so Neil you reviewed a homekit connected camera I did uh it's the dlink Omni 180 camera um interesting product um I was generally pretty happy with it I think that wait wait you scare me when you say it's an interesting product it's not a good product it's not it's what what's wrong here I mean I I think it's fine I don't personally another ringing endorsement from Neil Hughes my friends well it's one of these things where you know sometimes you get assigned a product by you know my publisher or whatever to review and this this is not something that I personally have a use for uh my wife didn't really want anything to do with it in fact she started when she was around at night putting a cup over it so that it couldn't record us she needed a teac cozy to stick over the top of it yeah I mean I think that you know as I said in in the uh uh headline on this review I think it's a great pet baby or nanny cam I don't have a baby or a nanny I do have a cat but um she doesn't really leave bed much uh she's 18 years old so uh not really much of a need for a webcam myself however if you fall in one of those categories and you're looking for something you can set up that you don't need to be discreet uh and you don't mind the lack of cloud storage I don't think that this is a a bad product to get I think you'll be pretty happy with it uh it's plug-and-play simple the software works the iOS and home integration is good um the feature I like the most is uh the screen is divided into a bunch of uh sections essentially and you can choose which ones you want to activate the motion detection sensor uh capabilities of it um and then when you turn that on you can get push notifications for it you can um uh have it uh record automatically a 20 second period before and after the motion was detected so you could see what's going on um it is not a discret camera and it does not have Cloud backup so you somebody robs your house and they see it laying there and they pick it up and steal it uh they're going to have all the footage and the SD card and everything else so yeah but this is this is not a terrible compromise either right I mean the problem with these cameras that are cloud storage is that you have to pay for the cloud storage so you subscribe for for so many dollars a month for the rest of your life to pay for cloud storage and here you just drop in a 64 gig SD card and and Bob's your uncle mhm right you're very happily not paying for cloud storage and you've got all the storage you want so so you just have to make sure your camera doesn't get stolen yeah I I think that uh I think that there's a market for this product I think that people that are security conscious would want something that offers cloud storage I think it would be nice I would like them to put like a klock slot on there so you could lock it down exactly I think that it would be nice if dlink offered both options because I think that certainly like you said the lack of cloud storage is appealing to some people just because they don't want to pay for something um and I would certainly be one of those people I would never pay for cloud storage well if you if you paid 200 bucks for the camera right and you're you're agreeing to pay however many bucks a month for the rest of your life for the it's a huge C cost yeah no absolutely I think that this would be a great opportunity for dlink to offer iCloud integration um and have the video files that you record back up to iCloud Drive o that would be way Char for it NE well what do they care they they're not charging for it any dude but they're not charging for right now anyhow so well there you go you know this is uh I think one of the standout features of this product is uh the fact that the camera on it is a true 180° view so I actually was testing it out in my kitchen looking out in the rest of my apartment and I had to put it up right to the edge of the counter because uh everything to the left and right gets picked up so it has to be have a clear 180 degree view otherwise some of it's going to get blocked off uh works at night uh in black and white uh the biggest limitations beyond the cloud storage issue is IOS uh limitations which would be um the Apple uh home app does not allow you to tap into the video files that are saved on it cuz that's not one of the capabilities of of the home app um if if you get an alert that uh there was motion detected it will show you a small thumbnail of what happened on your lock screen but then as soon as you open it uh it goes away and just takes you to a live view so if you see it 10 minutes later it's kind of pointless so you have to open up an Uma app intentionally instead of yeah you have to open the omna app to uh uh I'm not I'm sorry to uh to view it um and you know things like it would be nice to be able to say in home kit or in the home app um only alert me of motion when I'm not at home like give me a location based alert type thing or when I set a scene for or something like that it's kind of All or Nothing at the moment you have to go in and say Yes alert me um in the home app and then you'll get alerts or you turn it off and say don't alert me uh this should really be a customizable trigger um for automation false positives from walking around your apartment basically right exactly I had mine set up when I was testing it um to go uh trigger when the front door opens so in that sense it worked the door open the problem was if I went out to check the mail if I open the refrigerator which is right next to the front door it triggered it every single time so I'd go through and check all the videos and it's like there I am getting a snack there I am going to check the mail you know like it's not particularly interesting footage but that's to be expected when I wasn't really expecting anyone to rob my place either so yeah you just moved in right so you know I mean if you need something to keep an eye on a b and it has like a two-way microphone so um you can hear stuff but also you know speak to the person there and all that so if you wanted to like Comfort a baby or a pet or something uh that would be something you could do with it as well freak out your wife when you're not home that is true I tested that feature out too so how that work out for you she was like where's that coming from what is going on but I always have weird gadgets here so she's always just kind of like you know I I did that same thing to to my poor wife my longsuffering wife when was away on business and I started whispering through the the speaker of the camera at at the kids and she thought the house was haunted because she couldn't really hear it but the kids kept going over to the camera and and talking Whispering back at me and then I cranked it up a little bit and and and started whispering and she was sure the place was haunted she texted me saying we have to move in other news I'm terrible but uh yeah these These are good gadgets so the one of the problems that people worry about a little bit is these Internet of Things devices getting hacked and you know what what happens if someone gains access to it and can whisper horrible things at your sleeping child right yeah yeah and that's that's happened before with other devices yeah uh it makes me think of the episode from the latest uh season of uh of uh Black Mirror and why people put tape on their camera on their computer um um I think that um you know supposedly things are more secure with homekit um and Apple's secure authentication chip prevents uh you know outside nefarious users from hacking in uh time will always tell if that's true or not if you're paranoid about these kind of things you probably shouldn't have a camera in your home well one of the things that I've thought is that cameras in the home are one thing that cameras outside the home may be more useful and there aren't any of those yet for kit they're coming but they're not here yet the outdoor cameras for homekit are coming we saw some of the things that hinted at that at CES but they're not here yet um but it just it seems to me that that you know if you're worried about people coming and robbing you seeing suspicious people outside your house is just as good as seeing Subs people inside your house at least for the notification something's up um and it also makes people inside the home like like our wives who put t cozies on top of the cameras feel more comfortable mhm I I I I that doesn't really personally bother me I feel pretty secure with it but you can never really vouch for any of these kind of platforms because anything is possible um and time will tell you know how reliable or secure anything is um I think that if you're on the market for a homekit connected camera and you don't mind the limitations of this um and in some ways I think the limitations are are uh make it better uh some folks don't want to pay for cloud storage so uh I I think it's a good product if you know what you're getting um and you're happy with that but as as a camera the camera itself the 180° view night vision um uh microphone speaker all that kind of stuff I think it's great plug- andplay hom kit I mean I had the thing up and running in like two seconds it's it's good cool and and what rating did you give this I give it three and a half out of five all right why because I I think that uh if you are a security conscious user this is pretty useless to you it looks obvious that you have a camera there and so somebody if comes in robs your house all they got to do is just pick it up and unplug it and you're screwed and now they've got all the footage of them robbing your house and you have nothing okay cool I appreciate you explaining that for me sure so uh what else would you like to discuss this afternoon I think we covered it all pretty well didn't we tell tell me about Warren Buffett is there anything we can talk about Warren Buffett for uh he um he has purched 17 billion doll worth of steak Apple um he sees uh the company uh getting to a a uh uh market capitalization of more than a trillion dollars uh which would be the first of a uh publicly traded company so uh the stock because of that news and a number of other factors on the market has been inching higher closed above 140 for the first time this week um and if they uh get as high as uh 147 I believe uh then they will set a new record for market capitalization of about 775 billion uh inching their way closer to a trillion dollars uh the stock is already at an all-time high um and has been going that way for a few weeks now um the the reason that the stock is an all-time high but the market cap is not is because of the share buyback and and uh various uh uh the 7 to1 split they did a few years ago um kind of changes the value of the shares as as it relates to to uh the overall value of the company but uh Shares are trading right now at or near an all-time high um and they're getting near their all-time high for market capitalization and a big reason for that is because uh investors on Wall Street really admire Warren Buffett they think he knows what he's talking about fair enough thank you for summarizing that for us it so this has been the Apple Insider podcast fantastic episode 110 Neil where can people find you on the internet you can read my amings at appleinsider.com and you can find me on Twitter at thisis Neil NE I'm your host Victor marks I'm at V marks on Twitter we'd like to thank again Mara for sponsoring today's episode Mara is a handsfree virtual running assistant that uses Cutting Edge voice recognition to help coach you to better runs play music get updates on your location Pace or the weather and compare your current speed with past runs without ever stopping to look at your phone using your earbuds Mara can hear your commands and put them into action download your new running partner for free at mara. a today oh\n"